This week, Hinenu, along with Synagogues Rising, hosted a cooking demonstration from, and conversation with, Laila El-Haddad. Laila El-Haddad is an award-winning Palestinian author, social activist, policy analyst and journalist. She is the author of "Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between" co-author of the "The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey" and co-editor the anthology "Gaza Unsilenced." Laila joined us to talk about the roles that olives and olive oil play in Palestinian culture, cuisine, and resistance, and to share a few recipes that highlight olive oil.
She started by talking about the symbolic nature of the olive tree. "The olive tree is highly symbolic and epitomizes everything about policy and struggle," Laila said. "The tree itself withstands the incredibly harsh conditions. Palestinian farmers have a personal relationship with their trees and groves." She also pointed out the religious importance of olive trees for Muslims. "It's mentions numerous times in the Quran as being a blessing, and the lighting of the oil from the tree is compared to the light of God."
Laila pointed out that, in Gaza, where around 80% of residents are refugees displaced from their land and where over a decade of blockade has decimated Gaza's economy, most people can't afford to buy olive oil. "A significant number of Palestinians, more than half probably, have been denied their access to their own lands [by Israel], and by extension to this very crucial sort of experience" of growing and consuming olives. Looking at olive trees in Palestine "is a really good gateway to understanding so much about what's happening now and what's happened in the past."
Palestinian olive farmers, though, face attacks from both Israeli settlers and military operations, especially each year during the harvest season. "When we're talking about Zionism and ongoing Israeli settler colonialism and occupation, it's control over Palestinian lives and land, the idea of maximizing control over the land, while minimizing the number of Palestinian in that land."
Laila pointed out that planting and cultivating olive trees, which can take up to seventy years to become productive, is "is the ultimate act of resistance and this is what the farmers would tell me over and over again, insisting on the struggle to remain human and retain dignity, insisting on planting and tending to your farm, no matter how many times it's been destroyed.”
She tied this kind of resistance back to the Palestinian concept of sumud. "Sumud is a concept that has existed in Palestinian nomenclature specifically since the first Palestinian uprising in 1988, and it translates loosely to steadfastness. It means perseverance, the idea that, no matter what happens or comes our way, we will remain, we will exist, we will resist, and the olive tree is symbolic of that precisely because it withstands extremely harsh conditions."
If you’d like to support Hinenu’s Palestinain Solidarity Working Group’s campaign to raise $1,800 to plant 72 olive trees in Palestine, click here and make a donation. Be on the lookout for more opportunities to support Palestinian agricultural workers between now and Tu b’Shvat in January.