Jadu’i Watermelon harvested from heirloom seeds native to Jenin in the occupied West
Bank, grown as part of a collaboration between the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library and Ujamaa Farming Cooperative Alliance. (Ranganathan, 2025)
By Masha Kazantsev
This article discusses how seed libraries, seed keeping, and heirloom seeds serve as an
act of resistance and a way to preserve cultural identity for Palestinians against settler
occupation and genocide.
1. Introduction
In the warm days of October, at the start of olive harvesting season, families from surrounding villages gather around in olive groves, tenderly picking the bountiful fruits into cloths and baskets. Children gather eagerly to aid their elders in picking or sorting. This is the practice of A’wna or musha’a, a Palestinian communal land practice where farmers gather from village to village to help with various seasonal harvests.1 Decades before October 7th 2023 and continuing afterward, many of these olive trees, some thousands of years old, have been ripped from the ground by the Israeli military.2 Many of the farmers who tended to the olive trees were killed, and the groves which once held these sacred harvesting ceremonies now lay as wasteland of bombed, upturned, and empty erased land.3
Land is key to settler colonialism, namely the conquest of land by one group such that another group’s attachment to that land is delegitimized and erased. Land is also central to resource extraction, power formation, and the concept of property. The commodification of land strips the spiritual value of a place, and creates a racial hierarchy of the people who inhabit that land, binding them to a capitalistic system.4 This racial capitalism is defined, drawing on scholars Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Jodi Melamed, as the inherent tendency for capital to accumulate through the racial ordering of people and places.5
This system depends on displacement to generate wealth through the Israeli government and military stealing and destroying Palestinian land, as well as an active erasure of people native to the land.6 Land, stripped of its relational meaning, becomes only a vehicle for profit. This separation not only from land, but resources as well, is a form of apartheid, or a separation on the basis of ethnicity and race. According to the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, “apartheid” is defined in universal terms as a crime against humanity, involving “inhumane acts” committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime. These acts include forcible transfer of population and persecution against any identifiable group on the grounds of political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender identity.7
In the face of violence, how do local communities resist the dispossession and erasure of colonialism? The concept of the Plantationocene is helpful to understanding settler colonial and racial violence as it is exerted on land and agriculture. Specifically, heirloom seed libraries and Palestinian seed keeping are sites of resistance against occupation and reclamation of sovereignty through community engagement, traditional food practices, intergenerational knowledge, and storytelling. While this essay focuses on Palestine, seedkeeping is part of a larger global indigenous movement to reclaim food sovereignty and resist colonial structures. This analysis is framed through the lens of political ecology, critical agroecology, and geopolitics.
In the wake of the atrocities committed against Israelis by Hamas, an armed terror group fighting for Palestinian rights, on October 7, 2023 and the ensuing total onslaught and annihilation of Gaza committed by the Israeli government over the past 700+ days, it is a timely moment to show longstanding acts of resistance by the Palestinians. As children, parents, and siblings continue to lose their lives to preventable famine, Palestine is the mirror to the rest of the world, exposing the structures of colonization that are alive and well in land and agriculture.
