“If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them, their oil would become tears.”
- Mahmoud Darwish.
To plant a row of fava beans, you need to get down on your hands and knees to feel and smell the fresh soil. Gently loosen the soil first with a spading fork, just enough to give the beans room to take root. With two fingers, open up little holes in the earth and then drop the seeds in a row.
I traversed four different countries while in utero. My mom was pregnant with me when my parents left Iran during the height of the revolution, first to Pakistan, then England, then the United States. For the first eight years of my life, there was war in Iran. My parents’ minds were always in two places at once—back in their homeland with the family members they left behind, and in the United States where I grew up.
It’s a common feeling among children of immigrants to never feel fully at home. Is it a wonder then, why I was drawn to growing food? Every day, practicing the ritual and concrete act of putting roots into the earth to feel connected to—and perhaps to better understand—my adopted home. I know that land carries with it stories, if you listen. So let me tell you some stories from the land. Stories of resistance, stories of colonization. We will travel back and forth from New York City, where I farm, to Palestine, over 5,600 miles and oceans away.
Now is olive harvest time in Palestine. An olive tree, both elegant and gnarled with age, can live upwards of 500 years, though some trees have been aged far beyond. A tree named Al-Badawi in a village near Bethlehem is thought to be over 4,000 years old. Imagine what that tree has seen, what stories it carries through the soil, breathes through the stomata of the leaves, in the juice of the fruit, in the depth of the olive oil produced year after year by Palestinian farmers.
It is olive harvest time in Palestine, and Bilal Saleh, a farmer, forager, and father in the occupied West Bank, will not finish his harvest. On October 28 of this past year, an Israeli settler shot Bilal in the chest as he approached his trees. Bilal died soon thereafter. Though the settler was arrested, we know from history that Bilal and his family will not see justice.
Here on the farm in Brooklyn, we have sown our winter cover crop, spread straw across the fields and raised beds, insulated the chicken coop, left the tithonias and marigolds to overwinter for forage, and done our final glean of greens and root veggies left in the fields.
Since 1967, at least, an estimated 800,000 Palestinian olive trees have been uprooted by the Israeli government and illegal settlers.
We have three fig trees on the farm in Brooklyn—the fruit so obscenely exquisite, so outrageously abundant, so life affirming to all manner of farm fauna, human and otherwise. Though bereft of leaves and fruit for the winter, I couldn't imagine the farm without these robust little trees. Do not underestimate how integral a single tree can be to the fabric of a space, to an entire culture.
The apartheid wall built after the Second Intifada around the occupied West Bank was billed as a security measure, but amounted to an epic land grab, cutting off hundreds of Palestinian farmers from their fields and groves. From the Water Protectors here on Turtle Island, we learned the phrase, “water is life.” And yet, rainwater collection is criminalized, as the drops that fall from the heavens are considered the property of Israel. Meanwhile, the world witnessed the recent pouring of cement into a Palestinian water well by the Israeli army. Water is life, water is sacred. Observe carefully then, those who nurture and those who destroy.
Growing fava beans can be labor intensive, and so is processing them—but such is farming. Fava plants grow about three feet tall and have the typical bilateral flower of the legume family. The seed pods have a fuzzy outer shell, and then a layer of skin on each bean, which you need to peel off by hand or dunk in boiling water to remove. After that, you’re left with a stunningly bright green bean. As I am peeling, I admit I eat as many raw as I save to later make foul mudammas or baghali polo.
In the late nineties and early aughts, I was studying environmental science at UC Berkeley and volunteering in our student community garden, the first time I grew and tasted a fresh fava bean. We grew an amazing variety using saved seeds. My favorites had red spirals in the flowers with matching patterns on the exterior of the bean. We called them the psychedelic favas.
In 2001, I went to the first meeting for what became Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Berkeley. The meeting took place in a classroom with fluorescent lighting, the remnants of Comp Lit 101 still on the chalkboard. In those early years as we organized in solidarity with the Second Intifada, I had no idea SJP would grow into a national movement—into such a challenge to the status quo that local chapters are now being banned for speaking out against genocide. What I did know then is that I’d found a political home—connecting plants and people and organizing around the politics of land. We were young college students figuring out how to educate and agitate, to be loud and strategic.
The UN has reported that half of the 2.2 million population of Gaza is now at risk of starvation. Olive harvest time is followed by the ripening of strawberries, which grow abundantly on Gazan farms. But with most Palestinians in Gaza displaced and under constant Israeli bombardment, who will harvest Gaza’s 43,000 acres of farmland? And are these fruits now tainted with white phosphorus? What stories does the land tell us now?
In Brooklyn, we harvested over 30,000 pounds of produce at the farm last year so that our communities have the full bellies they need to fight for their dignity and humanity. Beloved Black civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer famously said, “When you have 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, no one can push you around or tell you what to say or do.” To put her words into action, she founded the 40 acre Freedom Farm Cooperative to feed and empower Black families in the US south. Remember that the Young Lords and Black Panthers offered free breakfast programs (inspiring/shaming the US government to follow suit). And the Panthers included a demand for land and bread in their famed 10 Point Program for liberation, published in 1966.
For the past 75 years, with full bellies or empty, we have seen Palestinian resistance to occupation endure. Starving the population of Gaza isn’t new. In 2012 and thereafter, the Israeli government put Gaza on a “diet,” calculating and limiting the caloric intake of the entire population in order to exert pressure and weaken the resistance. To understand why foraging is illegal in Palestine, we only have to look to the origins of our own no-trespassing laws here in the United States. Spanish colonizers banned the indigenous Aztecs from growing the protein-rich super-grain, amaranth. Farming is resistance. Seed saving is revolutionary.
I farm on land that was once stewarded by the Lenape indigenous communities who were violently displaced, as were many other native communities during the formation of the settler state of the US. In more recent history, decades of community organizing by radical urban gardeners paved the way for community gardens and farms like the one I am a part of. As a child of immigrants relatively new to this land, I welcome a future where I farm under the auspices of an indigenous-led movement, rather than the current settler colonial one.
I still feel nervous anticipation every time I plant a seed. I wonder if it is going to sprout, if the seed really only needs warmth and moisture and a welcome home for it to grow. It blows my mind every single time I see a seed sprout to life, even more than twenty years since I harvested my first fava bean. Do you feel that wonder too?
As farmers, we know only toxic fruit grows from poisoned soil. The olive trees and orange groves and strawberry fields remember the generations upon generations of Palestinians who tended the soil and watered their roots. The Palestinian struggle is our struggle.
May the seeds of solidarity we plant here in Brooklyn and around the world fruit into freedom for Palestine.