Occupied Palestine: How Israeli occupation trashes the environment

Originally published by Green Left Weekly, November 23



Ownership of the land of Palestine is hotly contested, so it is little surprise that the Earth itself is often the first casualty of Israel's occupation.

Israel uses a variety of tactics to try and drive Palestinians from their traditional lands and claim the spoils. This can mean direct violence against people, which includes settlers destroying the olive groves that Palestinian farmers have maintained for thousands of years.

But Israel also uses a scorched earth approach: contaminating arable land with garbage, draining aquifers of water and denying Palestinians the ability to develop sustainably.

Water
The apartheid practices of the state of Israel restrict day-to-day access to water for Palestinians. A 2013 report by Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq shows that water consumption by Israelis is around three to four times higher than that of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

Palestinian water consumption in the West Bank averages 73 litres per person per day, well below the World Health Organisation minimum of 100 litres, while Israelis use 300 litres on average. Israeli settlers consume even more — averaging 373 litres for personal use — while agricultural settlements in the Jordan Valley draw a whopping 1312 litres per capita.

“The level of unrestricted access to water enjoyed by those residing in Israel and Israeli settlers demonstrates that resources are plentiful and that the lack of sufficient water for Palestinians is a direct result of Israel's discriminatory policies in water management,” the report states.

The way Israel achieves this plentiful supply of water is through over-extraction from the Jordan River and the aquifers that lie underneath Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and the Sinai. Al-Haq reports that 38 Israeli wells are located in the West Bank, and Palestinians are denied access to waters of the Jordan River, despite it forming the eastern boundary of the West Bank under international law.

Friends of the Earth Middle East, a joint Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian organisation, reports that, “Diversion of 96% of its fresh water, in addition to discharge of large quantities of untreated sewage, threatens to irreversibly damage the River Valley.”

Waste
Sewage dumping is not just a problem for the Jordan River Valley. Israeli settlements routinely release their waste water so as to contaminate Palestinian agricultural land, while landfill is often routinely dumped by Israeli companies on Palestinian land.

“Israel has been dumping waste, including hazardous and toxic waste, into the West Bank for years as a cheaper and easier alternative to processing it properly in Israel at appropriate hazardous waste management sites,” Palestinian Environmental Authority (PEA) deputy director Jamil Mtoor told Inter Press Service in 2009.

Attempts by Palestinians to establish any kind of waste recycling are routinely frustrated by Israel. Restrictions on construction outside of the densely populated Zones A & B of the West Bank — under full or partial control of the Palestinian Authority, respectively — are almost total.

Industries which are able to recycle waste have even been actively targeted by Israel. In 2005, Israel banned sulphuric acid from entering the West Bank due to “security concerns”. This has meant a recycling plant used by the tanning industry in Hebron for removal of chromium has been unable to function and Palestinian tanneries have been at risk of closure since, Middle East Monitor reported in February.

Agricultural resistance
There are a variety of ways in which Palestinians resist Israel's environmental degradation of their country. Permaculture offers a way to bring together issues of environmental degradation, food security and maintaining traditional culture.

“Permaculture as a technique is not a new thing for us as Palestinians,” Palestinian farmer Murad al-Khufash told Green Left Weekly. “Before the occupation, before the new technologies, chemical fertilisers, pesticides, etc, we used to live in the permacultural way. As a word it is new, but the lifestyle is old.”

Permaculture is an agricultural philosophy based on three principles: care for the Earth — allowing all life forms in the ecosystem to flourish; care for people — farming to provide for people's needs; and, taking a fair share — reinvesting the surplus back into the ecosystem, rather than the agribusiness logic of extracting as much value from the soil as possible.

Al-Khufash owns a permaculture farm in the village of Marda, nestled beneath the Israeli settlement of Ariel. Israeli human rights organisation B'tselem reported in 2010 that "prolonged neglect of treatment of Ariel's waste water" had already resulted in damage to the surrounding environment.

