Sumud – the Palestinian resistance strategy of persistence and steadfastness – has received much scholarly attention as well as critique. In particular the PLO’s institutionalised sumud discourse of the 1970s/80s has been criticised for risking promoting a passive statist traditionalist strategy of mere holding on to the land. But sumud has also been associated with femininity, silent endurance and sacrifice. As such it might bear the danger of reducing women’s political contributions to their reproductive, caring and providing role. In this paper, I would like to revisit gendered meanings and practices of sumud, and trace their evolvements after 2000. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the West Bank from 2007-2011, I focus on rural women’s struggles to access and tender their agricultural lands. Agricultural work is one of the major activities though which women have tried to maintain the family economy and livelihoods. They – often in accordance with their unemployed husbands – claim that it is easier for women to sneak around Israeli-imposed restrictions, and that the violence and threats they receive are less harmful than those that their male kin would have had to face. Women tend to present their acts of accessing and tending their occupied lands as a form of sumud, of holding on to the land. Such land-related framings of sumud have a decidedly different meaning today, in the post-2000 context of tightened Israeli spatial control, than they had in the PLO’s institutionalised sumud discourse of the 1970s/80s. Given that the structural and direct violence imposed through Israeli settler-colonial policies today intrudes into all aspects of Palestinian everyday life, women’s acts of defying this violence by accessing and working the land should be understood as a pro-active survival strategy through which women claim and actively enact their role as family providers, and even as protectors of the land. Sumud, if understood and practiced in such an active way, does not assign women a passive role of victims or mere carers in the struggle. All women I spoke to cherished their innovative survival strategies; they tend to exchange their tactics and help each other. Although they might not imbue their acts explicitly with political meanings, they view themselves as active agents, rather than passive victims, when engaging in and devising sumud strategies. As such sumud in Palestine today constitutes a way for women to challenge victimisation narratives, and instead reclaim their humanity, dignity and right to a normal life.