Qassam Muaddi

On September 4, at 7:00 a.m., Palestinian journalist Alaa Rimawi posted a simple call on his Facebook page: forgive the debts owed to you. By 8:00 a.m., responses forgiving half a million shekels had already come in. By Tuesday, the total had reached 75 million shekels — approximately $24 million.

As a Palestinian journalist, I have spent my career explaining the context the world keeps ignoring. But I’ve come to realize that the context is itself the story, and we aren’t done telling it.

In Masafer Yatta in the southern occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers are accelerating their attacks on Palestinian farmers and herders in the area by cutting off their water supply.

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Israel is preparing to give settlers access to a main Palestinian thoroughfare in Ramallah, a move that would bring checkpoints and gates to one of the West Bank’s last spaces of free Palestinian movement and affordable urban growth.

On September 4, at 7:00 a.m., Palestinian journalist Alaa Rimawi posted a simple call on his Facebook page: forgive the debts owed to you. By 8:00 a.m., responses forgiving half a million shekels had already come in. By Tuesday, the total had reached 75 million shekels — approximately $24 million.

From my uncle’s exasperated sighs over olive groves we can no longer reach, to the iron gates the Israeli army has erected at the edge of my village, there is one word we use to cope: ‘aadi’, or, “normal” in Arabic. But this reality is anything but.

Israeli settlers are blocking, assaulting, and robbing Palestinian olive harvesters. For some 100,000 families in the West Bank who rely on the harvest for income, this season may decide whether the olive harvest survives at all.

Covering Israeli settler attacks on the Palestinian olive harvest, Mondoweiss’ Palestine Staff Writer asks how to tell a story when you and the subject are one and the same.

A fresh breeze makes its way around the porch as my father looks up at the cloudy sky. He zips up his jacket, turning to look at me with his eyebrows raised, and says, “Autumn is here.” In Palestine, especially in the annual calendar of villagers like my father, autumn already started a month ago, in mid-September, with the first rain of the year known as “the rain of the cross.” My father taught me this himself. But on this day, his comment was hinting at something else. “We should already be in the middle of the harvest,” I reply, shrugging my shoulders and looking down.