The Olive Harvest in Palestine: Mawsim al-Zaytoun, the Nabali Olive and the Village Press
In the autumn of 2019 the groves of Palestine gave up 177,000 tonnes of olives in about eight weeks. That season has a name, mawsim al-zaytoun (موسم الزيتون), the olive season, and it is the one appointment in the Palestinian year that closes schools, empties offices and puts three generations of the same family under the same tree on the same morning. The olive harvest in Palestine is not a farming date on a calendar. It is the calendar. The tree at the centre of it is the same one stitched into the Heritage Olive Tree collection, and the season is how it gets passed down.
TL;DR
The olive harvest in Palestine runs from October to November, with preparation beginning in September after talat al-matar, the first rains. More than 10 million olive trees are cultivated in the West Bank across roughly 86,000 hectares, about 47 per cent of all cultivated land, and between 80,000 and 100,000 families depend on olives for income. The dominant variety is the Nabali Baladi, with about 23 per cent oil content. Timing decides the product: picked green in September the fruit becomes table olives, picked ripe in November it becomes oil, and roughly 90 per cent of the crop goes to oil. Picking is done by hand, and the fruit goes to a village press, the ma'sara, usually within a day.
When Is the Olive Harvest in Palestine?
The season opens with weather, not with a date. Palestinian farmers watch for talat al-matar, the first rains of September, which soften the ground and swell the fruit. Preparation starts then: ladders checked, tarpaulins mended, the press booked. The picking itself runs from October through November, as a visual survey of the season sets out in detail.
Inside that window there is a second decision, and it is the one that matters most. Fruit taken in September, while it is still green and hard, is destined for the jar as table olives. Fruit left until November, when it has gone black and soft, is destined for the press. The ARTOLIO study of Mediterranean cultivars records both dates for the same variety.
Early fruit yields a bitter, grassy, aggressive oil. Late fruit yields a milder, rounder, golden one. Neither is a mistake. Households pick on both dates on purpose, because the year needs a jar of table olives on the table in February as much as it needs oil in the tin.
The Nabali Baladi and the Rumi
The tree that dominates the Palestinian grove is the Nabali Baladi. Baladi means of the country, of this place, and the name is doing the work of a passport. It is the predominant cultivar across Palestine, it carries roughly 23 per cent oil content, and it is grown for both uses, jar and press.
Beside it stands the Rumi, the Roman, older and larger, named for the empire that is credited with bringing it. Its fruit is firmer and more bitter, its trunks are the ones that photograph like sculpture, and it is the variety most often meant when a family says a tree is ancient.
That distinction is not academic. A grove is a family archive written in wood. The Nabali rows are what a grandfather planted and what a household lives on; the Rumi trunks are what was already standing when he planted them. Reading a grove means reading both. The same doubled logic runs through the olive tree as a symbol of roots and endurance, where the tree stands for a claim that predates every document filed about it.
How the Olives Come Off the Tree
The method is old and deliberately slow. Sheets go down under the canopy first, so that nothing touched by soil goes into the oil. Then the fruit is stripped from the branch by hand, finger by finger along the wood, working from the inside of the tree outward. Ladders reach the crown. What falls on the sheets is gathered, sorted for leaves and twigs, and bagged.
Hand-picking is not nostalgia. It is the method held locally to be the best precisely because it damages neither the fruit nor the wood, and a bruised olive begins to ferment before it reaches the press. Beating the branches with poles is faster and costs the following year's growth.
Around this work sits the rest of the day, which is the part no yield figure records. Bread baked at the grove, oil poured onto a plate, za'atar and the wild thyme it is built from, tea made on a fire between the rows. Children are sent up the smaller trees. Grandmothers arrive with the food and the instructions. A village that spends its year dispersed reassembles in the fields for six weeks.
The Ma'sara: What Happens at the Village Press
Sacks go to the ma'sara (معصرة), the press, usually the same day they are filled. The fruit is washed of dust and leaf, crushed to a paste, and the oil separated out. Speed is the whole discipline: olives left sitting in a sack overnight in a warm store lose grade before they are ever milled.
About 90 per cent of the Palestinian crop leaves the press as oil. In 2019 that meant 39,600 tonnes of it from 177,000 tonnes of fruit, with the largest volumes coming out of Jenin, Tubas and the northern valleys, then the cereal and citrus district of Tulkarm, then Gaza.
