Abstract

As a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement, I’ve travelled through rural villages, olive groves, and grazing fields across the West Bank where Palestinians live under the violent realities of Israeli apartheid and occupation. Drawing from on-the-ground experiences of protective presence and direct action in Palestine, this essay details how militarised farming outposts, firing zones, and frontier myths are weaponised for dispossession by the Zionist settler colonial regime.

“Calico” is an ISM volunteer, adherent to the sixth, and professor of emancipatory politics engaged in direct action and the documentation of human rights violations across occupied Palestine. Based in L8-Toxteth, Liverpool, they can be reached at lesdamnes@pm.me

Farming Outposts

Throughout the hills and valleys of the illegally occupied West Bank, farming outposts, firing zones, and frontier myths have become weapons of choice for Israeli settler colonialism. Frequently disguised as agricultural development, farming outposts are in fact militarised land grabs designed to erase Palestinian presence under the auspices of green economic growth and religious supremacy. Backed by the full weight of the Israeli state and with ethnonationalist zeal and livestock at the vanguard, Zionist settlers are carving new frontlines of dispossession across the region. 

To the untrained eye, the sprawling southern Hebron hills and fertile basin of the Jordan Valley may appear to be a bucolic, rural idyl. Beneath the surface, however, lies a brutal trifold campaign of illegal occupation, apartheid, and annexation. Israeli farming outposts are justified via the long-standing settler colonial and now infamous doctrine of terra nullius—an imperial decree that reifies Indigenous lands as “empty.” In turn, Palestinian territory continues to be recast in the image of the occupier as an open frontier that must be tamed and made “productive” via enclosure, commoditisation, and private ownership.

IOF soldiers arrest Palestinians near a rural village in the southern region of Masafer Yatta. Source: International Solidarity Movement (palsolidarity.org).

Zionist settlers, armed to the teeth and operating under the protection of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), receive grazing subsidies and establish outposts adjacent to remote Palestinian villages, often Bedouin. A series of predictable violent incursions are then unleashed: threats, raids, ambushes, arson attacks, crop damage, and the theft of animals. Every act of settler belligerence pushes Palestinians further off the land, not to mention into more acute forms of poverty. Goats, sheep, cattle, rudimentary shelters, electric fences, digital maps, spy drones, legal decrees, and assault rifles are all tools put in the service of stealing Palestinian land. 

In short, whilst the genocide of Gaza rages on, the West Bank is being torn apart, emptied out, and voraciously annexed. Indeed, the presence of settler outposts, Israeli flags, and the Zionist movement’s land management plans has never been innocent. All represent territorial claims to be enforced through terror, which has increased by an order of magnitude since October 7, 2023.

Colonial Roots

Pastoral colonisation in Palestine as a strategy draws from deep historical and ideological roots. Since the early 20th Century, Zionist leaders perceived Palestine to be a barren, uncultivated landscape—a desolate frontier awaiting Jewish renewal and “modern development.” Settler narratives of “making the desert bloom” and replacing “Arab infiltrators” disavowed the ecological knowledges, agricultural traditions, and Indigenous presence of Palestinians. Using pastoral outposts to confiscate land also extends the longer and broader practice of cunningly mobilising conservation to mask dispossession and domination. 

For example, in the late 1940s, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) collected donations to plant European pine trees on the ruins of Palestinian villages, which were wiped off the map during the Nakba. International charitable contributions to the JNF for nature reserves thus meant that trees could be used to cover up the crime of ethnic cleansing. While advertised as well-intentioned afforestation, it was a scheme to erase Palestinian placenames and foreclose possibilities of return. 

Today, Israeli grazing contracts and farming outposts operate under the same dual principle. Firstly, assert that that the frontier will equally be made industrially productive and adroitly preserved if in the hands of settlers. Secondly, stereotype as “backwards” and expel the Indigenous population for whom the land and local ecologies are vital to identity, culture, and survival. 

Present-day shepherding outposts recycle similar frontier mentalities and colonial-era abuses, framing occupying settlers who are guilty of illegal annexation and environmental devastation as eco-conscious stewards who safeguard nature. This amounts to premeditated mass manipulation and Palestinian elimination by design. It is also an exceptionally convenient way to greenwash Israeli apartheid and ecocide.  

A recently raided Bedouin community’s land in the Jordan Valley is marked for seizure by settlers. Source: International Solidarity Movement (palsolidarity.org).

The infrastructure and technology supporting the Zionist takeover of the West Bank is vast. Israeli authorities, under a smokescreen of administering “state land”, issue opaque grazing contracts that settlers weaponise to seize territory far beyond previously established (yet illegal) boundaries. Once settlers possess permits, they behave as if they own the land and call upon the IOF to expel Palestinians who are ironically deemed trespassers.

As recent reports have highlighted, Israeli contracts are sanctioning the expropriation of private Palestinian lands and areas under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Farming outposts and military firing zones are then installed. Meanwhile, Palestinian communities continue to be corralled and confined  by settler militias and the IOF into ever-shrinking enclaves.

Firing Zones

Across the occupied West Bank, Israel has also declared nearly 20 percent of the area as “firing zones”—spaces ostensibly reserved for military training but that are actually a leading means of dispossession. The designation strips local communities of access to pastures, fields, and water sources. Palestinians are put in an impossible bind because building, grazing, and cultivating are prohibited. To make matters worse, any attempt to remain on the land is met with reprisal—raids, arrests, demolitions.

