village of Bidia, which, on Saturdays, has become a shopping mall for Israelis, slowly crept up to the road. In anticipation of the next intifada, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak (each in his turn) decided on an even more sterile, bypass-the-bypass road. Again great stretches of Palestinian land were expropriated, again we demonstrated together with the Palestinian villagers (November 1998), again we were teargassed (one does not shoot at Israelis), again to no avail.
But now the road is empty. Only from time to time we meet
groups of cars. The settlers are driving in convoys for fear of stonethrowing children. But we were lucky. Here and there we saw stones lying around on the road, remnants of previous stone-showers, but we passed unmolested.
On the previous evening we received an SOS call from the villagers of Hares asking us to please go there. This Palestinian village, near the big Ariel settlement, is cut off from the world. The army is blockading it, no one is allowed to enter or leave. The olives, the only products of the village, are going to rot on the trees, especially in the orchard bordering the Revava settlement. Anyone trying to harvest there is in mortal danger. A 14-year-old boy was shot and killed there only three days ago, when he was alone in the orchard with his father. The villagers hope that the presence of Israelis will restrain the settlers and soldiers, allowing them harvest the olives on which their livelihood depends.
A woman from the village also called. She cried excitedly that at that moment the soldiers had opened fire on the village and on her. She begged us to come the next morning. Until darkness, she promised, there is generally no shooting.
Hares is situated on a hill, 100 meters away from the road, at a stretch where the bypass-bypass joins the bypass road. The stretch is an ideal place for throwing stones, and therefore the settlers are angry. We know the landscape well, because in March 1999 we helped a family in the next village, Kiffel-Hares, to rebuild a house demolished by the army.
It was not easy for us to decide what to do. It was clear that this was a war zone. In order to get to the place, we had to risk being stoned or shot at by Palestinians who would think that we were settlers. On the other hand, our presence would be like a red rag to the settlers. The army would consider us breakers of the occupation laws. All this in order to pick olives a few dozen yards from a settlement.
Gush Shalom activists who can turn out on a workday include youngsters in their teens and elderly people. Men and women. Was it responsible to advise them to enter a war-zone?