For decades and beyond, Palestinian women have cultivated native plants to heal and feed their families. Illustration by Ghayad Khatib.
In the depth of night, three plants gathered in the mountain’s embrace.
Sage, mallow, and thyme spread out on the breeze and laid their heads on the earth, a land that had memorized the faces of women, their voices, their healing incantations, and the tears of exhaustion. But tonight was different. There was no talk of dew, nor of the clippers used in harvest, nor of the sun’s fickle moods. They agreed, in an ancient silence, to leave behind their daily herb chatter and begin a different kind of tale: stories of the women who carried them in their hearts long before gathering them into baskets, who watered them with the tears of hardship before the rains came, and who hung them by windows like charms of survival.
At that moment, the moon was full, suspended in the sky like an unsleeping eye, a quiet witness, a light that knew its way to forgotten details. It wasn’t just a passing glow, but a storyteller walking the fields, tracing shadows, carrying stories in its chest.
It saw what no camera could, heard what was never written.
It was there, present, above the hills of Beit Fajjar, by the valleys of Al-Batouf, and in the forgotten fields between Yaabad and Ailabun.
The moon—our storyteller—spoke to us: “Before the gathering begins, let me tell you why this night had to happen. Why sage, thyme, and mallow came together after a long silence.”
The moon sighed and continued with the calm of the all-knowing: “Let me give you a bit of context— Not every night listens, and not every story finds someone to tell it. What’s about to be said is the distillation of lifetimes of silence. It’s what can’t be pinned to a banner, nor recorded in law. It began the moment stories faded, replaced by reports, classifications, and regulations. That’s where the tale begins.”
The relationship between Palestinians and wild plants was never a mere detail in their daily lives. Farming wasn’t just a means of survival: it was an extension of identity, a way of living that didn’t rely on the market or the state, but on knowledge, repetition, and the rhythm of weather.
Since the Nakba of 1948, this relationship has been systematically dismantled. It wasn’t just about land confiscation or village demolition, it was about targeting the customs that tied people to their land. What was once natural and self-evident became monitored, restricted, and criminalized.
In 1950, the Knesset passed a law titled “Protection of Plants – Goat Damage,” known as the “Black Goat Law.” It was framed as environmental protection from goats, but its real aim was to drive Palestinian farmers and herders off their lands and weaken their presence in rural life. Restricting goat movement was a roundabout way of shrinking self-sufficiency and drying up small income sources, especially for women who relied on this agricultural cycle to feed their families.
Later, as the colonial project continued, thyme, sage, and mallow were classified as “protected species.” Environmental laws, which were meant to preserve nature on the surface, were in fact severing the bond between Palestinians and their plants. Harvesting these herbs became an environmental offense, punishable by fines, often targeting women who had been foraging them for generations in villages like Beit Duqqu, Kafr Manda, and the surroundings of Mount Gerizim.
In 1963, a new law was passed, named the “National Parks and Nature Reserves Law.” Through this, authorities were able to close off vast areas of depopulated village lands and open spaces traditionally used for grazing and foraging. Under this law, even entering these zones or picking a single plant became a punishable act, treated as damage to the ecosystem.
At the same time, a less visible but even more devastating legal tactic unfolded. Most lands of displaced Palestinians were reclassified as “State Land” under the Absentees’ Property Law. This turned roaming through ancestral fields or collecting plants from historic family lands into what was legally considered “trespassing on state property.” Even those born in the place were barred from returning—except as distant onlookers behind fences, or as potential violators.
In parallel, the occupation deliberately undermined the natural environment itself, through the construction of the separation wall, expansion of settlements, and transforming farmland into military or industrial zones. These policies destroyed local biodiversity and shrank the habitats of wild plants, especially across the northern plains, the Jordan Valley edges, and the interior’s open hills.
When the moon finished its story, a brief silence fell, as if the fields themselves were catching their breath. There was no formal declaration of a new beginning, but the wind shifted, the tone changed, and the scent of the earth grew more present. Each plant, though deeply familiar with the others, felt the time had come to redefine itself, not only to its companions, but to itself first.
They needed to remind the world—and themselves—who they were, before they were reduced to images on tea boxes, pages in heritage books, or infractions on a citation slip.
And so, with reverent calm, they began to introduce themselves.
Wild thyme is used for a variety of medicinal purposes in Palestinian homes. Photo by Rami El-Sabban.
