The al-Badawi olive tree, Palestine’s oldest living tree, still yields 800 kg of olives every other year. Photographer Adam Broomberg, the author of a book about Palestinian olive trees, Anchor in the Landscape, writes, “Anyone, it doesn’t matter what their ideological beliefs are, would conclude that nobody who loves a land would willingly destroy its oldest indigenous inhabitants. Only when that someone is led by hate.” (IBRAHIM HUSSEINI/AL JAZEERA)
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August/September 2026, pp. xx-xx
Special Report
By MacKenzie DeBruhl
THE UBIQUITY of the olive tree in Palestinian liberation discourse points to an ancestral identification with land stewardship. The land on which the olive trees stand is not only a defining feature in the Palestinian geopolitical struggle but also at the heart of various cultural heritage practices. Olive cultivation is an expansion of this rationale. It symbolizes a rooted connection to the land sustained through millennia.
Olive trees have always inhabited a physical and imaginative spatiality within Palestinian cultural assemblages. Their average age spans several decades. Through these generations, Palestinian farmers have sustained the biocultural tradition of olive cultivation with a great deal of care and attention, contributing to an intimate connection and an intense identification with the trees. They comprise a large portion of the agricultural sector, both in economic production and as a primary food source, and they have come to reflect the growing sentiment of a materialized notion of Palestinian belonging to the land. These trees symbolize Palestinian Indigenous presence, a central motif of cultural identity, and a rooted determination and steadfast resilience against occupation. It is no wonder that they also often reflect an extension of family, held with great reverence and devotion.
The olive harvest season is a socioeconomic ritual—a two-month autumnal period when families, friends and communities coalesce around the harvesting of fruit and oil pressing, participating in a shared collective experience and ecological praxis that strengthens bonds of cultural identity and belonging. It operates as a centripetal force, structuring seasonal rhythms and drawing communities inward around shared heritage practices. Encompassing more than just these economic and geographical dimensions, the olive tree encapsulates historic, ecological, and deeply personal and collective dimensions of Palestinian cultural worlds.
AN ANCIENT WITNESS TREE
A single olive tree, known as al-Badawi, stands 13 meters (42 and a half feet) high with a diameter of 25 meters (82 feet). Its towering size is mirrored below the surface, with roots extending 25 meters deep. A nearby stacked barbed-wire military barrier creates a stark juxtaposition with the character of this rural landscape, characterized by historic terraced agricultural hillsides, stone walls and natural springs. Indeed, this site is a hotbed of geopolitical and cultural contestation.
Carbon dating suggests that al-Badawi olive tree, rooted in the village of al-Walaja in the Bethlehem Governorate of Palestine, is the oldest in the occupied territory, approximately 3,000-5,500 years old. The upper end of that estimate would place it among the oldest olive trees in the world, predating the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. As such, it serves as a “witness tree” to several religiously significant events, successive empires, and the systemic and ongoing humanitarian crisis of Palestinians.
It was given its name by Palestinians generations ago to honor the 13th-century Sufi mystic Sheikh Ahmad al-Badawi, who embarked on pilgrimages to the tree, often sleeping beside it. This sacred tradition of visitation among community members continues today, symbolizing the spiritual attachments transmitted across the axis of time.
Moreover, a great deal of protection is provided to the tree. The Palestinian Authority has designated the landowner, Salah Abu Ali, as the appointed guardian. Much like the Sufi mystic, Abu Ali rests each evening under the tree’s canopy, where he has established a field of care. Safekeeping and devotion to al-Badawi is, in effect, ensnared in a dialectical bind.
AL-WALAJA, AN OPEN-AIR PRISON
That tension is illustrated by major changes in the al-Walaja village since the Nakba. Prior to the start of the sweeping illegal land grab and violent Zionist campaign in 1948, al-Walaja covered an area of 17,793 dunams (4,400 acres). Since the Nakba, approximately 75 percent of the total land mass has been expropriated to Israeli control, and nearly all 1,600 residents became refugees in neighboring countries. Approximately 100 former residents resettled on their agricultural lands across the armistice line, establishing the “new al-Walaja.” In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, and nearly half of the remaining land of the village was annexed and incorporated into the Bethlehem Municipal area. Remaining residents faced extreme marginalization, such as excessive fines, restricted movement and rampant housing demolitions, as well as the ever-increasing settler violence.
