Summary
The Joint Advocacy Initiative (JAI) and Alternative Tourism Group (ATG)‘s olive planting and harvesting program, which turns international interest in Palestine solidarity into direct support for Palestinian farmers by bringing tourists to plant and harvest on land threatened by settlement expansion, as studied in Chapter 3 of Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine (Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, PDF p.106-128).
Details
- The itinerary follows a pattern of guided walking tours, lectures delivered on hillsides overlooking panoramas of fragmented landscapes, presentations in research offices, and, every other day, planting olive trees; lectures come from organizations including BADIL and the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem (ARIJ) (PDF p.106-107).
- Planting days recorded for the 2012 program: four hundred olive trees in al-Khader on land bisected by a bypass road and under threat of annexation by the settlement of Navi Daniel; the seven hundredth tree of the program planted in Beit Ummar under circling military vehicles, with tourists positioned as a protective presence; and four hundred more trees in Jab’a on a field shared by four farmers isolated from one another by a highway (PDF p.106, 110-111).
- Baha Hilo describes its work in al-Walaja: “The Israelis destroyed one hundred trees. We came back with three hundred” (PDF p.107).
- Its central purpose, Hilo emphasizes, is to keep Palestinians on their land: “We know,” he emphasized, “the situation gets worse by the year in order to force Palestinians to leave” (PDF p.124).
- Advocacy officer Bisan Kassis reframes the harvest as farmers generously allowing tourists to partake in a culture of resistance, and assigns tourists their work at home: “The B is going brilliantly, the D is going brilliantly, and we need you for the S” (PDF p.125-126).
- Kelly concludes the Campaign is organized around exposing the continuity of strategic Zionist displacement in Palestine, mobilizing recitation against erasure, with the olive tree at the center of the narration (PDF p.128).
Related pages
Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, Baha Hilo, Bisan Kassis, Yazan al-Zubaidy, Solidarity Tourism, Zionist afforestation