"I don't see Palestine as an isolated story"
On grief, land, and love in the struggle for Palestinian food and memory
I’ve been wanting to do an issue on food systems and food sovereignty in Palestine for a while.
I also wanted to do it with somebody who's very much deep in the food culture, storytelling, and preservation issues, and root the discussion there.
Well, I managed to do that this week and it’s a long one, so I’m keeping the preamble short and letting the Q&A do the talking.
This week, I’m speaking with Vivien Sansour, founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library and a tireless advocate for food sovereignty, not just for her home country but also for the world. For years, she’s worked to preserve the seeds, crops, and stories that root Palestinians to their land.
But what does that work mean when famine has been declared in Gaza, when only 1.5% of land is accessible and not damaged, and when a people already denied freedom of movement are also being starved? I wanted to ask Vivien about the past, present, and future of Palestinian food systems and about whether, and how, they might be revived.
Vivien said she stopped doing interviews for a while because the situation upset her so much, but she spoke to me because a good friend put in a good word on my behalf (thank you, you know who you are!).
Within minutes of our conversation, I understood her reluctance. Her words are blistering; her anger and heartbreak palpable. But so too is her love for her culture and her food. She listened patiently to my long-winded questions and offered thoughtful, almost poetic answers in return.
I felt pangs of guilt when she apologised for being angry, because really, I was pressing on raw wounds. Yet voices like hers are essential, and worth amplifying.
I spoke to her just before The Guardian’s March 2024 feature on her work won Covering Climate Now’s award on food & agriculture writing; before the massive rallies and a general strike here in Italy in solidarity with the Palestinians; before the UK, Australia and Canada recognised Palestine.
I’d like to think these signal something, although rallies and recognition mean little without accountability for the aggressor and its enablers.
Our conversation also reminded me of a phrase that has become a rallying cry in Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement, which is waging its own uneven struggle against a brutal military: “They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds.”
The conversation has been edited lightly for length and clarity.
THIN: Perhaps we can start with you telling the readers a bit more about the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, which you set up. What was the idea behind it? What prompted you to do this, and you know, what was the motivation?
VIVIEN: So the Seed Library came out of a lot of grief, really, and the idea that as a young person growing up in Palestine, I was born knowing that everything I love was under threat. So there was never a time in my life where I felt like I could take anything for granted.
I was born in the late 70s, and obviously we were well into the Israeli occupation. So the idea that there is someone who is in control of your life was always present. I'm sure you may be familiar with that coming from where you come from.
But when I was a child, the world was very tangible and real, like my grandmother's rabbits, my family's apricot trees, and the almond trees where I spent a lot of my time, not just as a child, but also as a grown person. The shade of those ancient, old almond trees… it's a relationship that continues to be very much in my pores. They’re like an extension of my body, my family, my life.
These are not just romantic words. This is how I grew up. I am in love with where I come from, and the Seed Library for me was a way to basically put that love in some form of… I don't know… contemporary story and structure people relate to and understand.
After I tried to do a PhD in Agriculture and Life Science, I realised, I want to go and talk to the people I grew up with and the people I forgot to meet. I don't want to waste eight years of my life in in the halls of universities, when I could be spending eight years of my life with elders who will not be there tomorrow, and the knowledge they have. I quit the program, went home, and just allowed myself to visit people I don't know, go to villages, talk to random people in the street and and just share myself as much I also received from others.
It's very ironic actually. After being a proud PhD drop outI ended up being invited to the halls of academia to speak about exactly what I did.
It all makes sense to me now, because I was doing the real field work. I didn't call it that, it was more like grief and work to preserve and honour and keep alive the culture and the bio culture of a place and a people that I belong to, but also a people that have been teachers to me.
I was looking for, literally, the taste of my childhood. So every inquiry I made was more of an inquiry into something I was longing for. I was like someone who lost their lover and is trying to rebuild them through the remnants of them, right? That's how I started collecting different seeds, like carrot or beans or arugula or spinach. And then I started sharing this with the world, and it turned out I wasn't the only heartbroken lover.
A lot of people walk around with broken hearts about their world that has been destroyed and is being destroyed. The Library now extends beyond Palestine, and we run pretty much a global grassroots initiative. I think it’s because people, especially indigenous people and people who know pain and oppression, understand that we are living in a time of hospice, where a lot of what we love is dying and is being intentionally destroyed and replaced.
THIN: That’s both lovely and sad and there are so many strands I want to follow up on. So you started out working to protect these seeds as well as the stories and the culture and the memories around them. And unfortunately, I'm going to have to drag you back to the Palestine. The latest UN statistics show that the vast majority of farmland in Gaza has been destroyed and those that are not destroyed are largely inaccessible. Beyond food production, what does that loss of farmland mean in terms of loss of history and culture and knowledge of your food systems?
