Holding Olives: Preserving Culture in Times of War
Artists Document Land Sovereignty in South Lebanon
Granddaughter of the Olive Tree, Yaroun, South Lebanon, 2022. Analogue photography by Zeinab Mahfoud.
My uncle’s father, my honorary jiddo, led us to an olive tree in the abandoned Nejmeh Square in Beirut. We gathered around as he reached up high for an olive to show my cousins and I how squeezing it would release its silky juice. The bitter scent and unripe tartness was a conduit of time—an exchange between a proud jiddo and excited learners drawn toward the land amid tired architecture and dissenting street art leading us from Martyrs’ Square.
Later, as we drove through our ancestral village of Qaraoun in the Beqaa Valley, jiddo took us to his patches of land where he planted almost 200 olive trees some 50 years ago. Lamenting that it was not olive season yet, I beamed as jiddo showed us the ripe fig trees co-habitating next to the olive trees. We began to eat straight from them, all of us cousins taking his lead as he harvested buckets of figs to share with family, like my mom had done before me.
I returned home to Canada with a small olive branch and a bag of exposed film rolls, ready to forge memories into art and facilitate more learning from the teachings and direct experience with the land. I held the material traces of home, carried them pressed in the pages of an old recipe book, feeling completely transformed.
In October 2025, summer had turned to fall, and I phoned jiddo to check on the olive harvest season. He told me the yield was quite small. It was to be expected, as the effects of climate change, rising temperatures, and drought (the worst in 65 years) affected the size and quantity of olives, which rely on rain for irrigation. All of Lebanon was feeling it, but in the South, where 38 percent of the country’s olives come from, the effects of Israeli military violence and Zionist occupation inhibited the olive harvest to another level.
Artists responded with acts of preservation and knowledge mobilization. Photographer Zeinab Mahfoud and filmmaker/journalist Angie Mrad positioned their artworks as ways to honour the food ritual in light of how olive trees are not just casualties but targets themselves. Their artworks radiate with love for the land and dedication to olives as resistance for the South.
It was the first olive harvest season since the so-called ceasefire agreement between Lebanon and Israel went into action on November 27, 2024—yet it was far from usual.
Olives under attack
In 2024, many olives remained unpicked due to escalating war and mass displacement, impacting a large source of Lebanon’s economic and cultural sustenance. To this day, the South—especially the border villages—still face prolonged displacement, occupation, and attacks, as the Lebanese Armed Forces neglects to defend the border while aiming to disarm the resistance.
The Israel Occupation Forces (IOF) uses ecocide as a weapon of war in Palestine and this could easily be classified as the case in Lebanon. They are responsible for the destruction, burning, and uprooting of ancient olive trees and other agricultural assaults—among the significant life lost. In this context, the relationship between food sovereignty and land sovereignty is one and the same.
According to a report by the Beirut regional office of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Israel’s attacks affected 36,000 farmers in Lebanon during the 2024 war, leaving 71 percent unable to access their lands. Damages were extensive, impacting olive trees the most—reflecting 57 percent of agricultural damages—followed by fruit trees and grapevines.
More than 60,000 ancient olive trees (with an average age of 150 years) were destroyed and the use of white phosphorus munitions on the South has caused long-term soil and water contamination. While the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reported USD 700 million in agricultural damages and losses in Lebanon between October 2023 to November 2024, the study by Rosa Luxemburg Foundation reports that damage estimates overall exceed $3 billion as of August 2025, “compounding the existing economic crisis.”
Given the gravity of the situation, efforts to preserve culture relationally, collectively, and creatively are important gestures of defiance, which artists are enacting in South Lebanon—efforts that deepen the significance of the olives with each passing year.
Rooted and uprooted
While visiting Lebanon last summer, I attended a film screening in Horsh Beirut dedicated to agriculture and land sovereignty. One of the films that touched me the most was Shifting Roots (2025), a short documentary directed by Angie Mrad about 81-year-old Nouhad of the border town of Marjayoun who was forced to flee her home. The film follows her brief return during the war to collect some things and harvest a small amount of olives outside her house.
