Planting Palestine: Food,environment,and the arts of solidarity

Abstract

This article identifies an ‘environmental turn’ in contemporary Palestinian arts and activism. It argues that environmentalism, mediated especially through food, is an increasingly important frame through which Palestinians and their supporters narrate the idea of Palestine and the Palestinian struggle to metropolitan audiences, and through which identification and solidarity are solicited and received. It outlines this turn through an examination of Palestinian visual artist Jumana Manna's documentary Foragers (Al-yad al-khadra, 2022). Manna's film portrays the criminalisation of foraging for za’atar and ‘akkoub in Palestine/Israel and has been widely screened internationally in the wake of Israel's 2023 war on Gaza. Foragers situates the struggle of Palestinian foragers, and in turn, the Palestinian struggle for the land, in relation to key vocabularies of contemporary environmental politics and culture, including food sovereignty, agroecology, indigeneity, posthumanism, and foraging itself. In this way, it activates key metropolitan trends, showing the possibility for an environmental framing to generate commitment from new audiences, while also enabling critiques of the political failings of posthumanist thought. I conclude by noting some limitations of the environmental turn, including the risks of essentialism and of inadvertently reinforcing Zionist narratives by overlooking Palestinian urban life prior to the creation of Israel. Nevertheless, the article argues for the significance of the environmental turn as a distinct and promising direction in a growing international solidarity movement.

In late January 2024, I squeezed onto a bench in a vegetarian café near my home for an event billed as ‘an evening of food and conversation, all about and for Gaza.’ The Scottish winter had not stopped people from coming out: this was the organisers’ second sell-out event of this type, and their food pop-ups, which they ran periodically from an old police box, were their most successful activities of all. The organiser was a local group, Sumud, formed soon after the start of Israel's war on Gaza, which followed the October 7 2023 Hamas attacks (at the time of writing, the war is ongoing). The host was a charismatic Gazan woman living in Edinburgh, named at the event but anonymous in publicity. She shared stories about her family's lives before and during the war, while talking us through a delicious home-cooked meal, rooted, she stressed, in distinctive, sustainable traditions of people and place. I had attended to meet others similarly distressed by the new atrocities unfolding in Gaza every day. I was also there out of curiosity. Communal meals are a familiar feature of the British Palestine solidarity movement, but proliferated in the wake of Israel's latest war, more than might have been expected as a result of the movement's broader growth. This event seemed part of something bigger: an emerging turn in Palestinian arts and activism towards food and environment, in which environmentalism, mediated especially through food, is an increasingly important frame through which Palestinians and their supporters narrate the idea of Palestine and the Palestinian struggle to metropolitan audiences, and through which identification and solidarity are solicited and received. This ‘environmental turn’ has been intensified by growing recognition of the scale of the environmental destruction of Israel's war against Gaza, which has devastated Gazan food systems and caused widespread famine (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, 2024; Walsh et al., 2024). The environmental disaster of the war provides the inescapable backdrop to this piece.

This article examines the environmental turn in Palestinian arts and activism by way of a discussion of Jumana Manna's Foragers (Al-yad al-khadra, 2022), an understated, hour-long documentary emblematic of this trend. ¹ I outline the contours and contexts of this turn, including its possibilities and limits. Foragers documents the illicit foraging activities of older Palestinians in the Golan Heights, Galilee and hills around East Jerusalem. It was initially released at European independent film festivals. Since the start of the war, it has been widely screened at solidarity events and in high-profile galleries and cultural centres, often alongside collective meals and foraging walks. ² Foragers is still by no means mainstream, yet has achieved a greater degree of visibility than might be expected for a contemporary Palestinian arthouse film. This is in part a contingent outcome of its release date, just over a year before October 7, and of Manna's decision to allow activist groups to screen it for little or no cost. Yet its widespread circulation underscores my argument that food and environment are key frames of contemporary Palestine solidarity, while the status Foragers has accrued through repetition as an emblematic representation of Palestinian environmental culture further justifies its central place in this analysis.

Manna's protagonists are searching for wild za’atar (Majorana syriaca) and ‘akkoub (Gundelia toumerfortii). Za’atar is a type of thyme essential to the Levantine spice mix of the same name. ‘Akkoub is a spiny thistle with an artichoke-like flavour, eaten fried in olive oil or in an omelette. Both plants are coveted in Palestinian cuisine and used in traditional medicine, but subject to Israeli conservation laws that prohibit them being picked, possessed or traded, on the grounds that they are at risk of extinction. Palestinians typically view these bans as a novel form of persecution by environmental means, for reasons elaborated below. Manna portrays foraging as a distinctive cultural practice through which foragers articulate their continued connection to, and ownership of, the land, and assert their dignity in the face of the threatened extinction of their culture; with the latter analogy made in the film's blurb and widely borrowed in reviews and screening promotional materials. ³ Foraging emerges as a form of sumud, or steadfastness, a key term for Palestinian resistance since the 1960s. Manna's portrayal of sumud through representations of nature, place and rootedness can be understood in relation to traditions in Palestinian nationalist art (Abufarha, 2008; Parmenter, 1994), yet her film differs in its use of an environmentalist, rather than primarily symbolic, register. Her film invites extrapolation outwards, locating the Palestinian cause alongside key vocabularies of contemporary environmental politics and culture including food sovereignty, agroecology, indigeneity, and foraging itself. Manna's film situates the Palestinian struggle in a global environmental context, heightening its metropolitan appeal and soliciting solidarity from new audiences.

This piece focuses on environmental culture, yet its concerns resonate with a broader increase in the salience of environmentalism to Palestine's political status. The shift it describes is therefore of greater significance than may first be apparent. Demonstrations of environmental concern have become increasingly relevant to Palestine's international status from the Oslo Accords onwards (1993–1995). Oslo built environmental protection into the template for a future Palestinian state as a condition of readiness for statehood. Environmental protection, along with climate change, shapes donor priorities in Palestine, not always in harmony with local needs or preferences (Stamatopolou-Robbins, 2019: 6, 15–16). It is increasingly associated with good governance, conditioning Palestinian access to international finance, political support, and institutions, and putting Palestinian officials under increasing pressure to present an environmental image.

