Olive cultivation is ancient across the Mediterranean, but in Palestine, the olive tree transcends agriculture. It is a living record of memory, continuity, and an enduring historical presence. For generations, these groves have been venerated and passed down, sustaining tens of thousands of Palestinian families.
The olive harvest in the occupied West Bank officially began on October 15. A time when families gather in groves passed down through centuries, picking fruit from trees that symbolize a powerful rootedness, resilience, and their deep connection to the land and a refusal to abandon their heritage.
They would help bring in the crops, eat breakfast together in the shade of the trees, and listen to stories and jokes. In the evenings they would bring the harvest back to the villages and directly to the olive press, watching it being processed into oil. The gleaming green and spicy taste of the first bit of freshly pressed oil would be a source of pride and celebration.
As farmers gather their olives currently there's a bittersweet undertone to the usual joy. Under Israeli occupation, the harvest has become a time of violence, fear, destruction, and dispossession as escalating Israeli settler violence, military raids, access restrictions and settlement expansion, including the rapid establishment of dozens of outposts, increasingly prevent Palestinians from reaching their farms and severing their ties to their land.
Out of roughly 2 million olive trees in Gaza before October 2023, only 150,000 trees remain standing. This is a loss of roughly 85% to 90% of the region's olive groves.
Ecocide is the deliberate, widespread destruction of natural ecosystems necessary to sustain human life. Many experts would agree that Israel's systematic destruction of Palestinian farmlands, aquifers, and trees would qualify as ecocide.
Under international humanitarian law including the Geneva Conventions, any objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population like agricultural areas are granted special protections during conflict.
Olive oil and table olives are crucial to Gaza's local agricultural economy, but in Palestinian culture, olive trees are much more than just a commodity. They are symbols of continuity, resilience, and attachment to the soil.
Many groves are hundreds of years old and passed down through generations.Unlike annual crops like tomatoes or cucumbers that can be replanted and harvested in a single season, mature olive trees represent decades of invested capital. Losing them wipes out a reliable source of income for thousands of families, leaving them dependent on foreign aid.
Seasons may change, villages may lose their familiar features, and people may be forcibly separated from their homes, but the olive tree remains a witness to the story of the land and to their right to their homeland, their memories, and their future.
Notwithstanding all obstacles, the olive harvest remains a key economic, social and cultural event for Palestinians. In a way the occupation has even strengthened the connection between the Palestinian people and their trees, and the annual harvest is seen by many as an act of defiance and a symbol of “summoud”, the Arabic term for steadfastness.
The destruction of a tree however is cruelty, it is not "self-defense". Settlers and the military destroying trees just shows they have no true respect for the land and what is growing on it. No matter the historical narratives claimed, the very ideology of uprooting ancient, life-giving groves exposes a colonizing force that fundamentally fails to grasp the sacred, symbolic pulse of the region.
To destroy an olive tree is to wage war on memory; to defend it is to defend the right to exist.The Palestinian people remain as deeply anchored as the trees they plant and protect with their lives, bound by a history that refuses to be uprooted. No matter what the criminals do, this land will not forget the olive trees; or the blood of its children shed upon it.
The following poem by Mahmoud Darwish, details the importance of the Olive Tree as a symbol for peace in Palestine.
The Second Olive Tree - Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by Marilyn Hacker
The olive tree does not weep and does not laugh. The olive tree
Is the hillside’s modest lady. Shadow
Covers her single leg, and she will not take her leaves off in front of the storm.
Standing, she is seated, and seated, standing.
She lives as a friendly sister of eternity, neighbour of time
That helps her stock her luminous oil and
Forget the invaders’ names, except the Romans, who
Coexisted with her, and borrowed some of her branches
To weave wreaths.They did not treat her as a prisoner of war
But as a venerable grandmother, before whose calm dignity
Swords shatter. In her reticent silver-green
Colour hesitates to say what it thinks, and to look at what is behind
The portrait, for the olive tree is neither green nor silver.
The olive tree is the colour of peace, if peace needed
A colour. No one says to the olive tree: How beautiful you are!
But: How noble and how splendid! And she,
She who teaches soldiers to lay down their rifles
And re-educates them in tenderness and humility:
Go home And light your lamps with my oil!But
These soldiers, these modern soldiers
Besiege her with bulldozers and uproot her from her lineage
Of earth. They vanquished our grandmother who foundered,
Her branches on the ground, her roots in the sky.
She did not weep or cry out. But one of her grandsons
Who witnessed the execution threw a stone
At a soldier, and he was martyred with her.
After the victorious soldiers
Had gone on their way,
we buried him there, in that deep
Pit – the grandmother’s cradle.
And that is why we were
Sure that he would become, in a little while, an olive
Tree – a thorny olive tree – and green!
