The olive harvest season has begun across the occupied West Bank, where Palestinian families cling to their ancestral land despite decades of aggression and dispossession by the Israeli regime.

In nearly every Palestinian home, a teta—a grandmother and guardian of tradition—passes down recipes and memories of harvests before the occupation fenced off the groves, before soldiers turned the act of picking olives into a defiant gesture of existence.

Olives, whether green or black, have sustained Palestinian families for centuries—pressed into oil, cured for the table, or shaped into crafts and soap. They are not merely crops but emblems of identity and steadfastness.

The olive tree, cultivated across Palestine for thousands of years, stands as both a source of livelihood and a living witness to the people’s endurance. More than 100,000 Palestinian families depend on the harvest, which runs through November and once united whole communities before war and military occupation divided them.

Before the Israeli regime’s latest war on Gaza in 2023, almost half of all cultivated land across the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip was covered with about 10 million olive trees. Today, vast swaths lie ruined, scorched by settler violence and bulldozers.

The Life and Legacy of Palestine’s Trees

Many olive trees in Palestine are more than a thousand years old—older than the occupation itself. These trees, resilient and drought-tolerant, once symbolized peace and rootedness. Now, they stand scarred and fenced off, their branches pruned by soldiers rather than farmers.

Palestinian varieties like Nabali and Souri produce oil prized across the Levant. Yet the harvest itself has become an act of resistance, carried out under threat of settler raids, army patrols, and confiscations.

Olive Harvesting Under Occupation

What was once a season of joy is now marked by fear and confrontation. The United Nations has documented over a hundred attacks by Israeli settlers this season alone—farmers beaten, trees torched, groves poisoned.

According to the Applied Research Institute Jerusalem (ARIJ), since 1967 the Israeli regime has uprooted around 800,000 olive trees in the occupied West Bank—each one representing a family’s hope, memory, and means of survival.

Many farmers cannot even reach their land without Israeli-issued permits, which are arbitrarily denied or restricted to just a few days each year. Large areas near illegal settlements are sealed off entirely, turning fertile Palestinian soil into militarized zones of exclusion.

For Palestinians, the olive harvest is no longer just an agricultural tradition.

It is a statement of defiance—a declaration that despite occupation, violence, and the regime’s systematic attempts to erase their roots, the people of Palestine remain bound to their land, their trees, and their right to live free.