The outing started off with everyone being on Palestine time. They said they'd meet me in Lion Square near here at 8:30, "9 at the very latest." At 9:20, they finally showed up. There was the young man whose family owns the trees and his girlfriend from France. Then we went around to another house and pick up Omar and a young English guy, and finally a woman from Denmark climbed into the truck.
There were more stops for gas and cigarettes, and finally we hit the road. We drove through the rolling rocky hills, down into a valley and finally onto a faster two-lane highway. The trees are beside this highway, so after parking we had to scramble down and embankment and then across the terraces formed from a hard volcanic rock, unlike the limestone you see everywhere here.
The family's trees are just young things compared to many of the groves in the West Bank: only a few hundred years old. There are trees around here that they say are two or even three thousand years old. There is one tree in Bethlehem area that is reputed to be 5,000 years old, although I have my doubts.
The trees are not overly tall, and they prune them to keep them that way, so you can reach most of the olives from the ground and by standing up on the lower branches. They also have a couple of rickety ladders.
The technique is to pull the olives off either individually or by running your hand down the branch and letting them fall on tarps spread on the ground. A few of the people were using children’s plastic rakes to scrape the olives off. The olives are purple-black and surprisingly small. Olive trees are like apples; they have lots of fruit one year and very little the next. Last year was the bumper crop and the family is surprised how good the crop is this year. The size of the olives is a result of last year’s good crop and a lack of rain this year. There’s no easy way to water them, although they used to bring big buckets of water by mule.
Picking the olives was a lot of fun. We stopped frequently for tea or water and at lunchtime had bread with hummus and other dips, all liberally laced with olive oil.
Like just about everything else around here, olive picking is wrapped up in politics and loss. The family has about 120 trees on the other side of Green Line, in other words, behind the wall. They say farmers didn’t have any say when the Israelis came along to build the wall and cut them off from their crop. Construction crews just showed up and started digging. In some other areas, they used big digging machines to pull up centuries-old trees by the roots. I’ve seen pictures of it.
The Israelis say they give Palestinian farmers a chance to cross into the Israeli side to harvest their olives, but Palestinians call that a sham. They say typically they get only two days to pick their trees, not nearly enough time. Farmers get family, friends and sometimes Internationals to help them harvest as much as they can. Others have told me stories of getting permission to harvest and then being harassed by troops and threatened or even shot at by settlers. You hear lots of tales of settlers yelling insults at olive pickers, beating them up and stealing their crop. There was no way for me to confirm this.
But olives are an important product here. They pack them in woven plastic sacks, about the size of a green plastic garbage bag. If the crop is good, one bag will produce about 18 litres of oil. Despite the huge amount they produce, they say Palestinians consume the majority of what they make. Olive oil shows up in just about every dish. Some is sent to relatives in Jordan and the rest is exported. There seems to be little organized exporting, although lately some cooperatives are forming. There are also some activist groups, such as Stop The Wall, that import Palestinian olive oil as a political act.
Olive picking is a family affair. Lots of kids were running around, playing Palestinian versions of tag, determining who was “it” by using something that sounded suspiciously like “eenie meenie, minie moe.” It really was pleasant just mindlessly picking olives and looking out across the rocky landscape. There are big prickly pear cactus growing amid the rocks. They say that’s where the snakes like to live.
Half way through the afternoon I have to say goodbye. This is my last day in the West Bank and I want to fit in one more thing; a visit to Bethlehem. Because time is so tight, I hire a taxi for the afternoon to drive me there, wait and drive me back. This requires crossing through part of Israel, so we pass a checkpoint, with yet another hot female soldier checking things out. There’s a good highway that seems to roughly follow the dividing line between the West Bank and Israel. After a bit of city traffic we arrive in Bethlehem. In some ways it’s a typical West Bank town, but as we get closer to Manger Square, it looks older and more interesting.
The highlight, of course, is the Church of the Nativity. It looks ancient and while there are parts that date back to the original construction in 326, most of it is from a major rebuilding in the 6th century. The first striking feature is the entrance. It’s a narrow door about five feet high that forces most people to bend over the enter, earning it the name the Door of Humility. It used to be much grander. The Crusaders made the original large opening smaller but still serviceable, installing a pointed arch that you can still see in the stone wall. Later rulers made it what it is today.
Once you’re inside, it becomes more impressive. Two rows of pink stone columns, which are part of the original building, run down both sides. A row of ornate ceiling fixtures hang in the middle. Oddly, each one has a shiny glass Christmas ornament dangling from the bottom.
The main attraction is in a grotto under the altar. This is the place where they claim Jesus was born. I’m not quite sure how they know. Hundreds of people seemed to be lined up waiting for their chance to reverently place their hand on the star.
The rest of the Manger Square area is worth a walk around. Right on the opposite side is the Mosque of Omar, built in 1860. Behind that are a number of twisting cobbled streets lined with shops, many of which are selling religious statues and crosses carved from olive wood.
Tomorrow I leave the Palestinian territories and head straight to Wadi Mussa, a town just outside Petra. The day after that I’ll get an early start and see Petra itself.
John
No comments:
Post a Comment