Introduction

1Decolonising the imagination, including in the social sciences, takes on a new form within the all-pervasive dynamics of climate change. The global climate emergency caused by greenhouse gas emissions, with its widespread local impact and accelerated environmental change, shines a new light on environment-related contradictions and conflicts, and on competition for and access to environmental resources—but also on the role and meanings attributed to “nature.” This draws attention to both the uncanny quality of the climate crisis itself and its historical construction as a Western narrative, which is intimately bound up with the fossil-fuel-based carbon economy (Mitchell 2011).

2As has been demonstrated within the anthropological tradition, most human societies, albeit diverse in terms of their symbolic construction and respective environments, have not classified the world as comprising two opposing spheres as is typical of our own naturalist cosmology (Descola 2005). Ours is a dualistic model of human society, seen as separate and distant from, and indeed in opposition to, a “natural world” that falls outside of relations, interdependencies, and limits; a mere object of dominion and exploitation. In contrast, the majority of cultures have not invested in “harmony with nature”—given that they lack the very concept of a separate world of multiple actors reductively summed up as “nature”—but rather in patterns of relatedness and interdependence with the nonhuman subjects in their environments. In the context of the climate emergency, environmental actors—water, the atmosphere, mountains, forests, etc.—resurface as, sometimes catastrophic, subjects, throwing into sharp relief the interdependencies and limits inherent in our relationship with our surroundings (Van Aken 2020).

3Over the past century, Palestine has represented a focal site for the politics of nature, which are understood to be a key feature of the colonial encounter. Themes have included the expropriation of “natural” resources (water, land, seeds, forests) for nation-building purposes, the symbolic appropriation and redefinition of “the others’ nature,” the role of forestry and agriculture in framing Israeli—and Palestinian—national and nationalistic ideologies, the “naturalization” of colonial expansion via narratives of modernisation and technopolitics (Mitchell 2002), and extractivist irrigation ideologies embedded in capitalist development in semi-arid areas. All of these interlinked aspects of the politics of nature stand at the very core of the colonial imagination.

4The effects of global greenhouse emissions are leading to accelerated environmental change in Mediterranean countries. Changes may also be observed in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) and Israel, including the increasing unpredictability of rainfall, water stress, and greater than previous oscillation of the weather between extremes. The climate emergency is driving more intense competition for access to resources, a desertification process in semi-arid areas, and a struggle for water in the oPt.

5In the Anthropocene—understood as a new geological era of accelerated environmental change caused by CO₂ emissions—decolonising Palestine goes hand in hand with decarbonising our collective imagination within the present context of climate emergency: nature, hitherto thought of as a distant object entirely at our disposal, is now re-emerging as an interdependent and entangled set of dynamic subjects. At the same time, the role of humans, with our carbon-fuelled societies and elite groups, is returning to the fore as a ‘agent’ (Latour 2015) that is contributing to abrupt geological and atmospheric changes, thereby subverting— including within the social sciences—the ordered categorisation of society/nature.

6This is prompting us to rediscover the impact of the carbon economy’s fossil-based imaginary on the construal of “nature,” not just at home in the heart of the Western world, but even more so in the colonial laboratories of the past century, among which Palestine represents a small but highly intensive experiment that has carried over into the new millennium.

7Furthermore, due to CO₂ emissions and the urgency of decarbonising economies, the atmosphere is becoming a new focus at the global level; emerging as a geopolitical issue, just as the quest for new—and ancient—relationships with the environment and the need for circular economy approaches are coming to the fore as themes within the political struggle.

8Rediscovering historical local patterns of atmospheric knowledge and farming practices in Palestine can help us to differently conceptualise the environmental and social changes we face, and to envisage possible feasible futures within the climate emergency. Here, we bring an anthropology of history perspective to bear on the present-day labour practices of Palestinian peasants (fellahin), analysing an ancient local pattern of farming knowledge that has survived in the context of fenced family subsistence gardens: an agricultural calendar known as al-murba’nia. This calendar of desirable rainfall patterns illustrates the local knowledge of peasants and farmers concerning their interdependence with the resources and limits of the environment, prior to the hegemonic takeover of notions of nature and expert agronomic knowledge; a theme that is increasingly recovering salience in our contemporary age of accelerated environmental change and internationally-shared concern about the link between environmental issues, and vulnerability and impoverishment.

9In 1995, when I was conducting ethnographic fieldwork among Palestinian refugees in the East Bank of the Jordan Valley, the lack of water in this dry and torrid depression was a key issue for the agribusiness sector, which had radically transformed environmental and social patterns of farming. While living in this low-lying and scorching region, I got used to waiting for the evening east wind to rise up so that I could cool down after the long hot summer days, and to hoping for the coming rainy season (on which water supplies and the next harvest depended). At that time, I recorded Amin Kanaan Turkmani—a 1948 refugee from the Haifa region—giving his account of an agricultural weather calendar that he still used to orient his way through the clouds and rain of the winter months, conserving it in his social memory as one of those traditions that refugees reify in displacement. This calendar (as stated above) was known as al-murba’nia. It details a set of phases that make up the much anticipated but erratic rainy season, offering a framework for defining specific work practices by guiding farmers to recognise the different types of wind and rain, the pattern of intensifying cold and frost, and the activity/development of other non-human sentinels such as snakes, specific insects, or wild plants. Al-murba’nia helped pinpoint the timing of the strategic farming tasks to be performed in preparation for the wished-for rainy season and the ensuing spring.

10At the time of my initial fieldwork, I categorised this ancient memory as part of the refugees’ nostalgia for their past and lost lands and homes, denying what has recently become more self-evident: namely, that knowledge of the environment has always been a component of local savoir faire. This local knowledge encompasses knowledge about the weather, its unpredictability, and the embodied experience of its historical patterns across the generations. Although my research concerned water as a key medium for social and political relations (Van Aken 2003, 2012), I then generally conceptualised weather conditions as external to the environment: indeed, atmospheric relationships are often absent from the social sciences, despite their prominence in the social world and in local knowledge.

11Al-murba’nia had become ‘out of place’ in Jordan, given that regional modernisation schemes led farming to be redefined as unlimited intensive irrigation to be mainly conducted indoors in greenhouses.1 Once the traditional patterns and techniques of rainfed agriculture had been substituted, water issues would remain hidden away in distant water control stations, designed to capture every available drop for commercial cash-crop agriculture and urban development. Nevertheless, Amin Kanaan, like many of his peers, recalled al-murba’nia not only out of nostalgia for his lost land, but also as a framework for his efforts to grow family food supplies in fields that were still rainfed or less systematically irrigated.

12The Palestinian refugees of 1948, and later those of 1967, brought with them not only what material objects they could carry. Along with a scant few possessions, they also travelled with their knowledge of the ‘atmosphere’ of their homelands: highly volatile, flowing, immaterial, cultural, and agro-pastoral knowledge that nonetheless represented a key component of their social belonging, their trust in places, and ways of dwelling and farming that persisted even in a strikingly different ecological and economic context.

13In more recent years,2 while conducting research on family farming in the Bethlehem area in the West Bank, I once again came across the memory of al-murba’nia among the older generations of fellahin, although for many—at least among the younger age groups and as an oral tradition—it has now fallen into oblivion. Current versions vary in terms of their classification of the phases of the calendar. Yet in one form or another, al-murba’nia is still present in family gardens and practices, even more so given the increasing loss of water sources, due to expropriation by the Israeli occupying forces and colonial settlers. In mountain areas especially, al-murba’nia is remembered and valued for its emphasis on the variable and limited availability of water; an issue that, in the high-tech colonised setting of the past half-century, has only had the effect of exacerbating distress and anguish. Still today, the legacy of al-murba’nia helps to strategically organise the work of rainfed farming, which demands skilful management of water and moisture.

14In the West Bank, on the hills where al-murba’nia originated, this meteorological knowledge system is nowadays seldom spoken about and is excluded from modernisation narratives. Yet, it continues to be a vital component of the skills required for family farming, which—in the circular and mostly subsistence economy of the Bethlehem area’s habba’il (terraced gardens)— still rests on relatedness with, and not extraction of, living forces and other non-human subjects in the environment.

