2025 Workshop
Marlaina Yost
PhD student in the department of history at Yale University.
“From Gaza, With Love”: Floriculture in Post-Oslo Palestine
In 1991, Israel lifted a military order banning the cultivation of decorative flowers in Gaza. Carnation fields expanded rapidly in the coastal soils and the quality of Palestinian flowers gained global renown. The new crop was not however without its difficulties, as farmers were required to uproot generationally tended citrus orchards to plant carnations, all seedlings were required to be purchased from the Israeli company Agrexco, and yields had to be released back to Israeli companies who controlled their international export. While the industry experienced major obstacles nearly from the beginning, the 2007 blockade caused severe economic deterioration in Gaza, with rising unemployment and plummeting household incomes. Without access to the international market and little domestic demand for luxuries such as flowers, waste in the form of blossoms rotting trapped at the border served as a reminder of the non-sovereign condition of Palestinian life. Yet although the export-market for carnations had been erratic at best, and is now completely absent, Gazan farmers continue to cultivate these flowers within resistant networks of care and survival. While Palestinian sumud, or steadfastness, is often symbolized through the olive tree which can live for thousands of years, floriculture reads another, more ephemeral side of sumud. As a labor intensive, short season, and high input crop, tending delicate carnations embodies the continued commitment to and tenuousness of life amidst capitalist ruin and endlessly imposed catastrophe. Contradictorily, while farmers apply toxic pesticides to flowers which leach into the soil, carnations as nonconsumables evade perennial concerns of other local food crops metabolizing the always more toxic residuals of Israeli onslaught—a paradox illustrating the inescapable toxicity of occupation’s waste siege.
In reading the history of carnation cultivation in Gaza across the post-Oslo popular press, this paper hopes to understand agriculture, water, and mobility from the Oslo Accords to the 2023 siege of Gaza. I situate this story within greater narratives of agricultural symbolism in Palestinian literary production and nationalist discourse, the discursive and material production of water scarcity, and the practice of sumud as a powerful Palestinian grammar of resistance. Rather than the failure of a peace process, following the agricultural markets of Palestine is yet another example of how Oslo was successful in its goal of establishing greater Israeli control over the resources and economy of Palestine as outlined in the peace accords. From the specificity of soil to international trade networks, this paper asks: in (and against) what conditions is life made? I explore the complicated entanglement of subsistence and capitalism in the market-oriented economy. Finally, this paper questions war as a space of life and survival for those who must live it, where Gazans still cultivate beauty from poisoned earth.
Marlaina Yost is a PhD student in the department of history at Yale University. Her research interests include the modern Middle East, environment, agrarian Studies, infrastructure, waste, sound & sensory landscapes, the body, meat, lifeworlds, multispecies communities, capitalism, and failure.