Ancient Harvest : Life Pauses for the Time of the Olive

It was a glorious Indian summer day in the rocky hill country north of Jerusalem, and Musa Salameh was clearly a contented man as he played his small part in a ritual both colorful and central to the life of this historic land.

“It’s a lovely time!” Salameh said as he breathed deeply of the pure air and the good fellowship. “We are waiting, year to year, to come for the olives.”

Along with thousands of his fellow Palestinians, the 59-year-old messenger and shopkeeper had come with his hand-made wooden ladders, his sticks, his burlap sacks and his extended family for the annual harvesting of one of the oldest and most revered of the Earth’s many fruits.

For most of the year, the estimated 10 million olive trees that cover the West Bank hills in neatly planted tiers go largely untended. The hollow, gnarled trunks of the older trees, a few of which are said to date from Roman times, take on a haunting appearance under the cold, gray sky of a winter morning.

Fall Harvest Ritual

In spring, the trees produce small, pale blossoms that soon give way to the first olive buds in early summer. The fruit ripens around the time of the first autumn rain, and then, for a few weeks in October and November, the hills come alive with the harvest.

West Bank schools declare a holiday so that youngsters can help their families gather the olives. Men make up excuses to be absent from their jobs, across the so-called “Green Line” in pre-1967 Israel, and the women pack picnic lunches to be spread on the ground under the silvery leaves of the nearest olive tree.

The harvesting day is long, from about 6 a.m. nearly until sundown, and the pickers--young people particularly--complain sometimes that the work is tedious.

A Milking Motion

The olives are removed by hand; a harvester pulls at each branch in a milking motion. Typically, the more agile youngsters climb the tree to get at the inside branches while the men climb ladders to the high limbs and the women work on lower branches or gather fallen olives into cans or sacks.

The olives most difficult to reach or most stubborn are knocked out of the trees with long sticks; it may take a family a full day to pick clean just two or three trees.

While it may bore the restless young, the harvest is vitally important economically. In a good year, like this one, olives may account for 25% of the value of all goods and services produced on the West Bank, said Israel’s area agricultural officer, Yoreh Artzi.

More than $50 million worth of West Bank olive oil is expected to be exported to Jordan this season. Nablus, the West Bank’s largest city, has been famous for its olive oil soap since the 14th Century. Pickled olives for eating are also exported, and souvenirs carved from olive wood are a staple in Jerusalem and Bethlehem shops.

But for most older Palestinians, even those for whom farming has become a part-time endeavor, there is more in the harvest than money. The olive tree remains their link to the soil, and the olive harvest remains an almost sacred ritual of renewal.

Olives have been a staple of this region’s diet since the earliest times, and olive oil has been used for cooking, light and anointing the body for as long as men and women have inhabited the land.

The olive features prominently in the holy books of all three of the great monotheistic religions--Judaism, Islam and Christianity--whose roots are here in the Middle East.

It was an olive branch that the dove is said to have returned to Noah on the Ark, a sign that the waters of the great flood were receding. The olive is one of the seven species with which the Bible says God blessed the ancient land of Israel. When Moses led the Israelites here, they found a land already fertile with “vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not.”

Trees of Bible Times

The Garden of Gethsemane, at the base of Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives, has what are believed to be the most ancient of the Holy Land’s olive trees. Some of them are said to have been 500 years old when Jesus Christ was arrested there on the eve of crucifixion. The Koran instructs Muslims to take an oath “by the fig and the olive.”

Ironically, given the bloody history of the Holy Land, the olive branch is perhaps the most enduring of the world’s symbols of peace.

Olive branches frame a menorah on the state seal of Israel, but while modern Israelis do grow olives--mostly in the Galilee, in the north--it is primarily an Arab enterprise.

Five times as much land is given to olive cultivation on the West Bank as within the pre-1967 borders of Israel. Even in Israel proper, about 80% of the olive trees are cultivated by Arab, rather than Jewish, citizens.

To some West Bank Arabs, the olive tree is a silent but potent political ally.

“The Arabs believe the Israelis won’t take over their land if it’s planted with olives,” explained Ahmed Jabr, the Arab agricultural planning and development director for the West Bank.

