nnn The Accidental Pilgrims

nnn The Accidental Pilgrims Olive Pickers in Palestine Anne Meneley

n ABSTRACT: This article focuses on the way in which olive-picking volunteers in Palestine become transformed into ‘accidental pilgrims’, and unconventional ones at that, by virtue of their participation in the olive harvest. Undergoing the difficulties of mobility that constrain the Palestinians and witnessing holy sites through the eyes and narratives of Palestinian guides, they are exposed to an alternative knowledge and affect regarding the Holy Land, unlike the experience offered by more conventional religious pilgrimage. Several vignettes reflect the diverse backgrounds of olive-picking pilgrims, who come from many different religions, class positions, and nationalities. Drawn together in a communitas of sorts through their shared commitment to learning about Palestine, they try to do what they can to further the Palestinian cause on their return home. Instead of a ‘moral geography’, they perceive a profoundly ‘immoral geography’ of occupation and oppression, which has a powerful transformative effect. n KEYWORDS: holy sites, Israeli settlements, Occupation, olive harvest, Palestine, pilgrims Most international volunteers who come to Palestine to pick olives do not describe themselves as pilgrims. In fact, many of them disdain the Christian pilgrims who are taken around on Israeli tourist buses to Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and other key sites mentioned in the Bible. By choosing an Israeli tour, these pilgrims are perceived to be intentionally cutting themselves off (or allowing themselves to be cut off) from direct contact with Palestine and Palestinians. In contrast, we have chosen to stay in hotels or hostels in East Jerusalem or in the West Bank, to eat and sometimes stay with Palestinian families, to listen to their stories, to pick their olives, and to learn about the Israeli Occupation that plagues their everyday life. We come under the auspices of the Keep Hope Alive campaign, which is sponsored by the East Jerusalem YMCA, Alternative Tours to Palestine, and the Alternative Information Center, an organization jointly founded by progressive Israelis and Palestinians. The Keep Hope Alive campaign, among its other activities, sponsors olive harvests and olive tree plantings on Palestinian land where agriculture has been disrupted or destroyed by the Israeli military or by illegal Israeli settlements. This deliberately international enterprise is designed to create and strengthen ties between internationals and Palestinian farmers and to inspire olive pilgrims to ‘spread the word’ about Palestine when they return home.1 It is in this respect that the olive pilgrims themselves need to be considered within the same ethnographic frame as the Palestinians in the olive tree campaign. For many pilgrims, the olive harvest Religion and Society: Advances in Research 5 (2014): 186–199 © Berghahn Books doi:10.3167/arrs.2014.050112

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is a small sacrifice of vacation time and money. While some are wealthy and others (such as myself) are funded by academic grants, many pilgrims have relatively modest means. For them, taking part in the harvest shows their commitment to the cause. What we olive pickers as ‘accidental pilgrims’2 are doing bears some resemblance to the agritourismo of Italy, except that, as one of my Belgian co-pickers pointed out, there one does not usually find tanks, soldiers, or aggressive settlers disrupting a pastoral activity. We olive pickers are not usually self-righteous, although there were notable (and dreary) exceptions. Despite a considerable diversity in nationalities (American, English, Irish, Japanese, Indian, Belgian, Dutch, French, and Swedish), we share in common a concern for social justice, a tendency toward leftwing politics, and a deep suspicion of bullies and authoritarianism. The program is sponsored by the YMCA, yet there is little focus on religion. We are as diverse in religious background as we are in nationality: Jews, Muslims, Presbyterians, Methodists, Quakers, Hindus, atheists, Unitarians, and Catholics (including fallen Catholics like myself) are among us. Almost every religious group is represented except for Protestants of various nationalities who support Israel occupying all of the Holy Land and are in general agreement with the Zionist narrative (Feldman 2007: 353). Religion is rarely cited by my fellow olive-picking pilgrims as the reason for coming to Palestine, but very often it is described as the ‘purpose’ of the visit when speaking to Israeli border authorities.

Crossing the Border: Lying Jackie Feldman (2007: 359) describes how, on Protestant tours, the Bible “is used to christen or cosmicize the neutral airport space.” These tour groups are met in the airport by a Jewish tour guide, trained and authorized by the Israeli government, who shepherds them through the airport and onto waiting tour buses. But for most olive pickers, Ben Gurion Airport is anything but ‘neutral’. We want to go to Palestine, but to do that we must go through Israel. Among all of the visitors to Israel, we are among the least welcome. Many sympathizers of the Palestinians risk harassment and deportation. We do not have tour guides to escort us through; our Palestinian guides are not even allowed into Ben Gurion Airport. Unlike the pilgrims on organized tours, we often arrive alone, which in itself arouses suspicion. The airport is for us the threshold of the pilgrimage, and the lies that we tell—and the harassment we suffer—are part of our initiation. Our ability to become olive-picking pilgrims crucially depends on our ability to dissimulate, to pretend that we are religious pilgrims or tourists going to get drunk on the beach in Tel Aviv.3 We olive-picking pilgrims often find it prudent to lie about the purpose of our visits to Israel since mentioning olives, olive oil, or olive picking will likely result in notoriously unpleasant interrogation sessions. Those with Arab names or who are Muslims are almost guaranteed a session, no matter what they say. When we finally arrive, usually exhausted, in Bayt Sahour, part of our initiation and our bonding with each other involves trading tales about “lying at the border.” There are stories about those who did not lie and were detained for hours. Most of us are fairly honest people, but we lie because we want to gain access to the Holy Land in order to gather data that will allow us to disseminate information about what is going on in the West Bank. Our accounts of “passing” at the border stress inventiveness, imagination, and faux indignation. As Simmel (1950) notes, lying is both personal and social. Lying is the unmarked state, the default setting, when talking to Israeli authorities. Palestinians or internationals or trusted Israelis are the audience for retellings of one’s successful deceptions, or even of those that failed. I was reminded of Michael Gilsenan’s (1976) famous article “Lying, Honor, and Contradiction,” in which lies, especially besting one’s supposed superiors, become feats of honor. So too there is sometimes a certain amount of bragging that goes on

