When They Uproot Our Olive Trees

this week In al-Mughayyir, a village near Ramallah, settlers destroyed 8,000 olive trees. Eight thousand lives. Eight thousand roots that tied families to their land, to their ancestors, to their children’s future.

I want you to understand what that means.

The olive tree is not just a crop for us. It is our family inheritance, our memory, our survival. My grandmother pressed its fruit into oil to feed her children. My father harvested it to keep us alive through lean years. We plant trees with the hope that they will outlive us, standing for hundreds of years as witnesses that we belonged here.

When settlers come with chainsaws, fire, and guns to cut these trees, they are not only attacking wood and branches. They are trying to sever us from our history. They are trying to erase our very claim to the land.

And I ask you, how can people who call themselves “indigenous” do this? How can they cut the most sacred tree of Palestine, the very tree that has grown here for thousands of years? That is not the act of the indigenous. That is the act of a colonizer. This has been their path for seventy-seven years: destruction, erasure, dispossession.

But there is another path — our path. For every single tree they destroy, we will plant ten more. Our resistance is rooted in life, not in death. Where they come with bulldozers and hatred, we come with shovels, water, blood, sweat, and tears. We plant because planting is how we fight back, how we refuse to disappear.

Do not grow numb to this violence. Do not accept it as “conflict” or “clashes.” Call it what it is: settler-colonialism, ethnic cleansing, genocide.

And know this: the olive tree will outlast the colonizer. Its roots run deeper than their ideology. Its branches will grow again, carried by the hands of Palestinians who refuse to give up their land.

As long as they destroy, we will plant.
As long as they erase, we will rebuild.
As long as they colonize, we will resist.

by ribhi hussein