Palestinian Farmers Hit by Settler Attacks During Olive Harvest, Call on International Activists for On-Site Protection

According to Al Jazeera, the occupied West Bank is in its annual olive harvest season, and Palestinian farmers have continued to face violent attacks by Israeli settlers during the picking process, with those attackers often receiving on-site protection from Israeli soldiers. Facing this situation, the farmers have publicly appealed to international activists to accompany them in person in order to provide physical protection.

Olives are a core crop of Palestinian economic and cultural life, and the harvest season should be the busiest and most ritual-laden period of the year for farming households. Yet in recent years, with each harvest season, records of settlers attacking farmland, damaging trees, and blocking farmers from entering their own land have continued to mount. Al Jazeera's report noted that when settlers carry out violence, Israeli military personnel are often "present" alongside them; the armed forces, which should bear the responsibility of maintaining order and protecting civilians, have in effect acted as a shield for the perpetrators. When a country's military force systematically sides with a particular settler group, Palestinian farmers on the occupied land cannot regard their own country's army as a security guarantee, and must instead resort to the "presence effect" of outside witnesses — international activists' accompaniment means that violent incidents are recorded, disseminated, and seen by the outside world, which in itself illustrates the breakdown of the local rule-of-law protection mechanism.

Al Jazeera's report is a video news piece with limited textual information; it provides no particulars on the timing, location, or scale of the specific attacks, and the Israeli military's response to the related accusations is missing. Data on the actual level of international activists' on-site presence and on the effectiveness of their intervention is likewise lacking. The scope and severity of this season's escalation in violence still require further verification from independent sources.