While presented as an Israeli “security” measure, the militarisation of Palestine produces profound ecological harm. IOF vehicles churn soil into dust, level terraces, and destroy delicate flora and fauna systems that evolved under centuries of Bedouin stewardship. Blasting activities ignite wildfires that consume crops and olive groves, leaving scorched earth where biodiverse ecosystems once flourished. Even in zones where no training occurs, the threat of military manoeuvres and clearance operations prevent Palestinians from tending to the land. Erosion, overgrowth, and food insecurity ensue.

A Palestinian home in the southern Hebron hills where settler attacks and demolitions are intensifying. Source: International Solidarity Movement (palsolidarity.org).

Water systems are especially vulnerable. Springs and cisterns dry up or are deliberately buried. Wells collapse under the weight of military convoys and access roads divert natural water flows. Pollution from IOF training operations further contaminate wells as residue from ordnances, oil spills, and burning fossil fuels leach into aquifers.

The result is chronic scarcity for Palestinian communities trying to survive arid conditions. In stark contrast, nearby Zionist settlements receive uninterrupted water supplies piped in through state-subsidised infrastructure. Some even have recreational ponds and underground swimming pools. 

By sabotaging the land’s regenerative capacity via militarised earthworks and detonating munitions, Israeli firing zones have become instruments of environmental exploitation and ruin. Palestinian families are forced to listen to and endure ballistic training, livestock confiscation, and the systematic decimation of their fields, water sources, and villages. Psychological, bodily, and ecological trauma are the primary outcomes.

This racialised order ensures that Bedouin shepherding communities are forcibly displaced and live in fear of being put in administrative detention. Conversely, Israeli settlers are offered armed escorts when grazing herds and constructing new outposts. Across the occupied territories, militarised apartheid is merging with ecofascism to forge a carceral geography that consolidates Zionist domination over Palestinian land and life.

Costs and Consequences 

Zionism’s settler colonial project is not merely displacing Palestinians—it is severing them from their inherited lands, ancestral memories, (bio)cultural heritage, livelihood strategies, and customary land management practices. Daily, under the Israeli apartheid regime’s escalating deployment of farming outposts and firing zones, Palestinians are experiencing mounting restrictions on mobility and movement of all forms. 

The environmental consequences of pastoral colonialism are as deliberate as they are destructive. Overgrazing by settler herds depletes vegetation and soil fertility, wrecking ecosystems Palestinians have relied on for generations. Olive groves are fenced off, cut down, or simply set on fire. Access to water is denied. Indigenous seeds and plants are debilitated by invasive species, if not replaced altogether.  

By paying lip service to sustainable development, Palestinian land is being ecologically re-engineered to expedite the Zionist annexation of the West Bank, establish an ethnonationalist state, and assert a single, supremacist religious identity. The Israeli government is underwriting this colonisation through millions of shekels in agricultural sponsorships, legal defence, and military support.

IOF soldiers block Palestinians from accessing their rural village, pastoral lands, and olive groves. Source: International Solidarity Movement (palsolidarity.org).

Additionally, extremist organisations like Amana funnel private and public resources into building and maintaining illegal agricultural stations and pastoral outposts. More specifically, Israeli youth programmes are used to recruit marginalised adolescents into settler militias tasked with encroaching on Palestinian land and terrorising Bedouin locals. Paradoxically, the initiatives are portrayed as “rehabilitative” and a way to support “at-risk” youth.

Undeniably, the Zionist regime’s plan for Palestine is composed of a potent combination of colonial expulsion and accumulation by dispossession. Indigenous groups and land relations are denigrated and denied, while land is seized and privatised. Put succinctly, the environment is being captured and converted into capital for production, profit, and the benefit of a settler population.

By establishing “facts on the ground,” Israel’s illegal occupation is doing the political dirty work of annexation and eradication. National security concerns founded in racist dehumanisation allow borders to redrawn. Green agri-entrepreneurial initiatives expedite land grabs. Palestinian presence is being purged from the West Bank. 

As I witnessed across Palestine, homes are being demolished, shepherds are being shot, and entire villages are being razed—all at the hands of fervent settlers and IOF soldiers who, along with their Christian Zionist supporters, argue they have been granted a biblical mandate. Such ruthless frontier pogroms are neither incidental nor exceptional. They are pages straight out of the settler coloniser’s chauvinist playbook.

What must be done?

Even though its defeat is impending, the Zionist settler colonial regime attempting to eradicate Palestine will not collapse on its own. The international community must stop treating outposts as marginal matters and illegal exceptions. Dismantling them requires cutting off financial flows, ending military support, and rejecting the ideological scaffolding that frames settler colonisation as sustainable cultivation.

Climate experts, environmental scientists, academic researchers, and human rights organisations alike must condemn and confront the Israeli apartheid state’s use of the environment as a weapon. The West Bank is neither a frontier nor a wilderness to be mercilessly conquered and tamed. It is at once a social and ecological home—inhabited and cultivated for generations—where every valley and hill carries the imprint of Palestinian history, heritage, memory, and life

Flowers tended to by a Palestinian woman rest above rolling hills where the family’s goats and sheep graze. Source: International Solidarity Movement (palsolidarity.org).

To achieve justice in Palestine, liberation, self-determination, and the right to return must be made material—not only in sentiment and statement but in action and deed. That begins with naming the Zionist regime’s settler colonial violence for what it is, exposing its tactics, and confronting its confederates. It also requires all of us to take a side and show up. And to do so while listening to Palestinians who are resisting and fighting back.

On this point, I give the final word to Fuad Abu Saif, a Palestinian activist and researcher with the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) and grassroots movement La Via Campesina, who aptly states: “To view the Palestinian farmer solely as a symbol of resilience or nostalgia is to miss the point. Today, the Palestinian farmer is the frontline defender of sovereignty, environmental justice, and the right to life itself.”