This is not merely an external pressure: the work of a growing number of farmers, scholars, and activists testifies to a lively and committed grassroots Palestinian environmentalism, most strongly associated internationally with Vivien Sansour's Palestine Heirloom Seed Library in Beit Sahour. ⁴ These projects, including Sansour's, often promote heritage (baladi) seeds and rainfed (ba’ali) agriculture. Goals include preserving Palestinian culture, self-reliance and food sovereignty (Kohlbry, 2023; Meneley, 2021a; Tabar, 2020); protecting and restoring the land, in the face of threats to agriculture from Israel's occupation and neoliberal Palestinian Authority (PA) reforms (Kanafani and Al-Botmeh, 2008; Kohlbry, 2023; Tabar and Al-Botmeh, 2020); promoting healthier and tastier diets, against fast food chains and monoculture (Meneley, 2021a: 159, 164); and strengthening resilience to drought caused primarily by Israel's control of water, and, to a lesser extent, climate change (Fullilove and Alimari, 2023; Selby et al., 2022; Tesdell et al., 2018a).

These projects respond to Israeli environmental discourse and practice, contesting the environmental narrative through which Israel increasingly seeks international legitimacy. Lately Israel has sought to build a reputation for environmental responsibility, notably through ‘cleantech’ innovations involving water which are frequently profiled in the international press. Israel's green story derives from its founding national myth of having ‘made the desert bloom’, a product of Zionism's un-ecological ‘technological optimism’ (Tal, 2008); belief in the redemptive nature of the reunification of people and land; and colonial narratives of native neglect. Nature played a key role in the Zionist notion of yediat ha’aretz, ‘knowing the land’, by which children and new immigrants were encouraged to cultivate a sense of belonging through natural history and hiking (tiyulim), and in the famous ‘blue box’ scheme, by which the diaspora was encouraged to fund Jewish National Fund tree-planting. If these projects have lately been re-scripted as proto-environmentalism by organisations like the JNF, their ultimate environmental consequences were far more mixed (Boast, 2012: 47; Sasa, 2023); yet their colonial outcome, of overwriting an Arab landscape with a Jewish one, was largely achieved (Benvenisti, 2000; Stein, 2009). Israel's green reputation provides ideological justification for land and resource expropriation, and has been criticised as greenwashing (Hughes et al., 2023). This narrative positions Palestinians as lacking in environmental concern and therefore ‘primitive’ or ‘backward’ (McKee, 2015), undermining their claim to metropolitan support and, worse, supporting the broader discursive apparatus by which they can be portrayed by Israeli politicians as ‘human animals’ and treated accordingly. ⁵ The disastrous environmental impacts of Israel's war on Gaza undermine any idea of environmentalism as a national priority.

Contemporary Palestinian environmentalism also draws on older Palestinian environmental legacies. These include the 1980s voluntary committees, which saw land reclamation as part of a broader vision of social transformation combining peasant and Marxist politics (Kohlbry, 2023). Similarly, the Palestinian Union of Agricultural Work Committees describes self-reliance in food production as crucial to building Palestinian political agency, drawing on international peasant movement La Vía Campesina's concept of food sovereignty (Tabar, 2020: 25–26). ⁶ The Palestinian environmental turn, exemplified in Manna's film, foregrounds an environmental ethic rooted in presence in the land over generations. It makes a counter-claim of rightful ownership (Cohen, 2011) and appeal for metropolitan support on parallel environmental grounds, responding both to Israeli discourses and Palestinian history.

The environmental turn echoes broader strategies by which Palestinians and the solidarity movement seek to extend support for the Palestinian cause. Scholars and activists increasingly call for Palestinians to build alliances with ‘all anti-imperial, all anti-racist, and all struggling to make another world possible’ (Salamanca et al., 2012: 5). This is exemplified in the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement tactic of bringing new supporters to the cause by activating common ‘repertoires of contention’ with the global justice movement (Morrison, 2020, citing Tilly), including shared organising strategies and corporate targets. The environmental turn in Palestine solidarity reflects the growing power of environmentalism as a force for mass mobilisation, as in the Extinction Rebellion roadblocks in the UK; Ende Gelände coal mine occupations in Germany; anti-pipeline protests across North America; and Fridays for Future/Skolstrejk för klimatet, founded by Greta Thunberg in Sweden in 2018 (it is worth noting Thunberg's outspoken support for Palestine, in spite of its high cost). It also reflects a longer Palestinian history of addressing international audiences as part of the ‘fight for legitimacy’ and ‘labour of self-construction’, in which documentary has been an important tool (Valassopoulos, 2014: 150).

Manna's transnational location is significant to her use of environmental themes to mediate transnational connection. She is from Shu’fat, East Jerusalem, and lives in Berlin, making her part of a generation of diaspora Palestinian artists whose response to their homeland is inflected by metropolitan sensibilities and trends, with her position between Palestine and Europe shaping her sense of how the Palestinian cause might capture metropolitan imaginations. In reading Manna's work in this light, I draw on Anna Bernard (2013) and Sophia Brown (2022) on how Palestinian creatives reflexively anticipate and pre-emptively respond to the projected metropolitan reception of their work within the work itself, and Bernard's scholarship on solidarity and culture (2017, 2021). I add a new dimension by examining the role of environmentalism in mediating Palestine. In its focus on the cultural side of environmental politics in Palestine/Israel, this article develops an emerging theme in social sciences and history. Topics include Palestinian environmental knowledge and resistance (Alqaisiya, 2023; Dajani, 2020; Hassouna, 2024); human-wildlife conflict and the politics of conservation (Amira, 2021; Braverman, 2023); governance and expertise (Gutkowski, 2024; Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2019); colonialism and the Anthropocene (Salih and Corry, 2022); and environmental histories of Zionist settlement (Kaminer, 2022; Novick, 2023). Notable interlocutors include Emily McKee on environmental campaigns in Palestine/Israel and ‘how various actors perform environmentalism, and to what ends’ (2018), and Anne Meneley on Palestinian agroecology (2021a, 2021b), and the capacity for media representations of Palestinian food to offer ‘an alternate vision of Palestinians’ (2024: 169). Environmental culture in Palestine/Israel remains under-explored (but see Boast, 2020; Farag, 2021; Hall, 2015), yet is crucial for understanding contentions over land and resources. As I discuss below, it also holds broader lessons for environmental thought, particularly the theory and politics of posthumanism and indigeneity.

