Olive Skins

Centering the olive tree as a symbol of Palestinian resilience under military occupation and settler colonial erasureOlive trees have been central to Palestinian life for centuries, providing wood, fuel, and sustenance. A cultural signifier of Palestinian rootedness, Palestinian olives are a valuable global commodity while, at home, ancestral gardens and groves are decimated by the militarized violence of Israel's settler colonialism. Since the formation of Israel, Palestine's olive landscapes, including harvesting practices and foodways, have been targeted, with lands stolen, ancestral foods appropriated, and ancient olive trees uprooted and destroyed. In Olive Skins, Lila Adib Sharif uplifts the olive tree as a site of Palestinian land struggle. Sharif draws on stories from Palestinian land cultivators from the West Bank, Israel, and across the diaspora, as well as individuals involved in fair trade networks, to reveal how Palestinians have seen their olive groves razed at the same moment Palestinian fair trade has hit international markets. Sharif documents Palestinians' everyday acts of resistance and resurgence in the face of genocidal violence and cultural erasure, focusing on fellahat (Palestinian land-cultivating women), food writing, and Indigenous food practices through knowledge transmitted by their foremothers. Emphasizing the importance of intergenerational storytelling between women to preserve Indigenous knowledge, ancestral lands, and food, Olive Skins examines multiple sites of Palestinian identity, oppression, and resistance—olive groves, fair trade cooperatives, family hearths, cookbooks, and social media—to illuminate the steadfastness of the people, the enduring existence of the Palestinian Indigenous nation, and the everyday work of remaining in and returning to Palestine. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.