Razan Zuayter holds an MS in agriculture and is the founder and president of the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature. Razan is the founder of the Arab Network for Food Sovereignty, co-chairs the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty, and is a member of the Committee for Hunger Eradication within the League of Arab States.

Any settler colonialism as it’s widely known aims for the complete destruction and replacement of indigenous people and their cultures with the settlers’ own cultures, in order to establish themselves as the rightful inhabitants. This is achieved through land theft and exploitation which is enabled by occupation, apartheid, genocide, ecocide, and famine. This is exactly what the colonizers and their prodigies, the Zionists, have been doing for the last 200 years.  The Apartheid wall, illegal settlements, military zones, and buffer zones restrict Palestinians from 40% of their land.  In terms of water resources, all Palestinian surface, ground, and rainwater is under Israeli occupation. Israel blocks access to the Jordan River and usurps more than 80% of the aquifer’s flow. It prohibits the construction of wells and destroys water infrastructure including rainwater collection facilities. Palestinians are forced to buy their stolen water at inflated rates. In the West Bank, illegal settlers receive four times more water than Palestinians, who receive much less than the minimum standard set by the World Health Organization.  The lack of water treatment plants forces sewage to be discharged into the Mediterranean Sea, and this has disastrous impacts on the quality of water and causes severe disruption of the marine ecosystem. As a result, Gaza’s children, who make up 47% of the population, drink polluted water, with 50% suffering from water-borne diseases of whom 12% tragically do not survive.  Moreover, Israel systematically poisons Palestinian water and soil through frequent herbicide spraying, and the dumping of untreated hazardous wastes within the West Bank, causing serious health problems for Palestinians. In 2007, Israel set a calorie count designed to keep Palestinians hungry but “not die of hunger”, as one Israeli official stated, to “keep Gaza’s economy on the brink of collapse”. After October 7th, the target was for Palestinians to die of hunger.  Starting in 2008, Israel employs internationally prohibited weapons, such as white phosphorus bombs which induces fire rains, leading to widespread mass death, in addition to the long-term poisoning and accumulation in the soil and groundwater. Israel has dropped over 75,000 tons of explosives on Gaza’s densely populated and rural areas, yielding over five times the firepower of Hiroshima. The planet-warming emissions generated during the first 2 months of the invasion of Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations. According to the IPC (Food Security Classification), 95% of Gazans are in food crises and 30% are in stage 5 defined as famine or catastrophe. This war has caused the most intense famine since World War II. 90% of children and 95% of pregnant and lactating women experience severe food poverty. Palestinians have resorted to eating tree leaves, grass, animal fodder, sometimes mixing it with soil. Women are unable to breastfeed due to malnutrition, and babies, the lucky ones, are being fed formula with water contaminated by sewage, toxins, and seawater.  The occupation, which destroyed 550 villages during the Nakba and isolated Palestinians in Bantustans, also confiscated vast areas of the land of Palestine under the guise of “natural reserves”.  So how did settler colonialism take root in our region? Originally, following the fall of the Ottoman Empire, there was fierce competition among European countries to seize control of the Arab region, but they were all united and dedicated around the establishment of very early Zionist settlements in Palestine. As early as 1840, 108 years before the Nakba, they used a range of tactics to expedite land grabs, France, Germany, and England established consulates in Jerusalem and other Palestinian towns, smuggling tons of weapons to settlers, granting them thousands of passports to enjoy tax exemption and judicial impunity. Furthermore, they facilitated the commodification of land, burdening Arab farmers with loans and subsequently seizing their land when they default. Despite all the immense 2 hundred years of brutality, the Palestinians never seized their resistance in all its forms, including armed resistance, rebellion, boycotts, and strikes, one of which was the longest strike in history (1936).  On our part as well, we at APN, had sworn not to surrender. We launched our green resistance movement to confront starvation and the weaponization of food and environment. By the end of 2023, we had supported over 33,000 farmers who collectively support around quarter of a million Palestinians. This year, on land day, we launched our latest project titled Revive Gaza Farmland, aiming to rehabilitate 500 farms. We have already helped 100 of them with seeds and irrigation networks, enabling them to counter the blockade and famine.  I would like to conclude with a number of recommendations.

1. We need to sustain the infinite forms of resistance on all fronts. South-south institutionalized solidarity as in ILPS and PCFS is one of them. 
2. We need to instate our narrative and be aware of the colonial use of certain terminologies to advance political agendas and maintain an oppressive status quo. It is not a conflict or a dispute, it is settler colonialism and occupation. It is not a war or crisis, but a genocide. There is not imminent risk of famine, it is a famine. Environmental damage is not collateral damage, it is an ecocide.
3. Legal action must be pursued, both judicially and through popular tribunals, in parallel to other forms of direct action. Israel must be held accountable and all parties complicit in enabling the occupation and genocide. 
4. Support Palestinians to revive local food system towards achieving food sovereignty including supporting on the ground projects that strengthen Palestinian resilience like our “Revive Gaza’s Farmland” project. 
5. Finally, it is imperative to focus on exposing and combating colonial indoctrination mainly among Western academic institutions as well as the media. 

In conclusion, the past six months, we all found ourselves facing one of 2 options, either we are part of the settler colonial project, or we resist it. I am happy and honored to be here today with those who chose to resist. The black seeds of the watermelon are sprouting all over the globe.