Israel’s Attacks on Seed Banks Destroy Millennia of Palestinian Cultural Heritage
Monday, September 8, 2025 at 09:11AM When Israel targets Palestinian seed banks, it’s not just destroying buildings. It’s attacking the future itself.
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Sabreen Abu Awad, 6, right, squeezes the olive seeds as Amal Abu Awad, 59, extends her palm to collect the juice in Turmus Ayya, Occupied West Bank, on December 1, 2023.MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMESThis summer, Israeli bulldozers rolled through the West Bank city of Hebron with ruthless efficiency, targeting not soldiers or weapons caches, but something deeply vulnerable: Palestine’s only surviving national seed bank.
Within hours of the bulldozers’ arrival on July 31, 2025, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees’ seed multiplication facility lay in ruins — its propagation materials scattered, its infrastructure demolished, and with it, generations of Palestinian agricultural heritage reduced to rubble.
What happened in Hebron fits the legal definition of ecocide — the deliberate destruction of ecosystems to undermine human survival. The Union of Agricultural Work Committees condemned this attack as “an act of erasure intended to sever the generational ties between farmers and their land.”
When ecocide operates within the context of genocide, as it does in Palestine, it functions as a temporal weapon that extends the logic of elimination far beyond the present moment, reaching into an indefinite future where recovery becomes systematically impossible.
The Union of Agricultural Work Committees’ seed facility housed over 70 baladi (heirloom) seed varieties, many of which no longer exist elsewhere, that Palestinian farmers had cultivated and perfected over centuries. These seeds — for rare, indigenous, hardy strains of tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, zucchini, and others collected from local farms in the West Bank and Gaza — weren’t just any seeds. They were living libraries of Palestinian agricultural knowledge, carrying genetic traits for drought resistance, soil adaptation, and nutritional density that commercial varieties lack.
Ecocide as Temporal Violence
Contemporary legal definitions of ecocide describe it as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment.”But this clinical language fails to capture the temporal dimensions of environmental destruction when deployed as a weapon of colonial control.
These seeds … were living libraries of Palestinian agricultural knowledge, carrying genetic traits for drought resistance, soil adaptation, and nutritional density.
Unlike direct physical violence, which operates in the immediate present, ecocide functions across temporal scales. The destruction of seed banks eliminates not just current agricultural capacity, but future possibilities for food sovereignty — the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, alongside the ability to define their own food and agriculture systems, centering community and resisting the demands and reliance on corporate food regimes. Indigenous seed varieties, once lost, cannot be recreated — they represent thousands of years of co-evolution between plants, soil, climate, and human knowledge systems. Their destruction constitutes a temporal amputation — the severing of a community’s ability to reproduce itself across generations.
This temporal dimension transforms ecocide from an environmental crime into genocidal strategy. The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Crucially, Article II(c) includes “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Ecocide operates precisely through this mechanism — creating conditions where the targeted group cannot sustain itself over time.
Severing the Roots of Resistance
Palestinian agriculture has always been more than economic activity — it represents a form of cultural continuity and resistance. Traditional Palestinian farming practices integrated olive groves with wheat, barley, legumes, and tree crops in polycultures that maximized both biodiversity and resilience. This agricultural system sustained Palestinian communities for millennia while maintaining soil health and water conservation.
The destruction of seed banks severs this generational chain of knowledge transmission. Each heirloom variety carries within its genetic structure the accumulated wisdom of Palestinian farmers who selected, saved, and improved seeds over centuries. When these varieties are destroyed, the cultural knowledge embedded within them — when to plant, how to process, which varieties thrive in specific microclimates — becomes orphaned, disconnected from its material foundation.
The destruction of seed banks eliminates not just current agricultural capacity, but future possibilities for food sovereignty.
In August 2025 alone, Israeli Occupation Forces uprooted 3000 olive trees in al-Mughayyir, near the West Bank city of Ramallah — gutting a community whose survival and identity are inseparable from its groves. Since October 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have destroyed over 52,300 olive trees in West Bank alone and the record stretches back to over six decades, with estimates surpassing 3 million uprooted olive and fruit trees.
