Settler-colonial Attempt to Uproot Palestine: Olive Harvest under Apartheid and Genocide
By Anisha Patel
Because justice for the Palestinian people cannot be left to the will of powerful governments, it must be demanded, built, and fought for.
Every year, autumn in Palestine marks the beginning of the olive harvest season — a cultural practice that bears witness to the deep relationship of the Palestinian people with their land and a pillar of economic and food sovereignty.
The harvests in 2024 and 2023 have been very limited and marred with increased violence carried out by the Israeli army and its settler militia, some of the worst in recent years, documented by grassroots movements, Palestinian Civil Society organizations, UN agencies, and others on the ground.
This year, in August, Israeli forces uprooted 10,000 olive trees, some of them over a 100 years old, in al Mughayyir as collective punishment; in September, the Israeli forces have issued multiple orders to clear out over 600 dunams of land for “protecting” illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory; and since the beginning of October, state-sanctioned settler militias have escalated their violence against Palestinian people and their land. These are just a few examples of a consistent and deliberate pattern of land dispossession, motivated by a settler-colonial ideology.
While a fragile ceasefire has recently come into force in Gaza, Israel has already violated it several times over the last week, continuing to kill hundreds of Palestinians and blocking humanitarian aid. This ceasefire comes as we entered the third year of the most brutal manifestation of the ongoing Nakba, the genocide being committed by Israel against the Palestinian people, marred by starvation, death, and a complete destruction of conditions of life.
Although the international community’s focus has remained on the unrelenting genocide in Gaza, a persistent campaign of violence continues to intensify across the West Bank including East Jerusalem – land is being annexed settlements are expanding more rapidly than ever, communities are being forcibly displaced from their homes, large number of people, including children, are being arbitrarily detained and shot in the streets. As such, this year, like the two before it, the olive harvest in Palestine continues under the shadow of a deepening apartheid, an unlawful military occupation, and the ongoing brutality of a genocide.
Uprooting a People
The olive tree is rooted in Palestinian identity, culture, and, over the last century, resistance. A cultural practice rooted in generations of care, olive farming in Palestine is a communal act of memory and resistance—bringing together land stewardship, ancestral knowledge, and seasonal rituals into a practice that sustains both the people and their sense of belonging.
Their capacity to survive under duress means that a large number of olive trees that survive in Palestine today have borne witness to the ongoing Nakba and have become a core element of the connection between the Palestinian people and their land. Over the past century, the olive tree has also come to embody Palestinian resilience in exile, becoming a site of both a memory of a land many can no longer access and the hope of one day returning to this home.
Prior to the genocidal assault on Gaza, olive farming constituted almost half of the cultivated land in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and, therefore, is an important component of the Palestinian agricultural sector. The olive harvest was the only source of income for over 100,000 Palestinians and generally contributed to 4.6% of Palestine’s GDP.
In an economy strangled by unlawful military occupation and apartheid, which has been coercively reshaped to depend on the Israeli economy, the olive sector remains a vital lifeline in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. But these numbers have been declining over the century as a result of Zionist policies of settler-colonial replacement. As comprehensively described most recently by the UN Special Rapporteur Michael Fakhri in his report, “from the beginning, agriculture and food were central to Zionist colonial techniques,” and we see them being operationalized for over a century now.
At the heart of this structural violence, against the people and the olive trees, is Zionist settler colonialism. As with other settler-colonial regimes, the Zionist movement has long prioritized the takeover of Palestinian land as fundamental to its existence and has pursued it through a range of political, legal, and military strategies.
The relationship of the Palestinian people to their land is integral to their identity and, as such, the severing of this relationship is also key to the Zionist project’s success and is enforced through coercion and deprivation associated with land and resources. Olive farming, a deeply rooted cultural practice, stands as both a symbol of Palestinian identity and connection to the land, and a target of settler-colonial efforts to erase that very identity.
Olive trees are not only central to Palestinian culture and economy—they are also a cornerstone of food sovereignty and, by extension, the right to self-determination, as enshrined in international law. In accordance with international legal frameworks, people have the right to freely determine their food systems, access natural resources, and sustain themselves in accordance with their cultural practices.
However, Israel’s settler-colonial regime systematically undermines these rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and across historic Palestine through land confiscation, movement restrictions, state-sanctioned settler militia violence, and targeted destruction of agricultural infrastructure. In essence, the Palestinian people’s ability to sustain their communities is being decimated. This structural violence is not incidental—it is a calculated method of colonial erasure. The most extreme manifestation is unfolding in Gaza, where mass starvation has been weaponized as a tool of domination.
