Seed banks destroyed, ancient olive trees uprooted, water cut off
Since the start of the year, Israeli soldiers and settlers have forced thousands of Palestinians from their land. Israel’s creeping annexation of the West Bank has devastated Palestinian food sovereignty.
Determined: Israeli soldiers stop Palestinians from getting to their olive fields at harvest time, near Nablus, West Bank, 27 November 2024
Nasser Ishtayeh · Sopa · Lightrocket · Getty
Sorting through the ruins of a house destroyed by Israeli bulldozers in winter 2024, Ali M, a farmer in his 20s, was searching for iron bars to shore up his goat pen when he was interrupted by a water delivery. A rusty old Citroën lorry carrying an enormous swaying water tank was making its way up the track. Ali greeted the driver, who splits his time between teaching biology in Jericho and delivering essential water to families in the region. We were in the village of Al-Maleh, in the north of the West Bank, in a small rocky valley leading down to the river Jordan. Just below the goat pen, a bed of stones was all that remained of a stream that had flowed there a couple of decades earlier.
Since the stream disappeared, the only thing that moves through the valley is a dusty wind. ‘The settlers arrived in 1967 and started pumping water from more than 100 metres down six years later,’ explained Ali. The five sources that had previously fed the stream gradually dried up. The truck was delivering enough water for the villagers and their animals to drink, but not enough for their land.
The Israeli occupation has had profound effects on Palestinian agriculture. ‘The sector’s contribution to the West Bank’s GDP has been in constant decline since 1967, the start of the occupation,’ explained Taher Labadi, a researcher at the French Institute of the Middle East (IFPO) in Jerusalem. There is a long history of working the land in Palestine; its agriculture is characterised by the many small family farms of under a hectare that together account for more than 70% of its farmland.
The farming families themselves consume much of what they produce but some is sold locally. In this rolling, semi-arid landscape, terracing is part of a rich farming heritage symbolised by olive trees. A hundred thousand families depend wholly or partly on these trees, making for a very specific relationship between Palestinians and their land and trees – it’s both a (…)
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(3) Bashar Abu Zarour, Amina Khasib, Islam Rabee and Shaker Sarsour, Economic Monitor, no 73, Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS), Ramallah, 2023.