Youth Agricultural Collectives in the Palestinian Central Highlands
A Model Emerging from the Contradictions of Colonization – Lecture and Q&A
18.30-20.30
Save the Date
For adults
in English
What forms of labor and cultivation constitute Palestinian agriculture today? How do practices of agricultural collectivity continue to shape and sustain Palestinian liberation?
This lecture examines the historical and contemporary forces shaping Palestinian agriculture, and the role of agricultural collectives in the production and reproduction of the Palestinian liberation politics.
In the years following the Second Intifada, neoliberal policies and the intensification of the Israeli occupation eroded the self-sufficiency of the Palestinian economy. The resulting financial precarity forced many Palestinians to seek work in cities and the Israeli labor market, leaving large swathes of agricultural land to fall into neglect. Rejecting these conditions, left-leaning youth in the West Bank returned to this fallow land and formed cooperatives built on traditional, self-sufficient farming methods, initiatives at once shaped by the occupation and working against it.
In his research, Faiq Mari reads this turn to agriculture as part of a broader resistance economy, situating these initiatives among longer histories of Palestinian political organising. In this lecture, he will talk about youth agricultural cooperatives and their current condition under tightening financial and spatial restrictions by the occupation. The lecture will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Hilal Alkan; initiatior of ghiras, Nabil Hamdan, will provide opening remarks.
This event is organized in collaboration with Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient and ghiras.
Description provided by event organizers.