From grandmothers to granddaughters: Generational agricultural knowledge among rural women in British Mandate Palestine

Abstract

Palestinian peasant families had to adapt and survive under political and economic conditions dictated by European occupation and Zionist settler colonialism. Women had a major role in contributing to the efforts for survival and acquiring their status in the rural economy and the wider national struggle against British policies. Rural Arab families constituted the vast majority of the Palestinian population before the Nakba, or those displaced from their villages during the war on Palestine in 1948, and the formation of the State of Israel. The agricultural knowledge Palestinian women had and passed from one generation to the other was an important element for the survival of the peasant families under the different periods in which colonial countries and Zionist settlement shook the base of their economic existence.