Broken Olive Branches

Rootedness, Dispossession, and Agricultural Violence

There are a lot of things that make me question my rootedness here sometimes. Our soil is poor, thin, and stricken with heavy clay. Our access to markets is extremely limited. The neighbors don’t know what to make of us. Our work goes underappreciated. But rootlessness is a modern convention. Ecosystems like my own have often evolved to not only hold human habitation, management and influence, but also communal human rootedness. When human influence on the landscape is itinerant, with the considerations of individual inhabitants extending no farther than a decade or two, the bond between people and land is broken, and the balance of co-evolution becomes chaotic. In other words, great harm and upset can come to a place when the proposition of generational habitation is lost. If we’re not considering how this place will hold and nurture our progeny, our motivation for care and stewardship is lost, and the precarious balance between humanity and ecology is tipped in potentially destructive ways.

In my less understanding, less wise moments, I have shrugged over land conflicts, particularly those in regions foreign to my own concepts of “good land”. Centuries of warfare waged over brittle desert, ungiving mountain terrain, impenetrable forest and jungle; these things don’t make clear, immediate sense to a simple midwestern boy like myself. Blame it on my rootless past, or the unique priveledge of being able to access rich dirt and a relatively hospitable climate. Lately I’ve been asking myself, if an occupation force arrived here with the intention to bulldoze what I’ve built and planted, would I take a stand, or move along? Would I remain a part of this place, a component of the ecosystem?

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Since 1967, over 800,000 Palestinian olive trees have been illegally uprooted by Israeli settlers and occupying forces, and I’m fully aware of the quagmire I’m dipping my toe into here by mentioning this. Religion, history, and geopolitics aside, I feel like I can comprehend how it feels to care for trees, benefit from their crop, and look toward them as some insurance against an uncertain future, for the continued survival of my own blood progeny and future community. 

Olives, olive oil, and even olive wood have been a reliable and sustaining crop for Palestine. For a region in near-constant flux and turmoil these past few decades, the persistent, rooted nature of this tree crop has provided a significant livelihood for agrarian people, in a place where agriculture is the primary sector of the economy, employing 13% of the population formally, and about 90% of working people informally. Of all the Palestinian crops, olives account for about half of the land in cultivation, and are the main income-producing export. The olive groves of Palestine are, in many ways, the roots that bind rural people to place. And when an occupying settler force seeks to dispossess people of their land, they sever these roots.

This has happened by means both gradual and drastic: following the Six Day War, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank led to an encouragement of agricultural expansion. This took a sudden change in the mid-to-late 70’s, when the Likud government decided to stop incentivizing Palestinian agriculture, considering it a hindrance to the annexation of uncultivated lands. Irrigation quotas were reduced, forcing many Palestinian farmers to seek wage labor in Israel. By 1984, 40% of land under cultivation had been lost by applying these policies.

Agronomics aside, the olive tree is symbolic of the Palestinian people. It’s a tough tree, surviving drought and difficult growing conditions. Many olive trees in production are centuries old, existing well before the occupation began, providing a livelihood and a source of sustenance in a challenging environment… in many parts of Gaza, olive trees are the only significant form of vegetation, particularly when access to irrigation is limited. Much like the Palestinian people who have limited access to water, the olive trees somehow remain and provide, their wind battered limbs and dusty leaves bearing the literal fat of the land. And so it is natural that for the Palestinian people to become dispossessed of their land, these trees would be destroyed. Without the olive groves, the motivation for farmers to remain in the region (olive trees take around 40 years to begin producing a significant crop) is eliminated, and encroachment can continue. 

In many agricultural areas, access to the groves is only allowed to farmers for a few days per year by Israeli authorities, to allow for basic care and harvesting. Access is granted on an annual basis, with no guarantee of renewal. Sometimes farmers return to their allotted groves for harvest season to find the trees cut, bulldozed or burnt. Other times they are harassed or beaten by settlers at harvest time. Palestinian families have been forced to watch their generational groves burnt before them. None of these stories are contested, this is just what we know. 

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In comparison with the Palestinian people, my roots here are admittedly shallow. In the past 10 years, I’ve planted more or less 600 trees, some of them bearing, some of them struggling to root in the clay hardpan of worn-out fields, some of them vulnerable to deer browse or the potential inability to make a lease payment, but in all they suffer no threat of elimination by an occupying force. I question what I would do if they were. Whether or not I completely understand it, I have entered into a long-term relationship with place, and I do hope that my care and stewardship will feed folks into the future. 

I am an apple that fell far from the tree, and in our culture here in the affluent Western world, where freedom of movement is taken for granted and a family can uproot and ramble on as they please, it is hard to relate to land dispossession. I am not standing on the ground that my great-grandaddy stood… I don’t even really know where that is. If I was made to leave this place under threat of violence, well, I guess I probably might. I care about this place, but the motivation to remain in the face of violence is perhaps unrelatable for some of us. Maybe our culture has been dispossessed of land and place for so long that we can’t quite grasp what it means in other circumstances. Perhaps building our lives upon land that was settled by a broad campaign of dispossession has created some ingrained immunity to the concept of rootedness. And this uprooted nature of our culture denies us our participatory role in place, in the larger ecosystem. 

I can’t pretend to know how I would react to purposeful and violent uprooting by an occupying force, and I tend to think that most folks in our culture who might judge what responses are or aren’t appropriate haven’t the life experience, let alone the history in place, to make an informed critique. What I do know is that there’s a world of roots out there, and they all need a little care. I’m starting here. May these roots reach deep and hold future folks firm to this place, for as long as it takes to create some understanding somewhere across these lines on a map.

Rooted for now,

BB

Hey y’all, as a side note, I did a little bit of writing on the relationship between agriculture and warfare in an earlier post from this year, embedded below. As always, thanks for reading… I’d planned to write mostly about duck butchery and squash genetics, but felt it necessary to say something in light of the current situation.