By Oliver Moore

During the summer, a Palestinian farming organisation called UAWC – the Union of Agriculture Work Committees – issued an urgent call for solidarity. The organisation wanted fellow farmers from the global peasant farmer movement La Via Campesina to come and see the “severe and critical conditions” on the ground in the West Bank in Palestine.

Attacks on farmers by settlers, the stealing of land, water and other resources, the intensity of military occupation, and injuries and deaths, were all increasing.

UAWC wanted to show people directly, to empower people to advocate back home for Palestinians. They also hoped to foster ongoing solidarity.

I jumped at the opportunity – and then spent months worrying.

There are many things you learn taking on a trip like this, and more properly understanding real fear is one of them. I never worried so much and for such a prolonged period.

I didn’t know others in the group and didn’t speak Arabic or Hebrew, and while I know about farming, I’m not an actual farmer. So, I wasn’t even especially handy should that be needed!

No matter what else was going on in my life, the clock seemed to gallop inexorably towards landing day, December 10th. Family time became especially precious.

Every pulse of dread (which always came at night-time) was accompanied by the guilt of comparing this to anything a typical Palestinian faced.

These months were a great lesson in understanding my own privilege – not knowing fear – and what to do with it.

ARRIVAL

Once we got there, UAWC were incredible hosts, so welcoming and warm. They really took us under their wing.

Our team of nine internationals lived in each other’s pockets – along with Fuad, Agsan, Sanna and Tamam, the local UAWC crew who spent every day with us. We found camaraderie over shared meals and stories, songs and laughter in people’s own homes. And daily tears.

The ten-day itinerary was intense. We visited six cities – Nablus, Hebron, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jericho and Occupied East Jerusalem; four villages – Qusra near Nablus and Bardala, Al Farsiya, and Jiftlik in the Jordan Valley; two refugee camps, Dhesheh and Aydah, in Bethlehem; and one school in the Masafer Yatta region.

 

SMALLER THAN COUNTY CORK

Palestine is smaller than people think. The West Bank is smaller than County Cork (5640 sq km vs 7500 sq km) and one of the first things you feel is trapped. Getting around was a long winded, stressful undertaking. Everywhere there are barriers. There were 800 or so roadblocks when we visited.

Cities like Nablus – the size of Belfast – have over 130 barriers to entry and exit. Some of these are fully militarised checkpoints, while others have huge orange gates closed without information or warning. All travel and trade, all trips to school, to hospital, to work, is impaired by these closures.

For us, this meant delays. For locals, this means the basics of life, whether routine or emergency, cannot be done easily or with certainty.

While settlers have their own well-built roads, Palestinians have winding ways to get around, on badly kept back roads full of traffic and roadblocks. Israel has been retaining tax revenue generated in the West Bank from the Palestinian Authority since October 7, 2023, so little investment is happening in upkeep.

 

WE HEARD TESTIMONIES

When stop-start moving, we also felt the suffocation of being surrounded by hilltop settlements. They were everywhere. For the UAWC team, the landscape was constantly changing. Two staff who are regularly out in the field visiting farmers and herders, kept pointing out the huge imposing Israeli flags indicating new land claimed by illegal settlers. Flags, outposts, settlements – increasing everywhere and always on the hills.

Outposts and settlements come with increased attacks on locals. Dozens of settlers can attack villages and go on the rampage. Many people had their story of their village being attacked by settlers, or family members being beaten up or arrested for the smallest of things by soldiers.

We heard testimonies about how the army often comes in after a settler attack and fires teargas and rubber bullets at people gathered to check-in on each other, compounding the abuse of the attacked.

Since January 2023 over 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed and over 16,000 injured. One million people have been arrested since the occupation began in 1967. The situation in prisons is deteriorating rapidly, including restrictions on visits, overcrowding, and arbitrary detention.

 

RURAL PALESTINE

We spent much time in area C – rural Palestine, where the Palestinian Authority has no authority (about two-thirds of the West Bank). This means the Palestinian police aren’t allowed in, so people must simply lock their doors and if caught outside, take their beating when settlers attack.

Ostensibly, the Israeli army protects locals from extremist, violent settlers. In practice, the two are largely in cahoots, moreso since thousands of weapons were distributed to settlers by the government.

Community after community was pressurised to abandon their land and homes. People faced constant attacks on themselves, their livestock and property. We saw many demolished houses and more about to be demolished.

 

CROPS DESTROYED BY MILITARY

Israel grants Palestinians about five permits annually to build homes, while demolishing about 2,000 structures annually.

As we went into the Jordan Valley, we encountered low-flying military planes. 20% of the West Bank is now a ‘firing zone’ – an area closed to Palestinians and kept for military use only. Nearby crops are destroyed by military manoeuvres and the sounds of war echo through the valleys constantly.