VIVIEN: First thing: I am not in the business of protecting anything. I think people keep talking about that and I find it fascinating, because in reality these seeds are protecting us. I mean, we are the ones who need to eat. We are the ones who need to breathe the clean oxygen. And in a lot of ways, in these times of massive grief, these seeds are keeping us alive, giving us some hope and holding within them our history. This is why we are trying to propagate them and give them space to grow wherever we can, because they are the holders of our story.
Secondly, I don't care about the UN. Fuck the UN, and fuck their reports. Also the international organisations that claim to care about human rights and ecology. As a person who is often referred to as an ecologist, I feel massively betrayed by these organisations. For example, our Seed Library is in Battir a village that’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And I don't see UNESCO trying to do anything to protect this site. In fact, every day we have a new settler incursion.
So please register my anger, because the world is dead silent, except for people in the grassroots who are like seeds trying to survive in environments that are completely volatile, from New York City to Burma to wherever. They're raising their voice, whereas all those institutions were designed to keep us silent.
I’ll get to your question on land but it’s important for me to highlight that we want the Seed Library to be a place of freedom, an initiative for us to have autonomy over our food, but also over our spirit, our minds, our words. That's why I've always rejected any support from governmental institutions.
And when you talk about land and the mass destruction of land, well, how can these these seeds live? These seeds, especially the crop varieties that we eat, like zucchini, tomatoes, etc, are varieties developed through an incredibly imaginative, creative and scientific manner, co-creating with soil, land, water, and air. They are thousands of years old. They engaged in relations with the farmers.
Okra isn’t from Palestine, but travelled there, was domesticated there, and throughout years of domestication, became a very nice guest (in our cuisine), to the point where we have what we call a ba'al okra, where ba'al refers to the Canaanite deity of fertility.
Until today, we call these varieties that grow with no irrigation “ba'al”. These varieties learned and entered into relationships with soil and the hands of people. Everything we eat today, if we're lucky to have food on our plate, is a product of a relationship between land, soil, human and non-human elements. And so when you take away and destroy the land and the soil, you are destroying the ability to have these relations that allow continuity.
It is obviously by design that this destruction of our farmland has happened. It's been ongoing, by the way.
THIN: I guess this is just the latest horror.
VIVIEN: It’s the utmost horror, but it's been happening for years. A lot of our seed varieties are not doing as well (now), because the soil has changed. Why? Because Israel is invested in, like many colonial and Western countries, agro biotech and hybridisation of seeds. They are the ones who introduced chemicals to our food system and our soil became sick.
Palestinian farmers will tell you: “Our seeds know the soil”. Now, the seed has changed and the soil has changed. So how do you recover from this big assault? When I talk about the seed, it's a metaphor also of us. When I go to Jerusalem, if I can go to Jerusalem, which is where I was born, it has resemblance of the Jerusalem I knew as a child, but I don't recognise it.
That is the essence of land destruction because land helps ground you in knowing who you are. Because when you live with land, over the seasons, every day, you have a relationship. It's like living with a partner. By the time you've lived with someone for 10, 20, years, you really know them, right? The same with the land. She knows us. We know her. If you think about the destruction of farmland, after our country, our language, and our homes are taken over… given that our plants give us a little window into remembering who we are….
We say in Arabic, “Oh, so and so beat so and so, so hard they made them forget their name.” I have been feeling like that. Taking away our land, our food ways, our farmland, our seeds, is the way to make us forget who we are. They can't kill every single one of us, because this is nature, somebody's gonna survive. But you want to make sure that whoever survives doesn't remember.
And our work is about well… we want as many of us to survive as possible and whoever survives, we want to make sure they remember. For example, we worked with a young man named Yousef Saqer in Gaza. His house was destroyed but when he went back to the ruins of his home, he found some dried seeds and some soil, and he started growing stuff. Obviously, when you're on the run, you can’t grow much but he did a lot, and the idea was to share the food with people.
And he started doing that, distributing egg plants and peppers under the shelling. And he was intentionally targeted a few times, and finally they did kill him. His family continues his work. He was 24 years old.
I’m talking too much… but the implication is that they have destroyed our farmlands, Gaza, and any form of life.
THIN: I want to go back to something that you said earlier about how people frame what you do as protecting seeds, but you don't see yourself that way. How would you then describe what you're doing?
VIVIEN: An attempt at hanging on to life and whatever remains of who we are. I don't want to call my work pathetic, but it feels pathetic in the grand scheme of everything. I know people see our work as massive and grandiose, and some days I feel that too, but most days I feel it's so small.
