Every year, October marks the onset of olive harvesting in Palestine. The olive industry is the sole breadwinner for more than 100,000 Palestinians, of whom over 15 percent are women. For a community whose lifeline is agriculture—especially the olive industry—and for whom olives are ubiquitous in their culinary culture, the harvest is nothing short of a festive season. Palestinian families gather and picnic around the olive groves to pick the stone fruit. 

However, every year, this joyous season is clouded by the imminent danger of attacks from Israeli settlers, often aided by the Israeli military. In 2023, the UN documented 113 harvest-related acts of violence where Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian farmers and damaged over 2000 olive trees. The iconic image of an elderly Palestinian farmer Mahfodah Shtayyeh, crying and hugging her olive tree as Israeli settlers attacked captures both the struggle and resistance of the Palestinian farmer and her trees. Shtayyeh says she has raised the tree as her child.

Under the occupation, all lives are precarious—people, flora, fauna—and the air, water, and land that holds them all. Since the inception of the Zionist movement, a great deal of violence has been unleashed upon olive trees. For instance, over 800,000 olive trees have been destroyed since 1967 alone. In the early days of settlements, Israelis would attack natives to intimidate them into evacuating and relinquishing their ownership of the land. These attacks also functioned as punitive measures against rebelling Arabs, depriving them of their source of income and cutting off their key sustenance, hence jeopardizing Palestinian food sovereignty. 

These Israeli attacks serve as both statements and practices of domination over territory, according to Israeli scholar Irus Braverman. That, and the growing need for expanding the colony and its ideology made the destruction of olive trees inevitable.

Olive Trees in Palestinian Resistance Narratives

Cultivated for thousands of years, olive trees and their fruits have an everyday presence at the dining tables of Palestinians and hold deep symbolism in the Palestinian nationalist discourse. The native origin of these centuries-old trees, coupled with the history of generations of Palestinian families tending to them, mark their deep-rooted connection to the land. Many trees—hundreds of years old—have symbolic value as witnesses and sites of memory of the ongoing Nakba and the many Intifadas the land has experienced. 

Their roots also represent Palestinian resistance, according to Bissan Okasha, the co-founder of Seeds of Resilience, an NGO in Gaza that resists genocide through planting seedlings. The trees’ strength to cling back to life even in the face of relentless attacks and replacement make the olive trees a quintessential emblem of sumud—a political concept that means “steadfast connection to the land” and “staying put despite continuous assault”—and Palestinian national movement.

The symbolic importance of olive trees has deeply influenced the creative works of Palestinian artists, poets, and storytellers. Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine’s “poet of resistance” in his poem An Al Sumud (On Resiliency) from the 1964 poetry collection Awraq Al Zaytun (Leaves of the Olive Trees) poignantly wrote the famous line, “If the Olive trees knew the hands that planted them, Their oil would become tears.” These words encapsulate the sorrow of Palestinian fellaheen (farmers) who lovingly planted olive trees in their lands but were later banished from them. The dispossessed olive tree stands as a poignant symbol of the loss and grief experienced by Palestinians. In Earth Presses Against Us, a poem written in 1987, during the First Intifada, Darwish the Palestinian resistance is compared to an olive tree—resilient and regenerating— continually rising against adversity. He writes: 

“Where shall we go, after the last frontier? Where will birds be flying, after the

last sky?

Where will plants find a place to rest, after the last expanse of air?

We will write our names in crimson vapour.

We will cut off the hand of song so that our flesh can complete the song.

Here we will die. Here in the last narrow passage. Or here our blood will plant –

its olive trees.”

Similarly, in Tawfiq Zayyad’s poem On the Trunk of an Olive Tree (1979), the olive tree is the perpetual spectator who will testify to the tragedy that has befallen them. He writes:

I shall carve the record of all my sufferings, and all my secrets,

On an olive tree, in the courtyard of the houses….

I shall carve the number of each deed of our usurped land,

The location of my villages and its boundaries

The demolished houses of its people, my uprooted trees,

… And to remember it all,

I shall continue to carve all the chapters of my tragedy,

and all the stages of the disaster, from beginning to end,

On the olive tree, in the courtyard of the house.

Palestinian men and women tending to their olive groves have been a prominent theme in the work of painter and co-founder of the League of Palestinian Artists, Sliman Mansour. In his powerful painting Quiet Morning (2009), a Palestinian farmer sits in front of an olive tree wrapped in barbed wire, symbolically representing the siege under which both the Palestinians and their trees live. “In the same way that the trees can survive and have deep roots in their land, so, too, do the Palestinian people,” he said. 

In these Palestinian imaginations, olive trees can be seen as what Pierre Nora calls “sites of memory.” The olive trees have become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of the Palestinian community. They conjure recollections of their lost homeland and its tragedies. As Nora states, such sites of memory require a “commemorative vigilance” to protect them from being erased by mainstream narratives. Palestinian communities preserve them through their art and protecting their trees.

