Bananas and the Imaginary of Progress: The National Environment and Agricultural Capitalism in Palestine

An economic activity, but political and environmental in confronting colonialism.

●       A paper was published in 2025, titled "Bananas and the Imaginary of Progress: The National Environment and Agricultural Capitalism in Palestine during the Mandate," authored by Dr. Nicole Khayyat and Dr. Fatna Abarik-Zubaidat – from Tel Aviv University. The study aims to understand how banana cultivation in Palestine became a site of struggle between Zionist settlement ambitions, and Palestinian economic and national desires, and how this cultivation was linked to emerging Palestinian capitalist development, and Arab nationalist currents; within this framework, banana cultivation is viewed not only as an economic activity, but as a political and environmental symbol in confronting colonialism!

●       Banana cultivation was not new to Palestine, yet efforts to greatly expand its production during the British Mandate collided with the unsuitability of soils and climate in the region, leading to competing discourses about scientific knowledge and cultural rootedness. Since the banana was neither a native plant in Palestine nor rooted in Biblical tradition, it evoked among settlers an alternative “secular” imaginary to replace their self-professed competence and expertise, which collided with the lived reality of indigenous peoples’ deep knowledge of the local environment and their comparative agricultural success. The article traces scientific discourses and cultural representations of banana cultivation in the districts of Baysan and Jericho, revealing new dimensions of how agriculture shaped the Zionist–Arab conflict, including the role of the Palestinian capitalist class in resisting settler-colonial dispossession. Thus the article clarifies the role of the banana in uneven regional development and in the struggle over control of land!

●      Zionists during the British Mandate of Palestine sought to market bananas produced in Palestine as “Hebrew,” which required a cultural and environmental discourse blending colonial ambition, capitalist agriculture, and ecological engineering. However, these conceptions collided with the successful Palestinian agricultural reality, linked to an ascending Palestinian capitalism, making the banana a terrain of conflict between Zionists and Palestinians.

●       The British Mandate in Palestine, which established and reinforced a new settler-colonial model, treated Jewish settlers as partners while placing Palestinians in the position of the colonized. In this context, the “Hebraization” of the banana served to normalize Zionist settlers as native inhabitants of the land, while portraying indigenous Palestinians as outsiders. At the same time, the land conflict in Baysan saw notable involvement by a large number of local Palestinian farmers, supported by an active Arabic press.

● In 1945, "Village Statistics," the most comprehensive government survey of its kind during the British Mandate period (1920–1948), recorded a total of 3881 dunums of taxable banana farms in Palestine. To put this figure in relative context, more than 281 thousand dunums were planted with citrus at the time (Department of Statistics, 1945).¹. However, regional banana cultivation during the Mandate period shifted from an intermittent activity to large-scale cash-crop cultivation. This shift was driven by overlapping interests among the colonial authorities, Zionist settlers, and Palestinian capitalist farmers, and the transformation was not only economic but also political and environmental.

●      Zionists and the British invested to assert control over land through banana cultivation, while Palestinians faced logistical and bureaucratic challenges, yet sometimes succeeded in demonstrating their agricultural expertise before colonial experimental stations. Palestinians participated in agricultural knowledge exchange with global research centers, which helped challenge the colonial perception of them as backward farmers! Despite their marginalization in colonial narratives, Palestinian agricultural actors actively engaged in global scientific networks. For example, George Khodr, president of the Arab Chamber of Commerce, was in contact with prominent agricultural associations and research centers abroad, including the Agricultural Experiment Station in Hawaii of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

●       Banana cultivation in Jericho and Baysan demonstrates the importance of the environmental–national discourse for understanding power relations under the British Mandate. The promise that banana cultivation might enhance Palestinian national interests was undermined by Zionist and British colonial interventions, endowing the struggle over control of banana plantations with environmental–national meanings, albeit taking divergent paths in the districts of Baysan and Jericho. By placing the banana at the center of analysis as both a crop and a commodity, the two cases highlight the historical effectiveness of Palestinian capitalist elites, rather than confining national meaning to peasants as the primary national indicator. With the rise of Arab nationalism and Zionist efforts to establish a distinct “Hebrew” banana industry, claims of “scientific expertise” became increasingly politicized—especially in Jericho, which emerged as the most successful and sustainable production center in the region.

