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What’s so special about olive trees?

Olive trees may be the only living organisms that don’t have a mechanism to die.
The oldest living one may be 9000 years old.
The Israelites found olive trees in the promised land, grew more of them and wrote about them.
Noah’s olive branch is said to have come from the highest mountain in Lebanon.
Olive trees are treasured even sacred to many.
Jesus famous Sermon on the Mount was on the Mount of Olives.

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The Mount of Olives

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Gethsemane

Gethsemane is the garden in East Jerusalem at the foot of the

Mount of Olives where, according to the 4 Gospels of the Christian Bible, Jesus underwent the Agony in the Garden and was arrested before his Crucifixion.

The garden is a place of great resonance in Christianity. There are several small olive groves in church property, all adjacent to each other and identified with biblical Gethsemane.

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Olive trees split when they get large.

Eventually they form a whole grove. They can become a corral for animals. They don’t usually die.

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Olive cultivation is a way of life for many.�And a cultural marker for many more.

The trees have a two-year cycle. They rest one year and produce the next.
They need fertilizer and pruning to produce heavily.
The olive harvest takes place after the first rains - usually in October – as the rain washes the dust from the fruit.
Whole families, often whole communities, participate in the harvest.
My Lebanese friend, now an American engineer, has just returned from harvesting his olives, as he has done every year.

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Story from my Palestinian friend

Young man: Grandfather, why are you planting olive trees?
Young man: Grandfather, you will not live to see the fruit of these trees.
Old man: Yes, olive trees take many years to mature.
Old man: It may be 20 years before their first harvest.
Young man: So why are you planting in your old age?
Old man: The olive trees we are harvesting were planted many years ago for us. I am planting these for you.

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The Olive Harvest - Unmolested

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The Olive Harvest - Molested

New York Times

Nov. 14, 2025

Ayssam Ma’ala, a happy-go-lucky eighth grader, had just laid down tarps to gather ripe olives in the West Bank town of Beita.

It was Oct. 11, the first Saturday of the harvest, traditionally a high point of the year.

The day before, his family had been driven from another grove

by extremist settlers who attacked them, witnesses said, in what has become a common occurrence in the West Bank.

So Saturday, they chose what seemed a safer spot.

No settlers were in sight. Ayssam, 13, told his mother to rest in the shade,

that “he’d take care of everything.”

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The Olive Harvesters Targeted

(Times, continued)

Israeli soldiers soon emerged from an army vehicle

a few hundred yards away and began firing tear gas, witnesses said.

Caught in a cloud of gas from three canisters, and unable to breathe, Ayssam collapsed. After four weeks in a coma, Ayssam died on Tuesday.

He became the first fatality in what has been a particularly violent olive harvest.

Palestinians and activists — Palestinian, Israeli and Western —

say bands of masked settlers have routinely assailed Palestinian villagers,

activists lending their support and journalists there to bear witness.

The attackers, they say, are emboldened by permissive law enforcement

and by troops who seldom intervene to stop Jewish extremists.

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Requiem for an olive grove, West Bank, 2025

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�Is this the Israel we pray to return to?�

NPR Nov 12, 2025

AL MAZRA AS-SHARQIYA, West Bank — Olives and dates are the pride and joy of Palestinian farmers, and autumn is the time of year they're picked.
But this season, the simple act of picking olives is dangerous.
Extremist Israeli settlers have been carrying out attacks on olive harvesters at levels not seen in years. Israel has deported some U.S. volunteers trying to defend the harvesters.
Date farmers have been spared that violence but face other challenges: Israeli army searches, Palestinian thieves, drought, and a war over water with settlers.
In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, a season of festivity is overshadowed by fear.

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Are settlers

destroying olive trees

planted by our biblical ancestors?

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Nov 16, 2025

Netanyahu vows there will be no Palestinian state.

Who will protect the olive trees?

Are olive branches a thing of the past?