Founder of ‘Handmade Palestine’ brings globally-recognized cultural heritage to Eugene

Presenter: Handmade Palestine will be represented at the Asian Celebration July 18 by People for Justice and Peace in Palestine. Here Karen McCowan from PJPP and Nancy Vrijmoet from Church Women United interview Morgan Totah, the founder of Handmade Palestine.

Karen McCowan (People for Justice and Peace in Palestine): My name is Karen McCowan. I am a retired journalist and I am a founding member of People for Justice and Peace in Palestine, a group that was formed about a year ago.

And our mission is to educate people about the Palestinian people, culture and the situation there. Not only the war in Gaza—which is ongoing, not over, and supported by our tax dollars to Israel—but also life for people under occupation in the West Bank of Palestine.

I would like to welcome Morgan Cooper Totah, who lives in Palestine and will be visiting Eugene from July 1 through 10. She is bringing work from a group that she helped organize, Handmade Palestine, and you will be able to see and touch and purchase handcrafts made there that will support families living under very difficult circumstances in Palestine.

Nancy Vrijmoet (Church Women United): I am Nancy Vrijmoet and I have been a friend of Morgan’s family for many years, so it is very much a wonderful thing for me that she has chosen to be not only in Oregon, but part of her time in Eugene with us this week.

I am a retired educator in the Eugene 4J school district. I taught for 30 years, and before that I was a musician. I joined a group called Church Women United about 12 years ago.

It’s a national organization of women from many faith communities. And here in Eugene we have people who are very much focused on social justice and very much interested in helping others. And so our outreach is spreading further and further every year that I’m part of that group.

Our motto in Church Women United is ‘Agreed to differ, resolved to love, united to serve.’ So we don’t feel like we all have to agree on any one particular issue. We just want to agree that we’re going to try our best to help other people, and ‘united to serve’ means that we’re looking all the time for ways to help.

So it’s a big delight that Morgan is here and it’s a big delight that I get to share in some of what she’s going to be doing.

Karen McCowan (People for Justice and Peace in Palestine): Morgan, I’m hoping you can begin by just very briefly explaining to us what took you to Palestine, and then the circumstances of your life there now.

Morgan Totah (Handmade Palestine): It was kind of an accident. I couldn’t get a job with my bachelor’s degree in literature. So I spent a summer selling avocados at my aunt’s and used the money for a one-way ticket to Europe, and I was just backpacking and working my way around.

And this professor asked me if I would go visit her son who was doing a one- year missionary stint teaching English at a Catholic high school in Ramallah. And I was like, ‘Yeah, cool, a new cultural experience.’ I had no idea where I was going and what I was getting myself into.

I asked him for a host family and a job, and it was quite hard for him to find a host family ’cause that just wasn’t really a thing. And this amazing woman Fida’ Moussa—Fida’ Moussa Khaweja—took me home with her on my very first day and adopted me.

She was basically a single mom. Her husband lived and worked in the States sending money back, and she had chosen to raise her kids there. And I always say that she like raised me. It’s kind of my second family, my second growing up.

And it was through the lens and experience of being part of that family that I learned everything. I mean, I learned what American foreign policy was doing. I learned so much about Islam, I learned about Palestinian food and culture and religious holidays.

And the language, you know, it was because of the kids putting their hands on my chest and my back and saying like, say, ‘Eh,’ you can do it. It needs to like vibrate here in your chest. ‘Eh.’

You just never have the (maybe) the freedom to humiliate yourself the same way when you’re with adults or in a class. And so it, it was really like quite accidental and, and then I was so embraced and loved. And this family, you know, people always think it was for my husband that I moved there. And I’m always like, ‘Nope. I fell in love with a woman, single mom, and she became my mom. I still call her imee, my mom.

Nancy Vrijmoet (Church Women United): What first struck you when you very first saw traditional handicrafts in your area there?

Morgan Totah: This woman who brought me into her family— Fida’ —her thobe. The thobe is the traditional Palestinian dress, and she’s from a town called Al-Bireh, now a city. If any Palestinians are listening, they’re probably from Al-Bireh. And the women from Al-Bireh have the most amazing athwab, these dresses, and the colors were magnificent.

But also the amount of time that someone hand-stitched the cross-stitch, even UNESCO has recognized it as world heritage, it’s just so incredible.

