Bringing Palestinians and Israelis Together Through Olive Oil Production

“Olive oil is the tool that is bring­ing us together,” said Nadia Giol, the chief group facil­i­ta­tor at Sindyanna of Galilee.

Giol is a Palestinian cit­i­zen of Israel who works at Sindyanna’s vis­i­tors cen­ter, where she shows off the high-qual­ity local olive oil pro­duc­tion and explains the pur­pose of the women-led, Arab-Israeli com­pany.

Sindyanna of Galilee is not a tra­di­tional olive oil pro­ducer. Instead, the non-profit buys olive oil and other agri­cul­tural prod­ucts from local farm­ers in the oil-soaked Galilee – a large coastal plain stretch­ing from north­ern Israel to south­ern Lebanon – bot­tles the oil and sells it domes­ti­cally or exports it abroad.

With the money earned from sell­ing the olive oil, the com­pany invests in the local com­mu­nity by plant­ing olive trees, help­ing farm­ers become cer­ti­fied fair-trade and organic and installing the nec­es­sary infra­struc­ture, such as irri­ga­tion.

Hadas Lahav, the non-profit’s co-founder and chief exec­u­tive, told Olive Oil Times that she has spent her life try­ing to forge a deeper con­nec­tion between Palestinians and Israelis with the olive tree – a mil­len­nia-old sym­bol of peace – at the heart of her efforts.

“My whole life, I was look­ing for ways to improve our soci­ety,” she said. ​“Whether it’s through women empow­er­ment, Arab-Jewish col­lab­o­ra­tion or employ­ment projects, every­thing that can make our soci­ety more just and fair.”

She started Sindyanna of Galilee in 1996 after rec­og­niz­ing the untapped eco­nomic poten­tial of the region’s boun­ti­ful olive groves.

“There is a lot of olive oil in the Galilee,” she said. ​“Twenty-five years ago, the olive groves mostly belonged to Arab farm­ers. And there was a big prob­lem with mar­ket­ing and adjust­ing the olive oil to the require­ments of the mod­ern mar­ket.”

At the time, most of these farm­ers were pro­duc­ing olive oil to con­sume at home, but Lahav saw the eco­nomic poten­tial that a lit­tle invest­ment in har­vest­ing and milling tech­niques could bring to the rural com­mu­nity.

“We saw that we can not only con­tribute to the improve­ment of the qual­ity of the olive oil but also find the bridges between the Arab farm­ers or the Arab olive oil pro­duc­ers and the Israeli mar­ket, and later on to the global mar­ket,” she said. ​“This is where our jour­ney started.”

Sindyanna of Galilee is based in the Arab town of Kafr Kanna, which Christians cel­e­brate as the loca­tion where Jesus Christ mirac­u­lously trans­formed water into wine. At the company’s ware­house, they trans­form raw olive oil into the end prod­uct that sells for up to €18 per half-liter in Western European cap­i­tals.

Once they have pur­chased the oil from the farm­ers, Lahav and her team trans­port it to the ware­house. Here, they fil­ter the olive oil, store it in state-of-the-art con­tain­ers, bot­tle the oil and even­tu­ally ship it to stores across the coun­try and around the world.

“We know almost all of the pro­duc­ers,” Lahav said. ​“We know them per­son­ally. We visit them and bring back not only the food prod­uct but also the story. It is very impor­tant for us that peo­ple who con­sume our prod­ucts know where they come from, what they rep­re­sent, and their story.”

“We are try­ing to build an alter­na­tive nar­ra­tive to the over­whelm­ing Israeli nar­ra­tive, which is based on sep­a­ra­tion and build­ing walls between the two dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties instead of bring­ing them together,” she added. ​“Sindyanna is try­ing to bring an alter­na­tive nar­ra­tive to Arab and Jewish com­mu­ni­ties.”

While Lahav, Giol and the rest of the team at Sindyanna are work­ing to share a vision of hope and com­mu­nity through extra vir­gin olive oil, they face plenty of chal­lenges in real­iz­ing this vision.

“On the agri­cul­tural level, the biggest chal­lenge of say local farm­ers is devel­op­ing irri­ga­tion sys­tems,” Lahav said. ​“Because of cli­mate change and the fact that sum­mers in the Middle East are get­ting hot­ter, the effect on the olive trees is very dra­matic.”

“Traditionally, olive groves in the Galilee are not irri­gated,” she added. ​“They are rain­fed, but we found out that you can get much big­ger crops and much bet­ter qual­ity by irri­gat­ing the olives.”

The team at Sindyanna of Galillee also works to edu­cate farm­ers about mod­ern har­vest­ing and pro­duc­tion tech­niques. Lahav believes that olive oil can fol­low in the wine sec­tor’s foot­steps in Israel, which has seen the value of its exports triple in the past 20 years.

“We are a lit­tle bit behind the wine indus­try with olive oil, but I think we are get­ting there,” Lahav said. ​“There is a global effort, and with the col­lab­o­ra­tion among all the olive oil pro­duc­ers, we can bring the olive oil to a new stage of a high-qual­ity com­mod­ity.”

One of the ways in which Israeli pro­duc­ers will arrive at this point is by demon­strat­ing their qual­ity at inter­na­tional com­pe­ti­tions.

To that end, Sindyanna of Galillee has earned var­i­ous inter­na­tional acco­lades, includ­ing a Silver Award at the 2021 NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition for a del­i­cate Barnea mono­va­ri­etal.

“This year, we sent two olive oils to New York,” Lahav said. ​“One is a Coratina from our fair-trade olive grove near Nazareth. And the other is an organic olive oil, which is a blend of Coratina and Barnea olives.”

Lahav said that Sindyanna of Galillee would be very happy to win more awards at the NYIOOC but cel­e­brates the fact that so many peo­ple are invested in olive oil com­pe­ti­tions, espe­cially at a moment of increased uncer­tainty about the future due to con­flict.

“We are opti­mistic that the world is con­cen­trated on an olive oil com­pe­ti­tion,” Lahav said. ​“Everyone who is now fight­ing for a bet­ter world, against the war [in Ukraine], every­thing that is not blood­shed and vio­lence is good, is absolutely opti­mistic.”

“Let’s do olive oil com­pe­ti­tions and not war,” she con­cluded.