The olive trees remain. Their Palestinian owners cannot return

Moshe Gilad writes in Haaretz on 2 November 2026:

There’s something hypnotic about ancient olive trees. Their trunks look like the wrinkles of old age. You can see the years, the time and the experience on them. They’re curved, tangled, twisted. They have cavities and hollows, flaws and cracks, and they are incredibly beautiful.

In mid-October, a conference on “The Cultural History of the Olive in the Galilee” was held at Tzippori, the site of a moshav rural cooperative community and the nearby ancient archaeological site of Zippori in Israel’s north. It opened with a tour of an ancient olive grove near the moshav. Thai workers spread large white nets on the ground and then operated blue electric rakes (they are usually called Campagnola, after the Italian company that produces them), which shook the upper branches. The olives fell to the ground. They were then gathered from the nets and put into containers. The quantity of fruit seemed large.

The conference organizer, Ayala Noy-Meir, whose family produces wonderful oil at the Rish Lakish olive press in Tzippori, explained in her opening remarks that thousands of centuries-old olive trees are scattered across the Lower Galilee. One of the lectures we heard afterward made it clear that it’s impossible to scientifically determine that there are olive trees in the Galilee that are more than 500 years old, but legends speak of trees 1,000 years old and older. There’s no doubt that the beautiful olive trees that we were standing near on the morning of our tour were planted by local residents 200 to 300 years ago.

The Arab village of Saffuriya (Zippori) was located on the southwestern slopes of the hill, 6 kilometers (less than 4 miles) north of Nazareth. The place has been continuously inhabited for the last 2,500 years. After the First Jewish Revolt in 70 C.E., Zippori became a Jewish center and later Christians and then Muslims settled there. Modern Saffuriya was the largest village in the Nazareth area at the beginning of the 20th century. About 5,000 residents lived there in 1948. Olives were the main crop and the most important source of the residents’ livelihood.

The village of Saffuriya was conquered two months after the establishment of the Israel in 1948. Its houses were destroyed and its residents expelled. Moshav Tzippori was established on the village’s land a year later, in 1949, when Kibbutz Hasolelim was also founded west of the site. In the 1980s, the village of Alon Hagalil, as well as Hoshaya, a religious moshav. and Kibbutz Hanaton were also established. Saffuriya’s land was declared absentee property and nationalized by the State of Israel.

The trees were left untended. Thousands of beautiful olive trees, including those that we saw that morning, were abandoned for decades and their condition deteriorated. The previous landowners weren’t allowed to return to them. Twenty-five years ago, Micha Noy-Meir, Ayala’s father, leased 3,500 of the trees from the Israel Land Administration (now the Israel Land Authority) and since then the family has been caring for them and harvesting the olives that the trees produce. According to my unprofessional eye, the trees now look in excellent condition.

The lectures at the conference, mostly delivered by Jewish and Arab academics, dealt with the history of olives in Israel, their place in local culture and olive-based agriculture in the past and present. Participants discussed spatial mapping of Tzippori’s orchards; genetic evidence of olive domestication in Israel; changes in olive cultivation from the Mamluk period (from 1260 to 1570 C.E.) to the British Mandate period; and olives and olive oil in Israeli cuisine. Additional lectures dealt with studying tree rings as a way of determining their age, and climate change and agronomic and economic transformations.

Contemporary topics such as settler violence against olive pickers in the West Bank or efforts by Religious Zionism party leader Bezalel Smotrich’s efforts to bring in Jews to live in Arab-majority areas of the Galilee weren’t mentioned. In her opening remarks, Ayala Noy-Meir introduced Ali Abu Shahada, the labor manager at the Rish Lakish olive grove, and warmly praised him as a partner sharing her love of olives. The two wore identical clothing – red shirts emblazoned with Rish Lakish’s logo. They’ve known each other since they were 14, when Abu Shahada began working as a shepherd for one of the families at Tzippori. Years later, he changed jobs to work in the Noy-Meir family’s olive grove and has been there ever since.

Like family

Abu Shahada explained to me that the olive trees near which we had stood that morning and which he tends on a daily basis as part of his work, once belonged to his family. His elderly mother remembers every tree in the grove. She knows which trees yield good fruit and which don’t. The entire family was uprooted in 1948, first to Kafr Manda in Israel’s north and then to the Israeli Arab town of Nazareth in the north.

“All of these olives, all the way down there in the valley, belonged to our family,” Abu Shahada gestured broadly. “My grandfather had another 400 dunams (100 acres) farther on. You can’t see from here. There were many more trees then than what we see today. According to what I was told, the entire valley was full of olive trees. There were stone hedges that separated the plots of the different families in Saffuriya. Since ’48, we’ve been forbidden to come here to pick olives, but here I am, working for 43 years at Tzippori. The Noy-Meir family is like my family. They’re wonderful people whom I truly love.”

What do you feel here?

