Let The Olive Tree Be

One day last autumn, while parking my car under the old olive tree in front of Mishkenot Sha’ananim, I noticed for the first time how rich the tree was with olives, which nobody cared to pick. Thinking back to a book I read called “Don’t Retire, Refire” (meaning: don’t let yourself sink into senility — rejuvenate yourself instead), I decided on the spot to become an olive pickler.

When I told my staff this, they exchanged knowing looks. They had seen me before try and fail to make jam (a sticky disaster, as it turned out) and pickled cucumbers (which my daughter tasted then asked if there weren’t any “normal” pickles around). But with olive pickling, I was determined to restore my lost honor.

If olives were a hobby for me, for Palestinian farmers in Judea and Samaria, they are a serious matter, a source of livelihood for over 100,000 families. That is why every year around harvest time, I’m filled with shame when I hear that some Israeli settlers are blocking Palestinians from harvesting their olives, or, worse, are cutting down some of their olive trees altogether.

Judaism teaches us that this is wrong. “Ki ha’adam etz ha’sadeh,” a biblical phrase meaning “for man is like a tree in a field,” asks us to consider the sanctity of nature: is a tree in the field like a man, that you fight with it? “When in your war against a city, you have to besiege it a long time in order to capture it,” the Bible tells us (Deuteronomy, 20:19). “you must not destroy its trees, wielding the ax against them.” But can we eat their fruits? “You may eat of them,” the Bible reassures us, “but you must not cut them down.”

However, that dictum applied to ancient times, when the Israelites were conquering Canaan, or, perhaps, to 1967, when we conquered the land again. Today, we are not besieging any city in Judea and Samaria, but we are living there next to Palestinians, and therefore we shouldn’t be eating other people’s olives. Furthermore, denying the Palestinians their right to enjoy the fruit of their labor contradicts “Hilchot Gezelah va’Avedah,” the laws of robbery and lost property as carved by Maimonides: “It is forbidden to rob even the slightest amount,” he said. “It is forbidden even to rob or to withhold money from a gentile who worships idols. If one robs or withholds money from such a person, one must return it.”

Denying the Palestinians their right to enjoy the fruit of their labor contradicts “Hilchot Gezelah va’Avedah.

One doesn’t necessarily have to be an Orthodox Jew to comply with Maimonides; just abiding by Israeli law will do. The Israeli Ministry of Justice published a report describing its efforts to uphold law enforcement, stating that “these efforts have proven to be successful in containing ideologically-based offences against Palestinians in the West Bank.” Some, however, were not so convinced. The U.N. Secretary-General, for example, stated last September that extreme settlers’ violent actions against Palestinians and their property created a “climate of impunity.”

It is easy to dismiss the U.N. as an anti-Israel body. But the fact that a respected organization, Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR), has been mobilizing its members every year to help Palestinians harvest their olive trees and protect them from extreme settlers speaks loudly. Rabbi Moshe Yehudai, an 80-year-member of RHR, can give personal evidence — last October, settlers broke his arm in an olive grove incident.

Of course, these attacks come from a subset of settlers. Official and mainstream settlers have condemned this violence, but obviously, they fail in containing their radicals. And the Israel Defense Force, which controls the area, treats violent settlers gently, even though soldiers are sometimes attacked by them.

Needless to say that the olive tree, by persevering for centuries against storms, heat, diseases, and wars, has assumed a lot of symbolism. In the Palestinian-Israeli context, it probably carries a message regarding the question of Whose Land Is It Anyway. Indeed, Regavim, a pro-settler organization committed to “protecting our national lands,” even suggests that the Palestinian Authority is planting millions of olive trees as a master plan to grab land in Judea and Samaria.

I’m willing to strike a deal with the settlers: you leave the olive trees in Judea and Samaria alone, and I’ll drop my attempts to pickle the olives of the tree at Mishkenot Sha’ananim. My staff would be very grateful.

Uri Dromi was the spokesman of the Rabin and Peres governments (1992-96).