Ecological Crisis As Structure, Not Event: Lessons from Jenin, Palestine

Long considered the “breadbasket” of Palestine, Jenin’s role in agrarian production for local and global markets has been shifted and constrained by a series of imperial and settler colonial powers. Before and after October 7, 2023, the villages and hinterlands of the Jenin Governorate in the northern West Bank were and remain under siege from Israel’s occupation. However, the daily life of farmers and rural dwellers under siege rarely makes headlines. Critical scholars must resist separating the daily violence of ecological crisis from the moments of horror that draw international condemnation, such as the destruction wrought on Jenin in July 2024 which was called in many media outlets the “second siege of Jenin” (after the 2002 siege). The crisis and genocide Palestinians have faced in the past year, as Palestinian scholars and activists around the world have cried out, must be put in the longue durée of the ongoing Nakba. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and historical archival research, I ask, what can Jenin teach us about environmental crises when they do not fit into “a notion of ‘crisis’ as an instance of short-lived, spectacular devastation” (Kirk and Lawson, 2022)? Jenin, due to its agrarian importance, physical geography, and cultural and political history of resistance, offers to both local and global studies of political ecological crisis an understanding of how multiple systems have impacted agrarian livelihoods over time.