The olive tree in the Palestinian West Bank is by far the single-most dominant plant in terms of cultivated area and crop value, yet there has been no agrarian, historical analysis of the topic in English. This is despite its nationalist political symbolism, as a sigil of sumud or steadfastness, and its economic importance — a good crop can contribute 20-30 percent of the value of the territory’s total agricultural production. This paper draws upon a range of archival and both governmental and non-governmental published primary sources from American, British, French, Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian archives in Arabic, English, French, and Hebrew to assess the changes in the olive sector over the latter half of the 20th century, intentionally crossing political periods for comparative purposes. In the process I aim to answer the following questions: Where specifically in the West Bank were olive trees planted and why? What were the main uses and outlets for the resulting products? And the overarching question: How did the olive tree come to be the dominant planting in (and by extension the dominant symbol of) the West Bank? Existing scholarship assumes stagnation under the Jordanians, followed by a boom in productivity in the early Israeli period. However, the Israeli occupational infrastructure depended almost entirely on the remnants of the Jordanian bureaucracy, and early gains under Israeli occupation were the result of investments made during the Jordanian period. In addition, Jordan maintained significant ties to the territory over the two decades following the Israeli conquest of the West Bank in 1967. Contrary to popular perceptions, the cultivation of the olive and production of olive oil in the West Bank largely continued to expand under both Jordanian rule and Israeli occupation, thanks to hands-off policies of neglect. Israeli military rule, especially in its first decade, was more of a continuation of Jordanian policy than a rupture, at least until the first intifada (beginning 1987) prompted radical shifts in both Israeli and Jordanian policies. At the same time, a range of longer-term trends — such as rising production costs with modernization that have lead to globally uncompetitive prices, compounded by Israeli land confiscations and tree uprootings — have threatened the economic survival of the olive sector, regardless of both its political importance and the increasing marketability of Mediterranean olive oil globally, thanks to recently improved understandings of its dietary and health benefits.