1 Before the creation of Israel, the Palestinian rural economy was mainly groundedon a family agriculture that had not yet been fully integrated into the capitalist market system, characterised by self-reliance, lack of external inputs and capital and labour-intensive activities. [1]

2 For Palestinian peasants, the creation of Israel meant the loss of access to most of their sources of livelihood. The Zionist project of construction of a sovereign Jewish nation-state was grounded on the reinvention of the territory through urban sprawl and the development of an unsustainable, high-tech and capitalist, intensive agriculture. [2] This has been allowed by the centralisation of most of regional water resources, systematic land expropriations and large-scale displacements of Palestinians and Bedouin pastoral groups.

3 Since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and especially in the neo-liberal framework imposed by the Oslo agreements, Palestinian agricultural production has been decreasing and the Palestinian society has been turned into a consumer one and the largest external market for the Israeli economy, leading to Palestinians’ food insecurity and increasing their subordination to Israel. [3] These dynamics have been favoured by agriculturecommoditisation, which have led to the loss of the historical self-reliance and environmental and economic sustainability of Palestinian farming activities.

4 In this article, Ibring to light these processes by analysing the case of the Palestinian rural village of Wādī Fūkīn, situated in the south-west area of Bethlehem (West Bank). First, I show the local ecological, economic and socio-political implications of both Israel’s territory planning, administrative and economic policies and of farmingcommoditisation and intensification fostered by some development agencies. Then, I highlight farmers’ knowledge patterns and daily strategies to continue to farm and to struggle for their food security and the material and socio-cultural reproduction of their family and the whole community.

The Ecological, Economic and Cultural Creation of Palestinians’ Food Subordination

5 The village of Wādī Fūkīn hosts about 1350 inhabitants and lies in a narrow valley characterised by the presence of numerous springs, whose water is used for irrigation via community management of a network of irrigation gravity flow channels and pools.

6 According to villagers’ social memories, before the creation of Israel the local subsistence economy was grounded on self-reliant family agro-pastoral activities, viewed as integrated and complementary strategies of using the multiple resources of the local semiarid environment, in a circular, autonomous and cooperative way. In the valley peasants practiced irrigated agriculture of vegetables, while the lands in the hills surrounding the valley were dedicated to grazing and to rain-fed farming of wheat and barley – used to produce flour and forage – and of citrus, walnuts, almond and olive treescultivated for the production of olives, oil and soap. Peasants raised many sheep, goats and cows and few camels that provided manure, meat and milk used to produce cheese and yogurt. They brought their animals to graze within an “area of subsistence” [4] extending until the area of Jericho, according to annual transhumance cycles. Surplus crops were sold mainly in the close Jerusalem market, which today is inaccessible.

7 The creation of Israel in 1948 led to radical changes in the community’s livelihood and its economic and socio-cultural configuration. The definition of Israel’s borders entailed the loss of access to most lands of the village, included into the State of Israel. In 1956 the Israeli army demolished the village and displaced its inhabitants, who became refugees, with the consequent scattering of tribal groups and extended families in the Palestinian territories, in Jordan and other countries. However, differently from most of refugees, in 1972 the people from Wādī Fūkīn succeeded to return to live in the village (except most of those living in foreign countries). Nevertheless, since the 1980s Israel continues to expropriate their lands to develop the Israeli town of Tzur Hadassah (within the Israeli State’s borders) and the urban settlement of Beitar Illit (in the West Bank), built on the top of the hills encircling the village. The strengthened borders of the village and the loss of access to the hill lands and pastures led to the gradual abandonment of cereal cultivation and of mobile herding activities, with the consequent villagers’ complete sedentarisation. [5]

8 Israel’s systematic expropriation of Palestinians’ lands is allowed by restoring the Ottoman land legislation fostering the individual land ownership system. In accordance with it, Israel declares a land without private title that is uncultivated for at least three consecutive years as state land and, therefore, liable to be expropriated.

9 The 1993 Oslo Accords establishing the Palestinian Authority (PA) did not secure Palestinians’ land rights, given thatmost lands in the village (the arable lands) have been included in an area C, under the Israeli army’s administration and security control. In the areas C Israel does not recognise the oral knowledge about families’ historical land ownerships and it does not allow the Palestinian Land Authority’s land registration. It also forbids any construction work, hindering the improvement of farming conditions. By means of these juridical and administrative policies Israel seeks to coerce villagers to leave farming in order to expropriate the uncultivated lands – such as those in the slopes of the hills, close to the Israeli urban areas, whose access is banned for security reasons. Moreover, it denies the expansion of the built-up area, limited to the area B (under the PA’s administration but the Israeli army’s security control), seeking to entice the new generations to move from the village. In the framework of the growth of the population over generations, these strategies lead to increasing conditions of land shortage and fragmentation while the use of many landsunder expropriation is banned by the Israeli authorities.

