Food sovereignty during occupation, genocide
The following was originally published in the print and digital Deluxe Food Edition. Order a print or digital copy to support the only Palestinian magazine in the United States.
Who owns the seeds you grow and controls the water you irrigate with can be the difference between life and death. The colonization of Palestine is no exception.
Settler colonial enterprises like the Israeli state require control of not only the physical land, but the narratives surrounding it. The colony subsumes the land’s history and mythology, builds its forts on the land, and exploits the land for resources. The land also materially sustains the Indigenous population, allowing them the steadfastness necessary to resist usurping colonizers. Therefore, colonizers issue laws to disconnect, dissect, and distance. To shackle and surround the population, stripping them of independence or autonomy.
Palestinian Syrian chef Reem Assil tells Palestine in America that there is also a correlation between the Indigenous struggle for food sovereignty and Palestine and the struggle of Indigenous and displaced people all over the world. “There is a constant fight to have the land take care of us and sacred connection to the land, which all Indigenous cultures share.”
As Indigenous people, Palestinians resist the colonization of their land, their souls, and their food. Sumood, resilience, is a core pillar of Palestinian refusal of colonization. Out of sumood, Palestinian food sovereignty arose. One way has been through challenging the shortcomings in the food security paradigm, which pushes reliance on trade, food aid, and charity, all of which are easily disrupted — or co-opted — by colonial powers and are vulnerable to global shocks, shortages, and political machinations. Food sovereignty isn’t just about procuring food without consideration of the politics or power relations behind the procurement.
Instead, food sovereignty centers small-scale farmers and seeks to build sustainable local food production. It focuses on reclaiming land and resources, creating communally organized production, and building the infrastructure needed to support resistance. According to Assil, within food sovereignty, the movement for Palestine has an incredible opportunity through Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and other boycott movements, as well as land-based movements in solidarity with other Indigenous people, Black people, and oppressed communities who have had their right to food infringed upon.
“We're economic actors, and so much of how we buy our food is wrapped up into the military industrial complex. If we go back to supporting the stewards of the land, we're fighting on two fronts. We're divesting our resources away from companies that are complicit in the genocide of Palestinians, and then we’re investing that back into people and places that are taking care of the land,” Assil said.
Food sovereignty, in short, is not a buzzword or a trend. It is a revolution, not metaphorically but literally. And because it is a revolution, it is constantly attacked. Nothing is safe. Not even an herb.
For centuries, the herb za’tar (wild thyme) has been part of the Levantine diet, with Palestinians harvesting it as part of heritage and ritual. Blends of ground za’tar with sesame seeds, sumac, and other spices are a staple in every Palestinian home. However, citing “environmental protections” and without scientific evidence, Israel banned the picking of za’tar in 1977. This falls in line with tactics pursued by colonial forces all over the globe, such as Canadian attempts to ban or restrict indigenous peoples from their millennia-old sustainable fishing practices. But it is settlers who endanger Indigenous environments; in addition to their many other violations, Israeli settlers were responsible for the extinction of crocodiles in Palestine. Still, Israelis falsely smear Palestinian hunters as having “cruel” practices that lead to endangerment and extinction of animals. As the old saying goes, every accusation is a confession.
Predictably, the ban on picking the herb did not result in environmental protections; it only robbed Palestinians of an abundant source of food that they could freely find growing in the hills and mountains. Instead, and in the same year, Israeli businessmen from the Ben Herut family sought to create a domesticated variant and monopolize this traditional Palestinian mix. According to their own testimony, the first attempt resulted in a product that was “Totally disgusting, it came out all black.” Only after appropriating a recipe from a Palestinian family did they create a mix that resembles the Palestinian staple. Yet, in typical colonial cognitive dissonance, when asked what drove their business, the son responded with: “National pride … I want people to say za’atar is Israel.”
Artwork by Ameerah Bad’r
Thus, in one fell swoop, Palestinians practicing their traditional agro-culinary practices became lawbreakers, and the settlers who barely learned how to prepare the mix claimed ownership of the practice as a marker of indigeneity. It is no coincidence that the only people who are punished for picking the herbs today are Palestinians.