"We want to show people you can resist the occupation by having your own security, your own food," al-Khufash told GLW. "One day I'll have everything set up in the farm: milk, eggs, meats, vegetables, electricity, water — you don't need anything from outside. With the checkpoints closing the streets and cities isolated from each other, it's not easy to get from place to place, so that is a kind of resistance."

When the wizard gets to me, I'm asking for a smaller heart

As a huge fan, I'm really disappointed to hear that, despite looking at the situation closely, Amanda Palmer has decided to cross the picket line of the Palestinian call for a cultural boycott of Israel and organise a gig in Tel Aviv.

I first came across Amanda Palmer around 2007; I was playing in a band with a couple of schoolfriends, and one of them suggested we play Coin Operated Boy. We weren't particularly good, but it was fun, and I borrowed the Dresden Dolls' whole discography at the time to listen to. 

Track forward a few years, and, after buying tickets to the gig when it was supposed to be in February, I had the honour for the first time of rocking out with AMANDA FUCKING PALMER live for myself earlier this month. It was at my partner's insistence that we got the tickets; she also backed the AFP kickstarter.

The stories of friends who had attended concerts left me with high expectations for the show; even so I was blown away. It was truly one of the most amazing gigs of my life. Although there was no crowd surfing pashes for me or my friends, at one point during 'Do It With A Rockstar' she did thrust the microphone into my mouth. I nearly fainted!




But I'd never be able to appreciate her music in the same way if she goes ahead with this gig. Simply taking a tour with Breaking the Silence, which she's cited as the reason she tipped to booking a gig, doesn't neutralise performing a public show in an apartheid state.

I hope Amanda (or anyone reading this) have read the PACBI website - if you haven't, you should really consider some of the arguments rebutting common reasons to break the boycott put here. Particularly worth reading in this context:

2. Why Not Boycott Other Human Rights Offenders Too?

...Israel is today the only state practicing a three-tiered system of oppression – occupation, colonization and apartheid – while being treated by Western states as part of their “democratic club” and, consequently, receiving unlimited political, economic, diplomatic, academic and cultural support from them. This entrenched and persistent Western complicity is precisely what perpetuates Israel’s colonial oppression and makes it a moral obligation for citizens of the West to endeavor to end their states’ respective complicity in Israel’s crimes. Striving to end collusion in human rights violations should be the absolute minimum that we expect from any conscientious artist or cultural worker.

I think AFP should go to Tel Aviv, and play for the kickstarter obligations. And I think she should take the tour with Breaking the Silence too. Visit the old city of Hebron, where a few hundred settlers terrorise the 10,000 Palestinian inhabitants in an attempt to ethnically cleanse the areas around the Ibrahim Mosque/Tomb of the Patriarchs. Visit Nablus, go through checkpoints where Palestinians are routinely denied entry while settlers are allowed to drive right though. Visit Bethlehem's 300 checkpoint at 4am, when Palestinian workers from the territories have to line up to try and get into Israel to start their jobs at 8am. If she is like me, then seeing these things for herself will break her heart and fill her with rage. If not, then I can respect that. Nonetheless, as someone who is totally on the right side of politics and who put on a 'Fuck Tony Abbott' T-shirt proferred by a fan during the signing after the gig, simply having that experience, documenting it, and sharing it with her fans will be a powerful thing.

But to play a public gig in Israel is to cross the picket line and say - this isn't cultural and religious apartheid, just another country with a few problems. And I would lose a lot of respect for Amanda Palmer and her amazing, challenging, uncompromising body of work if she does that.

A Beautiful Day To Be Alive

After around two weeks in Palestine, I came down with a depressive episode. 

I don't normally talk about my mental health. It's been a year since that time, so I feel like I have enough distance to write about it, and maybe try and draw some lessons for my ongoing life and activism. And i'm doing Movember, so I thought this might be a little bit in the way of an explanation. Male mental health is somewhat stigmatised in a country like Australia, which is a barrier to treatment for many.

And in the face of the bombs raining down on Gaza right now, some of the feelings I've been writing about in this post have risen again, so the best way to work through them seems to be writing about them.

