Green Intifada

The Palestinian environment is dying. Years of conflict, military occupation and colonisation have torn apart not only the people and their culture, but also the very fabric of the country. The soil is eroding and being poisoned, the water resources are threatened and native species are disappearing. At the same time, people are being driven from the land, denied access to essential resources, closed into urban ghettoes and severed from their natural heritage. Political constraints prevent action from being taken to ameliorate this situation. Development is frozen, human impact on the environment is not being managed, and the Palestinian Authority does not have the necessary sovereignty to take control of the crisis.

Intifada means ‘popular uprising’ or 'shaking off' – where the environment is concerned, everyone is a powerful actor and everyone can participate. The Green Intifada is a project to support Palestinians to non-violently resist the destruction of their country and to attain environmental justice.

The idea is a simple one: we can get everything we need from the environment around us – food, water, materials for shelter and for clothes. At the same time, we can manage our impacts on it such that it will continue to provide for us for many generations to come. When we place ourselves at the centre of this kind of conscious interaction with the world around us, in many ways we free ourselves from the control mechanisms of the power structures that overarch us. We take back power for ourselves.

In many places in the world there are problems with powerful elites placing the interests of one group ahead of those of another, profit before environment, short-term gain bought at the price of long-term environmental destruction. A frequent problem with large scale, top-down development models is that it takes money and power to implement them and so they reflect the agendas of money and power. Development becomes a tool to create and reinforce privilege (learn more...).

Palestinians are surrounded by power structures that are working to create a situation that is not at all to their advantage. They are becoming a population on life-support with Israel controlling all the lifelines. Access to resources and infrastructure are being used as weapons to enforce a political agenda of dispossession and disempowerment. Gaza is an extreme example of where this road leads (learn more...), but the current dynamics of occupation and colonisation do not place the West Bank far behind (learn more...). Palestinians have the right to resist this process, and we believe that permaculture may provide some of the tools to do so in a way that is creative and life-affirming, whilst at the same time actively improves quality of life and protects the environment.

Every week, Bustan Qaraaqa staff and volunteers work in the community to implement initiatives for sustainable living and food production: rainwater harvesting, vegetable gardens, tree planting, greywater reuse, composting systems and compost toilet building. In particular, we are supporting farmers who are resisting land confiscation by Israeli authorities to make way for settlement expansion and the construction of the Separation Barrier.

Learn more about our partners...
Visit our blog for stories and pictures from the Green Intifada...