OLIVES IN THE SOUTH
TEXT: JENNY GUSTAFSSON
PHOTOS: JENNY GUSTAFSSON
RESEARCH: NAGHAM KHALIL, ANGELA SAADE
EDITS: NISREEN KAJ
Stories from olive groves in the southern towns of Qouzeh and Baanoub
South Lebanon is an important olive growing region; 38 percent of all olives grown in the country come from the south
Placing one foot on a low, sturdy branch and grabbing another with his hand, Ali Kolin climbs up an olive tree growing on the slopes of a valley near Baanoub, a small village in the mountains north of Saida.
He soon reaches the halfway point, standing comfortably while holding onto the tree with one hand. With a long stick in the other, he starts hitting its branches. With each strike, the olives fall. They land with soft thuds on the ground, on a large piece of white tarpaulin.
“Every season in the fields has its own sound. This is the nice thing with the harvest,” says Yasmina Zahar, who manages the olive orchard with her husband.
“Flower picking is quiet, the machines used for avocado and pomegranate are loud, and olives make a distinct sound when falling to the ground,” she says.
She stands next to the tree where Ali is harvesting with his brother and two younger men, all of them in the midst of either beating the olives or collecting them from the ground. She grabs a box, not quite filled to the brim with olives. Another woman, Ahlam al Aqraa, who works with Yasmina in the fields, takes it from the other side. Together, they carry it to another part of the grove.
“We’re a bit late with the harvest this year. Because of the war, many workers left, and we had to find people to replace them,” Yasmina says.
When they arrive with the olives, they empty the box onto a table with long metal rods running from one end to another, creating narrow openings that allow tiny branches and leaves to fall through. Sorting the olives is the last step before they are taken to the press to make oil.
“We also remove any bad or damaged olives, and we separate small ones that we will use for pickling,” Yasmina says.
Behind the women are several trees yet to be harvested, all of them with the same silver-shimmering bark and leaves typical of trees from the Oleaceae family. Some trees on the land, which Yasmina and her husband lease from a nearby monastery, were recently planted, while others have been around for hundreds, even thousands, of years.
“It’s hard to know the exact age of olive trees. But all remnants in this region date back to Roman, Phoenician, and Byzantine times,” Yasmina says.
The olive tree is one of the most important trees in the Mediterranean, a region characterized by hot, dry summers and mild winters, exactly the kind of weather olives love. The tree is native to this area: studies, including those looking at historical pollen records, show that olive cultivation first took place in the southern Levant, which encompasses southern Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine, around 6500 BC. Several centuries later, cultivation began in nearby Crete as well. It is still unclear whether seedlings and knowledge spread to the Greek island from the Levant, or if cultivation appeared in both places independently of one another. Either way, it was from these two locations that olive horticulture spread throughout the Mediterranean.
Soil analysis shows that olive trees grew in Sour, the main coastal town in southern Lebanon, as early as 7,700 years ago, before the city was founded. A grove in the northern Lebanese village of Bechaale has trees that are around 6,000 years old; elsewhere in Lebanon, you can find olive trees dating back to before the year zero.
“The olive tree is a tree that doesn’t die. I think of everything that these trees have endured. Occupations, calamities, wars, fires, earthquakes. And they are still here,” Yasmina says.
Lebanon has between 12 and 15 million olive trees, growing in groves and orchards from the north to the south. These plantations make up at least one-fifth of all agricultural land in the country, making olives the single most widely grown crop by surface area. And they provide income to more than 110,000 farmers and growers.
The land in Baanoub, cultivated since Roman times, is rented from a nearby monastery on an 18-year lease
“I love my olive trees. Whenever I harvest during the day, I go to sleep dreaming about harvesting at night. That’s how much I care for them,” Georgette el Hajj, an olive grower from the small village of Qouzeh in southern Lebanon says.
She is sitting on the veranda of her son’s apartment in Hazmieh, on the outskirts of Beirut, where she has been staying since the Israeli attacks on southern Lebanon began in October 2023. More than a year has passed since she last saw her land.
“My husband passed away a few years ago. I wouldn’t have left the village had he been alive. But my children didn’t want me to stay there alone,” she says.
She goes into the kitchen to get clementines, apples, and a knife, and brings them back to the table. A man sits on one of the chairs: it is Simon Felfle, Georgette’s neighbor in Qouzeh and a member, just like her, of the village’s agricultural cooperative. He has come to give her some zaatar he just picked in Qouzeh.
“I stayed in the south until last week. I was one of the last to leave the village,” he says.
“We’ve become used to wars. In the beginning, when they were just exchanging missiles, it was manageable. But when it escalated to an invasion, I had to leave.”
The two of them start talking about Qouzeh, where Georgette has lived since 2000. Together with her husband, whose family is from the village, she moved there after the south was freed from Israel’s occupation in 2000.
Georgette el Hajj, who grows olives in Qouzeh
“My husband was very attached to the idea of working the land. He told me that we were going there with a purpose. It was like a blessing for us,” she says.
