Dozens of attendees gathered around a long table adorned with cheese pastries, fresh vegetables, and hummus, enthusiastically stacking their plates. A ceiling embellished with fabrics and archival photographs of Palestine hung from tangled strings, while the walls covered in vibrant revolutionary posters decorated the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago. In the center of the room, piles of books stacked on a table invited guests to draw connections between the literary world and the physical exhibit they found themselves in — Beneath the Blessed Tree, an exhibition celebrating the olive harvest season in Palestine.
Image courtsey of Marah Abdel Jaber.
Curated by Marah Abdel Jaber via the University of Chicago’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), the exhibit took place in the backdrop of the Palestinian olive harvest season. Held on Nov. 29, 2023 the exhibit opened with Hana Elias’ film, If These Stones Could Talk offering an immersive screening-panel experience paying homage to the olive tree as a symbol of revolutionary struggle. The event included panel interviews with Elias, her father Nassib, and her brother Zain.
Both the film and the exhibit can only be described as love letters to the land, whose meticulous curation zooms in on a specific theme to tell the broader story of Palestinian resistance.
Abdel Jaber's concept for the exhibit took root in a journal entry penned three years prior, where she envisioned a multifaceted space incorporating a library, café, and exhibit — a versatile center for fostering accessible and creative knowledge production. This guiding framework of accessible and creative knowledge production permeates much of Abdel Jaber's work. Growing up on the U.S.-Mexico border, she found herself as one of only a few Arabs in a region defined by intense violence, which agriculturally and systemically paralleled Palestine in many ways. Despite commonalities in geography and politics, the violence at the border and in Palestine manifested differently, from Abdel Jaber's perspective. Recognizing the power of creative and accessible knowledge production, she saw it as an avenue to welcome others into her own experience and to both contrast and connect her homeland and the community that shaped her in the diaspora.
Image courtsey of Marah Abdel Jaber.
Her openness to sharing her vision has been the driving force behind the exhibit. While curating the exhibit proved to be a somewhat solitary journey, marked by threats and pushback from Zionists, Abdel Jaber found support from fellow Palestinians. Event attendee and community organizer Malak Kanan told Palestine Square that she had attended the event not only to support her friend Marahbut also because, “[she] had been a victim of artistic censorship” herself.
Image courtsey of Marah Abdel Jaber.
Even prior to the exhibit, support from the Palestinian community for the project was palpable. When Abdel Jaber attended the American Muslims for Palestine conference in early November, she connected with Palestinian vendors collaborating with food producers in the West Bank. Upon learning about her work, the vendors generously contributed their inventories for her screening night. This collaborative and supportive spirit extended to her partnership with Hana Elias for the film screening. The two decided to unite their creative efforts during a conversation at the Palestine Writes festival, culminating in a larger project with CMES.
In the documentary, Elias travels to her family’s home in Palestine. She arrives during the olive harvest season as her family attempts to revive their olive grove after decades of living in America, an intimate vignette juxtaposed with a backdrop of Israeli warplanes.
Exhibit display, image courtsey of Marah Abdel Jaber.
As the season unfolds in the film, Elias’ father Nassib, a custodian of the peasant tradition, explains that olives are not to be plucked until it rains. The rain cleans away the dust of the summer and allows the olives to become richer as they absorb the rainfall. He spends time showing his children how to plant and harvest and speaks candidly about his apprehension in reviving the olive grove. The featured clip ends with Palestinian farmers competing with one another, not to sell their olives, but rather to feed each other from their own harvest.
Exhibit display, image courtsey of Marah Abdel Jaber.
In discussing his decision to leave his home in New York for their homeland in Palestine, Nassib says that “If the [olive trees] withstood all these difficult wars, we could also live here.” During the event’s panel, Nassib added to this sentiment, telling the audience that life in the West became relentlessly monotonous for him, and that as his desire to return grew stronger, going back seemed like the next logical step. In contrast, Nassib's son Zain, who was returning for the first time, explained to the audience how he grappled with contradictions between his Western studies in indigenous agricultural practice and the reality of indigenous practices taught to him by his father in the homeland. This dissonance, underlying both the rhetorical emptiness of Zain’s Canadian education and his father's sense of restlessness in the West, divulges the very nature of settler colonial dynamics themselves.
Community organizer and event attendee Omar Shanti spoke to this theme, stating that, “the event articulated well the symbiotic relationship between the indigenous and their land which… stands in stark contrast with Israel's wanton destruction.”
Exhibit display, image courtsey of Marah Abdel Jaber.
With nothing to work with but a facsimile of the source from which they extract, settlers and Western institutions alike try to replicate deep, lively traditions to no avail. These traditions have been cultivated through a genuine necessity to learn from and grapple with the land over time — a task which is itself antithetical to the rapid, plundering character that defines all fronts of colonial theft: geographical, agricultural, epistemological, and otherwise. From atrocity propaganda utilizing the narratives of Deir Yassin to staging photographs with animals they claimed to “rescue” from the rubble, Zionists’ attempts to replicate, replace, and ultimately become the indigenous are destined to fail since destruction cannot be creation, death cannot be life.
Palestinian farmers, competing to feed one another, sow physical and psychological resolve back into the Palestinian revolutionary spirit. Juxtaposed with settler colonialism — a project that offers only extraction and death from its inception — these acts of resistance set up the Palestinian struggle as one that continually breathes life back into itself. By its very nature, it cannot die. By its very nature, it will be victorious.
Exhibit display, image courtsey of Marah Abdel Jaber.
Much like the olive harvest, the Palestinian cause is ripest in moments of transition, where one season struggles to be born from the season before it — washing away the dust of the summer, flourishing under the flood of resistance.
