    Of the many good things one can do on our good Earth, helping Palestinians is the best and
    most pleasant one I know of. Kibbutz can’t compete with it. Young kibbutzniks are usually
    boring and aloof, while old kibbutzniks are, well, old. In kibbutz, you have the company of other
    foreigners, or none. Palestinians are so friendly, so open, so ready to talk to you. The Interna-tionals
    bask in their friendliness, live in enchanted villages, see the warm blue sky over the in-comparable
    landscape of Palestinian hills, and enjoy the fabulous hospitality of the peasants.
    And if occasionally they are shot at by the settlers or the army, it is just a small cost for all the
    fun, an additional divertissement courtesy of the IDF. That is, after all, why the Samurai are
    needed.
    The people who help Palestinians are quite different from kibbutz volunteers. They are
    more heterogeneous, from a 19-year-old student from Uppsala to a housewife from Brighton,
    from a Reverend from Georgia to a teacher from Boston, from a French farmer to an Italian MP.
    They are united by their feelings of compassion, of natural justice, and, yes, by their daring.
    They work in the shadow of Israeli tanks, and protect the olives and men with their own bodies.
    The harvest in the Samarian mountains is a joy but not for timid souls. We were to experience its
    rough side without further delay.
    We were picking olives, filling the bags with the green gold, when suddenly a Jeep drove
    down the stony ruddy road, and screeched to a halt near us, raising a cloud of dust; behind it was
    a bigger vehicle, an army troop carrier full of soldiers. A single man jumped out of the jeep,
    aiming an automatic rifle M-16 straight at the child on the tree.
    “Go away, you bloody Arabs,” he yelled in Brooklynese. He lifted a rock and hurled it into
    the nearest group of workers. A farmer, who could not turn away, was hit and nursed his hand.
    “Come one step closer and I’ll shoot!” he shouted when Laurie tried to talk to him. He was
    large, unkempt, ferocious, intentionally working himself into a high degree of hysteria.
    “Don’t even touch the olives!” he screamed at the peasants.
    From around the road bend, three men appeared running. They looked like nothing you ever
    saw. To their shaven foreheads, black boxes were strapped by narrow black belts; black belts
    crisscrossed their bare arms. The Jews put on the phylacteries, as this setup is called, for a
    morning prayer, but on these young men they looked like the amulets of a warlike tribe. They
    wore dark trousers and dark tee-shorts, while white shawls with black stripes flew behind their
    backs. Their rifles were pointed at us. They looked possessed by some strange demon, these
    young men in Jewish ritual dress and with their ideas from the Book of Joshua. I was not aston-ished
    when one of them pulled out a long curved blade. The scene reminded me of the recent
    movie, “The Time Machine,” with the sudden appearance of ferocious Morlocks and their on-slaught
    on bucolic Eloi.
    They pushed the women and cursed the men, their eyes burning with hate. Timid peasants,
    the Palestinians recoiled. A Samurai unarmed, I tried to reason with the attackers.
    “Let the farmers harvest their olives,” I beseeched, “it is their trees, it is their life. Be good
    neighbours to them!”
    “Go away, you Arab-lover,” hissed one of them. “You support our enemies. It is our land. It
    is the land of the Jews; the Goyim do not belong here.”
    In more peaceful circumstances, I would laugh: these disturbed young men from New York
    wished to expel the proper and rightful descendents of the people of Israel from their ancestral
    land. Never mind the incredible silliness of two-thousand-year-old claim in the country where
    five years of absence voids all claims. Never mind that their ‘Jewish’ ancestors probably hiked
    from the Eurasian steppe and never saw Palestine. Never mind that even the Jews of old never
    lived and hardly visited the land of Israel, between Bethel, Carmel and Jezreel. Soon the Roma-nian
    guest workers from Bucharest may expel the people of Florence, claiming direct descent
    from ancient Rome. But their rifles were no laughing stock.
    “Why do you burn olives, are the olives your enemies, too?”
    “Yes, the olives of our enemy are our enemies. And you are our enemies, too!” he shrieked.
    “Anti-Semites!”
    This word works magic with the Americans. Whenever an American is called an ‘anti-Semite’,
    he is supposed to prostrate on the ground, and swear eternal love and fealty to the Jew-ish
    people. I know it because daily I receive letters from people who were called ‘anti-Semites’
    for their support of Palestine and they could not cope with it. I provide them with first psycho-logical
    aid: after being punished for anti-Soviet activity, and condemned for anti-American
    opinions, an anti-Nomian lover of anti-Quity, I take the anti-Semitic label in my stride. Nowa-days,
    if one is not called an anti-S, it means one is clearly in the wrong, sandwiched between
    Sharon and Soros.
    Like ‘Arab-lover’, or ‘Nigger-lover’, an ‘anti-Semite’ is a label that smears its user by asso-ciation.