“My joy in life is picking olives early in the morning and then sitting and eating in the field. I hope we come here on Shabbat with the whole family to do some olive picking and sit in the grove. That’s our tradition and our love. Of course, I would die to live here, but it’s not possible. That’s life. Now, at the peak of the season, I’m here all day anyway. I only go home to sleep.”

How many olive groves do the Arabs have left?

“Nothing is left here. There are communities, for example, Deir Hanna, where there are private olive groves belonging to Arabs, but not here. Also in Rameh and other places, olives are grown on private land and good oil is produced.”

What do you think of the conference?

“It’s excellent. I’m glad people come here, and kudos to Ayala for organizing it. It’s important to understand that there aren’t enough farmers in the country. Even here, we don’t manage to earn enough. Anyone who has a vegetable shop in the city earns more than olive growers. Labor and water are expensive. We use four cubic meters of water to irrigate every 12 trees every two weeks. Due to difficulties with access on the slope, we irrigate with a tanker. If we don’t irrigate – everything dries up. We also have a lot of problems with the lack of pastureland. The big concern is that after all our hard work, someone will come and start a fire. It happened a few years ago, and it’s terrible.”

Abu Shahada then pointed to the surrounding hills and called each by its Arabic name. “Each of us tells our own story,” he remarked at the end of our conversation.

We stood in silence for a while, each lost in their own thoughts, and then he went to point out to the Thai workers that there were other trees that could be picked. At that point, it was completely clear to me that Noy-Meir and Abu Shahada well understood the absurdity of someone whose family owned the land and trees but now works for someone else who is leasing the land from the state. But both, it seemed, preferred to avoid talking about that.

It’s a bit like ancient family embarrassments that are best not brought up in large gatherings. The fire that Abu Shahada spoke about and that Noy-Meir also mentioned happened after a quarrel between two shepherds. The wind carried the fire to the olive grove and 180 Picual variety olive trees were burned.

That included 50 ancient olive trees that went up in flames that day. Part of the problem, Noy-Meir explained, stems from the fact that the number of cows grazing in the olive groves has significantly declined in recent years. Today, only about 100 cows graze in the areas, meaning that there are more thorns growing in the groves, heightening the risk of a fire.

Permission to graze requires a license from the Israel Land Authority, just as the license to pick olives does. “The authorities currently don’t know how to address how to save the ancient olive trees, which were here before us and will remain after us,” Noy-Meir remarked. On her family’s private land, there are 3,000 relatively young trees, planted with seven different varieties. This, she said, provides their livelihood. In addition, they care for another 3,500 ancient olive trees that belonged to Arabs in the Galilee and were neglected for decades.

“Every year we lose 200 shekels ($64) per dunam on the ancient trees that we care for. That’s due to low yields and high labor and water costs. This year we organized a crowdfunding campaign to reduce the loss. There’s immense importance in caring for these trees, which are a heritage of the Galilee. This is all our history, and I fully understand the very complex situation and everything surrounding it, but every year we tell my father that it’s creating losses and that we’ll need to stop, and he convinces us to continue for another year or two. I don’t know what will happen in the future. It’s very important, but very complex.”

Explain how it works.

“We acquire the right to pick the ancient trees from the ILA under a renewable two-year contract, per tree. We don’t own the land. We irrigate the trees, but we’re not allowed to plant new saplings. For example, we’re not allowed to maintain the terraces. We deal with soil erosion, but we’re not allowed to build new terraces because the land is not ours. Essentially, we are only allowed to come and pick the olives. The feeling is that there is a management problem. The solutions involve sensitive political issues.”

It appears that even here at the conference, people are afraid to talk about it.

“Of course, they’re afraid. We live in a difficult reality. This is our livelihood, profit margins are low, and people are afraid that if they talk too much about the issue, they might get burned. Even I, who don’t know how to keep my mouth shut, have already gotten burned. Everything is very challenging,” she said.

“We care for trees that belonged to Ali’s family, but what can we do? Not care for the trees? Neglect them? His family has good relations with us. It’s clear to them that we didn’t take their land, and there’s an understanding that we have to continue together, with a shared and great love for the land and the trees. We have to find a way to respect each other. We must ask how to cooperate, how to manage it correctly, in a real dialogue.”

Ayala Noy-Meir’s sincere and open remarks move me. Unlike most other people, she doesn’t shy away from the complex reality in which we all live and faces it clearly. A few weeks ago, I met her in a different context, when I wrote about her initiative called “Adama Le’Adam,” a project aimed at saving agricultural produce. Even then, her words impressed me.

The history of the olive industry shows that 95 percent of the olive grove land in Israel belonged to Arab farmers and growers in 1948. Of a total of about 147,000 dunams of olive groves, roughly 70,000 dunams were owned by Arab farmers who remained in Israel after the War of Independence. Another 70,000 dunams were groves owned by Arabs who left or were expelled during the war. Those groves were deemed “abandoned property” and were transferred to the Israeli Custodian of Absentee Property. Seven thousand dunams were owned by Jewish farmers.

