DISAPPEARED: The Palestine Olive Tree

You can't make olive oil without olives and you can't get olives without olive trees and you can't have olive trees without land and you can't get abundant harvests of olives from these trees without the farmers who know and understand them and who have tended them over generations.

The ruthless destruction of any tree fills me with anger and sadness but there is something about the deliberate savaging of olive trees in Palestine that amplifies my anger. I am especially affected by the irreversibility of the destruction: you have to wait 500 years to have more 500-year old olive trees.
For me, olive trees are not only ancient but noble, patient, quiet and very beautiful, their colors harmonious with the dusty, muted terrain. I respect these trees because for sometimes hundreds of years they've been the primary livelihood for Palestinians.

The olive farmers of Palestine are by no means an agribusiness, consisting of small, family enterprises using farming practices and equipment that are not at all helpful in a global economy. Combined with the additional obstacles created by Israel's occupation, it is nothing short of miraculous that we have the privilege of buying and using Palestinian olive oil.

Today, they are under terrible threat. The Israeli occupation of Palestine has created a cruel attack on the land, the cutting down of olive trees to build the enormous separation barrier, the annexation of agricultural land to build roads and the theft of land to build illegal settlements. Millions of olive trees have been uprooted while others have been separated from their farmers by the occupation's various pernicious tactics, including severely restricted access to the trees and to the harvesting of the olives.

Farmers are prevented from tending their trees by a series of punitive rules that regulate the hours during which Israeli soldiers allow access through guarded gates and the issuance of permits to who will be allowed this access. Uniformed soldiers are a threatening presence in the olive groves and heavy equipment a terrifying weapon that uproots, slashes and burns the trees.

It is estimated that as many as four million olive trees have been taken out of production, by one or other of these means.

These pictures tell the story. There is no need here for my explanatory words. I must however express the deep outrage I feel as a Jew that people of my 'tribe', a people for whom a belief in justice has always been fundamental, can destroy these ancient, beautiful living things and at the same time deprive another people of the right to their traditional livelihood.

When we buy olive oil from Spain or Italy or Greece, we don't think much about the journey from the olive tree to the bottle on our kitchen counter.


And when we think about olives we probably don't think about Palestine and many of us don't even know that we can buy Palestinian olive oil in North America. And even if we know all that, we may not realize the many, many obstacles that stand between those Palestinian olive trees and the Palestinian olive oil that is available to us in this country. I owe my first bottle of this excellent olive oil to Zatoun, (zatoun means olive in Arabic), a grass roots organization in Toronto and its founder Robert Massoud. Please listen to his story on Tidings from Hazel Kahan and visit the Zatoun website to place your order. The olive oil is also available from the American Friends Service Committee.

Even if you are at war with a city...you must not destroy its trees for the tree of the fields is man's life. Deut.20:19-20

Related sites:

International Women's Peace Service

Mahsanmilim

Jewish Peace News

Land  Research Center

B'Tselem

SHOULD WE ALL BE VEGANS?

Portraits of four animal activists

What inspires and motivates people to be animal rights activists and vegans? Until I interviewed four young American activists I had not realized just how intimate--and necessary--the connection is between the vegan and animal movements.

Although I know quite a number of vegetarians, I know rather few vegans. I’m aware of course that neither vegans nor vegetarians (although there’s also the puzzling concept of “almost vegetarian”) eat meat but there’s always been something rather mysterious about those who chose the vegan way: in my mind they were somehow more exotic, more serious, more disciplined, perhaps more ascetic, more willing to put up with deprivation. Or so I thought. I didn’t understand until I interviewed the four "superstar" activists for my radio program Tidings from Hazel Kahan that veganism is actually the linchpin of the animal movement. If you’re serious about protecting the rights of animals, especially the rights of farm animals, that is animals who are farmed for food, then you would find it difficult to argue against the logic of being a vegan.

Being an activist in the animal protection movement means not only protesting—and protecting-- the way farm animals are born, raised and killed, but also making explicit the profound connections between factory farming and our own health, the health of the environment, the health of workers and, last but not least, the ethics on which our society is based.
The four people whose stories I heard had all developed a compassionate consciousness of animal suffering when they were much younger. Often without the benefit of support from family or their peers, this compassion led them not only to make life-long food choices but also to a belief that these choices could make a difference. All of them are now leaders in the broader animal movement, shaping it through advocacy, legislation, undercover investigative work, outreach in national and international organizations as well as the forming of new organizations.

I have been inspired and moved by the ways in which they have integrated their values into their lives and their work. I hope you will be too.

Each of the activists I spoke with can recall exactly when and how they had their first awakening about animal suffering. When they talk about it, their memories have the feel of an epiphany, the day on which their lives were changed--it may have been a teacher, a video, a book or a conversation.

One of the myths about vegans is that their diet is boring at best, that they are malnourished at worst. Listen to these interviews and you will hear that myth debunked with dispatch! Rather than a marginal counter-culture phenomenon, veganism is growing and entering the main stream and general consumer consciousness. Although conclusive research evidence is difficult to come by, the capitalist proof lies in the capitalist pudding: greater demand has led to greater supply so that more products are now available in more places. If further proof is needed, Oprah herself has announced that she is embarking on a three-week vegan experience.