The apartheid regime imposed by Israel on the Palestinian people, across the region and in the diaspora, provides the legal scaffolding for this structure of subjugation and dispossession. Over the last two years, significant legal changes have ensured that, for all intents and purposes, the control of the West Bank has moved from the Israeli military to a civilian oversight led by militia leaders.
While the de facto annexation of the West Bank has been ongoing since 1967, this transformation paves the path for a de jure annexation.
This week, the Knesset approved with a majority the first reading of a bill to impose Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, a move that comes on the heels of the so-called.
In May 2025, the Israeli Knesset passed the Land Registration Law, transferring control of land registration in Area C of the occupied West Bank to Israeli authorities — a step towards cementing de facto annexation of nearly 60 percent of the territory, in contravention of international law. Additionally, the approval of the settlement E1 in August 2025 is slated to sever the north and south of the West Bank and cut off East Jerusalem.
From the apartheid wall to the hundreds of military checkpoints, the ever-expanding network of illegal settlements, and the arbitrary permit systems to access farmlands, the mechanisms are varied, but the objective is the same: to fragment the Palestinian people and forcibly displace them from their land. This is further reinforced by the State of Israel through the theft of water resources, the designation of military firing zones, and the routine seizure of private land under the guise of ‘security’—all of which make meaningful access of Palestinians to land increasingly impossible.
This violence—whether carried out through bombs, bulldozers, or legal codes—is not a deviation from Israeli policy; it is a pattern repeated over decades. And in the harvest season, this policy will be brutally enforced on those Palestinians trying to exercise their right to self-determination and remain on their lands. As history has taught us, settler-colonial apartheid regimes do not dissolve themselves, nor do such regimes act out of the moral or legal sense of doing what is right. Apartheid regimes cease to commit the crime of apartheid when it is no longer feasible to continue doing so.
Dismantling Apartheid
In its Advisory Opinion of July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice declared Israel’s presence in the entire Occupied Palestinian Territory unlawful. The Court called for Israel’s full withdrawal—an opinion endorsed by the UN General Assembly in Resolution ES-10/24, which set a deadline of September 18, 2025, for compliance. It also called for wide reparations, including returning land and assets seized during the duration of this unlawful occupation.
And yet, the situation in all of the Occupied Palestinian Territory only worsens. Under international law, third States are legally obligated not to aid or assist in internationally wrongful acts, such as the Israeli apartheid and unlawful occupation of the Palestinian territory. Yet many continue to offer Israel diplomatic cover, weapons, and preferential trade—directly enabling the very system the Court has condemned.
For over a year now, the legal and moral responsibilities before the international community have been clear- it must enforce Israel’s withdrawal from the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including through sanctions and legal accountability focused on dismantling state structures that sustain apartheid and corporations that enable and profit from it. This continued impunity extended to Israel has brought us to the edge of a complete collapse of the larger international legal order and demanding concrete actions from States that enable Palestinian self-determination remains a legal and moral imperative.
Additionally, given the pattern of structural and overt violence documented in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the policies and practices, such as the fragmentation of the territory and the attempt to sever the ties between the Palestinian people and their land, and the destruction of cultural practices, are all designed to destroy the conditions of life of the Palestinian people.
When viewed in conjunction with the statements of genocidal intent being expressed by the Israeli leadership and society towards all of the Palestinian people in the region and the history and trajectory of Zionism, it is necessary that the Genocide Convention be applied to all of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
This should, at the very least, trigger third State obligations to prevent genocide in the West Bank, as warned by the UN SR on the Occupied Palestinian Territory in her October 2024 report and more recently by the by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel in their Conference room paper published in September 2025.
States have failed in discharging their obligations, but grassroots movements stood their ground. Palestinian initiatives such as the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, Manjala, Stop The Wall, and Union of Agricultural Work Committees work on the ground to reclaim their agency by collectively strategizing for the preservation of traditional systems of agriculture, despite the apartheid.
Grassroots actions like the Zaytouna Campaign 2025, which supports Palestinian olive farmers and mobilizes international activists and observers during the harvest, offer tangible ways to stand with Palestinians—not just in principle, but in practice. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement remains a vital constituent of global solidarity, isolating the apartheid regime and making its genocide increasingly unsustainable.
Generating political incentives within third states to ensure they discharge international legal obligations is critical to bringing an end to the apartheid regime.
Because justice for the Palestinian people cannot be left to the will of powerful governments, it must be demanded, built, and fought for—through legal action, grassroots organizing, and sustained resistance. As this olive harvest season continues, despite the escalating violence, it reminds us that Palestine’s struggle is not only for their liberation from colonial domination —it is for their right to exist as a people and to remain rooted in the land that has nourished generations.
– Anisha Patel is a member of the Governing Council of Law for Palestine and a PhD researcher at the Europa-Universität Viadrina, Germany. She contributed this article to the Palestine Chronicle.
The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.