This is dedicated to all the friends, family, partners and comrades who have helped me through dark times. To Frank Tromp - vale. And to the children of Gaza.

When I first arrived at Ben Gurion airport, I was so nervous I couldn't even force myself to smile at the two women on the border security desk. Almost all of my thought in the days prior to my arrival had been on this part of the process, the possibility of being hauled aside and what I would say I'd been doing in Egypt and Tunisia to not arouse suspicions that I might actually think Arabs are human beings. I hadn't thought about getting through without a hitch, and I was quite emotionally unprepared to find myself in a Sherut running alongside the apartheid wall or stepping out in front of the Damascus Gate.

Sultan Suleiman Street, barbeque smoke hanging in the air.

 

My first few days in Jerusalem were somewhat off the deep end, but the whole experience of life in the holy land still felt surreal, like I wasn't really there, like I was living inside history. It's a simultaneously belittling and uplifting feeling; like the buildings and people around you all bear an ancient weight made up of the labour and lives of thousands of generations of people, and you have a chance to contribute a part of your life to that tradition.

After a few days I began the JAI olive harvest program, which certainly immersed me in life in the West Bank, life under an occupation. The structure of a program like that was good for keeping me moving, and climbing up trees and scratching my hands picking olives all day certainly shook me out of the bubble of surreality and grounded me in the present chapter of that history.

 

Meeting ordinary people in the West Bank - farmers, residents, workers, families, prisoners - and putting human faces to the suffering I understood on an ideological level didn't only bring me to a deeper understanding of the occupation; it inspired and invigorated me to expand my personal efforts for the Palestinian cause. It also helped me to see that there's a network of people all over the world struggling for justice in Palestine, even if we sometimes feel so few in Australia. The surreality of living in the holy land blends into the impossible reality of life under occupation; I think this contributes to the zest for life and the sumoud of the Palestinians.

Neda the zesty.

The program inspired me to push myself - late nights at the Grotto, early mornings for the harvest, evenings documenting what we'd done. On a day off I started this blog. I felt like the exhilaration of being in Palestine meant that my normal rules about burning myself out didn't apply. But despite the inspiration, I reached the limits of my energy.

After the program finished, I made my way down to Bustan Qaraaqa, a permaculture demonstration farm and project. Several of the friends I'd made doing the harvest had stayed there or knew the long-term volunteers, and I'd found out about it before hand online. It was certainly a fantastic space, and an amazing group of volunteers made it buzz.

As someone who's been involved in permaculture and environment campaigns in Australia, the project really appealed to me; some of the ideas I saw or worked on, like companion planting to make clearing fields more difficult for settlers, using traditional farming techniques to rehabilitate fallow land that hasn't been claimed by the ongoing expansion, or utilising the plentiful roadside plastic bottles to make a greenhouse roof that collects a great volume of rainwater, all make environmentalism another way to resist the occupation.

The reclaimed greenhouse.

However, despite the political interest I had in Bustan, I couldn't give as much energy to it as I would have liked. The thrill that drove me during the harvest program wore off; I found myself sleeping too much, drinking too much, and struggling to motivate myself in the less scheduled and more individual environment of the farm. To finish transcribing the interviews and article notes I'd done in Egypt and Tunisia and finish them became more and more difficult and less and less interesting. And knowing that I wasn't firing on all cylinders brought on some pretty strong guilt - I can't be weak, I have to keep going, I have to do as much as I can while I'm here. I had made some friends in the harvest who were still in Bethlehem, but I didn't have the energy to try and see more of them, or participate in many of the political activities I could have.

Comfort food, Palestinian style - broaster chicken

At first I put it down to another kind of culture shock - this certainly did hit me hard when I first arrived in Egypt - or perhaps missing some of the creature comforts I got in the hotel I didn't at a permaculture farm, but after a while I realised I was pushing myself too hard. To see the occupation up close and personally, just like the holy city, made me feel small and inconsequential - in the face of an injustice with the whole weight of global neo-colonialism behind it, I felt like I could do nothing to make a difference. In a sense, I think what triggered me was a kind of occupation shock.