15Al-murba’nia consists of a complex classification of increasingly rainy/wet/cold periods, a ‘rainsphere’ to be skilfully navigated with a view to saving as much moisture as possible for the longer, dry, hot summer. By engaging with the historical unpredictability and variability of rain, al-murba’nia offered, and offers, a means of framing uncertainty, and of attaining familiarity and intimacy—not with equilibrium or fixed seasons, as from a naturalistic perspective, but with the erratic, unpredictable, and uncertain patterns of fluctuating rainfall that have historically characterised the Palestinian environment. Indeed, contemporary Palestinians in the West Bank are highly expert in political risks and uncertainties, but also inherit past expertise in environmental risks surrounding water scarcity and undependability, which represents an intimate part of their local knowledge.

16In order to draw out the role of the imagination and the politics of “nature” from the initial colonial encounter through contemporary settings, I devote the first section of this essay to situating the meanings of “nature” and “air” within the context of Israeli nation-building, the depeasantisation process, and land and water expropriation in the oPt. In the second section, I outline key aspects of the politics of nature in relation to the colonial occupation process: the role of forestry planning in erasing the Palestinian landscape, the encounter between Zionist farming ideologies and the fellahin, and the interlinked Palestinian defensive farming and local symbolic value of food. This lays the ground for my analysis, in the final section, of the role of the resilient weather knowledge known as al-murba’nia in agricultural work based on rainfed farming techniques and relatedness to the atmospheric environment.

Up in the sky, facts on the ground

17One of Edward Said’s last publications was entitled After the Last Sky (1999). This work combined texts by the famous Palestinian intellectual with shots by the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr of landscapes in which the sky featured prominently. Anybody who is acquainted with the historical Palestinian refugee camps, with their spatial segregation and restrictions, conserves memories, such as local doves mating in the late afternoon while flying freely in the sky, a cue to dreaming of wide open spaces above to counterbalance the distressing facts on the ground; or children flying kites in the evening; or the vital role of rooftops as the leading place for private rendezvous among teenagers and as refreshment and hospitality venues for families during the long hot summers. Said’s Palestinian skylines were presented as a counterpoint to the situation on the ground yet were informed by a modernist perspective that assumes a disjuncture between earth and sky, taken to be two separate spheres. This was markedly different to the ancient perspective of al-murba’nia, from which dynamic actors and signs in the sky were interpreted as interrelated with “down to earth” farming practices.

18Global and local perceptions of the future are today increasingly characterised by a sense of crisis surrounding climate change: carbon dioxide emissions from human fossil fuel combustion have represented the main cause of atmospheric greenhouse gases and rising temperatures since pre-industrial times and are linked to accelerated environmental change. Models of the threats inherent in environmental change dominate projected scenarios for the coming decades; changes that will occur unevenly among populations and will often affect the more marginalised. In the Anthropocene, recognition of the anthropogenic nature of greenhouse gas emissions and other related human drivers have suddenly turned humans into “natural agents” with a geological role in climate change. The modernist notion of “nature” as a domain of resources at the disposal of human beings, has suddenly begun to appear uncanny; existential and epistemological upheaval has followed the discovery that “nature” is not stable, immutable, or susceptible to being simply managed, planned, or consumed by modern humans.

Figure 1: Local cultures are rooted ‘in the air’: local knowledge is related to patterns of socialization of the athmospheric environment

19The occupied West Bank serves as a tragic laboratory for the expropriation of land, deterritorialisation, material fencing, and the bordering of contiguous communities. In short, a set of harsh, contested ‘facts on the ground’ that are amplified by nationalist ideologies of land and nature arising in the context of Israeli nation-building and military control. Such conditions are peculiar to this setting yet reflect experimental spatial techniques for framing ‘contiguous disconnections’ of territory that are increasingly spreading around the world. In this scenario, land has become the unstable basis for a daily sense of crisis instead of the foundation of stability and trust. Environmental issues and climate change are just one remote problem among more tangible, urgent, and immediate emergencies stemming from colonial expropriation and discipline. In a land of perennial instability, such as the West Bank, homemaking, farming, and reproducing community encounter daily uncertainty; clearly, the environment is the least pressing concern amid multiple crises. At the same time, local knowledge has enabled the reproduction of resilient and sustainable patterns of family farming, seen as distinct from the chemical-based intensive agriculture promoted in the modernisation policies of recent decades, and as distinct from Israeli agribusiness. These farming practices are rooted in rainfed farming traditions, the intrinsic relatedness of the arid ecological environment, and local autonomy expressed through the deployment of local hands, tools, skills, and even local seeds. And this knowledge is held within the framework of al-murba’nia, which is not just a time-based calendar, but an account of relatedness that encompasses the interdependencies, limits, and actors within the atmosphere, a cultural resource that today has regained importance. There is no “nature” in the al-murba’nia, but rather a set of nonhuman actors, risks, and limitations. Indeed, al-murba’nia poses a strong challenge to our own contemporary models for understanding the air and weather in the context of the climate emergency: it highlights our present disconnect from the environment, whereby “nature” has become a separate and objective world of objects, as opposed to a world of subjects and relations of mutual reliance.

20As Hulme described (Hulme 2017), intimacy and culturally sensitive engagement with weather have historically undergirded societies’ trust in, and solidarity with, their territories: cultures are weathered, a transitive use of the verb that expresses interdependence with the uncertainties and fluxes of the atmosphere when it comes to rain and seasons. In Western societies, we have forgotten this, even more so within the social sciences, and the upshot is a lack of conceptual frameworks for weather relatedness (Van Aken 2020). This deficiency becomes even keener in light of the ongoing climate emergency, in which accelerated change is taking place in the skies above us, leading to altered rain cycles and increasing competition for water and food autonomy. Nevertheless, Middle Eastern societies have maintained their ties with what goes on up in the sky, and al-murba’nia is a good example of this kind of local legacy.

21First, it is a form of weather knowledge that stems from interaction, embodied experience, and engagement with the local winter as an unpredictable and variable ‘rainsphere,’ a highly concrete and on-the-ground experience that is also entangled with the atmosphere. Furthermore, its shared patterns of knowledge provide a basis for making sense of weather conditions and their historical unpredictability; it offers a means of constructing a sense of stability and solidarity in the midst of crisis. This stands in contrast to the emotional anguish of the inability to make sense of the extreme and unfamiliar weather conditions that are nowadays becoming more widespread as a result of climate change.

Meanings in the air

22The historical legacy of this weathered knowledge, understood as relatedness with living forces in the environment and a borderless atmosphere, is radically different to the new political and ecological context: lands have come under occupation via fencing and bordering, and even more crucially the sky has taken on alternative meanings under occupation. The ‘facts on the ground’ that have driven change in this small region have become disconnected from the ‘facts in the air.’ This represents a contemporary pattern of change that is not unique to the oPt; more specifically, from the perspective of modernity and the carbon economy, the land has been imagined as detached from the atmosphere, with the weather and air reduced to a mere space to be monitored. The weather has become a measurable sphere -as reflected in weather forecasts- or a logistic and military space (Van Aken 2020), transcending the interdependencies with the dimension above us that all cultural groups, including Palestinians, have traditionally valued: a dimension of risks, limits, and affordances—in short, of environmental relations and interferences.

23Within the contemporary attempt to seek out new frameworks and knowledge of weather relatedness in the Anthropocene, the wisdom about weather and its historical variability contained in al-murba’nia features key aspects of local knowledge about farming in arid areas. It is a guide to reducing the risks associated with potentially extreme weather events and erratic rains, which formed the cornerstone of ancient rainfed agriculture and food-making.