2. Brief History
The Zionist project of the post-World War II era was a movement which called for a safe, independent Jewish state in the wake of the Holocaust and the persecution and uneasy unwillingness of western countries to give asylum to Jewish refugees.8 Palestine was first proposed as the site for a partition plan by a 1947 UN charter detailing one Arab side and one Jewish side. The site was chosen as it is the Holy Land for Jews, Muslims, and Christians. This plan, Resolution 181, was drawn up during the end of the British Mandate. The land was not empty prior to the Israeli state’s creation in 1948; it was inhabited by a wide range of diverse groups of faith, co-existing and in community. After 1948, one group’s politics and cultural staying power was superimposed upon the others, often by force.9
There is a stark difference between Zionism and Judaism. Judaism is the religious practice of the Jewish people, while Zionism is a national and political ideology.10 While human and inalienable rights demand that no Jewish person should ever have to fear harm or persecution again, there have been major critiques of Zionism in its mission to create the Jewish state. The creation of Israel came with a major human cost, and set the stage for the violent present. The Nakba (Catastrophe) in 1948 was the westward forced displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes which allowed for settlers to occupy pre-built and abandoned homes.11 Behind this exodus is a clear settler logic: to claim land, one must erase its memory and remove those who remember it. As the Zionist slogan states, “a land without a people for a people without a land.”12 The cuisine, the fruit industries, the farms, the sea- every component of Palestinian food sovereignty and food culture was now in a position to be taken over, and used in order to build the identity of a middle eastern Jewish state, and claim the religious right to the land.13 The very presence of Palestinians is political, particularly in the last decade, as military occupation and violence in the form of shooting, bombs, and sieges have increased in scope and devastation.14 The topic of the state of Palestine has long been controversial. Criticism of the Israeli government and military violence has been conflated with antisemitism despite robust peacebuilding and human rights initiatives led by secular and religious Jewish organizations.15
3. All About Land: The Fast and Slow Violence of Settler Colonial Rule
The Plantationocene, a term emerging in response to the anthropocene, offers a more precise framing of the ecological and cultural violence tied to colonial capitalism. While the anthropocene describes humanity’s broad impact on the planet, particularly through fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, the Plantationocene names the specific historical trajectory of exploitation that has driven much of that destruction, particularly through settler colonialism. Coined to expose the links between colonialism, capitalism, and ecological degradation, the Plantationocene centers monoculture, forced labor, land dispossession, and extractive economies.16
Plantation logics continue to shape our world. From the violent land grabs of colonial conquest to the destruction of traditional food systems and commodification of seeds, these practices reflect an ongoing commodification of life. Settler colonialism thrives within this framework, using the tools of the Plantationocene to extract, dehumanize, and erase Indigenous ways of life.17 Seeds, once freely exchanged by communities, have been caught in the same web of erasure, privatization, and violence that has marked the experience of Indigenous peoples. Palestine, being a part of the Fertile Crescent, holds a legacy as being the birthplace of the domestication of wheat and barley.18 People have risked getting shot or arrested simply for foraging for wild thyme, an herb that is central to Palestinian (and the more widely known Middle Eastern) cuisine.19 The settler colonial structures and violences enacted against Palestinians also bear global similarities. At the core of the current genocide is a structural, cultural, and ecological violence designed to dispossess Indigenous communities of land, history, and life. The militant forces which project Zionist colonial operations have sought to eradicate, displace, and often advance the forced assimilation of indigenous groups by extracting the perceived enriched nature of so-called “virgin lands.”20 These are landscapes seen by the Israeli government as empty, ready to be cultivated, commodified, and controlled.
4. Palestine as Plantationocene
Plants, already named, known, and cared for in their original cultural contexts, were stripped of meaning, renamed, categorized, and sanitized to fit Western worldviews through global colonialism. This disconnection extended into the plantation system, where vast monocultures were designed to produce cash crops like cotton, sugar, and tobacco for colonial markets. The Transaltantic slave trade created a massive wealth boom for colonizing countries through resource extraction, for example: Haitian sugar cane crops, tobacco plantation in North Carolina, cotton in Gujurat, India and in Mississipi, USA.21 Crops began to be viewed purely through an extractive lens, along with the hands that tended the plants. These extractive systems demanded the removal of biodiversity and the imposition of industrial control over life. The logic of monoculture endures in today’s industrial agriculture. Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, chemical giants such as Monsanto and DuPont turned their attention to the seed industry, consolidating independent seed companies. Today, four companies control 60% of the global seed market and 75% of the global pesticide market.22 These corporations engineered seed varieties that depend on their associated chemicals, creating a cycle of dependency for farmers. Corporations criminalized the ancient practice of seed saving.23 Hybrid and sterile seeds, engineered not to reproduce, are an unnatural contradiction of what seeds represent: life, regeneration, and continuity. Through intellectual property regimes, corporations claim legal ownership over genetic materials and traditional practices, treating seeds as property devoid of history. Patents thus become a direct tool of coloniality, creating a sterile, neutral concept of seeds while actively destroying the cultural and ecological relationships of seedkeeping.24 Settler colonialism actively obscures and erases Indigenous peoples through violence and dispossession, shaping not only law and policy but also science, agriculture, and cultural memory itself.25
At its core, settler colonialism, and the Plantationocene, is about land. Yet, land is understood very differently in capitalist and colonial contexts than in indigenous worldviews, which helps explain how the violence against Palestinians can manifest in destruction of the land, or displacement from it. This section examines these competing understandings of land while also discussing how the logic of the Plantationocene extends beyond territorial control to encompass food sovereignty, agriculture, and water governance.