Each tree cut down represents more than lost income — it is the severing of ancestral ties and the deliberate dismantling of a self-sustaining agricultural system that has nourished Palestinian life. The systematic nature of this destruction is not incidental collateral of war but part of a sustained campaign of agricultural erasure, aimed at making cultural continuity impossible.
Young Palestinians growing up under occupation already face systematic barriers to accessing ancestral lands. The destruction of agricultural heritage adds another layer to this dispossession, ensuring that even if land access were restored, the specific varieties and knowledge systems that sustained Palestinian agriculture for generations would remain irretrievable.
Global Stakes
The temporal logic of ecocide extends beyond Palestine’s borders, connecting to global struggles over seed sovereignty and agricultural biodiversity. Industrial agriculture has already driven the extinction of an estimated 75 percent of agricultural biodiversity since the 1900s. This “genetic erosion” makes all human communities more vulnerable to climate change, plant diseases, and environmental disruptions.
Indigenous and traditional seed varieties often carry genetic traits for drought tolerance, disease resistance, and nutritional density that commercial varieties lack. The destruction of Palestine’s seed bank eliminates these traits not just for Palestinians, but also for the global gene pool. In an era of climate crisis, such biodiversity represents irreplaceable adaptive potential for human survival.
The targeting of seed banks in conflict zones — from Palestine to Sudan to Ukraine — reveals how ecocide operates as a global strategy of domination. By destroying the biological foundation of food sovereignty, powerful actors ensure that displaced and oppressed populations remain permanently dependent on external food systems controlled by their oppressors.
The Undeterminable Future
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of ecocide is its indefinite temporal reach. While physical violence creates immediate trauma that communities can potentially heal from, the destruction of ecological foundations creates wounds that may never close. Seeds destroyed today cannot be replanted tomorrow — their genetic information is gone forever.
This creates what professor Rob Nixon has termed “slow violence” — harm that unfolds gradually across temporal scales that exceed individual human lifespans. Palestinian children born today will inherit an impoverished biological landscape, with fewer Indigenous food varieties, degraded soil ecosystems, and diminished agricultural knowledge systems. Their children will inherit even less.
The undeterminable nature of this future damage is precisely the point. Ecocide operates through the creation of permanent dependency and vulnerability. By destroying the biological foundation of Palestinian food sovereignty, occupying forces ensure that resistance cannot take root — literally — in future generations.
Toward Accountability
Recognition of ecocide as a crime against humanity represents a crucial step toward accountability. Several countries have already criminalized ecocide in their domestic legal systems, and there are growing calls for the International Criminal Court to recognize it as a crime under international law.
But legal frameworks alone cannot address the temporal dimensions of ecological destruction. We must pay attention to the ongoing genocide in the present and be woefully aware of the temporal extension of the harms that we are complicit in. We need new models of accountability that recognize harm across generational time scales — reparations that address not just immediate damage, but the ongoing impacts of biological impoverishment.
The destruction of Palestine’s seed banks reveals ecocide as a weapon of temporal control — a strategy for extending genocide beyond the present moment into an undeterminable future. Understanding this temporal dimension is crucial for developing effective forms of resistance, solidarity, and accountability.
Seeds of Refusal, Glimmer of Hope
Despite these systematic attacks, Palestinian agricultural resistance continues, and seed savers persist. Every saved seed becomes an act of refusal — a rejection of the logic that says Palestinians have no future. Each act of preservation becomes a bridge across the wounds that ecocide seeks to create.
Vivien Sansour, founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, has spent years searching for traditional varieties to save and propagate. Sansour’s vision for the library is “not just about Palestinian seeds, but about how Palestinian seeds can tell the story of tenderness of our people, and people around the world that have made it possible for us to have shade under a tree.” Based in the UNESCO World Heritage village of Battir, her project seeks to preserve heritage seed varieties and traditional farming practices. In this patient work of recovery and propagation lies the possibility of futures that oppressive forces cannot control — futures that remain, like well-saved seeds, full of unexpected potential for new growth.
The occupation’s bulldozers destroyed buildings and scattered seeds. But they cannot destroy the deeper truth that Palestinian seed keepers like Sansour embody.
“I have seen seeds make their way out of concrete,” Sansour says. “I have seen people come out of rubble, and I have saved my own seeds in ashes, and I have seen life insisting on itself — not because of us but despite us.”
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