Austin American Statesman · 27 October 2002

CP-2002-092

Olive groves now another West Bank battleground

By John Ward Anderson / THE WASHINGTON POST

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Transcribed from the clipping

MAZRAA SHARQIYA, West Bank — Members of the Azzam family gathered in their 3-acre olive grove last week for a usually routine ritual that has become increasingly hazardous: the annual olive harvest.

As 16 family members, from toddlers to grandparents, shook the branches and raked through the silvery green leaves with their fingers to plunk the small, green olives onto tarps spread like blankets below the trees, they said they were on guard against Jewish settlers who this year are waging a violent and economically devastating war against Palestinian olive pickers.

Next to the family plot, hundreds of olive trees were set afire two weeks ago by residents of nearby Jewish settlements, family members said. Down the road, about 100 other trees were sawed to the ground.

Ten miles north, in the town of Aqraba, settlers three weeks ago shot and killed a 24-year-old Palestinian man who was picking olives on his land, according to Palestinian witnesses.

Since the harvest season began in early October, Palestinian communities across the West Bank have reported almost daily attacks by settlers against harvesters collecting the olives that are a staple of the Palestinian diet and economy. On several occasions, Palestinians complained that after driving them from their groves, the settlers took the olives.

“They are trying to uproot us from our lands, and without our land, we will have no attachment to Palestine,” said Lufti Azzam, 54, as he sat with his family in the shade of an olive tree eating bread and chicken. “But we are not going to be as simple-minded as our parents and grandparents,” he said.

“We are not going to leave our land like they did. We are not going to Jordan and Syria. We are going to resist them and harvest our olives.”

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The same copy, in 1 other paper

• A Hazardous Harvest For PalestiniansHartford Courant24 October 2002CP-2002-091

Their text and this one are nearly identical. Found by comparing transcriptions, not by reading them side by side, so this establishes that the text overlaps and not that these papers ran the same dispatch. How this was done.