The olive industry has doubled since then. Today there are 330,000 dunams of olive groves, more than any other orchard crop in Israel, and 250,000 dunams of that, most of which is unirrigated, are cultivated by Arabs. The irrigated groves are managed by Jews.

That means that the Arab community has about three-quarters of the total area of olive groves in Israel. They are mostly in the north of the country. The Jerusalem-based Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael in Hebrew) currently cares for about 20,000 dunams of olive groves, many of which are ancient or have been integrated into JNF forests and orchards. Most of the groves are not used for commercial agriculture but rather for landscape preservation purposes.

The 70,000 dunams of olive groves that were transferred to the Custodian of Abandoned Property were considered absentee property. The law established a very broad definition for the term “absentee.” Then there are “present absentees” (an Israeli invention that rivals only the acrobatic abilities of Israeli gymnast Artem Dolgopyat). They are residents who did not leave the borders of Israel, but during the war, they temporarily moved to another village or their village was conquered and they were not in their homes on the relevant date. Legally, they were defined as “absentees” (because they did not reside at their property), but as a practical matter, they were “present” in the country and received Israeli citizenship.

Their land, including the olive groves, was nationalized, transferred to the management of the Custodian and then to the management of the Israel Land Administration. A lot of land, including tens of thousands of dunams of olive groves, vineyards and orchards, was transferred for purposes of establishing new Jewish communities or to expand existing ones. The residents of Saffuriya were deemed “present absentees” – citizens of Israel whose assets were nationalized. Some of them were offered meager financial compensation or small alternative plots over time as part of various arrangements with the state, but the vast majority refused to accept such compensation so as not to recognize the expropriation of their original land.

The issue of “present absentees” is one of the most complex and sensitive in Israel’s legal history. Since the 1950s, the state has almost completely refrained from returning the original land to its owners. In some cases, small financial compensation was paid. Most “present absentees” and their heirs refused to file compensation claims or sign agreements with the Israel Land Authority for ideological reasons and because the amounts were considered insulting and didn’t truly compensate for the loss of family assets. Most olive groves in Arab villages grow on privately owned land.

Basma Khalaf from Rameh came to the conference in Tzippori to listen to the lectures. During one of the breaks, she told me about her family’s large olive press and that she is currently investing an effort in marketing the olive oil in the United States that they produce. The grove has belonged to the Khalaf family for about 200 years, and the grove has roughly 2,000 trees. Her father, Moussa Khalaf, said that in the past, residents of Tyre and Sidon in Lebanon specifically came to buy Rameh’s famous olive oil.

Basma Khalaf worked for 18 years at Intel as a computer engineer but recently decided to make time to continue her family’s tradition. In the course of our conversation, she proudly displayed a New York Times article from 2021 about the olive presses in Rameh. The title of the article is: “The Best Olive Oil in the World? This Village Thinks So.”

“I’m now mainly working on branding the olive press, to give our oil the value it deserves. With all due respect to Spanish and Italian olive oils, they’re no better than ours. Our quality is truly the best in the world,” she explained with a smile.

Why are there so few Arabs here at the conference?

“Olives for us are more of a traditional thing, not necessarily a livelihood. There aren’t many families for whom this is their livelihood anymore. Everyone already earns a living from other things, and the family plots are part of the tradition, but the whole issue is very sensitive, and I prefer not to talk about it at all. Let’s stop here.”

Obtaining responses for this article proved to be a somewhat complex task. The impression was that no one wants to deal with the issue. I asked four agencies, three of them governmental, if there was any future intention to change the legal status of the olive grove areas in the Galilee, meaning extending the lease agreements or transferring them from state ownership to private ownership, so that the trees could be better cared for.

The JNF said that was for the Israel Land Authority to answer. The ILA initially said that answer should come from the Agriculture Ministry. Then it said it deals with land, not trees, and then wondered why anyone would want to transfer land ownership from the state to someone else. Ultimately it said that I didn’t provide sufficient details for it to respond properly, adding that if I provide block and parcel numbers, it would respond in detail. I didn’t get them.

The Israel Nature and Parks Authority explained that at the adjacent Zippori National Park site, there are dozens of ancient olive trees that a private family harvests under a contract signed with the ILA. The family also receives instructions from the ILA on caring and pruning. The Agriculture Ministry promised to respond but didn’t provide a response by the time this article was published in Hebrew.

Poet Taha Muhammad Ali was born in Saffuriya in 1931. During the War of Independence, he left with his family for Lebanon and then returned to Israel and lived in Nazareth. One of his poems (translated into Hebrew by Anton Shammas in 1984) is entitled “Abd al-Hadi Fights a Great Power”:

“In his life, he never wrote or read. / In his life, he never cut a tree or stabbed a cow. / In his life, he never spoke ill of The New York Times behind its back. / In his life, he never raised his voice at anyone except to say: By God, I swear, you must come in! / And despite everything – his cause is lost. His situation is desperate, and his rights are a grain of salt that fell into the ocean waters.”

This article is reproduced in its entirety