At first, they had to work hard to remove rocks from the land and prepare the soil. The fields had been neglected for years.
“It wasn’t easy. But when we came there and started working alongside everyone in the village, I fell in love with the place,” Georgette says.
In 2004 and 2005, they planted new olive trees to grow alongside the ones that were already on the land. They also planted pine, carob, almond, and fig trees, as well as zaatar and grapes.
“In the 2006 war, many trees were destroyed. It took a long time to recover from that loss,” Georgette says.
“We’ve suffered a lot in the south. We had to leave our land in 2006, and our houses were damaged. Now, we’re going through the same thing again.”
For two years in a row, Georgette has not been able to harvest her olives. Simon could only harvest some of his last year, from trees growing near his house.
“When you cannot harvest, you lose all the olives left on the trees. And if your fields are hit, you have to trim any damaged and burned branches to save the trees,” he says.
Yasmina and Ahlam work together to clean and sort the olives
South Lebanon’s olive production, which accounts for 38 percent of Lebanon’s entire output, has been hit hard by the war. The Israeli army has targeted both lands and olive processing facilities. On October 15, its spokesperson issued a direct warning to people, telling them not to go to their olive fields in the south. George Mitri, director of the Land and Natural Resources program at the University of Balamand, says that around 22 percent of Lebanon’s olive oil production was lost this season. He has been monitoring land destruction in the south, including damage to forests, grasslands, and fields.
“The total damaged land that we have assessed and mapped is around 5,745 hectares,” he says.
“Olive trees catch fire very easily. I call these monumental trees because they survive for such a long time. They are like relics. And now you see them burn in just a few seconds.”
In Baanoub, which sits right at the edge of the South Lebanon governorate (or muhafaza), Yasmina and her husband were able to harvest their olives both last year and this season.
“We are at the limit of where people could harvest this year. Farther south, very few were able to harvest their olives,” she says.
Together with Ahlam, she has filled several large boxes with cleaned and sorted olives. They are stacked on top of each other on the ground, waiting to be taken to the press.
Two dogs living on the farm, one white and one gray, are sleeping in the shade.
Most of the olives have a faint black tinge. Others are green, only beginning to turn dark. Yasmina likes to mix olives from different trees when making olive oil, as each variety contributes a different flavor.
“Black olives are usually sweeter. Green olives will give you an oil that is strong and slightly pungent,” she says.
“Olives change color as a sign of ripening. Some change from green to black, others from yellow to green.”
Lebanon produces around 20,000 tons of olive oil each year, but the figures vary from year to year. Some 70-80 percent of all olives are turned into oil
Soon, all olives on the table have been cleaned and sorted. Yasmina and Ahlam take an empty box and walk over to collect more from the far end of the grove, where the others are harvesting.
Zahreddine Kolin, the younger brother of Ali, is in the midst of collecting olives that have fallen to the ground. He grabs one end of a big tarpaulin sheet and lifts it up, so that all fruit gathers in the middle. Then, he starts transferring them into boxes.
This is the first year that Zahreddine and Ali are working with Yasmina. The brothers come from Kurdistan in Syria and have been living and working in Lebanon for many years. When the war started, they lost both their jobs and all their belongings.
“We were living in a village near Bint Jbeil. I was working in construction, driving a truck. When the attacks started in the south last year, we had to escape. We went to Burj Rahhal near Sour and stayed there for several months,” Zahreddine says.
Ali and Zahreddine Kolin care for the olives as soon as they fall from the tree.
“But then that area became unsafe as well, so we had to leave once again. We left with our children on our motorbikes. We left everything behind,” he says.
One of the younger men working with the brothers, wearing soft sneakers and jeans, climbs quickly to the top of a tree. As soon as he gets up, he starts beating the branches. With each strike, a handful of olives falls to the ground.
Yasmina and her husband’s olives are of two varieties: smoukmouki and souri. Souri olives are common in Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine and are said to be named after the city of Sour. Many Lebanese olive farmers also grow varieties called ayrouni, shatawi, shami, and baladi, and the so called teliene, Italian, olives.
Georgette says that most people in Qouzeh grow baladi, “local,” olives.
“They are easy to harvest, not like teliene olives, which are tough because you have to pick each olive separately,” she says.
Both she and Simon say that olive oil from southern Lebanon tastes better than oil from other regions.
“Olive oil from the south is really special. I think that both the soil and the weather play a role,” Georgette says.
Even within the same region, she says, trees growing in different locations give different kinds of olives. The villages around Qouzeh, for example, all have their own profiles.
“Naqqoura is not far from Qouzeh. But the villages in between all have olives that taste different from ours. Like Yarin, for instance, their olives are very green, almost as if they have been dyed,” Georgette says.
During the war, her family has not been able to make their own olive oil. They miss it dearly.
“When my children want to eat labneh now, they can’t find oil that is as good as ours,” she says.