24While ‘down-to-earth’ is a terrestrial metaphor that aptly depicts the material conditions of farmers, it deflects attention from the patterns whereby different cultures “weather” (Hulme 2017) their everyday landed practices as active engagement with the atmosphere, looking up into the air as a collective multisensory experience that guides them in ploughing, sowing, and mitigating risk or water stress. Hence, like any weather knowledge system, al-murba’nia may be more appropriately understood as a “down-to-air” pattern of knowledge and practice, in which on-the-ground dynamics are closely interrelated with dwelling in an atmosphere, via an empirical set of actions and relations (Strauss and Orlove 2003; Vannini et al. 2012). Undoubtedly, climate change is driving a revisiting of the disconnect between human activities and nonhuman agents, and especially between an environment viewed as solely terrestrial and the weather in which it is enmeshed. While cultures have traditionally been ‘weathered’ (Hulme 2017), in that they have always inhabited dynamically shifting weathers, having to deal with an overheating global atmosphere is bringing the relationship between weather and society back into focus—this time within a crisis framework.

25Furthermore, in local cultures, weather is domesticated and made familiar rather than dominated or managed through measurement. Knowledge of previously experienced and predicted seasonality translates into an active relationship with a “weather world” (Ingold 2005), in the sense of social and cultural involvement with the atmospheric environment. In Palestine, this has meant interacting with fluctuating levels of humidity in an essentially arid or semi-arid setting. It has consisted of an attempt to navigate volatile weather conditions via recognition of winds, patterns of humidity, types of cloud, and the actions and signals of multiple living agents. Al-murba’nia thus represents one of the “diverse cultural interpretations of humans’ sensory experience of the atmosphere’s restless weather” (Hulme 2017, XIII), which in this instance has been historically related to dependency on rainfall. Farming knowledge is ‘rooted in the air’ and Palestinian peasants knew about this incertitude, embracing flexible patterns of work to match the limits and affordances of local seasonality.

Figure 2: Farming is weathered where the atmospheric environment acts on the ground

26Both the fragility and potential inherent in this ancient relatedness to water and weather rest on the key historical distinction between a long hot and rainless summer (sef) interrupted by a hoped for, unpredictable, and changeable winter rainy season known as shitta, not by chance the same word used to signify ‘rain.’ From a local peasant perspective, the year is inevitably and sharply divided into a variable and internally complex rainy season and a lengthy rainless phase.

27Al-murba’nia was local meteorological knowledge shared by both coastal and mountainous agricultural areas, with the latter forming the main barrier attracting seasonal rainfall to the West Bank. However, the Palestinians lost access to the sea, along with their sea merchant culture, and today are fenced into high-lying areas of the West Bank. As argued by Tamari in a book significantly entitled Mountain Against the Sea, being cut off from the sea has amplified the historical “emergence of the cultural divide between mercantile and cosmopolitan coastal communities and mountain-dwelling smallholder peasants” (Tamari 2009,1)—enclosing Palestinians, along with the failed possibility of an independent state, in this mountain region that was historically home to an autonomous peasantry representing the backbone of agricultural production. From a territorial perspective, the mountains have lost the sea, yet in the terms of al-murba’nia, weather still unites these bordering divided-off areas. The land has been fragmented, fenced, and over-signified but all of this takes place underneath a shared weather system.3

28Re-discovering this weather relatedness, even in a modernised and colonised context, helps us understand the meanings, and patterns of denial, that come into play in accelerated weather change. Western societies today lack shared cultural models for coping with uncertainty and an environment that re-acts and manifests itself as a subject: given that “nature” mainly comprises measurable objects, climate change is essentially “unthinkable” as Ghosh (2016) has proposed. For when we are disconnected from our environment, and consequently no longer capable of reading our interdependencies, climate change becomes radically and emotionally unsettling, undermining our sense of familiarity and trust, and amplifying the uncanny impact (Weintrobe 2013) of being unable to make sense of atmospheric relations. This stands at the core of weather weirding and the distressing quality of the climate emergency.

29Weather cultures, also defined as “weather worlds” (Ingold 2005, 2007), or local patterns of engagement with rain and the atmosphere, invariably entail attempts to stabilise a relationship that comprises “repeated exposure over periods of time to particular types and sequences of weather” (Hulme 2017,15).

30Even historical happenings are often linked with exceptional climate events. Palestinian refugees’ memories of the 1967 displacement are associated with an exceptional winter snowstorm in the Jordan Valley. Local community members recall waking up in the early morning to the sight of snow falling but also of refugees arriving; they began to host the children and women in their tents and homes, as a first local form of assistance, in the midst of extraordinarily cold winter weather. Within the social memory of the community, the unusual snowfall came to symbolise both the dramatic and irregular situation of the refugees and a local tradition of mutual aid.

31However, the meaning of the air has changed radically over time, a shift that is even further heightened in the West Bank of today. The air has become a locus of risk (Sloterdijk 2016): it is the space of colonial visual control, helicopter discipline and attacks, chemical pollution by Israeli factories (externalised to the West Bank), or drone surveillance. Furthermore, Israeli colonial architecture has created two separate vertical landscapes (Weizman 2002), whereby the surface of the land is juridically divided from the underground dimension (water or archaeological resources) and, crucially, also from the air above (air control, radio and telecommunications networks): a technically-supported but schizophrenic fragmentation of sense of place, effected via multiple technologies and shifting military borders.

32In this context, it is interesting to note the use of weather metaphors by the Israeli Defense Forces to describe their military operations, in an overturning of historical atmospheric meanings in the region: Operation Rainbow (2004), Operation Summer Rains (November 2006), Operation Autumn Clouds (November 2006), Operation Hot Winter (March 2008), Operation Sea Breeze (May 2010). The traditional cultural investment in rain that is shared by both cultures makes a comeback here, but as a human affair, while the ‘hot winter’ metaphor is well suited to the dynamics of overheating that we are currently experiencing at the global level. Shared weather patterns have been disconnected, just as water resources on the ground have been bordered. Emblematic of global patterns of territorial management and idolatries of land, the aerial dimension has become a detached locus of risk.

33Weather changes challenge our understanding of the cultural relations between the terrestrial environment and the atmosphere. Thus, an exploration of the key meanings of land and environment in Palestine can usefully inform our analysis.

The politics of nature: Land idolatries and farming ideologies

34While disconnection from weather worlds, and from the environment, is currently a global issue, in the context of the West Bank it is related to experimentation with new material borders. Today, the West Bank is a tragic laboratory for walled futures: a colonial space where we can observe novel techniques of territorial colonisation and segregation, contiguous separateness, and confined categories of humanity. Indeed, the accelerating and modernist quality of land discipline in the high-tech colonial encounter (Weizman 2002; Temper 2009) is bound up with nationalistic politics of nature.

The occupation is characterized by expropriation, integration, and externalization: expropriation of the resources, particularly water and land; integration of the economies, leading to a captive market and a captive labour force; and externalization of the environmental costs. (Temper 2009, 100)

35The materiality of the land is indeed ‘difficult to imagine’ from an exogenous perspective or from within other colonial experiences of the last century: arbitrariness and disconnect characterise local perceptions of the territory, with Israeli settlements forming the borders of Palestinian neighbourhoods, and the colonists’ networks and logistics constituting fences around the Palestinians’ territories and movements. Territory has taken on an extra-territorial dimension.

36The West Bank has been integrated into Israel via a process of segregation that rules out any future sense of territorial contiguity, let alone autonomy. Since 1967, the militarilycontrolled Area C has contained most of the farming land and water resources and is inhabited today by 300,000 Palestinians who are fenced in and surrounded by settlements housing 356,000 Israeli colonists. In this territory, farmland owned by Palestinians is continuously at risk of arbitrary expropriation—when this appears functional to ensuring the security or expansion of a nearby colony—or the denial of access to underground water resources.

Figure 3: Defensive farming: Planting young olive trees among aubergines, as a legal ploy against expropriation.

37Indeed, Palestinian communities might be best represented as disconnected islands in a sea of military control and scattered neighbouring colonies. Within this material framework, it is commonplace for a field of olive trees to be secretly mule-ploughed at night, because a farmer is not allowed to work land that has been reclassified as a “security area.” Another frequent sight is rows of small olive trees planted in aubergine fields, a crop combination that has nothing to do with historical relationships among local plants but rather embodies a form of “defensive agriculture”—in the case of military expropriation, only the presence of olive trees offers tenuous legal grounds for appealing the decision to a military court (Braverman 2009, 130). For generations, and even more so over the past two decades, land has come to represent the material risk of losing the ‘ground from under one’s feet’: rather than solid stability, land now constitutes a surface of arbitrariness and a lack of control over the material.

