Olive Branch Gesture
By Eric Silver

“You cannot remove Evil with a capital E,” said Rabbi Dov Marmur, “but all of us can remove some evils. This is one such opportunity.”

The 71-year-old Holocaust survivor, who once served Reform congregations in Ilford and North-West London, was one of 300 Jews in baggy sweaters and sensible shoes who trudged through the rocky, thorn-strewn hills of Samaria on Tu Bishvat, the New Year for Trees, to plant 500 olive saplings for the Palestinian villagers of Salem.

Guarded by jeeploads of soldiers and police, they were replacing trees vandalised during the autumn harvest season by Salem’s radical settler neighbours. Some were uprooted; some were torched; some were hacked with power saws, but have now been trimmed clean and are sprouting afresh.

Villagers estimated the loss at £30,000. They strenuously denied claims by right-wing publicists that they had ravaged their own trees to give the Jews a bad name, or that they were the victims of over-enthusiastic pruning. You don’t prune, they said, before you pick the fruit.

On Monday, the fields were like a movie back lot for a falafel Western. Young Arabs showed off their horsemanship, donkeys brayed, shepherd boys grazed their flocks. Motherly Israelis handed out Tu Bishvat dried fruit.

Arik Ascherman, chairman of Rabbis for Human Rights, a Hollywood preacher if ever there was one, recited a verse from Deuteronomy (20:19): “When thou shalt besiege a city, in making war against it to take it, thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof.”

Abu Zaki, a 37-year-old father of six whose family lost about 100 trees, told the JC: “We’d cultivated these trees for more than 30 years. This is how we earn our living. You come in the morning and you find they’ve been destroyed. It’s as if a murderer breaks into your house and kills your children.”

Ahmed Shtayeh, another farmer digging away in a flamboyant white turban, thanked his guests. “We see that there are different Jews, good ones as well as bad ones. The problem is that in the name of religion, the settlers disgrace their own people.”

The planters, men and women ranging from early 20s to early 80s, were bussed in by five organisations: the New Israel Fund, Rabbis for Human Rights, the Kibbutz Movement, the Reform Political Action Committee and the Bina Jewish education institute. The NIF alone raised £3,000 from small donors to pay for the new trees.

Sami Michael, a veteran Baghdad-born Hebrew novelist, told the JC: “I am a Jew who suffered in Iraq for being a Jew. I can’t see how I can live in a Jewish country where Arabs suffer because they are a minority.”

Haim Guri, the 82-year-old poet of the Palmach, the strike force of Israel’s War of Independence, took the vandalism as a personal blow. “As someone who was born here and was brought up to love this landscape, it is unacceptable to me that fellow Jews destroyed the olive trees of these impoverished peasants.

“Having lived through six wars and seen all the hatred they generated, I think there is no simple solution to the conflict between our peoples.

“No force on earth is going to remove us from this land, and no force is going to remove the Arabs either. But kindness and good neighbourliness still mean something.”