Planting Palestine: Food, environment, and the arts of solidarity

This article identifies an ‘environmental turn’ in contemporary Palestinian arts and activism. It argues that environmentalism, mediated especially through food, is an increasingly important frame through which Palestinians and their supporters narrate the idea of Palestine and the Palestinian struggle to metropolitan audiences, and through which identification and solidarity are solicited and received. It outlines this turn through an examination of Palestinian visual artist Jumana Manna's documentary Foragers ( Al-yad al-khadra , 2022). Manna's film portrays the criminalisation of foraging for za’atar and ‘akkoub in Palestine/Israel and has been widely screened internationally in the wake of Israel's 2023 war on Gaza. Foragers situates the struggle of Palestinian foragers, and in turn, the Palestinian struggle for the land, in relation to key vocabularies of contemporary environmental politics and culture, including food sovereignty, agroecology, indigeneity, posthumanism, and foraging itself. In this way, it activates key metropolitan trends, showing the possibility for an environmental framing to generate commitment from new audiences, while also enabling critiques of the political failings of posthumanist thought. I conclude by noting some limitations of the environmental turn, including the risks of essentialism and of inadvertently reinforcing Zionist narratives by overlooking Palestinian urban life prior to the creation of Israel. Nevertheless, the article argues for the significance of the environmental turn as a distinct and promising direction in a growing international solidarity movement.