Malik and his brothers farm an ample spread of land in the village of Al-Nasseriya, about 14 kilometers east of Nablus. As he walked through their crops in August 2024, he recounted his good fortune: “We have around 600 dunams [150 acres], a good water supply, and some of the best produce in this part of the valley.” But as he spoke, his eyes strayed to the high ground above us, where we could see the outlines of a makeshift settlement. “The ‘shepherds’ up there are always coming down to harass us,” he said, meaning the unkempt, roving settlers who look as if they just stepped out of the pages of the Bible and started arriving in the area in 2023. “They send drones, and they release their wild boars to ravage our fields.” Yet he also told us that on the other side of that hill, there were more than 1,500 dunams of greenhouses and farmed plots, newly erected and cultivated by Palestinians since Oct. 7. Even though these new farmers might be in competition with him, he seemed to welcome their cultivation of the land.

There are very few positive stories coming out of Palestine. One candidate is the return to the land that is happening in various forms and locations in the West Bank. After Oct. 7, Israeli authorities rescinded the ability to work for as many as 200,000 Palestinians who had been engaged in waged labor inside the Green Line. Many of those cut off from well-paying jobs are opting to work on their ancestral lands, either to keep themselves busy or to eke out an alternative livelihood. The move to integrate Palestinians into the Israeli economy from 1967 onward through the permit system resulted in the progressive abandonment of farms, making it easier for Israeli settlers to seize their land. Reclaiming what remains of their West Bank acreages and reviving the deep heritage of Palestinian agriculture is something to applaud, especially when it draws on the belief that returning the land to productive use is also a form of protection from further seizures.

But this promising new development, as with almost all things Palestinian, has opened up a new field of conflict with the colonizers. At a time when settlers are running rampant on the West Bank, any effort on the part of Palestinians to preserve or defend their smallholdings from theft attracts aggressive attention from Israeli Jews who believe they have an archaic and divinely ordained right to all of the Promised Land. Every square inch of the Jordan Valley in particular is up for grabs; the benign climate and fertile terrain of this natural greenhouse make for a bountiful agricultural prize, and it is being ethnically cleansed at a rapid rate. Many of those displaced are recruited as day laborers on the newly established settlement farms, well supplied with water from Israel’s own national grid while Palestinians are forbidden from digging wells to access their own groundwater.

In addition, the occupation authorities are primed to crack down on any attempt to create an alternative economy, independent of the monopoly enjoyed by Israeli suppliers of goods and services. Most Palestinian grocery stores are stocked with highly subsidized Israeli products, and local farmers are at a competitive disadvantage with their Israeli counterparts, who enjoy discounted water, superior technologies, and better economies of scale and are usually able to get their produce to market first. Yet one of the steps on the road to national liberation is winning the capacity for self-sufficient production — in this case, for Palestinians to grow and put food on their tables by and for themselves.

This idea lies at the root of “food sovereignty,” a concept pioneered by La Via Campesina in the 1990s as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.” The principles were devised as a bottom-up, global south corrective to the accommodationist idea of “food security,” adopted and widely embraced by the corporate agribusiness industry. Unlike in Gaza, where dehydration and famine have been deployed as weapons of genocidal war, there is no imminent threat of famine in the West Bank, but neither is there any guarantee that the far-right Israeli government will not resort to starvation tactics to drive people out in the future. For the time being, most residents enjoy food security, to the benefit of Israeli producers and middlemen for whom the West Bank is a captive, and lucrative, market. But what are the prospects for food sovereignty heralded by the recent return to the land? Is there any evidence, or hope, that an alternative economy can take root, one grounded in solidarity?

If so, it will be because the groundwork has already been laid, over the past few years, by an emergent network of small agricultural cooperatives, many of whose members are politically intentional about the need to create a new kind of social relationship through food production and provision. One of us (Nadine) is a volunteer with the Palestinian Social Fund (PSF), a grassroots fundraising platform aimed at supporting cooperative farms. The other (Andrew) visited several of the farms this past summer. Aside from the heritage of the fellaheen (smallholder farmers), the cooperatives draw upon a lineage that dates to the First Intifada (1987–93), when the interfactional front of the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees called upon Palestinian women to boycott Israeli goods and to participate in the production of homegrown alternatives. The urgent need for locally produced food and clothing prompted a wave of cooperatives involved in home gardening, food processing, handicrafts, animal husbandry, and the reclamation of unused or abandoned land.

This drive to set up a resistance economy, free from the occupation’s clutches and based on a return to the productivity of the land, sprang up under emergency conditions, but it proved to be one of the slow-burning legacies of the intifada years. Whenever labor was withheld as part of a boycott or when Israel canceled work permits as a form of collective punishment for some civil uprising, the land and the promise of autonomy beckoned as both a practical alternative and a political cause.

Alternative agriculture has adherents worldwide, some attracted by the romance of agrarianism or the appeal of healthy lifestyles and others motivated by the urgent need to decarbonize food production and consumption, which accounts for up to 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. In the U.S., a new generation of young and BIPOC farmers has sprung up nationwide, many of them dedicated to sustainable, chemical-free growing under the aegis of agro-ecology. As elsewhere, the cooperatives in Palestine have been founded by college-educated youth. A scarcity of jobs has led them to choose cooperative labor in the fields over nonproductive opportunities in the West Bank’s saturated service sector or the humiliations of waged labor in Israel and the settlements.