THIN: But we gotta start somewhere, right? You've been doing this for a much longer time than I have been doing my journalistic work but my thinking is that if I give up what I’m doing, I let them win, them being either the military dictators in Burma/Myanmar or the people who put private profits above public goods in terms of food and climate. But I definitely feel what I’m doing is totally inadequate.
VIVIEN: You know, I don't see Palestine as an isolated story. This is not the core of why I live or why I do what I do. We live in a scorching hot world, not only as in rising temperatures although that is, of course, part of it, but a scorching hot world of violence and of unprecedented measures. The introduction of AI, the advancement of military technology and surveillance, and the hyper capitalism we're living in has made this planet almost uninhabitable, right?
So I don't see what's happening to us in isolation of that. I see it as a microcosm.
In fact, I was talking to a friend in Palestine the other day, and he said, “Maybe we are the lucky ones in the sense that the the way we're heading in terms of AI and climate change take over, the hell we are living may look tender in the face of the hell the world might see”.
The President of Colombia, very intelligently, has said this many times, that Palestine is a test run. So watch out and wake up, world. For me and for us at the Seed Library, the vision has always been that I may not be able to change the world in my lifetime, but what I can do, as much as I can do, is create more tender spaces in the world, and expand those tender spaces as much as possible so that they can connect, but also that the next generation will have something. It was not about, “Oh, I'm going to liberate Palestine.”
Our work is about reminding people that there is still life worth fighting for. What is the saying where you plant a seed for others to live in its shade. That’s it.
THIN: You talked also earlier about the destruction that has been going on for a very long time. Looking into the future, do you believe that Palestinian food systems and food ways and the kind of stories that you remember growing up with can be rebuilt and revived? And if so, how do you think that can be done?
VIVIEN: I'm sure most of us struggling with this question of revival and I've been thinking about it for a long time, because some things, you can't revive. I don't believe in death as the final destination, but I do think that in order to create something new, we have to accept - not condone - certain losses.
So can I revive the Palestinian cucumber? Probably, but will it be the same? The truth is, seeds are like us you know? We are going through something horrific and so we're constantly changing. We must also think about the difficult, hard process of transformation.
So, for example, there are people growing Palestinian seeds all over the world right now. We have over 40 farmers in the US alone growing Palestinian seeds. Those seeds are taking refuge there. They're also getting to know new soil, new elements. Some of them will adjust. Some of them won't, and we are very keen about making sure they are good guests and not invasive in any way.
But when you travel, you change, you will never be the girl you were when you left your country. Not even if you went back. I experienced this firsthand. But I think there is certainty we will have revival. I think the question is what kind of revival? Meaning are we going to be able to accept some of the losses so that we can start to design something new?
It's like someone losing their limb. They can never get their limb back. That's not obviously an easy task. So we have to accept as a world and as a people, we will never be the same, and what does that look like? We are not the first people to experience the genocide, obviously, and there are many genocides happening as we speak. We're the first televised genocide, as people will say.
If you look at the (native) Armenians, or the Jewish Holocaust, people survive, and it's amazing what can happen. However, my prayer and my wish, when I think about Palestinian revival of seed and people, is that whatever we revive is something beautiful and able to break the human pattern of the oppressed becoming the oppressor.
I'm not very inspired by just surviving. Our work is, how do we make sure we don't survive as demons, and as life giving people, which is the origins of who we are?
THIN: A lot of international headlines these days, if they do cover what's happening in Gaza, it’s about aid trucks and calories that are being delivered and what's being blocked. But on a personal level, what do you wish the world would understand better about food in Palestinian life beyond food aid and calories?
VIVIEN: You know, my stomach burns when you ask me these questions. It's not about you, but the fact that I would like the world to know how disgusting the world looks like to me when I hear them having discussions, because if we were a French population, nobody would be discussing how many calories we should be allowed to have.
It’s a testimony to the violence of the still very vibrant and alive colonial mind that exists in Europe, where they still claim they are so humanitarian and better than the US. For me, they're the same. I hope you actually relay this message in whatever you end up writing, because I am disgusted.
Basically Israel and the US create a paradigm of discussion, like a playground, and they give all these people that claim to be humanitarians the toys in which they're allowed to play in the playground. And they go with it, forgetting that the main issue is, why should people be besieged and imprisoned and killed and starved? Isn't this the real question? It's not about how many calories. We should be able to eat whatever the fuck we want to eat.
And we have the right to grow our own food and to have access to our land. We have the right to live in safety, and we're not asking this right from them. This is a God given right for every living thing. And most importantly, we don't want their trash aid anyway. We can grow our own food. It's dehumanising and humiliating us. And I'm learning more and more how the world really does not understand what dignity means for a Palestinian.
