CJNV brings activists to join the Olive Harvest and stand with Palestinian farmers and families resisting land expulsion as they tend to their olive trees and fields.
Our Olive Harvest program is not currently open for applications. The best way to stay updated on our current and future programming is to sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
About the Project
Participants will spend the olive harvest season accompanying Palestinians farmers and families on their lands. Oftentimes we may be accompanying families to fields that are particularly targeted by settlers, and therefore particularly difficult to access. For that reason, it is extremely important that there are activists present to document and nonviolently co-resist against this settler-state violence. Participants will be available to help in the harvest, act in coordination with our partners to document incidents and participate in nonviolent direct action in the region.
Participants will communicate their experiences to international audiences, crafting narratives that can advance co-resistance efforts. They will work with Palestinian activists to highlight their stories and experiences living and resisting under apartheid, serving to further amplify partners’ voices. Over the course of the project, participants will build relationships that will expand and strengthen CJNV’s working network of solidarity and co-resistance.
CJNV will provide participants with group lodging, logistical support, nonviolent action training, and facilitation.
Background and Context
The olive harvest is a significant time of the year in Palestinian society. It’s a powerful moment when local Palestinian farmers and families steadfastly tend their olive trees and work their land as they have for generations. It is a symbolic and material act of resistance to land theft and expulsion and an affirmation of Palestinian livelihood and culture. For this reason, it is also a time of increased settler-state violence, where settlers and army violently try to keep Palestinians from reaching their ancestral lands and harvesting their olives, a crucial part of the livelihoods of these communities. As Jews, it is a meaningful act of solidarity and co-resistance to show up with our partners in this moment – to materially support by harvesting olives and documenting human rights violations, as well as to stand in solidarity with our partners against land theft, settler-state violence, and systems of oppression and segregation that allow one community to flourish at the expense of the other.
We know from our experience that the presence of solidarity activists mitigates settler and military violence against local activists and community residents in Area C of the occupied West Bank. CJNV has forged dynamic, sustained, and trusting relationships in solidarity with communities throughout the region across seven years of co-resistance against state violence and dispossession, and wants to build on that work with this new piece of programming.