Firing zones are getting bigger and bigger. Once this designation happens, farmers face restrictions in accessing roads and their land, forcing them out.

Concurrently they face ever more illegal outposts and settlements also taking more and more land.

 

RURAL RESILIENCE IN A WARZONE

In the face of all this, how do people keep their resilience? People work out ways to keep supporting each other through sumud, a particularly Palestinian iteration of sometimes static, sometimes creative, steadfastness.

Staying on the land is the core of sumud (sometimes passively, sometimes with resistance). For example, UAWC’s seed bank enables sumud – by providing farmers with hardy, free, drought-resistant seeds with a 90% germination rate.

Against huge odds, court cases are won – people have won the right to return at least to the region they were intimidated from (as happened in Khirbet Zanuta near Hebron in early February). In this case, the community demonstrated sumud. All acts of return – including the return to northern Gaza – is sumud.

 

ROADS, WELLS AND OLIVE TREES HELP COMMUNITIES

UAWC is amazing, acting like a cross between LEADER, the Department of Agriculture and a huge farming organisation with thousands of members. Simply put – UAWC helps farmers stay on the land and helps communities stay together. It has built dozens of roads, drilled wells, planted olive trees, grant-aided machinery, helped establish dozens of coops, runs an incredible seed bank and a rooftop hydroponic garden for refugees, and helps farmers assert their legal rights.

UWAC also brings international volunteers to help protect and monitor the harvest, a proactive action credited with increasing the olive harvest by over 1,000 hectares in 2024, according to the Nablus governor Ghassan Daghlass we met.

There are numerous other human rights-orientated organisations doing similar work.

Occupation and colonisation has a thousand little ways to relentlessly beat people down; resilience and resistance has a million multi-layered manifestations.

More info: https://uawc-pal.org/about-us/

 

About Talamh Beo

Talamh Beo is a small farmer and agro-ecology* organisation established in 2017. It has over 300 members, and is part of a wider European and International movement of farmers called La Via Campesina.

There are 200 million+ farmers in La Via Campesina, fighting to defend peasant farmer rights.

As Talamh Beo describes it: “We believe that farmers and communities should be at the centre of decision-making for food and agriculture systems and developing agricultural policies.

We stand for a system which puts the power back into the hands of farmers, communities and citizens instead of corporate interests and industrial agriculture and food production.”

Currently Talamh Beo is campaigning for support for the many small-scale horticulturalists who lost polytunnels and other core growing infrastructure in the recent storm.

* Agro-ecology is about new farming methods that increase yields while reducing environmental impacts.

 

To visit the West Bank

The ISM – International Solidarity Movement – and Faz3a are the two main organisations people travel to Palestine with for the Autumn Olive Harvest.

Both ask for an initial contact by email, using an email address that does not include your full legal name. For ISM the email is ismtraining@riseup.net. Faz3a has a form here: https://www.defendpalestine.org/en/join.

Two weeks is the minimum stay, with longer preferred. Both provide initial online training. Volunteers usually self-fund the cost of travel (often doing local fundraisers to help).

According to Faz3a intensive on-the-ground training includes “orientation, legal rights and obligations, principles and tactics of non-violent intervention and de-escalation, effective documentation practices, and adherence to Palestinian leadership and local community needs”.

Volunteers are then stationed in threatened communities and they may also be mobilised for emergencies.

The Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel also provides a protective presence. Here, ‘accompaniers’ spend up to 3 months helping through activities like walking children to school. For more see: www.oikoumene.org.

About Oliver Moore

Fairness around food and farming has always been core to me. In the early ‘90s I volunteered to sell what was to become fair trade coffee in the corridors of UCD; now I work in agri-food policy.

I also lecture on the MSc in Agri-Food, Sustainable Development and Cooperatives in UCC’s Centre for Co-operative Studies.

Where I live in Cloughjordan, I volunteer with and am a member of a community-owned farm. We use participatory budgeting to work out production costs, to pay our farmers decent wages, and we charge ourselves accordingly. We have a ‘take what you need/should’ policy for distribution.

Talamh Beo was established in 2017 at ‘Feeding Ourselves’ – an event we organise in Cloughjordan every April.

I’ve been a member since then, and Talamh Beo is a member of La Via Campesina. And this membership is how I ended up in Palestine. The purposes of the trip for me and for all the team were solidarity, knowledge building, and advocacy.

(Ed’s note: While he doesn’t say it, Moore also has a PhD in the sociology of farming and food).

You can download our full Spring edition for free to read Oliver’s report along with many other articles on community development.