By Omar Waheed, Madison 365, Oct 15, 2024

A community event to highlight Palestinian resilience will be held at Tenney Park on Madison’s East Side on Sunday, Oct. 27.

Madison-Rafah Sister City Project, Palestine Partners and Jewish Voice for Peace-Madison will host “Olive Harvest 2024” to honor the resilience of Palestinian families. The event will highlight ongoing efforts to spread awareness on efforts to rally against the ongoing genocide in Gaza since 2023. It will feature Palestinian foods, books, arts, and music and will educate consumers on how what they purchase affects the genocide.

In terms of how what you purchase matters, the event will call for Willy Street Co-op to remove Sabra Hummus. The product, commonly sold in grocery stores around the country, is owned by PepsiCo and the Strauss Group. Pepsi products are on the list of companies listed in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

“In the process of it, part of our goal is also to educate people about the concept of their purchasing power having to be a way that they can interact with our participation in genocide and occupation,” said Cassandra Dixon, member of Madison-Rafah Sister City Project. “Hopefully it will also prompt people to look at other places where their labor and their finances interact with policy and the occupation because it’s certainly not just Sabra. There’s so many companies that are engaged in one way or another, and have been for a long time.”

Sabra Hummus is only sold at the Northside Willy Street Co-op store on Sherman Avenue. Dixon notes that the Willy Street location is more receptive to community demands and feedback. She hopes community outreach to the grocery store will lead to the product being pulled from shelves. The event will ask attendees to write a customer comment card to achieve the goal.

There are currently no plans to try to get other grocery stores in Madison to pull Sabra Hummus off of shelves. Dixon hopes that it will lead attendees to be more conscious about where their money will go as they shop at other stores in the future.

Olive Harvest 2024 will also feature family-friendly activities aimed at educating the community. Children’s books about Palestine will be available to read and purchase. The venture through Read Palestine, a project from the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project, offers children in Madison free access to Palestinian stories and cultures through books.

“There are a number of people in Madison-Rafah [Sister Cities Project] that are parents of young children themselves. So they really have focused on reaching out to other parents of school-aged children and asking those parents to get involved with getting books into their children’s school libraries,” Dixon said. “It’s a very personal approach. It’s not just randomly writing to librarians and asking them to do something.”

Many products central to Palestinian culture will also be available. From bread to art, olive oil and olive soap, Olive Harvest will bring attention to the destruction of Palestinian olive trees and its rampant increase since the conflict in Gaza started. Currently, it’s estimated that more than one million Palestinian olive trees have been destroyed since 1967, the Ecologist reported.

The event will be a chance to give updates on a new effort to bring an 8-year-old Palestinian child to Madison for treatment. Specifics on the treatment sought for the child are not yet available. 

Olive Harvest 2024 will be held on Oct. 27, 1-4 p.m. at Tenney Park, 402 N. Thornton Ave. The event is free to attend. A vigil will be held to close out the event on East Johnson Street.