38As in other parts of the Middle East, food and farming have been absorbed into modernist ideologies, following a Californian landscape model based on reducing labour costs, chemical-based agricultural intensification, and the substitution of “traditional” farming systems with high-tech irrigated intensive farming. As at many other sites of the green revolution, globally and in other arid areas, this has also led to the widescale replacement and marginalisation of semi-arid, rainfed cultivation patterns, seeds, and techniques. In Area C, military orders have been “staked in” agriculture (on the use of water, see Qandeel, 2023). For example, the ban on planting productive orchards (Military Order no. 1015, 27 August 1982), aubergines and tomatoes (Military Order no. 103), or onions and onion seeds (Military Order no. 1015); the total ban on growing tobacco; the ban4 on milk production, except for family subsistence, until a decade ago; or the ban on using use organic pesticides (sulphur, copper).

39In this context, modernisation narratives are coupled with biblical narratives of the land and the invention of a desert to be redeemed using techno-fix solutions (Worster 1985; Mitchell 2000), consistent with the contemporary myth, widespread throughout the Middle East, of ‘making the desert bloom.’ The notion of controlling resources, based on the modern invention of ‘nature,’ in order to restore ‘biblical nature’ as an authentic reality, is at the heart of nationalist symbolic values and ideologies. Thus, the land has been overlaid with idolatries that have been reproduced in secular nationalist territorial planning. Not only have Palestinian lands and landscapes often been appropriated, destroyed, and hidden by the extension of forested zones, but local farming systems and control over resources have been increasingly forbidden.

40A further related factor that has contributed to reshaping the concept of environment under occupation is a specific politics of nature: the colonial endeavour has been legitimised via a narrative about modernising nature by replacing “backward” local farming systems. At the same time, this has led to a naturalisation of colonial expansion, presented as a natural and moral endeavour required to develop resources and ‘make the desert bloom.’ This is typical of technopolitics (Mitchell 2002, wherein key political changes are effected via authoritarian patterns of technical planning of the environmental (Scott 1998).

41Promethean ideologies that see man as controlling nature have informed new national meanings of farming and planting, leading trees to be assigned a special role within Zionism (Braverman 2009). In the wake of the Holocaust, agricultural ideologies of redeeming supposedly abandoned territories served to root the new Jewish man and a new national and religious community in the returned-to ‘Promised Land.’ Indeed, politics have been planted along with pine forests (Cohen 1993) and attachment to the land has been naturalised through farming. Such symbolic meanings of forest management are present in many cultures, but here they have been intensively developed and condensed.

Figure 4: Cultivated habbai’l in Battir, with an Israeli colonial settlement in the foreground and, to the right, pine forestation covering up the remains of a pre-1948 Palestinian village.

42Indeed, the national policy of pine forestry development has been intended since the creation of Israel, and even more so since the 1967 incorporation of the West Bank, to cancel out lost Palestinian landscapes and villages by hiding a community and its territorial markings with the aid of the fast-growing pine. Within the nationalist Zionist narrative, protecting and managing “nature” has conferred totemic value on the pine tree: a flag planted to mark the conquest of land that simultaneously serves to erase contested Palestinian lands and greenwash power relations, all in the name of ‘sustainable’ arid development. In this context, rooting one community through farming and pine forestry programmes has meant de-rooting Palestinian communities, villages, and olive groves, while obscuring the political nature of a process that is presented as a greening and modernisation of the landscape.

43Today, two opposing “treescapes” representing two different aspirations to nationhood—realised in the case of the Israelis and reduced to a segregated peace process in the case of the Palestinians—face one another down on these hills. The outcome is a struggle between iconic anchorages to the land of pine versus olive trees, within a de facto segregated incorporation of the West Bank into Israel. In short, nation-building has been conducted based on an arboreal imaginary of roots that is coincident with denial of the Other. Trees have thus become totems: offensive anchors to the land that express the competing identities aspiring to be national represented by the pine and olive, respectively (Braverman 2009).

Palestinian defensive fenced farming

44On this battlefield of planting ideologies, the Palestinian peasant has become both an icon of national resilience in the face of occupation and an anchor to the land of a reified Palestinian cultural authenticity, an icon of resistance to the occupation. However, the idealisation of the local fellahin within Palestinian nationalism has been paralleled by a historical process of ‘de-peasantisation’ and the proletarisation of cheap labour in Israel. The collapse of local agropastoral systems and the ongoing loss of land and water autonomy have nonetheless failed to eliminate residual farming and the reproduction of patterns of cooperation in farming in the midst of wider social mistrust.

45Indeed, the fellah has acted as a “national signifier” (Swedenburg 1990) “that unites and mobilises by virtue of the fact that it dissimulates past and present differences within the national movement, in the interests of a leadership with particular class interests” (Swedenburg 1990, 25). While on the one hand the fellah continues to function as the soul and root of national identity, on the other hand small traditional farmers have received both little developmental aid and limited assistance from the Palestinian National Authority, which has instead prioritised the intensive irrigated farming of cash crops. The fellahin have become a national icon of struggle, but have lost their material reality, offering abstract social capital that is not reflected in actual livelihoods. Hence, the fellahin are subject to mythical idealisation on one level, while being generally devalued and forced to abandon agricultural work on another. The outcome today is, as the local expression goes, “farming without peasants”: a contradictory process that supports the modernisation of agriculture in the absence of territorial independence and the development of market agriculture within a framework of dependency on imported Israeli foodstuffs.

46Notwithstanding the reification of the fellahin (to the detriment of the bedu pastoral tradition), not much is known about historical changes in, and the current status of, their local knowledge and relationship with the environment. This ‘construction of ignorance’ is underpinned by colonisation of the land and amplified by Palestinian modernisation policies that have overlooked local rural systems and expertise. Rarely has attention been paid to local knowledge and on-the-ground farming practices, aspects that have been overshadowed by theories of modernisation focused on transforming the ‘backward’ peasant into a ‘modern’ farmer (Van Aken 2012), and by the expropriation of land and water within the on-going colonial integration of the West Bank into Israel.

47One exception in the anglophone literature is a historic investigation into local knowledge conducted a century ago by Dalman (1920), whose exploration in Work and Customs in Palestine primarily explored local systems for understanding rain and weather in light of strongly variable fluctuations in precipitation: “The end of the year is the end of the summer” (Dalman 1920, 24). This historical account of local material ‘traditions’ examined local relatedness to the weather in terms of proverbs, with farming practices presented as tools for dealing with the unpredictability of weather, and for interpreting of patterns of rain, wind, frost, and dew.

Food as freedom in Battir (Bethlehem): Cultivating relatedness

48The politics of modernising nature have driven the naturalisation process and informed the new and contested meanings attributed to land, water, environment, and air, all condensed into food. Such a modernist model (Scott 1998) is today highly unsustainable, notwithstanding a rhetoric of sustainability and green techno-fix solutions. More so than economic productivity, farming has yielded symbolic productivity (Bernal 1997): a modern landscape has been invented by means of facts on the ground and territorial expropriation, but even more so via a new imaginary and representation of “nature” as at the disposal of humans and a new population to be rooted and naturalised as an imagined community (Anderson 1991). The condensation into food and contestation of this dynamic are aptly described here:

This is part of an ongoing semiotic warfare that Israel wages on Palestinian national symbols and signifiers ranging from the Jaffa oranges, the olive tree, and the cactus, to national Palestinian dishes such as hummus and falafel, to Dabke (Palestinian folk dances) and more. What is evident in this dynamic is that Israel seeks to gut the Palestinian symbols and national signifiers of their cultural significance in relation to Palestinian nationhood and Palestine. (Abufarha 2008, 363)

49Food, farming, land, and water as symbolic resources have been appropriated and reinvented by Israel, following a pattern based on the denial of the Palestinian Other. Local rural knowledge and practices have become entrenched in small but intensively cultivated gardens called habba’il in the village of Battir (Bethlehem). These are spaces of cultural intimacy that remain crucial to family subsistence, with surplus production sold at nearby markets to bring in cash. Above all, they are valued as a means of reproducing “our own food,” deemed “pure,” clean (naddhaf), and “natural” (tabia’). Here, the theory and practice of rural expertise, which has otherwise disappeared or been marginalised, remain resilient, in the form of cultivation—and cultural—techniques, seed varieties, ploughing patterns, and spaces of autonomy where community members can continue producing their own food. In the past, the area’s ancient tradition of arid farming ensured its role as the breadbasket of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Today, in contrast, it is separated from the nearby Holy City and—similarly to other nearby5 farming villages—lost its historic marketplaces in recent decades. These impervious, mountainous, and terraced spaces are marginalised chiefly because they are seen from modernist perspectives as in opposition to the mechanised and chemical-based intensive production of monocultures produced via irrigated farming. Nevertheless, they remain home to ancient rainfed techniques and relationships.

