Rotfeste og forvisning

Professor Anne Meneley
Trent University, Ontario, Canada

This paper discusses how the materiality of olive trees make them refractory actants in presences and absences in Palestine/Israel.

My field research with Palestinian olive farmers and olive oil producers and ongoing archival research highlights the material qualities of olive trees: their longevity, their rootedness, their tenacity and their productivity. These material qualities are drawn upon in arboreal imaginaries which are implicated in practices of asserting presence or attempting erasure in the Holy Land. 

The processes of rooting and uprooting trees in the land has long been a part of making historical claims and invoking memory. In Palestinian imaginaries, the olive tree is understood as an actor, a kind of co-producer of its own product, olive oil; this productive capacity, a result of human-tree co-generativity, questions a Zionist claim about an empty, barren landscape. The Palestinians, however, have competing arboreal imaginaries involving differing personification of trees in their struggle with the Israeli colonizers.

The rootedness and longevity of olive trees, the older ones imagined as grandparents and the newly rooted/planted ones as children, stand as a testimony to longstanding Palestinian presence on the land they own. Israeli settler attacks against olive trees in the West Bank sometimes proceed as if olive trees are a stand-in for Palestinians whose presence ought to be (and can be) uprooted from the land. As Irus Braverman’s work (2009) indicates, sometimes trees are depicted as threatening presences, “as enemy soldiers,” to Israeli occupiers in the West Bank, and in certain contexts, as her discussion with Jewish National Fund representatives indicate, the lives of trees are depicted as considerably more important than Palestinian lives. Yet shoots coming up from the base of a tree subject to a settler's axe become a sign of Palestinian steadfastness [sumood].

This paper investigates the myriad rooting and uprooting practices of living, material presences on the land, in staking claims to history and the right not to be erased. The fruit of this threatened tree, in the form of fair trade Palestinian olive oil, provides a vehicle for conveying this complicated struggle to consumers abroad.

You can read more about Professor Anne Menely here: https://www.trentu.ca/anthropology/meneley.php

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