when hot bath feels like heaven on earth after a whole day of being squished like a crab under a rock and body screaming at you to flee and im like literally purring from feeling so grateful
It’s striking how frequently you can take a Zionist claim, exactly reverse it, and arrive at something much closer to the truth.
Zionists claim that the majority of Palestinian land was unproductive, that Palestinians were neglecting the agricultural potential of the land, and that the مشاع (musha’) system of shared landholding (wherein plots were swapped around within a large family unit rather than belonging to one owner and their descendants in perpetuity) held back the land’s potential—because the “Arabs” (of course, naturally selfish) would not want to make long-term improvements or allow standard maintenance (e.g. letting it lie fallow) of land if they could not expect the sole long-term benefit from doing so.
I expect that this system, like all systems, had its disadvantages, but Palestinians were demonstrably making long-term changes to the land which their whole unit would benefit from. Terracing, for example, must be accepted to be a long-term project which does not merely immediately extract the maximum yield from the soil year after year?
Meanwhile, while Israelis have invented and instituted developments in agriculture (drip irrigation and irrigation with wastewater as tools of water management, for example), these developments are ones that they have actively prevented Palestinians from making themselves by depriving them of land, water, electricity, capital, the ability to import or export anything, or anything else you would need to technologically innovate anything, since the late 19th century—
—and Israeli methods of agriculture often fall into the ethos of “immediately extract the maximum yield from the soil year after year,” with nitrate pollution from their constant use of fertilizers poisoning well water (mostly to the detriment of Palestinians), pollution of soil with salt buildup, use of pesticides leading to high rates of breast cancer, overpumping aquifiers and causing them to fill with brackish water in pursuit of water-hungry crops that should not be grown in the south of Palestine, &c.
And meanwhile the agricultural methods that many Palestinians are now forced to use frequently approach “only think about this season’s yield,” because they have no faith that they will be able to reap the benefits of their investments (constantly being bombed and driven from their lands and having their farming equipment banned or destroyed) and because they cannot let their land lie fallow for a moment without Israel using that as a pretext to “legally” expropriate it. Zionism is what creates these habits.
