WORDS BY DOUG BIEREND
The Palestine Heirloom Seed Library works to sustain traditional foodways and identity amidst Israel’s ongoing assault on Palestinian people, lands, and traditions.
On a brisk December evening at Bard College, a small crowd stood on a hill overlooking the Mahicannituck River. They were gathered to mourn and honor the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians killed by Israel’s relentless campaign of bombing, displacement, and starvation, in what the International Court of Justice would later rule “plausible” acts of genocide. It was a funeral at a distance, in absentia, for those who would not otherwise receive one.
Vivien Sansour, the Palestinian artist, writer, and founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library (PHSL), addressed the gathering. “We are all here as guests,” she said solemnly, standing before a field of white flags representing the lives lost. “Some of us are guests because we chose to be here, to take shelter. But most of us didn’t choose to be here. We have worlds that we love, and we wish had come here as just temporary visitors, but our worlds are being destroyed.”
At the end of the event, visitors were offered cups of soil and envelopes of seeds from the PHSL. The small gifts represented a great deal: the memory of those killed, but also the connections between Palestinians and their land, the scattering of people, seeds, and tradition among far-flung places, and the persistence of life through catastrophe.
Noting Bard’s campus as a former site of slave labor and the beautiful river nearby a witness to the genocidal erasure and removal of Native Americans, Sansour drew a connection between the dispossession and displacement of Indigenous people around the globe and the systems of extraction that threaten all life.
“Right now, it’s us; tomorrow, it’s you,” she said. “The same forces that are murdering us right now have no interest in life. They have an interest in destroying this beautiful planet.”
Born near Bethlehem, now living in New York, Sansour founded the PHSL in 2014 to preserve, propagate, and share traditional Palestinian foods and foodways; to carry forward ancestral agricultural practices; and to retain the stories and connection to the land shared by seed and people alike. Now, in the face of unprecedented violence, that work has become more urgent than ever. It represents a defense of food sovereignty in Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora and an act of defiance in the face of efforts to uproot a people, their ways of life, and their history.
“They can’t kill all of us,” Sansour told me after the funeral. “I feel my responsibility is towards not just trying to survive, but ensuring that those seeds that do escape will have something to return to, as a map to say, Look, this is who we are, this is who we were, and this is who we’ve been.”
Today’s atrocities in Gaza, and a half-century of draconian, encroaching occupation in the West Bank, have included not just the murder and forcible removal of people, but also efforts to erase their culture and connection to place. To this end, the Israeli military has targeted mosques, archives, universities, cemeteries, and, very pointedly, food and agriculture.
“It really symbolizes the freedom we hope to achieve ourselves. If we can’t fly, our seeds are flying, and they are the teachers, not us.”
During a blockade in Gaza from 2007 to 2010, for instance, the Israeli military famously calculated how many calories Gazans required before reaching malnourishment. Today in Gaza, in addition to destroying farmland outright, Israel is wielding starvation as a weapon—a war crime, according to Human Rights Watch—including denying crucial aid from reaching starving people displaced by the bombing, and leading a charge to defund UNRWA, the primary provider of humanitarian aid in the region. In the West Bank, Israel has even criminalized foraging for traditional plants, exerting control over water access and enforcing dependency on its own products and economy.
Sansour recalled being tear-gassed 10 years ago while taking her nephew foraging for akkoub, a thistle-like plant beloved by Palestinians and found growing in the region’s rocky hills. Israel criminalized foraging for akkoub in 2005. Although foraging persists today, the herb is only legally available in a cultivated form, grown and sold by Israeli-owned farms. “It’s part of the pressure that Israel puts on us to starve us out,” said Samir Naamneh, a Palestinian forager, to Undark Magazine.
The aims of acts and policies that target foodways, such as the systematic destruction and confiscation of centuries-old olive groves, are largely about disrupting traditional livelihoods. But they are also symbolic: After all, what strategic or tactical purpose is there for targeting a well-known sculpture of the Jadu’i watermelon, now an internationally recognized symbol of Palestinian resistance, situated on a roundabout outside of Jenin?
In this context, planting an heirloom seed amounts to an act of defiance. The life that sprouts is a reminder of the soils from which it has traditionally emerged, the ancestral hands that have tended it through seasons, across generations, and indeed, into new landscapes. “They tell a story: Not only did we exist, we exist today, and we will exist in the future,” said Sansour. “We might look different, but we are here. That’s really the vision of the seed library for me.”