A part of the valley of Wādī Fūkīn. In the background, the Israeli settlement of Beitar Illit

A part of the valley of Wādī Fūkīn. In the background, the Israeli settlement of Beitar Illit

10 The expansion of paved impermeable lands for the development of the Israeli urban settlements hinders winter rainwater infiltration into the ground, thus weakening the springs, some of which dried up completely. [6] The winter rainwater that is not absorbed by the soil flows down to the village, damaging farmlands, roads and houses. The Israeli ban on building in the area C prevents the construction of a network of channels and harvesting cisterns to collect rainwater in order to prevent floods and to use it for irrigation. The Israeli urban development thus hinders the “hydro-social cycle” [7] on which local livelihood is historically grounded, creating increasing conditions of irrigation water stress.

11 These processes threaten the resilience of the commercial family farming in the village, which has to face also the harsh competition with the Israeli subsidised, high-tech, intensive agriculture, whose cheaper products flood the Palestinian markets, causing the decrease of crops’ price.

12 In the framework of life commoditisation, of the spread of urban life styles and growing economic competition, the unprofitable commercial family farming cannot satisfy the increasingly expensive needs and aspirations of the families. Therefore, most of households are compelled to diversify their sources of livelihood, combining farming activities with waged employment. Due to the high rate of unemployment in the West Bank, [8] most of them temporary work in the Israeli building sector both legally and illegally, an activity more profitable than agriculture despite the discrimination of Palestinians as lowpaid workers. The possibility to have access to the Israeli territory, labour market, cheaper food (such as meat) and services increases a household’s ability to meet its food and health needs. It is a criterion of social differentiation and an opportunity of social mobility in the Palestinian society.

13 The integration in the labour market has increased socio-economic segmentation, which overlaps with the hierarchies grounded on land ownership. With the changes in the sources of power on which hierarchies are built, the prestige of agriculture has been declining, especially among the new generations, who aspire to go to the university and to have a paid job.

14 These radical changes are leading to the increasing abandonment of agriculture, with the risk of expropriation of all farmlands in the village, which might become a proletarian suburb of Palestinian workers for Israel. According to the official expansion plans of the neighbouring Israeli urban areas, the village might even disappear another time, threatening villagers to become again refugees. Indeed, Israel planned to expropriate and annex to it all the south-west area of Bethlehem, the biggest agricultural area and the main source of food and other resources of the Bethlehem Governorate. The implementation of these plans would increase the dependenceof Palestinian families’ nourishment and reproduction on the Israeli resources and market, strengthening their food subordination.

“Farming modernisation” : the Development of Dependence and the Individualisation of Food Security

15 In the context of the increasing conditions of land and irrigation water shortage and of the harsh competition with the Israeli agriculture, farmers adopt intensive farming techniques in order to increase agricultural production, such as expensive hybrid seeds, chemical pesticides and fertilisers, greenhouses and drip irrigation. According to farmers, in the late 1980s some donors and development agencies and organisations, such as the World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and World Vision International, fostered the use of intensive farming techniques, spread globally in the framework of the Green Revolution. Seeking to achieve the main goal of reducing poverty and starvation by increasing agricultural production, these development actors aimed at creating “developed” farmers according to the Western model of agricultural entrepreneur, [9] integrating local productive systems in the global market economy. They brought to the Palestinian farmlands the modernist view of agriculture as an economic activity ruled by the market logic of production and grounded on the exploitation of natural resources such as land and water. Agricultural development means the maximisation of the productive efficiency and profit of agriculture through the adoption of a package of scientific technologies as a whole, considered suitable for all ecological contexts and supersedinglocal farming practices, reified as backward and inefficient.

16 Differently from local seeds, the expensive hybrid seeds dominating the market cannot be locally reproduced and they have to be bought at each production cycle. Moreover, according to farmers [10] these highproductivity seeds are marīd (sick), because they aremore susceptible to fungi and pest infestations. They require the use of chemical pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, generally called dawā’ (medicine), that over time have caused groundwater pollution and soil infertility, leading to the increasing need of chemical fertilisers. Land is increasingly unproductive also because of its over-exploitation, due to the growth of the population and the impossibility to leave it at rest increasing the risk of expropriation.

