Battir, Palestine: The UNESCO Terraces and the Roots of Palestinian Farming

TL;DR: Battir, Palestine, a farming village between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, still waters its stone terraces through a 2,000 year old irrigation system built in the Roman period. That system, and the ancient rotation eight families still use to divide its water, is why UNESCO named Battir a World Heritage Site in 2014, the same year the listing helped freeze a plan to build Israel's separation barrier through the terraces.

Ain al-Balad, the spring that has irrigated Battir's terraces for centuries. (Photo: Urjuwan Najjar, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Battir (بتير) is a village of stone houses stacked into a hillside southwest of Jerusalem, in the Bethlehem governorate. What makes Battir, Palestine unusual is not what stands in the village but what grows below it: a set of ancient farming terraces, watered by a spring that has never stopped running. Anyone who has spent time with FALASTIN's Palestinian clothing collection has already met a version of this landscape, stitched rather than farmed, since Palestinian tatreez has long used the hillside and the terrace as a motif for the land itself.

The village sits just above the old railway line that once ran from Jaffa to Jerusalem. From 1949 to 1967, that same line served as the armistice boundary between Israel and Jordan. Battir's fields lay on the far side of it. For nearly two decades, the line that divided a country ran directly along the edge of one village's farmland, and the village kept farming anyway.

Where Battir, Palestine Sits, Between Jerusalem and the Green Line

Battir lies roughly seven kilometers southwest of Jerusalem's Old City, in the hill country that separates Jerusalem from Bethlehem, in whose governorate the village sits today. The village is built on a slope, and its houses climb the hill in tiers, the same way its fields do below them. Its location gave it two identities at once: a farming village whose economy depended on its terraces, and a border village whose land sat against the 1949 armistice line for eighteen years, until Israel captured the West Bank in 1967.

That location is also what saved Battir's terraces from paving and expansion. The land could not easily be built on or annexed while the old railway and the armistice line ran through it, and the same isolation that once limited the village kept its ancient field pattern intact long after most of the region's terraced hillsides had been abandoned or built over.

Why Did UNESCO List Battir's Terraces as a World Heritage Site?

In June 2014, the World Heritage Committee, meeting in Doha, voted to inscribe Battir under an emergency nomination procedure, reserved for sites facing an immediate threat. The official name of the listing is Palestine: Land of Olives and Vines, Cultural Landscape of Southern Jerusalem, Battir. The protected area covers roughly 12.5 square kilometers, and includes the village's historic core along with its terraces, its springs, its irrigation channels, and its old stone watchtowers.

UNESCO's own listing points to two things at once: the terraces themselves, a rare example of dry-stone agricultural engineering still in daily use, and the irrigation system that keeps them alive. Battir was named a World Heritage Site not for a monument but for a working farm, one that has been worked the same way for roughly two thousand years.

The Ein al-Balad Spring and a 2,000 Year Old Irrigation System

Battir's terraces are fed by two springs, Ein al-Balad and Ein Jama. Their water collects in stone pools built for that purpose, then runs downhill through a network of channels that villagers describe as a zero-cost system: gravity does the work that a pump would otherwise have to do. Together the springs irrigate close to 3,000 dunums, about 300 hectares, of terraced land.

What makes the system remarkable is not only its age but its fairness. The water is divided among eight family lines under a rotation that assigns each family a fixed block of time to draw from the shared pools, calculated so precisely that the whole cycle repeats without dispute. It is not a modern cooperative. It is closer to a very old contract, kept because it still works, sustaining terraces that, by the account of local farmers and the irrigation system's own engineering, date to the Roman period, making Battir's fields close to two thousand years old and still in use.

The Battir Eggplant and What Still Grows on the Terraces

The terraces grow olives and grapes, the two crops named in UNESCO's own title for the site, along with a rotation of vegetables that has made Battir a market garden for the towns around it for generations. The village's best known crop, though, is narrower than that: the Battir eggplant, a long, slender variety grown almost nowhere else. Villagers describe it as sweet enough to eat raw, closer in texture and flavor to a cucumber than to the eggplant sold elsewhere in the region.

A crop like that survives only where the water and the soil that produced it survive too. The Battir eggplant is not a heritage curiosity kept alive for its own sake. It is a variety that exists because the terraces, the spring, and the rotation that divides its water are all still doing the job they were built for.

The Wall That Was Never Built

In the early 2010s, Israel's Ministry of Defense proposed a route for the separation barrier that would have cut through Battir's terraces, separating farmers from fields some of their families had worked for generations. Battir's villagers, together with the Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian environmental organization Friends of the Earth Middle East, challenged the route in Israel's High Court of Justice, arguing that the terraces and their irrigation system could not survive a barrier built through them.

UNESCO's emergency listing in June 2014 was granted, in part, to strengthen that case: a site already recognized as a World Heritage Site is harder to argue away in a courtroom. In January 2015, Israel's High Court froze the state's plan to build the barrier through Battir. The terraces the court was asked to weigh were the same terraces that had already been watered by the same spring for two thousand years, an argument that a courtroom does not often get to hear made so literally.

Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet born in 1941 in the village of al-Birwa, which was destroyed in 1948, wrote across more than thirty books about exile, land, and memory. Of the olive tree, the same tree that gives Battir's UNESCO listing half its name, he wrote: "If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them, their oil would become tears."

Frequently Asked Questions

Battir, Palestine, built on the hillside above the valley that holds its terraces. (Photo: יעקב, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

At FALASTIN, we aim to keep that heritage alive through our Olive Tree collection.

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