Youth Cooperatives: An Emergent Model for a Palestinian Resistance Economy

During a rainy night in November 2017, Samer, Adham, Nawras and Qasem gathered in a small shack in Saffa, a village west of Ramallah in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. The four young men were university students, who worked day jobs and volunteered in grass­roots organi­zations. Some of them had been involved in an urban coop­er­ative in Ramallah, but that night they concluded that they could do better in rural areas, where land is still available and people retained knowl­edge of traditional farming techniques.

Huddling in the shack they had converted into their social space, Samer suggested they cultivate a small plot of land that his family owns next to Israel’s Apart­heid wall among vast village lands threatened by expro­pri­ation. A week later the group was ploughing the soil. They followed the advice of Samer’s grand­mother to plant peas, and the following March they reaped a good harvest. The profit from the first season encouraged them to continue.

The group called its experiment The Land of Despair Sprouts with Hope, or Ard el-Ya’s in Arabic, Land of Despair, for short. Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche, the name reflects the group’s somber yet determined view of life under occu­pation and their responsi­bilities within it: Saffa’s land was under threat of Zionist settlers while their professional prospects vacillated between the Scylla of unem­ployment and the Charybdis of under­paid wage labor. With Ard el-Ya’s they not only hoped to protect the land and its ecology, but to establish a "resis­tance economy" — an economy of self-reliance as the basis of a viable Pales­tinian liberation struggle, and one that offers dignified work opportunities.

Today, Ard el-Ya’s has grown into one of the most success­ful youth coop­er­atives and is a catalyst for over twenty similar ones. Its story reflects young people’s recog­nition of the role of capitalism in the colo­nization and the economic destruction of Palestine as well as their pursuit of alter­native economic models. Its perse­verance is one of the best examples of what resis­tance economy in Palestine can accomplish but also high­lights its short­comings. Under­standing the potential and limitations of those agri­cultural experi­ments is important, not only for the future of Palestine, but also for a world that is suffering from a grave ecological crisis and in need of a path beyond unfettered capitalist growth.

Decades of struggle

The history of resis­tance economy in Palestine is a tale of colonial destruc­tion, grass­root response, and the realization of the detri­ments of institutional funding. Its concept is a recent reincar­nation of the sumud policies of the 1970s and 1980s. Sumud literally translates to «endurance» and «resilience». In Palestine, sumud means the ability of the local popu­lation to remain on their land despite colonial violence – and, above all, the ability of Pales­tinians to thrive and develop under those conditions.

Sumud’s develop­mental aspect evolved in response to the economic destruction (or "de-develop­ment") enacted by Israel in the West Bank and Gaza after the occu­pation of those areas in 1967. In the decades that followed, Israel confis­cated vast parts of Palestinian land, destroyed wells and farm­land, and began building illegal settle­ments. Through brute force, taxation and other policies, Israel gradually suffocated Palestine’s productive sectors, as a conse­quence of which most Palestinians became wage workers. Agri­culture was the sector most harshly affected. According to Leila Farsakh, author of «Palestinian Labor Migration to Israel», between 1965 and 1994, thirty percent of agri­cultural land in the West Bank ceased production.

To counteract this develop­ment Palestinian revolu­tionary parties in the 1970s and 1980s created an infras­tructure of grass­root committees that provided agri­cultural as well as health- and child­care services. Beyond ensuring Pales­tinians’ survival on their land, these committees also aimed to enhance people’s living condi­tions and to mobilize them into a national struggle to liberate the occupied lands.

De-development of the productive sectors in Palestine

One example of such a grass­root organi­zation is the Women’s Work Committee (WWC), founded in 1978. It set up local committees that offered vocational training, child­care, and education to rural women. Medical and agri­cultural committees followed. During the 1987 Intifada, neighbor­hoods organized their own local committees. A famous one operated in Beit Sahour, east of Bethlehem: To break the town’s depen­dence on Israeli import, the committee purchased 18 cows to produce their own dairy products. In 2014 this story was chronicled in the Palestinian-Canadian animated documentary film The Wanted 18.

With the Oslo Treaty signed between the Palestinian Liber­ation Organi­zation (PLO) and Israel in 1993, Pales­tinians effectively forwent their infras­tructure of grass­roots service-provision infras­tructure in exchange for the promise of self-determination. But the hope Pales­tinians had in the peace processes turned out to be deceiving: Not only did Israel gain direct control over the majority of the West Bank and Gaza, but through the Protocol on Economic Relations (the Paris Protocol), the agree­ments also codified the subor­dination of the newly formed Pales­tinian Authority to Israel. While Israel continued and even accelerated its confis­cation of Pales­tinian land and the settlement-building, its policies as well as those of the subor­dinate Pales­tinian Authority further de-developed the productive sectors in Palestine, particularly agri­culture.