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in our accounts of notable lying. For instance, one elderly olive picker, who had been blacklisted because of his participation several years ago in a demonstration against the Wall (i.e., the West Bank barrier), told us gleefully of how he had fooled the Israeli authorities by claiming that his wife would be joining him in a few days to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary in the Holy Land, and he would not stand for them disappointing her. What is celebrated is the triumph of the vulnerable over the strong, especially the notoriously severe Israeli border guards. Other stories were funny retellings of terror. One young British woman of Palestinian origin had been harassed for hours by the Israelis until she finally snapped and blurted out, “I’m just here to see my homeland,” to which her interrogator retorted, “It’s not YOUR homeland.” A fashionably dressed South Asian sayyid (descendant of the Prophet Muhammad) refused to let the Israelis intimidate him. When they came to release him from the detention room, he claimed to have become engrossed in watching a soccer game and asked if he could stay a bit longer. An American colleague and friend with 30 years of experience in Palestine was detained at Ben Gurion and questioned for quite some time. At the end of the interrogation, she held up her passport and said, “Now I have a question for you. Does this passport mean anything to you?” Her interrogator gave what she described as a “smarmy” smile and said, “Not a thing.” These border moments tell much of global political economies and the confidence and arrogance with which Israel asserts its place in the world. Like the checkpoints for Palestinians (cf. Hammami 2010), Ben Gurion for us is the moment when the individual confronts the state, and the encounter is often frightening. The bravado comes later. I have had my own brushes with terror and have told and retold these stories. The first time I landed in Ben Gurion Airport, I told the attendant I was staying at a hotel that was formerly an Armenian convent in East Jerusalem. The woman (at least 20 years younger than me) seemed very troubled by the fact that I was staying alone in Arab East Jerusalem and kept asking me if I was not frightened. I later learned that I was ‘supposed’ to be afraid to be in Arab hotels and Arab neighborhoods. These tales are part of what Raymond Williams (1977: 40–41) would call language as a “practical activity,” whereby signs are both internalized and social. We pilgrims are sincere in our commitment, but we have to lie to get in and out of the airport. Our stories become honorific signs, part of our capital as ‘pilgrims of commitment’. As they are told and retold, they are central to the creation of a moral self that opposes oppression and is sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people. What we suffer as internationals sympathetic to Palestinians is but a pale shadow of the threats that Palestinians continually face. After all, if we get deported, at least we have somewhere to go. Nonetheless, experiencing a small dimension of what Palestinians suffer is an important aspect of our initiation into these relations of oppression. We learn that spaces occupied by Palestinians are said by Israelis to be inherently dangerous, but our experience teaches us otherwise. For us, Palestine is not the source of intimidation. Rather, it is the Israelis with their guns and tanks and the power to expel us—to bar us from the Holy Land—whom we fear.

Guides Our guides are intelligent people. There is no foolish or needlessly inflammatory talk of pushing Israel into the sea or the like. They do speak of the necessity of Israel moving back to the 1967 borders, however. All are vocal critics of Israeli policies in the West Bank, but they never resort to the easy, essentialist arguments of anti-Semitism. The narrative that follows is that of our Palestinian guides, our hosts, and my olive-picking peers. My peers and I are not radicals. Basically, our goals are three: first, to provide labor for Palestinians who are not allowed to bring other Palestinians onto their land to help with the harvest; second, to become informed in order to pass


along to those in our home countries the dire situation in Palestine; and, third, to help protect the rights of Palestinians to stay on the land that they own legally by helping with the harvest and tree planting. If the land appears neglected or barren for three years, it is much easier for the Israelis to confiscate it through an old Ottoman Land Law of 1858 (Weizman 2007: 116–118). This Keep Hope Alive Palestinian initiative has certain parallels in Israeli peace groups.4 There is little mention of what we hear about on mainstream media in North America, of the Palestinian Authority (PA), of Fatah and Hamas, of Mahmood Abbas or Ismail Haniyeh, indeed, of the formal ‘peace process’ at all, aside from a few jokes here and there. Asking a Palestinian “How’s that peace process working for you?” is sure to guarantee snorts of good-humored derision. The organizers and participants of the Keep Hope Alive campaign were much more encouraged by the non-governmental Gaza freedom flotilla initiative and the growing Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement than any drivel that comes from the US government or the Israeli government—or the PA for that matter. The PA is an ‘authority’ that is essentially deterritorialized: it has no control over its territory in any permanent fashion and therefore little authority in any sense of the word, including moral authority.