From the onset of Zionist settler colonialism, one of the primary mechanisms to dominate Palestinians has been the de-development of their capacity to provide for themselves and reduce them to captive consumers of Israeli goods. A huge blow was dealt to the predominantly agricultural Palestinian society during and after the Nakba, which saw the ethnic cleansing of nearly a million Palestinians and the expropriation of thousands of acres of arable and fertile land. The number of seized farms was so great that there was little need for the now-established Zionist entity to construct new ones: Restoring the abandoned farms of the ethnically cleansed Palestinians accounted for the most significant source of agricultural growth of the Zionist state well into the 1970s.
The destruction of Palestinian self-reliance doesn’t always take the form of sweeping land theft and bloodshed. It also manifests quotidian — even mundane — workings and logic of colonial military occupation, the day-to-day injustice and systemic violence that make up the life of colonized people. Permits, checkpoints, and laws are all utilized in an attempt to sever Palestinians from their traditional food culture. The story of za’tar encapsulates these tactics, showing how carcerality is the steadfast companion of settler colonial mechanisms of control.
From Victory Gardens to Proletarianization
With the outbreak of the Intifada of 1987, the struggle for food sovereignty and self-reliance took center stage to sustain the anti-colonial resistance. If Palestinians could produce their own food, they could mitigate the consequences of open rebellion. Towards that aim, so-called “Victory Gardens” were established. These were grassroots initiatives to organize small-scale agriculture at the household and neighborhood levels. Palestinian communities all over replaced their flowers and roses with tomatoes and peppers; their ornamental trees gave way to citrus and stone fruits.
Agricultural cooperatives arose to support these endeavors, providing seeds, tools, and insecticide at cost to Palestinians in the surrounding areas. As a result, it is estimated that between 1987 and 1989, over 500,000 productive trees were planted across Palestine. Technically, no colonial laws were being broken, but Yitzhak Rabin (the Israeli defense minister at the time) understood the implication of these efforts. He thus devised methods to strangle Palestinian agricultural production. One of the main tactics was to strategically declare week-long curfews during the harvest season so that the produce would rot in the field rather than provide sustenance to the Palestinian resistance. When the residents of Beit Sahour purchased 18 dairy cows to produce their own milk, the occupation authorities spared no effort in their attempt to seize the cows so that Palestinians would remain dependent on Israeli milk.
Today, the occupation employs similar methods to curb Palestinian food sovereignty. From its rampant settlement of the West Bank to its control of water and other resources, pursuing agricultural activities is heavily disincentivized and, in many cases, punished. This has led to many farmers abandoning their lands, with only 26% of farmers reporting agriculture as their primary profession. Instead, Palestinians become captive day laborers inside the colonial economy to make ends meet. This has the effect of detaching Palestinians from their land, which fosters a double dependence on the occupier: A dependence for daily wages, and a dependence for food in the absence of adequate farming output from now-fallow lands. Additionally, this provides pretexts to the army and settlers who exploit obsolete Ottoman laws to seize the lands due to their “unproductivity.”
The considerable efforts the occupation employs in combating Palestinian food sovereignty indicate that it views it as a severe threat to its regime of control. Food sovereignty has social and political dimensions in addition to the immediate economic ones; Palestinian cooperatives often served as dynamos for mobilizing activism and resistance.
The politics of food behind bars
Retributive measures against the Indigenous are an intrinsic feature of settler colonialism. Chief among them is incarceration. Taking Palestians as political prisoners at whim is an aim by the Israeli state to project power and signal mastery over the land and its Indigenous population. But through mass incarceration, they instead reveal a weakness: that the colonial project lacks legitimacy and is openly rejected by the people it seeks to dominate. They reveal their fear; the resistance is so powerful that its fighters, its supports, their children, their mothers, their fathers — everyone who represents the resistance in any small way — must be isolated and locked up in dark cells.