The land forms the core of Palestinian national demands and culture. Yet for Palestinians and Israelis, partly for this reason, the environment has often figured primarily as a means for litigating broader ‘national metanarratives’, rarely as a concern in and of itself (Cohen, 2011: 246). Focusing on nature when human life in Palestine is under such threat risks triviality (Cohen, 2021: 362), while Palestinians can be suspicious of environmental initiatives given environmentalists’ history of avoiding questions of power and ownership, and environmentalism's role in Israeli colonisation (McKee, 2018: 453–454). The environmental turn described here does not refute Cohen's concern that the environmental remains subordinated to the national in a Palestinian context. Yet I argue that environmental issues now play a far greater role in the Palestinian national narrative, and are no longer ‘marginal in impact and, in many respects, irrelevant’ (Cohen, 2011: 246). Environmentalism is a key emerging mode in which Palestinian national claims are made and solidarity sought, and is increasingly scripted into a vision of the Palestinian future (Hassouna, 2024) – particularly when addressing metropolitan audiences. The turn outlined here promises to only be of greater significance for a growing solidarity movement.

Foraging and the law

I now discuss Manna's film and the insights it provides into the environmental turn. Foragers is a 64-min documentary comprised of footage of foragers outdoors and in their homes; experimental durational shots of plants, including extreme close-ups; interviews by Manna; archival television recordings; phone camera footage; and staged courtroom scenes. The film's composition is not my primary focus. However, it is worth noting that Manna's combination of forms, particularly re-enactment, lends Foragers a self-consciously constructed quality; transitions between format are deliberately not seamless. Her use of re-enactment may also be surprising; common in early documentary, it became frowned upon after the 1960s cinéma vérité movement, and now disrupts the expected ‘tight correspondence between image and reality' that gives documentary its ‘indexical quality’ (Nichols, 2017, 23). ⁷ Manna has commented on her staged courtroom scenes in ways that illuminate the film's composition generally. As she notes, hazards of filming in real Israeli courts include the difficulty of permissions, risk of collaboration, and her protagonists’ vulnerability. She states that ‘[s]ince much of the theater of law is about the art of lying, it felt fitting to erase this distinction between truth and fabulation, or old-school divisions of documentary and fiction, in order to tell the story as I wanted to tell it’ (Masters, 2022). Manna's placing of the film's construction at the fore resonates with her critique of the arbitrariness of the designations of za’atar and ‘akkoub as ‘protected’, as well as the Israeli state's self-appointed role as arbiter of truth and designation of Palestinians as criminals.

Manna's foragers, as noted above, are searching for wild za’atar and ‘akkoub. Foraging for za’atar was banned in 1977 by then-Minister of Agriculture, Ariel Sharon. Foraging for ‘akkoub was banned in 2005. Sharon's involvement in the za’atar ban may seem curious, an interest in conservation out-of-place alongside the brutality of his career as an IDF general and later Prime Minister of Israel. Yet as Manna shows, these laws have had deleterious, if less visible, impacts on Palestinian life. It is overwhelmingly Palestinians who endure arrests, prosecution and fines. Rabea Eghbariah, who campaigns against the laws with Israeli NGO Adalah and co-scripted Manna's courtroom scenes, describes them as suppressing a ‘long-standing agro-culinary tradition under the auspices of law and nature’ (2020: 106). Their conservation merits are also contested. Israel's Nature and Parks Authority (INPA) maintains no programme monitoring the plants’ status, while Israeli urbanisation, road-building, and intensive agriculture pose greater biodiversity threats (Eghbariah, 2020: 111). Foragers shows the extent of Israel's transformation of the land by roads, many of which Palestinians are not permitted to use. Manna's protagonists drive on a huge, multi-lane highway, and forage among the concrete columns of an enormous elevated road. Challenging these threats, however, is far more difficult than identifying Palestinians as the culprit.

The foraging bans are part of a broader phenomenon through which Israeli nature protection laws enable the enclosure and appropriation of Palestinian land. This is an environmental version of ‘lawfare’, Israel's use of legal means to perpetuate Palestinian displacement, dispossession and death (Jones, 2020; Weizman, 2011). East Jerusalem's national parks, declared by the INPA in built-up areas and on private Palestinian land, are a key example, seeming to promote territorial expansionism more than nature protection (Braverman, 2021; B’tselem, 2014). By preventing Palestinians from accessing their land, these conservation laws put it at risk of being appropriated as ‘unused’ under the 1858 Ottoman Land Code, which Israel has strategically exploited; and indeed Manna refers to the Code in discussion of the film. ⁸ In Israel, the seemingly straightforward meaning of nature protection as an obvious good obscures its capacity to serve settler-colonial ends, with nature's invisibility as a political tool making it ‘the settler state's strongest weapon for territorial takeover’ (Braverman, 2023: 14). Contestations over nature protection in Palestine/Israel are not unique, if the live context of settler colonialism and extreme violence renders them especially acute. They echo wider disputes over ‘green colonialism’, ‘militarized conservation’ and wilderness (Cronon, 1995, 69–90; Duffy, 2022; Guha, 1989). Environmentalism's colonial role in Palestine/Israel is continuous with, not an aberration from, its longer history.

As Manna shows, the bans have not stopped Palestinians from foraging. She portrays foraging as a practice through which Palestinians draw on and reinforce their deep knowledge of and connection with their homeland. Foragers begins with an aerial shot of a landscape that seems empty, except for scattered plants and limestone rocks. As the camera slowly zooms in, a figure becomes visible: a forager, circling the plants, pausing to inspect and pick, moving again. The aerial shot makes the figure initially difficult to distinguish from the landscape, underscoring their rootedness. Their ability to find food in a landscape that looks, to the untrained eye, unpromising, indicates knowledge, presumably acquired over a long period of time, and suggests rightful Palestinian ownership (to certain audiences; I return to this below). Manna's assertion of Palestinian knowledge of the land provides an implicit counterpoint to longstanding Zionist claims that Palestine was uninhabited and awaiting its rightful owners, ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’ (Zangwill, cited in Masalha, 1992: 6).

Later, Manna moves to eye level and landscapes appear more verdant. We see her parents Adel and Aziza (who appear as themselves) clambering across hillsides, through shoulder-height grasses, accompanied by birdsong. Manna shows their knowledge of Palestinian nature as they collect za’atar, ‘akkoub, and other wild plants including loof (black calla), hummeid (bladder dock) and shomar (wild dill). We see their care in selecting and cutting only certain stems, and hear them discuss which plants they have already collected and which to leave. In this way, Manna counters claims of over-harvesting that underlies the Israeli ban. We see the gentle attention and skill of another forager, Zeidan Hajib, as he safely removes the thorny outer leaves from ‘akkoub before placing it in his bag, making it ready to cook when delivered to friends. Eating foraged foods, Manna suggests, is a collective effort, reliant on a community's knowledge and skills. It is an endangered art, threatened by Israel's occupation and the participants’ advanced age. Her film documents this practice and encourages its revival, complementing wider initiatives like Sansour's promotion of heritage seeds and Makaneyyat's guide to foraging wild plants of Palestine (Tesdell et al., 2018b).