Olive Picking After swapping initiation stories on our arrival, we soon have other things to discuss and experiences to undergo that help the process of self-transformation. After an early breakfast at the hotel, we board the aging bus that will take us to various farms in the Bayt Sahour/Bethlehem/Bayt Jala area on ill-kept and dangerous roads. We are not allowed on the ‘settler only’ roads. We are introduced to what Lawrence Taylor (2007: 384) calls a “moral geography,” which he describes as “the cultural practices of ascribing symbolic significance and moral valence to particular landscapes.” We learn about what seems more like an ‘immoral geography’ as we travel to the fields.5 We pick olives on the Palestinian farmlands that are close to the illegal Israeli settlements and the outposts of the occupying Israeli army. On occasion, Israeli soldiers come around. Some ask why we are not helping Israeli farmers, which gets a good laugh after the fact, although most of us, not used to guns, do not confront the soldiers. We sometimes see glowering and well-armed settlers, but for the most part we view them from a distance. We learn to fear them and the soldiers, as they know whose side we are on. That makes us vulnerable, although not as vulnerable as the Palestinians since the Israeli army’s murder of American Rachel Corrie in Gaza garnered so much international press. We feel a bit like human shields with our international passports, but these passports allow us to help pick olives on land to which Palestinian non-family members are denied access. We also encounter the army when they take our passports and make us nervously wait before allowing us to pass onto the farmer’s land. We know we are being watched: surveillance towers are menacing presences on the hilltops. The olive harvest is extremely sensitive to time, and delays caused by the army, settlers, poor roads, or road blocks threaten a successful harvest.6 We are a bizarre migrant labor force. We are not trained in agricultural labor; indeed, some of us look like we have never done any manual labor at all. We are from prosperous countries, so we are reversing the usual direction of migrant laborers. We are not paid but instead pay our own way. After we arrive at a farmer’s field (a different one each day), we descend from the bus and gather up the buckets and the blue plastic mats to spread under the trees, while the stronger among us hoist ladders as we all march into the fields. Olive picking is fun and, with a bit of instruction, relatively easy. There is something deeply satisfying about it. In our initiation into this practice, we come to experience with our bodies why the Palestinians love their trees, value

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this experience, and fear losing their trees and their land. The olive tree is venerated in both Christianity and Islam as is evident in the early-twentieth-century work of medical doctor and amateur ethnographer Taufik Canaan (1927).7 Olive picking is a sociable task. Usually, three or four people or more, depending on the size of the tree, pick on one tree. We get used to the sensual feel of the olives as we comb them with our fingers. Cooperation is required. There are several aspects of the labor, and the younger people tend to be the ones climbing the trees (although we had a light and limber 84-year-old up in the trees). Others pick the lower branches, and some, usually those who are tired and need a bit of a break, sit on the mats and gather up the olives that the rest of us have thrown down. It is repetitive work, but it provides the opportunity for reflection and conversation. We are not the only ones who have recognized the ways in which olive picking lends itself to positive sociality: in Palestine and all over the Mediterranean, the olive harvest is known to be both hard work and a time of fun. There are antiphonal olive-picking songs, and it is a notorious time for the exchange of gossip. I do not know what it is about the work, but conversation seems to flow easily during harvests. Obscured by the olive branches, we chat, sometimes over the politics of Palestine and sometimes over more intimate matters. The olive tree in general is described as the shijara mubaraka, the blessed tree. One of our most memorable trees is considered the exemplar of the shijara mubaraka as it is the most productive tree on a very productive olive farm in Bayt Jala, owned by a Palestinian farmer, Antwan. This farm, right underneath Gilo settlement, has been rezoned to be a part of Jerusalem, which is the last step before the outright confiscation of this valuable agricultural land. The tree is so large that it takes 12 of us to pick it. We work hard, although probably not as efficiently as more experienced olive pickers. Several authors of pilgrimage (e.g., Crain 1997; Hammoudi 2006; Orsi 2010; Taylor 2007) have noted that physical exertion and even exhaustion are essential, embodied elements of an effective pilgrimage. We are hot and dusty and sometimes clumsy as we negotiate the rough rocks that surround the olive trees. Our Palestinian hosts bring us most welcome cool water and juice and hot sweet tea and coffee. There is communitas of sorts in this shared labor: we feel that we are contributing something, however symbolic, to the Palestinian cause. The young Palestinian boys in the family collect our buckets of olives and dump them into the larger sacks that are loaded onto donkeys. These olives eventually make their way to the olive press, where amid the intoxicating smell of fresh pressed olives, the farmers watch with eagle eyes over their own olives. In exchange for our labor, our host family provides lunch for us. Sometimes lunch is held in the fields, sometimes in the farmer’s compound. The farmers are hard to get to know at first, as they bustle about, trying to organize people, fetching more buckets and ladders. However, after five years of olive picking, I have come to know them and especially their wives, sisters, and daughters, so now I volunteer to help with the lunch in some modest fashion, cutting lemons or handing out plates and cutlery. I asked our Palestinian guide Baha if we were imposing on our hosts for lunch because I was not sure that our amateur olive-picking skills would offset the cost. Baha confirmed that, behind the scenes, the organizers of our tours compensate our hosts for our lunches. While eating, we do not mention the payment for the ingredients for the lunch. This silence about payment, together with the considerable female labor necessary to produce the meal, makes this exchange of hospitality in thanks for our volunteer labor productive of a sense of solidarity in the Maussian sense.