Land Use Restricted

Since it captured the area from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel, through various means, has confiscated or severely restricted the use of more than half of what was Arab land here. In the same period, the acreage devoted to Arab olive cultivation on the West Bank was increased by more than half, to nearly 15% of the entire territory.

There have been frequent clashes between Arab farmers and Israeli security forces or Jewish settlers who have uprooted olive trees they said were illegally planted by Palestinians as a means of claiming title to disputed land.

Although politics are very much a part of the West Bank olive story, they seem to recede further into the background during the harvest, perhaps because the people are so busy.

“Yesterday I worked from 6 a.m. to midnight,” said George Habibeh as he showed visitors around his father’s old olive press in Beit Jala, near Bethlehem. During most of the year the building is locked up, but for about six weeks during the annual olive harvest, it is rarely closed.

While there are now more than 60 new, fully automatic olive presses on the West Bank, Habibeh’s is one of the many old ones still in use here. His main concession to modernism is a motor and floppy belt drive that replaced the donkeys that once moved the big millstones that crush the olives in the first stage of the pressing process.

The crushed olives are put in disc-shaped, hemp containers and stacked for pressing. After the oil is squeezed out, the olive dregs, or jefet, are dumped in a pile.

Dregs Used in Soap

Once the harvest is finished, Habibeh said, the dregs will be sold to the Nablus soap factories, which will resqueeze them in more powerful presses to get the last of their oil. In the meantime, the dregs are the Middle East equivalent of a haystack, in which a dozen boys wrestle playfully.

Ibrahim Ali, a 70-year-old Palestinian farmer who wears the traditional djellaba (ankle-length cotton gown) and the kaffiyeh (the familiar Arab headdress), has been bringing his olives to Habibeh’s press for years. In the past, he said, the olives yielded twice as much oil as now.

“The world now is not good, so the olives aren’t as good as they used to be,” he declared. “In the past, we used to depend more on olives. People used to live on olives.” On that much, Musa Salameh agreed. When his grandfather first acquired this land overlooking Jifna in the valley below, the olives were his primary support. When he died, the land was divided among his children, and they divided it among their heirs.

Today, Salameh owns 25 olive trees, enough only to provide a small supplement to his income. He works mornings as a messenger for a Catholic school in Ramallah and in the afternoons is a shopkeeper there, he said.

It used to be that the end of the harvest was a day for feasting on roast lamb, Salameh recalled, but no longer.

No Time for Feasting

“Now, everyone is in a hurry to go to his (regular) work,” he said.

But on this day, in the midst of the harvest, Salameh was in no hurry.

“He loves the land very much,” said his wife, Farha. “He comes to tend the trees every Thursday. He’d come even if it were snowing.”

Daughters Maissoun, 16, and Manal, 14, helped gather olives while the youngest Salameh son, Shady, 11, seemed more interested in exploring. Two older boys have scholarships to universities abroad, one in France and the other in the Soviet Union.

In their absence, Salameh, a Christian Arab, has hired three Muslim Arab refugees from the nearby Jalazone camp to help with the harvest. Abu Akhmed, a wiry 70-year-old who lost his home in Haifa after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, works from a ladder beside the landowner on the high branches and is paid the equivalent of $10 a day. Im Daoud and Im Abdallah, both widows originally from Jaffa, get about $7 daily for helping on the ground.

Im Daoud had worked for him before, but Salameh had just met the other two refugees. In the spirit of the harvest, they all laughed and joked with one another like old friends.

As they sat together for a mid-morning snack of hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, cucumbers, pita bread and sweet tea, Abu Akhmed heckled one of the strangers who had stopped after seeing them working from the road, a 23-year-old Palestinian woman who had just graduated from college.

“You are old not to be married!” he chided her. “After you reach 25 you’ll never find a husband--but I have just the man for you. He’s a nurse in the Ramallah hospital.”

Abu Akhmed was the first on his feet after the meal.

“Let’s get back to work!” he urged everyone in a loud voice. “I’m only working until 3:30 p.m.”

Musa Salameh just smiled and slowly began to help pick up the remnants of the food.

“If I could support my family, I’d just stay here,” he said.