November 3, 2008
KAFR QADDUM, West Bank (AFP) — For a number of years, volunteers have joined Palestinian farmers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank to help pick olives and provide some form of protection against increasingly violent attacks by settlers.

"We do this because we want to defend Palestinians' rights to their land," said Rabbi Yehiel Grenimann, of the Israeli Rabbis for Human Rights which organises volunteer teams to work in olive groves where Palestinian farmers are under potential threat.

"As a last resort we stand between Palestinian farmers and the settlers," said Grenimann, who was born in Australia of Holocaust survivors.

Around him, half a dozen volunteers, most of them Israelis, plucked olives -- some with their fingers, others using small plastic rakes -- which they dropped onto tarpaulins laid out on the rocky ground.

That day's harvest, also just outside Qedumim, went smoothly until it was halted by a heavy downpour. In several cases it is settler attacks that prevent farmers and volunteers from picking olives in the West Bank.

"It has become worse," said Hellela Siew, 64, who has travelled from Britain for the past six year to take part in the annual harvest of the tiny fruit that is a mainstay of the West Bank economy and has come to symbolise Palestinian nationhood, not to mention peace.

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