And the inside, the backside of this—so if you guys see any of our crafts in Eugene, flip over the tatreez, the embroidery, and look at the backside because it is so clean that sometimes people think the backside is the front side, ’cause it’s so well done.

And the amount of labor that goes into this is just mind-blowing, especially a full dress.

My favorite thing is to go to a wedding in Al-Bireh because you know everyone’s going to to show up just dressed amazingly in these traditional dresses.

I don’t know that I paid a whole lot of attention to other crafting in the very beginning. I was so busy looking at all of the soldiers and the guns and the razor wire and the settlements and smelling the sewage that they were intentionally dumping from the tops of the settlements down into the valleys and the olive groves of the Palestinians below.

I remember the first three months, it was like I couldn’t understand how they were pointing their guns at our faces, and it didn’t matter that I wasn’t Palestinian. The second you stand with Palestinians, you are in the line of fire because they are the target constantly.

And I could not comprehend that. I was like, ‘Wait, I’m American. This can’t be the case, right?’ And yet it still doesn’t matter. I mean, I’m 22 years living there and the Israelis have such disdain for Palestinians and Palestinian life. The Israelis call the Palestinians ‘human animals,’ right? Publicly.

And I just don’t think that I was able for a long time to even notice the beauty, to notice the crafting and the cultural heritage, to enjoy nature because I was living in this just horrified state of trying to process what really comes off as a science fiction movie.

Like, it’s not possible that this is reality. It is not possible that this system of apartheid exists at that time in 2004, like, this is unreal.

So it took me a while. And I think it was through, there’s this amazing organization in Jerusalem and I went to one of their markets and it was through them that I really started meeting artisans and seeing like, this is so amazing.

I founded Handmade Palestine quite accidentally. You know, my husband had this dream of having land on the mountain to plant trees for future generations to learn about indigenous trees. And in Arabic there’s this saying, ‘We plant so they may eat.’ And that was his dream in life.

He wanted to buy one dunam, which is a quarter acre, and we ended up buying 10 dunams, so two and a half acres of this land. He’s from the founding families of Ramallah, and he was always so upset that his dad hadn’t left him any agricultural land. So finally we managed that. We went out, we registered a nonprofit and started what we hoped would someday become an arboretum for the city.

And we couldn’t get any funding, so we’re like, ‘Let’s put a little display of handicrafts in our restaurant.’ He had opened a restaurant and that’s really how Handmade Palestine started. It was just this corner display.

But once I started doing that, more and more artisans were coming to us asking for support, and that’s when I started seeing, ‘Wow, these handicrafts are so amazing.’

And really learning about historically and the different stitches from different areas, and how women would go to markets or go to weddings and get exposed to each other’s stitches and copy them. They would always keep a little piece of fabric and a needle and thread, and they would copy what they saw and it would spread.

Palestine is just this tiny little country the size of New Jersey, and yet the cultural heritage and the biodiversity are magnificent there. And it took me a while to be able to see that.

I mean, occupation—it’s like a cancer. Colonialism is a cancer and it’s everywhere you look, so it’s hard. You have to make an effort to see through all of that and to be able to see and celebrate the beauty everywhere.

Nancy Vrijmoet (Church Women United): Do you also have men who are creating some of the handicrafts or is it mostly women?

Morgan Totah: No, we also work with men. Traditionally Palestinian crafting is using local raw materials. So you have olive wood, which, every autumn is the olive harvest, and you heavily prune trees usually every second year. And those prunings are used for crafting out of Bethlehem and the olive wood crafting is almost exclusively men doing that work. Ceramics also is largely men. The keffiyeh industry, largely men.

But the embroidery, the tatreez, which is really a center of traditional crafting— that’s women. It’s being passed down from generation to generation, and it wasn’t done for income until pretty recently.

Mostly it was done by women at home who were preparing to get married. Or they were decorating a dress or they were decorating a tablecloth or something to put up on the wall. It was a gift for their mother-in-law, that kind of thing. So it became a core part of women’s economic opportunity by necessity, really.

On Oct. 8, tens of thousands of Palestinian men and women woke up to find that they had no Israeli military permit to allow them to cross the checkpoint and go to their jobs. So tens of thousands of Palestinians overnight lost their ability to generate income.