Figure 5: The village of Battir viewed from beneath its cultivated terrace

50The habbai’l in Battir are terraced tracts of land that also receive irrigation thanks to the survival of one key source of spring water. This is shared among the village’s main eight hama’il (tribes in the sense of patrilinear units), following a pattern of cooperation or water commons that has endured across times of crisis. Today, it is actively used to irrigate family food supplies against a backdrop of decreasing resources, land confiscation, and market closures, such that cultivating “our own food” is often perceived as a crucial symbol of “freedom.”

51Local environmental knowledge and expertise, which have generally been substituted by a mix of colonial and aid-driven modernisation patterns within an overall devaluing of agriculture, remain entrenched in these domestic, irrigated terraced gardens, retaining a strong emphasis on the relatedness of resources. The core of this surviving local savoir faire is awareness of the limitedness and variability of resources, prompting a circular exchange of ecological resources in which “nothing is wasted” (Van Aken 2016), the local reproduction of ancient rainfed seeds (baali) that have generally been substituted by intensively irrigated crops produced for the market, and the renewal of soil fertility as the basis for sustainable home production.

52These gardens are spaces of intensive production; they feature a diverse range of vegetables (summer and winter crops) together with multiple varieties of fruit trees, domestic herbs, and key wild herbs that are crucial to the local diet and medicinal practices.6 Elderly fellahin often weed by hand, which allows them to separate valued wild herbs from fodder for a few residual sheep and goats, whose manure is still prized as the best fertiliser.

53Indeed, Palestinian fellahin are highly “conservative” in this regard: all that is cultivated and harvested must be conserved for as long as possible. The gardens are configured as a public extension of the kitchen, of women’s recipes and culinary and regional skills and tastes—for example, planting even takes into account what will be needed in the kitchen during Ramadan. In addition, plants, leaves, fruit, and crops are “conserved” as the basis of the crucial year-round family food supply: techniques from drying (tajfif) to pickling (takhlil), frown cooking (tagmidh), concentration (magdah), and jam-making yield typical local products such as tomato paste, mrabba (marmalade), malban (cooked grape juice), and dbes (sheets of dried grape). In addition, the habbala remains a key social place for hospitality, swapping information, storing and exchanging seeds, and sharing labour, thus acting as a concrete public extension of domestic space.

Figure 6: A series of mashkabe, or irrigated plant nurseries, in early spring.

54‘Cultivating chaos’ would be an appropriate way to define this form of cultural investment; chaos due to the unpredictability of the shifting colonial setting, where a tract of land may be expropriated at any time under Israeli military law. Yet there is a positive quality to the apparently irrational confusion of these promiscuous and seemingly disorderly vertical gardens: grass is left in the fields in order to retain humidity during specific periods or to protect young plants from the sun, and selected crops are left unharvested in gardens to mature for seed production. The key emphasis in these family gardens is doing the work with “our [the farmers] own hands,” so as to reproduce skills that are meaningful not only in relation to the peasants’ past but also to their future, in terms of making resources available for the years to come or passing on knowledge to future generations by teaching mule-drawn ploughing techniques to young children during weekends. Such skills, as embodied practices enacted within the environment, are often not verbally articulated. Yet, for these Palestinians, ‘knowing how to do’ things is connected, within their severely disciplined context, with being horr (free), as is ‘knowing how to move around’ (for example, when going out at night to search for zatar, a well-known wild herb, now designated as ‘protected’ by military order). Furthermore, gardening remains key to local economic coping strategies. In practice, these marginal and relatively small tracts of land represent a key narrative that revolves around having one’s own food and land, which is associated with having the freedom to belong.

55These gardens are a family affair. Inhabited places of hospitality, they replicate cooperative arrangements on a smaller scale. Seeds are planted to cater to the family’s culinary preferences, and to produce ritual dishes in advance of Ramadan exchanges, while the sharing of crops reinforces family ties within the ‘aila (extended family) or the otherwise fragmented hamula (tribe). Only in the event of a surplus will a small amount of cash income be earned at the Bethlehem market. As intensive spaces of production, the gardens rely on investment in diversity and relatedness, in the form of crop rotation, fallow cultivation, management of crop combinations and relations (those that are positive and those to be avoided), the strategic use of shade, or special preparation of the soil to capture the summer dew.

56In the habba’il, the fellahin not only produce and harvest a wide variety of crops, both domestic and wild. They also maintain the fertility of the soil by tenaciously spreading animal manure (notwithstanding the marginalisation of herders and animal breeding), storing scarce water supplies, optimising levels of moisture in the ground, and reproducing solidarity among their family or neighbourhood networks. Despite the highly fragmented and deterritoralised context, this reflects a coherent idea of “us” and community.

57Local knowledge about habba’il cultivation is based, as are most peasant knowledge systems, on metaphorical understandings linked to savoir faire in terms of incorporated practices that are seldom transcribed into writing, but rather are reflected in (and condensed into) sets of proverbs, skills, and “ways of doing things” that comprise the surviving local repertoire of marginalised resources and techniques.

Figure 7. The “freedom” to garden deriving from the fellahin’s own skill and knowledge, whose starting point is water and moisture.

58The proverb ‘ali al tin, wati al zaitun (“High grows the fig, lower the olives”) is a condensation into the oral culture of a technique for pruning trees and of the historical “marriage between” and agricultural complementarity of two trees with a key role as dietary staples and identity markers. This is reflected, where this knowledge is conserved, in a particular construction of landscapes via everyday practices, whereby fig trees are ideally chosen to grow on higher ground and provide shade, while olive trees, for harvesting purposes among other reasons, should be planted immediately below them. Many work practices that are not recognised by agronomic science here represent elements of key wisdom for the local “moral community,” defining how to be a good, wise, and “free” (horr) fellah. They mirror local perceptions of the moral and technical ‘do’s and don’ts’ of farming to enhance farm productivity and sustainability, such as tree or crop combinations or rotation, or promiscuity between different crops to provide shade or facilitate vertical gardening—or, again, local notions of the warm (hami) or cold (bard) quality of the soil as a function of its moisture levels and absorption capacity.

59From local embodied perspectives, savoir faire with “our own hands” is the pre-eminent value: it is essential to growing baladii food and also serves as an identity marker setting the fellahin apart from Israeli farmers, seen as not knowing how to do anything without machines and chemicals. It includes the knowledge required to achieve self-sufficiency with scarce but circular resources, and the associated skill and expertise required to walk these disciplined farmlands, while ably circumventing check points and military control of grazing, harvesting, or night ploughing. Importantly, “knowing the land” also extends to familiarity with wild herbs, which continue to make a key contribution to the local diet.