This logic materializes in the destruction of ecosystems, the imposition of colonial agriculture, and the criminalization of traditional farming. In Palestine, this has taken the form of militarized checkpoints, restricted access to agricultural land, and the splitting and zoning of land.26 For example, in Area C, 70% of land is off-limits to Palestinians.27 The result is a system of land apartheid, where Palestinians are simultaneously displaced and criminalized for attempting to remain on their own land.28
Map of areas A, B, and C as of September 2024. Source: Al Jazeera. Haddad, M., & Ali, M. (2024)
Food sovereignty is defined as “an expression of communities’ and Indigenous Peoples’ power to determine how they grow, prepare, share and eat food and a reflection of their relationship to land and water.”29 While “sovereignty” often suggests state-like control over land, many Indigenous revitalization projects instead redefine sovereignty as reciprocal, autonomous relationships with the land, protected from outside interference.30 For Palestinian farmers and seedkeeping groups, rebuilding food systems is inseparable from political autonomy. The struggle for food sovereignty is a combined struggle against erasure and occupation, as “a people cannot be truly sovereign if they cannot shape what and how they eat.”31
Control over agriculture is a core tactic of settler-colonialism in Palestine. The Israeli state applies a wide range of policies to dismantle the Palestinian agricultural sector and displace farmers.32 Since 1967, the agricultural sector’s contribution to Palestine’s GDP has dropped from over 33% to just 3.9% by 2014, while its labor force share fell from 32% to less than 10% by 2015. Meanwhile, settler water consumption for agriculture is 18 times higher than that of Palestinians in the West Bank.33 Israeli settlers also appropriated both the land and techniques of Palestinian farmers, often rebranding them as their own. The concept of avodat ha-adama (working the land), for instance, emerged from Zionist ideology, yet copied the traditional Palestinian relationship to soil.34 In 1948, Zionist militias took over all Palestinian orange groves along the stretch of the Palestinian coast as well as the brand “Jaffa Orange”. The Jaffa Orange became trademarked as a symbol of a “New Israel.”35
Water, too, has been weaponized. Palestinians are often denied access to natural water sources, such as wells and rainwater cisterns, even prior to October 7.36 As water and food began to be blockaded by the IDF, the criminalization of rainwater collection became further dire.37 The state of Israel systematically uproots olive trees, symbols of Palestinian heritage and resilience, in an effort to erase the cultural landscape.38 Despite these hardships, Palestinians continue to resist through the cultivation of Ba’ali (rain fed) seeds which require minimal water and represent centuries of resilient agro-ecological knowledge.39
This strategy of agricultural suppression is reinforced by international financial institutions like the World Bank and IMF, which lend to the Palestinian Authority on the condition that it adopts neoliberal reforms: deregulation, privatization, and the development of export markets.40 Farmers have struggled to continue a biodiverse style of farming and rain fed agriculture. The pressures on Palestinian farmers to industrialize by international organizations and the Israeli government meant fields were homogenized into monoculture, while farmers who had intimate knowledge of the soil were displaced.41 Destruction of orchard trees, especially orange and olive, paint the depth of settler colonial violence.42
