IT IS the olive harvest season. Palestinian communities are preparing for it, as they have for generations. This is not only economically vital, but also a practice rooted in their history, culture, and traditions.

However, not all Palestinian farmers can simply go to the family plot and collect the olives growing on the trees. In dozens of villages across the Occupied West Bank, Palestinians face harassment, beatings, and sometimes even fatal attacks, carried out by extremist Israeli settlers.

During last year’s harvest period, while international attention was largely focused on Gaza, more than 1,400 settler attacks were documented in the West Bank. Especially notorious are the so-called “Hilltop Youth” — far-right hooligan settlers that have repeatedly attacked Palestinians, destroying homes and uprooting trees.

Last week, I went along with dozens of other peace activists from Israel to participate in the olive harvest, as an act of Protective Presence, whereby the physical presence of Israeli volunteers who accompany Palestinian farmers can help prevent violence from the settlers, and possibly allow the Palestinians safe access to their lands. The logistics of the action was organised by Rabbis for Human Rights, with Standing Together mobilising its activists.

Early in the morning, we headed from Tel Aviv towards the West Bank, with more people coming from Jerusalem and the north. After an hour’s drive we arrived at Deir Ammar, near Ramallah. There we met with village leaders, and conversed in a mixture of Hebrew, Arabic and English to plan our day’s work. Nawras — a Palestinian citizen of Israel, organiser of the Standing Together local group in the centre of the Galilee — helped to translate. We had a sizable group of activists, numbering around thirty.

As we were heading towards the olive groves, we saw on the nearby hill a few makeshift buildings. “This is the new settlement,” we were told.

It had popped up less than three months ago, and is inhabited by Hilltop Youth. In Israel, these are known as “illegal outposts.” All Israeli settlements in the West Bank are considered illegal according to international law, but these impromptu “outposts” are considered illegal even according to Israel’s own laws, as they were set up without the government’s consent. The zealous settlers who inhabit them don’t believe they need anyone’s approval to “settle the holy land,” harassing the nearby Palestinians and trying to force them to leave.

We arrived. Activists and villagers started to hand pick the olives and put them in buckets. Others laid plastic sheets on the ground below the olive trees, and combed the tall branches with rakes, causing ripe olives to fall. For a while, the entire scene was buzzing with people hard at work.

A couple of minutes later, an army jeep arrived. Five young soldiers — perhaps 18 or 19 years old — came out, weapons in hand. Dotan — an experienced Standing Together activist from Tel-Aviv — approached them to negotiate.

“You can’t be here,” they told him. “Why is that?” he enquired. “Security reasons. You must leave this place at once.” They continued to talk, with Dotan maintaining his calm, asking questions. He knew what he was doing: stalling for time, keeping the soldiers busy, so the rest of us could make the most of these precious minutes to hurriedly harvest more olives.

Finally, an agreement was reached. “You can only harvest the olive trees on this side of the road, and not on the other side,” the soldiers told Dotan. Why exactly? What was the reasoning behind this strange restriction? No point in trying to find logic in it. Under the occupation, many things are arbitrary. The whim of a young soldier is transformed into law, and questioning that is useless.

After more minutes passed, with our buckets filling with olives, the soldiers returned, saying: “This has now been declared a closed military area. You need to head back to the village.”

It was then, when someone noticed a movement nearby. “Settlers are heading our way!.” One car was driving from the outpost towards us. Another group of settlers, carrying sticks, was making its way on foot. We gathered our equipment, fearing confrontation. As we were about to leave, we saw the settlers standing very close, and pulled out our phones, starting to film.

Capturing their faces can sometimes deter them. Suddenly, some settlers — their faces covered — threw rocks at us. “Why aren’t you stopping this?” we shouted at the nearby soldiers, who looked unimpressed. After they noticed everything was recorded on video, they moved towards the settlers, doing as little as possible to actually stop them.

It was at this time that I saw Ruth — a young Standing Together activist from Jerusalem, where she studies at the university — standing behind me, looking visibly shaken. It seems that while we were preoccupied with the rock-throwing settlers, the other group of settlers arrived behind us, and started to beat two Palestinian villagers who were still in the olive grove.

Ruth was filming them with her phone, when one of the settlers reached her and tried to pull it out from her hand. One villager, beaten badly, had to be carried away to be hospitalised. Ruth was now busy trying to get a reception on her phone, to upload the video of the settler attack. If our presence can’t deter the settlers from beating the Palestinians, at least we can document their crimes.

We began to retreat towards the village, while a dozen settlers — some of them armed with guns — were standing very close, shouting and taunting. The Palestinian villagers with whom we marched were stopping every few metres to shout back at them: “This is our land!” “These are our olives!”

The soldiers tried to hasten our departure. Two of the soldiers, their faces also covered, were the most confrontational. “If you don’t leave this place in a minute, I have authorisation to use stun grenades and to make arrests. Don’t test my patience,” one of them told us. “You’ll never harvest these olives,” the other grinned. No reason was given as to why the settlers were allowed to stay, while the Palestinian villagers who owned this land were forced to march back to their village.

We made it back to the village, buckets of olives in our hands. Despite the interference by the army and the settler attack, we didn’t return empty handed. We said our goodbyes, and headed back to our vans.

There is nothing especially unusual or exceptionally dramatic on this day of olive harvest.

This is the reality of so many Palestinian families in the Occupied West Bank, whose every aspect of their daily lives is dictated by an army of a state which is not their own.

While the world has its eyes on the Gaza Strip and the atrocities that our government commits there, we mustn’t let go of the fact that settler violence is on the rise in the West Bank, and action is needed to be taken there as well.

Our van was driving westwards, approaching the Green Line (the pre-1967 border), which separates the State of Israel from the West Bank. There we had to pass through an army checkpoint in order to get back into Israel.

A soldier ordered us to stop, and peeked inside our minibus. It was full of dishevelled activists, wearing bilingual purple T-shirts. “Where are you coming from?” he asked. No use lying, was it? It’s not as if we could pass for tourists.

“We come from the olive harvest at Deir Ammar.” The soldier looked back at us with blank eyes. He didn’t expect this answer. He seemed to be exhausted from merely having to think about it. “Just go,” he said. So we went.

Uri Weltmann is the national field organiser of Standing Together (www.standing-together.org).