Incarceration is meant to be a shaming, isolating experience. In 1982, Orlando Patterson described the condition of enslaved Black Americas as a “social death,” and the terminology has also been used by scholars like Joshua M. Price to describe the American prison industrial complex, a system where over 28 percent of Black men are estimated to endure in their lifetimes. While all forms of systemic incarceration are unjust and horrific, the concept of incarceration being a “social death” is another area where the colonization of Palestine has met fierce resistance. Being targeted by these systems is not a point of shame but of pride for Palestinians, whereas other settler colonies have been more successful at falsely deeming incarceration to be a sign of deviancy and unworthiness. In Palestine, we await and fight for the return of our political prisoners. We tell of the traumas they endure such as rape not to humiliate them but to stand with them. And they emerge from their cells as respected community leaders and are greeted in the streets with cheers, processions, and flowers.
This open defiance of colonial mechanisms of control extends inside the prison cells. The political, primal nature of food makes it a central axis of struggle within the prison. Food, in the confines of Israeli prisons, becomes an arena where Palestinians can exert some form of agency in a context designed to strip them of autonomy or self-reliance.
While in some rare cases around the world, prisoners are afforded the ability to cultivate gardens and partake in programs that help supplement their daily food — one might argue that even these programs are an example of cracks in the food security paradigm, as prisoners still must entreat the state to allow them to feed themselves — this does not exist for Palestinians in Israeli jails.
Instead, the struggle over food takes a different dimension, where the decision even to consume food can constitute a significant flashpoint. This takes the form of hunger strikes, where Palestinians overturn the notion of “normalcy” inside cells and turn the jailors’ means of control against them.
Throughout its history, the Palestinian prisoner movement has staged many large-scale hunger strikes, dating back to at least the 1960s. This is the ultimate rejection of colonial control mechanisms, prisoners putting their own lives on the line to demand their freedom. This embodies the philosophy of “victory or death.” Palestinians have been martyred in this struggle for freedom and dignity. Khader Adnan, who died in Israeli jails after 80 days of hunger strike, is an enduring symbol of this resistance.
From its side, Israel has always done its best to break the will of the strikers, seeking to control everything down to what Palestinians choose to eat or not eat. Every ounce of agency or free will must be denied. Consequently, the Israeli regime and its prison administration crack down heavily on Palestinians who dare to strike; these tactics include:
“...pulling captives out of their cells, stripping them, and mocking their slender bodies; conducting provocative room searches, confiscating their remaining assets; revoking all rights, such as the right to access daily newspapers or to the radio; reducing break times; overcrowding rooms."
Another method to break the will of Palestinians is force-feeding, which is a prohibited practice and widely considered a form of torture. Additionally, Israeli prison authorities employ psychological torment by spreading rumors that other prisoners had broken their strike and were, in fact, feasting while others suffered hunger and thirst.
Since October 7th, 2023, the mistreatment and torture of Palestinian prisoners has taken new heights, according to Basil Farraj, Assistant Professor at Birzeit University and specialist in carceral practices. Palestinians are emerging from Israeli cells “looking like skeletons.” Undernourishment and starvation have become the standard, and any achievements and rights won by the prisoner movement over the last five decades have been stripped away. Reports of meager portions and downright rotten food have been documented by prisoners’ lawyers in the few times they were permitted to visit. This amounts to the “use of food and starvation to blackmail and torture Palestinians.” Farraj added. Prisoners from Gaza are not even granted the “luxury” of lawyers and are forcefully disappeared, only to be tortured, starved, and released as corpses by the truckload.
The depths of sadistic cruelty displayed by the genocide in Gaza underline how dire the struggle for food in Palestine is. The bombing of bakeries, the complete strangulation of aid at the crossings, the insulting and deadly aid drops, and the multiple flour massacres are just some examples of this. Hunger has forced Palestinians to bake bread made from animal feed, and their emaciated bodies tell the tale of the horrors of the weaponization of starvation, not only to control but also to exterminate. But Palestinians resist this as well, as Assil points out. “Even in the rubbles of Gaza, Palestinians are planting seeds as a way to feed ourselves, as a way to show reverence for the Earth and to plant seeds that will grow when Palestine is free.”
As Palestinians, sovereignty over food, including the freedom and ability to produce and consume it on our own terms, is an issue of monumental implications. Our agro-culinary traditions transcend mere cultural significance and play a pivotal role in creating the conditions necessary to foment resistance to colonialism. Ultimately, if we cannot feed ourselves, we cannot free ourselves. This is why such efforts are so bitterly opposed by those who see Palestinian liberation as anathema.
