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Harvesting Olives in the West Bank, in Photos

For 7,000 years, the tradition has been a lifeline for Palestinians. Now, it’s under siege.

By , a writer from the South Side of Chicago.
Photo: Jasmine Sanders
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Photo: Jasmine Sanders
Photo: Jasmine Sanders

I went to the West Bank to make myself useful. I came to this decision last fall, when two years of advocacy, protesting, and boycotting — the tactics generally employed by the Palestine solidarity movement — had not ended the genocide. This collective failure took on, for me, the searing quality of a personal one. I needed to do “something,” as in anything that felt like more than nothing.

In one of the hundreds of community-organizing Signal threads I’ve been on since 2020, I found a link: The Union of Agricultural Work Committees, a West Bank nonprofit focused on Palestinian food sovereignty, had issued a call for volunteers for its annual olive-harvest campaign. Olives have been cultivated in the Levant for some 7,000 years. The crop is grown, harvested, and pressed into olive oil, which is then sold for income. In the UAWC’s program, volunteers’ roles are as much about documenting human-rights abuses as about assisting farmers with agricultural work. Just the presence of Westerners is intended to deter Israeli settler violence and land theft.

Photo: Jasmine Sanders

Palestinians in the West Bank face a double bind: Relinquish their homes to Israeli settlers, becoming either displaced within Palestine or international refugees; or remain on their land, perpetually vulnerable to surveillance, attack, and intimidation. Israeli disruption of the olive season is both a means of land dispossession and a form of regimented impoverishment. As The Guardian reported, roughly 110,000 Palestinians rely on income from olive farming, and an estimated 70 percent of their harvest was threatened in 2025. At the end of the season, the U.N. reported 178 settler attacks. Farmers and their families, including children, were killed by gunfire and tear gas. Centuries-old olive trees were razed. Thousands of acres were burned, bulldozed, or blocked off for Israeli “military use.” Since then, the violence hasn’t died down: In February, settlers reportedly destroyed seven Palestinian villages in a single week. At the same time, Israel continues to exert ever tighter control over the West Bank, making it more difficult for Palestinians to retain their land.

If that sounds complex and faraway, I can relate, to some extent. My understanding of American foreign policy took shape amid the wars in Afghanistan, then Iraq — countries with distinct customs, cultures, and people, which were flattened and portrayed as uniformly “not us” and “not here.” This mind-set continues in the war with Iran and undergirds the funding of Israeli arms used against Palestine. In all of this, I’m supposed to regard the U.S. as a well-intentioned global power: violent for reasons of keeping the peace. Going to Palestine was another way to undermine that fiction.

So I completed the volunteer form. I logged in to my virtual training punctually. The program coordinator warned of the dangers of traveling to the West Bank: arrest, detention, deportation, assault, shooting by armed settlers or the Israeli Defense Forces. The group of 32 volunteers preceding ours had been arrested, detained in a squalid Israeli prison, then deported and issued a 99-year ban from the territories. In 2024, several foreign volunteers with a different organization aiding the olive harvest were beaten by settlers and had to be hospitalized. Rachel Corrie, the most famous international activist to have lost her life in Palestine, was crushed by a bulldozer demolishing homes in Rafah in 2003.

Near the end of my first UAWC training, the coordinator said to us, “Do not think of yourselves as saviors. The Palestinian people are going to save ourselves.” Her anger was radiant, righteous, and, to me, an invitation. I updated my passport, applied for an Israeli visa, and compiled enough copywriting work to fund a trip the following month, November: $1,454.56 for a flight to Jordan and back home, a night in a hotel in Amman, and a donation to offset food costs for the families of Palestinian farmers, or fellaheen, with whom I would be staying.

Photo: Jasmine Sanders

Where racial-justice movements in the U.S. foreground Black humanity through figurative images and portraits, Palestinian liberation illustrates its Indigenous claim on the fruits of the land. A bounty of produce: pomegranates, figs, watermelons, the Jaffa orange. The olive and the olive tree.