Manna's subject is timely. Foraging, once stigmatised as a backward practice of the rural poor (Fullilove, 2022), has transformed over the past two decades into an elite class signifier. Its status derives from its association with the ‘New Nordic’ cuisine, particularly the trend's emblematic restaurant Noma in Copenhagen, led by head chef René Redzepi and frequently ranked as best in the world. Foraging's rise in status is also driven by the Slow Food movement, whose adherents criticise the world food system's domination by industrial agribusiness and promote ‘artisanal and authentic’ local food; often affordable only by the elites who now favour foraged foods (Carruth, 2017; Chrzan, 2004: 124). Interest in foraging in the UK and US boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic, as participants sought local socially-distanced activities and meaningful connections with people and place (Clouse, 2022: 292; Russo and McCarthy, 2024: 185, 190). Its popularity persists, with bookshop natural history sections filled with foraging guides and memoirs. UK newspapers that promote the virtues of foraging now also warn of the harms of foraging to excess (Blessit, 2023). This writing is often inflected by a popular strain of posthumanism, in which foraging has played a central role since Anna Tsing's work on matsutake mushroom collecting (2015). For Tsing and her peers, foraging is one of the ‘art[s] of noticing’ (Tsing, 2010: 192) that help us cultivate ‘attentiveness’ to the nonhuman, thereby generating a new ecological ethic (van Dooren et al., 2016: 5–6). During the pandemic, another arthouse documentary about charming elderly foragers, The Truffle Hunters (2020), set in Italy, received crossover success. This connection was noted by a reviewer (Romney, 2022) and by audience members at talks on this work. Manna's film, then, emerged into a context in which audiences were primed to view foraging in certain ways, including as an aspirational practice associated with authentic connection to and care for nature. This set of meanings became available for transfer to a population, Palestinians, with whom metropolitan audiences have not always been readily sympathetic – and whose monstering in the press sharply accelerated after October 7. Foraging opened up an alternative story.

Foraging as sumud

For Manna's protagonists, foraging is a cultural practice and valuable source of food. Wild foods are important in the early months of the year when cultivated agriculture is less productive (Tesdell et al., 2018a: 31). They are preserved for consumption year-round (Hani et al., 2024), and help to mitigate against crop failure and climate shocks (Fullilove, 2022). This is salient in the context of the extreme disruption caused to Palestinian agriculture by Israeli occupation. Only sixty per cent of the West Bank is food secure; in Gaza, even before the war, the same number was food insecure (Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute, 2021: vi). The causes include Israel's expropriation of Palestinian land and water resources, settlement-building and settler violence, and the territorial fragmentation of the Separation Wall, closures, curfews and checkpoints that separate farmers from their lands. The resultant decline in Palestinian domestic production has been entrenched by food aid after the Second Intifada (Kanafani and Al-Botmeh, 2008). Food in Palestine has been transformed into a humanitarian problem and Palestinians a ‘captive market’ for Israeli goods (Tabar, 2020: 19); largely with the consent of the PA, which has not prioritised agriculture for domestic consumption. We are reminded of this in Foragers when one protagonist goes to the supermarket and all the goods, including fresh fruit and vegetables, are labelled in Hebrew. Foraging emerges as an everyday refusal of the forced dependency on imported and Israeli goods which undermines Palestinian sovereignty.

Manna shows the many obstacles for foragers, including fines and court cases, to which they respond with defiance. She portrays foraging as an act of sumud, a term literally meaning ‘steadfastness’, used by Palestinians since the 1960s to describe their determination to stay on the land. In one court case, a forager asserts in Hebrew to an unseen Israeli prosecutor, ‘teva, zeh ani’ [the countryside is me]. He is filmed head-on in the centre of the screen, suggesting a mugshot and showing his interpellation as a criminal under Israeli law. The frontal shot also serves as a portrait, emphasising the forager's dignity and his age. This partly reflects the age distribution of people interested in preserving Palestinian food culture, yet also emphasises sumud as a cross-generational act, in contrast to the emphasis on Palestinian youth (as in representations of stone-throwers). His assertion that ‘I’ll also be caught in 2050 with my children and grandchildren’ recalls James C. Scott's notion of the ‘weapons of the weak’ (1985), and Rob Nixon's ‘environmentalism of the poor’, borrowed from Joan Martinez-Alier (2011), further challenging the notion of Palestinians as passive victims.

Food production has an important role in sumud, inflecting Manna's portrayal of foraging and explaining her protagonists’ persistence in spite of heavy consequences. Farming became one of the ‘[n]ew prototypical examples of sumud’ in Palestinian consciousness and representation after the First Intifada, with a key example being ‘the peasant whose olive trees were uprooted by the Israeli army or settlers, but who replanted them’ (Rijke and van Teeffelen, 2014: 88). ⁹ This echoes the significance of the fellah, or peasant, in Palestinian nationalist discourse and iconography since 1948. Previously stigmatised as backward and uneducated, from 1948 onwards the fellah, and rural culture, began to be valorised and romanticised for embodying a distinctive Palestinian way of life to be preserved, transmitted, and restored (Cohen, 2011: 248–9; Swedenberg, 1990: 19). Palestinian nationalism is not unique in its concern for peasants and folk tradition: these recur in nationalist culture for their capacity to naturalise territorial claims (Swedenberg, 1990: 18–19), but their ability to assert rootedness and belonging has an additional valence amid the ‘endangered status of the Palestinian nation’ (Swedenberg, 1990: 19).