Olive oil is an essential part of Lebanese cooking, just like in all diets around the Mediterranean. The region is home to 95 percent of the world’s total olive cultivation area, and few typical Mediterranean dishes can be prepared without using olive oil. This practice can be traced back through history: archaeological discoveries of stone presses and mortars show that olives have been used and consumed in similar ways for millennia.
The olive tree has always carried great symbolical importance. Dating back to Greek mythology, olives have signified peace, victory, and life. Homer cited olives both in his Odyssey and Iliad (where he described olive oil as “liquid gold”).
The ancient Egyptians used oil for their mummification procedures, while athletes in Olympia would massage it onto their bodies and be crowned with olive wreaths in case of victory.
Perhaps the most well-known legend of all is that of Athena, the Greek goddess who won a contest with Poseidon over the city that now bears her name. After planting an olive tree atop the Acropolis – which is said to still grow there today – the people of the city chose her as their patron deity, over the god of the sea and waters. In Ancient Greece, there were state-owned olive trees believed to have propagated from Athena’s original tree. Anyone who uprooted them was punished with banishment from the city.
Given the olive tree’s rootedness in the region, it has long been a main theme of Palestinian resistance art and poetry. Mahmoud Darwish refers to it as “the hillside’s modest lady” and “a friendly sister of eternity, neighbor of time.” Palestine is inscribed as a “land of olives and vines” on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Olives are also important fruits in the region’s Jewish culture, as they were brought as offerings to the temples alongside crops like wheat, barley, dates, and pomegranates.
Harvesting olives from the tree
Georgette, on her veranda in Hazmieh, continues to talk about the olive trees on her land and what they meant to her husband. Before his passing, when he needed a cane to walk and eventually used a wheelchair, he would still insist on going to the fields to have his coffee.
“One time, the first year after he started his chemotherapy, he got so tired that he fell asleep under the trees. He loved working on the land and made the rest of us fall in love with it too,” she says.
“When he passed away, I felt as if the olive trees were mourning. I could see how sad they looked. They would yield more and were in better shape before his passing.”
She takes out her phone and shows a photo of her and her late husband, sitting next to each other on a tractor, looking out over their fields. She has added a frame to the image, with tiny colorful hearts. There are also photos of her daughter, who stayed in the village where she lives in the south, taking care of animals – pigs, cows, a horse, and even pigeons – that sought shelter as the war worsened.
Georgette shows a photograph of her and her late husband
Part of Israel’s warfare has been to bring total destruction to villages and land near the border. Early in the war, the region was hit with white phosphorus, a substance that has long-term effects on the environment, including soil contamination, which causes diminished fertility. Several organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the UN, have documented Israel’s use of it in southern Lebanon.
“People are hesitant now to buy and use olive oil from the south because of this. There wasn’t any white phosphorus contamination in our village, but there’s still worry,” Simon says.
Qouzeh is just a short drive from Aita ash Shaab and Ramiyeh, border towns that have been almost entirely destroyed by Israel. Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN special rapporteur on housing, has stated that the Israeli army’s demolition of villages in southern Lebanon, just like its destruction in Gaza, amounts to “domicide” – the deliberate and systematic destruction of homes and housing.
In Palestine, Israel’s destruction of the country’s olive heritage has been well documented, both in previous years and during the current war on Gaza.
The view over the valleys near Baanoub
“If I would go and find my trees burned, I cannot even begin to describe how deeply sad and disappointed I would feel, knowing all the hard work I put into nurturing them,” Georgette says.
Both her and Simon have seen their homeland destroyed before. Simon’s family home was damaged and rebuilt twenty years ago.
“The older generations were committed to restoring their houses, to keep the family heritage alive,” he says.
Georgette’s parents and grandparents once left the south because of the bad situation during the years of occupation.
“That generation left the village and went to Beirut. At first, they didn’t want to leave, but then they found jobs in the city and stayed there, so the village grew smaller and smaller,” she says.
“That’s why we decided to establish our cooperative now, to help people remain in the village.”
Hippocrates, often considered the father of modern medicine, called olive oil “a great healer”
It’s afternoon on the land in Baanoub, and the harvest is done for the day. Yasmina, Ahlam, Zahreddine, and the others still have a lot of work to do before all the trees are harvested, and they plan on starting again the next morning. For now, they weigh each box of sorted olives on a scale and load them into the back of Yasmina’s car. The olives need to be taken to the nearby press as soon as possible in order to produce the best quality oil.
Lebanon has hundreds of olive mills (544 according to a 2017 industry overview), so most olive farmers will have one in their vicinity.
“The last cleaning process is done by a machine at the press. It removes any dried or damaged olives. In the end, sixty kilos of olives give one bottle of oil,” Yasmina says.
“My own favorite is green olives, the kind that grows on the old trees on our upper land. I always make some oil using only those olives,” she says.
“Olive oil is what you use to preserve and prolong life. It has to do with transmission and survival. The olive tree is an essential tree. You get edible fruits and oil, and you can make things with the leaves and the wood. You can live for ages with this.”