17 The spread of intensive farming techniques has led to the gradual loss of local farming knowledge, such as crop rotation and the production of local rain-fed seeds, historically selected to be suitable for the specific local semi-arid context and dry farming. Created for irrigated agriculture in a context of greater water availability, hybrid seeds, locally called al-budūr min barra (“the seeds from outside”), require a greater amount of water. They thus increase irrigation water stress and they threaten the local agricultural biodiversity.

18 “Farming modernisation” has led to the commoditisation of the previously self-reliant agriculture and to its integration in new relationships of dependence on Israeli and multinational seed, fertiliser and pesticide companies. The “artificialisation” [11] of farming inputs increases the costs of agricultural production and entails its disconnection from local ecosystems, [12] causing environmental degradation. Therefore, the adoption of intensive farming techniques has led to the unprofitable and unsustainable character of agriculture, threatening the community’s food and health security.

19 Farmers perceive that the long-time adoption of intensive farming techniques and land over-exploitation have compromised the soil, creating an almost irreversible dependence on chemical fertilisers and pesticides and, thus, on Israel. According to some farmers, the complete abandonment of intensive farming practices would require previous soil treatments to increase its fertility and to solve the burden of pest infestations. This would not allow them to farm for a long period, increasing the risk of land expropriation and of their family’s starvation.

20 Another strategy fostered by some development actors in order to supportlocal agriculture is the development of an efficient management of irrigation water, a key resource in food production. Since the late ‘80s, humanitarian and development agencies and organisations such as the American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA), the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the Water and Environmental Development Organisation (WEDO), World Vision International, the Association France Palestine Solidarité and the Applied Research Institute in Jerusalem (ARIJ) finance projects addressing the maintenance of the springs and the “modernisation” of irrigation infrastructures and techniques, in order to support villagers to manage irrigation water stress. In 1986 ANERA supported a project implemented by the local Agricultural Cooperative, providinga tractor and the rubber pipes, motor pumps and technical knowledge to introduce the drip irrigation technique – invented in the Israeli settlements in the Negev arid area. It also supplied the material to build 31 concrete privateburak (pools) for irrigation water collection.

21 These technical solutions convey the “planners’ moral economy”, [13] affected by the individualistic ideology and the economic notion of water and water scarcity characterising the neo-liberal “global water regime” [14] dominating since the 1990s. This focuses on patterns of decentralised management and fosters water commoditisation and privatisation. The solution of water stress and other ecological problems and, thus, agricultural development can be achieved by increasing the technical abilities of individual farmers to manage water efficiently. Water management and irrigation practices are viewed as economic and technical activities disconnected from socio-political dynamics and carried out by atomised individual farmers, independent of the community and acting according to “pure” economic considerations.

22 Compared to the local labour-intensive technique called mašākib, [15] drip irrigation requires less effort and allows the use of a smaller amount of water. The irrigation pools allow farmers to adapt their irrigation strategies to their participation to the labour market. However, not all families can afford the adoption of these techniques, whose gradual spreadhas been allowed by the NGOs’ supply of construction materials and technologies. The maintenance and development of the irrigation infrastructures – which once were a collective responsibility expressing the meaning of “water community” – today highly depend on the individuals’ access to the resources and expertise bestowed by development actors.

23 In the framework of economic marginalisation and of the use of external farming inputs and irrigation technologies, in the village there is an increasing perception that agricultural production highly depends on the resources supplied for development projects, with the consequent spread of a passive and dependence attitude. Some farmers complain the need of the NGOs’ interventions and protest for the organisations’ request to partially contribute to the payment of the projects’ costs, while showing lack of initiative concerning activities that require only people’s efforts and interests, like the cleaning of the irrigation channels and springs.