And a lot of people around the world wanted to show solidarity with Palestinians, wanted to support Palestinians, so they wanted to pump money into the Palestinian economy. They did that by buying Palestinian handicrafts.

So this entire industry came out overnight. There were people doing it (already), I mean, Handmade Palestine has existed for a decade, but as everybody trying to find a way to generate income under the most impossible circumstances, that became a desperate need on Oct. 8 for so many people.

So a lot of women took on embroidery, tatreez, in their houses to try at night to generate income, to buy bread, to buy basic necessities. And it is like painstaking, exhausting. It just kills your eyes, it kills your back to do that work.

And a lot of people don’t realize, like, when you’re buying something that’s handmade, you shouldn’t just say the words, like, ‘fair trade’ is not a marketing slogan, right?

You should actually value what that woman put into that. So this is a largely women’s industry, the tatreez. Soapmaking is also a lot of men, but most of our crafting is actually embroidery.

We also found on Oct. 7 that all of our embroidery had come from Gaza. Gaza was like just the most perfect tatreez ever. You never had to check the work. It was just perfect.

And so there were two projects we worked with. Sulafa was a U.N. women’s project, and Atfaluna was a deaf school. And this, I yesterday unboxed this kind of lost box that’s been sitting in our warehouse for three years and it has all of this Gaza embroidery and Gaza fabric.

Gaza was actually the center of textiles, not the Gaza Strip as you know today that was created by the United Nations, but the Gaza District. From 1947 and before, Palestine was in 16 districts, and the district of Gaza had a city Majdal that was known for making Majdalawi fabric. They used to weave—gauze is from Gaza, like, it’s handmade. It was handwoven there.

I mean, the history is just so amazing and rich in that part of the world. Syrian fabrics also.

And so overnight we lost access to all of this embroidery that we had gotten before. And really early on, the Israelis bombed Atfaluna, the Center for the Deaf School, the Center for the Deaf crafting, and said, ‘We have succeeded in taking out this terrorist target.’

I think it was like a few days in, five days in. I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s the deaf school. Are they crazy?’ I mean, it was so insane.

But again, you want to annihilate life, you take out all of that kind of infrastructure. You go after water, you go after soil, everything.

So when we realized that, ‘Okay, these women have all been killed or displaced and they’re not going to be able to craft anymore, and there are so many women in the West Bank that overnight found themselves desperate for an income,’ we decided to found Manjel Ma’quod, which is our embroidery project that works with up to 80 women at a time doing this cross-stitch.

I would say that from Handmade Palestine, it’s probably 50-50 with how many men and women are doing the crafting. But it’s all traditional and it’s all using raw materials out of Palestine.

Nancy Vrijmoet (Church Women United): Wow. What a great story of how you’ve taken the lead on that. I wanted to ask a little more about the impact on the families of those women who just basically had to switch gears and just go into hyperdrive. What have you seen?

Morgan Totah: Well, I went last year to visit one of the communities where women are doing embroidery with us and when we drove into the village, we parked our car right next to this house where one of the women who does the tatreez was going to host a group of the women from the community who participate in doing the embroidery and generating income through our project.

We’re going to come for tea and to have a chat with us about the work that they’re doing, and I parked my car right below her house. And literally I could see into the illegal Israeli settler’s kitchen window.

I, like, saw her inside her kitchen and I just thought, ‘My God, how is this so close?’ They are like, they came in and, and they just bordered right on this woman’s property in the village.

And as we spoke over the few hours that I was with this group of women, they told me that their kids hadn’t gone to school in years, and I had no idea. There was no school at all in their village. And that was because the teachers were on strike because the government was not paying them their full salaries for a long time.

And of course, there’s a lot of corruption in the Palestinian Authority that we can and should call out because it is a puppet government that was put in place in order to have a ‘peace partner’ in all of this. Okay. So definitely we have to always call that out.

At the same time, the Israelis take all of the Palestinian aid, everything goes through the occupying power. Okay? So all of the aid coming in and also taxes—it all gets remitted through the Israelis. So of course teachers are not going to get paid.

Of course, there’s not going to be money for running the government properly because the Israelis control it.

And one of the things I always say about occupation is that it is so deeply invested in, its entire goal is to make life untenable for Palestinians so that they cannot live in Palestine, they cannot survive. Not even thrive, just survive.

