A valley of olives and drones: life at the edge of an expanding settlement
The buzz of a drone cuts across a late afternoon sky that ought to be full of birdsong and the scent of crushed olives. Instead there is the metallic tang of fear and the dust of bulldozers. In the West Bank towns of Turmus Ayya and al‑Mughayyir, an ancient landscape of terraced groves and stone houses is being remade—by tents, by trucks, by men with guns and by machines that rip rooted trees from the earth.
“This was supposed to be my father’s retirement. He came here from California and planted these trees with his own hands,” says Yasser Alkam, a man in his forties whose palms still smell faintly of oil when he speaks. “I have the title papers. I have the documents. But the paperwork means very little when someone points a gun at you and says ‘leave or else.’”
There is a rhythm to his words: a long, slow breath, then a detail. “Two weeks ago there was one tent,” he tells me, looking down the dusty lane. “Now there are two—one on the right, one on the left. It keeps spreading, inch by inch.” Above us, the drone hovers, sentinel and witness, as a settler on a nearby hill watches and his machine mirrors every movement.
When trees become currency
Six kilometres away, in al‑Mughayyir, the scene turned from intimidation to outright erasure. Locals counted the stumps and the empty hills; they say more than 10,000 olive trees were bulldozed, hundreds of hectares stripped bare. “They took our history,” says Marzouq Abu Naem, deputy head of the al‑Mughayyir municipality. “Those trees would have produced about 5,000 gallons of oil. At $150 a gallon, that’s a lifetime of income gone—gone with the roots.”
The arithmetic is stark: 5,000 gallons multiplied by $150 equals roughly $750,000 in lost revenue that, for a small farming community, would have funded schools, repairs, the medical bills of elderly parents. But the loss is not merely economic. “People collapsed in grief when they saw the land,” Abu Naem says. “These trees were our calendar. They marked births, weddings, funerals. You cannot replace a thousand-year‑old olive with a sapling and say the grief is over.”
Days after my visit, locals reported another attack. A man who was wounded in the confrontation later died of his injuries; his funeral, sombre and angry, threaded through narrow lanes where children still play among the stones. In these regions, grief and politics are braided together; every funeral echoes with old injustices and new fears.
On the ground: tents, patrols and the normalisation of outposts
The tents Yasser describes are part of a wider pattern. Outposts—often declared illegal even under Israeli law—appear on ridges and in valleys, sometimes with the protection of night patrols and the visible presence of the Israeli military by day. “We see soldiers, then settlers, then earthmovers,” a farmer from Turmus Ayya told me, hands inked with years of olive pressing. “It feels like watching a slow occupation of space.”
According to Israeli data and international monitors, settler populations in the West Bank and East Jerusalem number in the many hundreds of thousands; their expansion, years in the making, has accelerated in recent months. The past year, beginning 7 October, has seen a marked increase in tensions and violence across the occupied territories, with independent observers noting a surge in attacks on Palestinian communities and their property.
“There is a sense of impunity now,” says Rana Haddad, an aid worker who has documented incidents across the region. “When bulldozers arrive after confrontations, or when new tents appear on private land, it’s not just the buildings that change—the rules of space and belonging shift, quietly but irreversibly.”
Voices from different sides
Not everyone sees this as dispossession. “We are building homes, creating safe places for our people,” one settler told a reporter, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We are farmers too; we want to work the land.” Yet the scenes on the ground—armed confrontations, drone surveillance during interviews, the uprooting of centuries‑old groves—leave many Palestinians feeling besieged.
“I returned from California because I believed in this land,” Yasser says. “My American friends would say: why risk it? I would tell them about the olive trees, about the stone walls my grandfather built. But what good are memories when your land is being taken while the world watches and says little?”
Olive trees as a ledger of culture and climate
Olives are not merely crops in the West Bank; they are a cultural ledger. The harvest—stolen from children who learn to carry baskets before they can read—is a season of songs and jokes, of women beating nets against branches, of the first dark, bitter oil cooling in jars. Olive oil is served not only at meals but at weddings, presented as a blessing, poured over bread and into the mouths of infants on feast days.
There is also a climate dimension. Olive trees are drought‑resistant and part of a sustainable, very old agricultural system that helps stabilise the soil. Bulldozers that remove them accelerate erosion and make hillsides less resilient to increasingly erratic weather. “You don’t just lose fruit—you lose a buffer against climate extremes,” notes Dr. Laila Barghouti, an agronomist who has worked with smallholders in the region.
Questions for the reader, and for the world
What does it mean to protect cultural landscapes when political forces prize land as strategic advantage? How do you quantify the worth of a tree that has seen generations and named children? These are not abstract questions. They are answered in the crumbling walls of a family home, in the silence where a grove once stood, in the little jar of oil that will no longer be sold at market.
International law frameworks and appeals from human rights groups have yet to halt the spread of outposts or the bulldozing of groves. Calls for independent monitoring and for accountability echo in diplomatic corridors, but on the ground, families keep harvest calendars and wait for seeds to sprout in places they hope will not be taken again.
As you read this from wherever you are—city apartment, coastal town, highland village—consider how closely land and memory are bound for so many people. And ask: when a community loses its trees, what does the rest of us lose? A landscape of olives is, in many ways, a map of belonging. When that map is erased, the story that remains is one of absence and, for those who love the hills, a profound longing to be let back in.