Beyond this, the mere presence of heirloom olive trees builds a counter-narrative to Zionism. Mariam Al Jaajaa of the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN) calls these olive trees “enemies of Zionism,” as “they expose the lie that Israelis came to an empty land.” These trees dismantle colonial myths and Zionist slogans like “a land without a people for a people without a land”, by being the proof that land was never barren nor without its people. They show how generations of Palestinian families—of all faiths, including Jewish Arabs—have cultivated the land and cared for its trees. 

Olive Trees as a Biblical Promise Turned Barrier for Zionists

Olive trees are one of the seven biblical promises of the land of Israel. These awaiting ancient trees embodied and supported the Zionist historical narrative of a connected mythical golden age and modern Jewish nation-state.

Planting, including olive trees, was a performance meant to construct a new Jewish persona. The agricultural act of “working the land” was not only promoted to support the economy of the new settlements but also to ideologically and literally “root” the settlers to the new/old homeland. Early European Jewish collectives like Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion), the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), and individual funders like Baron Edmond de Rothschild of Paris actively contributed by buying large dunams of land in historic Palestine and providing agro-tech know-how to the newly immigrated Europeans, who had no experience farming in its terrain. These collectives and funders actively promoted planting the holy olive tree during these early days of Zionism.

However, this “biblical promise” and a culinary “ambassador” of the Zionist project faced a troubled future in the later stages of the movement. The bitter taste of olives, the long waiting period before the trees yielded fruit, and the labor-intensive methods of tending made them unpopular among the European Jews.

One of the early challenges faced by the colonizers was acclimating to the native foods of Palestine, including olives. This became a taunting problem and even found its way into popular literature as a theme in novels. For instance, Israeli novelist S. Y. Agnon’s 1945 novel Temol Shilshom (Only Yesterday) is a story of a young Polish Jew who migrated to Palestine, seduced by Zionist slogans and biblical promises, but struggles even to consume the food there, such as tomatoes and olives. His friends tell him that if he wishes to be the “son of the land,” he must start eating what it provides. Agnon ends the story with the protagonist developing a taste for these foods. This “happy ending” serves to reassure the incoming Jews of the diaspora of a life they can build in the promised land.

Likewise, the 1935 cookbook published by the Women’s International Zionist Organisation (WIZO), How to Cook in Palestine, took this matter very seriously. Among its many efforts, the cookbook aimed to introduce local products and create a kitchen “befitting the land of Israel.” It offered innovative recipes for those who couldn’t “stand the typical smell of eggplants” or those learning to “eat olives quite easily.” According to the manual, one should “wholeheartedly stand in favor of healthy Palestine cooking,” which would “help us more than anything else in becoming acclimatized to our old-new homeland.”

How Israel Abandoned Olive Trees For Pines

Though these efforts to grow olives and make them more agreeable to the palates of the colonists were initially successful, olive trees faded over time as a prominent symbol of the Israeli state. The strong association of olives with the culture and heritage of native Arabs, along with its adaptation as a symbol of resistance in their movement, was a significant reason for the shift away from olives as a Zionist symbol.

Founded in 1901, the Jewish National Fund (JNF)—which played a central role in shaping the modern landscapes of both Israel and Palestine through extensive land acquisition and “afforestation campaigns,”—introduced non-native pines to the region. Over the years, Israel introduced over 240 million non-native trees, mostly pine to the region. Its institutionalized planting to create forests and recreational parks was not just a material act but an ideological one. An integral part of the Zionist discourse and vision, pines became known as a “Jewish tree” among the natives.

Along with the potential of pine timber to support the infrastructure needs of the emerging Israeli state and plantations as an act of environmental consciousness, the physical act of “putting down roots” through the planting of saplings symbolized the “rooting” of the “returning Jews” and the formation of a connection to the “Jewish homeland.” The JNF distributed and oversaw the planting of thousands of pine saplings, accompanied by pamphlets quoting biblical verses such as, “And when you come to the land, you shall plant all manner of trees.” 

Under the JNF’s guidance, Tu Bishvat, the “New Year of the Trees” was celebrated as a national holiday for planting trees in the supposedly “barren land.” These new traditions were said to have not been part of pre-Zionist Judaism but were invented to help establish a nation-state. The planting also served the important function of “memorializing.” Trees were planted in memory of Zionist figures, religious and political leaders, and Holocaust victims. Jews in the diaspora could donate trees in one’s name to “root” themselves vicariously.

Planting these “green lungs” also served to conceal the bulldozed houses and torched groves of Palestinian villages. Most of the sites the JNF chose were evacuated Palestinian lands. These efforts not only prevented the return of the indigenous people but, more importantly, played a role in Nakba denial and the erasure of Palestinian history and collective memory.

