As of July 2020, the North Staffordshire Olive Tree Campaign, an arm of Sumud Palestine, has donated £15920.50 to support farmers losing their land to the Israeli occupation. The money is sent through YCare International to the Jai Keep Hope Alive Olive Tree Campaign. Supporters of Sumud Palestine have come to know Nidal Abu Zuluf and the JAI well having taken part in the annual programmes planting olive trees
and picking olives.
Initially the NSOTC invited sponsorship of an olive tree. Individual and organisations can have a named plaque to mark their donation. This is a particularly good marker for organisations raising money because they can go online and identify their plaque on a field. A plaque also serves to remind members of the IDF and settlers who routinely destroy olive trees and orchards that members of the international have full knowledge
of their actions.
The NSOTC and Sumud Palestine are happy if Nidal Abu Zuluf spends our donations where the need is most urgent. In 2014 Nidal spoke by video link to a meeting of Sumud Palestine. You can see this on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQvci8J9c80 and you can watch a documentary by JAI Palestine which tells the story of two farmers from Al Jab’a, a village southwest of Bethlehem whose farmlands were confiscated by the Israeli authorities in order to build and expand the surrounding settlements, to pave the Israeli-only by-pass roads, and lay down water pipes which pump out Palestinian water to the adjacent settlements around the village. These farmers have lost many of their olive trees at the hands of the settlers, and they tell their stories of loss and subjection to violence by the Israeli system and the Israeli settlers. They are forced to witness the expansion of the Israeli settlements on their own lands while they and their community are pushed out of the ever-shrinking area of their historic birthplace.