AQRABA, West Bank, October 30 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - About 40 Israeli writers, artists and businessmen on Wednesday, October 30, went to pick olives with Palestinians south of Nablus in the West Bank in protest at rising violence from Jewish settlers.

At the demonstration in olive groves near Aqraba village were veteran writers Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman, who protested alongside Rabbi Menachem Froman, a pro-peace rabbi from Teqoa settlement south of Jerusalem, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"We have come here to call for justice," said Oz, a former nominee for the Nobel prize for literature.

"I came to protest against what I regard as a crying and vicious plunder of the Arab olive harvest," he added in English.

Hawkish Jewish settlers have launched an unprecedented campaign of intimidation and harassment against Palestinian farmers during the month-long olive harvest, Israeli and international aid workers say.

In the valley just outside the village, farmers face repeated raids by armed Jewish settlers who live in the nearby illegal settlement of Itamar.

Froman condemned the violence and the plunder of the Palestinian olive harvest, citing Jewish texts which forbid such practices.

"It is a deep religious duty to love your neighbor and the Palestinians are our neighbors."

Froman has earned opprobrium from settlers for reaching out to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and the spiritual leader of the Islamic resistance group Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, proposing to broker settler-Palestinian coexistence through neighborly love, AFP reported.

"What the settlers are doing is a complete mutation of Zionism," said veteran peace activist Yakov Manor of the unchecked theft and violence perpetrated by Jewish settlers.

During this year's olive harvest, Jewish settlers have killed at least one Palestinian farmer and wounded several others.

The Israeli rights group B'Tselem said Jewish settlers had also stolen olives belonging to Palestinian farmers.

B'Tselem said at the start of the olive season that Israeli "security forces have not taken sufficient steps to enforce the law on settlers who used violence to prevent Palestinian farmers from harvesting their olives."

It called on the army and police to do all it could to prevent Jewish settlers from attacking Palestinian farmers and the Israeli and international peace activists who accompany them to afford some protection.

"Such steps are more urgent now than ever, as the harvest is a critical source of income for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian residents, who are already suffering from very difficult economic conditions," B'Tselem said.

Despite the appeal, Jewish settlers near Nablus beat up two U.S. activists, a 74-year-old man and a 68-year-old woman, on Sunday, October 20.

Top military analyst Zeev Schiff, writing in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, said the huge theft of food from the Palestinians could mark the beginning of a worrying shift toward the idea of "transfer," a right-wing project to shift Palestinians en masse out of the West Bank and into neighboring Arab states.

"Israelis are stealing and confiscating Palestinian food.

"Even if they won't admit it, it can be seen as laying the groundwork for transfer, not by the state but by a group of settlers."

Earlier this month, marauding settlers succeeded in expelling almost the entire population out of the Palestinian village of Yanun, close to Itamar.

The families only started returning when Israeli peace activists turned up in numbers to help them harvest their crops.

Gadi Al-Gazi, an activist from Taayush, an Israeli-Arab solidarity group providing protection in Yanun, said: "People think transfer is a dramatic event," while in fact it could start with the harvesting of olives.