Samer Karajah, a member of this new generation, is from the West Bank village of Saffa, whose 5,000 or so inhabitants live in proximity to the apartheid wall. Illegal Israeli settlements lie just to the north. Most of the village’s surrounding agricultural lands fall under what is designated Area C and are subject to Israeli military control. Area C currently represents the active frontier for settlers: the largest swaths of cultivable land with the fewest Palestinian inhabitants and the easiest to expropriate. Karajah, a dabke dancer with the formidable El-Funoun Palestinian Dance Troupe, is part owner of a bohemian Ramallah cafe and a member of the cooperative known as Ard Al-Ya’s, or Land of Despair. He explained that the name, derived from Nietzsche, speaks to the need felt by many young Palestinians to try to transform their alienation into “a productive path towards the future.” In that spirit, the collective employs environmentally conscious cultivation techniques, such as homemade fertilizer and native seeds, as a direct response to colonial conditions not of their choosing.

Established in 2017, Land of Despair began as an agroecology experiment on a small plot belonging to the family of one of the founders. It has expanded to include some 16 members: young men and women, disillusioned by the prospect of working for banks or corporations, who have turned to the nascent cooperatives for a source of income and a sense of political purpose. They serve their own village community of Saffa with discounted produce and donations to low-income families, bringing the rest of the crop to a newly established biweekly popular market in Ramallah. Given the precarious location of their plots, they are doing “resistance farming” inside the open jaw of the occupation. But Karajah insisted, “This is not a romantic effort — we have to show we are economically successful if we want to persuade others to follow suit.” He pointed out that their mission of sustainable farming might even be helped along by Israel restricting access to chemical fertilizer to prevent its use in making explosives.

Land of Despair is one of about 30 cooperatives now operating in the Nablus, Tulkarem, and Ramallah regions. Networked through civil society organizations like the Popular Art Centre, the cooperatives share technical agricultural knowledge and innovative organizational ideas about how to secure the kind of community involvement that will be needed for the projects to thrive over the long term. Culture plays no small role in these initiatives. Aside from mobilizing volunteer work, such as the communal labor that Palestinians perform around the yearly olive harvest, dance and music traditions are an integral part of their work. Karajah said, “We plan to do dabke dance workshops” on one of the Land of Despair plots, reminding us that the dance originated in labor: the stomping of feet firmed up the soil.

The growing co-op movement is a political response to everyday life choices. These new farmers are opting out of the culture of ultra-consumerism and debt leveraging introduced by the Palestinian Authority’s experiment with neoliberalism. The outcome of that economic gamble has further subdued an occupied people through the crushing burden of paying down loans taken out to sustain their middle-class aspirations. By comparison, and despite the lip service paid by PA leaders to the nationalistic value of the land, only 1 percent of its budget goes to agriculture, while as much as 35 percent is allocated to security services as of 2015.

Palestinian civil society, particularly the feminist movement, has long sought to escape its servitude to international NGOs that distribute funding with stringent conditions attached. This restrictive donor mentality has only intensified since Oct. 7, through stepped-up threats to withdraw essential aid for organizations that refuse to tone down their support for resistance. A recent joint statement by 32 Palestinian community organizations calls for “disengaging from ... dependence on foreign aid, replacing it with mobilizing and employing resources at our disposal while nurturing the spirit of participatory work, volunteerism, and giving.” How is this shift manifested in “return to the land” initiatives? The agricultural cooperatives require inputs for the purchase of necessary infrastructure like greenhouses and irrigation equipment. One way of securing these resources is through grassroots fundraising efforts in the diaspora.

Established by Palestinian activists in North America, the Palestinian Social Fund is an organic outgrowth of the cooperative movement. As founder Adam Albarghouthi explained to us, “The Palestinian diaspora once played an active role in supporting the movement for liberation, but the establishment of the Palestinian Authority effectively cut off this crucial link.” The PSF seeks to restore that responsibility by providing financial support for projects that protect and nurture the land. The fund has supported the construction of greenhouses, including at Land of Despair, and the rehabilitation of agricultural infrastructure destroyed by Israeli forces. The PSF’s model relies on a large number of small recurring monthly contributions from Palestinians and allies primarily based in North America. The PSF is oriented toward outlasting the aid generated by humanitarian news cycles tied to outbreaks of extreme military aggression and supporting civil society initiatives that take a principled stance of rejecting conditional donor funding. The goal is to build a grassroots financial infrastructure that, like the cooperatives themselves, can sustain politically grounded work in the long term. 

The cooperatives are building communal bonds that prefigure what a free society could look like in the lands between the river and the sea. In line with the global movement for food sovereignty, their members adhere to the credo that there can be no liberation without sovereignty over daily bread. The reverberations of this sentiment can be heard on the streets of cities around the world, where protesters chant, “Eish, hurriyya, Falastin Arabiyya” (Bread, freedom, and an Arab Palestine). As frontier settlers rampage all across the West Bank and Israel’s military launches more ground invasions into the core residential enclaves of Areas A and B, it remains unclear how the cooperatives, or more generally, the return to the land will fare. In the face of such widespread violence and destruction, there is a tremendous amount of despair, but some remain condemned to hope.