And this one community that we visited was just total evidence of that. Not only do you not have school in, not only do you have— but you have settler violence. You have them literally on your grandfather’s land, building and throwing their trash out their backyard into your yard. I mean, it’s like such an insane reality.

It’s like—there’s this book, ‘The City & The City.’ That’s really happening. They pretend that they don’t see you as Palestinians. They build walls so that they don’t see you.

I saw an image on Instagram recently of a mass abduction of Palestinian boys and men, and they were being marched on the street by the Israeli soldiers.

And it was through a tunnel. And I thought something that Americans aren’t going to realize when they see this image is that the road above them where the Israeli settlers are driving, is up above because it’s intended to allow the Israeli settlers to pretend that they don’t see the Palestinian bodies and infrastructure that they have been destroying. It was so insane.

And to get to this village, of course, you go through a series of tunnels so that you are always hidden and the violence being done to Palestinians is hidden so that it’s more palatable to the colonizers.

Karen McCowan (People for Justice and Peace in Palestine): You’ve talked a little bit about your shock and frustration over the ignorance of most Americans regarding the situation in Gaza and in the West Bank, and I must admit that I had no real sense of what was going on, no idea till I was there.

It was very shocking. I had no idea that they were building U.S. suburban-style cities with walls around them in the middle of Palestinian land. No idea.

And I was there when the war started, so that was an experience as well in terms of really getting a perspective of the imbalance of power as the war unfolded.

How do you think we can persuade people to educate themselves about what their tax dollars are supporting?

Morgan Totah: So I was raised in a home where my mom would never drive straight from the grocery store to our house. Like, she would see a family walking down the street with all of their groceries and she would stop.

And I would just always kind of roll my eyes and go, ‘Here goes 30 more minutes of taking people home.’

And they taught me that when you see something wrong or unjust anywhere, you must stop. You must take action. And I think this is also like a very Christian concept, like that Jesus shared with his followers this concept of compassion as ‘a deep aching’ for seeing something wrong.

And I believe—I was raised to believe—that when you see that injustice in front of you, you have a responsibility.

Your awareness brings with it a call to action to do something, and I think it’s so much easier for all of us in the busyness of our lives to stick our head in the sand and not want to learn more. But also something I can’t understand is how fundamentally difficult it is for people to shake themselves out of the propaganda they’ve been raised with.

It shatters something. It rocks their world. It breaks something at a core level about what they knew, a basic of the world, and of their tenets as a Christian. And that just is always mind-blowing for me.

What it means to be a Christian is to be called to love others and God, and you cannot support racism or genocide and say that you’re following Jesus or even just being a decent human being.

So I think that it’s really hard to find a way to like shake people out of complacency, but your silence and your complacency is complicity in this, and luckily, amazingly, since Oct. 7 to today, there’s been such a shift in the world, but especially in American understanding, because people finally saw and got it a bit more.

But it doesn’t mean that it’s changed anything. Obviously, it has not changed anything. In fact, the occupation and the violence has become so much more entrenched and Israel has taken advantage of the last few years to deepen its colonial project, and the violence, the state violence that comes in the form of the military and the settlers.

So I don’t think there’s a great answer to that. Like, how do we get more people to take action or change American policy? I think that has to come from within them, that they are willing to give something and that’s a really hard thing to ask.

What I do know is that the one incredibly powerful tool that Americans have or people have is their power as a consumer. And sometimes when you feel really powerless that you can’t reach your representatives, you’re not heard when you go to demonstrations, your buying power literally can crush companies or it can build companies.

The boycott movement, BDS—boycott, divestment, and sanctions—these are the three tools that we have. And we’ve seen this right? South African apartheid fell. That regime fell because of the BDS, and people don’t have to feel alone with their buying choices that, ‘Okay, I’m boycotting this, but nobody else is,’ because there are, there’s a movement. BDSmovement.net is an amazing resource, and the boycott is very targeted.

So I really believe that that is the only true power we have to affect change, not only for the Palestinians who have faced decades and decades of injustice and violence and colonial violence, but also like in general, that is our power as a community to create change locally, to create change nationally, and definitely internationally.