24 The changes in the irrigation infrastructures and techniques mirror the changes in the normative relationships and patterns of cooperation and authority that shape the organisation of water distribution and irrigation practices. The cooperative management of spring water is historically organised according to kinship relations and a communal property regime. Despite the egalitarian language of kinship, the division of water and land between the extended families has always been characterised by power struggles, patronage and marriage relationships and other alliances for the control over these resources. [16]

25 Before the creation of Israel, the members of an extended family shared the access to spring water, land and the flock. They cooperated to carry out the agro-pastoral subsistence activities, according to a hierarchical structure in which younger generations and women were subordinate to the authority of their oldest male relatives, who controlled the division of tasks and the access to crops and other essential resources to live. [17] The sexual division of labour was not overly pronounced. Women contributed to farm, took care about animals and produced milk and cheese. However, they have always been excluded from the management and use of irrigation water, a main source of productivity connected to fertility and a male public arena. [18]

26 The increasing spread of private irrigation pools (83 in 2015) highlights the fragmentation of the extended family, affected by the socio-economic segmentation and the spread of the neo-liberal individualistic ideology. The spread of waged employment as main means of support allows young men to achieve a greater economic independence. Since they marry and have their household they usually seek to make it independent of their oldest male relatives’ control of resources such as irrigation water, often competing between brothers.

27 These dynamics are connected to the change in the conditions of spring water access. People living in foreign countries or those who took up another job once used to leave their relatives use their land and spring water shares according to local sharing patterns. Today, these people often rent and less frequently sell these resources as private commodities to other inhabitants, even if they are relatives. Water rights, as well as land tenure conditions, are characterised by a “legal pluralism” [19] affected by changing local norms, by neo-liberal water commoditisation and privatisation and by the Palestinian and Israeli land legislations and private property regimes [20]. In the framework of the overlapping of different and contested norms and rights, the lack of shared rules for the reallocation of the land and water of absent people amplifies the tensions for the access to them.

28 As a consequence of these processes, the agricultural production in the village is disintegrated in multiple, individualised farming activities, whose differentiation mirrors amplified patterns of inequality in the access to water, land, capital and the resources conveyed by development actors. These are distributed by the heads of local organisations according to kinship, friendship, patronage relationships and economic alliances increasingly affected by socio-economic segmentation. These dynamics threaten marginalised households’ food security, which has become an individualised concern. While few people with a privileged access to their relatives’ resources have an amount of land that they can difficultly farm alone, others have not access to enough land and spring water to feed the family, or they have access to these resources only by renting them. Great amounts of agricultural and food waste are not recycled as forage or to produce compost, while many people have to buy compost and animal feed in the market. Local farming know-how, historically shared collectively, and intensive farming expertise are often viewed as a commodity and an object of competition. A farmer had to pay a person from the close Hūsān village in order to get access to the technique of graft in olive trees, despite other farmers in Wādī Fūkīn knew it.

29 The individualisation of farming strategies and the spread of individualisticand competitive behaviours hinder the potential cooperative and complementary character of farmers’ productive activities, which might allow them to achieve a greater economic, ecological and “social efficiency” [21] in the use of resources and knowledge. The integration and coordination of local agricultural activities might decrease the need of external farming inputs, contributing to their ecologic and economic sustainability. This might entice people to return to farm, while empowering marginalised families’ ability to meet their basic food needs.

Farming Food, Resistance and the Moral Rural Community

30 Villagers perceive the creation of Israel as a traumatic event that fragmented the life’s continuity in the village and led to moral corruption, connected to the abandonment of agriculture, to water commoditisation and to the spread of intensive farming and individualistic behaviours.

31 Despite the unprofitable character of the commercial family agriculture, farmers make many efforts to continue to farm their land. They even use a part of the earnings from temporary waged employments to support agriculture, if necessary. In response to the Israeli legal devices for land expropriation, farming activities bear for villagers a new political value. They are viewed as practices of self-representation and resistance as a rural community that inscribe in the territory Palestinians’ belonging to it and allow families to gain some spaces of autonomy from Israel in the satisfaction of their basic food needs. Most people who do not farm prefer not to sell but to temporary rent their land and spring water share. Indeed, in the framework of job insecurity and precariousness and of Israel’s changing labour and security policies, these resources ensure a livelihood in case of unemployment or of the Israeli border closures.