The Picking Pilgrims When I tried out the term ‘pilgrim’ on my olive-picking buddies in October 2011 (it was my fifth season olive picking, and I knew many of them well), they did not have any strong objection to


it. What they teased me about was the idea of me interviewing them, as we had developed strong ties through the pleasure and hard work of olive picking together and through our shared horror of witnessing the awful unfairness and brutality of the Occupation. And we bonded by unwinding together in the evening. We washed the dust of the Holy Land off our persons, ever mindful that we had water because the price of our hotel room included extra water, something our Palestinian neighbors could not afford. After eating a communal dinner in the hotel, many of us went to smoke the water pipe (argileh or shisha) and drink Taybeh beer, a locally produced Palestinian beer whose slogan is “Drink the revolution,” which on occasion leads to a certain amount of selfrighteous gaiety. Jokes about our support of the local economy were legion as the next round of drinks was ordered. During the harvest, I did not formally interview anyone, but I did have the chance to hear what had brought people to Palestine as we shared breakfast and dinner at the hotel, picked olives together, or hung out in the evening at our favorite restaurant-bars in Bayt Sahour. I have found my olive-picking peers, for the most part, to be smart, funny, and insightful. Some of them have become very close friends. What we share, having little else in common, is a feeling of obligation to weigh in on behalf of the dispossessed. Most of us know something of the situation in Palestine: it is not a destination one chooses without considerable thought. But the visceral response to witnessing it is more acute than any of us would have imagined. Several first-time pilgrims were moved to tears and reported having a hard time fathoming the systematic oppression, which is worse than any of us expected. In this way, olive picking has the same transformative potential as other forms of more conventional religious pilgrimage.8 One of the olive pilgrims recently sent me an e-mail saying “I think we all left a bit of our hearts in Bayt Sahour.” Here are a few vignettes of some of the olive pilgrims I have come to know and respect. People had varied reasons for coming to Palestine. Some were the offspring of Palestinian parents, so the journey to Palestine had a ‘roots’ feel to it.9 The damage that Israel has done to these children of refugees was obvious. One olive picker grew up in a refugee camp in Lebanon. Although his family eventually made their way to Dubai, the deep hurt that had been instilled in him because of the exile was apparent. He was the one who took a photo of an Israeli soldier outside the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. When the soldiers tried to get him to delete the photo, he created a considerable scene, yelling “Why would I want your fucking picture?” The soldiers were speaking to him in Arabic, and he kept screaming “Speak English! I don’t understand you!” When we finally got through the checkpoint and into the mosque, our guide said to him in Arabic, “Where are you from?” and he replied in Arabic. His anger was about the racialized assumptions of the Israelis. He had been singled out among the whole group because of his appearance: we were all taking pictures of the soldiers. The damage that Israel has done to Jews was also pointed out by Jewish participants in the olive harvest. Eric, an 84-year-old Egyptian Jew, was appalled by Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians and expressed deep shame about them. After olive picking, he went on to do a threemonth stint with the International Solidarity Movement. I returned home to find an e-mail with a YouTube video of Eric being arrested at the weekly protest against the Wall in Bil’in. Ingmar, a Hungarian Jew and now a citizen of Sweden, had been on a left-wing kibbutz in Israel in 1969. He said that no one seems to remember that Israel was once considered left-wing because now it is the embodiment of right-wing politics. He had volunteered in the past with the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Jayyous to watch the checkpoints and escort children to school so they would not be hurt by the Israeli settlers or the army. When he went to visit family members who had settled in Israel, their reaction to him ranged from uncomfortable to downright hostile. His nephew would not even speak to him, considering him a traitor. Like Eric, Ingmar chose to speak out against Israel, making analogies between what the Jews endured in Europe and what the Palestinians are suffering now. Like many olive pickers, he objected to the social

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reproduction of oppression. He was not the only one to notice how Palestinian cities are beginning to resemble the shtetls of Eastern Europe. I met Luigi on my first day of olive picking in 2008, and we bonded immediately over our shared love of the shisha. He has a terrific sense of humor and a deep kindness and generosity. When he learned that our tour guide’s mother suffers from diabetes, as he does, the following year he brought her medical supplies from London that are hard to acquire in the West Bank. He is part of a network of gay activists for Palestine who oppose Israel’s use of gay rights to cover up their oppression of Palestinian rights: Israel’s ‘pinkwashing’ campaign claims that Israel is the only gay-friendly country in the region in contrast to “homophobic and hateful Arabs.” Luigi recruited an Irish friend, Daniel, a gay acupuncturist and filmmaker. He, too, objected to Israel’s ‘pinkwashing’ campaign, but Daniel also found that the Israeli oppression of Palestinian citizens struck a chord with Irish memories of the British oppression. Another Irish friend, Jack, responding to the Israeli co-option of one of the Palestinian farmer’s wells, was emphatically outraged over this blatant appropriation of another’s property. Jack is to inherit his family’s farm in Kilkenny, and he made analogies as to how he would feel if someone took his well, thus undermining the viability of his farm. When I asked a British-Indian woman, Halima, why she had come olive picking with us, she replied that she had been greatly moved by her three-month stint with the WCC, escorting school children, as had Ingmar, and wanted to come back to Palestine. But she could not afford that much time off from work again, so she chose 10 days of olive picking instead. She is a deeply devout Catholic, and on our one day off she chose to go to Jerusalem to follow the Stations of the Cross. She came back sickened, she said, by the pious pilgrims who were weeping and beating themselves over the agony of Christ while ignoring the injustice that was taking place all around them. She said that she had more insight into the suffering of Christ at the harrowing checkpoint that cuts Bethlehem off from Jerusalem than she did watching self-absorbed spiritual pilgrims. These are but a few of the people I have met olive picking. We shared the same experiences in Palestine, but we brought our own past knowledge to them. There were long periods of waiting time: stuck in buses, stuck at the checkpoint, stuck in traffic. These are akin to forced ‘liminal spaces’. Such delays gave us a sense of the enormous frustrations that Palestinians face trying to carry out their everyday lives.