Karen McCowan (People for Justice and Peace in Palestine): How do the beautiful cultural, culinary, all the handicrafts and the food that you are bringing us to see and taste and experience, how can those help people understand this incredibly beautiful culture of the Palestinian people?

Morgan Totah: You know, there, the famous Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once said that Palestinians have the great misfortune of being the enemies of the state of Israel. Like they didn’t choose that, right? Nobody says ‘come colonize us,’ ever.

And I realized at some point that the way Americans access Palestine and Palestinians is through this violence that is imposed on, done to, an Indigenous population.

And so our framework for understanding and interacting with Palestine and Palestinians is always since 1948, and it’s always as part of violence, you know, the victims of violence, martyrs, freedom fighters, resistance fighters, and I think that it does such a disservice because Palestinian history, the story of the Palestinian people, is millennia old.

And we need to do them the great service of seeing how incredibly rich and beautiful these people and this culture is. And you know, after Oct. 7, I think so many people just felt so depressed at seeing every day. I mean, depression is not even the right word for how extreme it was.

Karen McCowan (People for Justice and Peace in Palestine): Crushed, right? Crushed.

Morgan Totah: Crushed, yeah. Crushed by this insane violence that this incredibly powerful, I think the third-most-powerful military in the world was doing against a civilian population and against hospitals. And it was just crushing. They were annihilating life. And I just was like, all I care about is screaming and begging people to stop this, to care about the lives that are suffering so desperately.

And one day I was able to find my way to the social enterprise and the cultural aspect by realizing that Palestinian cultural heritage is all connected to the land and it all bears witness to the Palestinian’s ancient and sacred relationship as stewards of that land.

And it allowed me to also break free of modern history and this narrative and say, ‘No, we are going to celebrate Palestinians in their own right, not only as victims of colonial violence, but also as an incredibly rich and diverse culture that has been here collecting and protecting ancient grains for thousands of years, harvesting trees on the mountain and just stewarding this land.’

And so for me, I think every time you interact with a Palestinian handicraft, you get connected to the people who are handcrafting that in that land. And you get connected to a beautiful culture that has really not ever been celebrated because people are so busy always just seeing it within this colonial violence.

Nancy Vrijmoet (Church Women United): Fabulous, Morgan, thank you. So many of the things that you say just ring true to me. There’s so many levels of what rings true.

We’re part of a group called Interfaith Alliance with Migrants, and we put that group together a year ago to bring information about how to help those in the immigrant community be supported in our area by the people of faith.

So the motto, ‘Welcome The Stranger,’ is paramount for us. And it’s, it’s what we carry on a banner and it’s what we really believe.

So to be with you has so many important meanings and I really appreciate the fact that you shared how you arrived at where you are now.

And the message you’re bringing us, standing up for human rights and everything that you are doing to make that clear to the people you meet in Oregon, I applaud you for that.

And I want you to know this is very important and Karen and I want you to know that. We know it is not easy, and we know it’s not a simple thing for you, and you also have a family and you have other obligations in your life.

So I want to just ask you, do you have any particular struggles that you face as a mom of two children that you’d like to tell us about?

Morgan Totah: Well, remember how I said occupation controls everything? Well, it also controls the Population Registry of Palestine, so the Israelis are in control of the Palestinian population registry.

So even when I first had my kids, to register them as Palestinians (because I chose to home birth my children, which meant that they weren’t through the hospital system) and so just to register my kids was a huge challenge because I didn’t go through the right system.

And then to get the Palestinian ID number issued for them was really, really challenging, but it also means that the Israelis have kept me and my legal status as a tourist for 22 years. (Wow.)

What does that mean? When you fly into Ben-Gurion airport, you’re given a three-month tourist visa. If you’re not deported right away, you’re given that three months to be in Israel. You’re not meant to go into the West Bank or you’re not allowed to go on the Gaza Strip. And after three months you have to leave and you’re only allowed to come into the country twice in the year if they let you in.

Their border control is pretty aggressive and (I don’t know what the right word is…) suspicious. And mean. Mean-spirited.

So if you’re allowed in by law, you can be in the country two times up to six months in a year. That is used against my family to try to deny me entry. I have to go through a process of getting permission from the Israeli military to be allowed to enter the country at all.