The PHSL takes several forms. Its “headquarters” is a room in the village of Battir, a UNESCO Heritage Site southwest of Jerusalem with a rich farming history based around an ancient system of terraces. Battir is also a site of intensifying settler encroachment.
Jars full of seeds line the room’s walls alongside a small library of instructional books. Many of these crop varieties arrived at the PHSL after elder Palestinians recalled to Sansour a dish or plant from their youth, initiating a search for their seeds. Local farmers can retrieve seeds to plant on their land, access to which is increasingly constrained and dangerous as settler violence intensifies.
The PHSL doesn’t systematically track who takes the seeds or where they end up. Sansour sees in them the same urge for life and liberty that she does in people—an agency to “sprout wings” and go where the winds take them, to find root, and take on roles as good neighbors in new lands. “It really symbolizes the freedom we hope to achieve ourselves,” she said. “If we can’t fly, our seeds are flying, and they are the teachers, not us.”
The library largely exists, like many Palestinians, in a diaspora—a term drawn from the sowing of seeds. In California for instance, Palestinian-Venezuelan professor Riad Bahhur tends to seeds from the PHSL at his Sacramento home. Among them are long-necked gourds known as yaqteen, white cucumbers, and Battiri eggplants, which he grows with gardeners from the Sacramento-Bethlehem Sister City group. Bahhur befriended Sansour shortly before she launched the library. They bonded over a shared conviction that growing ancestral foods can keep Palestinians “connected to the land under the immense pressures of Israeli practices to break that connection.”
“These ancestral practices cannot bring back the people who have been killed…but they do embody for us that our ancestral heritage in the land is a long and rooted one.”
Bahhur received his seeds in simple handmade packets, describing his custody over them as part of a mutually understood, sacred trust. “The seeds allow me to continue an ancestral practice in the place where I find myself,” he said. “These ancestral practices cannot bring back the people who have been killed, or the amputated limbs of children, or erase their nightmares and traumas, but they do embody for us that our ancestral heritage in the land is a long and rooted one, and that our ancestors are with us now during this dark time.”
Bahhur said that the climate in Sacramento requires some special considerations, but that the plants have adapted, including by finding familiar friends among their new neighbors. In 2022, for instance, he sowed his garden almost entirely with Battiri eggplants from the PHSL. The eggplant did best in a section of the garden overrun with mint, planted from a sprig that his aunt brought from Palestine decades earlier.
When Bahhur reported this to Sansour, “she excitedly said, Mint! There is so much mint grown in Battir. You always see Battiri women walking with straw trays on their heads piled high with mint! We both felt joy that the Battiri eggplant was reunited with the Palestinian mint in their Sacramento diasporic home and that they seemed to help each other thrive.”
The PHSL is an effort at carrying a world currently “in hospice,” as Sansour puts it, through the painful transition into a world that will be, in many ways, radically different from the one we’ve known—not only for Palestinians and their lifeways, but for everyone. It’s less about locking seeds away in a vault, than about cultivating living, evolving relationships between human and more-than-human life that have always been the basis of collective survival.
“The seed library’s objective isn’t to preserve seeds for doomsday. It is to keep seeds alive in a living archive, in the land, so they continue to be alive and creative, because the seeds are in a constant creative process with humans and with the soil and with the elements,” she said.
The travesties committed in Gaza and the West Bank will irrevocably transform the face of Palestinian life and culture, a pattern unfortunately repeated throughout generations. But the historical roots of agriculture in Palestine run thousands of years deep and may indeed prove invaluable to the future. Many seeds in the PHSL are ba’al, or rainfed crops, requiring relatively little water to thrive. This is another facet of the project: to preserve precious biodiversity that, in cooperation with humans, may help both to adapt on a changing planet.
Preserving the seeds and the connection to the place they represent is a means of persistence, even if at a distance—a struggle for life and a way of living that is as old as the cultivation of plants. As all of humanity faces an increasingly uncertain future, that may be some cause for hope—or at least a model for survival and of carrying identities and ways of life through the breach.
“You can’t deny literally over 10,000 years of human relationship with nature,” said Sansour, “So good luck. You can kill me, but I’m going to sprout somewhere, and that makes me happy.”
Palestine’s Seeds in Diaspora