Fundamental to the animal protection movement is a strong sense of injustice tempered by compassion. Other vegans have told me that for them the suffering of animals is so palpable that they believe that by eating meat they are actually ingesting the suffering into their own beings. I was curious to see if such thinking was shared by these activists and if they also saw participation in animal abuse—witting or unwitting—as somehow staining our entire society. Although this may not use quite those words, they are passionately logical about the ethical ramifications of animal suffering and food choices that create and extend such suffering.

Although the various groups within the animal movement differ in emphasis and style and connotation, they are bound as witnesses by the documented horror of animal suffering and their belief that a vegan diet makes an important contribution to change. This is an energetic movement, galvanized by exchange of people from one organization to another, the forming of new groups and organizations, increased collaboration, the relative youth of its members and the increasing salience of its vision on the broader planetary stage.

Perhaps it’s time to think about why we aren’t all vegans already!
Podcasts of the two-part program are available: Part 1 and Part 2

Please visit their websites to learn more about these activists and their work: Nora Kramer www.humanecalifornia.org, Nathan Runkle www.mercyforanimals.org, Lauren Ornelas www.foodispower.org and Paul Shapiro www.hsus.org.

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Interviews with the four activists were broadcast on June 26, 2008 and July 3, 2008 on WPKN 89.5 fm Bridgeport and 88.7 Montauk, totally independent and listener-supported radio stations. This and all other Tidings from Hazel Kahan programs are produced by Tony Ernst..

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The four larger photos: cockerel, pigs, sheep and chickens were taken by me in Paraguay and Guernsey! The two smaller ones are web downloads.

HOW DOES A COUNTRY CRUMBLE?

I AM ALWAYS GRIPPED by the ways in which political forces affect the life of a single individual. Even when printed headlines expand to a few minutes of real time video capturing the mother, man, child or dog against backgrounds of raging fires, rampages or collapsed houses, I want to know more. I want to get as interior as I can. How does one man, this Donald Fraser, feel as his country crumbles around him, his cat is lost, his laptop battery has run out of juice and his passport is stolen? What did he manage to forage for lunch? Can he count on his neighbors?

I met Donald (he asked us not to use his real name) in Tanzania where he was a safari guide. He was born in what was then Northern Rhodesia and is now Zambia, went to school in what is now Zimbabwe and lives in Harare, its capital. He is a white man, approaching 60, an artist and writer and one of the millions of Zimbabwe’s citizens struggling to exist in increasingly apocalyptic times. Remembering his idyllic life as a child and young man on very same land he lives on now lends a special poignancy to his story. How did it come to this, I ask him. What makes a country crumble?

When we spoke, courtesy of Skype, it was two or three weeks before the last ‘real’ election, March 29, 2008, that is one where there was still an opposition candidate. Since then, Zimbabwe has occupied headlines every day and become a target for international sanctions, rebuke, analysis; none of this has, so far, lessened the terror experienced by its citizens, black and white.It’s the 21st century, it’s the year 2008 and arguably we’ve become somewhat immune to stories of collapsing countries, failed states, genocide and suffering populations. They’re on every continent, especially in Africa. When Zimbabwe is mentioned in the media, many of us shrug it off as just another one of those countries, distinguished perhaps by stratospheric inflation rates. Just like Nazi Germany. Oh, and the fuel shortages? Just like Gaza. And the corrupt dictators? Just like so many places in the Middle East, Africa, South America. We shake our heads and let our attention continue its wandering.

How do countries collapse with such speed and drama? What does it take to transform a nation from an effective, self-sustaining, creative, thriving place for all of its citizens to one where the vast majority of its people have to forage for food and water, narrowly concentrated on survival, vigilant to enemies and living from moment to desperate moment? Countries are huge entities yet they are also delicately-balanced systems, each with its own irrevocable, irreversible tipping point. We watch with alarm as our own country, the proud and powerful United States, confronts the fall of towering institutions and respected leaders. How did Zimbabwe go from good to bad?Can Zimbabwe be put together again? Is Donald waiting for its reconstruction and reconciliation? Why doesn’t he run away? I think I would!

He’s hoping, he says, for a return to law order, for the economy to return to profitability, for people with skills to return to the country to make the place work again, for the violence to stop:

“My family have lived in Africa since 1820 …I feel Africa is where I belong...people, traditions, history, how everything works…So for me to feel as if there isn’t a future in Africa is turning my back on a hundred years of continuous existence on this continent…a serious statement. It’s easy to say I’ve had enough but I’ve lived here a long time and for me to say I’ve had enough is a significant thing. In the last couple of months I’ve said what is there to live for… when your body starts to crack up and you need medical supplies…it’s more and more difficult to find that over here.”

Since we spoke in March, these hopes have the appearance of delusion. Violence and chaos have multiplied, inflation has soared beyond calculation and Donald has left for a short work spell in Zambia where he is beyond the reach of email and telephone.

Like Yusuf, a Palestinian man demographically quite dissimlar from him, Donald is trapped in a country where everything that once gave him life has turned to poison. Like Yusuf, there is no other country reaching out to extend him permanent shelter.

That’s what happens when a country crumbles.

You can hear Donald describe the dénouement of Zimbabwe and the accompanying unraveling of his life by listening to him talk on this Tidings from Hazel Kahan program.