And there's many ways in which the West has been trying to feed us their trash. Now they come to us and say, “We want to teach you about ecology and environment and this and that”. Well, guess what? KFCs are closing shops in the West, and where are they? Opening shop in the Caribbean, in the Arab world, all over Southeast Asia. Like, what the hell is this? That's them throwing their trash on us, blaming us and still acting like the superior power.
Obviously, I'm very angry. When I started this Seed Library, the vision was for us to continue to be sovereign people over our food, because if you can't eat from your own hands, you can't think for your own self. And it started with Oslo Accords which included the severing of Palestinians from their farmlands. They made all farmland areas under Area C, under Israeli military rule.
(THIN: A World Bank report more than a decade ago documented this. Area C, where a majority of farmland in the West Bank resides, was to be gradually transferred to the Palestinian Authority but the transfer never took place.)
Again, this is a global issue, because I'm in the Caribbean now, and what do these beautiful, amazing people of Jamaica eat? The trash of the West and China because their land and their soil is being sold and their beaches where the fish are, are not accessible for them.
THIN: You're absolutely right in that this is a global phenomenon, and there are two things, right? One is the starvation and the deliberate destruction of the ability to produce your own food and the other is the destruction of food culture where you’re displacing the traditional foods with what's considered Western diets.
VIVIEN: With industrial, commercial, and now, tech food. You know, Israel prides itself in creating this fake meat. They're manufacturing food. Food is no longer alive.
THIN: For people who sees what's happening in Gaza and in other places and who care about what's happening, what can they do?
VIVIEN: Stop eating mediocrity. Stop swallowing mediocrity. Stop accepting unacceptable conditions. Whether it's through your job or structural systems.
You’re gonna die anyway and you swallowing the mediocrity of your systems isn't going to save you. This tolerance to mediocrity is what led us to where we are today as a global state, not just as a Palestinian state.
THIN: Last question. I can only imagine the mental load of both your work and the current events have on you. What keeps you going?
VIVIEN: I guess I still have love in me, and I'm a hopeless romantic. Most importantly, I was and have been, very, very, very lucky to have been born in Palestine and to have been loved so deeply and warmly and generously and unconditionally by people who are people of soil and spirit and plants and non-humans.
I feel very loyal to this love, and so I think that's what keeps me going.
I don't think of myself as a fighter. Some people think I am, but I am not at all. I am actually a wuss, but there's a part of me that's saving myself for maybe a moment when I will be needed to birth something or to construct something. Whatever it is, I pray that I will be used for good.
Thin’s Pickings
Killed seeking food - BBC
Important and infuriating read from Jeremy Bowen on how interviews and information were gathered for Gaza: Dying for Food, at a time when Israel does not allow international news outlets into Gaza to report freely.
How Israel is dismantling the dream of a Palestinian state - Financial Times
"Israel has been weakening the delicate architecture of governance and occupation that Oslo created in the West Bank almost since the accords were signed by expanding settlements, illegal under international law, building walls and deepening its military presence there,” wrote Mehul Srivastava.
A critical long read on the dismantling of economic and political governance in the West Bank, a subject less widely reported.Revealed: ‘Chilling’ Surveillance of Activists by Meat and Dairy Industry - DeSmog
An eye-opening piece by Clare Carlile on the U.S.-based, industry-funded Animal Agriculture Alliance (AAA), its surveillance of animal welfare groups and activists (including tracking personal relationships), and its efforts to brand animal rights campaigns as “extreme activities.”
I’ve come across AAA before, in our investigation into how the EU’s animal welfare legislation unravelled despite massive public support.
Her story also reminds me of our Poison PR investigation on the US-based PR firm, v-Fluence, which built profiles on hundreds of scientists, campaigners and writers, whilst coordinating with government officials, to counter global resistance to pesticides.After 20 Years, an Agreement to Protect the 'High Seas' - World Resources Institute
Good news for once!
The High Seas Treaty, aimed at protecting marine life in the vast, mostly unregulated waters beyond national jurisdictions, has been ratified by more than 60 countries, a target needed to trigger its entry into force.
Officially known as the Treaty for the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ agreement), it will become a binding agreement on 17 January 2026.
This treaty is much needed, because the status quo is neither fair nor sustainable. I wrote about the problems three years ago.EU plans to delay anti-deforestation rules, again - Politico
It’s groundhog day: the European Commission is pushing to delay its flagship law for a second year running. The official reason is to minimise business disruption. The real reason? Unclear.
As Leonie Carter and Bartosz Brzeziński wrote, “It's the latest in a long string of actions by the Commission since late last year to weaken or delay green rules, part of a grand push to get rid of red tape and boost the global competitiveness of European industry.”
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Thank you so much for this.