Sumud is an outward-looking practice, underscoring its relevance to the metropolitan circulation and reception of Palestinian film. Alexandra Rijke and Toine van Teeffelen describe it as ‘not so much a tool to strengthen the symbolic national unity or to think of community strategies, but a conceptual window to communicate Palestinian humanity to non-Palestinians’ (2014: 89). In the interview room shot mentioned above, the viewer, positioned in the place of the prosecutor, is confronted directly by the forager and forced to respond. They can either refuse this appeal or respond with solidarity. Manna emphasises the criminalisation of foraging by accompanying footage of ‘akkoub being prepared by elderly women with Hebrew audio comparing the Palestinian desire for banned wild plants to drug dealing and addiction. This incongruous juxtaposition creates audience laughter, the comedy of the scene heightened by its clash with the reverence with which we might expect sumud to be treated. Manna's comic portrayal of sumud is noteworthy, placing Foragers in a recognisable Palestinian cinematic comic trend (Lionis, 2016), while resonating with Nicole Seymour's argument for comedy's untapped environmental potential (2018). Foragers surprises its viewers and sharpens its appeal by drawing on conventions of Palestinian national culture and ecocinema, then exceeding and subverting them.

Genre and filmmaking

Manna's use of the documentary form plays a key role in her portrayal of Palestinian foraging and solicitations of solidarity. Cinema has long been important to the Palestinian struggle (Massad, 2006: 32), but documentary is of particular significance (Valassopoulos, 2014), reflecting its role in social movements more broadly and in ‘“distant issue” activism’ (Bernard, 2017: 368, citing Rucht). Its value derives in part from the capacity of literature and culture to cultivate ‘the “embodied passionate character of connections” between actors who are distanced by geography, and often also by race, class or wealth’ (Bernard, 2017: 368, citing Featherstone). This is salient in contexts in which subjects live under radically different conditions to readers or viewers, when their survival may be at stake (Bernard, 2017: 368). The distinct role of documentary derives from its ‘asserted veridical representation’ (Plantinga, 2005: 105), or the implicit understanding between filmmaker and viewer that what is presented is intended as a truthful representation of some aspect of the world, about which the viewer is expected to form true beliefs and potentially be prompted to action (Nichols, 2017: xiii). For Palestinians, the association between documentary and truth is significant amid a media and political environment in which Palestinians are denied ‘permission to narrate’ (Said, 1984), which persisted as much as ever during Israel's ongoing war on Gaza.

A key feature of Manna's style is close observation. This unites her form and subject, while also generating a point of contact between traditions of Palestinian representation and the forms of popular posthumanism noted above. Her foragers show discernment in identifying and differentiating between plants, inspecting their growth and taking only the quantity they need of plants that are ready to be harvested. Manna records their activities and environment using long takes that suggest careful attention and duration: from contemplative footage of the landscape, to a static shot of hands sorting za’atar leaves to be dried, to close-up footage of wild plants which move in and out of focus. Her use of long takes, emphasis on the everyday, absence of narration and muted palette draw from the techniques of slow cinema (de Luca and Barradas Jorge, 2016). This prompts a reflective mood that is out of sync with the fast pace viewers may be conditioned to expect amid the urgency of political violence in Palestine. If Manna's depiction of foraging as a kind of ‘slow food’ situates Palestine in relation to markers of authenticity and distinction, this is intensified by the link to slow cinema, an elite aesthetic with high cultural cachet, increasing her film's metropolitan appeal.

It is worth noting that Manna's focus on the small and everyday was partly a product of contingent circumstances; when lockdowns were announced in 2020, she was in Shu’fat to shoot Foragers and found herself unexpectedly quarantined with her parents. Yet the virus, she says, brought ‘serendipitous gifts’, forcing her to focus on the ‘small adventures’ of day-to-day life and develop a ‘new-old way of being present in Jerusalem’ (Manna, 2020). Manna borrows ironically from the title of Theodor Herzl's 1902 utopian novel Altneuland to indicate her increasingly distant relationship to her homeland and fear that, prior to this extended stay, she had become a ‘cultural tourist’ in Palestine, returning only to gather cultural resources before leaving again for Europe (Manna, 2020). Her fears resonate with those of other Palestinians who have feared the impact of the loss of a material connection with Palestine on their political and artistic sensibilities. Human rights lawyer and memoirist Raja Shehadeh once memorably described the danger of viewing the land from exile like a ‘pornographer’ (1982b: 87), and transforming it into symbols. Manna's attention to the small and local may have been forced in part by the pandemic, but it evokes older conversations about art, exile, and national culture, notably Shehadeh's efforts in Palestinian Walks (2007) to stage an encounter with the material place – which helped his text circulate widely in metropolitan contexts.

Manna's focus on foraging and close observation resonates further with trends in Environmental Humanities and their popular manifestations in a growing body of art and nonfiction, as noted above. The labours of the foragers, and Manna as filmmaker, evoke Tsing's ‘art of noticing’ (2010: 192), suggesting Palestine, more commonly portrayed in metropolitan contexts as a site of ruin and disaster, as an unlikely incubator of a new environmental consciousness. ¹⁰ Manna's long takes and movement between scales align Foragers with the genre of ecocinema, in which these techniques are often used to decentre the human, and underscore a sense of the film as concerned with extending ethical responsibility beyond human worlds. Her close-ups evoke Jennifer M. Barker's notion of ‘embodied spectatorship’ (2009: 3), encouraging audience experience of the film at a sensory level. The film provides a ‘passionate immersion’ in nonhuman life, identified by Tsing as a vital counterpart to knowledge from the natural sciences in understanding nonhuman worlds (2010: 201). This is intensified by Manna's use of what she calls a ‘foraging camera’, described as follows:

A movement that kind of mimics the act of foraging. A handheld movement, with close up shots focused on the ground. It's not an eye that's looking at the landscape as such. But very much about recognizing plants that are around you, in movement—about being in movement in the landscape (Manna and Eghbariah, 2022).

This foraging camera moves up and down according to the shape of the terrain, encouraging a sense of embodied identification between viewers and protagonists, and allowing viewers to share in as direct as possible an encounter with Palestine's landscape from a distance.

If an environmental sensibility might suggest naturalism, Manna emphasises the distinctiveness of the nonhuman world of Palestine through the use of jarring and incongruous audio. The opening drone shot is accompanied by an eerie sci-fi-style score of bells and synthesisers by Rashad Becker, which increases in volume and intensity. A similar audio track recurs later in the film, accompanying a panning shot of swaying grasses and plants filmed through a night vision lens. These techniques help us ‘begin to feel the chill of a world that humans cannot ken’, reminding us that ‘some worlds do not pivot around human knowledge’ (Celermajer et al., 2020: 500). ¹¹ In this way, Manna portrays Palestine not as a site of fragile ecologies that must be expunged of damaging Palestinian presence and managed by Israeli rangers, but of multispecies agency that exceeds Israeli efforts at scientific knowledge or control. Her film twins the subordination of Palestinians with the domination of nonhuman nature, undermining Israeli assertions of superior environmental responsibility through a markedly contemporary framework.

