Sustaining Resistance, Cultivating Liberation: The Enduring Bond of Rooted-Resistance-Companionship between Palestinians and Olive Trees

Abstract

This thesis focuses on olive trees and Palestinians’ relationality by asking, “What role do olive trees play in Palestinian sumud?” Sumud is rooted in Palestinian culture and describes steadfastness and resilience in the face of occupation (Meari 2014; Rijke and van Teeffelen 2014). Throughout this thesis, I critically engage with Donna Haraway’s (2003) companion species concept and expand it to the rooted-resistance-companionship to comprehensively understand the relationality between Palestinians and olive trees in their context of sumud practices under the Zionist settler colonial regime. The concept of rooted-resistance-companionship emphasizes the interconnection through which Palestinians and olive trees engage in an anticolonial praxis. Through this concept, I posit a posthuman feminist (Braidotti 2022) glance and present a cultural analysis by embarking on a journey tracing the trajectory of olive trees, from their initial existence in the soil to their subsequent re-presentation in literary and visual artworks. I focus on Mahmoud Darwish’s poem Earth Pressing against Us (2003), prose Absent Presence (2010), and photographer Steve Sabella’s Till the End (2004) visual artwork. My primary interest lies in examining Israel’s Zionist terraforming strategies and how the olive tree’s journey epitomizes rooted-resistance-companionship and elucidates how olive trees and Palestinians mutually share a colonial wound stemming from the ongoing Nakba.