Eco-sumud and the Palestinian struggle for eco-social justice

The creation of Israel on 78% of the land of Historical Palestine has marked a violent disruption of the sustainable relationship that Palestinians have maintained with their land for generations. The ongoing Israeli colonization of the rest of Palestine – culminating in the unfolding genocide and ecocide in the Gaza Strip and the silent ethnic cleansing in the West Bank – poses further threat to the indigenous Palestinian lifestyle in relation to land. Despite more than seven decades of colonial dispossession and violence, Palestinians have been able to steadfastly face Israeli attempts at obliterating the knowledge and skills that Palestinians draw on to maintain a sustainable attachment to the land. I call this the act of eco-sumud, meaning eco-steadfastness.

The anti-colonial praxis of eco-sumud refers to the Palestinian persistence to stay on the land using environmentally friendly ways of maintaining a strong attachment to it. This includes the use of indigenous land-based knowledge, cultural values, tactics and tools to fight back against Israeli dispossession and the unsustainable management of land and its resources that comes with dispossession. Palestinian women have been key environmental and anti-colonial warriors in reinforcing eco-sumud. Eco-sumud is premised on the understanding that the fight for climate justice and the struggle of the Palestinian people for self-determination are inextricably linked. As a concept and practise it thus acknowledges the mutual constitution of social and ecological crises. It recognises the pursuit of a just agricultural and energy transition in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as inseparable from the pursuit of Palestinian self- determination and social justice – and vice versa. As such, eco-sumud constitutes a powerful counter-practice to Israeli ecological colonialism while also informing a counter-narrative to Israel’s efforts at greenwashing so as to cover its ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people and their environment with a green garb.

Rainfed agricultural practice among Palestinian villagers in Dayr Ballut, the West Bank, offers an empirical example of eco-sumud. Ba’li, as the practice is known in vernacular Arabic, has facilitated the local preservation of agricultural land across a century of colonial occupation, water apartheid and land grabbing. It involves the preparation, planting, cultivation and protection of plants and soil without irrigation, utilising instead natural soil moisture and the capture and preservation of water during rain seasons. In Dayr Ballut, villagers, predominantly women, have combined this traditional farming method with diversifying the types of crops grown to reduce their vulnerability to water scarcity, climate shocks, and soil degradation.

Embodying at once a social, spiritual, cultural and material relation to the local ecology, facilitating both social justice and sustainable uses of the land, ba’li crystallises the power and potential of eco-sumud to inform a just decolonial transition in Palestine. Such a transition is premised on five pillars: First, it disrupts the internalisation of the social construction of Palestinian knowledge and culture as inferior to their colonisers. Second, it foregrounds relationships with the land and its natural resources based on reciprocity and interdependence. Third, it promotes the collective sharing of land, water and knowledge rather than their monopolisation and luxury commodification for the few. Fourth, it affirms that women are primary actors in the anti-colonial struggle for self-determination and ecological justice. Finally, it refuses the notion that Israeli settler colonialism is undefeatable, cementing instead the invincibility of the burning desire of the colonised to determine their own destiny.