Erasing roots, stealing seeds and engineering flight

The recent raid by Israeli forces on the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) in Ramallah—during which young female employees were blindfolded, tied, filmed, and the organization’s seed bank and files were confiscated—should not be treated as a marginal incident of intimidation. It exposes the deeper architecture of displacement operating in Palestine today. A settler-colonial project does not rely solely on spectacular acts of expulsion or dramatic moments of forced transfer; it also depends on the slow, methodical erosion of the conditions that allow a people to remain. The theft of seeds is therefore an assault on the material and ecological bases of Palestinian rootedness.

In Palestine, seeds embody accumulated knowledge of agriculture, adapted over centuries from the ancestors to a particular soil and climate. They preserve biodiversity, livelihoods, and memory. By targeting the seed bank, Israeli authorities confiscated property and attacked the infrastructure through which Palestinians reproduce life, autonomy, and belonging. The raid fits within what Patrick Wolfe described as the “logic of elimination” embedded in settler colonialism, where the removal of a native population is pursued through a series of interventions that make indigenous presence increasingly untenable.

The displacement Palestinians face today is thus not confined to direct expulsions, although these remain present. It is also produced through the dismantling of livelihood capitals such as economic, social, financial, and ecological, that sustain daily life. When agricultural unions are raided, when seeds are stolen, when olive groves are burned or uprooted by settlers, when grazing lands are encroached upon, the result is a cumulative uninhabitability. These practices hollow out the ability of Palestinians to stay, while enabling Israel to frame any eventual departure as an act of individual choice rather than the outcome of coercion.

The targeting of agriculture is not incidental. Agriculture has long been a pillar of Palestinian steadfastness (sumud), anchoring people to land and sustaining communities across generations. It is also one of the few sectors not fully captured by dependence on the Israeli economy. For this reason, it becomes a site where sovereignty, dignity, and resistance intersect. The theft of the seed bank thus strikes at a domain that combines economic survival with cultural continuity. When such an institution is ransacked, the harm extends beyond the immediate disruption of operations; it severs threads of historical connection and undermines the capacity to reproduce communal life.

READ: Israeli police swap UN flag for Israeli flag during raid on UNRWA compound in East Jerusalem

This strategy is consistent with a broader political economy of displacement that operates across Palestine. In Gaza, famine conditions and deliberate restrictions on food, water, and reconstruction materials have transformed survival itself into a daily negotiation with death. In the West Bank, economic strangulation, through closures, land seizures, settler violence, the fragmentation of territorial contiguity, and the unpredictability of movement, prevents people from securing stable livelihoods. In both geographies, the pressure is designed to punish and to render the choice to stay increasingly irrational.

The attack on UAWC is part of a larger pattern of criminalizing Palestinian civil society. Community-based organizations, unions, women’s cooperatives, human rights groups, and agricultural networks have faced closures, raids, defunding, and repeated attempts to delegitimize their work. These institutions form the backbone of Palestinian collective life; they facilitate learning, production, advocacy, and social cohesion. Their erosion is therefore a crucial mechanism in the reconfiguration of Palestinian subjectivity, from political actors resisting injustice to atomized individuals navigating survival. When institutions collapse, displacement becomes a physical movement dismantling ultimately of social horizons.

The violence extends beyond offices and seed banks. Farmers across the West Bank regularly awaken to scorched fields, poisoned wells, or hundreds of olive trees, some centuries old, cut down overnight. These attacks by Zionist settlers are presented in public discourse as isolated extremism or local-level clashes, yet they are deeply entangled with state structures that enable, protect, or even escort the perpetrators. Burning an olive grove is but the destruction of a family’s income, heritage, and sense of permanence. It is a message that the land cannot provide safety or sustenance. In this way, ecological destruction becomes a tool of governance, a way of “managing” populations by making their continued presence appear futile.

When Palestinians finally reach breaking points—when starvation, unemployment, daily fear, or the collapse of community support systems drive them to attempt migration—the narrative is swiftly reframed as evidence of their desire to leave, “voluntary migration”!!. The recent case of 150 Palestinians who landed in South Africa without documentation was widely spoken about as a desperate attempt for a better life, as though such decisions were taken in a vacuum. In reality, what appears as voluntary migration is the product of unbearable conditions. Coercion in this context is not always a soldier at one’s door; it is the suffocating removal of all pathways to live with dignity.

READ: Gaza ceasefire remains incomplete without West Bank, Qatari prime minister says

The displacement machine thus functions through a dual strategy: intensifying unlivability while rebranding the exits it produces as personal choices. This rhetorical shift is key to absolving the Israeli state of responsibility and to securing international complacency. If Palestinians are made to appear as migrants rather than refugees, the underlying violence that pushes them to leave is obscured. The raid on the agricultural union therefore sits within a wider epistemic struggle: who gets to narrate Palestinian movement, and whose interpretation carries political weight.

The world must understand the implications of these acts. When seeds are stolen, when archives disappear, when farmers are driven from fields, when ecological continuity is broken, displacement is already underway. The methods differ in scale, bombardment, starvation, bureaucratic suffocation, settler terror, institutional erosion, but the objective remains consistent: to transform a rooted people into a dispersible population.

Recognising the theft of the seed bank as part of this systemic project is essential. It reveals how deeply the assault penetrates, not only targeting bodies and homes, but dismantling the very conditions that make collective life viable. And it underscores that Palestinian resilience is inseparable from the preservation of their ecological and agricultural heritage. Without seeds, groves, or the institutions that protect them, the capacity to remain becomes endangered.

If the international community continues to read these events as isolated episodes of conflict rather than as parts of a coordinated structure, it will perpetuate the illusion that Palestinians are leaving by choice. A displacement that is engineered through deprivation is not voluntary. The raid in Ramallah is a chilling reminder that the struggle over Palestine is also a struggle over the right to remain, to cultivate, and to root one’s future in one’s land.

OPINION: A new face of ethnic cleansing: From siege to demographic engineering

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.