Indigeneity and Farming Under Occupation in Palestine

Settler colonial powers have consistently attempted to erase and replace Native peoples by attacking their food systems (Burnett, Hay, and Chambers, 2016) through strategies like banning traditional foods and ceremonies, displacing people from ancestral lands, and imposing dependency on colonial governments for aid and farming inputs. In the face of these attacks, Indigenous peoples worldwide assert their sovereignty over land, water, and food to resist ongoing colonial violence against their health, culture, and self-determination. Indigenous food sovereignty entails culturally appropriate, healthy, and self-determined food systems practiced free from dependency and other modes of disruption to traditional practices. Palestinians have used farming as a core strategy for pursuing Indigenous food sovereignty by developing a self-sufficient food system to resist Israeli occupation. 

Israel has consistently targeted Palestinian food systems, but they have come under unprecedented assault amidst the ongoing genocide. The number of calories per day allowed to enter Gaza by Israel has been restricted to 245 (Oxfam, 2024) at the time of writing, and, according to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, the “entirely man-made disaster” of the famine in Gaza has “‘the highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded by the Integrated Food Security Classification system—anywhere, anytime’” (United Nations, 2024a cited in Browne, 2024). The assault on Palestinian food systems, one component of Israel’s multifaceted, ongoing genocide (United Nations, 2024b), began before October of 2023: attacks on Palestinian food sovereignty have been central to Israel’s occupation since its inception. 

Land is core to Palestinian culture and self-determination. The land has long been the basis of subsistence in Palestine (Anderson and Phan, 2023), and relationships with the land, its sacred nature, and stewardship are core to Palestinian heritage and identity (Graf, 2019). This includes generations of farming on the land using ancestral methods. One of the most devastating features of Israeli colonialism is the theft and desecration of land, including through the 1948 Nakba, when 78% of historic Palestine came under Israeli occupation, with the remaining 22% under some form of Israeli control since 1967 (Guimarães and Paq, 2019). The occupation has extensively impacted farming. Water was not a scarce resource before colonialism. However, through the course of the occupation, the Israeli state took control of water resources, physically altering the landscape by rerouting water away from Palestinians towards settlers (Anderson and Phan, 2023). The occupation’s control over the movement of goods negates the self-determination of farmers, such as when a Palestinian mushroom farm was forced to close in 2016 after the Israeli government killed mushroom spores by holding them up in port (El Zein, 2017). The degree of control that the occupation has over necessities like land, water, and the movement of inputs highlights its attacks on Palestinian sovereignty. It also demonstrates how important it is to pursue self-sufficient food production to resist the power of the occupation over people’s everyday lives. 

Om Sleiman Farm places a central role on self-sufficiency as a resistance strategy. The farm, which follows a community-supported agriculture model to provide Palestinians with local produce as an alternative to Israeli imports, is in the village of Bil’in, where after years of direct action against the occupation, Palestinians reclaimed 30% of the area’s annexed land (Shoal Collective, 2021, p. 98). Ghada Hamdan, a pseudonym for a woman who works at Om Sleiman, highlights the importance of self-sufficiency in the Palestinian food system: “I chose farming as a form of activism and resistance, especially permaculture, because it shows how you can make solutions out of problems…I’m really interested in self-sufficiency because that’s what’s really missing in Palestine. Palestinians are dependent on the Israeli occupation for food and water. Israel controls everything; we don’t even have an independent economy of our own” (Shoal Collective, 2021, p. 99). Another Om Sleiman worker, Yara Dowani, argues that “[if] we as Palestinians cannot produce our own food, build our own shelter, have our own energy–how can we get rid of this occupation?” (Alqamar, 2018). Ultimately, the cultivation of self-sufficiency is about returning to long-practiced methods of living off the land. By creating an alternative for Palestinians to buy food produced on their land through techniques honed for the local environment over generations, Om Sleiman mirrors other Indigenous food sovereignty initiatives that emphasize connecting with the land by growing on it. 

The premise of “how you can make solutions out of problems,” in Hamdan’s words, is a widespread dictum in Palestinian farming. Palestinians use ancestral methods of farming to find ways around Israel’s control over water. The Ba’al method, named after the Canaanite god of fertility and destruction, uses humidity in the soil to grow crops like watermelons without needing to water them (Snaije, 2022). But, with inconsistent rainfall resulting from climate change, the Ba’al method is under threat (Snaije, 2022). Despite its increasing difficulty, traditional innovations like Ba’al continue to enable Palestinians to work around the limitations imposed on their food sovereignty by the occupier.

Even with Indigenous ecological knowledge like Ba’al farming, food production in Palestine is deeply precarious. This precarity emphasizes the constant tension between resistance and survival (Graf, 2019). The relationship between Palestinian farming and boycotts of Israeli goods illustrates this tension. Om Sleiman and other farms aim to provide Palestinian foods so people can boycott Israeli imports. Alternative economies designed to reduce or eliminate dependency on the occupier are known as “resistance economies.” However, some Palestinians, like the founders of the Amoro mushroom farm, which closed in 2016 as a result of Israel’s control over sea ports, hesitate to frame farming as “resistance”: “who has my back when a tank rolls in here and knocks over our hangars? No one” (El Zein, 2017). The concerns of Amoro’s farmers demonstrate that, while in principle, practices like self-sufficient farming are acts of resistance, the absence of broader institutional and economic networks of support means these enterprises are still largely at the whims of the occupier who can shut off the tap of essential resources.