Holy Sites In the mornings we pick olives, and on several afternoons we go on tours. Just as pious pilgrims do, we also visit the holy sites. But instead of looking to a distant past, our pedagogy is oriented toward the relatively recent past and the present. In visiting these sites, we are also looking to the future. After all, our olive-picking stint is envisioned as the beginning of a project of advocacy for Palestine. Ours is the truth of the present, a mission to unmask the propaganda about Israel and the Palestinians. We are oriented toward the future, but not a ‘when the Messiah comes’ type of future. It is the future of what may happen when the Keep Hope Alive and BDS movements succeed.

Bethlehem We olive pilgrims purposely contrast ourselves to Christian pilgrims being whisked through on a tour bus by choosing to go through the Bethlehem checkpoint on foot. This is an uncomfortable and time-consuming process during which we, along with the Palestinians, are subject to the


scrutiny of aggressive security personnel.10 We too visit the Church of the Nativity, a mammoth structure built over the place where Christ was born that bears no resemblance to what I imagined as a child from the Christmas carols “Away in a Manger” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Temporally, our pedagogy about the holy sites is rooted firmly in the present, or at least in the post-1948 (Nakba) time frame. We set ourselves apart from the tourist hordes who often quibble with each other about who is spending too long praying on the spot, marked with a gold star, where Christ was allegedly born. Many are crying at the miracle of Christ’s birth, while we may be more inclined to cry when we are told how, during the Israeli siege of Bethlehem in 2002, resistance fighters were holed up in the Church of the Nativity for 39 days by the Israeli army. We see the bullet holes, and I can imagine the claustrophobia and terror as we hear about the shortages of food and water and overflowing bathrooms, with the Israeli army deployed in the Bethlehem Peace Center across the street and their snipers shooting into the church. From Manger Square, we can see Har Homa, a huge settlement on a hill.11 Lone tourists rarely come to Bethlehem as it means going through the checkpoint on foot and facing desperate cab drivers vying for their business. The square is rather ghostly now. Even the most ambitious souvenir merchants appear to have lost their zest for enticing the few pilgrims into their shops.

Jerusalem The first thing we learn about Jerusalem is that Baha, our Palestinian guide, cannot go with us because he, like the majority of West Bank citizens, is not allowed by the Israelis to enter Jerusalem. Instead, we are led by a Dutch guide, Kristel, who has long experience in the West Bank. We drive by the site of the Jerusalem Museum of Tolerance, which is rather intolerantly planned to be built over the ancient Muslim cemetery, Mamilla. As we walk through the Old City, our guide points out the Israeli settlements that have recently been established in the Muslim Quarter after evicting Muslim families. We hear about how the Moroccan Quarter, which had occupied the space in front of the Wailing Wall for over 700 years, was ethnically cleansed immediately following the 1967 War and the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Many of its inhabitants were banished to the Shu’fat refugee camp and never allowed to return (cf. Abowd 2000). Kristel points out Ariel Sharon’s house in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which overlooks a main artery that leads directly to Haram al-Sharif (what the Israelis call Temple Mount). Before we go into the compound (after passing through another Israeli checkpoint), we are told about Sharon provoking the Second Intifada in 2000 by marching into the mosque with dozens of armed soldiers. The mosque itself is under some threat by a radical group that wants to tear it down and build the Third Temple. I am struck by the incredible beauty of the Haram al-Sharif compound with its groves of olive trees. It is here that I understand why people are drawn to the Holy Land. The Church of the Holy Selpuchre is another matter: only the most keen among us braved the hordes of pilgrims in its dark, incensed, and claustrophobic space, in contrast to the spaciousness of Haram al-Sharif.12 We drive by Silwan, where Israeli archaeologists or pseudo-archaeologists claim to have discovered the so-called City of David (see Paz, this volume). Kristel points out yet another way in which archaeology is being used to displace Palestinians from their lands and homes in the neighborhood of Silwan and as a pretext for the establishment of Israeli settlements right in the middle of the area. Here we can find a contrast with the American Protestant tours described by Feldman (2007). The narratives on those tours focus on archaeology: “Protestant and Israeli archaeology presents archaeological remains as embodiments of biblical textual traditions … Science and the modern state recover the ‘natural’ past of ‘Israel’ buried under the dirt and clutter of oriental ‘tradition’” (ibid.: 365). Kristel states, in contrast, that we are not talking about

