“Time for Thyme” 

A few years ago, Rantis’ farmers raced to catch the falling olives.  Their forefathers once did the same.  It was even tougher for them then as they had a smaller population and less manpower.   No wonder that through the years these olive groves have filled with families, and often host three generations at a time. The land summons; it will not wait.  But this year it won’t be the Palestinian people of Rantis charting the orchards.  They’ll be watching from the other side of a barbed fence.  And wishing.

On a warm Monday December day, Saleh Ballout can be found behind the steel mesh, front and center, an onlooker. Saleh is a father of four sons and a daughter.  For many years, fatherhood came easy for the 40 year old farmer.  Furthermore, new birth brought new joy to an entire village of youngsters.   Ten years ago, Saleh and other active parents banded together to convert a rundown former mosque into a bustling children’s center.  It was the first of its kind in an area sorely lacking organized enrichment and recreation for children.  A diamond in the provincial rough, the renovated quarters were soon host to pinhole camera workshops, theatre performances, folk art lessons, and barrels of laughter.  The Ballout kids had an ever giving father ensuring them a neighborhood of never ending fun.   

Of late, the fortunes of Rantis’ parents’ have been quite different.  Israeli bulldozers recently tore across village farms, sparing nothing in their path.  They unearthed the present day hardship of a community which has lived off the land for centuries.  Only a few days behind the plows came an electric fence crowned with coiled steel, firmly staked across the trails once used by farmers to reach their land.  The plows must have been on autopilot.  How else to explain this senseless loss of livelihood to so many farmers?  Surely, a “security barrier” does not make a country safer by snaking its way through well used olives, grapes, and figs.  Yet Israeli government officials insist the Fence will insulate its citizens from Palestinian terrorists and that its’ route is not mapped for the purpose of expanding territory and settlements.  This claim is further suspect when noting many stretches of the Wall have been erected in unprotected valleys, deep onto Palestinian turf, rather than on the easily monitored high ground of the 1967 Green Line.   

Israeli security aside, the Fence has quickly created insecurity at the Ballout dinner table.  Crop revenues are small, while the kids appetites are anything but.  Stark Pantry is a new frontier for families of three and four as well, not just a plight of big tables.   Nowadays, the children’s center in the old Mosque doesn’t get its fill either.  Kids no longer climb the club’s steep steps into arms of after school welcome.  Costs to keep the place open are too much for the parents who, before the Fence’s construction, gladly paid overhead expenses through donation.   Many of them are fathers who were formerly employed in the nearby Israeli city of Rosh Ha Ayin.   They are now looking elsewhere for jobs, forbidden from stepping foot in Israel.    A number of them have risked imprisonment, and slashed the fence in the hopes of securing a morsel of wealth from the Israeli side.  In common speak, their efforts may keep their children out of want for another day.

 Strangely enough, since the club’s closure, the kids have more time than ever to play.  They are no longer busy helping their folks harvest the crops now that hundreds of dunums of land have been lost.  This lost Palestinian land falls well within the 1967 Green Line, but extends far beyond the strangling Fence.  Less land has created a similar irony for working age residents of Rantis.   With fewer jobs available due to travel restrictions and border closures created by the Fence, more Palestinian adults have turned to farming to make money.  There is now more time and hands to till less land.  This prompted Saleh to join his local LDC (Land Defense Committee), an outfit of concerned citizens working to peacefully counter

Israeli threats to Palestinian land.  Norwegian People’s Aid recently underwrote the group’s efforts by providing funding to the MA’AN Development Center enabling them to launch a three year “Right to My Land” project.  This project gives teeth to the committees’ cause by developing their organizational and advocacy capacities.
 

In addition, small grants are awarded to qualifying villages trying to recover from Israeli land confiscation policies.  Rantis was a perfect candidate. 

 Rantis’ villagers have combed the village surroundings in search of arable soil.  Much of what they’ve found appears more suitable for quarry than cultivation.  The only tract  with any potential for growth was studded with massive rocks.   Before the Fence, Saleh and his fellow farmers would have spurned the idea of using such land.  Then again, they would have had no need for it.  Now there is no other choice.   They have far from giving up, using every last dollar of the grant to sow every foot of soil.  Scores of farmers turned out to for the facelift, clearing endless rocks and rubble before planting the seeds.  Now, Thyme can be seen peeking out from under the patches of dirt; an apt and ironic choice of crop.  It is Time that is now in surplus in Rantis.  Saleh, for one, will put both time and Thyme to good use.  After his family is fed, any remaining profits from the upcoming Thyme harvest will be set aside to one day reopen the children’s club.  As for the extra time he now has on his hands, he will work with other LDC members toward putting their own committee out of existence.  For all the right reasons.