In the year 2000, when Palestinians revolted against the reality brought about by Oslo during the second Intifada, Israel responded brutally. It invaded Palestinian cities to quell resis­tance, killing over 3000 Palestinians and destroying whole neighbor­hoods. Moreover, it confis­cated and severed access to fertile lands and wells, and uprooted hundreds of thousands of trees in the country­side.

Following the pressure of Israeli, US, and EU sanctions after the Intifada in 2006, the Fatah-led Pales­tinian Authority dismantled any remaining resis­tance infras­tructure and worked on reforming – that is, further neo-liberal­izing – the Pales­tinian economy. As a result, living conditions deteriorated for most of the popu­lation in the West Bank and Palestinian workers became even more dependent on the Israeli economy. Between 2007 and 2015 unemploy­ment hovered at around 18 percent. As shown by a recent Labour Force Survey of the Pales­tinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), 25 percent of West Bank Pales­tinian workers earn their living as precarious wage laborers in Israel and its settle­ments.

Resistance Economy as alternative to the neoliberal policy of the Palestinian Authority

By the end of the 2000s, the detriments of Palestinian economic sub­ordi­nation to Israel became pain­fully clear, and the voices calling for a sovereign Pales­tinian economy got louder. Economists who advocated for change now called for the return to sumud practices and presented the concept of resis­tance economy as an alter­native to the then neoliberal policy of the Palestinian Authority. Today’s resis­tance economy builds on the older sumud practices but also learns from their failures: The national-scale committees, like the afore­mentioned Women’s Work, Committee, for example, had emphasized political goals at the expense of economic sustain­ability. Subse­quently, they came to rely on foreign aid, which in turn led to the demobilization of their grass­roots structure.

Advocates of resistance economy argue that economic indepen­dence is crucial for a success­ful political liberation struggle: As long as Pales­tinians remain hostage to Israeli wages or donor money and import their food, they will remain hostage to the fluctu­ations of a market controlled by Israel. As a result, their political thinking will be limited by their economic interests, and they will never be able to develop the indepen­dent political will that is necessary for liberation.

The «Sharaka Youth Forum»

Meanwhile, by the early 2010s some activists were already putting similar ideas into reality. They developed projects with broader national, ecological, or political goals in mind. Cooperative cafes, private perma­culture farms, and a handful of similar initiatives started to emerge.

Nevertheless, Ard el-Ya’s and the group of coop­er­atives it has inspired, stand out: first because they survived, while most of the previous ones did not. Ard el-Ya’s and most of its fellow coop­er­atives are profitable: one was able to buy land, others at least break even. Second, and more importantly, their practice conjoins grass­root organi­zations with a direct responsi­bility for the local community and an economic goal. In short, their business model enables them to sustain their community service while providing income for them­selves.

Two of the founders of Ard el-Yas’s were members of the Sharaka Youth Forum, which brings together Palestinian grass­root groups from the West Bank, Gaza, the lands of 1948 (i.e. what came to be the state of Israel), and from the diaspora. Most of those groups serve their communities as volunteers: They clean streets, defend land against settler expro­priation, and offer various free services. However, their funds are limited and their members often un­employed, both hindering their capacity for action.

In events organized by the Forum, Ard el-Ya’s was able to inspire these groups. Between 2018 and 2021 sixteen new coop­er­atives were formed by Sharaka members. They mostly focus on agri­culture, while one is a grocery store. They are spread throughout the West Bank, mainly in the central mountain villages around Ramallah and Nablus, a few are located in the internal planes. Most of their members have received vocational training or higher education and struggled to find jobs. Some have been denied wage labor in Israeli settle­ments or have refused to accept jobs they felt degrading. Others pursue the work in the coop­er­ative besides their studies.

The core values the Sharaka coop­er­atives have defined for dealing with society, the environ­ment, and with each other are care, justice, equality, and indepen­dence. Thus, they mainly sow indigenous seeds and farm staple produce, like vegetables and grains, but also olives, for domestic consump­tion to support food sovereignty. They have also been experimenting with various ecologically-aware farming practices and philoso­phies. Most provide food baskets to the needy in their villages and continue to participate in volunteer work. At the same time, the coop­er­atives main­tain a horizontal structure and experiment with manage­ment and remuner­ation models that fit their egalitarian principles. For them, the cooperative is an attempt at living out the free­dom they seek for Palestinians.

Farming land helps to protect it from confiscation

It is not a coincidence that those groups turned to agri­culture. The land is threatened by expro­priation and is subject to recurring settler violence. Farming the land helps to protect it from confis­cation. From 1967 to 1979 Israel confis­cated Palestinian lands for settle­ment building through military orders claiming security reasons. After 1979, Israel came to rely on an inter­pretation of Ottoman law that stipulates that land without «proper registration» – meaning land that is cultivated less than 50 percent – returns to the state. This is one reason settler-militias regularly burn fields and cut down trees on Pales­tinian lands. At the same time, the colonial violence that led farmers to desert their land made it available for active youth to cultivate it, even if under tough conditions.

