CURRENT AFFAIRS | PALESTINE | WEST BANK
The Olive Harvest
With all eyes on Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank worry what this olive harvest might bring.
2023–10–25
A time of joy and family, when the whole village heads to the hills to pluck the love of the sun from the trees of their ancestors. Under the fragrant shade they work together. The encampment ends with a trip to the olive press loaded with bags. About one such visit in the 1970s, to a press in nearby Qubeibah, I write in Fugitive Dreams:
I watched bags of olives emptied down slides, the pregnant fruit rolling down till squeezed by a hydraulic press, liquid gold pouring out the other side. The crushed pits were bagged for use as fertilizer, animal feed, or fuel for furnaces. Onsite, we saw the ruins of an ancient press, where the thick trunk of an olive tree [pressed] a grindstone.
With all eyes on Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank worry what this olive harvest might bring.
On October 5, 2023, I rode with my brother around the West Bank. Having written for 30 years at the alarming growth of the Israeli stolenments, they managed to shock and alarm me yet again. Hardly a place to stand without one in sight. The hills are carved out even more, to make room for wider roads connecting them. Everywhere, I see construction, and walls. It is an all-out assault on the Land — our last remaining land — land for a state 30-years-in-waiting.
I refuse in Fugitive Dreams to use the word “settlement”, which
suggests a civilizing impetus amidst a wilderness, when in reality those communities are erected on stolen lands, taken by force backed by dubious means, in a legal system where the Palestinian owner has no voice. Furthermore, they are built as fortresses, oftentimes adjacent to Palestinian urban areas. There is no wilderness to tame. Only people to conquer.
The settlers are those people who live among us but enjoy all the rights we are denied. They can drive on the brand new Occupation Roads, without getting stopped at checkpoints. They can carry guns. They can vote. They can live wherever they wanted. The settler in Psagot, on a hill overlooking El-Bireh and Ramallah, can be on the beach in Tel Aviv in 1 hour. I first need a permit, and hours more at the Qalandia Gate to leave the Ramallah prison.
My mother came from there — Yafa, Palestine’s largest city — the Bride of the Sea. Mom’s 16 in the earliest photograph I have of her. That’s how old she was in May 1948 when her family, as most of Yafa’s Palestinians, were expelled from the city. The majority escaped for their lives on fishing boats to Gaza, where they lingered in the misery of refugee camps for 75 years. That’s how Israel was founded.
As I wrote in a social media post on Oct. 7 — a post that got attacked and censored — the Gazans who crossed the border were not invading “Israel”, but returning to their homes in Yafa and Asqalan and Isdud, homes from which they and 800,000 other Palestinians were forcefully evicted.
By 1993, when the “peace process” started, the West Bank had 200,000 settlers. Now, the settler population has quadrupled to near 800,000. So did the stolenments — in number and in size. They surround Palestinians towns and villages the way the “old stolenments” like Bat Yam and Tel Aviv encircled Yafa, strangling it and shelling it from all sides until the people sought the fishing boats.
Naturally, the Palestinians surrounded by this don’t feel safe. For years, settlers systematically harassed Palestinian villagers at the olive harvest. Strutting with guns on the hills to keep the villagers from their trees, from their livelihoods. This year, the settler attacks have become more violent, with settler gangs this spring and summer initiating dozens of pogroms against isolated Palestinian villages like Huwwara or Turmus Ayya, killing, looting, and burning houses, cars, and trees.
Such raids are nothing new, my brother having lost his new car to a settler raid in 1988 — way back during the first Intifada when settlers had the temerity to enter Ramallah.
The Israeli army does nothing against settler violence. The army’s job after all, is to protect citizens — the settlers — not the indigenous Palestinians. They look away like they did when Baruch Goldstein entered the Abrahamic mosque in al-Khalil (Hebron) and gunned down 40 unarmed Palestinian worshippers. That was Feb. 1992, two months before the first ever Hamas suicide bomb.
(In reality, Israeli soldiers were always the ones to deliver eviction notices to Palestinians whose lands were coveted from the stolenments.)
Three weeks ago, before the war started, one could sense a joyful anticipation of the olive harvest. People were making plans, signing up as volunteers, and expats returning to help their aged parents with the harvest.
Since, feelings changed to a nervous dread of what might happen out in the open, away from the safety of the village. With no entity providing security for Palestinians in the West Bank, settler attacks are an ever-present danger and could ignite another front.
For a moment on the way back to Ramallah on Oct. 5, I stopped paying attention to the stolenments and enjoyed the hills of olive trees.
Olive trees are almost sacred, revered for their strength, stability and productivity. A tree continues to bear fruit for hundreds of years. It is handed down generations, producing fruit, oil, wood, and fragrance. Certain olive trees in Jerusalem are said to be living witnesses to Jesus’s prayers underneath them. The richness of its produce made the olive branch a symbol of peace, brotherhood, and hope.
With love from an undisclosed location,
– Ramsey Hanhan