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“the clutter of Oriental tradition” but about actual people who have inhabited the Holy Land for thousands of years and who are being erased—not metaphorically, but actually, with their homes being destroyed and their children arrested or shot. After lunch in the Armenian monastery, we are taken on a tour by the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, which was co-founded in 1997 by Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper. We are shown vistas of the city and can see for ourselves how the Apartheid Wall snakes around Jerusalem, cutting off Arab suburbs and enclosing illegal Israeli settlements, making it hard to imagine how East Jerusalem could possibly be the capital of a Palestinian state. Our guide points out that while the settlements in East Jerusalem are allowed to proceed at breakneck speed, Palestinians are rarely given building permits and have nowhere to accommodate their growing families. We are taken by the remains of Palestinian houses demolished by Israeli bulldozers. While driving through the Israeli settlement Ma’ale Adumim, our guide draws our attention to the ancient olive tree at its entrance, intended to give an air of longevity to the settlement. This tree, he tells us, was uprooted from a Palestinian farm. He points out the swimming pools where settler children play while Palestine is parched. We drive by Palestinian olive trees that have been cut down by settlers. We see straggles of Palestinian workers coming out of the Israeli industrial seam zones, designed to take advantage of cheap Palestinian labor. We have been shown a landscape of great beauty and shocking injustice.

Hebron On the road to Hebron we pass by the rapidly expanding settlements, and our tour guide Ali started in on his lecture, which began: “God is not a real estate dealer! The Holy Land is for everyone who wants to worship in it.” Here he was contesting the claims of some Israelis that the biblical narrative should necessarily constitute an erasure of the following prophetic traditions or the people who lived within them. Ali championed the lived memory of the people of Hebron and their right to remain in the houses and businesses that their families have owned for centuries. According to him, there is no room for lived memory of place in the Zionist narrative, no respect for the rights of ownership. Our reference is not to Old Testament narratives but to UN conventions on conflict, the rights of ownership, and the obligations of occupiers, and also to institutions like UNESCO that want to preserve world heritage sites such as Hebron but are unable to do so because of Palestine’s uncertain legal status in the international community. Hebron houses the Tomb of the Patriarchs—believed to be the burial place of Abraham (or Ibrahim), a prophet venerated in all three monotheistic religions—in the old city of Hebron, which is even more of a ghost town than Bethlehem. We are told about the American settler Baruch Goldstein, who perpetrated a massacre of praying Muslims in 1994 and whose tomb in Hebron has now become a site of pilgrimage for extremist Israeli settlers. Although most of the settlements occupy Palestinian agricultural land, we are told that 500 settlers have moved directly into the center of the city. We walk through the suq (marketplace) and look up to see wire mesh stretched from building to building. We are told that settlers occupy the top apartments in these buildings. The mesh is there to prevent the garbage that settlers throw out of their windows from hitting pedestrians below. Sometimes we do not have to be told anything at all. Looking up again, I see a sniper with his gun trained on me and Philip, my 12-year-old olive-picking buddy.13 We visit the Ibrahimi Mosque after going through the checkpoint, which we are told was allegedly set up to ‘protect’ the Palestinians but has merely served as one more means to restrict the movement of Hebronites in their own city. In the mosque, we are told that both Jews and Muslims used to pray together, but Israel has cordoned off a section so that Jews can pray without the presence of Muslims. We visit the Hebron Reconstruction Committee, which is funded by international


donors. On the surface of things, it is about preserving the architecture in one of the world’s oldest cities. But there is also the goal of resistance, of encouraging families to move back to the old city, of not letting the houses be abandoned and then confiscated. Like olive picking and olive planting, it is non-violent resistance: it is about tenacity and the refusal to leave despite the fact that the citizens of Hebron are subject to constant harassment by the settlers, who have a reputation for being the most vicious in all of the West Bank. Throughout the tour we are shown how the urban landscape has been reshaped with the intention of eliminating the Arab population. We do not talk to the settlers or the soldiers, although the settlers sometimes yell at us.14 We do hear from the Christian Peace Keepers, who escort Palestinian children to school to protect them from being attacked by settler children or even by settler adults. We too are at risk from the settler children, who barrel down the narrow streets on expensive bicycles, seeming to want to intimidate us. We see graffiti spray-painted on the wall of an elementary school that says “Arabs to the gas chambers.” Many of us risk taking photos of the graffiti and soldiers despite the fear of retaliation. It is clear that the soldiers do not want us there, witnessing what they are doing, and they do not want us recording it. By the time we leave the old city, we are shaken. Our tours of the holy sites are as moving as our embodied engagement with the olive trees, but more disturbing. There is little talk of anyone’s gods or prophets. The focus is on the forcible incursions into holy sites in Jerusalem, Hebron, and Bethlehem and the regular exclusion of West Bank Palestinians from Jerusalem and its holy sites. The emphasis is on contemporary history—the post-1948 holy sites—and the narratives we hear are those of the excluded.

Going Home Departing through Ben Gurion is often as traumatic as entering: we are questioned and our bags searched for material signs that we have been in the West Bank. Many will leave with smuggling tales, both triumphal and woeful. After we have all dispersed, we hear these stories through e-mail or on Facebook. Alia reported her triumph in smuggling a small beaded bracelet with the Palestinian flag on it, despite being flagged (as a Muslim Arab) for a particularly thorough search. Luigi, who is of Italian descent, seems to raise phenotypical alarm, as he too was searched, and the kuffiyah (headdress) and “Free Palestine” T-shirt stuffed in the legs of filthy olive-picking pants were discovered. Kristel noted on Facebook that she had flirted with the customs official until she managed to talk her way out, even though her three-month visa had expired. News of Palestine is routinely shared among olive-picking pilgrims. Participants often send photos around or post them online. Sometimes we get reports about letters that olive pickers have written to the editors of their local newspapers or about presentations made to their local communities or church groups, with either positive or negative reception. When people receive negative feedback, the olive-picking pilgrims commiserate and commend their comrades’ bravery through social media. One of my olive-picking friends who gave a talk at her church and received a bitter attack from one of the audience members told me that the reason she comes to Palestine is to become a better mother. I was at first mystified by this comment, but she explained that she wanted to set an example for her children so that they would know to stand up for those who are oppressed, even if one receives a hostile reception. One woman, reporting that the son of the Palestinian family she was staying with had been arrested and imprisoned by the Israelis, asked for our signatures on a petition. One friend acts as the nodal point for recruiting olive pilgrims from the UK; another does the same for Holland, acting as back-up support for Palestinian organizers. Others report importing Palestinian olive oil, participating in demonstrations, or holding

