Palestine

The Palestinian olive harvest season has come to a close, a turbulent time when families and generations come together to harvest the fruits of their land against the lingering if not present threat of settler and military violence. Often accompanied by Israelis and internationals offering their presence in solidarity, the crowds of youth and veteran activists pick olives alongside Palestinian landowners in order deter militarized settlers from unleashing their most brutal violence. What unites the old and young solidarity activists: many of them are military refusers, and not by coincidence. The connection between solidarity with Palestinians and the refuser movement is what fuels the overwhelming presence of draft dodgers in villages dotting the West Bank during the olive harvest and year-round. The work involves documenting settler and military violence, deescalating and mediating, and even putting our bodies in between the assailants and Palestinians.

Our goal is to allow Palestinians unfettered access to their own so that they can rightfully reap its fruits, against the wishes of West Bank settlers backed by the Israeli military. For those opposed to Israel's forever wars in Gaza and Lebanon — and every other war — access to land, freedom of movement and autonomy for all Palestinians are why we refuse to serve in the military, why we make our way to the olive groves. Refuser Solidarity Network is diligently documenting the olive harvest and news from the anti-war movement fighting for justice on the ground: follow our page Voices Against the War on Instagram and Twitter to inform your own solidarity work with Palestine.

On my most recent visit to the West Bank, me and my friends headed to Masafer Yatta, just south of Hebron, to join the last days of the harvest. We operated like itinerants: we started picking alongside the family we originally came to see before moving onto other groves, meeting new families we spotted from across the road and helping them wrap up their harvest. I had met a set of brothers, their wives and their children on one of these excursions. All of them hailed from a large nearby city where the brothers all worked as teachers, while they tended to their small parcel of land outside the city to make extra income from the annual olive harvest. Their extra source of side income has become a dangerous business: the settlers and the army regularly trespass on their land and physically threaten them. When they are not present on their land, their olive trees are threatened by arsonists from nearby settlements, a now ubiquitous phenomenon. The settlers are as keen to defile the land itself as they are to attack the Palestinians who tend to it.

The images of olive trees aflame that have made the rounds online are not so distant from the footage of American-made weapons enshrouding entire buildings in fire and smoke in the Gaza Strip before the ceasefire. Refusing the war also means refusing ecocide in all its forms: across Israel-Palestine, the military is determined to push people off of their land by destroying the land itself. RSN and local activists have documented some of these cases in the West Bank on our platform Voices Against the War at the same time as researchers are framing Israel's assault on Gaza as ecocide. The soil in today's Gaza is contaminated, while half of the Strip's farmland and tree cover has been decimated by some estimates. With greenhouses also destroyed throughout the Strip, Gaza's agricultural infrastructure is almost entirely decimated, a process advancing in the West Bank although at different rhythms and in different forms, which refusers and activists have witnessed during the olive harvest season and beyond.

As an anti-war and refuser movement, RSN is invested in identifying the connections between the West Bank, Gaza and Israel-Palestine as a whole. What seem like distant realities are deeply linked, notably the ecocide in Gaza and the settler and military violence destroying generations-old ecosystems in the West Bank, right before our eyes. When we refuse, we refuse the state of affairs from the river to the sea in its entirety: the genocide, the removal of people from their lands, the destruction of local ecosystems, and the sacrificing of Israeli children to advance these processes of Palestinian dispossesion. That is why our platform Voices Against the War documents resistance on a diverse range of fronts, where you will see current and former refusers on the front lines of dissent. Keep your communities informed: tell them about Voices Against the War to stay updated on internal resistance to Israel's crimes. Follow and share our Instagram and Facebook pages.

In solidarity,

Tal Marom
International Solidarity Coordinator
Refuser Solidarity Network

(Taken from an email sent to me by the Refuser Solidarity Network. Emphasis original.)