Cultivating Agrarian Futures in Palestine

This paper explores the politics and practices of avocado cultivation in the Palestinian/Israeli context. In the northern rural highlands of the West Bank, vegetables and citrus trees have been increasingly replaced over the past decade by avocados destinated for foreign markets, especially in the Arab World. The Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture, together with international organizations, has promoted the cultivation of this high-value crop by presenting it as an opportunity to delink from the Israeli economy and resist settler colonial land dispossession. However, participant observation and semi-structured interviews conducted in the summer 2023 have shown that while some farmers have embraced this narrative and transformed their farm production systems into avocado monocultures in the hope of obtaining higher land returns, others have rejected it. For the latter, opposing settler colonial processes of dispossession and de-agrarianization means restoring agroecological farm production systems where avocados are grown alongside other fruits and vegetables. Centering the voices of farmers their avocado farming practices, this paper shows how agrarian spaces and subjectivities change not only in relation to state and capital interventions but also to the ways in which heterogenous Palestinian rural communities interact, oppose, and navigate these processes, thus making choices for their future.