I’m only allowed to enter like Palestinians from the West Bank through the bridge, which connects the West Bank to Jordan, but is actually controlled by the Israelis.

I mean, the bridge that you have to go through is really the most degrading, disgusting, humiliating, dehumanizing experience and it costs a ton of money. And it’s what all Palestinians are forced to go through, this awful experience to come in and out of the West Bank.

So I pay Israel an exit tax of around $100 every time I go out, if I’m not allowed to go even to Jerusalem, which they illegally annexed, where my U.S. Embassy is, which means I was not able to renew my children’s passports, because for minors you have to go in person.

So the Americans were not offering U.S. citizen services for years in Ramallah. And that creates a huge crisis when you’re a mom trying to renew the passports. But also it is a denial of their rights as Palestinians under occupation.

In the Geneva conventions, the occupied people have a right to family reunification, and the occupier is obliged to facilitate that, and that’s denied to my kids and my husband as I’m kept a tourist.

Now, I am a white American from the United States. I have no right to be there legally, but they have that right. But imagine a Palestinian who was born in the diaspora or a Palestinian who went out for university and was out for several years. And so the Israelis take away their ID number and their citizenship really, their residency.

So they come back, they marry, and they’re all of a sudden a foreign national. They’re a tourist as well. Yeah, so imagine the impact that denying family reunification as a legal identity has on families. It’s very intense and it’s very intentional.

They were very clever to demand control of that during the Oslo Accords, and they’ve broken up so many families by doing that.

Also, of course, like being a parent means that you take your children to school, and many times Ramallah is meant to be the bubble, like the safest of the places. But if you think about it, this idea of a peace partner, it’s really just performative. There was never ever an intention for a two-state solution.

You wouldn’t have created the West Bank and Gaza strip an hour and a half apart from each other and then said, ‘Okay, build one state out of these two chunks of land that are not connected.’

Much less the fact that the West Bank, since the 1967 occupation by the Israelis, where they have illegally transferred their civilian population as settlers, has just divided the West Bank into tiny little holes in a piece of Swiss cheese that are not connected, that have all of this infrastructure throughout that means Palestinians are isolated and living under an apartheid system.

So to get your child to school in Ramallah. You know, the Israelis used to come in in the middle of the night and raid banks, raid houses, abduct Palestinians and take them hostage. Now, what you’re seeing since Oct. 8 is because there are no red lines, the Israelis have no fear.

They don’t care what you record them doing because everything goes, right? They can bomb hospitals, they can destroy the oxygen tanks that are going into the NICU unit and kill the babies in incubators.

They largely (I mean, as a population) have voted that they have no problem with rape being a weapon of war used in the prisons with the illegally-abducted Palestinian hostages.

There’s no red lines, right? There’s no need to participate anymore in the theater of this peace process. So Ramallah the bubble, the safest place, now has Israeli soldiers regularly coming in, in the middle of the day, doing whatever it is they want to do—just to instill fear.

So that means when I take my kids to school or any Palestinian mother is taking her kids to school in what is supposed be the safest area, you now may go to a street where you have the Israeli military driving past you, or even worse, doing some kind of ‘operation’ to abduct someone.

Or as happened to my home two weeks ago, literally just stopping in front of the house and throwing sound grenades into our garden. So this is the new norm for Ramallah.

That said, this has been the experience for so much of occupied Palestine and Palestinians, and you see the extreme of that in Gaza, where life itself is just being annihilated in the most vicious ways possible.

How can any mom ever give her children a sense of safety? And we’re not talking about an imagined violence, like maybe, you know, maybe there would be—no. There is a truck of soldiers with sound grenades, with tear gas, with bombs, with guns, and they are stopping and they are shooting live ammunition and the settlers who are armed to the teeth—

I just saw that the government just gave settlers—illegal Israeli colonizers— drones to terrorize Palestinian farmers. It’s not. Imagine it is happening daily, everywhere. How can any mother give her children a sense of safety, much less raise her children to have a sense of like social responsibility and love, and how is that possible?

And that’s the thing too: Palestinian children are so aware, they are so politically savvy. You can have my son on this radio program and he can talk about settler colonialism.

And that is so messed up because children should be allowed to be children, but Palestinian children have their childhoods robbed from them the day they are born. It is one of the first casualties of settler colonialism.