My experience of the olive harvest was one of queasy liminality. Not war, and yet not peace: the bracingly quotidian terror of life under threat from settlers and amid Israeli military occupation, which is now the longest such occupation in history.

During the 12-hour flight to Jordan, I focus on the seatback map. Gaza is a gray expanse. A friend, D., is volunteering with another organization and traveling with me. When we arrive at our hotel, I ask the concierge for advice about crossing the Israeli border. He gives me directions to the bridge and tells me how much a cab should cost. “For you, it will be easier,” he says. “It’s much harder for us Arabs.”


The next day, D. and I wake up at 5 a.m. Our car arrives, costing 20 Jordanian dinars. We head to King Hussein Bridge, where we will cross into Israel. The driver insists on coffee. He stops at a gas station, procures three cups, then ushers D. and me into another car at a second gas station. We trust we’re headed the right way.


We are to pass through Jordanian border control, then catch a bus to Israeli border control, where we’ll cross into Jerusalem. The Jordanian border is managed by men who approach a comically inefficient process with kindness, offering cash for the vending machine and personally escorting me to the bathroom. An officer collects our passports.

Two hours later, we are loaded onto a bus without them. Palestinians are sent to a different bus. On the one we’ve boarded, the names of nations are yelled out at random. The officer shouts, “America!” and we collect our little blue books.


The Israeli border appears as a collage of guns, then men in camouflage. They gaze into the bus. We’re questioned by a very young guard, her gruff, remote demeanor recalling a teenage retail worker’s. D. and I are tourists, as is proved by the itinerary we hand her, which includes return flights. After a series of banal questions, she asks, “Do you know any Arabs inside of Israel?” I say, honestly, “no.” This leg of the trip has taken another two hours.

In Jerusalem, I head toward Ramallah to a meeting point, and the other volunteers and I are driven to a small village. Though Ramallah is only a 45-minute drive from this village, it takes us almost three times as long because of Israeli checkpoints and the fragmentation of the roads.

The other volunteers are several Americans, an Irishman, and a quiet man from Belgium. We’ll stay together in a small apartment. Each day, we’ll work with a family, collecting and separating olives to be bagged and sent for processing at a local plant.

Around us, the illegal settler outposts encroaching on the farms are easy to spot. Their roofing, unlike the flat stone tops of Palestinian dwellings, have the familiar triangular arch. The dwellings of settlements and kibbutzes, Israeli agricultural communes, also don’t have rain-collecting cisterns, as Palestinians’ do. Since Israeli water is unrestricted, they have no reason for such measures. 

The next day, it is time to work. A woman sits in the middle of the olive grove, separating branches and stems from fruit: the image of command and tranquility in enclosure.

I’m handed a rake and pointed to a tree. The other workers and I comb the branches, undisturbed. A helicopter whirs overhead, accompanied by a plane. I ask whether they’re surveillance. “No,” says M., a male farmhand. “Those are fighter planes.” Where are they headed? “To bomb Gaza.” 

“Are there settlers nearby?” I ask. “Five kilometers that way,” M. says, nodding. “Three that way,” says the woman sorting olives. The occupation is omnipresent but frequently invisible, exerting a strange pressure on daily life. M. lights a cigarette. Smiling, he says to me, “If settlers come, grab the tools and the cigarettes.” 


For four days, we wake up early, enter the groves, pick olives, then return to the apartment. The work is gratifying: approaching a tree bursting with olives and leaving it bare. Unprocessed olives are stoney, tasting of turpentine, bearing no resemblance to the food as we know it.

The families detail the recent restriction of their movement. Daily, the family loses dozens of trees, they tell me, with settlers burning or uprooting thousands in the past year alone. They say settlers also release wild boars into the groves, which ravage the orchards and impede work.

One farmer I meet speaks in the measured language of a young diplomat. “The hills are not safe,” he says, owing to settler encroachment near his home. “The situation is difficult,” he says. He used to retreat into those hills to camp — and sing. He invites me to join him for karaoke in Ramallah. The diplomat is a Mariah Carey fan.