It is worth noting that this argument goes somewhat against the grain of the political tendencies of much posthumanist writing. As Dinesh Wadiwel writes, taking as exemplar the work of Jane Bennett, posthumanism and new materialism's commitment to ‘ontological monism’ has sometimes led to a ‘political monism’ and subsequent refusal of politics as a site of antagonism (2023: 43). Manna's film is significant here not just because of the way in which it takes posthumanist thought into a Palestinian context to prompt new forms of political engagement with the Palestinian cause, but also because a Palestinian context shows the limits of the posthumanist emphasis on distributive agency, and all-too-common reluctance to speak clearly about power, violence and responsibility. In the phrase ‘arts of solidarity’ in my title, I borrow from Tsing's ‘art of noticing’ to describe Manna's distinctive use of posthumanist aesthetics to portray aspects of the Palestinian struggle. I indicate the possibilities contained within her work for how we might cultivate an ethical commitment that goes across species lines, even amid extreme violence aimed at extinguishing human life; I also gesture towards the widespread limitations of posthumanist thought at the present moment.

Manna's evocation of a distinctive set of Palestinian relationships with nature has an additional connection to debates in Environmental Humanities and contemporary politics through its engagement with indigeneity. Manna notes foraging as an indigenous Palestinian practice (2020) and both Manna and Eghbariah have drawn analogies with the American and Australian colonial extinguishing of indigenous environmental practices (Katrib et al., 2022). This framing appears far more frequently in reviews and promotional materials than in the filmmakers’ comments – perhaps notably, it does not appear in the blurb (2022) – indicating its significance to Foragers’ reception and circulation. This is in part because of the growth over the past twenty years in the use of a settler-colonial framework in scholarship on Palestine/Israel (Sabbagh-Khoury, 2022), influenced notably by the work of Australian scholar Patrick Wolfe. ¹² This analytic has risen rapidly to prominence in the public imagination, in part because of the comparisons it enables with the United States and the outsized influence of this country in generating global activist vocabularies, as well as the pre-existing affective and moral registers it makes available. ¹³ Environmental Humanities also has a particular interest in indigeneity, with scholars, indigenous and otherwise, emphasising the violent disruption of socio-ecological relations occasioned by settler colonialism, and the potential insights into alternative ways of living with nonhuman nature found in indigenous thought (McGregor et al., 2020; Whyte, 2018). The framing of Manna's film as a documentation of indigeneity seems overdetermined given its themes, and a release date amid these conversations.

Indigeneity plays a number of roles in Foragers and its reception. The ability of Manna's protagonists to find food in a landscape that looks, to the untrained eye, unpromising, suggests their indigeneity and rootedness, in spite of Israeli efforts to remove them. In this way the film joins contemporary assertions of Palestinian indigeneity to current debates on the importance of indigenous environmental knowledge. Foragers resonates in particular with a certain framing of indigenous environmental practice in scholarship and popular culture, shaped notably by the work of Indigenous scholars with a high public profile such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose 2013 hit Braiding Sweetgrass is typically found in the bookshop sections mentioned above (and whose latest book was in the windows of independent bookshops as this article was completed). In scholarly, arts and activist contexts, among others, indigenous cultures are widely celebrated for their ‘futural’ quality, portrayed as having much to teach the Global North about how to envision different and more sustainable worlds (Anthias and Asher, 2024; Chandler and Reid, 2020). Foragers’ translated title has an intriguing resonance with this popular emphasis on indigenous futurity. Its Arabic title is Al-yad al-khadra, ‘green hands’. Translated as Foragers, the title is repositioned to frame Palestine as always already devoted to organic, small-scale and slow food principles. Palestine, in this context, anticipates rather than imitates current metropolitan sensibilities through its association with the foraging trend, furthering the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause in the eyes of these audiences.

Israeli and Palestinian environmental narratives

I have focused so far on Manna's portrayal of Palestinian relationships with nature. However, her portrayal of Israeli relationships with nature is also significant, offering a sharp contrast that furthers the film's case for Palestinian belonging and ownership. We see these two relationships in the opening scene. As noted above, the film begins with an aerial shot of a forager. The aerial perspective is presumably from a drone, a disconcerting reminder of the surveillance tool and weapon that is a ubiquitous feature of Palestinian life and fundamental part of Israel's ‘military-innovation ecosystem’ (Abdelnour, 2023). Manna implicitly contrasts the advanced Israeli technologies used to surveil, kill, and generate profit, and the traditional practices depicted onscreen. In Foragers, Israeli knowledge of the land is abstract and technologically mediated through an instrument of death. The foragers’ knowledge, meanwhile, is intimate, embodied and, through its association with social reproduction, nurtures life and community. As noted above, in the first shot the forager appears literally as part of the land; elsewhere their close relationship to the land is captured through Manna's ‘foraging camera’. Manna opposes her filmmaking style to an ‘eye that's looking at the landscape’ (Manna and Eghbariah, 2022). We might read this as a reference to the drone, but it also evokes an older notion of landscape as ‘something to be seen, not touched’ and a viewpoint that ‘dominates, frames and codifies the landscape’ (Mitchell, 2000: 197). Transported into colonial contexts, including Palestine, the ‘detached vertical perspective’ of cartography made land legible and ripe for appropriation (Benvenisti, 2000; Harris, 2004: 175). Manna's opening aerial shot evokes this history of the colonial encounter with landscape. Becker's unnerving score emphasises a sense of the landscape as strange and foreign while also suggesting it is being perceived from above by aliens, reinforcing a tension between the traditional scene and an unseen threat that creates apprehension for the viewer. A blunt reading of this scene might see it as portraying Israelis as alien outsiders; yet neither is it reducible to this, not least because Manna puts the viewer in the same position. Manna confronts us with our own preconceptions of Palestinian environments as degraded, which are then overturned in the rest of the film as we see their biodiversity.

