And this tiny eggplant?

On allotments, land, and digging as resistance

On Sunday the kids were a bit restless, so we decided to take a walk down the road to our allotment plot. Actually, we’d intended to visit it only on the way back from a much longer walk, but a meandering three-year-old had other ideas so we aborted our original mission and headed straight for plot 40A.

When we arrived we were surprised to find that nobody else was there! This doesn’t happen very often, and it felt a bit delicious to have the whole place to ourselves. We couldn’t be bothered with opening up the gate properly so decided to crawl under the fence instead. This was highly amusing to my three-year old, who, after nimbly crawling through the fence herself, enjoyed watching her parents struggle.

The paths between all the plots are pretty narrow and make navigation with a pram slow-going. The upside to this is getting to see our neighbour’s plots in all their glory. On one border, an artichoke was in full bloom – a gorgeous vibrant lilac.

Quite beautiful, I thought.

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Allotments exist in the UK thanks (in part) to the efforts of the Diggers, a breakaway sect of the English civil war who fought against the enclosure of common lands, which enabled the wealthy to privatise large swathes of land during a time of high starvation. The Diggers advocated for the poor mans ‘right to dig’ arguing in one pamphlet that there was ‘no ‘righteous power’ to sell or give the earth away, making the landlords with their enclosures not only iniquitous and cruel, but acting against the will of God¹.’ Although the government quickly clamped down on the Digger’s activities, the principle of a poor person’s right to access land eventually led to the Smallholding and Allotments Act of 1907, which put a legal responsibility on councils to provide allotments where there is demand.

Demand for allotments is so high In the part of Somerset where I live that you can expect to wait four years before a plot becomes available.

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It had been a few weeks since I’d been to our plot. (My husband had made a few visits in the interim to keep us stocked in radishes). So it was amazing to see the sheer volume of crops that our little parcel of earth has managed to produce in pretty dry conditions. Together we wandered around our allotment and marvelled at the density and diversity of its abundance.

As we walked around, commenting on what has or hasn’t done well, I couldn’t help but think about the lack of fresh produce in Gaza, and the astronomical prices these vegetables would fetch on the black market there. I pulled off a couple of sweetcorn husks, explaining to my daughter that we would eat them for dinner later. ‘Are they sleeping?’ she asked, seeing the leaves that keep the corn-kernels protected. ‘Yes, let’s put them back to bed’. I replied.

As we talked a video I’d watched a couple of weeks earlier came to my mind. It was of a little Gazan boy called Ahmed who was talking to camera and showing his small aubergine plant to the public. Later I looked up the transcript of that video:

At a time when the whole world let us down
My little garden didn’t
And this tiny eggplant?
It stood stronger than all their silence
I planted it during lighter days
Never imagined it would one day be my only meal
Today, in the middle of famine, in the middle of war,
This plant stood tall and whispered: there’s still hope
A small hope — but a stubborn one

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When I was sixteen I came across a book that a friend had left at our house called ‘Whose promised land?’ by Colin Chapman. The orignal strapline asked – Israel or Palestine? What are the claims and counter-claims? Are the ancient promises of the Bible relevant today? Is there a way forward? I had just started studying politics at A Level and read the book with interest, starting to understand the religious and geopolitical contours that underpin the violence we now see on our TV screens daily.

Chapman’s book was written specifically with Christians in mind, and attempts to explain the history of Israel’s relationship with Palestine, showing how the indigenous Palestinian population was systematically deprived of their land through the creation of an Israeli state in 1948. Lots of Christian’s feel intrinsically connected to the idea of Israel, and so find themselves aligning with the Israeli state, which they feel fulfils the promises made to God’s people in the Old Testament. But Chapman points out that between 1948-49, around 750,000 (80% of the Arab population) left or were driven out from their homes and became refugees, in a process that would today be recognised as ethnic cleansing.

In the following period, Israel instituted the Absentees Property Law, which enabled the state to take control of the homes, farms and land 'left behind’ by Palestinian refugees. In conjunction with the Land Acquisitions Law of 1953, the mass transfer of Palestinian land to the Israeli state was enacted. Through these processes, the Israeli state gained control of over 739,750 agricultural acres.

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In a similar spirit, the Enclosure Acts of the 18th Century ‘took away the growing and grazing rights of the rural poor’ in England and Wales. Providing a legal framework for the privatisation of common land that was previously accessible to the poor. In this week’s Telegraph, Jeremy Corbyn describes this process as a ‘monstrous attack on working-class life’ and argued that ‘the enclosures represented the widespread theft of public land, sanctioned by a parliament that was dominated by landowners.’

Why is Jeremy Corbyn in the Telegraph writing about enclosure? Well, it emerged this week that the UK’s Labour government have apparently given a handful of councils the right to sell allotment sites to fund day-to-day spending. Unsurprisingly, both the far-left and right have seized on this as a betrayal (which it is). ‘Once lost, they never return.’ Corbyn argued. ‘Their loss makes us all poorer, as we become more and more detached from how food is grown and how nature interacts with us.’

I am not seeking to make a draw a direct comparison between the situation in Gaza and the sale of some Allotment plots by Labour. The magnitude of Gazan’s suffering is unimaginable and obviously far outweighs the loss of some public smallholdings in Nottinghamshire.

But the question of land ownership and disposession runs through both these news stories, and in both instances, a state claims to have the power to arbitrarily sell off or occupy land which was once served the interests of the people. In England and Wales, enclosure once removed the dignity and rights of the starving poor. In Palestine, land ownership was and is a tool through which Israel’s settler colonialism has tried to eradicate the existence of an entire ethnic group.

And now, in the final throes of genocide, Israel has completely cut the Gazan people off from their land, the land which is theirs and which they need to survive. Yesterday the Guardian reported that Israel’s destruction of Gaza has left starving Palestinian’s with access to only 1.5% of cropland suitable for cultivation, down from 4% in April.

In the second half of his gardening video, Ahmed says:

We’re not okay, but we’re trying to survive.
Not because there’s a way…
But because we have no choice but to plant, to endure, and to tell the world:
We’re still here — even if you forgot us.

I had the radio on during breakfast this morning.

Netanyahu is gathering his war cabinet in order to approve the full occupation of Gaza.

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Thank you for reading. The Murmuration is a weekly essay that digs beneath the topsoil of our daily life - covering politics, climate and culture. We are also a community which asks big questions about the stuff that matters. To receive The Murmuration every week, hit the subscribe button below. — Grace

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• Decolonise Palestine: Resources for anyone who wants to learn more about Palestine

1. The Garden Against Time, Olivia Laing