●       In Baysan, initially considered a promising area for banana cultivation, the Arabic press actively promoted Palestinian investment and the establishment of plantations. In 1927, the newspaper Al-Karmil reported that many residents of Baysan were seeking buyers for their lands, raising concerns about what appeared to be governmental obstruction of Arab economic development in the region; through his newspaper, Najib Nassar encouraged wealthy Arabs to protect Palestinian land from Zionist acquisition by engaging in productive projects of a national character, urging them to buy land and plant bananas in Baysan. He believed such investments would secure returns for investors while contributing to the preservation of the homeland!

●       Palestinian investment in the Baysan area continued throughout the early 1930s, where “effendis and Arab merchants” purchased land for banana cultivation, and these initiatives were not merely economic but were bolstered by a nationalist discourse that portrayed agricultural development as a means of preserving Palestinian land ownership in the face of gradual Zionist encroachment. Among the early investors exemplifying this pragmatic nationalism was Haseeb Wahbeh, who had planted palms in the area, alongside investors from Ramallah such as Deputy Mayor of Ramallah Musa al-Khalil, and the businessman George Harb. Together they planted more than 20,000 banana saplings, and their projects received enthusiastic support from the newspaper Al-Karmil, which praised, among other things, the effectiveness of their marketing strategies,

●       And with environmental challenges threatening the viability of their economic projects, many Palestinian investors soon retreated from agricultural pursuits despite their national motivations. After the frost of 1931, prospective farmers abandoned plans in Baysan, leaving only those with substantial existing investments. Many plantations on unsuitable lands, including the coastal plain, were neglected, and only a small proportion remained productive. Nevertheless, concerns arose about land allocation in Baysan, with complaints that the government was granting lands to Jewish settlers—who, in addition to government loans, received financial support from Zionist organizations unavailable to Palestinians—exacerbating economic disparities, Shihadeh, 1931.

●       The national struggle between Arabs and Zionists over the banana in Palestine was also linked to regional seasons of cultivation and harvest. Jericho’s favorable climate, and the absence of competition for members of the al-Husayni family and other Palestinian farmers there, allowed them to sell the bulk of their crop at high prices from May to October; in contrast, Jewish farmers, whose production was concentrated between November and May, were limited in their ability to benefit from seasonal price peaks in the market. The Hebrew press described these practices as price-cutting aimed at undermining Jewish farmers.

●       And with the difficulty of competing with the cheaper bananas from Jericho that flooded the market in Carmel in Tel Aviv, Jewish producers urged consumers to buy “Hebrew” bananas despite their higher cost, to prevent the collapse of the Hebrew banana market!

●       Nationalism in Palestine also played a prominent role in the dynamics of the local market during the period of general strikes and the anti-colonial uprising known as the Great Arab Revolt (1936–1939). For example, the Hebrew press warned of attempts by activists of the Arab nationalist movement to sell Jericho bananas to Jews. Moreover, in 1936 a Jewish writer criticized shopkeepers in Haifa for selling bananas grown on farms in Jericho, which he claimed were owned by "leaders of the killers." To counter this alleged threat, the Jewish Central Association for Agricultural Production in Palestine (Tnuva, which was established in 1926) began labeling bananas coming from Jewish farms to help consumers recognize them, and urged Jewish settlers to support Zionism and the Jewish economy by consuming exclusively "Hebrew" products.

●       Banana cultivation in the Jordan Valley continued after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, supported by waters from private springs and wells and access to regional Arab markets. However, the situation changed after 1967, when Israel placed the water sector in the West Bank under direct military administration and took control of all major water resources, deprived Palestinians of access to the Jordan River, and restricted the digging and maintenance of wells. The Oslo Accords of 1993 consolidated this system by regularizing Israeli civilian and military authority over most of the Jordan Valley, making the cultivation of water-intensive crops such as bananas unsustainable. With the depletion of groundwater and the rise in its salinity, the environmental viability of bananas diminished, profits fell as a result of the closure of Arab markets, and Palestinian farmers turned to نخيل المجهول, which tolerates irrigation with saline water and achieves high prices in international markets!