    It is often used by the settlers, by Foxman the spymaster, Kahane the racist, Mort Zuck-ermann
    the USA Today owner, Conrad Black the husband of Barbara Amiel, Sharon the mass
    murderer, Richard Perle the warmonger, Tom Friedman the shyster, Shylock the loan-shark and
    Elie Wiesel the pay-as-you-cry holocaust weepy. It was used against TS Elliot and Dostoyevsky,
    Genet and Hamsun, St John and Yeats, Marx and Woody Allen, and it is a much better company
    to be in. Still, our Americans hesitated for a moment, our good Israelis began to explain their
    position, but it was a good English girl from Manchester, Jennifer, who proved the superiority of
    Brits and saved the day by a brusque ‘fuck you’.
    The barrel of M-16 rifle made a curve and pointed at her. The soldiers looked at the goings
    on with interest. I turned to them.
    “Stop them! They’re aiming their guns at us!”
    “They haven’t shot you, yet”, answered the sergeant.
    The soldiers would not intervene as long as the Morlocks had their way, but the moment we
    engaged them, the awesome armed might of the Jewish state will be visited upon us. The Mor-locks
    knew it too: they smashed a camera of Dave’s, pushed Angie, poured insults at the girls,
    and threw stones.
    “Won’t you stop them?” I appealed to the soldiers.
    “Sorry, pal. Only police may deal with them,” replied the officer. “But we can arrest
    YOU, if you insist.”
    The army takes care of the Palestinians, and the police attends to the settlers — this simple
    ruse is one of the better inventions of the Jewish genius. Probably they borrowed it from the
    European settlements in China, where they had different police forces and different sets of law
    for Europeans and for Chinese. That is why the Morlocks may do what they want. The Palestini-ans
    were visibly upset: they are not fighters, but farmers with women and children harvesting
    their olives; they did not come there to die. Not yet, anyway. The settlers kill the villagers for
    sport or for fun, with and without provocation. For the last week, they murdered a few men who
    dared to harvest their own olives. If the villagers would defend themselves, would just dare to
    raise their hands at a Jew, they would be all slaughtered and their village wiped out. But the ol-ives
    had to be harvested, and the stand-off continued.
    “All the troubles are caused by the bloody settlers,” called out Uri, a good Israeli, who kept
    off the settler thugs to the right of me. “Without them, we would live peacefully. We would visit
    Yassouf with passports, like tourists. It is them, the settlers.”
    Indeed, it was easy, almost obligatory to hate the vicious young men, who destroyed crops
    and starved villages. This particular settlement is known as a bulwark of the Kahanist or Judeo-Nazi
    creed, as the late Professor Leibovich called it. They celebrated the assassination of Prime
    Minister Rabin; they worshipped Baruch Goldstein, the mass murderer from Brooklyn; they
    published the banned book of Rabbi Alba that openly proclaims the religious duty of the Jew to
    exterminate Gentiles. They were so evil it required no effort to hate them and to agree with Uri.
    But as I looked at the blank faces of the soldiers, a memory came back from the days of my
    childhood. The hoodlums do not go around robbing strangers: they would send forth a small kid
    to relieve you of the burden of your wallet. If you’d push the kid away, they would fall on you
    like a ton of bricks for molesting the youth. It was quite pointless to hate the small kid since he
    was sent by the bigger hoods.
    These young crackpots were sent by the bigger hoods, too. That is why the soldiers did not
    bat an eyelid when the settlers attacked the farmers. It was the division of labour: the thugs
    starved the peasants, the army protected the thugs, and the government endorsed it. While the
    army guns kept down the Palestinians, the US army kept down Iraq, the only state in the region
    that might be able to provide the balance of power, and the US diplomats wielded their veto in
    the Security Council. And beyond them, one could see the biggest hoods that did not care for
    olives, peasants or soldiers. On one end of the chain of command, there was a crazy Brooklyn
    settler with M-16; on the other end, Bronfman and Zuckerman, Sulzberger and Wolfowitz,
    Foxman and Friedman.
    And somewhere between, were we, the Israelis and the American Jews, who duly voted and
    paid taxes and supported the scheme, because without our support, Wolfowitz would have to
    conquer Baghdad single-handedly and Bronfman would have to burn the olives himself.
    Still, each man and beast has its pest, and we had to deal with our own. The farmers of Yas-souf
    and their international supporters, that’s us, stood our ground and did not flinch. Police ar-rived
    and consorted with the settlers. In a while, a smiley tall hair-cropped liaison officer came
    down to us.
    “You may pick your olives, but work in the bottom of the valley, where the settlers
    won’t see you and get annoyed.”
    It was a minor victory, a compromise, but it didn’t matter. We would harvest olives, that
    was the bottom line. We rolled down the valley, its slopes reinforced by numerous terraces, and
    the harvest continued. Down here, the olives were smaller and fewer. For three years, the peas-ants
    were prohibited from working their fields, although the olive needs a lot of care. Normally,
    peasants plough around the trees every year by an old-fashioned plough pulled by a donkey: the
    terraces are too small for tractor. Without it, winter rains run off the land and fail to reach the
    roots. The terraces also need a lot of maintenance. But it couldn’t be done now, for the farmers
    prudently avoided taking up their hoes and spades, dangerous weapons in the eyes of their well-armed
    tormentors.