As the world wakes up to the horrendous violence unleashed on the people of Gaza by the state of Israel through its ongoing genocidal siege, the pictures are a stark reminder to the world, put in terms of UNICEF spokesperson James Elder, that “Gaza has become a graveyard for children and a living hell for others”. While the alarm bells have been ringing worldwide for an immediate ceasefire, the live telecast of the barbarity meted out to innocent lives, land, water, air, cannot at all be put to words.
Pablo Picasso’s Dove of Peace. Photo: author provided.
From carpet-bombing of refugee camps, to residential compounds, schools, hospitals and places of worship sheltering people, Gaza has seen it all as collective-punishment by the Israeli-state in response to the October 7 attack by Hamas militants Israeli civilians.
Nowhere is safe in Gaza at the moment, and people struggle to keep their families and children alive while simultaneously coping with the huge lack of medical and food supplies, along with the growing burden this adds on healthcare providers and first-responders, every day.
Gaza has become the purgatory of all good that has been left of humankind. The arrogance of war, blockades and borders has been so nerve-wrecking that people are strangled, forcibly locked up in a strip, their flesh pounded to smithereens, with no immediate options for rescue and recovery. The massacre is a humanitarian disaster especially for children, as parents have taken to writing the names and whereabouts of children on their bodies lest they should die anonymously.
All this has been unfolding in the season of olive-picking, otherwise known to be a venerated time, a season of cultural harvest, that starts in October every year and goes on till December. Over the past many years, olive harvesting has transformed into a struggle for Palestinians due to continuing and growing settler attacks that hamper their access to fields, planting, caring and harvesting olive trees.
Attacks on Palestinians are simultaneously occurring in the occupied West Bank as Gaza is under siege right now. A few days ago, in another round of settler-violence many Palestinians were killed with Israelis particularly attacking farmers harvesting olives. Volunteers from around the world have been arriving in Palestine to pay ‘witness’ to harvesting every year, an act believed to assist farmers in wake of rising threats from settlers especially in those Palestinian fields located in close proximity to illegal Israeli-settlements.
Olives have always been a sacred fruit, in Islam, Christianity, Judaism – the prominent religions of the three people in the region, since ancient times. A lot of folklore, myths and stories associated with olives are present in key religious books of the three religions, making it a tree of peace, a divine sacred fruit, whose oil burns the divine light.
Agony in the Garden, by Andrea Mantegna, 15th century, displayed in the National Art Gallery, U.K.
The scriptures in Christianity, especially the gospels of Mathew, Mark and Luke, records the significance of the Mount of Olives, one of the peaks in Jerusalem, separating the Temple-Mount/ Dome of the Rock from the Judea-desert on the eastern side. Mount of Olives becomes this significant place that is frequented by Jesus especially during the last leg of his journey to the cross. He is found praying, weeping in anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane along with his disciples after the last supper, in an act of what came to be seen as the passion, brought to life by the imaginations of various key artists in history, such as in, ‘The Agony of the Garden’ painted by various artists in different times. Jesus is betrayed by Judas, one of his disciples, who tells on him and arrives with an army of priests, elites and soldiers from Jerusalem to capture him, on this very mount.
For Jews, it is the Mount of Anointment, as the pressed oil from its olives was used to anoint Israelite kings in the ancient past. A large part of the mount is covered with what is today known as the Jewish cemetery, and most of the Jews want to be buried here for the sake of several scriptural prophecies their faith revolves around.
Convent of St. Catherine, by David Roberts, 1839, Library of Congress Archives
Olives are also considered a blessed fruit in Islam. Prophet is believed to have been very fond of olives and in fact encouraged people to grow, use and cherish the tree’s fruits, especially applauding the oil’s medicinal values. In, surah-an-noor, the lamp that guides humankind towards light in darkness, is lit by the oil of the blessed tree.
The spread of olive trees around the Mediterranean and in the rest of the world is believed to have occurred from Asia Minor, Levant, Egypt and Palestine (trees like Noah’s sisters in Lebanon and Al-Badawi in Palestine are estimated to be 6000 to 2000 years old). Mount Sinai in Egypt, sacred to all three Abrahamic religions, has a lot of olive tree scriptural references. The sixth century St. Catherine’s monastery at the northern foot of Sinai has olive trees growing in its courtyard. Another verse in Quran, surah-at-tin, speaks of zaytoun at tur-Sinai, olives at mount Sinai, “by the fig and the olives…”
The dove with an olive branch in Genesis, has become a symbol of reconciliation between the human and the divine. In the old-testament, Noah, now having taken refuge in the ark for seven months, sends the birds, a raven and a dove to go see if the waters of the flood had subsided. The raven never returned and kept flying until dry land emerged at the end of the floods. The dove does return without finding dry land anywhere. After seven days, he sends the dove out again, only this time she returns with an olive-twig in her beak, signalling Noah that the waters have receded, and living creatures can finally come out of the ark and repopulate the earth. It symbolises the beginnings of life after deluge akin to life and growth emerging after the darkness, the earth becoming habitable and peaceful again.
The 16th century Mughal miniature by Miskina, an artist in Akbar’s court, of the Noah’s ark, Prophet Nuh in Islam, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian
Olives have always been a part of Palestinian economic trade and sustenance besides being a shared cultural entity. They continue to be so in both Palestinian and Israeli societies. The cultivators of olives, the Palestinian farmers who owned most of the lands with olive-grooves until 1947, had always shared an extended kinship with the trees – some of trees being hundreds and thousands of years in age – so much so that they look at them as no less than their kins, as one of their own, as families with whom they share an ancestral relation.