32 Spring water has a central role both in the material and the socio-cultural reproduction of the local rural community. As a reaction to Israel’s water appropriation and commoditisation and to the PA’s unfair domestic water distribution, [22] villagers claim the legitimacy of their cooperative management of spring water by reifying it as ruled by reinvented Islamic lawsguaranteeing social justice and fairness, such as those about inheritance and the moral ban on water commoditisation. This normative ideal of water management defines “theoretical water rights” [23] according to actual or imagined kinship and inheritance relations referring to the period before the creation of Israel. These water relations shape the meaning of the tribal group and the extended families composing it, viewed as patrilineal lineages, as well as the meaning of community, idealised as a single large family and legitimised by a thick network of marriage relationships. Seeking to recompose the historical, identity and cultural splits caused by the creation of Israel, the ties between the members of the community are naturalised in order to mitigate the conflicts for water and land that fragment the patterns of cooperation on which the management of resources and agricultural production are historically grounded. Despite the spread of individualistic and competitive behaviours and of the monetised access to spring water, people often exchange this resource with their relatives or neighbours, or they leave one of their brothers or cousins uses their land in order to contrast its fragmentation. Negotiated and contested moral norms and values shape a changing moral economy that affects economic behaviours, including market transactions of land and water. A person who wants to sell or to rent his land has to respect the haqqaš-šafā‘a (the right of intercession or safeguarding) – incorporated in thePalestinian land legislation [24] – establishing the priority right of a land owner to buy a neighbouring land offered for sale. This customary norm seeks to protect women’s respectability and to preserve the dimension of solidarity of the neighbourhood, grounded on actual or imagined kinship ties between people living in it.

33 In conditions of marginalisation and pauperisation, these networks of solidarity relations are a main form of social capital allowing a household to have access to economic and material resources and to meet its food and health needs.

34 Seeking to give a sense to the difficult farming conditions and environmental degradation, villagers reinterpret the intensive farming practices that development actors propose as technical solutions through the lens of the local moral economy, which concerns also the relationships with the environment and, thus, farming strategies. They produce alternative discursive and embodied patterns of farming knowledge in order to claim for “socio-ecological justice”, [25] consisting in their right to preserve the socio-ecological network on which the material, social and cultural reproduction of the community are grounded.

35 Farming commoditisation and intensification are perceived by villagers as an evidence of the epochal division and fundamental change of civility established by the creation of Israel, which they express in the reification and symbolic opposition between past peasants and present farmers. The past fallāhīn (peasants) and their agro-pastoral activities are naturalised as part of the local socio-ecological processes. They are idealised as implicitly healthy and legitimised as practices respecting the Islamic obligation of human beings to protect the environment. [26] According to farmers, agricultural production consists in an exchange and reciprocal transformation between human and not-human beings such as land, water, seeds and plants, which are subjectified. As noted also by Mauro Van Aken [27] studying in the close village of Battir, the budūr baladiyya (local seeds) and the kūsā baladiyya (local courgettes) are idealised as symbols of villagers’ cultural authenticity, historical roots in the territory and healthy reciprocal relationships with the environment. Spring water scarcity, rainwater floods, groundwater pollution and soil infertility consist in the active response of the environment to Israel’s drastic re-modelling of the territory and to the intensive farming techniques of the present muzāri‘ (farmer). These are viewed as stranger, “unnatural”, immoral and unhealthy practices that threaten secular harmonious and sustainable eco-social systems while serving Israel’s purposes.

36 Especially in low socio-economic conditions, farmers embody this “counterculture” [28] as a strategy to ensure their ability to feed their family despite the colonial and economic constraints. This is the case, in particular, of elders and of people with a low level of education, who are disadvantaged in the job competition in the West Bank, as well as of people who are excluded from the Israeli labour market because for Israel they have a criminal record. All farmers produce some crops for home consumption with local seeds and techniques, according to women’s management of the family’s yearly diet and culinary preferences. Some women raise few sheep (5-8) in little cattle sheds outside home, which provide milk, cheese and yogurt for home consumption and can be fed with the scant waste agricultural products avoiding buying barley seeds. Some families have also some poultry providing eggs and few ones have a mule.

37 In the village there is an increasing number of olive trees planted in lands of people living in Jordan and by villagers who have not enough spring water, time (because they have other jobs) or economic resources for vegetable farming. Indeed, šağaraz-zeytūn (the olive trees) can resist to water stress and do not require daily work or many inputs bought in the market. Olive tree is not only an historical economic activity providing oil, an increasingly expensive, important element of local diet. The planting of this very permanent and resistant cultivation also consists in a claim of the permanent use of a land and of its ownership, facing the Israeli legal devices for land expropriation. Olive trees stand for absent people and embody Palestinians’ territorial claims and nationhood. According to this idea, some local and international NGOs donate olive trees to Palestinians, in the framework of projects for land rehabilitation. This strategy is a response to the Israeli army’s systematic uprooting of olive and other trees in lands under expropriation in the village and in the whole historical Palestine. [29]

38 Nevertheless, in the struggle to achieve their family’s “social subsistence” [30] by satisfying both its food and social needs, farmers often use also intensive farming techniques, seeking to increase crops’ production and to contrast pest infestations and soil infertility. During my fieldwork periods, a person with a low socio-economic status who did not own any farmland rented two small plots and farmedthem using mainly hybrid seeds and chemical inputs. Seeking to increase his family’s status, he wanted to earn and save enough money to send all his sons to the University, to make his sons marry and to buy land for them. « I want to give them a future », as he said me many times.