The other greatest threat to the olives and all agriculture is the lack of water: Israel limits Palestinians’ water access, and the water they are allotted is often stolen or tampered with by settlers, amounting to a kind of “water apartheid.” Droughts and overwarm days brought on by climate change further imperil the crops. 

A member of the village offers a visit to his home to document the damage done by a fire bombing a day earlier. I decline. “Are you afraid?” he asks. The fear I locate is dissociative: I can understand why being near armed settlers would be unsettling. I can imagine that being within walking distance of a home that was fire-bombed might be frightening. I fall asleep in the apartment, alone. 


In the morning, we drive to a village outside of Al-Khalil (or Hebron). It’s now late November, so the olive harvest is complete; we’ll move on to other work. On our drive, we traverse Areas A, B, and C, each guarded by dozens of checkpoints. In Area A, miles of Israeli flags are planted along the highway, though this region is fully administered by the Palestinian Authority, an “interim” governing body established in 1994. We’ll be staying in the largest of them, Area C, which is fully controlled by the Israeli state.

We stay with another family, sleeping sprawled in their living room. Ten of the family’s men speak about their time in Israeli prisons. Four of them have been shot. Games of canasta run late into the night. During the day, we weave cucumbers through trellises.

We feed goats and sheep, muck stalls, weed greenhouses. Around 4:30 p.m., the work takes on a frenzied, clumsier nature, as everyone hurries to be home by dark, when the village gates close and Israeli forces start patrolling the highways. A sundown town. 

Photographs by Jasmine Sanders

During the 12-hour flight to Jordan, I focus on the seatback map. Gaza is a gray expanse. A friend, D., is volunteering with another organization and traveling with me. When we arrive at our hotel, I ask the concierge for advice about crossing the Israeli border. He gives me directions to the bridge and tells me how much a cab should cost. “For you, it will be easier,” he says. “It’s much harder for us Arabs.”


The next day, D. and I wake up at 5 a.m. Our car arrives, costing 20 Jordanian dinars. We head to King Hussein Bridge, where we will cross into Israel. The driver insists on coffee. He stops at a gas station, procures three cups, then ushers D. and me into another car at a second gas station. We trust we’re headed the right way.


We are to pass through Jordanian border control, then catch a bus to Israeli border control, where we’ll cross into Jerusalem. The Jordanian border is managed by men who approach a comically inefficient process with kindness, offering cash for the vending machine and personally escorting me to the bathroom. An officer collects our passports.

Two hours later, we are loaded onto a bus without them. Palestinians are sent to a different bus. On the one we’ve boarded, the names of nations are yelled out at random. The officer shouts, “America!” and we collect our little blue books.


The Israeli border appears as a collage of guns, then men in camouflage. They gaze into the bus. We’re questioned by a very young guard, her gruff, remote demeanor recalling a teenage retail worker’s. D. and I are tourists, as is proved by the itinerary we hand her, which includes return flights. After a series of banal questions, she asks, “Do you know any Arabs inside of Israel?” I say, honestly, “no.” This leg of the trip has taken another two hours.

In Jerusalem, I head toward Ramallah to a meeting point, and the other volunteers and I are driven to a small village. Though Ramallah is only a 45-minute drive from this village, it takes us almost three times as long because of Israeli checkpoints and the fragmentation of the roads.

The other volunteers are several Americans, an Irishman, and a quiet man from Belgium. We’ll stay together in a small apartment. Each day, we’ll work with a family, collecting and separating olives to be bagged and sent for processing at a local plant.

Around us, the illegal settler outposts encroaching on the farms are easy to spot. Their roofing, unlike the flat stone tops of Palestinian dwellings, have the familiar triangular arch. The dwellings of settlements and kibbutzes, Israeli agricultural communes, also don’t have rain-collecting cisterns, as Palestinians’ do. Since Israeli water is unrestricted, they have no reason for such measures. 

