Some fifteen years ago, I was lucky enough to be in Palestine during the olive harvest season. So much about what I saw on that visit was overwhelmingly sad and infuriating. The ugly infrastructure of apartheid was everywhere—the huge concrete apartheid wall with the looming Israeli sniper towers, checkpoints seemingly at every turn, menacing armed soldiers and hilltops dotted with settlements. But a visit with farmers in a village outside Jenin felt like stepping into an alternate universe, full of joy and beauty.
Multiple generations of Palestinian families all gathered together in varying degrees of work and play. Teenagers, usually glued to their mobile phones, were getting gentle lessons from their elders on the best way to shake the tree branches to loosen the crop. Joyful toddlers waddled around their grandmothers and mothers, who made tea while chatting and preparing the freshest, most delicious bread I’ve ever eaten, filled with fresh cheese and za’atar.
If you could train your eyes on this scene, you could imagine, for a moment, what a free Palestine might look and sound like.
The olive harvest season is not just a time for Palestinians families to gather and celebrate their heritage. It is traditionally the economic lifeblood of Palestine, already under significant pressure because of decades of Israel’s land grabs, not to mention restrictions on exports which benefit Israeli settlers and harm Palestine’s indigenous olive economy under occupation.
The olive harvest used to be a significant part of the economy in the Gaza Strip, where olive trees are now largely a memory of a time past, before endless expanses of rubble dominated the terrain.
A site of existential threat
In recent years, on top of the ordinary hardship of occupation, the olive harvest in the West Bank has increasingly been hit with violence and danger. Gone are the days when the olive groves could offer a glimpse of a possible future life — now they are a site of existential threat and fear.
The UN reported that last week, the official week starting the olive harvest, saw nearly 200 settler attacks across the expanse of the West Bank, with casualties, property damage or both, including damage to 2,500 trees and saplings. This is already more than the 185 comparable incidents recorded during the entire olive harvest season last year in 2025, which was already the worst many could remember.
These settler attacks don’t come out of nowhere. UN human rights experts raised alarm that the Israeli military had issued orders in September for the removal of vegetation, including provisions to uproot olive trees, from approximately 339,000 square metres (84 acres) of Palestinian agricultural land in the West Bank.
In what has now become a predictable pattern, the Israeli military provided a blueprint for settler attacks on the olive harvest through its policies. It is the same military, of course, which provides armed cover for the settlers when they wage their violent attacks.
When Palestinians report that the settlers and the army are working hand in hand, this is what they mean.
News footage from Palestine this week shows this starkly. Farmers work as quickly as possible before the mobs of settlers arrive, armed with clubs or worse. For Palestinian farmers, the thought of bringing family members who aren’t able to work quickly is unimaginable now, because of the looming danger in every minute.
The settler attacks are ruthless and don’t spare any man, woman or child. Mainstream news outlets globally showed videos last weekend of settlers beating and attacking a Washington Post journalist covering the West Bank, as well as European diplomats who had been on an official visit. One journalist who tried to help his colleague reported the difficulty of reaching her. This was not only because of the settlers, but also because the Israeli military was firing tear gas and live ammunition into the area, forcing the Palestinian farmers to flee their own fields.
You don’t need much more information to guess that if that is how white Americans and Europeans are being treated, Palestinians are confronted with violence that is ten times worse.
Weaknesses in the UK government’s response
Here in Britain, Israel’s colonial settlements have had more media exposure in the past few months than possibly ever before, as the British government announced new measures last month to ban the import of settlement goods and some limited sanctions, along with other measures designed to curb the actions of what Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband called “settler terrorists”.
Whilst these measures are certainly a step in the right direction, they don’t go nearly as far as they should. This month’s spike in attacks on Palestinians harvesting their olives shows both the weaknesses of the British sanctions as they are currently formulated, but also the possibilities that could be pushed if the government is serious about tackling settler violence.
The weakness of the British government’s position is that it has rhetoric that is tough on settler violence but treats that phenomenon as its own isolated problem. Understanding the inextricable link between the settler movement, the colonial settlements already established for decades, and Israel’s military occupation itself is key to intervening in the violence.
The settlers couldn’t function as they do without the full-throated support they enjoy from the Israeli military. And despite commitments to curb the flow of arms that enable the occupation, no additional arms exports to Israel have been halted since Miliband’s announcement last month.
The problem goes even further if one understands the link between the settler movement and the Israeli government itself. The British government seems to be still entertaining the fantasy that the settler movement can be isolated and treated separately from the Israeli state.
Of course it is the Israeli state itself which, over decades and across parties, has enacted policy and funded the settlements. Nowadays top Israeli government ministers come directly from the far-right settler movement, but this is a result of decades of normalisation of settlements, rather than the start of it.
Even if you could magically remove the far-right settler movement in isolation, many of Israel’s earliest West Bank settlements are now major hubs of the Israeli agricultural industry. They profit from land grabs from Palestinians, enriching themselves from Palestinian land and water, and dominating the exports of produce abroad, whilst Palestinian olive farmers struggle, and still would even without the violent settler attacks.
In order to really tackle settler violence, the British government must extend its sanctions proposal to be state sanctions on Israel. There is no separating out the settlements from the state, and there is no legitimate trade with a state committing apartheid and genocide.
These sanctions must include, but not be limited to, a full two-way arms embargo on Israel.
Stemming from this, the tasks of the solidarity movement are clear. We must continue to push the British government to strengthen its sanctions on Israel, through lobbying and protesting, but also by exposing the contradictions in what is currently in place.
None of these actions will stop the horror of settler attacks during this olive harvest season. The coming month will be a painful time for Palestinians who are being forced to defend themselves, their families, their livelihoods and their lands.
Whilst political debates within our solidarity movement rage on, certainly we can all agree that we absolutely cannot lose sight of the stakes for Palestinians, and the horrible costs they are paying every day. But this urgency must compel our solidarity forward to push our government to enact full sanctions on Israel now.
Ryvka Barnard is the Deputy Director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign UK.
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