It’s really, truly heartbreaking and just so unfair that we live in a world where Americans get to send their kids off to school and let their kids go to the park afterwards or to soccer practice, or be in drama class, and Palestinian children halfway around the world have to struggle to even get to school.

You know, in the Hebron area, there are kids who are literally having their school under the sun because the Israeli military blocks them from getting to their school. I mean, it’s just so insane.

And this is the world we live in, 2026. Thank you very much to every taxpayer. Now do something about it, because all injustice is connected and the injustices you are seeing in Palestine and the weapons being tested in Palestine, they’re coming home.

It is all connected and we have to stand up for what is right, no matter where that is happening, because standing up for what is right, it affects everywhere. What did Nelson Mandela say: ‘Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinian people.’

I mean, that is so true for all oppressed peoples and it is our responsibility to use our privilege and our consumer power to fight for justice in this world.

What Palestinians are going through is so far away and you can just choose to turn off the news or to even believe the filtered propaganda news and not access on social media accounts of Palestinian voices who are living there ’cause it overwhelms you and you just don’t want to see that, instead of saying, ‘Wow, we have a responsibility to do something.’

Which, again, is boycott to everybody out there. You have to participate because it is literally a matter of life and death for human beings, and it is our responsibility as American taxpayers because we are the ones funding the violence. (Amen.)

And then Americans think, ‘Well, you know, I’m busy enough. I have enough bad news. I don’t need to care about this.’ But we actually must care about where our money is going and what it is doing. We must care. Because this whole world is breaking down and it’s our empire that’s doing that. And we have to be the ones who make the world safer for all children, for all families, for all people.

It is truly our responsibility, even if only five people listening today take that on, then they can spread that by choosing five more people who are open to hear about it and open to joining the boycott movement. And you just keep growing that, asking for five more people to participate, challenging them to each get five more and we just spread out as this web that is all together working towards a more just world.

Karen McCowan (People for Justice and Peace in Palestine): Based on my visit to the West Bank in October of 2023, I was very struck by (I believe it’s) a Handmade Palestine initiative: ‘Adopt An Olive Tree.’ Is that part of Handmade Palestine? (Yeah.)

Can you talk about that a little bit? Because I was so horrified by what is happening to olive growers in the West Bank who’ve been on their land for generations, and their olive groves are being burned, their trees are being destroyed. (Yes). It’s just mind-blowing to me that this is being tolerated and I would love to hear you talk about that.

Morgan Totah: I’m never able to understand how, like, a colonial power coming in and saying, ‘We want this land’ is so determined to have it at any cost, even if they’re destroying it. You know, it’s like a little kid: ‘If I can’t have it, no one will.’

And they literally slice the olive trees at the very base of the trunk or burn them or throw bleach into the soil or run their raw sewage into them. And I mean, it’s, like, devastating. Some of these trees are thousands of years old. It’s so insane to me, and you’re polluting the soil for generations to come. I cannot fathom that level of violence against land.

So ‘Adopt An Olive Tree’ was the brainchild of my very crazy husband. I married a man who is a tree hugger in the worst way. Like he cannot pass a beautiful tree, especially a ginkgo tree without getting out of the car and hugging it. And he just has this love relationship with trees and nature.

And it hurts his heart really to see not only the devastation, the violence against the landscape and the trees, but also, in our city of Ramallah when the municipality plants, and they plant trees that the Zionists brought in, instead of native trees that do well in our climate. So he’s like a tree activist in the city and always trying to get them to celebrate native trees.

And why is that so important? The Turks, the Ottomans cut down all of the oak trees of Palestine to build their railway, and there has been so much devastation against indigenous trees except for the olive tree, even by Palestinians. Like, the olive tree is so prized because it has such economic value, not only for selling excess, but also in your own household, you need that to sustain your life.

Like we go through near a liter of olive oil a week in our house. I know, I know. As an American that was always like, ‘Agh! That’s a crazy amount,’ but if you see my husband, he just drinks this stuff.

So he had this idea that we would buy this land and we would create a nonprofit arboretum. And like I said, we couldn’t get any funding.

So we started Handmade Palestine and we’re selling the handicrafts and we realized that that’s not actually generating a lot of income to plant trees, but it was sustaining a lot of artisans.