The next day, it is time to work. A woman sits in the middle of the olive grove, separating branches and stems from fruit: the image of command and tranquility in enclosure.

I’m handed a rake and pointed to a tree. The other workers and I comb the branches, undisturbed. A helicopter whirs overhead, accompanied by a plane. I ask whether they’re surveillance. “No,” says M., a male farmhand. “Those are fighter planes.” Where are they headed? “To bomb Gaza.” 

“Are there settlers nearby?” I ask. “Five kilometers that way,” M. says, nodding. “Three that way,” says the woman sorting olives. The occupation is omnipresent but frequently invisible, exerting a strange pressure on daily life. M. lights a cigarette. Smiling, he says to me, “If settlers come, grab the tools and the cigarettes.” 


For four days, we wake up early, enter the groves, pick olives, then return to the apartment. The work is gratifying: approaching a tree bursting with olives and leaving it bare. Unprocessed olives are stoney, tasting of turpentine, bearing no resemblance to the food as we know it.

The families detail the recent restriction of their movement. Daily, the family loses dozens of trees, they tell me, with settlers burning or uprooting thousands in the past year alone. They say settlers also release wild boars into the groves, which ravage the orchards and impede work.

One farmer I meet speaks in the measured language of a young diplomat. “The hills are not safe,” he says, owing to settler encroachment near his home. “The situation is difficult,” he says. He used to retreat into those hills to camp — and sing. He invites me to join him for karaoke in Ramallah. The diplomat is a Mariah Carey fan.

The other greatest threat to the olives and all agriculture is the lack of water: Israel limits Palestinians’ water access, and the water they are allotted is often stolen or tampered with by settlers, amounting to a kind of “water apartheid.” Droughts and overwarm days brought on by climate change further imperil the crops. 

A member of the village offers a visit to his home to document the damage done by a fire bombing a day earlier. I decline. “Are you afraid?” he asks. The fear I locate is dissociative: I can understand why being near armed settlers would be unsettling. I can imagine that being within walking distance of a home that was fire-bombed might be frightening. I fall asleep in the apartment, alone. 


In the morning, we drive to a village outside of Al-Khalil (or Hebron). It’s now late November, so the olive harvest is complete; we’ll move on to other work. On our drive, we traverse Areas A, B, and C, each guarded by dozens of checkpoints. In Area A, miles of Israeli flags are planted along the highway, though this region is fully administered by the Palestinian Authority, an “interim” governing body established in 1994. We’ll be staying in the largest of them, Area C, which is fully controlled by the Israeli state.

We stay with another family, sleeping sprawled in their living room. Ten of the family’s men speak about their time in Israeli prisons. Four of them have been shot. Games of canasta run late into the night. During the day, we weave cucumbers through trellises.

We feed goats and sheep, muck stalls, weed greenhouses. Around 4:30 p.m., the work takes on a frenzied, clumsier nature, as everyone hurries to be home by dark, when the village gates close and Israeli forces start patrolling the highways. A sundown town. 

Photographs by Jasmine Sanders

I meet O., a neighbor, who is the guardian of her two disabled adult brothers. Every day for six months, a settler woman has driven onto O.’s property, threatening her brothers, burning beehives, and pointing a gun at her elderly father. As we speak, a car approaches. O. rises, saying, “That’s her.” She exits, followed by a fellow volunteer and myself. The car speeds past. We leave before dusk.


Another night, in the back of a pickup, we’re tailed by a car driven by settlers. I sit in the truck bed with four children: the farmer’s daughter and three cousins. Our truck’s driver cuts its lights to try to lose the other drivers. The car continues to follow us. I decide, reflexively and without panic, that I will die in order to protect the children next to me if I have to. Then the car turns off the road toward a settlement. We continue home in silence. 

At the farm, we plant olive saplings with a group of 20 girls, all college-age members of a local humanitarian organization also focused on land preservation. They are ebullient and chatty — completely self-assured, wildly curious. I speak with one young woman named Sara. “You can write about me,” she says. “But don’t make it sad!”


