The Olive Harvest

          This is olive harvest season.  You’ve probably never given much thought to where olives come from but here, they are an essential part of the Palestinian culture. Olives have been grown and harvested here for thousands of years; some trees date back 4,000 years.  Because olive trees grow and produce fruit for thousands of years, are drought resistant, and grow in poor soil conditions, they have become symbolic of Palestinian continuity on the land as well as Palestinian resilience.  Some families have trees that have been passed down for centuries and they tend them with great care.  So, the olive harvest is often a family affair that recalls generations of forefathers and mothers who’ve harvested olives from the very same trees.  Olives account for 70% of fruit production in Palestine and around 80,000 families rely on the harvest as a main source of income.  Knowing I would be here during the olive harvest, I hoped that I would get to participate.

Olive tree in the Garden of Gethsemane that is over 2000 years old.
The inside is hollow but note the smaller branches growing out of the old trunk.

As it turns out, one of my colleagues at Bethlehem Bible College has a handful of

Bucket #1 of my harvest

olives trees in her family garden (along with fig, apple, apricot, plum, and citrus trees).  Jihan is typical of a Palestinian family.  She shares a beautiful home with her husband, her son and her husband’s parents, and they provide a wonderful network of support for each other.  Jihan invited me over one Saturday to help with the olive harvest.  It took us most of the day to pick, pull, shake and collect olives from their three tress.  It was the most fun I have ever had doing anything that involves gardening!  In total, we harvested over 200 pounds of olives, about 45 pounds of which were mine.  Some will be pressed into oil and the rest will be pickled, all for use by the family.   

Maklouba

And, of course, this being Palestine, I was fed and fed!  Jihan’s mother-in-law made a traditional Palestinian dish called maklouba, literally “upside down”, which has rice, fried cauliflower, chicken and a variety of spices.  When finished, it is flipped over onto a plate and served with yogurt.  Of course, it was delicious and it took three cups of strong Arabic coffee for me to recover enough from my food coma to finish olive picking.  I was so touched by how this family just took me into their midst – I will be so sad to leave Jihan in a few short weeks but am grateful to have a family here to call my own.

But, many Palestinians do not find it so easy to harvest their olives. Since 1967, Israeli authorities have uprooted an estimated 2.5 million olive trees in the West Bank.  Trees are removed to build settlements, to build bypass highways to connect these settlements to Israel proper and to build the separation wall. This massive barrier winds in and out of the West Bank, intentionally separating Palestinians from their farmland and

Uprooted trees, Oct 10th

water sources.  Radical settlers have poisoned and uprooted Palestinian olive trees and attacked farmers, often with impunity. In fact, there have been at least four attacks by Jewish settlers on olive farmers, their trees and their harvests in just the last week.  What should be a joyous season of harvest, festivals and celebrations becomes instead a time of fear and hardship. Yet, many Palestinians find their strength in the land and in a shared sense of family and community that has endured for centuries.  They harvest their olives as best they can, as they have always done.  Just like their olive trees, they endure, hoping for a future free of occupation. To be able to share a small part of life here is an incredible privilege for me.