In the initial stages of the IDF’s response, it was estimated by Israeli operatives that Hamas combatants were killed for every two civilians. However, this underestimates the civilian ratio, particularly children under 18, who make up 47% of the total population.43 It is now estimated that 69,000 Palestinians have been killed, directly and indirectly.44 Food and water have been weaponized, and Palestine is currently in the emergency final stages of famine, as food and aid is blocked from entering Gaza by the IDF.45 The destruction of infrastructure, including energy, water, agriculture, healthcare, sanitation, and housing, has created a near unlivable environment and devastating implications for future generations to come.46 Despite the ceasefire on October 10 2025, about 241 Palestinians have been killed, strikes have been ordered by the state of Israel, and food insecurity remains an urgent issue.47
5. Seed Saving as Transnational Resistance
Seeds are an integral part of human history. As humans began to farm, they selected for desirable traits such as robust yields and climate resistance.48 Over centuries, vegetables, grain, and fruit transformed into versions of the food we know today. Seed keeping is a term traditionally known to many indigenous groups.49 Indigenous relationships to land and non-human lives are kincentric, or seen as a web of relation, as opposed to hierarchical.50 In this worldview, growing crops is not a streamlined process to extract food, rather, it is service to land. Seeds are seen as kin, and safeguarded by seedkeepers. Just like heirloom objects, seeds are passed down through generations. Seeds, however, also contain the DNA of their predecessors. Seeds represent the stories and traditions of the farmers that have held them and farmed them.51 The Palestinian cultural values of perseverance, resistance, and rootedness in the land are encapsulated in the struggle for self determination.52 This ethos is mirrored in Indigenous practices where crop diversity is a direct result of ongoing acts of reclamation and resistance.
Seeds also have symbolic and spiritual meaning. For instance, Ba’ali seeds are adapted for dry climates and used in Ba’al, the Palestinian practice of rainfed agriculture named after the Canaanite god of fertility and fortitude, Ba’al.53 Seeds suited to growth in an arid climate include wheat, tomatoes, okra, zucchini, and watermelon. Another prominent Palestinian crop is the Jaffa orange of Al-Majdal, which formed a booming industry in the 1930s and 1940s. This orange was exported to the Middle East and Europe, earning its acclaim for its lovely sweetness, which became a source of pride and a symbol of Palestine’s nationhood.54
In many Indigenous traditions, seeds are not only viewed as ancestors but also as living archives, vessels of memory, identity, and ecological knowledge.55 Planting and harvesting are embedded in cultural and spiritual practices; seeds feed communities physically while also rooting them in place, memory, and relation. The act of growing food is ceremonial, relational, and intergenerational.56 The traces of the olive tree in Palestine date back to 8,000 BC, coming from Greece adapting readily to the arid conditions.57 Palestinian farmers and olive trees have a familial relationship, as the service of the caretaker for the tree is the main concern rather than the yield of olives. The care of the farmer is reflected in the tree’s health.58
The wealth of documentation on farming as resistance, rather than simple livelihood is telling of the story of colonialism and the erasure of traditional livelihoods.
Seed libraries exist at the intersection of physical space and living tradition. They are dynamic, community-based networks for education, empowerment, and cultural continuity. In Palestine, these spaces help reclaim heirloom seed (also often known as landraces) varieties grown for generations, carrying in their DNA the tastes, stories, and relationships of the people who have cultivated them.59 Individuals can go to seed libraries to take seeds for gardening and farming, free of cost. Ideally, seeds from the plants grown would then be returned to the library for growing the next year.60 Seed libraries can also encompass the action of seed exchange, seed keeping, even the gathering of community over traditional crops, as this too builds connection back to traditional practices.61 Seed libraries create pathways for agricultural self-sufficiency, sovereignty, and serve as quiet but powerful acts of resistance against erasure.