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Palestine booths at local seasonal markets. Some of us (myself included) publish anthropology papers or give informal presentations to students or community groups, while others are active campaigners for the BDS movement. I suspect that most of us sign several petitions a week. We are in no sense a group, but we do have a collective project. Networks as thin as cobwebs are often as persistent: they cannot be brushed away. Ephemeral as our ties may be, all of us were devastated to hear from Baha that after we left, the Israelis had destroyed the olive trees from which we had picked olives on Izzat Abu Taha’s farm in October. Izzat told members of East Jerusalem’s Joint Advocacy Initiative: “When I saw them cutting down the trees, I felt as if my heart was being uprooted from between my lungs.” He added that he had been growing olives on his land for 40 years: “Every year I planted as many trees as I could manage, and now they come to destroy what I have been working on. Olive trees are holy. What faith, what religion allows this to happen? How does any human being have the heart to kill trees like this?” It is our learned empathy and our knowledge of what olive trees mean to Palestinians that lead us to be repulsed and angered by this news. It is this kind of careless brutality and dismissal of Palestinian rights to livelihood that keeps us olive pilgrims coming back, as futile or symbolic as our efforts may be.

n ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my olive-picking pilgrims, especially Paolo, Aisha, Mounia, Lana, David, Nazaleen, Jo, and John. All of the names in the article are pseudonyms aside from those of our fearless, beloved guides, Baha Hilo and Kristel Letschert, as they are public activists. Our continuing friendship and shared political commitment mean a great deal to me. Thanks are also extended to colleagues who gave me advice on research in Palestine, particularly Ted Swedenburg, Rebecca Stein, Julie Peteet, and Rema Hammami. A version of this article was presented at the University of Toronto’s Speaker Series on Pilgrimage in 2010. Shorter versions were presented at meetings of the American Anthropological Association in 2011 and the American Ethnological Society in 2012. I am grateful to the audience members for their insightful comments and to Ellen Badone and Jasmin Habib for their thoughtful critiques. As ever, thanks to my generous colleague and interlocutor, Paul Manning, for our running conversations about this article and every other one. Thanks to Jackie Feldman and Donna Young for their comments and considerable work on this special section. Thanks to Robert Massoud, the founder of Zatoun Canada, which imports Palestinian olive oil to Canada, for the opportunity to present a part of this article at Beit Zatoun in Toronto, a wonderful ecumenical space for activists and concerned citizens to gather in a congenial atmosphere. Thanks to all the Al-Rass clan in Toronto, who have never seen their home in Jaffa. The generous spirit I encountered in Palestine lives on in exile: the Al-Rass family ensured that my husband Vaidila and my son Theo Banelis were never left hungry or lonely during my absences. Finally, I would like to thank my dear sister Angela Sekulic, who got dragged into reading this article at the eleventh hour.


n ANNE MENELEY is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Trent University. She has published one major ethnography and two jointly edited book collections, and her articles have appeared in several journals, including American Anthropologist; Anthropologica; Cultural Anthropology; Ethnos; Food and Foodways; Food, Culture and Society; Gastronomica; Middle East Report; and Social Analysis. In addition to being the guest editor for three special journal editions, she has contributed articles to several edited volumes. She has served on the board of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association. Her main interests include competitive sociability and veiling practices in Yemen, the anthropology of academic practices, the politics of food, and the global circulation of extra-virgin olive oil from Tuscany and Palestine; [email protected].