And over the years that had grown and grown until we’re now supporting 30 artisan groups and cooperatives, which is a lot of individual people and a lot of households. So we still really didn’t, until basically COVID, we weren’t able to make a profit off of Handmade Palestine to be able to donate that money towards the land.

So he had this crazy idea that: Let’s do an ‘Adopt An Olive Tree.’ And he actually wants to do a kind of similar program with the Palestinian oak trees that are growing on our land naturally by themselves.

So he said, ‘We’re going to put on the website Handmade Palestine: Adopt An Olive Tree. We’re going to let people adopt it for one year, and that money is going to be used to hire people to work on the land, to do the harvest,’ which is an insane month-long process for us to pay for the press and to make all of the olives as well as store the oil.

‘And we’re also going to use it to fertilize the trees.’ I mean, he brings dump trucks of fertilizer up and after the harvest, you go around and you put fertilizer in a circle, in a ring around the base of every olive tree. And then the rains come and it goes down into the soil.

So I said, ‘That’s great, but you know, why would people do that?’ And he’s like, ‘Because we’re going to send them a half a liter of fresh pressed olive oil and a half a liter of homemade olives.’

And I was like, ‘Well, you know, California has oil, people can get cheap oil, people go to Costco.’

And he was like, ‘Nobody has ever tasted oil like this.’ So it comes and it’s, like, still green. Most people see olive oil and it’s like this gold color—that’s aged. So our olive oil comes fresh and green and it’s spicy when it’s fresh. It’s so amazing!

And it’s been a really successful program. And that’s funding caring for all of those trees.

And when we first bought the land, they were in terrible shape. Like, you know, one of the many consequences of the colonial violence is that of course, through the dispossession, through the ethnic cleansing, Palestinians have been made refugees. And the refugees are also internal. So we have refugee camps all around inside of the West Bank and Gaza.

And that disconnection from land, that alienation from land has had really serious consequences on nature as well, because stewards are no longer there, but the traditional knowledge has also been lost.

And you also had, during the Oslo Accords, the Israelis say, ‘Okay. This is Area A for Palestinian control, but the rest of this area is, B and C are Israeli military.’

So all the agricultural land was marked under the control of the Israeli military, even though it’s in the so-called West Bank of Occupied Palestine. And that meant that going to land, picnicking on land, harvesting your land became an act of resistance and frankly, quite dangerous for so many farmers. And that created further alienation from the land.

So what was basic knowledge, like that Palestinians pick the carob trees, harvest the carob, dry the carob, how to make carob molasses, how to make the carob brewed drink.

There was a dish that people used to make from the green carob called m’qiqa, it’s—I’ve never, ever tried it. I don’t know anyone who makes it. Most people don’t even know what it is anymore today.

So this is kind of the work that we’re trying to do up there, and the Adopt an Olive Tree program is so important because it’s trying to pay for the costs of having that land.

And actually recently, two months ago, we signed a 30-year contract with the city of Ramallah to turn it into a city botanic garden and arboretum, where we can protect traditional knowledge around agriculture and wildlife and pass that on to our community.

So, woo-hoo! Huge success there. And that tree program—the Adopt An Olive Tree program—is a major part of sustaining all of that work.

Nancy Vrijmoet (Church Women United): We are going to have a table at the Asian Celebration on the 18th of July. And that’s a table that will be manned by the folks from People for Justice and Peace in Palestine.

We’re going to be celebrating Palestinian culture there, we’re going to be hearing more about stories and about the art, and we’re also going to be having a sampling of the works that Morgan has brought with her, including not just the handicrafts, but also beautiful olive oil.

And that’s going to be there at the Asian Celebration, which is going to be on the 18th of July at Alton Baker Park from 10 a.m. until 9 p.m. So those people who are not able to meet Morgan in person while she’s here, please be sure and join us at the Asian celebration.

Presenter: That’s Karen McCowan and Nancy Vrijmoet interviewing the founder of Handmade Palestine, Morgan Totah. You can learn more about traditional Palestinian crafts at the Asian Celebration, July 18 in Alton Baker Park, as People for Justice and Peace in Palestine will represent Handmade Palestine. You can also find more at their websites AsianCelebration.org and HandmadePalestine.com.

Image from ‘Adopt An Olive Tree,’ HandmadePalestine.com .