The guilt I felt for feeling helpless was magnified by the fact that I knew I could go home with relative ease to one of the richest countries on earth, while for the Palestinians around me this weight had been on them their whole lives and didn't appear to be going anywhere. And despite that, the Palestinians live hard, live with sumoud, love and work and struggle far more than Australians who sit in empty cars and avoid each other in the street. I felt guilty for ever feeling weak and alone and depressed when my suffering, too, was so insignificant in the face of the occupation.

Graffiti on the apartheid wall, Bethlehem. I wrote this when I first saw it: "That a Palestinian could spraypaint this on the biggest symbol of their people's dispossession makes me feel ashamed for every day I only got out of my comfortable Queen-sized bed to drive my car to a fast food drive thru"

Seeing my dear friend and fellow Wollongong activist Ella after my time at Bustan, hooking into the network of teachers in Nablus, and having some amazing times travelling the rest of the length of the West Bank, certainly helped me recover. But the thing which cleared my head the most was the fact that seeing Ella again also got me demonstrating - for the Freedom Waves flotilla crew detained for breaking the siege of Gaza (including fellow Aussie Michael Coleman!), documenting the Freedom Rides, and on my last day in the West Bank, joining in the weekly demonstrations against the apartheid wall in Bil'in. To take direct action - no matter how small or ineffective it may be on its own - is our strongest and most empowering collective tool of action.

Demonstration for the Freedom Waves flotilla in Ramallah, 04/11/11

Freedom Riders on a bus being taken through Hizma checkpoint, 15/11/11

Bil'in, 25/11/11

Asides from what I learned about the situation in Palestine (and Egypt and Tunisia), some of the lessons I learned about myself during my travels I've tried (not totally successfully) to apply to my activities here in Australia. It's important that we all take time for self care, and set whatever conditions or limits to our activism are necessary - not only for the sake of long-term committment, but also for approaching our tasks professionally. Some activists I struggle alongside rarely seem to need their own time, while others are ironclad that they have nights or at least one day off every week. I don't want to prescribe a recipe, but whatever your personal limits are, you shouldn't let them be eaten into. To say yes to everything and always be rushing from task to task without an overall clarity on what we're doing is worse than to say no. Here in Australia we're not fighting an underground struggle which uses military means, so we shouldn't take Lenin too literally. The struggle needs us for the long haul.

The Jersualem Syndrome

Jerusalem Syndrome is something which I hadn't heard about before I travelled to the city in 2011, but you can quite easily guess what it's supposed to be from the name. For a land so replete with religious significance, it's probably unsurprising that around fifty tourists each year fall into some form of holy psychosis while wondering through sites of worship continually used for thousands of years. I was first told about the syndrome by a genial Swiss-Israeli woman living in the East Jerusalem hostel where I spent my first days in Palestine; she was using it to describe the actions of one of our fellow guests, who would climb the ramparts of the old city to stand guard at dawn. There are many such characters who perhaps do not think themselves the messiah, but feel compelled to do some duty in the Holy City.

Damascus Gate, Old City of Jerusalem

There are slightly darker sides to this story, of course; the obliteration of Palestinian connection to the old city in media reportage of this "syndrome" is near total. Neither the Wiki article on the topic nor any of its references even mention the word "Palestine" in describing this fever taking place, while the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs is listed as author on an article in the Jewish Virtual Library on the topic. Academic writing on the topic has come entirely from Israeli authors; Dr Yair Bar-El, who classified the syndrome into three separate levels of psychosis based on previous mental health and religiosity, was a former director of Kfar Shaul Mental Health Centre, which deals with all cases of the syndrome - and which was built in the ruins of ethnically-cleansed Deir Yassin.

