Existential Ecologism. Economic and Multispecies Resistance in Palestine

Abstract (English)

Since October 2023, Gazans and Palestinians are experiencing a new Nakba, due to a genocidal war that has targeted everything that allows them to imagine a future, and in this sense constitutes futuricide (Latte Abdallah 2024, 2025a, 2025b), to which is added a creeping annexation of the West Bank. However, colonial, military and economic violence has a long history, and is directed against people and their living environment. Works have highlighted the toxicity of colonization and military occupation, the multiple destructions and recompositions of the Palestinian landscape that took place (Gutkowsky 2021, Braverman 2014, 2023; Molavi 2024). These processes have been described an “environmental Nakba” (Qumsiyeh & Abusarhan 2020). The economic system generated by the Oslo peace process has also been analyzed as a participant in colonial domination and the perpetuation of occupation (Dana 2014, Al-Botmeh 2013). Capitalism and colonialism have been seen as “co-constitutive” (Tartir, Dana, Seidel 2021) of an “economic neo-colonialism” (Nakhleh 2014). The link between discursive and imaginary control of futures and colonialism has been established (Tuck&Gastambide-Fernandez 2013, Hassouna 2023), and, conversely, imagination, temporal projections are so many ways to escape and divert futurities constrained by dominations.
Focusing on the necessary return to a so-called "resistance economy", a radical form of solidarity and ecological economy (Dana 2014, Latte Abdallah 2019, 2022), this paper analyzes prefigurative engagements that have been developed since the 2010s such as peasant alternatives (return to farming, maintenance of agricultural activities, new farmers), circulation, research, and conservation of plant species (local seeds – baladi, wild relatives of cultivated species), and sensitive and multispecies resistance, all aimed at food sovereignty and subsistence. This movement, initiated by a few pioneers in the 2000s, has recently gained momentum as a younger generation, more feminine than the first, has taken up farming collectives, mostly in agroecology. They aim to achieve food self-sufficiency at the level of micro-regions. They contribute to a broader autonomy and at the same time respond to the actual and potential siege resulting from the extreme fragmentation of the territory, and the multiplication of lock-ups of Palestinians in micro-zones. In the face of the futuricide and erasure at work, these engagements constitute forms of “real utopias” (Wright 2017), interstitial spaces of emancipation from capitalism and colonialism. They are part of an existential ecologism, i.e., one that directly, immediately and visibly brings into play the possibility of existing. An existential ecologism that summons multiple temporalities: it is in the present, here and now, the possibility of a future that exists only when tied to a memory of resistance and a memory of a land inhabited by humans and non-humans inscribed in the deep time of historical continuity.