39 Farmers show their ability to select the new technologies and knowledge and to adapt their use to their own practical needs and economic and political strategies.

40 Seeking to make their agricultural production more sustainable, some farmers adopt also new organic farming techniques and participate to the bank al-budūr al-baladiyya (the bank of local seeds), organised by the Bethlehem Farmers Society and financedlocal and western donors. The seed bank collects local seeds and encourages Palestinian farmers to cultivate them, aware of the risk to lose local biodiversity, besides the Palestinian agriculture’s last spaces of autonomy. This project is organised in the framework of the global spread of an alternative meaning of rural development, identified with a sustainable organic agriculture. Some farmers appropriate the new rhetoric about the better taste and healthy character of organic food, spread among the Israeli and Palestinian urban middle class, as a strategy of self-representation to gain space in the crops’ market, e.g., selling their crops to Israelis going to the village from the neighbouring Tzur Hadassah. Not all these farmers necessary engage only in organic farming, but theyuse in a strategic way these people’ new needs and imagination of Palestinian agriculture as “traditional” and, thus, implicitly “natural” and healthy.

41 “Farming modernisation” has not turned farmers into agricultural entrepreneursconforming to the Western ideal dominating the main donors and international organisations’ narratives. During daily farming activities farmers adopt, juxtapose and articulate local historical know-how and new intensive and organic farming techniques. These multiple farming practices are mobilised as contingent and contextual strategies to use the available resources and knowledge in order “to farm the resistance” against land expropriation and for survival, while seeking to achieve the “eco-social sustainability”. [31]

Conclusions

42 The case of Wādī Fūkīn can be considered as representative of the processes affecting rural communities and agricultural production in the Palestinian territories, in the framework of the Israeli techno-politics [32] aimed at the domination of Palestinians. By means of territory and water planning and economic, security and job policies Israel produces increasing conditions of land and water shortage – highlighted as hybrid socio-natural processes – that threaten agricultural activities. By hindering the material and socio-cultural reproduction of rural communities, Israel seeks to coerce them to leave farming and to move to urban areas, while integrating them in the lower rungs of the Israeli economy. Palestinians’ de-peasantisation [33] allows Israel to expropriate their lands, increasing their dependence on the Israeli market for the access to food, water resources and other basic goods. Palestinians’ food subordination and insecurity ensure Israel’s control over their possibility to survive, in the framework of the creation of increasing dimensions of unbalanced interdependence between the Israeli and the Palestinian societies that allow Israel to keep its economic and political hegemony.

43 Instead of contributing to the development of an independent Palestinian agricultural sector and economy and to the struggle for Palestinians’ food security and sovereignty, donors and development agencies fostering intensive farming have integrated Palestinian agriculture in even deepen relations of dependence on Israel and the international aid. They have led to the “de-development” [34] of agriculture, while further threatening Palestinians’ food security.

44 Facing these power strategies, Palestinians seek to achieve some spaces of autonomy to secure their family’s material and social reproduction, through agricultural activities that ensure staple food subsistence and basic consumer goods, while expressing the embodiment of collective identity claims against the threat of becoming refugees, an even more precarious and marginalised status.

45 As highlighted by other authors, [35] this article suggests that the development of a Palestinian independent and sustainable agriculture is an important step in the struggle for Palestinians’ land and food security. The adoption of farming patterns suitable for the local semi-arid and arid climate that contribute to preserve soil fertility and entail the decrease of external inputs and costs of production would increase Palestinians’ ability to continue to farm and their autonomy in the satisfaction of their food needs. However, in the framework of the difficult ecological conditions, economic marginalisation and colonial constraints, Palestinians can difficultly accomplish this goal by their only efforts. The PA should support farmers by means of subsidies, policies and plans empowering them and coordinating their efforts, breaking their actual dependence on international aid [36] and the marginalisation of rural communities by the urban elites ruling the PA. [37]