Apart from the socio-cultural investment where harvesting months have always been celebrated as festivities, with families taking time off work and gathering to pick olives together for weeks. The emotional and sentimental investment in olive-trees became more pronounced as the settler attacks on farmers increased manifold in the last few decades.
Olive-trees, since then have become symbol of resilience, attachment and belonging, one without which the idea of home/homeland cannot be complete. People have been fighting legal battles to get a permit issued in their names so that they can access land that belongs to them but one that lay inaccessible by separation walls, settler only roads, proximity with the settlements and so on. The planting, grooming and harvesting season that once was a source of shared cultural and historic importance has now become a source of anxiety.
This has led to many social organizations around the world, and in Israel and West bank, getting involved through volunteering. People from around the world come during the harvest season and stay with the families for weeks, picking olives and paying ‘witness’ to any sort of settler violence and intimidation that Palestinians farmers are no now highly exposed to.
Amidst all of this, olives continue to thrive as a cultural symbol of three people who belong to one land and have shared the socio-cultural and religious significance of trees that are rendered blessed in each of their scriptures. It is, as if, the olive trees have stood in testimony to shared multi-religious co-existence as three religions and a shared civilisation flourished in the region in the ancient, Byzantine and Roman times till that of Ottomans.
People across religions have a bond with them, both religious and psychological, and the cultural economic value of these trees continues to shape and inform people both in Israel and Palestine, of a past that nurtured natural and human, material and immaterial life equally.
By continuing to engage in the ‘us vs them’ discourse, the settler violence is particularly harming these trees and causing a forced displacement of Palestinians and is completely blind to their own history that regards olive trees as sacred.
Forms of eco-cultural attachments are widely found especially in displaced populations who are made to live like refugees in and outside their homelands. The material concrete stories of land, home, fields, rivers, wind, clothes, food, become bed-time stories that each new generation grows up with. The idea of home, though lost, is not forgotten but instead becomes stronger and alive as years pass by. Nowhere has this been more profound than in the post-colonial Partition and separation stories.
Palestinian children on rooftop. Photo: Justin McIntosh,, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The children of Partition in South Asia have been living with these every day, especially those of us who belong to the families of the displaced. Stories in my own life have been shaping my idea of home for a very long time now. The sense of belonging gets rooted firmly in the ecological, cultural and material belongings, and myths, folktales and scriptural stories, all have a profound role in shaping attachments across borders and barriers, unnaturally and artificially created to keep people separated. The idea of ‘a sentient being’ is rooted in ‘an eco-cultural being’ as much as it is rooted in other identity markers and expressions such as language, religion, gender, territory etc.
For Palestinians, who have been at the receiving end of so much violence, the trees have always been their children, a part of their everyday lives. So much so that it shapes not only their idea of home, but also their idea of resistance. Proses and poetry continue to mention these trees, and it is important to revisit one of the most highly regarded poets and writers, Mahmoud Darwish, and his poem, ‘The Second Olive Tree’.
The poem is especially relevant in times such as these, as it symbolises rootedness in the land Palestinians call home, even in times of violent upheaval. Like life, the second olive tree in Darwish’s poem is the second child, the continued progeny, generational lineage, that refuses to die or vanish for the face of their beloved homeland, even when subjected to savagery and incomprehensible violence. Below, is an English translation of the poem by Marilyn Hacker:
The Second Olive Tree
The olive tree does not weep and does not laugh. The olive tree
Is the hillside’s modest lady. Shadow
Covers her single leg, and she will not take her leaves off in front of the storm.
Standing, she is seated, and seated, standing.
She lives as a friendly sister of eternity, neighbour of time
That helps her stock her luminous oil and
Forget the invaders’ names, except the Romans, who
Coexisted with her, and borrowed some of her branches
To weave wreaths. They did not treat her as a prisoner of war
But as a venerable grandmother, before whose calm dignity
Swords shatter. In her reticent silver-green
Color hesitates to say what it thinks, and to look at what is behind
The portrait, for the olive tree is neither green nor silver.
The olive tree is the color of peace, if peace needed
A color. No one says to the olive tree: How beautiful you are!
But: How noble and how splendid! And she,
She who teaches soldiers to lay down their rifles
And re-educates them in tenderness and humility: Go home
And light your lamps with my oil! But
These soldiers, these modern soldiers
Besiege her with bulldozers and uproot her from her lineage
Of earth. They vanquished our grandmother who foundered,
Her branches on the ground, her roots in the sky.
She did not weep or cry out. But one of her grandsons
Who witnessed the execution threw a stone
At a soldier, and he was martyred with her.
After the victorious soldiers
Had gone on their way, we buried him there, in that deep
Pit – the grandmother’s cradle. And that is why we were
Sure that he would become, in a little while, an olive
Tree – a thorny olive tree – and green!
P.S: Olive-trees refuse to die. Farmers have been uprooting them from those parts of their fields that they are seldom allowed to access, and replanting them to the other. Many of these trees die, but most of them survive in the process. They grow profusely, with a thousand cuts (given their propagation through the techniques of cuts and grafts is widely used for olive-cultivation). One can cut the one-year-old younglings at a forty-five-degree angle, and they will survive. The fascinating part is to see them grow while being grafted together, a scion tightly fitted into a root-stock, glued to each other, as if providing life support to those who need it to further grow and sustain life. Sticking together as different children of one olive-branch in the region will lead to a collective growth. Perhaps, the time for the dove to fly and extend an olive-branch for the sake of all humankind is now.
Malvika Sharma is a post-doctoral researcher at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, US.