What does not become oil becomes something else that lasts. Table olives in brine. Wood carved in Bethlehem. And soap, most famously the olive oil soap of Nablus and its old city, a trade that exists because a surplus of oil had to go somewhere. A Palestinian household treats the tree as a supply chain, not a crop.
The Oldest Tree Still Being Harvested
In the village of al-Walaja, about five kilometres west of Bethlehem, stands a tree called al-Badawi. It is roughly 12 metres tall and its canopy covers about 250 square metres. Estimates of its age, as reporting on the dispute over its birth date makes clear, range from 3,000 to 5,500 years depending on which team of researchers is asked; the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture and the family who own the land put it at 4,000 to 5,000. No fully conclusive dating exists.
The number is arguable. The practice is not. Al-Badawi is still harvested. Whatever its true age, a tree that was mature before most of the world's written archives existed is picked by hand every autumn by a family that will do it again next year, which is a more serious claim to continuity than any certificate.
What the Season Is Losing
The scale of what depends on this is easy to underestimate. According to United Nations reporting on the sector, more than 10 million olive trees are cultivated in the West Bank on some 86,000 hectares, about 47 per cent of the total cultivated area. Between 80,000 and 100,000 families rely on olives and olive oil for primary or secondary income, and the sector accounts for more than 15 per cent of working women.
Access is the pressure point. Groves that fall between the Barrier and the Green Line can only be reached through agricultural gates, most of which open seasonally and require a permit or prior coordination. Four years of United Nations monitoring in the northern West Bank found the yield of trees in that strip reduced by roughly 55 to 65 per cent compared with equivalent trees that can be reached year-round. The same reporting documented 5,582 trees damaged in the 2017 season against 1,652 the year before.
A tree that is not pruned, not weeded around and not visited for eleven months does not produce, and eventually does not survive. That is the quiet mechanism by which a grove is lost, and it is why the harvest is treated as an obligation rather than a chore. Turning up is the maintenance.
Frequently Asked Questions
When does the olive harvest start in Palestine?
Preparation begins in September with the first rains, known as talat al-matar. The picking itself runs from October through November. Olives intended as table olives are taken earlier, in September, while they are still green; olives intended for oil are left until November, when they are fully ripe.
What is mawsim al-zaytoun?
Mawsim al-zaytoun is Arabic for the olive season. It refers to the annual harvest period between roughly October and November, and to everything that surrounds it: families returning to their land, meals taken in the groves, and the trip to the village press. It functions as a social season as much as an agricultural one.
What kind of olives grow in Palestine?
The dominant variety is the Nabali Baladi, meaning the local or country Nabali, which carries around 23 per cent oil content and is used both as a table olive and for oil. The other well-known variety is the Rumi, or Roman, an older and larger tree with firmer, more bitter fruit.
How are Palestinian olives picked?
By hand. Sheets are spread beneath the tree, and the fruit is stripped from the branches by hand, with ladders used to reach the upper canopy. Hand-picking is preferred because it damages neither the fruit nor the wood, and bruised olives begin to spoil before they reach the press.
How much olive oil does Palestine produce?
Production varies sharply from year to year because olive trees crop heavily in alternate seasons. In 2019, a strong year, 177,000 tonnes of olives were pressed and 39,600 tonnes of olive oil produced. Around 90 per cent of the Palestinian olive crop is turned into oil, with the remainder going to table olives, soap and wood.
An Inherited Calendar
Heritage writing tends to reach for the olive tree as a metaphor and stop there. The tree is patient, the tree is rooted, the tree endures. All true, and all of it skips the part that actually transmits the culture, which is the eight weeks of labour that repeat every autumn whether or not anyone is feeling symbolic about it.
A child learns which fruit is ready by being handed a branch and corrected. A family learns its own land by walking every row of it once a year. A village learns who is still there by who shows up. The olive on a chest panel and the olive in a sack are the same olive, and the reason the motif still means anything is that the season behind it is still being kept.
Written for FALASTIN by Jad Sahyoun, with the assistance of AI tools and checked against United Nations reporting on the olive sector, the ARTOLIO cultivar studies, and published documentation of the Palestinian harvest season.
At FALASTIN, we aim to keep that heritage alive through our Heritage Olive Tree collection.
100% of profits from FALASTIN are donated to the United Palestinian Appeal.