The honourable exception is Haaretz, which compared the insanity of individuals suffering the syndrome to the holy war being waged by the Israeli government to legitimise their control of the city. Despite the fact that East Jerusalem, like the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, is an occupied territory, the Israeli state exercises full military and civil authority over it (while denying residents the right to vote). In 1980 the Israeli Knesset passed a law declaring Jerusalem united and the capital of Israel, which was rejected by UN Security Council Resolution 478. But the theft of East Jerusalem was already well underway. From the moment of occupation in 1967, Israel set in place a long term plan to rewrite "facts on the ground" with massive settlement in areas surrounding East Jerusalem. Administrative boundaries, which had been set under the partition plan, were unilaterally redrawn by Israel in 1967 to include "“NO AREA” for future Arab Jerusalemite development":

The new boundaries of the City were delineated for security and demographic considerations and in order to create geographic integrity and demographic superiority for the Jewish population in Jerusalem. In order to accomplish this, the redrawing of Jerusalem municipal boundaries excluded the densely populated Palestinian communities (the residences but not the lands) in the north, including Beit Iksa and Beir Nabala, whereas the sparsely populated communities’ lands in the south were included (Bethlehem and Beit Sahour)

Settlements east of Jerusalem

Today, the East Jersualem suburbs of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan frequently flare up in protests against housing demolitions.

There is a still darker side to the Jerusalem syndrome, and the narratives of "holy war" which use religiosity to justify oppression. An example of this is Denis Michael Rohan, an Australian tourist who attempted to set fire to the al-Aqsa mosque in 1969. He had previously worked on a Kibbutz in Israel, and was attempting to destroy the mosque in order to enable the biblical Temple to be rebuilt. For some, the political "holy war" should be waged biblically.

Western Wall and the al-Aqsa Mosque

Perhaps the breath-snatching surreal feeling I had the whole time I spent in East Jerusalem is a form of the syndrome, too. Even for a firmly non-religious person like myself, there is something overwhelming about the Holy City. It's a feeling I took with me everywhere in Palestine, which at times nearly brought me to tears. I found it immensely jarring to be walking the old city's cobbled streets looking for a reasonably priced laundromat! Every movement, every place, every word somehow seemed heavier than it would in Australia, more laden with significance.

To me, it's the weight of human history, moreso than the religious assocations, which make Jerusalem (and Palestine) such a singular place. For thousands of years, untold lives have been sacraficed to control a single square kilometre of land. It's been destroyed twice, besieged 23 times, attacked 52 times, and captured and recaptured 44 times. Now, that weight of history and significance bears down on the residents of the old city; both those Israelis who see themselves as chosen people, and their attempts to cleanse the land as mandated by God, and the Palestinians, who with characteristic sumoud (steadfastness), refuse to buckle under the weight of discriminatory Israeli policies.

Shout out to Teachers for Palestine

So a friend of mine who volunteers in Palestine mentioned me on her blog. For the record, I haven't been able to spend as much time and energy on Palestine solidarity work since I returned to Australia as I'd like; however, stay posted for info on a Nakba day demonstration, and I've got my fingers crossed for a travel article about harvesting olives to be published in a local paper. So I guess I've been keeping busy :)

I decided I'd give a little shout out to Caseceso and another one of my friends still volunteering in Palestine, E, who have been doing some amazing work with the English language teaching project Teach for Palestine for nearly a year now. They've both also been writing blogs about their experiences and adventures in occupied Palestine, constantly reminding me of how much I wish I could have stayed there longer, and putting together a great wealth of information about Palestinian society and culture and how it's impacted by the occupation. E in particular has written about women's issues in Palestine without buying into orientalist superiority narratives at all - figures, coming from a human geographer ;) Well worth reading.

Book of the Year - Bradt's Palestine

Green Left Weekly asked me to contribute to a list of books of the year. I chose the Bradt Travel Guide for Palestine, which I found an invaluable resource in getting around and knowing how to handle the regime's attempts to deter international solidarity (or even basic functioning of the tourist economy).