This contrast between two types of environmental relationship is underscored by Manna's portrayal of INPA rangers. These men are played for laughs, in spite of their state-backed authority. They are presented as unlike Manna's protagonists in every respect, indicating their lack of a connection to the land – ironically, given their job of nature protection. Manna's protagonists blend into the landscape, speak slowly and reflectively, as if taking care not to disturb it, and walk gently through the uneven hills, adapting their movement to the terrain's changing shape in a way that shows longstanding familiarity. The rangers, meanwhile, are far from the tanned sabra of Zionist myth – confident, heroic, at ease in the land of Palestine, and therefore indigenous to it (Almog, 2000). They look awkward and out-of-place in their white uniforms, fiddle with their ill-fitting white sun hats, talk loudly in crude language, and speed along in a shiny white SUV, seeing the land solely as a distance to be crossed rather than as an ecosystem under their tyres. Worse, for environmentalist viewers, is their failure to switch off their engine when they stop, underscoring their ironic lack of care for nature in spite of their professional responsibilities. The rangers may be backed by the power of the state, but the foragers continually outwit them, prompting audience laughter. Manna's representation of the awkward rangers and foragers’ wilful persistence resonates with Lisa Bhungalia's account of humour in Palestine as a refusal of power's ‘authorizing force’ (2020): a disavowal by Palestinians of Israeli power and its claim to authority, which at the same time maintains the possibility of organising things otherwise.

Manna adds a further angle to her juxtaposition of contrasting relationships with nonhuman nature by addressing economics. In addition to being a means to persecute Palestinians and suppress historic cultural practices, she suggests that the foraging bans have a financial rationale, boosting Israeli industries by forcing a reliance on bought commercial crops. This theme is addressed in a different style: while Palestinian foragers are shot in contemplative scenes in the countryside, or having everyday conversations in their homes, the primary technique here is interviews, in archival footage and with Manna. The first suggestion of an economic motive appears less than four minutes into the film, in a grainy clip from an old Israeli television show. Its early appearance, before other possible reasons for the laws are elaborated in the police interview scenes, suggests its importance as a framing idea. In the clip, presenters suggest to an Israeli entrepreneur that his efforts to establish an Israeli za’atar industry are absurd given the historic association of za’atar with Arab cuisine, and as ‘the national food of the Arabs’. Unperturbed, he declares: ‘za’atar is Israel’. Later, Manna's interviewee, a modern-day entrepreneur attempting to make ‘akkoub into a commercial industry, is clearly uncomfortable with her insistent questions on this topic as he tries to end the interview. ¹⁴ Manna suggests that Israeli conservation law serves as a means to promote Israeli agriculture, and a counterpart to a broader process by which Israel is seen as having ‘stolen’ Palestinian-Arab food heritage – most notoriously, hummus and falafel – and transformed them into Israeli national dishes (Baron and Press-Barnathan, 2021: 344).

Manna contrasts her portrayal of Israeli economic interests in za’atar and ‘akkoub with scenes in which foraged foods are shared collectively by Palestinian foragers. In this way her film resonates again with the notion of multispecies justice (Celermajer et al., 2020), suggesting that it is not just Palestinian humans who are harmed by the foraging bans, but that a broader lifeworld is threatened with extinction. It also resonates with global political movements that might be allied to the Palestinian cause, as noted in the introduction, in this case suggesting an organic form of anticapitalism and anti-globalisation deriving from peasant resistance. We see this in a scene in Aziza's sister's kitchen, where her sister and another female relative prepare ‘akkoub foraged by Adel and Aziza, to be eaten by a group of female relatives as part of a shared meal. This contrasts with the Israeli relationships with the plants portrayed in the film, in which plants are understood purely as a taxonomical category for legal regulation, or a potential source of profit. In both cases, the plants are detached from their cultural meanings and a broader set of socio-ecological relations. Elsewhere in the film, Manna portrays foraging as implicated in other forms of care for nonhuman nature. The most touching scenes feature another elderly man, Zeidan, who forages with his six dogs. Manna documents tender moments between Zeidan and the dogs, as in one moment filmed in close shot in which he draws one dog to his face, closes his eyes and addresses it fondly as ‘my love’, and later in the film when he invites his dogs into his outdoor bed. The dogs are named in the credits as Kishkou, Ma’moule, Kharoube, Fad’ara, Dundun, and ‘Akiko, in an acknowledgement on Manna's part of their contribution to the film. Later in the film we observe Aziza and Adel sitting by a lake, appreciating the pleasures of a hot day from a cool spot. Aziza takes a dip in the still water, and relaxation leads them into shared reminiscences. Manna presents foraging as one aspect of a broader non-instrumental relationship with nonhuman nature, in which it is viewed with affection, care and gratitude, as a source of nourishment and joy, and an integral part of life. In this way Foragers resonates with comments about sumud made by one of Rijke and van Teeffelen's interviewees, Zoughbi Zoughbi:

'Sumud is not a single, demonstrative action. It is not just planting a tree and saying, ‘This is sumud.’ It is about how to nourish the tree, how to trim it, how to harvest it, how to create a healthier atmosphere for all … Sumud is an art of living … and building relationships between people’ (2014: 92).

If the environmental image here may be invoked as a metaphor, it also indicates the way that Foragers opens up a meaning of sumud as an ongoing practice of nurturing and strengthening Palestinian community and place, in spite of the persistent reality of war and occupation.

Hazards of the environmental turn

Foragers is a powerful portrayal of Palestinian relationships with nonhuman nature that has enabled many audiences to encounter a different perspective on Palestine during the ongoing war. In this piece I have emphasised its capacity to build solidarity with Palestinians through its focus on common environmental values between subjects and viewers, and in turn, to strengthen the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause in metropolitan contexts. It is a moving, sensitive and self-aware portrayal of the care for nonhuman nature extended by its subjects even under dire circumstances, and a testament to Palestinian determination embodied in the virtue of sumud. Yet it is also worth noting some of the hazards raised by the film and the environmental turn generally. Jessica Winegar warns against viewing art as ‘a ‘bridge of understanding’ that humanises and dispels stereotypes’ of Arabs, particularly Muslims, as violent and terroristic (2008: 652). This approach, she writes, can inadvertently reproduce a default presumption of Arab inhumanity. If this blunt framing may feel like a disservice to Manna's subtle film, Winegar's warning captures something of the film's appeal as a ‘novel’ perspective on Palestinian life amid a war prompted initially by terrorist attacks. Indeed, Manna plays provocatively with stereotypes of Palestinian terror in Foragers. A tense early scene shows a protagonist covertly carrying a knife towards Israeli rangers, ending comically as he stabs their SUV tyres. This scene, which cleverly wrongfoots its viewer, also offers a reminder of the way in which the film's broader emphasis on nonviolent resistance constrains the possibilities of legitimate Palestinian political action in line with metropolitan sensibilities.

