A Hail of Olives (Erev Rosh HaShana 5786)

Dedicated to ProPeaceBoston

As I advanced through childhood and youth in a city of the Israeli interior, the few Palestinians sharing my daily routes were construction workers or patients reporting to the public clinics or hospitals.

A third category, seasonal, manifests toward my middle school years. A team of traditionally-gowned Palestinian women climbs off a pickup truck to harvest the olives in what I had understood until then as a playground of special appeal. The dramatic terracing allows an urban flatlander the experience of ascension and descent along a multileveled soil connected by stairs.

In an otherwise typical tower block neighborhood in an area of the city new to me, an unusual urban retreat was equipped with the standard swing sets, a slide and a sandbox, and other structures I remember uncertainly now. I was too old for the play elements by then.

Ridable toy animals suspended on a springy base, enabling the wobbly fantasy adventures, were there a few of these on the lower level? I am inclined to say that one was a chicken. I can’t swear to it.

An array of metal amusements has been embedded in a spacious urban playground distinguished by old trees. And in season rustic harvesters will spread voluminous cloths about the olive roots and knock down all the hard little fruit, before disappearing again.

In my adolescence I could not yet articulate the lesson taught me by the annual harvesters. It happened that I learned to expect them and would not forget them.

Hindsight approaches the women again and again. As they debark from the bed of a small truck, each will manage her way down to the pavement as she will while handling the skirt of a voluminous gown.

Next these women will extend the gowned effect to the olive trees whose roots they drape with great cloths. Finally, they wield their sticks. Notice your fear. Wonder why no adult parkgoer intervenes while out-of-towners surround and thrash our municipal plantlife.

Hear the hail of falling fruit, a sound unlike that of icy pellets striking an apartment windowpane, but there is a similarity.

In the present age I witness the harvesters’ second holocaust. In this phase of their peoplehood’s predicament, the pattern of divestiture has done away with a densely built and heavily populated urban corridor resembling my formative territory. A singular pattern of Middle Eastern existence has been obliterated.

We have seen a people rise from ruination. That can happen.

They will not be the same. An abjection of this order will yield dissociated visionaries powered by the agony and outrage of an epic betrayal. We are embroiled in irresolvable horror while these are our leaders.

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— from Mixed City, a developing book of nonfiction by Naama Goldstein