08/12/2025
Last week, we shared the news that the Israeli army had bulldozed the Union of Agricultural Work Committee's Seed Bank storage warehouses and infrastructure in Hebron, West Bank, where equipment, seed materials, and tools for indigenous seed reproduction were kept.
Another vital Palestinian seed-saving project is the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library . Founded by Vivien Sansour in 2014 in the West Bank village of Battir, the seed library has responded to conditions in Palestine by forming an international network of seed protector friends who are able to grow out seeds in safer parts of the world, to ensure that Palestinian crop varieties will be preserved and returned.
This Guardian article dives into the work of the Seed Library in the West Bank. https://bit.ly/47s1Z9D
"[Sansour] remembers Beit Jala when it was still more a small village than a town, replete with terrace gardens full of stone fruits, olives, artichokes and herbs. [...] But as time went on, that biological diversity began to narrow as the climate crisis upended longstanding growing cycles, Israeli settlements encroached on the land and agribusinesses pushed local growers away from the seed varieties that had been passed down for generations."
"She points to seed varieties that have been bred by Palestinians over thousands of years to grow abundantly in the summer without irrigation, often called “ba’al” crops, after the Canaanite deity of the same name. “I have people in California that call me asking for these varieties, because we have droughts in California now. So having a fava bean that can grow with no irrigation is very precious,” she said. “Our work is also the work of research. How do we develop varieties that can tolerate more heat or more flooding?”"
This work is vital—not only to Palestinian farmers, but to the world’s collective ability to adapt and thrive in a changing climate.
(Artist credit: Fedco staffer, Melissa May)