Palestine by Sarah Irving
Bradt Travel Guides, 2011
This is the ideal resource for Palestinian solidarity activists and travellers in the Holy Land. The best book of its kind, it delivers a frank and honest picture of Palestine when the vast majority of tourist literature is an accomplice to the erasure of Palestinian history and culture.
As the author states in the introduction, "to visit Palestine is, in some measure, a political act" even for conventional tourists.
The guide's background information section pulls no punches regarding the creation of Israel and the occupation of '67. It's also one of the only guides available that also covers Palestinian communities inside Israel. This is the only book worth reading for travellers to Palestine, whether interested in solidarity activism or not.

Palestine: The Olive Harvest Diaries

The following travelogue was written from notes taken during my first volunteer program in Palestine.

As we stare out over the terraced hills now cut off from the village of al-Khader by Highway 60, the main Israeli bypass road cutting through the southern West Bank, I turn to Baha Hilo, coordinator of the Olive Tree Campaign at the Joint Advocacy Initiative of the East Jerusalem YMCA and the YWCA of Palestine, and say "It's a beautiful country".

He pauses, then replies: "Why do you think they want to steal it from us?"

It's my fifth day in Palestine, and my first on this year's olive harvest volunteer program run by the JAI. This October, over 110 international volunteers are taking part. We visit and harvest groves around Bethlehem threatened by Israel's system of segregation; both symbolically and economically, the issue is at the heart of the struggle for control of the West Bank. I'm one of two Australians taking part; our group are mostly from Europe and North America and are of many different backgrounds: solidarity groups, Christian peace groups, the Palestinian diaspora, and international YMCA-YWCA programs. None of us can fail to see the injustices here.

The owner of the first farm we visit, in the valley to the west of al-Khader, is one of the lucky ones. He has a small house on his land, built before the Israeli occupation began in 1967, which means he and his family can always access their trees. Most Palestinian farmers own olive groves in the terraced hills on the outskirts of their villages, which are cut off by bypass roads, walls and the settlements of the occupation. Any new construction which would allow farmers to live on their land and have guaranteed access to it requires a permit from the state of Israel –– they are rarely granted.

We get to work before 9am. Hilo rolls out a tarpaulin beneath the overhanging branches of the first tree and shows us how to "milk" a branch: take it between thumb and forefinger and firmly slide it to the end so the olives pop off and rain down onto the sheet. It takes first timers like myself awhile to get the hang of it, and scratches up the forearms are unavoidable. By the time we finish for lunch - stuffed vine leaves, called "Warak Dawali" in Palestine - we've got two sacks full of firm green olives – not a bad first day!

The Keep Hope Alive program is not just about volunteering our labour. On the first afternoon we visit Dheisheh Refugee Camp, the largest in Bethlehem city. A checkpoint gate remains at the entrance from the First Intifada, when the Israeli military surrounded the camp with a fence and this was the only way in or out. The refugees of Dheisheh left it standing to remember the curfews and brutality they suffered for five years. Within a few minutes of wandering the camp's narrow alleys many of us lose our guide; thankfully we take our directions from the unforgettable Banksy mural located in the camp and find the bus again.

Day two takes us to Husan, one of six Palestinian communities in west Bethlehem. The town has a population of nearly 6000. Since 1978 the land owned by the village has shrunk from 7361 dunams (73.61 hectares) to just under 928, taken over by settlements and the military.

Betar Illit is one of these settlements, created in 1984 by land confiscated from Husan and other villages. Its population has grown to more than 38,000. The field we harvest adjoins the Houses of Betar Illit, within the settlement's security fence, so the Palestinian owner had to apply through Israeli courts for permission to harvest his olives. This precarious position is worsened by frequent attacks on the groves, which are treated with indifference by the settlement security and IDF. Last harvest, fire-fighting crews trying to put out blazes lit by settlers were delayed by the authorities, and 35 dunams of fruitful trees were lost.

"When there are settler attacks on farmland," Hilo says, "the surveillance system sees nothing – but when a Palestinian throws a single rock, it identifies them."