Furthermore, the focus on agri­culture and the environ­mentally conscious practices reflect the increased attention Pales­tinian activists pay to the environ­ment as well as the influence of global move­ments for peasant rights, agro-ecology, and degrowth. These youths are increasingly aware that the capitalist model fueling Israeli colonization, of which cheap settle­ment labor is one facet and unemploy­ment another, is the same that drives the planet to extinction. Finding non-capitalist ways to provide basic needs, especially food, seems to many of them an alter­native starting point.

The cooperative model makes sense as well. It allows the pooling of resources, while the collective nature of its labor fits the require­ments of agri­cultural work as well as the desires of those young people alienated in wage jobs. The location of the coop­er­atives further testifies to their objectives: When the Ard el-Fallahin coop­er­ative started in 2019, it targeted village lands next to the spring threatened by settlers. Most of the other coop­er­atives farmed lands on the front­lines of Israeli-Palestinian confronta­tion, namely in Area C, which comprises the majority of the West Bank, and falls under the military and civic adminis­tration of Israel.

Today, as the extreme-right Israeli govern­ment has emboldened the settler community to increase violent attacks on Palestinian lives and property, the coop­er­atives find them­selves under recurrent threats. Nevertheless, Samer, one of the founders of Ard el-Ya’s, states, this doesn’t stop them: «Some days I think to myself: Damn this country, it’s all too much», he says. «Then I remember the land and it gives me a sense of safety. There is nothing like it.»

The financial challenge

While many of the Sharaka coop­er­atives are only minimally profitable, the number of their members remain constant even when other work oppor­tunities arise. For the Sharaka group, senti­mental motivation and broader purpose of the work trumps financial consider­ations. However, the more strategically-minded members realize that for such a model to flourish, it needs to offer a decent source of income: If coop­er­atives intend to provide Pales­tinian wage workers an alter­native to the humiliating labor in Israeli settle­ments, they need to be able to compete with it.

This is not an easy task. There are 1250 registered coop­er­atives in the West Bank, of which only 350 are active, meaning that they have set a budget and convened a general assembly meeting at least once in the past three years, and of which 147 are agri­cultural. The Sharaka group however, includes twenty youth coop­er­atives, which in comparison is quite a large number.

What makes the task of youth coop­er­atives more difficult is the fact that Sharaka coop­er­atives insist on self-reliance and avoid NGO funding. The reason for this resolute stance is the lesson learned from the experience of the 1980s committees: After the Oslo Treaty, they had transformed into NGOs that increasingly became more accountable to their funders than to their popular base. Thus, Ard el-Ya’s and four other coop­er­atives collected limited resources and borrowed from family and friends. Later, some started to accept unconditional NGO aid and individual donations, while others declined NGO support altogether.

A major advance­ment came with the founding of The Palestinian Social Fund in the year 2021. The Fund was initiated by a group of young Palestinians in the diaspora to support the inchoate cooperative move­ment. It accepts individual donations through its web­site and funnels them to specific cooperative projects. It does not accept institutional donations or conditional funding, nor does it impose conditions on the coop­er­atives it supports. The fund has so far collected roughly 7’000 USD, mostly in small donations under twenty dollars, and has supported projects such as a green­house for Ard el-Ya’s.

Today, many of the youth coop­er­atives realize that they need larger financial invest­ments to be able to survive in the market. A few are falling back into the trap of institutional support, often to their detri­ment. This happened to two Sharaka coop­er­atives that merged into one in response to a condition for funding from Oxfam, only to then find them­selves in an inoperable state because they had not been ready for the merger.

Other Sharaka cooperatives developed success­ful alter­natives. Some have turned to farming less water or labor-intensive produce, such as fruit trees and grains, thereby reducing their costs and increase their labor flexibility. Others are beginning to think of ways to operate outside of the market, in circles of product and service barter, so as not to compete with the much more powerful agr­ibusiness—mainly sub­sidized Israeli.

The Sharaka collectives succeeded where others before them failed: They have survived as a model of self-funded community-based organi­zations that offer community services and generate income for its members. However, the member­ship in each cooperative remains relatively low – it hardly exceeds ten people – and they are yet to offer a lucrative source of income that is a generalizable alter­native to settle­ment labor. Will these coop­er­atives be able to expand and replicate or will they remain marginal islands for idealist youth?

The answer will depend on the ingenuity of their members, but also on the solidarity net­work that can support them, both within Palestinian society and inter­nationally. Crowd­funding and solidarity campaigns might indeed be able to kick­start a self-sustaining economic model that no longer relies on aid. Even so, success is not guaranteed. Nonethe­less these coop­er­atives offer an avenue that is well worth pursuing at a time when the out­look for the Pales­tinian cause, and indeed the planet, seems uncertain.