Sara is 20 years old. She has a bachelor’s degree in business management and accounting, working the family retail business in her native Hebron. Repeatedly, she professes her love of Drake.

Discussing the olive harvest, Sara emphasizes the centrality of family, camaraderie, and peacefulness that it represents. “The olive harvest season is a time of sumud” — steadfastness — “reverence, and resilience,” she says. “There is a certain magic that arrives. A transformation of the land, the people, and the soul. It is a season of belonging and connection with the earth and community. The trees become alive with anticipation, generously offering their fruit. The olive tree is like a grandmother, for me. The branches feel like shaking hands with history. The olive tree is history.”

I left the West Bank in the last week of November. On December 1, Israeli security officials raided the UAWC’s offices. They detained eight men and handcuffed and blindfolded others in the building, making them kneel or lie on the floor for hours, according to the U.N., which condemned the raid as another instance of Israel’s continuing illegal crackdown on Palestinian civic life and liberties. The organization is still running. 


On my final day with the UAWC, our host farmer, alongside us, had been able to access his fields without settler confrontations for the first time that growing season. We sowed wheat. Sharp tools can be difficult to transport through checkpoints, so the wheat will be hand-scythed upon maturation, if it matures. As the farmer reminded us, nothing is certain: “Inshallah, it will rain soon. Inshallah, the wheat will grow. Inshallah, the settlers stay away.”


Photographs by Jasmine Sanders

I meet O., a neighbor, who is the guardian of her two disabled adult brothers. Every day for six months, a settler woman has driven onto O.’s property, threatening her brothers, burning beehives, and pointing a gun at her elderly father. As we speak, a car approaches. O. rises, saying, “That’s her.” She exits, followed by a fellow volunteer and myself. The car speeds past. We leave before dusk.


Another night, in the back of a pickup, we’re tailed by a car driven by settlers. I sit in the truck bed with four children: the farmer’s daughter and three cousins. Our truck’s driver cuts its lights to try to lose the other drivers. The car continues to follow us. I decide, reflexively and without panic, that I will die in order to protect the children next to me if I have to. Then the car turns off the road toward a settlement. We continue home in silence. 

At the farm, we plant olive saplings with a group of 20 girls, all college-age members of a local humanitarian organization also focused on land preservation. They are ebullient and chatty — completely self-assured, wildly curious. I speak with one young woman named Sara. “You can write about me,” she says. “But don’t make it sad!”


Sara is 20 years old. She has a bachelor’s degree in business management and accounting, working the family retail business in her native Hebron. Repeatedly, she professes her love of Drake.

Discussing the olive harvest, Sara emphasizes the centrality of family, camaraderie, and peacefulness that it represents. “The olive harvest season is a time of sumud” — steadfastness — “reverence, and resilience,” she says. “There is a certain magic that arrives. A transformation of the land, the people, and the soul. It is a season of belonging and connection with the earth and community. The trees become alive with anticipation, generously offering their fruit. The olive tree is like a grandmother, for me. The branches feel like shaking hands with history. The olive tree is history.”

I left the West Bank in the last week of November. On December 1, Israeli security officials raided the UAWC’s offices. They detained eight men and handcuffed and blindfolded others in the building, making them kneel or lie on the floor for hours, according to the U.N., which condemned the raid as another instance of Israel’s continuing illegal crackdown on Palestinian civic life and liberties. The organization is still running. 


On my final day with the UAWC, our host farmer, alongside us, had been able to access his fields without settler confrontations for the first time that growing season. We sowed wheat. Sharp tools can be difficult to transport through checkpoints, so the wheat will be hand-scythed upon maturation, if it matures. As the farmer reminded us, nothing is certain: “Inshallah, it will rain soon. Inshallah, the wheat will grow. Inshallah, the settlers stay away.”


Photographs by Jasmine Sanders

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