A further hazard is the potential for an environmental turn to be counterproductive. That is, it may not justify claims of land ownership in the ways expected – and sometimes may do the opposite. If Manna's courtroom and sabotage scenes show the steely determination and political agency of her protagonists, the film also romanticises Palestinian heritage and tradition in ways that heighten its appeal to metropolitan audiences seeking, particularly post-pandemic, ‘reconnection’ with nature. In this context we might wonder about the possibility for such framings of Palestinian life to unintentionally reproduce an image of an ‘ecological Palestinian’ (cf. Krech, 1999), living in harmony with nature prior to Zionist colonisation, whose authentic life bears lessons for alienated metropolitan viewers. This narrative circulates widely in activist spaces, reproduced and reinforced through commentary on Manna's film, and intensified by popular concerns with the moral force and environmental lessons of indigeneity, which for indigenous peoples ‘locks them into that colonial past’ (Pickerill in Rose and Pickerill, 2024: 10). ¹⁵ The environmental turn may well concede too much ground to Zionist narratives, aligning with them quite neatly.

It is worth noting that any claim that foraging demonstrates land ownership would be unconvincing to Palestine's British and Zionist colonisers. Israel Zangwill, author of the Zionist slogan of ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’, famously argued in 1920 for the justness of Zionist colonisation on the basis that ‘there is no Arab people living in intimate fusion with the country, utilising its resources and stamping it with a characteristic impress: there is at best an Arab encampment’ (cited in Masalha, 1992: 6). On this Lockean model, foraging would show a Palestinian failure to develop or ‘improve’ the land of Palestine through the application of labour, thereby undermining ownership claims. Portrayals of Palestinian foraging thus have an ambivalent relation to land ownership, containing the potential to reinforce perceptions of Palestinian nomadism (‘an Arab encampment’) that associates Palestinians with a stigmatised identity long seen as causing environmental harm (Davis, 2016: 115), rather than enacting environmental knowledge, care and belonging. The equation of foraging with ownership only makes sense within a contemporary rhetorical apparatus drawn from posthumanist-inflected popular environmentalism and activist vocabularies of indigeneity. While this does not mean it cannot be mobilised in those contexts, this history speaks to limitations of this approach.

There are further risks to bear in mind in any turn to environmentalism to secure the legitimacy of Palestinian presence and ownership, namely a loose connection to Palestinian history and Palestinian life in the present. An emphasis on Palestinian connection to the land through traditional environmental practices risks portraying Palestinian agriculture as unchanging and outside history, neglecting histories of Palestinian agricultural change, innovation and adaptability. For instance: the olive tree may be shorthand for timeless Palestinian presence and rootedness, yet the widespread planting of olive trees in the West Bank was catalysed by changes in the Palestinian economy after 1967, prompting a turn to crops that require less intensive management (Kohlbry, 2023: 2672). This emphasis on natural history also appears as a curious refraction of earlier Zionist models of rightful ownership, seen in the practice of ‘knowing the land’, which suggests dangers in using this as the basis for a moral claim; and indeed, Palestinian environmental practices are sometimes claimed as mere revivals of ancient Jewish indigenous traditions (Braverman, 2021: 128). Perhaps more significantly, an emphasis on harmonious Palestinian relations with nature prior to Zionist colonisation obscures the history of Ottoman modernity and Palestine's thriving urban life at the start of the twentieth century, extinguished by Israel (Tamari, 2009). This history presents more complicated narratives than one of peasant harmony, fitting less easily into a contemporary moral calculus premised increasingly on the seemingly clear issue of indigeneity. Yet it also offers relatively neglected opportunities to tell powerful stories about Palestinian life, including of what was lost and what might be in the future. These stories are worth articulating within and alongside histories of Palestinian care for nature. As Meneley writes of Sansour's seed library, the goal is not ‘going back to an untouched bucolic Palestinian past’ (2021a: 163), yet sometimes popular representation and reception of these projects suggests otherwise. In this context, the experimental aspects of Manna's film, including its jarring extra-diegetic audio and the long shot at its conclusion, offer untapped promise for the environmental turn, showing how it can also contain ambivalence about nonhuman nature.

Conclusion

In this piece I have offered an overview of key themes in Palestinian/Israeli environmental history through the lens of a recent film by Palestinian artist Jumana Manna, Foragers. I argued that Foragers is an emblematic example of a recent shift towards an environmental framing in Palestinian art and activism oriented towards an international audience. The turn moves away from the ‘tragic discourse’ of victimhood and stereotypes of violence and terror that have dominated metropolitan representations of Palestinians (Bernard, 2013; Khalili, 2007: 34). It foregrounds a form of nonviolent resistance that shows Palestinian self-respect and dignity, providing a new perspective on the national virtue of sumud. As Meneley notes, this turn ‘reclaim[s] older traditions where food was known to heal as well as nourish and to provide pleasure, comfort, and strength’ (2021a: 168), producing a perception of Palestinians as agents and as generous hosts, rather than as passive recipients of aid (Meneley, 2021b). This shift, and Manna's film, reshapes metropolitan perceptions of Palestine and Palestinians by tapping into a potent combination of contemporary political and cultural vocabularies. Key among these are the popular inflections of posthumanist theory found in a growing body of nature writing and environmental journalism, and the related popular interest in indigeneity, especially its environmental dimensions and value as a rhetorical intensifier of moral claims. In this way, Palestine and Palestinians become connected to prestige values of authenticity, naturalness and distinction (Meneley, 2021a: 161). Attention to Palestine also offers important qualifiers to posthuman thought and the reluctance of its thinkers to engage with political antagonism. As I noted in conclusion, however, the environmental framing, while potent, brings hazards that activists and scholars would do well to remember, even as we seek to mobilise all resources within our power to bring Israel's war to an end and support Palestinian struggle.

Highlights

• The environment is a key area of contestation in Palestine/Israel.

• Food and environment play important roles in shaping ideas of Palestine and ‘being Palestinian’.

• Contemporary Palestinian arts and activism increasingly address environment and food, activating connections with broader topics in contemporary politics and culture including agroecology, food sovereignty, posthumanism, indigeneity, and foraging.

• Food and environment provide novel frames that allow artists and activists to solicit solidarity and identification with Palestine from new audiences.

• Examining food and environment in Palestine/Israel highlights the political limitations of strands of posthumanist thought.