60Baladii thus spans multiple levels of significance: the home and the ritual production of the extended family in the everyday; local food, in a context where the dimensions of territory and environment are under threat; baladii in opposition to Israeli food in supermarkets; or even baladii as biological or organic food, whose producers reject the use of pesticides or chemical fertilisers, catering to the new preferences of both the Palestinian urban class and the international community, or even of groups of Israeli consumers in search of better and purer food, genuine crops, and sustainable relations with the land.7

61Baladii thus signifies laying claim to localness, within a generalised lack of stable relations with lands that are subjected to expropriation or isolation. It is a ‘local dimension’ whose strong symbolic meaning is shared with other parts of the world, but is experienced even more intensely here, by the farmers and peasants on these small hills, as “an ongoing struggle for autonomy and progress in a context characterised by multiple patterns of dependency and associated processes of exploitation and marginalization” (van der Ploeg 2008). Indeed, its main distinguishing feature is a relationship with the environment that emphasises guarding, sparing, and making circular use of resources, while acknowledging human interdependence with the many non-human actors that come into play even in the microcosm of a small garden.

62According to another proverb, al ‘adas biwashwash, ua al bikia bitnadi, meaning “lentils whisper, spinach loudly calls.” Although lentils are not as frequently produced as many other historical crops or grains (such as simsim or wheat), this saying evokes the sowing techniques applied with rainfed baladii seeds, whereby some crops need to be deeply rooted while others require shallow planting close to the surface of the land, as a function of soil type and the plot’s exposure to the sun, wind, rain, and weather in general. Merely by spending time in these work and social spaces, one can witness the importance of local seed reproduction in place of purchasing irrigated market seeds for specific cultivars. As one fellah explained in reference to local seeds: “bizr baladii bint al mintaqa.” That is to say, baladii seeds are the “daughter of the place,” an idiom suggesting that they are locally perceived as context-bound—as opposed to context-free—with respect to their environment and local history, albeit with the potential to flexibly adapt to local weather and water availability.

63These agri/cultural patterns are neither ideal nor frozen in time as naturalised traditions, but rather are typical instances of human-environment co-production uninformed by an ideal of nature as a separate domain, that rather assumes interdependence and reciprocity vis-à-vis other environmental actors, with an emphasis on the limits and dynamic relations that characterise farming work.

The colonial encounter as environmental encounter

64The symbolic and material appropriation of “nature” lies at the root of the colonial encounter. It is interesting to rediscover how the first encounters with Zionist farming communities a century ago, in the 1920s, were clearly informed by an evolutionary perspective viewing the indigenous Palestinian population as an icon of backward and primitive farming that needed to be replaced. Nonetheless, these social encounters also functioned to humanise the fellahin and bring to light their ancient patterns of adaptation to the environment. This contrasts with the “peace process” of recent decades, in which segregation and the dehumanising of the Palestinian Other have become the leading features.

65In the 1920s, a Polish agronomist El Ezari Vulcani—a scientist and experimental researcher in early agronomic techniques for farming in dry climates and founder of the first experimental “modern farm”, later renamed the Agricultural Research Station—worked alongside fellahin on their local traditional farming practices in an intensive encounter with Palestinian labourers. Vulcani was conducting an applied study on modern farming when he came into contact with “primitive” Palestinian dry and rainfed farming in what subsequently became Israel and the occupied territories. Notwithstanding the evolutionary model within which he framed modern farming, with local fellahin and their system of farming in a fragile, arid environment seen mainly as an obstacle to development, he also felt bound to praise the fellah’s relationship with water: “the secret of his improvement is the skilful storing of the water in the layers of the earth, and the economic use of it” (Vulcani 1930,15).

66Indeed, the subsequent meanings of baladii (food) developed from the historical, asymmetrical colonial encounter between the fellahin (and bedu) and the kibbutzim at the turn of the last century. This encounter was marked by the perceived inferior status of “primitive” local techniques, which were to be supplanted; yet hand in hand with this attitude went admiring recognition of their adaptability to the environment and their sustainability in the face of vulnerable resources for making food.

67Vulcani also observed local farming practices in his study The Fellah Farm (Vulcani, 1930), wherein he praised local knowledge and low-tech practices for their contribution to sparing water in semi-arid settings, as well as the fellahin’s studied and skilful re-utilisation of scarce resources, which was not informed by a naturalist perspective positing infinite and available resources. Based on an evolutionary understanding of the native population, he condemned the “fellah’s primitive farms,” yet in the encounter with local farmers, could not help admiring their work patterns and savoir faire:

The whole farm of the Fellah forms an organic unity. Everything is produced in it by its own powers: he is not dependent on any external economic factors (…) His world is not governed by the principle of time is money, but by the principle of “preservation of matter”. He allows nothing to go to waste. Everything which appears to be lost returns to him after various transformations. (Vulcani 1930, 40)

68These local skills were based on a recognition of the Other that tends to be denied in the contemporary politics of nature framed as technical endeavours and a linear modernisation process. Vulcani deemed that the fellahin’s techniques and local knowledge should be retained as part of the new experimental modern farming systems, and he could not but acknowledge how skilled they were at sparing and storing water, collected using rainfed techniques and patterns of cooperative labour exchange linked to the historical unpredictability of the water supply in these territories.

69Interestingly, Vulcani was later to become the Israeli national icon of modern agronomy and the scientific founder of colonial farming, a national symbol still today. Yet, his studies on the knowledge of local fellahin and their contribution to “modern farming” have long since been denied. This is despite the fact that the circular farming economy and eco-agronomy are currently being put forward as frameworks for farming systems that do not rely on fossil fuels, while Vulcani at the time of his original research was witness to an example of a highly circular farming system. The historical encounters of one century ago bring to light not only key patterns of relatedness with the environment as reflected in the local knowledge system and the active legacy of al-murba’nia, but also patterns of relatedness among Israelis and Palestinians, in the fields, around the themes of seed and water, in terms of a mutual, albeit asymmetrical, recognition that has been censored in recent decades.

Al-murba’nia: Weathering land and meanings

70The memory of this ancient climate knowledge and agricultural calendar, associated with specific water practices and agricultural skills, is present in the recollections of community elders and is also active in everyday family farming practice. Local knowledge about the meanings and “habits” of weather in the fields encompasses not only deep familiarity with water collection schedules and techniques, but also sensory knowledge of the land, seeds, and fertiliser as well as the interrelatedness of these resources. Present in older texts but forgotten in the agronomic studies of the past half-century, local understandings of the circular flow of resources, starting from the weather and the air, remain key to understanding environmental change, in an everyday life context where autonomy is lacking.

71As earlier stated, al-murba’nia stands for a complex schedule of winter rains, broadly classified as a 90-day season bound up with the need for water in an arid environment and agro-pastoral economy: the khamsinia, divided into four phases (sa’ad), is the period spanning the final 50 days, which sees the strategic implementation of work patterns, sowing, and other farm tasks as a function of fluctuations in the rain and cold. This weather knowledge system lays special emphasis on the beginning of winter as the inauguration of the new year, and a signal that the dry, rainless weather of the hot summer is about to be interrupted, prompting the fellahin to strategically time and refine their work practices as a function of highly variable winter weather patterns that demand flexible management.

72The fellahin’s calendar for working the land has traditionally been organised around the rains, with time and space becoming a rainsphere that requires flexible and skilful farming to maximise water supplies for the longer, dry, hot summer season and protect the land from excesses of rain that could cause the erosion or destruction of terraced slopes. The scheduling of farm work has never been determined by market prices, the current political and economic restrictions, or aid funding to grow unsustainable market-oriented flowers, but rather by a more ancient cosmology that was intimately familiar with the unpredictability of the weather and the associated “fluxes” of water: a recognition of the different types of rains and their “proper timing” (Dalman 1928, 117) in terms of quality and quantity, in combination with patterns of frost, snow, dew, moisture, and the activity of multiple non-human agents on the ground, including types of wind, insects, and wild plants. And given that the calendar is mainly a savoir faire comprising a set of skills for inhabiting and farming arid conditions, it has reproduced itself via social practices in action, even in the face of radical changes in the social and environmental context of the bordered landmass that is the West Bank. Only refugees outside the region have crystallised this memory into their “cultural heritage” via oral accounts: in the West Bank itself, al-murba’nia is a set of practices and “down-to-air” patterns that has survived in the remaining few home gardens. It thus represents local social engagement with aridity and the potentials associated with unpredictable rainfall patterns, limitations, risks, and resources, whereby farming inevitably implies entanglement with other non-human forces.

