The olive tree as witness and flagrant opportunism

St Grace has over the past year or so been inadvertently been putting J's socks in my sock drawer. And without saying much, though knowing they are his, I've been happily wearing them myself. They are particularly useful since I don't seem to have many of my own.

I was pondering this opportunist requisition of J's socks on my part as I drove to Israeli customs in the Givat Shaul area of Jerusalem to start the registration of our car. Literally meaning, 'Saul's Hill', this area is now an industrial zone which forms part of West Jerusalem, and is situated on the site of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. It overlooks what remains of Lifta, once a tiny Arab village, no longer inhabited, which is perched on the side of the slope below Givat Shaul.

A local friend of ours took me there, and explained the little visible bits of history as we drove. As we parked by the customs building he pointed out a building site behind tall metal walls, covered in those images of the behemoth that is to be built behind. As the diggers rumbled away the other side of the wafer wall, our friend explained that they were demolishing the last Arab house in Givat Shaul. It doesn't take long, I thought, to wipe out the traces of a previous owner, scrunching my toes uncomfortably in J's socks. No one would know they once were his. Apart from him of course. Fortunately for me, there's not even a nametape.

Although the land in and around Deir Yassin was actually purchased for the most part, starting in around 1906, from Arab inhabitants, it has a more gruesome association due to the massacre, in April 1948 of 107 villagers, half of whom were women and children, at the hands of the Irgun paramilitary force headed by Menachim Begin. As the Deir Yassin webpage explains: "The massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin is one of the most significant events in 20th-century Palestinian and Israeli history. This is not because of its size or its brutality, but because it stands as the starkest early warning of a calculated depopulation of over 400 Arab villages and cities and the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian inhabitants to make room for survivors of the Holocaust and other Jews from the rest of the world."

And just this week, the final remnant of what was there before has been effaced, leaving only the remains of the tiny village of Lifta clinging to the slope below like a limpet whose flesh has long since left the shell, to remind us of what might have been.

Our conversation moved on to families, as they often do in these parts. And our friend explained he had lost his brother over 20 years ago in the Al Aqsa mosque when Israeli soldiers shot and killed 21 people there. His father died of a heart attack 6 months after his brother was killed. But our friend is a survivor, fluent Hebrew speaking, intelligent and unjudgemental. He just gets on with what he needs to care for his wife and four daughters and educate his children in peace.

A few days earlier as we'd stood in the Garden of Gethsemane with another local friend, and looked at the gnarled but stately olive tree, that people estimate would have witnessed the night that Jesus spent there, it struck me how these trees, centuries older than most of the buildings, are some of the only witnesses in this land.

I read a report by the Ma'an news agency last week that Israeli settlers cut down more than 50 olive trees in Huwwara village south of Nablus in the northern West Bank, and that more than 5,700 trees have been cut down by settlers in the West Bank since the beginning of this year, according to the same agency.

Other than their status as a valuable resource, they are a vital witness of human time, and looking at the ancient trunk, which has withstood earthquakes, wars, sieges, floods and drought, should really be a commodity we collectively fight to preserve, if only for their symbol. They are so much more than just a branch for peace.