Erasing roots, stealing seeds and engineering flight |
The recent raid by Israeli forces on the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) in Ramallah—during which young female employees were blindfolded, tied, filmed, and the organization’s seed bank and files were confiscated—should not be treated as a marginal incident of intimidation. It exposes the deeper architecture of displacement operating in Palestine today. A settler-colonial project does not rely solely on spectacular acts of expulsion or dramatic moments of forced transfer; it also depends on the slow, methodical erosion of the conditions that allow a people to remain. The theft of seeds is therefore an assault on the material and ecological bases of Palestinian rootedness.
In Palestine, seeds embody accumulated knowledge of agriculture, adapted over centuries from the ancestors to a particular soil and climate. They preserve biodiversity, livelihoods, and memory. By targeting the seed bank, Israeli authorities confiscated property and attacked the infrastructure through which Palestinians reproduce life, autonomy, and belonging. The raid fits within what Patrick Wolfe described as the “logic of elimination” embedded in settler colonialism, where the removal of a native population is pursued through a series of interventions that make indigenous presence increasingly untenable.
The displacement Palestinians face today is thus not confined to direct expulsions, although these remain present. It is also produced through the dismantling of livelihood capitals such as economic, social, financial, and ecological, that sustain daily life. When agricultural unions are raided, when seeds are stolen, when olive groves are burned or uprooted by settlers, when grazing lands are encroached upon, the result is a cumulative uninhabitability. These practices hollow out the ability of Palestinians to stay, while enabling Israel to frame any eventual departure as an act of individual choice rather than the outcome of coercion.
The targeting of agriculture is not incidental. Agriculture has long been a pillar of........