73The shitta (the term for both winter and rain) traditionally lasted 90 days beginning on 21 December. The most strategic tasks were carried out before and over the first 50 days, during the khamsinia: at this time, from 1 February to 21 March, land and seed were prepared and work cooperation initiated in advance of the rains. Over this time span the rain and cold would gradually intensify, and this period was divided into ideal phases lasting “12-and-a-half days” each. The first time that I received an oral account of the calendar, I was struck by what appeared to be the excessively precise measurement of the phases in terms of half-days. However, I later realised that rather than a rigid prediction, this was intended to encourage flexible management of a potentially disorienting variability in the timing and incidence of rainfall. As aptly expressed in a proverb recorded by Dalman: “One hour rain, one hour sun” (Dalman 1928, 122).

74The entire calendar year is divided into seven fifty-day periods, termed khamsinat, which “are reminiscent of Gelenus and are not based on star constellations but on the feasts of the Christian calendar” (Dalman 1928, 51). Among these, the crucial fifty days of rain and cold are subdivided into four phases, known as sa’ad, “literally the four fortunes” (Qleibo 2009, 13). This weather model was informed by animist beliefs about Baal, the ancient god of fertility and rain, with weather rhythms incorporated into religious feasts as social markers of both atmospheric events and shared farming knowledge. The variability of the rain is not only borne out by rainfall statistics, but also strongly reflected in Palestinian proverbs such as “al-murba’ania is a burning sun or a submerging rain!” (Kurzom 2012,12).

75The first phase of al-murba’ania, named sa’d al dhabih (Capricorn), lasted from 1 February 1 to 12.5 February” and was characterised by an initial spell of intensifying cold, sometimes preceded by an east wind as an “arouser of rain.” This was followed by sa’d al bala, running from 12.5 February to– 25 February, and marked by the khamsin wind blowing from the western badia (arid land)—a cold but dry air current that contained less humidity than the east wind sweeping in from the sea. Indeed, February was often referred to as “the harbinger of summer” given that the increasing cold also preceded the end of the rainy winter and the initial growth of the newly sown crops in the fields.

76Next came sa’d al sau’d (25 February to 8.5 March), a period that was strategically interrelated with mustaqrida’att (25 February to 4 March), when the land “warmed up” and “drank” or absorbed the rainwater. A final cold wind characterised this shift towards increasing warmth, notwithstanding the possibility of heavy rain and mud in the fields. Given that the last rains before the long rainless summer were often critically important, if water was scarce during the shortest month of February, then it was hoped that some might be “lent” to March, thereby “prolonging the [winter’s] age” (Kurzon 2012, 12). Last but not least, there was the period of sa’d al khabaieh (8.5 March to 21 March) “when snakes and scorpions (khabaieh) come out after their winter sleep,” characterised by further warming up of the land, the onset of milder temperatures, and key end-of-winter farming activities.8 The entire climate calendar, in apparent contradiction with the provision of a precise time schedule, has many different variations, which are probably related to the model’s context dependence (sensitivity to factors such as a given mountain valley’s distance from the sea or nearness to the Jordan Valley depression), in contrast with the context-free model of contemporary modernised farming.

77The end of this liminal rainy period of “proper” versus risky rain is often depicted as a radical shift from aridity to luxuriantly blossoming “greenery.” Khudra—which bears the multiple meanings of the colour ‘green,’ ‘vegetables,’ ‘green growth,’ and more generally the ‘greenness’ of the landscape—is also the name for the start of summer. “The fertilizer of the year is March. March is its fertilizer, but also its barrenness” (Dalman 1928, 308), an ambivalence that played out yearly as a function of rainfall variability and the farmers’ skill in working with it. This is the period when “the land warms up,” as an old farmer in Battir used to tell me, which requires preparing the soil to retain moisture, collecting rainwater, taking protective measures against any late frosts, and flexibly reacting to fluctuating weather patterns. In sum, in this model, weather is not conceptualised as an indoor phenomenon under human control (as in contemporary greenhouse agriculture), but as relatedness with generations of adaptations to the unruly outdoor fluxes of the atmosphere. The “local saying, (…) “move hard with your land work, peasant, for there is no more time to count before the winter sets in”, reminds the peasant that the countdown for winter is over” (Qleibo 2009,13).

78The titles of the phases evoke not only a weather world, but an entire cosmology that was later assimilated into Islam, as well as into the other two monotheistic religions that originated in this land amid these weather patterns. This kind of syncretism is reflected in religious rituals, such as the Palestinian rites of spring and the Thursday of the Dead (Qleibo 2009, 18). In short, this “weather world” (Ingold 2010) established, in both moral and pragmatic terms, the collective and individual work needing to be done, as well as a complex set of shared meanings surrounding the much-admired seasonal greenness of the region’s hills.

79The traditional Palestinian weather calendar can be of use to us today in reading the relationship between cultures and weather environments, in light of key themes such as global warming, water scarcity, and social resilience to climate changes. First, it represents a historic social pattern of coping with extreme changes and unpredictability in weather. In these regions, ‘crisis’ periods have featured in farming knowledge and practice since antiquity. Second, it offers a knowledge of the weather based on the interplay of uncertainty and engaging in practical multisensory reconnaissance.

80For generations, the inhabitants of these lands have been obliged to work with the variability of the winter rain and to manage uncertainty in order to make food and develop a sense of place. Their weather calendar, far from providing certainty and a basis upon which to reliably predict the weather, above all emphasised flexibly navigating one’s way through the rains, given that “rain is unpredictable in its occurrence or absence” (Dalman 1928, 313). In short, it offered an approach to monitoring and responding to the erratic “coming and going” (Dalman 1928, 117) of atmospheric events, while taking into account the risks of premature rain, of frost and snow, and the strategic use of dew or shade in building farming spaces.

81One of the main actors in weather is undoubtedly the wind, yet it is increasingly forgotten, not only in irrigated agriculture and ‘indoor’ agricultural models, but also in greenhouse agriculture that allows crops to be grown out of season to meet the demands of a (closed) open market.9 Indeed, al-murba’nia defined weather as a medium for the social world on the ground, within which farmers could work to the best of their ability. It was a source of perturbation, in the positive and active sense of this term; a collective, generational experience that took place not only on the surface of the land but also in the atmosphere.

Working down to air

82While “down to earth” is a good metaphor for how we practically care for the landed environment with which we are entangled, it reproduces an implicit disconnection from the weather world above us as a medium for human action. “Down to air” is a closer metaphorical representation of what we experience daily and of what the al-murba’nia has represented for centuries: the rooting of knowledge and experience in the air above us, and its relatedness with dwelling and farming on the ground. Today, denial of this entanglement is leading to global distress because it is accompanied by a void of meaning and the loss of a practical guide, a lack of familiarity that stands between our living and our consuming on the earth. We are confronted by troubling issues arising from our materialism, which may be seen as unmoored from both non-human agents and the upper environment. The landmass and the cultures rooted in it are viewed as a basis for certainty, stability, and a sense of permanence, yet al-murba’nia (as with other cases of local meteorological knowledge) shows that uncertain and flexible stability depends on strategically following the rhythms and phases of the local weather.

83Al-murba’nia speaks of relations: symbolic meanings, farming practices, and relatedness with water and other non-human agents. The calendar prescribed three main down-to-earth practices for sowing plants with appropriate levels of moisture: harvesting water, understood as “harvesting weather,” reproducing and planting rainfed ba’ali seed via exposure to rain, and ploughing the land accordingly. Although today there appears to be no place for al-murba’nia in a context of intensive, irrigated agriculture and politically disconnected lands, it remains an active part of local savoir faire in family gardens.

