The Olive Harvest: Rooted in Palestine, Outliving the Occupation

Adults and children gathering olives together beneath the branches, with harvest combs and a green net.

Rooted in Palestine and determined to outlive the occupation

The olive harvest sustains Palestinian life. It brings oil to our tables and income to our households. It gathers generations around work they share, passing knowledge from one pair of hands to another. The olives we pick become food for the months ahead, and tending the trees becomes a responsibility to those who will come after us.

This is why the harvest matters so deeply. Our connection to Palestine is lived through the care we give the land and the life it sustains. A cloth spread beneath the branches, olives gathered by hand, a meal shared after hours of work: these are ordinary acts of belonging.

Adults and children sharing a meal at a low table outdoors, with rubble behind them.
A meal shared around the table.

In al-Walaja, near Bethlehem, the ancient al-Badawi olive tree holds generations of Palestinian history. Its age is estimated in thousands of years. [1] Its survival also carries the work of the people protecting it. In a 2020 interview, caretaker Salah Abu Ali described how his sons helped watch over the tree, as his father had before him. [2] Al-Badawi makes that relationship visible: a tree sustained by generations, and generations sustained by their land. Our roots reach further back than the occupation. Our future must reach beyond it.

A large olive tree with a wide, multi-stemmed trunk and dense green canopy.
An olive tree with a broad canopy.

Under occupation, even that ordinary life is attacked. The people tending the land face the terrorism of Israeli forces and settlers who seize it, destroy its trees, and try to conceal the Palestinian life rooted there.

The harvest carries our refusal to let them decide where our story ends. We will outlive the occupation.

Palestinian farmers care for the land. Israeli colonizers destroy it.

An olive tree needs care beyond the weeks when its olives are ready. Israeli authorities have subjected Palestinian farmers' access to their own groves to permits and coordination requirements, restricting that care. OCHA's account ahead of the 2025 harvest described how tens of thousands of farmers were denied access to groves behind Israel's separation barrier in 2023, with severe limitations continuing in 2024. [3]

Between 1 October and 10 November 2025, OCHA documented 167 olive-harvest-related settler attacks against Palestinians. These included assaults on farmers, theft of crops and equipment, and damage to trees. In Rantis, a family granted access to its land for two days arrived to find its olive groves burned. [4]

This is colonial dispossession at the scale of a family's working day. It determines whether we can reach what we have tended, and whether anything will remain to harvest when we arrive.

A destroyed tree is a real loss. It can mean lost income, years of care cut down, and a familiar part of home gone. A new sapling cannot simply replace everything that was taken. But uprooting a tree does not uproot a people's right to their land.

How the Jewish National Fund tries to conceal Palestine

Israeli colonization also works by trying to hide the Palestinian history of the land. The Jewish National Fund (JNF), a Zionist land and forestry organization, has planted forests over the remains of Palestinian villages whose people were displaced. Zochrot's documentation traces how forests and recreation sites cover these places and obscure their history. [5][6]

For us, covering homes with a forest while their people are kept away is an attempt to erase Palestine's identity. A new name and new trees cannot undo the lives rooted there. Our people have a right to return.

Our Palestinian identity endures attempts at colonial erasure

Israeli forces, settlers, and the institutions remaking the landscape can try to erase the signs of our presence. They cannot make dispossession a rightful claim to what they have taken.

Our belonging does not depend on whether we can reach a grove or bring in a harvest. The family barred from its land belongs. The family forced from home belongs. So do those of us who know the names of our villages through the people who long to return to them.

We hold onto those names because the places are real. So is our right to return.

We want our children to inherit this land in freedom. To tend its trees, gather its olives, and build their lives without the threat of being driven away.

We will outlive the occupation. And we intend to live freely.

Sources

[1] Ruba Saleh, In the Seam Zone: Walaja’s Fate Between Jerusalem and Nowhere, Jerusalem Quarterly 49, page 54. Identifies al-Badawi in al-Walaja and describes the stories surrounding the ancient tree. Published age estimates are not treated here as scientifically settled. Read source

[2] Jason Ruffin, firsthand reporting and interview with Salah Abu Ali in al-Walaja, Atlas Obscura, 6 March 2020. Documents the tree's care by Abu Ali, his father, and his sons. Al-Badawi and its caretaker

[3] UN OCHA, Humanitarian Situation Update 328, 1 October 2025. See the 2025 Olive Harvest Season section. Read source

[4] UN OCHA, Humanitarian Situation Update 339, 12 November 2025. See the 2025 Olive Harvest Season section, including the incident in Rantis. Read source

[5] KKL-JNF, Goals and Actions. Its own account describes its Zionist role, land acquisition and development, and forestry work. Read source

[6] Zochrot, JNF project. Original documentation of Palestinian village sites covered by JNF forests and recreation areas. Zochrot's JNF project

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