Nouhad’s joy for the small amount of olives is immense. In the film, Nouhad says, “I’ll keep the hope, hope is beautiful. What can we do? There is nothing we can do. We smile, that’s life, if we die, we’ll die happy. Like the olive tree is rooted in the land, so are we.” The name “Shifting Roots” references the destruction of olive trees, but also the experience of displacement.
Shifting Roots, a short documentary by Angie Mrad following the story of Marjayoun-native Nouhad, who was forced to flee due to Israeli attacks. 2025.
In an interview with the Beirut-born and raised South Lebanese director, she informed me that the majority of Nouhad’s olive trees are located in an orchard currently still under shelling.
Despite the accepted risks taken by those who choose to stay on their land, filming in a war zone comes with certain professional responsibilities, which were important to Mrad. As a journalist in South Lebanon, Mrad is used to staying despite vulnerability to violence. However, as the director on set, she had the job of deciding when the crew should clear the area.
“I don’t want to take risks on the people, especially when it is my own project and when I have to make the decision. And I was a director doing a documentary, so it wasn’t something like breaking news,” she told me. “When we go somewhere, we do a risk assessment, and I place limits… that’s why when we arrive, I take the most important shots… entering the house and seeing her stuff, then picking the olives.”
In the film, we hear Mrad ask Nouhad if she hears the bombing, and Nouhad responds, “It’s just one.” She is cupping a handful of green and purple olives, almost shrugging at the news. Mrad tells me that when she held a private screening for Nouhad and her family, it was the first time Nouhad’s children knew that she had gone to Marjayoun during the war, since they had asked her not to go for fear of safety.
Still from Angie Mrad’s Shifting Roots, available on Al Jazeera. 2025.
“There were four or five strikes and we started hearing them getting louder and louder,” Mrad said as she described the filming day. Her friend called her and said the occupation had just struck close by, so Mrad instructed the crew to pack up and go back to Beirut even though she had hoped to film a sit-in interview in Marjayoun.
At the Q&A after the screening, Mrad said, “you could feel it—not just hear it—you could feel the strikes getting closer.” She added that she chose to film about Nouhad, her neighbour of 25 years, because she represents resilience and hope to her. Three quarters of Nouhad’s orchard had already been destroyed at the time of filming, Mrad further explained during her Q&A.
“She always says we are as resilient as the olive trees,” she said about Nouhad—who is hopeful that she will be able to participate in the olive harvest next year. “When I was having lunch with her in Marjayoun, when she was pouring the olive oil for me; she said, ‘yeah, but this is not new, this is not from this season, because we couldn’t.’”
Granddaughter of the Olive tree. Taken in Yaroun, South Lebanon. 2022. Analogue photography by Zeinab Mahfoud.
Collective labor, collective reward
Usually, the resulting olives and olive oil from the harvest are enough for Lebanese people to sustain themselves for the year, gift them to family and friends, and for some, to sell them. South Lebanese photographer Zeinab Mahfoud said this year’s olive harvest was different from the others. “The major difference is that there was no longer a sense of excitement for this season, it was more like a sense of trying to survive,” she said.
Her grandparents’ neighbors were only able to harvest 4 kg instead of their usual 50 because of damage and lack of access to their land. شجر الزيتون مش حامل السنة” the villagers would say, meaning: “The olive trees aren’t holding this year.”
Mahfoud was unable to access her family’s trees this fall, so she participated in the olive harvest with her husband’s family in Jezzine, a southern town that’s a bit farther from the border. Their olive trees are on the same land as their house, making it easier to access.
Mahfoud, whose maternal hometown is Yaroun and paternal hometown is Aitaroun, was born and raised in Sydney, Australia and had visited Lebanon twice before moving in 2022, living between the villages and Beirut. “My maternal grandparents, my uncles and aunts’ homes are all destroyed,” she said. Last October, she made the difficult decision to move back to Sydney for a few years until it is possible to return.
“Because of the amount of destruction, we no longer had a house to go back to. We intended to live in my grandparents’ house. The house was no longer there, I no longer had work, and we could no longer survive living in Beirut,” she said.