Heirloom seeds have cultural significance that transcends just cultural practice; in many ways these seeds hold generations of memories, which for many indigenous groups may be lost otherwise. As Vivien Sansour of the Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library (PHSL) explains, “These heirloom varieties represent our cultural identity, who we are is living in the DNA of these seeds”.62 The relationship between seeds and people is so deeply interwoven that the genetic bond is a complement to the kincentric connection.
The saving of heirloom seeds is central to the mutual preservation of crop biodiversity and cultural heritage. Efforts to reclaim seeds as a commons (communal area/resource) involve the creation of spaces beyond the state and the market, with the production and circulation of seeds.63 Even an act of storing and exchanging seeds is seen as political, and threatening.64 Seed saving has a long and controversial history, even in the United States, a country that greatly prioritizes agricultural intellectual property rights in order to be a leader in world food production. An early seed library in California was shut down by the State Agricultural Department, on the basis that the library was committing ‘agri-terrorism’ under the 2004 Seeds Act.65 These actions expose how seed sharing, a relational and reciprocal practice, threatens colonial-capitalist logics of extraction, ownership, and commodification. An example of this occurring in the current genocide is farmers like 24 year old Youssef Saqr Abu Rabie, whose fields were bulldozed. He was killed by the IDF for his efforts to keep seeds and grow vegetables in plastic containers using tree waste to feed his community under starvation conditions.66
Seeds, for many Palestinians, are more than tools of cultivation, they are national and cultural heirlooms. Passed down through generations, these landraces hold deep sentimental value, much like cherished family objects. Vivien Sansour’s founding of the PHSL centers the symbolic power of seeds as vessels of memory, identity, and hope. Based in Battir, a UNESCO World Heritage site, the PHSL functions as both an agricultural and artistic space that recovers ancient varieties and the stories they carry, saving them from extinction while repatriating the seeds back to the people.67
Image from Battir, source: Palestine: Land of olives and vines – cultural landscape of southern Jerusalem, Battir – UNESCO World Heritage Centre.
“Abu Samra أبو سمرة,” a song composed by Ziyad Hilal and inspired by the seed library, celebrates a variety in the PHSL:a dark-whiskered heirloom wheat used for bread and freekeh, a spiced grain dish. Sansour laments its loss: “Abu Samra seeds have been treasured and passed down for centuries, but in more recent times have been lost and forgotten… The danger is that we are becoming consumers not producers.”68 This critique of agribusiness warns against the displacement of traditional practices by industrialized systems reliant on chemicals and commodification, the same chemical and industrial practices employed by the state of Israel.69 Through projects like the PHSL, seeds of landraces native to the region are kept, exchanged, and planted around the world to keep Palestine alive. Palestinians are able reclaim their roles as seed keepers and storytellers. Seeds become living archives, and symbols of a deep yearning of return.
Top: Image of Abu Samra wheat (Cresswell, 2021). Bottom: Viviene Sansour holding the harvested wheat source: Sansour, V. (n.d.). Palestine Heirloom Seed Library
Heirloom seeds evolve in situ, meaning they adapt to a specific environment and “know the soil.”70 In Palestinian poetry, this kinship relationship of seeds is described not only with people who serve them but also nonhuman entities, such as the moisture, the soil, the sun, the birds, and the wind.71 The ecological context is everything, because it shapes the experience of the seed and how it takes on characteristics of its own. The importance of in situ for heirloom seeds is also a fitting metaphor for examining the displacement and resilience of Palestinians from their lands.
