I missed the olive harvest again this year. Without the sounds of bin trailers clanking across the tracks near my house, I forget to look for the other signs: the ladder trailers, the women with kerchiefs around their hair and faces caked with dust, the small fires in olive groves where breakfast was briefly warmed.
I’ve had some communion with olive groves in the past, even irrigated a few and watched at least one magnificent harvest from beginning to end. Harvests are a wonderful experience, a culmination of effort and grace that can produce mild euphoria. Even the trees breathe a sigh of relief when the fruit is gone, a sigh you can hear if you pay attention. My memories of that joy are dampened by the fact that most of those groves I’ve known are gone.
Olives were an important part of Thanksgiving dinner in my family, something we enjoyed only at holidays and usually the off-brands. One more prosperous year we splurged and got Lindsay Olives, whose motto “a nice town, a great olive” made me want to go there. By the time I did, the town had changed. The olive plant had closed a couple of years before, and they were auctioning off the equipment in 1993 as I moved in.
I began thinking about all this after hearing a news item on NPR last Friday about the olive harvest in Palestine. The radio host, Mary Louise Kelly, introduced the piece by saying “The Palestinian olive harvest is a celebratory tradition. It goes back hundreds of years.” Then she told what made it news: this year, Palestinians are being shot and killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers while they try to harvest their trees.
NPR reporter Hadeel Al-Shalchi interviewed some villagers in an olive-growing community in the West Bank, which is occupied by Israeli troops. A Palestinian, Ali Zeidat, 71, was harvesting alone because the people he normally hires to help him are afraid for their lives. The sounds of his tarp unfolding to lay under a tree came to us through the speakers, followed by the sound of the little black olives falling on the tarp like rain as he raked them from the branches.
“Zeidat loves olive season,” the reporter began. “This land has been in Zeidat’s family for over a hundred years in a village called Faqu’a,” she said, then describing the look of the landscape. Stoically he tells her “Land and honor are the same thing.”
The reporter also interviewed the head of the Palestinian Farmers’ Union, Abbas Milhem. Speaking of villagers like those in Faqu’a, he said “They enjoy spending, like, two months in the farmland every day, going and coming back and singing while collecting the olive harvest. It’s a symbol of identity. It’s a symbol of love.” Perhaps this image is what made the rest of the story so hard to bear.
Zeidat was working alone because in mid-October his neighbor was shot and killed by Israeli troops while she and her husband were harvesting their olive trees. She was 59, the mother of 7 children, and wife of a man who told the reporter they had been inseparable all their married lives. When the shooting began, they both ran, dragging their tarp of harvested olives behind them, but as they reached the car she cried out “I’m injured.” He got her to the hospital, but there was nothing the doctor could do and she died in his lap.
Tensions during olive harvest have been high for several years, but since the Gaza war began, there has been a huge increase. Milhelm, the Palestinian Farmer’s Union man, said that it’s a strategy. “They want the farmers to leave behind their lands,” he said.
The story shifted to a funeral not far away of an Israeli soldier who had been killed in the conflict. The agony was high; people in that village thought the Palestinians should be driven out of the West Bank completely. Then the story returned to Zeidat, still harvesting his olives.
We hear the rustling of the leaves, the raking. He speaks to the reporter in Arabic. She translates. “He says ‘We have to take care of this land.’”
How I wish more of us in America still knew what he meant.
Trudy Wischemann is a rural witness who writes. You can send her your olive love stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247. This column is not a news article but the opinion of the writer and does not reflect the views of the Mid Valley Times newspaper.