The field has soaring views of the valley between the settlement and the Palestinian community of Nahhalin. The people of this land made Bethlehem the land of milk and honey by laboriously building terraces into the steep hills, dragging up chalk to line them to ensure the soil would capture and store water in the winter. So in this semi-arid climate, the farms remain fertile in the long dry summer months, and the olives and other fruit trees provide a bountiful crop. Now, the "biblical" view from this spot is reserved for the settlers.

As Hilo says: "Thousands of years of Palestinian cultivation has become marketing for the real estate of the occupiers.”

We work our way through the morning, pausing for shai (tea) and kahua (coffee) provided by the farmer's family. We thank the farmer's family, and they thank us in return. Picking the olives is hot work, and we are glad to be interrupted by a gecko climbing the branches besides us, going about its way despite the conflict which centres around the olives.

In the afternoon we visit the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem, based in Bethlehem since the Israeli occupation, for information on settler activity and the control of resources by settlements in the West Bank.

It's an issue we get to see in greater detail the next day, when we skip the harvest to visit Jerusalem, and see the sharp contrasts between the Palestinian & settler communities to the city's east. Most of this area is slated to become part of the Ma'ale Adumim block, linking the settlement suburbs with nature reserves, bypass roads – even a water park. Vast olive trees, uprooted from farms of the area, stand in the middle of roundabouts or next to observation decks, fed water constantly by sophisticated drip irrigation systems. Settlements never have problems accessing water, even in the depths of summer. Pipes feed in from subterranean aquifers throughout the region. Palestinian communities, on the other hand, frequently have water supplies cut off in the summer; the easiest way to recognise the difference between a Palestinian community and a settler one is the big black rainwater tanks which sprout on the former's rooftops.

The Bedouin of Khan Al-Ahmar, a small hamlet in the shadows of Ma'ale Adumim, sits at the other end of the spectrum. Since 1952, when they arrived after being driven from their original homes near Beersheba, they've managed to carve a bit of home out of the Judean Desert, with fruit trees and corrugated sheet buildings. The Bedouin people have to pay the government for every drop of water, which has to be brought to the community by donkey. When the pipelines carrying water to the settlement were first built, they made punctures in it to gather water, before an agreement was reached and the Israeli authorities installed a meter. They are cut off by military zones, settlements and bypass roads; in recent years, the bypass roads have been lined with metal safety barriers, preventing the shepherds on the west side from accessing Jericho, which had been the only market available to them. The permit system does not allow them into Jerusalem to sell their products. They have no electricity. They have not been allowed to work in the Israeli settlements since 2009; when they were allowed to work, they got no more than 70 shekels a day (around US$20).

Five children from the community have died crossing the highway to get to a school in the West Bank - so the villagers here built their own. The pale brown school, the most stable-looking buildings in the unrecognised village, are made from tyres that the people filled with rubbish and lined with mud. International supporters and an Italian aid agency helped build the school. The community takes great pride in their determination. But the building's future is not guaranteed. After the villagers visited the nearby settlement to tell their story and suggest a cultural exchange program between their new school and the one in the settlement, the settlers petitioned Israel's courts to issue a demolition order for the building, as it "threatened their security". So far three military demolition orders have been served on the building.

The harvest on day four takes us to fields around the village of Jab'a. The Beit Ein settlement in the distance is notorious for attacking nearby villages and farms, including the one we begin to harvest. This land is also threatened by Israel, which has drilled into the aquifers under the Palestinian villages and laid a pipeline through the groves to the settlements - cutting down more olive trees in the process. We pass one of the pumping stations on the way to the farm, clean white machinery painted with the Israeli Flag.

At the farm we are visited by the Israeli police and the IDF during the morning. For “security reasons”, the IDF uprooted over 100 olive trees from this farmer's land earlier in the year. To put that number in context: during the day's work, our group of over forty volunteers is able to pick around eight trees clean. The fruit varies between the thick green kind and the small black ones; the farmer tells us that they both produce oil, but only the larger kind are pickled for eating.