As much as these grave violations informed the Palestinian movement, they were also articulated in the controversial 1963 short story by Israeli writer A. B. Yehoshua, Facing the Forests. The story follows an Israeli forest watcher who discovers that the forest he is in charge of protecting was planted over the ruins of an Arab village. An acute sense of guilt overtakes the watcher, and he encourages an Arab to set the forest on fire. He rejoices when the forest is burned down and the contours of the buried village reappear. The story had a shocking effect on Israeli readers, opening up the consciously repressed guilt and anxiety surrounding the massacres.

Another important reason for replanting the land with pines, according to Carol B. Bardenstein, is that pines create a European-modeled landscape. She argues that this conceals the geographical dislocation experienced by the predominant Ashkenazi Jews. Ilan Pappe also observes this in his groundbreaking work The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006). 

Olive Trees and the Ideological Paradoxes of Zionism

Parallel to these shifts, olive trees were also caught in some other major ideological and politico-legal crossfires. These trees began to be perceived as “enemy soldiers” in the Israeli discourse as they negated many of the dominant Zionist narratives and legalities, mostly through their mere presence. For example, the rallying ideological cries of Zionism like “make the desert bloom” and “a land without a people for a people without a land” meant Palestinian land was “terra nullius,” meaning “nobody’s land” or “a land without a master”. It justified colonizing Palestine and denying the existence of its native people.

From the river to the sea, Palestine lies within the Fertile Crescent, one of West Asia’s most agriculturally productive regions. With access to water, nutrient-rich soil, and its position at the crossroads of continents, the region has been home to some of the earliest agricultural societies and thriving civilizations. Historical records show olives and oranges were exported to Europe long before the arrival of Jewish settlers from Europe. Thus, the sheer presence of age-old olive trees disputes significant propaganda and reveals the tension between Zionist ideology and the reality of tree attacks and land appropriation practices.

The uprooting of olive trees, often regarded as patriotic acts by the Israeli state and settler communities, also starkly contradicts Jewish heritage, religious laws, and ecological claims of Zionist afforestation efforts. The explicit prohibition of the destruction of trees, even in times of war, is also found in the Torah, and the Zionist actions also breach these teachings. Many Jewish organizations, both within and outside of Palestine and Israel, have voiced opposition to these violations of religious principles. They have extended their support to Palestinian farmers through various initiatives, such as donating and planting olive saplings to replace those destroyed. For example, Rabbis for Human Rights, an Israeli human rights group, has taken direct action by forming human shields during the harvest season to protect Palestinian farmers from attacks by settlers.

Moreover, the uprooting of these trees constitutes a gross violation of international law, amounting to war crimes. These acts go against the spirit of the Paris Protocols, The Hague and Geneva Conventions, and the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Specifically, they violate Articles 54 and 55 of the 1977 Protocol to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which explicitly prohibits the destruction of trees in times of conflict.

Israel’s Legal Battle Against Palestinian Olive Trees

A significant politico-legal reason for targeting olive trees is the farmer-friendly local land laws that protect land ownership in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). For example, some local land laws originally granted the right of land possession to a native who has cultivated the land for a continuous 10-year term. Ownership of the land was not lost if its cultivation ceased. Similarly, local laws regarding rocky terrains stipulated that cultivating pockets of fertile land was enough to grant rights over the entire parcel. 

These laws were deliberately misinterpreted by the Israeli administration that ruled over OPT to insist that continuous cultivation even after the stipulated 10-year period is necessary, otherwise the land could be seized by the state—namely, Israel. Also, the new interpretation allows Israel to seize land if more than 50 percent of the land is not cultivated– irrespective of the nature of the terrain.

In this colonial pursuit, the absence—and destruction—of Palestinian olive trees are crucial for Israel to grab land “legally,” making their very presence a threat to Israel’s expansionist ambitions. This difficult situation makes them “enemy soldiers” in this battle over land and its presence an act of “tree invasion,” according to an Israeli officer quoted in Braverman’s ethnography, who said:

[T]he tree is the source of the problem. It’s not just an incidental thing like [it is] in the Bible. Here, the tree is not only a symbol of the Arab’s occupation of the land, but it is also the central means through which they carry out this occupation. [. ..] It’s not like the tree is the enemy’s property, in which case the Bible tells you not to uproot it because it has nothing to do with the fight. Here it has everything to do with it. The tree is the enemy soldier.

Like children, their trees look so naïve, as if they can’t harm But like [their] children, several years later they turn into a ticking bomb.

