Enclavization is a key feature of the continuous colonial-engineering of space in Palestine. It is simultaneously a byproduct of prolonged displacement, land confiscation, and occupation and a spatial device used by Israel to concentrate and manage excluded or surplus populations. The process of enclavization, crystallized in the post-Oslo era, has severed Palestinian cities from their peripheries, distorted landscapes, and transformed social worlds and ecologies. In this study, we focus on the Northwest Jerusalem enclave, to examine the effects of the interplay between exposure to prolonged violence, mobility restrictions, reconfiguration (and disfiguration) of space, and fragmentation of social life, livelihoods, and health. We center the social ecologies and spaces that people inhabit and seek to understand the ways in which long-term exposure to political violence and dispossession impact the social worlds, livelihoods, and health of Palestinians in the Northwest Jerusalem enclave. Our research consists of extensive fieldwork in the villages constituting the Northwest Jerusalem enclave, including 35 in-depth interviews, two focus group discussions, and several site visits between October 2018 and December 2019. Drawing on eco-social theory and the concept of ‘slow violence’, we argue that exclusionary spatial policies and continuing settler-colonial encroachment impact health through multiple levels, including environments, communities, families, and persons. The complex web of bureaucratic and mobility restrictions imposed by the Israeli occupation, including the Oslo land classification system, ongoing confiscation of land, and settlement expansion, have had profounds impacts on the built environment, infrastructure, and agricultural lands. They have expedited urban sprawl in some of the villages, increased crowding, rendered proper zoning almost impossible, and resulted in environmental degradation, including higher levels of pollution and waste. According to our interlocutors, the ensuing spatial transformations have negatively impacted social environments and reshaped local Palestinian inhabitants’ relationships with their environments, often leading to increased stressors and various forms of suffocation (khanq), at times linked with chronic conditions like hypertension and diabetes. Interlocutors also highlighted two sources of toxins they believed to be driving disease: Israeli cellular towers servicing illegal settlements; and waste disposal from these settlements into Palestinian areas. Through their narratives, our interlocutors point to manifestations of both structural and ‘slow’ violence rendering their environments vulnerable to degradation and distortion and rendering themselves vulnerable to ill-health and disease.

The Jordan Valley, one of the main agricultural areas in the West Bank, has experienced key structural transformations since the Oslo Accords resulting from political, economic and environmental changes. Most of the Jordan Valley is classified as Area C, which is under complete Israeli control. Palestinians in the Jordan Valley live in poverty, are in constant fear of home-demolitions, have restricted movement, limited access to healthcare and education, and constraints on maintaining viable agricultural livelihoods. Palestinian women constitute the main labor force for agriculture in the Valley, and are among the most vulnerable groups in the population. This study explores the changes in agriculture in the Jordan Valley, specifically those after Oslo Accords, and how these changes affected farming women’s working and living conditions, and the effects on health. We draw on qualitative in-depth interviews with 30 women, and two focus groups with 20 women from June to December, 2019 in Nweimeh-Dyouk and Jiftlik communities in the Jordan Valley. We find that political factors have had a primary role in increasing the effects of social, economic and environmental factors, and thus affecting the living, working and health conditions of the farming women. Climate change and environmental degradation have introduced additional risks in agriculture. Concurrently, increased restrictions on farmers by Israeli settlers, including land confiscation, restrictions on accessing water resources, and restrictions on selling products, have decreased the economic benefit from agriculture. These conditions have pushed some women to either work outside the family farms or migrate to another village to work in agriculture. Families increasingly rely on women’s work to survive, as men were arrested or injured, thereby increasing the workload on women. In addition to dealing with poor living conditions and inadequate infrastructure, this has affected their health. Most women reported that carrying heavy loads and continuous bending when harvesting have caused musculoskeletal issues. Some participants reported having health problems related to pesticides-exposure such as asthma, respiratory and skin allergies, as well as dehydration and poor nutrition. Difficult living conditions, Israeli violations, together with occupational and environmental exposures, and lack of occupational training and safety, have negatively affected women’s health, with possibly adverse consequences for the wellbeing of their children and families who depend on them. This study raises important questions regarding the gendered experiences and effects of political and environmental transformations in the Jordan Valley on agricultural work, and the wellbeing of agricultural workers.

As a contribution to contemporary discussions on land alienation and ecosystem degradation in Palestine, this paper considers emerging critical ecologies of the relationships among people, plants and landscapes, and offers future-oriented perspectives on the connections between contemporary agroecology and “traditional” local agricultural practices. It is often assumed that landscape and biodiversity research in Palestine was conducted primarily by Western researchers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the fields of archaeology, anthropology, geography and geology, among others. But a parallel, and sometimes intersecting, line of land-based research has been carried out by Palestinians for more than a century. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in such land-based research and biodiversity conservation in Palestine, mainly due to the global climate crisis and local Israeli land appropriation. This work has been partly enabled by the establishment of several new research initiatives, such as the Palestinian Natural History Museum, and independent groups of specialists from the natural and social sciences, as well as artists, community organizers, and so on. Drawing upon theoretical perspectives that we have developed in our own research areas of contemporary agroecology and historic ecology, we suggest that the combination of Israeli occupation practices of land and resource (i.e. food, water) appropriation, Palestinian urban expansion, and the climate crisis are the major causes of ecosystem/biodiversity degradation. We argue that these food and resource-related crises have led to an increasing sense of land alienation - the detrimental effects on physical and mental health of individuals and communities induced by the historical and ongoing trauma of settler colonialism. These challenges to historical and ontological understandings of land, landscape and biodiversity are central to discussions of the real-world issues of food sovereignty and social well-being that are crucial to the maintenance of social ecologies within and between local communities throughout Palestine. In practical terms, we discuss how our current projects with communities in the West Bank can advance some thoughts for the future reconfiguration of local/traditional ecological relationships in the reality of Palestine’s deeply altered social landscapes. We show how recent local strategies are creating new systems of food sovereignty through the development of sustainable food practices and the strengthening of agroecological landscapes. These developments represent significant, resilient challenges to the agro-appropriation strategies of the occupation, and offer alternatives to the hitherto debilitating stresses of land alienation.