Insurgent Agriculture

“The oppressed dig deep in the earth, looking for a living root, a viable shoot, a tree that may one day grow.” 
- Mourid Barghouti, I was born there, I was born here

Insurgent agriculture is a practice challenging settler-colonial and neoliberal commodification of land and resources, emphasizing resistance, steadfastness and hope as ways to reroot in the earth and reroute towards liberated futures and communities. It is characterized by an increasing number of youth- and women-led agricultural initiatives, including cooperatives and community supported agriculture (CSA) farms that, similar to other Indigenous agrarian movements in the South, echo notions of dignified work, food and seed sovereignty, community wellbeing, and resistance. These initiatives have grown in a context which has been flooded by political and economic arrangements that seek to render Palestinian agricultural production unviable with dwindling resources, squeezing Palestinians into highly-urbanized bantustans that produce little but consume much, losing what little control they have left over land as well as food, economic, and cultural systems. Israel’s system of closures has been part of Israel’s sustained forms of social and economic control through the weaponization of food (Li 2006). This has disproportionately affected women, who do most of the agricultural labor in Palestine. In response, holding fast and returning to land is not just an assertion of food sovereignty1 but also an assertion of Indigenous rights, identity, and communal practices to delink from a settler-colonial and neoliberal system that wishes to turn cultivators only into wage laborers in Israeli settlements.

Insurgent agriculture is a move to cultivate lands deemed non-cultivable: rocky lands that normally would need much rehabilitation, soil regeneration, and terrace repairs or construction. Many times, these are lands that are not connected to a water source or electricity. They are not fenced and so are not immune to wild boar attacks. And they are found on Area C lands,2 making it nearly impossible to dig wells, harvest rain, or build permanent structures. Thinking through insurgent agriculture involves understanding it as a decolonial practice, not only as a response to the immediate challenges of occupation but also a broader struggle against the historical and ongoing impacts of colonialism. This perspective highlights the importance of land and resource rights, the revival of indigenous knowledge, and the creation of self-sustaining communities as acts of resistance. 

In the 1970s and 1980s, the main form of Palestinian resistance centered around Sumud (steadfastness), where Palestinians not only clung to what remained of their land in the face of colonial expansion and dispossession, but against all odds, also thrived under this violence (Shehadeh 1982). This produced large networks of Palestinian volunteers, especially student activists, who concentrated their efforts on supporting agricultural work (Robinson 1997). This volunteer movement paved the way for the establishment of “popular committees” that permeated throughout Palestinian society in the Intifada (uprising) of 1987. This was driven by Israeli laws in the 1970s allowing “uncultivated”3 land to be confiscated. The main aim of these committees was to establish an alternative Palestinian economy that undermined colonial subjugation and promoted Palestinian independence (Nassar and Heacock 1990; Tabar and Salamanca 2015). This was precisely the reason for Israel outlawing them in 1988, viewing them as “establishing an alternative apparatus” to Israeli military rule (Robinson 1997:96). Economic production, mutual aid, and popular schools were the main features of these local committees; agricultural production, through backyard farming and cultivating disused lands, thus became a prominent feature of local Palestinian resistance. At a national level, urban-based agronomists and agricultural engineers created links with rural farmers to reduce dependence on Israeli produce and promote self-organizing projects and agricultural development. These culminated in the establishment of the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee (PARC) in 1983 and the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) established in 1986, and the Technical Center for Agricultural Services (TCAS) in 1986 (Robinson 1997). 

In the last decade and in response to oppressive processes carried out by the occupation and the negligence of the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian land-workers have established several initiatives as resistance against colonial oppression and dispossession. In Ramallah’s surrounding villages, youth-led and many women-led agricultural cooperatives emerged such as Ard al-Ya’s Cooperative, Om Sleiman CSA farm, and a cooperative of cooperatives – al-Khat al-Gharbi (Rumanna Nursery, al-Fallah, Om Sleiman Farm, and Ard al-Ya’s) – on lands they don’t own, offered by the community or landowners for cultivation and protection. These agricultural cooperatives mainly aim to 1) preserve ancestral food systems, food sovereignty and dignified livelihoods; 2) reactivate networks of communal solidarity and labor; 3) experiment in alternative and resistance economic systems, refusing foreign funding as core value; and 4) combat land confiscations through collective power (Mari 2023; Kohlbry 2022). Besides land labor, these cooperatives also re-direct discourse around agriculture, producer-community relations, knowledge sources, and local agricultural practices that have been cast as inferior by the occupation. By tapping into place-based historical conceptions of the world, they seek futures beyond colonial constructions of the possible and the sensible (Escobar 2004; Ritskes 2017). For example, some re-center ancestral agricultural knowledge that has mainly passed through successive generations of women; many are preserving and propagating heirloom seeds and plant varieties; and those led by women are reclaiming social and economic power that was stripped away through colonial and patriarchal norms. Similar to other feminist agro-ecological and landless peasant collectives across the globe, such as Fundación Entre Mujeres in Nicaragua, Las Margaritas, and Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra in Brazil, these are some of the Palestinian ways in which these models of insurgent agriculture are promoting food sovereignty that is based not around individual salvation, but around notions of dignity, community wellbeing, grassroots action, and resistance.

• 1. Food sovereignty advocates for the right of communities to control their food production. This includes the preservation and promotion of ancestral agricultural practices that have sustained Palestinian communities for generations. By prioritizing local seed varieties and useful traditional farming methods, these movements aim to achieve seed sovereignty, maintaining the genetic diversity crucial for resilient food systems.
• 2. Area C makes up 60% of the West Bank and contains the majority of fertile land and 80% of water aquifers. Within these areas, Palestinians are banned from digging wells, building permanent structures, expanding infrastructures, or renovating their land without permission of the ICA. Only around 1% of permit applications are accepted, meaning the majority of construction is subject to demolition orders. By contrast, 68% of Area C is reserved for Israeli settlement building. This has forced a growing Palestinian population into ever-shrinking densely-populated spaces and suffocated Palestinian cultivators, who have ended up constrained in small plots and dependent either on waters from nearby springs or purchasing water from nearby settlements.
• 3. “Uncultivated” means either lands left “idle” for 10 years or more by Palestinian landowners who are unable to access or tend to their lands, or lands cultivated using ancestral farming techniques and primarily used for feeding families and their communities, thereby not contributing to the market economy.