In the decade following the 1967 Naksa, 123 dunams of al-Walaja’s lands were confiscated for Gilo and Har Gilo, two illegal Jewish settlements. The loss of village land was further exacerbated by the construction of the Separation Wall in 2007, which encircles all of al-Walaja village, funneling movement through a single checkpoint and transforming a village whose very name—“the opening,” a reference to its position as a place of passage and entry through the linkage of the mountain chain—into an open-air prison.
Israel’s Separation Barrier (also known as the Apartheid Wall) is just one manifestation of a brutal Israeli policy targeting Palestinians in their ancestral homelands.
Boundaries in this landscape were traditionally composed of earth, stone and vegetation—materials that speak to the intimate relationship between Palestinian traditional communities and their farmlands. Since the construction of Israel’s militarized complex, a network that includes the Separation Barrier, watchtowers and checkpoints, a draconian incursion has redrawn the landscape’s boundaries, dictating Palestinian movement, restricting access to agricultural lands and demanding a far more involved interpretation of the landscape’s character.
“OLIVE WARFARE”
Beyond Israel’s militarized and bureaucratic structure that severely restricts Palestinian farmers and landowners’ access to their land, Israeli Jewish settlers carry out acts of violent arborcide. They also intimidate and deny access to agricultural lands, often attacking Palestinian farmers in the process. In the years spanning 1967-2012, Israeli authorities have uprooted or burned to the ground 800,000 olive trees in the West Bank. Israelis destroyed an additional 52,000 olive trees in the two-year period from 2023 to 2025. In August 2025, a single Palestinian village, al-Mughayyir, near Ramallah experienced a decimating uprooting of approximately 10,000 olive trees by Israeli military forces, as an act of reprisal.
Today, the remaining residents of al-Walaja village, roughly 3,000, experience sustained Israeli violence during the olive harvest season. Jewish settlers routinely target and vandalize Palestinian groves, and Israeli state forces wreak havoc through bulldozing and housing demolitions, compounding the ongoing displacement and uprooting of daily life. The illegal confiscation of Palestinian land and olive tree destruction is what legal scholar Irus Braverman termed, as early as 2009, “olive warfare,” which is enacted by both Israeli forces and the Jewish settlers.
Scholars describe olive trees as “silent witnesses” to the ongoing persecution and bloodshed of Palestinians. This is echoed by those close to the land as well. Abu Ali, the guardian of al-Badawi olive tree, has said the place where it is rooted is the soil of martyrs.
The consequences of these geopolitical transformations are cumulative and multifold: a dramatic 70 percent reduction in Palestinian land holdings, a complete encirclement by the Separation Barrier, a declining village population, the confiscation and degradation of water sources upon which Palestinian farmers once depended for agricultural subsistence and the broader deterioration of environmental conditions that sustained the landscape for centuries. For Palestinians, these losses give way to an intensification of daily precarity.
Yet the dialectical tension between Israeli occupation and collective Palestinian identity deepens the bonds of place-attachment and kithship with olive trees. Looming largest, the Badawi olive tree underscores the spatio-temporal continuity of the Palestinian people, symbolizing their topophilia and spirit of perseverance despite decades of brute separation and oppression.
If the olive tree represents Palestinian belonging to the land, providing living testimony to rootedness and steadfastness against occupation (sumud), then an even deeper meaning is attributed to the ancient al-Badawi olive tree. It serves as an ancestral, silent witness to the convergence of suffering and sanctity. Not only is it a landmark and a site of biocultural heritage of the Palestinian people, but it is also an argument for its continued stewardship. As it stands under siege, this olive tree compels a broader conversation—one that calls upon the international community to address the conditions of its precarity and to protect the cultural heritage it embodies.
MacKenzie DeBruhl is a graduate student in Cultural Sustainability at Goucher College, where she researches place-based cultural heritage practices as means of Indigenous resistance and Palestinian cultural landscapes under occupation.