The next day is another inter-city trip, to the southern city of Hebron. Entering the old city through a checkpoint, we pass an impromptu protest of teachers. Restriction of movement goes hand in hand with attacks by about 420 fundamentalist settlers who live in small settlements inside the old city. Their aim is to drive the 30,000 Palestinians out.

The school is one of the focal points of tension. Schoolchildren are often hassled on their way to class. Ordinary school supplies are restricted and must be smuggled in. After visiting the teachers, we pass graffiti reading "Gas the Arabs" on the school wall.

Cages were built over the souks of the old city to protect Palestinians from rocks, rubbish & furniture settlers throw from the top floors of buildings above.

A reason the tension is the Tomb of the Patriarchs, or Ibrahim Mosque – the site of shrines to three biblical couples. The large building is divided between a synagogue and a mosque. Entry to both is controlled by the IDF. In the mosque, the enclosure showing the direction towards Mecca has pink scars on the white marble - bullet marks. In February 1994, Baruch Goldstein - Brooklyn-born settler - walked into the mosque during Ramadan dawn prayers and opened fire with automatic weapons, killing 29 and wounding 125. A bullet-proof barrier has since been placed between the two sides.

Day seven is a full harvest day in the valley of Wadi Ahmed. The fields are in the northern and western part of Beit Jala, historically within Bethlehem district . But the settlements on the hilltops are built on land confiscated from Beit Jala, considered by Israel to be part of Jerusalem, while the groves in the valleys belong to farmers living in Beit Jala. This means the farmers find themselves prohibited from having free access to their land as Israel restricts access of Palestinians from the rest of the West Bank and Gaza to the holy city.

We must pass the 300 Checkpoint into Jerusalem and drive around to access the valley from the other side, as access from the Palestinian side is restricted to a single gate, requiring special permits. Our farmer can only bring his mother & brother through the gate with him. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers can cruise past on the bypass bridge overhead, the longest in the West Bank.

An IDF Humvee pulls us over on the dirt road leading to the farmer's land and demands "special" permission to enter the valley (even though under Israel's redrawn maps we are still within Israel). The farmer has already contacted the soldiers’ superiors and ensured we are not breaking any Israeli military orders; but they still detain us for a few nervous minutes, before we go on. The family has a stone house built on the land, which must always be inhabited to ensure it isn't destroyed. The planned path of Israel's separation wall goes through this valley to surround Cremisan Monastery, which produces Palestine's only wine.

Most of the trees we harvest are hundreds of years old – I can climb high enough to get vertigo. But no branches snap beneath us; the trees here are stronger than I realise. At the end of the day, we walk past one planted in Roman times; it's possibly the second oldest thing I've seen after the Pyramids.

Our last day of harvest takes back to the fields south of al Khader, on the other side of Efrat settlement (the biblical name for Bethlehem). It takes us over an hour to get to the field; even the bypass roads Palestinians can drive on aren't equally accessible, and even our bus was pulled over, held up for half an hour, and the driver was given several fines for being un-roadworthy. This generally only happens to the white-and-green plated Palestinian vehicles.

The demountable blocks on the edge of this farmer's terraces are settlement "outposts" - where some settlers relocate a few kilometres away in a strategic location. Israel is required to build roads, power lines, water mains, and all the necessary infrastructure for a modern state once they have done this. Over time, settlements expand to include the outposts.

The farmer knows his fields down in the valley, in which all manner of fruit and vegetables are growing, might be safe for the near future; but the outpost metres away represents a clear threat.

Our farewell night party comes, and it's hard to believe that we must leave behind all our new friends. Perhaps it's being thrown together and exposed to the daily struggle of Palestinian life that has built our bond; or perhaps it's our common drive to go beyond the package tourists with whom we share our hotel, and see the real story of this land.

Despite our different countries and reasons for getting involved, we have formed our own network of solidarity activists – committed to joining campaigns calling attention to the crime of Israel's occupation within our home countries, but also to working for peace in a practical way, with our own hands – and showing ordinary Palestinian farmers, families and communities that, no matter how little our governments care for the injustices done here, the people of the world do.