Why we need to care about Palestine?

Cynthia Wang
Nov 26, 2016
5 min read

Many people have asked me, Why Palestine?

I am not Palestinian; I am from Taiwan, an East Asian country that is 8000 km far away from Palestine. There is little news talking about it. With almost no direct economic and diplomatic relations between Palestine and Taiwan, my life can possibly have no crossovers with this land forever.

But here I am, in Palestine, as a visitor, as a friend to many, as a journalist.

There is much suffering in the world at the moment. Attention is given to the Syrian civil war with atrocities committed and civilian casualties. The world media is also eyeing the US presidential election with comments from both Donald Trump and Clinton Hilary become the daily news headlines. In this environment, a story about Palestinian minors detained in Israeli prison violating the International law does not get the news attention it deserves. They have become numbers that perish in hundreds more breaking news.

My answer to the question of why Palestine has begun to surface at one of the October weekend, which is the best time for olive picking in Palestine.

I was invited by my friend, Wafa, to experience the olive harvest with her family in Aroura, a village located northwest of Ramallah in the West Bank. We started from the early morning at 7a.m. Following her father, and joined by her mother and three of her younger siblings fully equipped, we walked to the ground where belonged to her family.

At the top of the hill, Wafa told me, “Our grandfathers and great grandfathers have passed these trees down to us. They marked the trees and distinguished which lands and trees belonged to them without any means of technology.”

Olives and olive oil have a significant role in all of the major religions developed in this region, which have been mentioned in Qur’an, the Bible and the Torah. Olive symbolizes life, renewal, resilience, and peace. The oil stands for purity, protection, health and light. Olive trees have been cultivated here for many thousands of years.

“Look!” Hiba, a 5-year-old, youngest daughter among this family, put out her hands to me, palms up, there was a small pile of greenish black olives.

She then offered me an orange rake and eagerly showed me how to brush mature olives down from the tree branches. The sound of the olives falling is similar to rhythm of the rain. We collected them on a big canvas, which covered on the ground around the tree.

“Olives!” She innocently yelled with a stunning smile on her face, reflecting the sun-shined mountainous olive field. She kneeled down on the canvas and scooped some olives up in her hand. It is said to be a gesture Palestinian farmers do when they cultivate olives.

In Palestine, it is estimated that there are more than 10 million of olive trees. Every year in the West Bank, 10,000 more trees are planted. They produce more than 20,000 tonnes of olive oil to be pressed from the crop[1]. It is the main food fat in the daily diet. Almost no Palestinian food can be made without taking olive oil into account. The olive industry stands as the key role in the Palestinian economy, and it also has become an essential aspect of Palestinian culture, heritage and identity. The significance of it is socio-cultural.

However, the destruction of Palestinian olive trees by Israeli soldiers and settlers has become a common tragedy in recent years.

“It takes so many years for an olive tree to grow and bear fruits. Some of the trees might already be hundreds or even thousands years old,” said Wafa, indicating that Palestine has some of the world’s oldest olive trees, which could be dated back to 4,000 years ago[2].

Because of the historical, economic and cultural importance of these olive trees to Palestinians, the Israeli uprooting trees to make new rooms for settlements has less a territorial but more a spiritual significance[3].

While the children yelling and jumping up and down in the tree to harvest olives, Wafa’s mother collected some tree branches and made fire to prepare traditional Arabic coffee.

“We don’t waste anything from the trees, from the branches, the leaves, the olive itself and its seed. Every part of it is valuable and can be reproduced into something,” explained Wafa’s mother, offering me a cup of hot coffee. “It means life for us.”

“Palestinians are in love with life,” the sentence of Mahmoud Darwish suddenly aroused in my mind, echoing her comment.

She then called out to the harvest crew for Futur. It is time for a traditional Palestinian breakfast. We took refuge in the shade of an olive tree from the blazing sun and enjoyed a feast composed of bread, tuna, olive oil, hummus, and some homemade pickles. The children fell on the food and ate it with satisfaction and joyfulness.

Staring at their smiles, I turned my head to the other side with endless olive trees in sight, the question came to me again, as so many times before: Why Palestine? The answer began to gel in my mind.

It does not matter where you are from. It does not matter if you have your own opinion about what is right or what is wrong in this long-standing historical complication between Israel and Palestine.

But there is life. There is humanity.

Perhaps I come to Palestine for myself. I come to Palestine to look for myself. In a bigger sense, I even come to Palestine for Taiwan. I do not know how much I can help Palestinians as a foreign journalist. But I realize my role in Palestine is not to free Palestinians but to stand side by side as humans with them to tell the truth and deliver their message to farther away.

And the message is simple: we all want to live a free, simple, carefree, happy and safe life, with our beloved family members, lovers, and friends beside in a place we call home. We share the same feelings and we all crave the same ideas- freedom, self-identity, and love.

Many Palestinians are still in exile. The comment made by a Palestinian living abroad, “Home is home, but it is somewhere I cannot return” is way too familiar to Palestinians. A story, or picture of Palestinians does not simply show the sorrow and suffering of them, but it is a narration and proof of human history and humanism. This is why I feel obliged to share and write stories about Palestine.

As cultural critic Edward Said had noted, “just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography.” When next time someone asks me again why a Taiwanese girl is here writing for Palestine, my answer to he or she is- there is something essential that everyone on this earth should give solidarity to: we all have the rights to go home, to enjoy freedom and life.