1/The Palestine Children's Welfare Fund Project – Oil from Jayyous

Dear Friends,

We are pleased to announce a new effort to support the farmers in
Palestine and to help promote the olive oil business in the small
villages of Palestine. PCWF have employed three young Palestinian
men and women to source olive oil from us from the small villages to
support the farmers and provide them with an honorable living wage.
Our first project is the small town of Jayyous that has been on the
front line against the apartheid wall and suffering heavily due to
the inability of the farmers to market their olive oil outside the
city.

Our friends in Jayyous can send you a tin can of olive oil from
Jayyous to your door step anywhere in the United States or Europe in
less than 4 weeks. By buying a tin of olive oil you can help the
farmers of Jayyous resist the criminal occupation, help support the
historic olives and olive oil business and maintain the heritage in
the villages of Palestine. Besides, you will be contributing to the
welfare of hundreds of Palestinian families who will benefit from
your choice of using the best olive oil in the world and to share
the pride of resisting the occupation.

Please consider buying a tin can of olive oil for your annual needs
that will come along with one kilo of Zaatar from Nablus. You will
also receive a recipe for Manakeesh and Karakeesh and the love of
the children of Palestine. To buy just click on the link below

 http://pcwf.org/artifacts/oliveoil/oliveoil.htm

and please tell us in the message that you want the oil to come from
Jayyous. You can also help by passing the message to your friends
and colleagues and asking them to do the same. To learn more about
Jayyous please click and read and learn and support the struggle of
the people of Jayyous.

 http://www.jayyousonline.org/

Thanks for your patience and support

Salamat

Riad Hamad

 http://www.pcwf.org,  http://www.pcwfund.org , Palestine Children's
Welfare Fund. 201 W. Stassney # 201, Austin, Texas 78745 Click to
buy Palestinian embroidery online, sponsor a Palestinian child ,buy
a flag or a Kuffiya to feed one, donate a book to teach one or plant
an olive/ orange tree in Palestine to honor a loved one
=====================================================================

2/Demonstration At the Wall
03.18.04
By Starhawk


The service, which is a cross between a bus and a shared taxi, winds
its way through the hills behind Ramallah on the way to Budrus,
where I am meeting up with the ISM team to go to today's
demonstration at the site where work is progressing on the wall.
The hills stretch before me in undulating curves, formed of white
limestone, carved into ancient terraces lined with rock walls,
studded with gray green olives, their trunks thick and braided with
age. The wildflowers are blooming in splashes of yellow and pink.
We pass old stone houses with courtyards covered with grapevines and
grind up narrow streets where every yard has a fig tree or an
olive. I am enchanted, watching the land, the olive groves, the
graceful combinations of olive, fig, grape, fava bean and prickly
pear. Agriculture has been practiced here for ten thousand years,
and yet this land, which was never the most fertile to begin with,
is still productive and abundant. Here in these villages, life
still seems to follow an ancient rhythm. Should the ancestors
return, they would feel right at home. And I feel their presence,
here, again. This land would have looked much the same when Sarah
or Rachel or Deborah the Prophetess walked these hills, and they
would probably have approved my interest in just how those olives
are pruned. I have just about seventy olive trees myself, on my
land in California, and so I have a professional interest even
though I have to admit that I've been too busy to prune them at all
the last few years. I'm so happy to be out on the land that I can
almost forget what I'm here for, forget that just a couple of weeks
ago four people were killed at a demonstration much like the one I'm
heading for today.

Among the many things I was taught to believe that I now know are
not true are the things I was taught about Israel and agriculture. I
remember, on that Hebrew High School Ulpan trip so long ago, being
taken a spot that in 1966 was on the border between Israel and
Jordan – the border that is now the Green Line separating Israel
proper from the occupied territories of the West Bank. The Israeli
side was green: the Jordanian side was brown. "You see," our guide
said. "The Arabs had this land for 2000 years, and did nothing with
it. We've had it for twenty, and we've made the desert bloom."

I remember how much that argument impressed me as a young teenager.
Many years later, in a museum in British Columbia, I found the same
argument cited as a rationale for taking the land of the northwest
Coast First Nations "they weren't using it, weren't doing anything
with it." It's simply the justification the conquerors use to
convince themselves that they deserve the fruits of conquest.
Israel represents progress, science – Palestine represents
stagnation, regression, superstition.

Now, looking at the land from the perspective of permaculture and
ecological design. I find myself impressed by the elegance of
Palestinian agriculture, so integrally suited to the land and
climate, frugal in its use of water, making use of the plants native
to or adapted to this region, somehow preserving enough fertility in
this stony soil after ten millennia of cultivation to produce figs
and grapes and oil and bread. The "scientific" agriculture
practiced in some of the settlements, with profligate use of water,
energy, and chemicals, seems to me another form of assault on the
land. And the Israeli side of the border was green, I now know,
because they'd taken all the water, as the Sharon government is now
confiscating the aquifers.

