"I'm a doctor. The soldiers came for me and took out my eye. For 15 years they poison our springs. And I'm the terrorist?"

Crate after crate after box after box after flat after flat. In the pouring rain, shin deep in thick Palestine mud. We passed the fruits and vegetables over the roadblock. Oranges. Eggplants. Cabbages. Potatoes. Apples. Cauliflower. Lettuce. Tomatoes. Bananas. We heaved them all from the back of one flatbed truck, up and over the heaping mud and slick limestone, into another waiting to distribute these essential foods to the people of Dir Istya.

There were about 50 of us--from the US, UK, and Canada--and we were able to send the trucks on their ways in a half-hour. Without us it would surely have taken the three middle-aged men and one shebab (young man) hours. But that's "normal" for the villages in the Salfit region (just north of Jerusalem)--the closures, the denial of bare necessities, and the fact that every time a Palestinian tries to provide these goods to his or her community he or she risks not coming back.

But this day was different, a local man told us. Different because of the rain. "Farmers love the rain," he said, smiling, "thank you for bringing it with you today."

After the food trucks bolted, the people from a nearby house bubbled us sweet sage tea, the sky cleared, and we set off down the valley.

Welcome to the Salfit region.

The Salfit region is a complex geography of mountains, valleys and rugged terraced slopes with thousands upon thousands of olive trees breaking out of this earth and up to the sun. Many of these trees are over 1000 years old (some folks can tell if the Romans planted them by measuring the distance between the trees). They've lived and grown and born their fruit through the Romans, Turks, and Brits and now they're all in deep danger. Israeli settlers, whose illegal settlements overlook the valley, are infamous for burning, uprooting and/or simply chopping down these trees. And the evidence abounds: thick truncated trunks still pushing out new sprigs, charred stumps, and entire trees withering on the roadside.

Yes, the settlers are here. And they're armed. Settlements frequently double as military bases, actually, as well as production plants for export goods--like bottled water. In the Salfit region there are 22 settlements that oversee 22 Palestinian villages. And all this is in Areas "B" and "C" (like about 80% of the West Bank), which means that the local Palestinians enjoy all the benefits of a heavily armed and hostile Israeli civilian and military presence, as well as the fruits of a crumbling PNA infrastructure.

Nusfet, our guide for the day, took us to the valley floor, to a settlement "wastewater treatment plant," in reality nothing more than an free-flowing stream of sewage. The raw waste slopping into the stream smelled putrid, and Nusfet said to me, "for 15 years it's like this. Now our orange trees can't grow, our goats and sheep don't eat, and our water supply is ruined." And so they have to buy bottled water from the very settlements that poison their natural springs.

This is life here. Sweet sage tea one minute, spewing raw sewage the next. Every instance of joy--not to say empowerment--is bludgeoned by the overarching truncheon that is The Occupation.

For three days in the Salfit area we dug out roadblocks and provided the locals some precious few hours of safe passage, only to have the IDF heap the mud up higher. We visited the familiy of Diab Al-Sarawi, shot three times in his head by Israeli snipers when he walked onto his verandah, and spent evenings with our hosts in a village called Marda, sharing magic tricks and sucking thick Arabic coffee. There's no reprieve here, no retreating from this siege.

And so today we pulverize roadblocks, and tomorrow Israel builds it back up. And so today we overtake a checkpoint and allow students to pass freely, but tomorrow Israel confiscates more ID cards and detains more shebab. And so today I write, and tomorrow I fight. And tomorrow we fight.

--Trevor Baumgartner, from the West Bank. He is writing and sending dispatches to ETS! and other publications during his stay in the Middle East.