Beyond safety concerns, the relative she usually harvests with in Yaroun had moved, making it impossible to harvest there this year. “His house was bombed, and then he got cancer and moved back to New York,” she said.
UNIFIL and the Lebanese Armed Forces provided escorts between October 16 to 20 to be able to harvest, prune, plough, and cut firewood safely from a number of South Lebanese villages, including hers. However, the land owner needed to apply for the escort, and without him there, it was not possible, she said.
The escorting process had been initiated due to a lack of government support that caused people to utilize UNIFIL—who sought permission from the IOF and coordinated with the Lebanese army to perform safety evaluations. Attaining clearance to access one’s own land was frustrating and the buzzing of drones added pressure through surveillance as an additional form of psychological warfare. Those who were able to do the escorted harvests still did not have a fruitful season, Mahfoud said.
Her photographic series from her first year of the harvest, Granddaughter of the Olive Tree (2022), was driven by a desire to understand how the process works and what the cultural connection to olives is. “Figs, dates, olives, pomegranates—these are all foods that are mentioned in the Quran that we tend to,” she said.
Mahfoud’s photos show the many details of the collective task of the olive harvest. Some people are on the ladder while others hold the ladder and more pick from the ground. While they work, they keep their tea and fig jam on the side to nibble on. In having made the photographs, she feels an urgency as well. Her ancestral village depicted in the images suffered extensive damage since the photos were taken.
“This is part of our lineage, part of our heritage, and part of my roots, and it’s true that the olives and the olive trees have been there long before any of us arrived, and long before the IOF and the whole occupation came to be—so it’s a reminder that this is part of me, part of my land, and part of my heritage,” she said.
Granddaughter of the Olive tree. Taken during the olive harvest in Yaroun, South Lebanon. 2022. Analogue photography by Zeinab Mahfoud.
Mahfoud performed the harvest with her grandmother, inspiring the title of the work. She enjoyed learning it with her because she has “green hands” and is a great harvester, she said. The intergenerational implications of learning this land knowledge was an important reminder for Mahfoud that olives are entangled with her identity and with the South.
Reminiscing on her first harvest, she expresses how interactive the working day felt: “We would have lunch and enjoy this time together. It’s not just a job that you’re doing. It isn’t about the result afterwards… It really is about doing this together as a family,” she says.
After the outdoor labor, the olives make their way inside the home. “It’s all we see,” she says. The harvesting process Mahfoud learned is very traditional because her uncle tends to the trees “like they’re a child,” so most tasks are done by hand rather than with machinery that speeds up the process.
Mahfoud describes the energy and exchange of the harvest season as a festival. There is a week to two-week period where everyone goes out early in the morning and the entire village is bustling with conversations about the oil. “You get taste testing around and we would have debates over what the difference is with the oil, who’s got the nicest oil… Whereas this year, it was really like, how much can we pick in what amount of time, because we need to go back to Beirut.”
The collective spirit of the South’s olive harvest had been shrouded with the heaviness of loss mixed with logistical anxieties, yet land workers persisted and the role of art became clearer in its sociopolitical purpose and potential.
Liberating the land, liberating the people
Still from Angie Mrad’s Shifting Roots, available on Al Jazeera. 2025.
The struggle for a liberated land is a local, regional, and global issue. The IOF’s attacks on trees serve multiple functions—they weaken the economy, attack culture, eliminate cover for the resistance, and make the land unlivable for Israel’s expansionist fantasies toward a “Greater Israel” that includes Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan.
Mahfoud was recently hit with the realization that her artwork captures scenes she might not see again. For this reason, she understands her work as an act of preservation. “It’s an archive, ensuring that our stories don’t disappear,” she says. “I fear that one day, there’s no longer going to be a South Lebanon, and it’ll be Northern Israel, and so my art is a reflection of that. It’s a reflection of the way previous generations really understand their own environment that’s around them.”
Mahfoud and Mrad’s artworks affirm South Lebanese presence and foodways through olives. They are not only archives, but serve as calls to action for other Lebanese people and the international community in solidarity against the human rights abuses currently being inflicted by the Zionist entity (with Western support).
