Hi to all of you,
Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals who came to celebrate with us this olive tree planting day.
I am vary glad to see that you all made to here today – it is important to you all would be living witnesses to this well orchestrated show that god willing, would come true to become a daily reality.
I truly love to see all those new faces in the crowd – it is time for all of you to get our country to pluck its head out of the sand and face the cruel and inhuman reality of daily life we are living in here.
A reality of an enlightened and democratic state, in which roads are designated apart for Jews and non-Jews, as it was in the darkest of regimes, that disintegrated a long time ago.
Roads that are crowded with roadblocks whose job is to turn the life of a whole nation despicable and intolerable, roadblocks in which men, women, and children die when a soldier to hold them at bay for no reason on their way to the hospital, soldiers that I witnessed more than once toying with their weapon and aiming it threateningly on innocent civilians just to pass the grudge of long hours.
As a stubborn and longtime veteran human rights activist who runs meets daily with the Palestinian people and speak well their language, I sympathize most sincere with their suffering. As a mother and grandmother, I whish the Palestinian children the same rights, privileges, and pleasures my own children and grandchildren enjoy, to live normal and respectable lives – with regularly available education, medical care, safety, and nutrition – regualrily available and undisturbed whenever a soldier on the road or a corporal at the checkpoint decides to cut them off.
With all due respect to the venerable officials who gathered here today, I would have been so much happier if the mighty military force that is present here today to insure our safety, would have also been present in real time, anywhere on the land, to enforce court orders to shut off illegal settlements, and clamp hard on their people when they come down from the hills to menace their Palestinian neighbors, an army provide Palestinian farmers with their most basic need - to work their land in peace.
It is my pleasure here today to recall the words of a dear and unyielding friend, Yaakov Manor, who once wrote me the following: "many, in Israel and in the world at large alike, tend to distinguish political and protest organizations from organizations active on behalf of humanitarian and human right causes. In the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, those distinctions fall apart, when the political action often provide for humanitarian relief, and vice versa. In fact, every human right cause or humanitarian effort impart a powerful political impact."
Such is the participation in the olive harvest season and in numerous agricultural field labor – the deed is humanitarian, designed to help Palestinian farmers meet their daily chores and provide for their families – and with it the locations are often chosen to come in villages near settlements that often sends out brutal and ruthless assailants, or at those locations "annexed", cutoff, and imprisoned from their original Palestinian owners into Israel by the apartheid wall. They all have a distinct political echo, a voice against land embezzlement, against the "crawling transfer" of Palestinians from their land, of opposition to the colonial occupation and its many functional apparatuses.
The olive tree and its fruit are for the Palestinian farmer not a mere source of income, it is his people's symbol of continuing rejuvenation, and an important motif of its cultural heritage. Deep and stubborn as the tree roots holding to the ground, so to he Palestinian is the connection to the ground, a bond that give him the cause and the power to live, a symbiotic relation central to Palestinian agriculture.
The Palestinian farmer care for and tend the olive grove as you would your beloved children. A respected and honorable heritage no longer possible under Israeli occupation, and its messengers, the ruthless settlers who often speaks so highly about "coming back to our roots".
The settlers were fast to discover the deep connection of the Palestinians to the land and the olives, and in a flame of buoyant envy and hatred, frequently raid Palestinian fields and olive groves, uproot trees, dismember limbs, and often burn what is left, or steal its crops altogether. The olives of love, the cornucopia of Palestinian agriculture, were turned into battleground of hatred and fear.
As many of you have, I too did see the picture of the Salem girl hugging her headless olive tree – her eyes full of tears, her gaze angry, but her expression resolute, unyielding, her stance proud and unrepentant – "NO! – you shall not uproot me out of here, be the price what it may, this is my land, not yours, which I shall never give up!"
The Israeli colonial occupation, through its army and its relentless support of settlers, rarely held back the settlers vicious violence against Palestinians people and property alike – in fact the settlers always were the army's long, relentless, and not-so-concealed arm of oppression, a powerfull machinery to displace the Palestinian people out of their homes and land.
Came the apartheid wall now, that dismembered and cripple not only the economies but the entire fabric of life of nearly each and every Palestinian, who's life became impossible behind its barbed wires and endless cement walls.
Us being here today, and each and every deed we commit together with our Palestinian brothers and sisters strengthen and support the Palestinian people hold of their land, their sustenance, and the chance that one day both people would commit a better future together.
I call all of you today to come and participate in the plowing of the land, in the planting of trees, and in taking part in any other agricultural work, to strengthen the peaceful aims we all work to achieve.
May you all go in peace, and have a Shabat Shalom.
