24 October 2025

Embrace the Middle East is a charity which is supporting Palestinians on the West Bank with a project entitled, ‘Olive Tree Project’.  The olive trees are under threat from Jewish settlers who want to expand onto Palestinian land. The trees are dug up, cut down, set on fire.

Since 1967, a million olive trees have been destroyed. Since the war in Gaza, the trees have become more vulnerable. Recently, Jewish settlers used bulldozers to destroy 1,200 trees in Al Mughayar, near Ramallah. Nothing survived!

Talking about the destruction, Muhanad Al Qaisy, Director, said of the farmers, ‘They don't want to lose the land and they want to fight the occupation - but they don't fight it by violence; they are fighting now by planting olive trees. Farming is a way to express and to empty the anger that they have in a non-violent way.’

He added, ‘More lands will be annexed.  Planting the empty lands with trees will help stop the Israelis taking more and more lands as land with crops is harder to seize for settlements than uncultivated land.’ In addition, 350,000 Palestinians have lost their permits to work in Israel. They look to the land!

With settler expansion, there are new roads, more checkpoints, more restrictions, more attacks. The Olive Tree Project has supplied 200 First Aid Kits, 300 ladders to harvest the olives and sheets to catch them as they fall out of the tree. They have been helping 1,600 farmers, 7,000 people.

It takes two to three years to cultivate olives. This, in turn, can be made into olive oil. Patience and resilience are at a premium. The old olive branches are transformed into  wooden ornaments like our miniature Nativity Set reminding us that Jesus was born in occupied Palestine and was forced to flee to Egypt as a refugee.