My arrival in Israel-Palestine in late September 2024 for the Shatil Social Justice Fellowship coincided with the annual olive harvest. That weekend was my first olive harvest.
I had long known about the centrality of olives and olive oil to the Palestinian economy, but I could not fail to sense that this year’s harvest took on special urgency. One full year after October 7, Israel was still prosecuting its merciless onslaught on Gaza. In the West Bank, Jewish settlers were ramping up their own attacks on Palestinians as the army intensified its raids on what they called “terrorists’ nests”—which the locals called, “our homes.”
Early Saturday morning, I met four fellow harvesters in south Tel Aviv. We got on a chartered bus and picked up two dozen other harvesters. Contrary to my expectations, most were elderly, and all of them were Israeli. It was moving to see them exchanging warm greetings with their comrades as they boarded the bus, but I couldn’t help thinking about whether the absence of younger people was typical for this sort of activity and whether it tells us something about the political direction of Israeli society.
It was on the bus that we first learned our destination: Amin’s olive orchards, located in the notorious “seam zone” of the occupied West Bank. This zone was created when Israel decided to construct the separation wall in 2002. Because the wall is not constructed along the Green Line, and instead dips into Palestinian territory, large swaths of Palestinian-owned land are effectively “trapped” between the wall to their east and Israel proper to their west. By design, this area contains many illegal settlements, which the wall effectively annexes to Israel.
But this territory is also home to Palestinians. Entire villages and towns are stuck in this limbo space where they are neither properly inside of Israel nor properly connected to the West Bank. They are cut off. For the Palestinians in or near the seam zone, the wall often separates their homes from their workplaces or fields. It separates families. It makes life miserable. We saw this for ourselves that day. Before the wall, Amin, who lives in the Palestinian town of Jayyous, simply walked out the door and into his ancestral orchards, an organic extension of his village. Now, a barbed wire fence stands between him and his olive trees. He needs special military permission to enter his own land.
Amin could certainly use some help from strangers. First, harvesting an olive orchard requires hands, and Amin’s permits are limited to him and his sons, and do not extend to other West Bank Palestinians. But as Israelis, my fellow harvesters did not need a permit. Neither did I.
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With our small orange rakes, we clawed clumsily at the branches above us, waiting for the sound of dozens of ripe olives hitting the plastic tarps we had draped around the base of the tree trunk. I was hot and sweaty, and when I took a break from work to chat with Amin, we talked about his relatives in the U.S. and the experience of living with a wall between his home and his olive trees. When I told him I’d spent the previous year in Jordan, Amin asked if I “had loved someone” there, to which I told the disappointing truth, that I was much too focused on studying.
Come afternoon, we collected kindling and prepared tea with marimiyeh (sage). One of the old kibbutznik volunteers watched in horror as Amin poured a huge quantity of sugar into the kettle—he didn’t ask anyone to say “when”!
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My second time harvesting, in the company of another NIF/Shatil Social Justice Fellow, Nona Golan, I was happy to hear that we would be returning to Jayyous. But then, we got a real-time illustration of the bureaucratic cruelty of the permit system. Amin and his sons would not join us: the army had just revoked their permission to access and work their own farmland on Saturday, a new, seemingly random penalty on Palestinian farmers in the seam zone. As if olives care about which day of the week they are harvested, or as if Muslims observe the Jewish Sabbath.
We worked as quickly and efficiently as our modest group of twenty could. We left the olives in large bags for the farmers to retrieve when they would next be permitted to enter their own land. I was glad we did it anyway and was heartened by the company of caring Israelis, including those who brought their children to harvest with them. Some youngsters, finally. But I missed Amin and his sons. Above all, I was saddened by the thought that Amin, whose family has likely lived and worked this land for generations, is denied access to the land.
And the situation seems to only be getting worse. A few weeks ago, state representatives informed Israel’s Supreme Court that he government will not renew the entry permits of most Palestinian farmers whose lands are in the seam zone after completely revoking all entry permits in the wake of October 7.
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Harvesting olives in the West Bank is one thing. Harvesting olives in Gaza, in the year 2024, is another thing altogether. Around the time I started olive harvesting in the West Bank, I was assigned to edit a report on the olive harvest in Gaza as part of my job at +972 Magazine, where I have been working for the past five months as an NIF fellow. In the past year, we regularly commissioned and published reports from local Gaza journalists, about their lives under fire, providing western and Israeli audiences with first-hand testimonies. When my boss, Editor-in-Chief Ghousoon Bisharat, handed me the assignment, I could not believe my eyes. An olive harvest in Gaza? Now? Are there any olive trees left to harvest after a year of nonstop bombing which all but wiped out the greater part of the tiny coastal strip? But Taghreed Ali and Ibtisam Mahdi, who reported for us from Gaza, assured me that while most of Gaza’s olive orchards have indeed been destroyed, along with the rest of its civilian infrastructure, some had survived, and there were Gazan farmers who desperately left their tents and shelters to harvest as many olives as they could before the aerial bombing destroyed their trees or caused them to shed their fruits prematurely.
Working on this story required me to use Arabic, and it was my first editorial assignment. Before then, I had stuck mostly to translating pieces from Hebrew and Arabic into English for our predominantly Western audience. I took cues from the editors, who showed me how to foreground the personal experiences and testimonies of Gazans on the ground while providing the necessary historical and political context readers would need to make sense of them.
One of the most meaningful things about working at +972 Magazine this year is the opportunity to bring Gazan voices to English-speaking audiences. If Palestinian perspectives are often marginalized or discredited in Western media, they are virtually absent from Hebrew media. The close relationship between +972 Magazine and its Hebrew-language sister site, Sikha Mekomit (Local Call), has enabled us to bring news from Gaza to Jewish Israeli society. Working with my colleagues to translate pieces written by Palestinian journalists in Gaza from Arabic into English and then from English into Hebrew has reminded me that even in an age of social media and smartphones, language remains a powerful tool for humanizing the other. I am deeply grateful to the NIF/Shatil Social Justice Fellowship for supporting my work this year, and I look forward to helping make a modest contribution towards ending Israel’s occupation.