“Media and phones are the most powerful tool right now to show the world what is really happening, to show the truth,” says Mrad. She is unsure if justice will come from it, but she remains hopeful despite the lack of progress since 2023, citing the global protests for Palestine as a positive step. “It’s gonna take time, but that’s where our role comes in as storytellers, journalists, artists—it is to keep telling these stories,” she said.
From an environmental standpoint, the non-profit Arab Group for the Protection of Nature is committed to replanting efforts in Lebanon and in Gaza, where more than 1.6 million olive trees have been uprooted. “Defiance is our response, and agriculture is our resistance,” they shared on Instagram.
This perspective of resistance is shared by Mahfoud, who connects the olive harvest with refusal and vitality: “It’s a stance of us saying that we’re still here, our olives are still growing, we’re still harvesting, which means we’re still living,” she said. “So that sovereignty is confirming our existence in this place that is ours.”
Granddaughter of the Olive tree. Taken in Yaroun, South Lebanon. 2022. Analogue photography by Zeinab Mahfoud.
By working the land, South Lebanese people affirm their deeply rooted presence and protect the longevity of future generations in place. Along with the violence of the IOF and the negligence of the Lebanese government, the land itself is suffering from the effects of climate change. Mahfoud suggests that if we return to the way our ancestors used to do things, specifically with the environment and with agriculture, we might see a change.
Food sovereignty and land sovereignty are vital to the future of the South and all of Lebanon and Bilad al-Sham/the Levant. Forced separation from the land must be fought against, but growing our relationship with the land is also something to work towards. Olives are more than a symbol or a product. They feed the soul and root us to home.
Afterword
In March 2026, after more than 15,000 ceasefire violations in 15 months, Israeli violence ramped up its daily killing and destruction into another war—which in fact had not ended—causing more than 1200 deaths and 1.1 million people displaced by the end of the month. Occupation of South Lebanon broadened across the Litani River, with attempts at a ground invasion and stated aims at a “larger buffer zone.” Divisions within Lebanon have widened and South Lebanese and Gazan artists and journalists are demanding dignity and solidarity beyond witnessing. A published statement by Palestinian and Arab thought leaders included a proposal for a Charter for Comprehensive Liberation to “confront this historic moment with courage and ethical commitment.” The genocidal Zionist entity continues to spread propaganda and threats while terrorizing Lebanon with sonic booms, airstrikes, white phosphorus munitions, dropped leaflets, evacuation notices, and attacks on agriculture, journalists, healthcare workers, refugee camps, families, animals, and infrastructure—disproportionately impacting the South, but also Dahye and parts of Beqaa. A survey of 15,025 farmers by the Ministry of Agriculture found that 76.6 percent are currently displaced from the South, 87 percent of olive presses have been abandoned due to displacement, and 22 percent of the country’s agricultural land has been damaged. Angie Mrad continues to report from South Lebanon and Zeinab Mahfoud recently held an art exhibition and screening fundraiser in Sydney themed around olives in South Lebanon.
Christina Hajjar
Christina Hajjar is a Lebanese Canadian artist, writer, and cultural worker based in Winnipeg on Treaty 1 Territory. Her practice considers intergenerational inheritance, domesticity, and place through diaspora, body archives, and cultural iconography. Her filmThe Landmarks of Memorywas awarded Best International Short Documentary at the 2025 Lebanese Independent Film Festival. She was a recipient of the 2020 PLATFORM Photography Award and her publicationDiaspora Daughter / Diaspora Dykewon Artzine of the Year in 2021. Hajjar is passionate about independent publishing and editsHerizons Magazine(on feminism),Carnation Zine(on diaspora and displacement), andqumra journal(on world cinema). Her writing has appeared inBAHR Magazine, C Magazine, BlackFlash, The Capilano Review, andThe Uniter. She holds a Bachelor of Business and Administration, a Bachelor of Arts in Women’s and Gender Studies, and a Multimedia Journalism certificate.christinahajjar.com.