Foreign aid is also used to erode Palestinian food self-sufficiency. Ghada Hamdan, in a 2021 interview, describes how USAID (the United States Agency for International Development) implemented a program converting large sectors of Palestinian farming to growing small cucumbers, gradually forcing farmers to pay for more and more components of the process. Palestinian farmers lost the ability to sell their crops on the market because they all grew the same thing, and many fell into debt from having to buy seeds and fertilizers from USAID (Shoal Collective, 2021). Many Palestinian enterprises, including Om Sleiman, reject foreign aid to retain as much autonomy as possible. However, autonomy is always limited by the occupation. Palestinians previously produced 80% of their own food needs and exported surpluses of sesame–now, under occupation, Israel controls the supply of seeds, chemicals, and land (Shoal Collective, 2021). Paradoxically, Palestine now depends on imports for its own traditional foods like sesame. 

Despite the challenges to self-sufficient farming under occupation, it is an important site of resistance for many Palestinians. Yara Dowani reiterates that “farming is […] a crucial part of our resistance[…]to be able to produce, despite the minimal resources the [Israeli] occupation has left us, and to offer a space for community knowledge sharing, is to resist and combat an oppressive system which wants to erase our existence” (Dowani, 2023).  While essentials of food production like land, water, inputs, and movement are controlled by the occupier, Palestinians continue to use the methods of their ancestors to grow food on their lands, resisting their erasure and promoting their self-determination. This self-determination is incomplete, though, as long as Israel continues to occupy Palestinian land, control essential resources, and pursue ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide. The only way for Palestine to be truly food sovereign is for Palestinians to have their political sovereignty and right to return realized, a condition that depends on the end of the occupation and a liberated Palestine. 

References

Alqamar, L. (2018) Farming as resistance: Reviving Indigenous Agricultural Practices in Palestine, VICE. Available at: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3kyzej/farming-as-resistance-reviving-indigenous-agricultural-practices-in-palestine (Accessed: 01 August 2024). 

Anderson, M.G. and Phan, T. (2023) Decolonisation on (in) the ground: Farming as colonial resistance in Palestine, Shado Magazine. https://shado-mag.com/columns/land-defenders/decolonisation-colonial-resistance-in-palestine/ (Accessed: 01 August 2024). 

Browne, B. C. (2024) The Coloniality of Enforced Starvation: Reading Famine in Gaza through An Gorta Mór, Journal of Palestine Studies, pp. 1–7. doi: 10.1080/0377919X.2024.2379709.

Burnett, K., Hay, T., and Chambers, L. (2016) Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Peoples and Food: Federal Indian Policies and Nutrition Programs in the Canadian North since 1945, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 17(2), 1–19. doi: 10.1353/cch.2016.0030

Dowani, Y. (2023) We have always been here: Women farmers in Palestine, Shado Magazine. https://shado-mag.com/do/we-have-always-been-here-women-farmers-in-palestine/ (Accessed: 02 August 2024). 

El Zein, R. (2017) Developing a Palestinian resistance economy through Agricultural Labor, Journal of Palestine Studies, 46(3), pp. 7–26. doi:10.1525/jps.2017.46.3.7. 

Graf, C. (2019) Food is the first frontier of the Israeli-palestinian conflict, Pulitzer Center. https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/food-first-frontier-israeli-palestinian-conflict (Accessed: 02 August 2024). 

Guimarães, S.A. and Paq, A. (2019) Sowing seeds of resistance: The fight for Food Sovereignty in Palestine, Equal Times. https://www.equaltimes.org/sowing-seeds-of-resistance-the?lang=en (Accessed: 02 August 2024). 

“Imminent Famine in Northern Gaza Is ‘Entirely Man-Made Disaster’: Guterres,”(2024a). United Nations. https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147656.

Oxfam. (2024)“People in northern Gaza forced to survive on 245 calories a day, less than a can of beans” – Oxfam (2024) Oxfam International. Available at: https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/people-northern-gaza-forced-survive-245-calories-day-less-can-beans-oxfam (Accessed: 30 July 2024). 

Snaije, O. (2022) In the West Bank, plants are political, New Lines Magazine. https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/in-the-west-bank-plants-are-political/ (Accessed: 02 August 2024). 

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United Nations. (2024b). Gaza: ICJ ruling offers hope for protection of civilians enduring apocalyptic conditions, say UN Experts | OHCHR. UNOHCHR. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/01/gaza-icj-ruling-offers-hope-protection-civilians-enduring-apocalyptic

UNDP PAPP. (2013) 40-year-old Ahed Izhiman growing crops on a farm in Gaza. [Photograph]. CC-BY-NC. https://www.flickr.com/photos/unitednationsdevelopmentprogramme/12208110526