The service lets me off in Budrus, a village built in the twelfth
century by a Crusader, where prickly pear fences outline small
fields and flowers grow from the cracks in the old stone walls. I'm
met by Perla, who will be the new Budrus coordinator. Born in
Lebanon to a Palestinian father, she was raised in Canada and has
the slim, grace of so many of the women here, and a warm smile.

The group of internationals is seated in a courtyard overlooking the
swelling mountains. Abu Ahmed owns the house, and he serves us tea.
Red geraniums grow in a border, and banana trees hold clumps of
ripening bananas.

We all talk for a while, then pile into another van for the trip to
the nearby village of Deir Qaddis, where a crowd has gathered in the
square. We get out and join them on a march to the area in a village
nearby where the soldiers have started work on the wall.

There are about two hundred people in the square, and the men lead
off, carrying bright banners of different political factions. They
are followed by a large contingent of women in white headscarves and
their daughters, all chanting in a loud and spirited voice. I buddy
up with Perla, who like me hangs toward the back. Normally I head
for the front of the line but today I want to observe first, and not
to get arrested. And I'm taking pictures, which slows me down. A
group of schoolgirls swarms around us, chanting and laughing in
their striped dresses. The older ones wear headscarves, some of the
youngest are in jeans and bright sweaters.

We get to the edge of the town, and the young and fast disappear
into the olive groves. I am neither, but I shelter behind a young
woman and head out over the rough ground. It's slow going – my
knees and ankles just don't bend or take my weight the way they once
did. Perla stays with me while much of the march fans out ahead,
over a beautiful valley of grey-green olives, and up a far hill.
The bulldozers are on the top.

Erik, who is up at the top with the soldiers, has been in contact
with Perla by phone, and told her the soldiers are threatening to
arrest internationals. But as yet they haven't. I am picking my
way slowly down the rocks – just don't have the knees or ankles to
move as quickly over this rough ground as I'd like to go. We are
far back, with the women, as the front wave reaches the top and is
pushed back. We see tear gas, the plumes oddly beautiful as they
arc over the olive trees, trailing smoke, then land to diffuse
clouds that hover among the trees like a sudden fog.

The villagers scatter, then gradually filter back. The soldiers are
firing sound bombs, distinguished by their deep, stomach-rattling
boom, and what sounds like live ammunition, which has much sharper
crack that echoes through the hills. They are shooting rubber
bullets at the clumps of people who gather. We make our way forward
to join the other internationals, who are sitting in the valley at
the bottom of our hill, just below the rise of the hill topped by
the bulldozers. Then teargas lands near us, and the soldiers start
to come down. We run back, up the slope we've just climbed down,
stumbling on the rocks and clambering over the stone walls. I am
alarmed by how hard the run is for me. With all the hiking I do
regularly, I am simply not fast going uphill at the best of times.
I'd hoped adrenalin would compensate – but now I have to admit that
it doesn't. Should some buff, eighteen year old soldier come
bounding after me, I am not going to be able to outrun him.

We've put quite a distance between us and the soldiers now, and
Perla and I stop and rest. A group of young girls joins us. Down
below, some of the men are trying to get the others to regroup. The
women go down and join them, and then head back up the hill to the
bulldozers again. We should go with them, but I am frankly tired,
and erring perhaps on the side of too much caution, for once. The
plan, we learn later, is for the shebab, the young men, to race up
the sides of the hill and distract the soldiers while the women come
up the center. But the shebab head straight up, forcing the women
to the side where they are stopped by rocks they can't climb. Up at
the very top there is a small group of women and internationals and
media right up by the bulldozers, which continue to work. Through
Perla's binoculars, I see a woman remonstrating with the soldiers,
sitting in front of the very bucket of the giant machines, who look,
from this distance, like an attack of monsters.

And so the day goes, with forays and volleys of tear gas and
scatterings, while the beautiful young girls around us try to teach
me Arabic. They are ten, twelve, thirteen years old, some of them
newly wearing headscarves, and they point out which one fainted from
the tear gas at the first demonstration, and who was hit by a rubber
bullet. We leave around four in the afternoon. Abu Ahmed is angry
with the villagers – he's from Budrus, which is better organized and
bolder, and some of our young men are also disappointed with the
lack of coherence and organization. I'm not – or rather, I know
from experience how little can be expected of a group who doesn't
have training and preparation and a plan. I'm here to help prepare
those trainings and to help the ISM think about how to offer
preparations, both for internationals and for Palestinians, so for
me the day has been well spent, although I'm wishing now I'd been
bolder and stronger and pushed up more toward the front, where I
generally find myself. No one has been killed, or seriously
injured. But no one leaves with a great sense of empowerment,
either. The bulldozers continue to work. This lovely valley,
with its ancient trees and its peace and its ancient way of life,
will soon be ripped to bare rock, split with giant fence that will
cut the villagers off from their land, and we have yet to find the
actions or the strategy that can stop it.

www.starhawk.org