The Israeli armed forces were busy on 9 March 2020. The army implemented a closure of the Occupied Palestinian Territories for the Israeli Purim festivities, and locked down travel between Bethlehem and its surrounding areas so as to contain the coronavirus outbreak. That would seem like a full work schedule. But the military still found the time to uproot 400 olive trees in a Palestinian village.
The olive trees had only been in the soil a few weeks when the army decided they would come out again. They had been planted by international volunteers on 14 and 26 February. It is hard work, planting a tree. It requires expertise, money and space. Volunteers fundraised in their home communities to pay for their visit to Palestine and to sponsor tree planting organised by the YMCA’s Joint Advocacy Initiative. Each planting day costs the organisation around 6000 shekels (GBP 1350), covering the transport of volunteers, the purchase of saplings and gardening tools, and the administrative costs of coordinating the volunteers’ activities and processing olive growers’ applications for support. And there’s the carrying of trees and tools, the digging of holes, and the securing of saplings. On 14 February 2020, twenty-six North American and British volunteers and a handful of Palestinians went to do this back-breaking work in the lands of Wad Foukin.
Wad Foukin is a village of some 1500 inhabitants, west of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. The slopes primed for planting were located right on the edge of the West Bank, by the 1949 armistice line known as the Green Line. It was selected after an evaluation of applications to the YMCA’s Joint Advocacy Initiative because Wad Foukin is hemmed in by constantly expanding Israeli construction. The villagers are engaged in a court case to reclaim expropriated land. International volunteers support the villagers’ right to access their lands by planting trees.