Seed libraries challenge industrial agriculture and settler control by reframing food as a communal right rather than a commodity. For example, a community garden that grows freely and feeds freely reclaims the logic of farming from capitalist extraction to collective care. In Palestine, this vision takes root in the work of institutions like the Palestine Museum of Natural History. Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, its founder, describes the museum’s gardening project as, “ a waiting game…Planted seeds do not bear fruit immediately.”72 Here, tending to plants becomes a form of long-term resistance, one that nurtures life under occupation and invests in future generations. Even the simple act of planting olive trees in Palestine is layered with resistance and risk. It is impactful when considering that an olive tree takes about seven to eight years from the time it is plated to bear fruit. It is fully mature in 15 years after planting.73 It is a refusal to surrender land, a symbol of return, and a declaration that Palestinians will continue to not just exist, but outlast the current system of violence. Qumsiyeh provides the framework that the current Plantationocene is not sustainable, and eventually will collapse in on itself.74 To save seeds is to refuse despair; it is to believe in a future where violence gives way to regeneration, and where land once stolen is tended again with care.
6. Conclusion – Seeds For The Future
Seed libraries are a symbol and serve as foundational steps in a broader process of resistance to settler colonialism. They offer a possibility for communities to reclaim their seeds, stories, and sovereignty.
However, Palestinian cultural foods have had a history of appropriation by the state of Israel as a nation building tool.75 This raises a pressing question: Can heirloom seeds in Palestine remain safe from commodification and appropriation? Despite this concern, many seed activists believe in the necessity of dispersion. These seeds are not sold, they are given after establishing an interpersonal relationship of trust and community. Entrustments such as this hold the opener to a social contract, a promise that creates a personal connection to the seeds.
The PHSL hopes to share Palestinian seeds around the world, not to erase their origins, but to keep them alive until they can be returned and planted again in liberated soil.76 This is a vision not just of preservation, but of return.
Palestine and international indigenous communities share a struggle of displacement and an attempted continued erasure of their identities and culture. Seed saving and seed libraries provide a way to repair and resist the violence of settler colonialism and the Plantationocene, while regaining relationships to oneself, food, and the land.
Endnotes
1. Al Jazeera English. (2024, October 12). Harvesting resilience: Olive picking during war and displacement. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8vPD44inh0
2. Fakhri, M. (2024). Starvation and the right to food: With an emphasis on the Palestinian people’s food sovereignty (Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to food). United Nations Human Rights Council.
3. United Nations. (2025, October). Un rights office sounds alarm over “skyrocketing” Israeli settler violence during Olive Harvest | UN News. United Nations. https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/10/1166145
4. Trott, S. (2024). Sowing discord: A critical discourse analysis of seeds and struggle in the Plantationocene.
5. Melamed, J. (2015). Racial capitalism. Critical ethnic studies, 1(1), 76-85.
6. Gilmore, R. W., Antipon, L. C., Alves, C. N., & Novo, M. F. (2024). Ruth Wilson Gilmore-Freedom is a place. Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Abolition Geography. GEOUSP, 28(1), e-222824.
7. Waxman, D. (2022). Israel, amnesty, and the apartheid accusation: a wake-up call. Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture, 27(1/2), 25-32.
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24. Embree, J. K., & Gilman, N. V. (2024). The story of the modern seed library. Council on Library and Information Resources.
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49. Peiser, M. (2022). Citing seeds, citing people: Bibliography and Indigenous memory, relations, and living knowledge-keepers. Criticism, 64(3), 521–531. https://doi.org/10.13110/criticism.64.3.0521
50. Peiser, M. (2022). Citing seeds, citing people: Bibliography and Indigenous memory, relations, and living knowledge-keepers. Criticism, 64(3), 521–531. https://doi.org/10.13110/criticism.64.3.0521
51. Embree, J. K., & Gilman, N. V. (2024). The story of the modern seed library. Council on Library and Information Resources.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Masha Kazantsev
Masha Kazantsev is a graduate student at the School of International Service studying
Global Environmental Policy. She is interested in the impact of climate change on future
infrastructures of urban spaces, food-cultural heritage, and migration policy. She is a generalist
to her delight and detriment.
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