We told the Palestinian villagers we were willing to risk injury or arrest if they thought this would help. But the villagers told us, "We won't let you do this alone, and we will be with you even if it comes to beatings and arrests." This is a huge risk for them. For most of us, we had never in our lives seen anything quite like this.

Thursday, 10/17/02 Action and Victory

It was time to proceed with this well-planned major harvest action. The participants included: about 400 Palestinians from the village; 16 internationals-13 ISMs and 3 women from IWPS (the International Women's Peace Service); plus 8 Israeli activists (some of them from Rabbis for Human Rights). The plan was for this large number of villagers to carry out major harvesting work today - to be shielded from the settlers by the internationals and the Israeli peace activists. The settlers had been raiding the olive groves, preventing the Palestinians from getting to their fields and groves, and
annexing more and more Palestinian land to their settlement.

We awoke at about 6 A.M. and met the villagers at the roadblock leading to their fields. There were about 400 villagers. There was enormous anticipation in the air-it had a been a long time since they had been able to visit these fields, because of the great danger.