West Bank: Harvesting Your Own Olives Becomes a Deadly Risk

According to Al Jazeera, in the occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers have turned the olive harvest into a deadly activity for Palestinians. The title of its video report sums up the absurdity of the situation: Palestinians are reduced to "stealing their own olives". The dispatch we have is brief. At this stage we do not know the exact number of victims, the precise locations of the attacks or the response of the Israeli authorities. We will not invent them.

What we can do is say what this scene reveals, and this is our reading, not a fact established by the dispatch. The olive tree is not a simple tree. For peasant families, it is income, inheritance, proof of a bond with the land passed down from generation to generation. Preventing the harvest means attacking, at the same time, the land and the labour that sustains it. When such obstruction is accompanied by lethal violence, it is no longer a neighbourly dispute: it is an instrument of pressure on a population, meant to make it give up its fields.

Anticolonial Marxists speak of dispossession to describe this mechanism: one seizes the soil, then controls or destroys the work of those who inhabit it. In a logic of settler colonialism, the land matters more than the labour, and the population already in place becomes an obstacle rather than a resource. The harvest, the moment when land is converted into subsistence, is then a natural point of friction. Whoever bars access to it does not merely steal fruit: he makes ownership or use of the land untenable and prepares the abandonment of the plots.

We must also look at who protects whom. Settler violence that recurs year after year presupposes, at the very least, tolerance or powerlessness on the part of the institutions meant to guarantee civilians' security. We have no evidence here to detail the role of the Israeli army or justice system, and we say so frankly. But the structural question remains: who benefits from the harvest becoming an act of courage? Not the farmers, at any rate.

One would like the international community, so quick to recall the law in other circumstances, to show the same consistency here. Statements of concern follow one another; the olive trees, meanwhile, remain within reach of those who threaten them. A law that does not protect the most ordinary gestures, picking, carrying crates, returning home in the evening, is nothing but scenery.

Above all, there are lives lost and families in mourning, whose names the dispatch does not give us. We owe them sobriety: no easy formulas, only the demand to know, to document and to name those responsible. The olive season should be a season of work and sharing. That it has become a season of fear says everything about what it means to live under occupation.