Atmospheric seeds: Ba’ali and desired fertility

84Ba’ali seeds are clearly differentiated from muhaggan market seeds: the former are obtained through rainfed farming and absorb less water, while the latter are irrigation-dependent and far more vulnerable to water stress. Ba’ali seeds are seldom available at markets, but rather are to be found in the pockets and gardens of farmers. They are collected during the appropriate season, often dried in the garden, initially sown on shady plots beside the home, then carefully transplanted to the mashkabe (a seed bed that is a subdivision of the habba’il) in the garden.

85Ba’ali, or rainfed seed, has been reproduced under these specific weathered conditions by generations of farming people. The land where this seed has traditionally been planted is known as ard ba’al (“exposed to rain,” Dalman 1928, 194), with the concept of exposure clearly expressing the system’s rootedness in weather. However, ba’ali in recent decades has been perceived as unsuited to market requirements and has acquired, in the contemporary colonial setting, the meaning of local, or baladii (“of the village”). In parallel, via metonymic transliteration, it has also become an icon of “organic” and naturalness. Ba’ali seed is context- and practice-dependent: it originated and has been reproduced within al-murba’nia system of relatedness. Born of the affordances and related work practices of the air, rain, clouds, and winds of the winter,10 ba’ali is weather-dependent and weather-sensitive, needs to ‘drink less’ than other varieties, is well-adapted to the caprices of the winter rains, and suited to ad hoc techniques of deeper planting that leave a greater portion of the plant’s stem in contact with the moisture in the ground.11

86Interestingly, the name of this kind of seed derives from the earlier-mentioned rain and fertility divinity of antiquity, Baal, a major deity in the Canaanite religion of the ancient Near East (Botica 201,: 97). This connection reflects the intimate relations between weather cycles, agriculture, fertility, and belief systems. Baal was “the bearer of rain,” whether weather conditions were stormy, rain was bountiful, or drought struck; this meant that rain was a sacred blessing and drought a judgement. Today, ba’ali seed is not just a form of biodiversity that has survived in home gardens, but a shaping of seed in relation to the local weather world that allows small farmers to retain their local and family food supply as a synonym for being “free.”

Figure 8: A fellah proudly showing off a Battiri aubergine.

Harvesting water, harvesting weather

87Al muhimm al bire! (“The most important thing is the cistern!”) is a common-sense rule for anybody farming in the West Bank. Today, it refers to the need to store as much water as possible in a specially constructed cement cistern that represents a major cost for small landowners but is critical, given the increasing tendency for water supplies to be cut off and diverted to serve Israeli settlements. Hence, the current political context forces farmers to rely on the rainy season to harvest water even more so than in the past. Al-murba’nia, meanwhile, historically encompassed a set of practices and techniques for harvesting water—that is to say, for harvesting weather, in the form of wind, moisture, rain, and storms—and storing it. Such practices include maintaining, repairing, or carving out terraced land (senasil) to avoid sliding and erosion in case of heavy rain, and laying out the land so as to conduct rainwater to a common storage pool, where it is purified and kept for the long work of the summer. In the past, a bire was a water basin dug into rock and covered to prevent evaporation.

Figure 9: Old-style underground bire.

88This denotes a historical intimacy with the need to guard each last drop of water, as observed one century ago by Dalman, based on local proverbs and landscapes: “Limited reserves in the cisterns and wells, a modest or bad harvest, an inadequate yield of grapes, figs and olives, are a certainty and one has to be careful to use water sparingly” (Dalman 1928, 306). Today, climate change and agro-ecology are once again pointing to the importance of such weathered skills, which express the relatedness of human action with weather and vulnerability in these lands. Collecting water has traditionally represented—and today, against a backdrop of intensifying competition for water, represents even more strongly—a harvesting of rain and weather by preparing the land network to store as much water as possible for the future summer season. Al-murba’nia rain calendar made this very clear by specifying the required preparatory work and framing these practices as a moral obligation. Of course, local knowledge of weather has apparently become irrelevant in the new cosmology of intensive, irrigated, indoor cultivation, which relies on aid funding, having distanced itself from local weather worlds.

89Ploughing is another technique that is exploited to harvest moisture and optimise its absorption and storage deep in the ground. Hence, the ploughing calendar is also informed by the timeframe of al-murba’nia and designed to take account of weather fluxes. The mule-drawn plough vis-à-vis the modern tractor is an icon of fellah primitivism, but notwithstanding this orientalist stereotype, it remains the superior technique for preparing the land in small and fragile terraced fields. Thus, it is still in great demand among small farmers and even among the Israeli colonists who recognise it as the most appropriate method for limiting damage to the terrain. Ploughing stands, amid dispossession and arbitrary land control, as an icon of independence, of knowing “how to do things”: ploughing at night to get around the Israeli army’s prohibition of it, ploughing as solidarity among families, ploughing as crucial source of seasonal income.

Figure 10: Senasil, drywall, or the art of constructing and maintaining the landscape.

Figure 11: Ploughing terraced land

90The arrival of the rainy season is linked with the strategic timing of ploughing and techniques for the optimisation of moisture absorption in preparation for the dry season. For many vegetables, the first ploughing is termed shkak (“opening up the land”) and takes place before the first rain in November, followed by ithra (in local dialects, also itsara), or “taking out the grass” in March. In between, we find al-ithnaia, “allowing the land to drink” after the first rainfall at the height of al-murba’nia, and if necessary, for the plants that need most water (e.g., fakkus12). Interestingly, the second main ploughing is carried out in a perpendicular direction to the first, facilitating greater absorption of moisture.

91These agri/cultural practices, in their heterogeneity, far from being frozen or ideal, are contemporary examples of patterns of coproduction that span culture and environment, in which the symbolic meaning of human relatedness to other agents plays a crucial part in local productivity. The capability of local systems and networks to adapt to change, and to accommodate the complexity of gardening, point to the key need today, as local communities face uncertain futures, for institutional flexibility and ways of relating to the environment that deny neither relatedness nor change.

Conclusions

92A politics of nature stands at the heart of nationalist perspectives—a politics of planting, rooting, and up-rooting self and others in the name of technofix utopias—that lack the capacity to respond to environmental change, implying the need for a new shared pattern of knowledge and use of resources. Notwithstanding the development of borders “on the ground,” the Palestinian population and Israeli colonists and military forces all share the same overheating atmosphere, under and “after the last sky.” The construction of “nature” in Palestine has been entangled with the colonial imagination and colonial practices, as well as the de facto expropriation of Palestinians’ environmental resources.

93As Ghosh aptly commented, “a broader imaginative and cultural failure […] lies at the heart of the climate crisis” (Ghosh 2016, 8). This failure is implicit in the denial of environmental relatedness and of the different environmental actors, and in the managing of “nature” as though human societies were not part of the environment. But it also encompasses the loss of our capacity to “read” and relate at the social level to the atmosphere, which climate change is currently rendering even more distressingly unfamiliar and uncanny than before. Where we expected order and regular seasons, we realise instead that “everything is changing”; hence the unthinkable character of the current environmental scenario.

94The historical legacy of al-murba’nia, which survives in the oral tradition and the savoir faire of some local farmers, denotes an imaginative and cultural capacity to dwell in an atmosphere that is not viewed as ordered equilibrium, but as a succession of unpredictable arid and wetter periods, where by definition seasons are made up of change. It represents a pattern of shared meanings and a work calendar that illustrate how local cultures can make sense of erratic living forces and dwell in weathered environments. More specifically, these cultures imagine weather as familiar and domesticated, as part of a system of limits and affordances that contributes to defining belonging, even in displacement.

95Such local knowledge of a weathered world challenges our own ambivalent model, including within the social sciences, whereby we manage the material as a stable fundament, viewing the dynamism of the immaterial and aerial as mere instability, invisibility, or meaninglessness. In contrast, Palestinian peasant memories and down-to-earth savoir faire in the fields invite us to adopt a “down-to-air” perspective and practices of relatedness.

96Decolonising must go hand in hand with decarbonising social models and imagination in understanding Palestine and, even more, in the Western fossil cosmology. The notion of nature, and its uses and abuses, as an object that is external to relations and relatedness, turns out to be one of the main ideological tools that has been deployed to naturalise the political processes at stake in this region.