n NOTES 1. Much has been said since the 1980s about the myth of the ‘objectivity’ of the ethnographer. My first field trip to Palestine in April 2006 with a group affiliated with the British branch of Jews for Justice was so shocking and transformative that, like many of my peers who have worked in Palestine, I could not envision adopting a neutral position. This short trip was enormously important in formulating my project on the complex activities surrounding the use of Palestinian olive oil as a means of political mobilization, which was subsequently funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Upon my return in 2006, I quickly became engaged as a volunteer helping to package Palestinian olive oil and continue to act as the Palestinian olive oil ‘dealer’ at my university, as well as giving lectures to student groups and community lectures along with my academic work. The data on which this article is based were gathered during participant observation with Palestinian families and international olive-picking pilgrims who volunteered to help with the fall harvests from 2007–2011. 2. The term ‘accidental pilgrim’ was suggested by Donna Young when I presented a version of this article at the University of Toronto in 2010. It suggests that while olive pickers do not explicitly envision themselves as pilgrims to begin with, they do end up experiencing a profound transformation, as do pilgrims who describe themselves as such. In this sense, olive pickers take part in what Ellen Badone (this volume) describes as “unconventional pilgrimage.” 3. The latter was my colleague Ted Swedenburg’s helpful suggestion. 4. Although I have not studied them, I know from David Shulman’s (2007) lovely memoir Dark Hope that there are Israeli groups (e.g., Rabbis for Human Rights and Tayyush) that are similarly engaged in activities in the West Bank designed to support Palestinians’ claims to land by protecting their trees and raising awareness about the oppression they suffer. See Peter Lagerquist’s (2011) critique of the imagery of the Israeli Left. 5. Simon Coleman and John Eade (2004) have all manner of interesting comments about the importance of mobility in pilgrimage, but what we learn in Palestine are the myriad ways in which mobility is constricted in the West Bank. This forces us to share to a small degree the everyday frustrations of the Palestinian people. 6. I discuss the importance of time with regard to the olive harvest in more detail elsewhere (see Meneley 2008). 7. Canaan’s (1927) account describes local shrines, many of them associated with olive trees, that were venerated by Muslims and Christians alike. Bowman (1993, 2001) talks about the way in which Palestinian Christians and Muslims unite to oppose the Israeli Occupation. The same is true in oliverelated activism. I expand on the importance of the olive tree in Palestine elsewhere (Meneley 2014). The olive tree is also venerated in Judaism, which leads some to question why the Israeli settlers focus on destroying Palestinian olive trees (Braverman 2009).

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8. As Basu (2004: 173) notes for “roots-tourists” who quest after their origins and ancestors, olive pickers are “[m]etaphorically translated into proverbial pilgrims” in their quest for knowledge and comprehension of the Occupation. 9. See Basu (2004) for an elaboration of this concept. 10. See Feldman (2011) for a vivid description of the rather different reception that Christian Zionists get from the Israelis. 11. There are rumors that they are building hotels in Har Homa to divert tourists from Bethlehem’s hotels. This appears not to be the case, but it is true that the number of tour groups booking in Bethlehem’s hotels has declined markedly, with growing numbers of tourists being taken instead to hotels in West Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. 12. Bajc (2006) describes Catholic and Orthodox tour groups for whom the Church of the Holy Selpuchre was a focal point for their pilgrimage. For us, it is optional and most of us hang about on the steps, waiting for the rest of the group. 13. Precocious Philip insisted on coming from England with his mother on her pilgrimage to Palestine. 14. Feldman (2011) discusses how Christian Zionists actually meet with the Hebron settlers, something that would be unthinkable for us, both ethically and practically.

n REFERENCES Abowd, Tom. 2000. “The Moroccan Quarter: A History of the Present.” Jerusalem Quarterly 7: 6–16. Bajc, Vida. 2006. “Christian Pilgrimage Groups in Jerusalem: Framing the Experience Through Linear Meta-Narrative.” Journeys 7 (2): 101–128. Basu, Paul. 2004. “Route Metaphors of ‘Roots-Tourism’ in the Scottish Highland Diaspora.” Pp. 150–174 in Coleman and Eade 2004. Bowman, Glenn. 1993. “Nationalizing and Denationalizing the Sacred: Shrines and Shifting Identities in the Israeli-Occupied Territories.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 28 (3): 431–460. Bowman, Glenn. 2001. “The Two Deaths of Basem Rishmawi: Identity Constructions and Reconstructions in a Muslim-Christian Palestinian Community.” Identities 8 (1): 47–81. Braverman, Irus. 2009. Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Canaan, Taufik. 1927. Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine. London: Luzac. Coleman, Simon, and John Eade, eds. 2004. Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion. New York: Routledge. Crain, Mary M. 1997. “The Remaking of an Andalusian Pilgrimage Tradition.” Pp. 291–311 in Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, ed. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Feldman, Jackie. 2007. “Constructing a Shared Bible Land: Jewish Israeli Guiding Performances for Protestant Pilgrims.” American Ethnologist 34 (2): 351–374. Feldman, Jackie. 2011. “Abraham the Settler, Jesus the Refugee: Contemporary Conflict and Christianity on the Road to Bethlehem.” History & Memory 23 (1): 62–95. Gilsenan, Michael. 1976. “Lying, Honor, and Contradiction.” Pp. 191–219 in Transaction and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behavior, ed. Bruce Kapferer. Philadelphia, PA: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Hammami, Rema. 2010. “Qalandiya: Jerusalem’s Tora Bora and the Frontiers of Global Inequality.” Jerusalem Quarterly 41: 29–51. Hammoudi, Abdellah. 2006. A Season in Mecca: Narrative of a Pilgrimage. New York: Hill & Wang. Lagerquist, Peter. 2011. “Making the Humanitarian Primitive: Time and Violence on the Eternal Frontier.” Jerusalem Quarterly 46: 49–67. Meneley, Anne. 2008. “Time in a Bottle: The Uneasy Circulation of Palestinian Olive Oil.” Middle East Report 248: 18–23.


Meneley, Anne. 2014. “The Qualities of Palestinian Olive Oil.” Pp. 17–31 in Fat: Culture and Materiality, ed. Christopher E. Forth and Alison Leitch. London: Bloomsbury. Orsi, Robert. 2010. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shulman, David. 2007. Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simmel, George. 1950. The Sociology of George Simmel. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Taylor, Lawrence J. 2007. “Centre and Edge: Pilgrimage and the Moral Geography of the US/Mexico Border.” Mobilities 2 (3): 383–393. Weizman, Eyal. 2007. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.