To cover the land in green: rain-fed agriculture and anti-colonial land reclamation in Palestine

ABSTRACT

In the 1980s, Palestinian agronomists, activists, and farmers turned land reclamation into an anti-colonial project in the West Bank. Drawing on technical studies, interviews, and fieldwork, this article argues that anti-colonial reclamation is a composite of modernist engineering, peasant tradition, and international Leftist thought. Palestinian experts and voluntary work activists used reclamation to confront colonization and build a political collective to sustain territorial struggle. Today, this legacy shapes plans for landscape transformation and efforts to revitalize village agriculture. Reclamation highlights the importance of agricultural interventions in Palestinian anti-colonialism and reveals connections between seemingly disparate agrarian and Indigenous struggles against dispossession.

KEYWORDS:

• Israel/Palestine
• land
• settler colonialism
• reclamation
• agrarian change
• anti-colonialism

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Kellan Anfinson, Gabi Kirk, Graham Pitts, and China Sajadian for their thoughtful suggestions and comments on an early iteration of the arguments that appear in this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I have used the real names of public figures and anonymized others. There are several barriers to carrying out archival research on agrarian Palestine, and in the West Bank in particular. Palestinians have never enjoyed a centralized state archive, and Israel has destroyed and confiscated materials from the archives kept by various Palestinian municipalities and organizations. As a result, the material I draw on in this article I collected from libraries in Birzeit, Jerusalem, and Nablus.

2 Two additional studies (Awwad 1992; Istanbuli 1991) cover similar ideas and were published in the early 1990s.

3 The Development for Steadfastness Conference was a pivotal series of conferences held from 1981 to 1982 held at universities and centers in the West Bank in which researchers presented a series of papers covering all aspects of the economy in the occupied territories (Khalidi 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the NSF, Palestinian American Research Center, and Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Paul Kohlbry

Paul Kohlbry is an anthropologist. He is currently the Postdoctoral Instructor in Human Rights in the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights at the University of Chicago.