To aid the physical destruction of olive trees, Israeli entities both state and pro-settler organizations like Regavim, use a comprehensive system of inspectors and technology for aerial surveillance. They detect any new tree that has “encroached” through aerial images and any young olive tree found is marked as a “new illegal structure” is uprooted. According to the Israeli civil administration, these Palestinian olive trees are “illegal” or an act of “trespassing,” and their uprooting is sanctioned. 

This battle over the legality of the trees has been further complicated as real estate organizations like the Land Redemption Fund seize Palestinian lands of OPT first as unauthorized, illegal outposts and then convert them into legalized settlements. One of their method or tactics They came up with demands to make the local laws applicable to them as well and began planting older olive trees on the stolen lands as a tactic to claim ownership of land through cultivation. 

An illegal settler and advocate of the Land Redemption Fund who planted olive trees is quoted in Braverman’s study saying: “I definitely planted the trees only for the purpose of seizing land. I’m a lawyer; I don’t have time to be a farmer.” This use of olive trees as a tool for land seizure undermines the olive tree’s status as a Palestinian symbol. A Palestinian advocate laments this loss, stating, “They even steal our symbol…”

Another alarming case against the occupation is its theft of olive trees. Palestinian Observatory of Israeli Colonization Activities (POICA) has documented several incidents of theft of Palestinian-owned olive trees and saplings, in which the Israeli state and military are complicit. Trees older than the state of Israel have been uprooted from Palestinian lands and replanted in Israeli cities to beautify public spaces in Israel. A Haaretz report speculated about the presence of mafia teams that smuggle ancient trees from Palestinian lands. These grand old trees are reportedly in high demand as ornamental trees among wealthy Israelis to decorate their yards.

Zionist Attacks on Palestinian Olive Trees Constitute Ecological Imperialism

Fortifying its critics’ claim of Zionism as a colonial enterprise, many of the “environmental” actions—including apparent “conservation” efforts—of the Zionist movement have been proved detrimental to the region’s ecology. Post-colonial scholars argue that transformations of the occupied landscape and its ecology are core characteristics of colonialism and amount to “ecological imperialism”—the domination of not just people but their landscapes and environment.

Israel, like many other colonial states, has engaged in unscientific monocultural practices for decades, which has significantly impacted the region’s biodiversity. Early Zionist projects planted thousands of eucalyptus and pine trees in Southern Palestine, exacerbating groundwater depletion by drying up swamps. These species also heightened the risk of forest fires, frequently occurring in Israel and the OPT. In 2021 alone, the United Nations Environment Programme reported the loss of 2,000 hectares of pine and oak forests in Israel due to wildfires. Monocultural afforestation practices persisted until the 1990s when critical discourses challenging their environmental impact gained traction.

Israel’s formation of about 400 nature reserves and national parks since 1948 has further exacerbated the harmful environmental effects of Zionism. Nature reserves and parks historically served as a tool of colonialism, are often used to displace indigenous peoples from their lands and ecosystems under the guise of ecological conservation. Israel’s formations of such areas on the OPT, are also alleged as tactics to restrict the Palestinian access to land and trees while pushing its twin aim of “greenwashing” or advancing its “green diplomacy.” An irony of Israel’s conservation efforts is that the Israel Nature and Parks Authority has been uprooting and confiscating olive trees from these areas designated to “preserve” nature. Environmental activists have raised serious concerns about sealing lands in the OPT under the pretext of “conservation.” B’tselem argues that this strategy is a means to bypass international laws and seize these lands for future settlement projects. 

Israel is guilty of not only genocide but also ecocide and environmental Nakba, by deliberately targeting all environmental elements vital to life, including olive trees. According to Palestinian environmental activist Abeer Al Butmeh, this includes targeting soil, agriculture, water resources, and even solar energy projects using prohibited weapons such as phosphorus bombs and other chemical agents. She argues that the fight for climate justice and Palestinian freedom are inherently connected.

The history of oppression and dispossession shared by both the people of Palestine and their olive trees have symbolically intertwined them forever. The history of Zionist aggression against native olive trees stands as a stark testament to Israel’s relentless war on both the Palestinian people and their environment. The systematic uprooting of these ancient, biblical trees not only violates Jewish religious laws but also exposes the contradictions within Zionist ideologies and Israel’s self-proclaimed “green diplomacy.” This massive arboricide, executed in the pursuit of establishing a settler-colonial state, underscores the inseparable link between anti-colonial struggles and the fight for environmental justice. 

On 26th November of every year, the UN celebrates World Olive Tree Day to “encourage the protection of the olive tree” and celebrate its many virtues. This year, the day was celebrated when the brutal genocide against Palestinians and its olive trees entered its second year. It is also celebrated when the UN fails again to bring a ceasefire resolution with a tyrannical veto by the US for the fourth time. At this moment in history when the international community as a whole has failed to cease the indescribable destruction, the olive trees continue to inspire Palestinian resistance and solidarity movements with their resilience and ability to regenerate.