Thyme spoke first, its warm scent filling the air:
“I am the thyme of breakfast, the flavor of lunch, the scent of a long-lost one. We used to be gathered from between the rocks with the first light, spread out on rooftops, dried in the shade, then mixed with sesame and olive oil. I’d become a bundle packed in schoolbags, workbags, exile bags. I was steeped in tea for stomach aches, to calm coughs, stored in glass jars or burlap sacks, hung from kitchen strings. I traveled in care packages, smuggled through checkpoints, added to homes with love.”
“I was always part of the home’s rituals,” thyme continued, “A gift that traveled from town to town, from village to camp, from a mother to her daughter. I am thyme—not a metaphor, not a symbol. I am the flesh of your day, the scent of your morning. There is no day that truly begins without me.”
In 1977, just one year after the massacre of Tel al-Zaatar—the Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon that was entirely destroyed and soaked in the blood of thousands—Israeli Minister of Agriculture Ariel Sharon added thyme to the list of “protected plants.” There was no official connection between the massacre and the law, but the symbolism was stark: A plant that carried the camp’s name was criminalized after the loss, as if the occupation wasn’t content with butchering the body. It also sought to seize the memory, even in name.
From that point on, foraging thyme was no longer simply an ecological act; it became a punishable offense, subject to fines or imprisonment. The goal was not to protect nature but to transform a simple tradition into an activity governed by military orders.
The assault on the plant wasn’t just environmental or economic: it was a blow to people’s ability to gather, preserve rituals, and maintain their organic relationship to the land. This coincided with the establishment of the Green Patrol in 1976, allegedly formed to enforce environmental regulations. But it quickly became a colonial tool, chasing farmers and shepherds, confiscating village harvests, and demolishing homes under the guise of “environmental violations.”
Wild flowers of Palestine. White sage (Salvia graveolens Vahl). 1900. Photo part of Matson (G. Eric and Edith) Photograph Collection. Library of Congress.
Sage smiled at Thyme, and spoke with a voice that sounded like the scent of soil after rain:
“I, too, have tasted the sting of pursuit, my comrade in the field. They would pick me at dawn and hide me in corners of the home. Our grandmothers tucked me into cloth sacks, on shelves no eyes or patrols could reach. I am sage, the herb that always simmered on a quiet fire in every household. My voice rose with the steam of tea, settled into the palms of mothers watching over their children, or into the chest of a man weary from his day.
I was never just tea— I was stillness, relief after strain, a long breath after a suffocating day.
I steeped with black tea leaves, melted headaches in silence. You’d find me in corners, in calloused hands, in homes scented with memories.”
Sage continued: “Women knew me like they knew their own fatigue. They brewed me for the children, prepared me in rituals that resembled nothing in a pharmacy. They dabbed me on aching heads and gave me as gifts, like a warm palm on sorrow’s brow.
I was always present, in celebration and in sorrow. They adorned graves with my scent, raised me in weddings and births. I heard the ululations, and I heard the wails. I witnessed how life passed from doorway to hallway.”
“My voice lived in their chants:
We planted sage by the door,
We planted sage in the garden,
We planted sage in the orchards…
I was a song of life. But when we were broken, when the harvest was threatened and the homeland wounded, the chant turned into a song of resistance:
Mother, give me the fedayee even for free, He slipped into the occupied land with a rifle in hand…
The words changed, but I remained. The herb of stories and songs, of prisons and folk dances.
And when the land was denied to us, they began to chase me too, like they chased you, Thyme. My picking became forbidden. My symbolism unsettled them.
But I say this, just as the elder women said before me:
Palestine calls to the free… I am sage.
I am not just picked—I am spoken.
Not just grown—I am sung.
I am the shadow of the past when they try to erase it,
The taste of belonging when people feel lost.
I am what remained, even when so many did not.”
Though sage was never officially listed among the “protected species,” her existence was not spared from persecution. Since the mid-1970s, Israeli authorities began enforcing new agricultural policies in the West Bank and Galilee, focusing on introducing alternative crops, particularly medicinal and aromatic plants, into settlements, supported directly by the Ministries of Agriculture and Economy. These herbs were promoted as income sources for new settlers, while Palestinian markets were choked by licensing requirements. Palestinian women were forbidden from selling herbs like sage and mallow in central markets without pre-approved permits, which were often denied.
By the 1980s, sage and other wild herbs were publicly associated with “unmonitored quality risks.” A directive from the occupation’s Civil Administration required Palestinian producers to submit samples for laboratory testing before distributing commercially, regulations not imposed on settler-grown crops.
Mallow (malva pusilla), found in Palestine’s wilderness, known as a “stubborn herb” that grows in the most unsuspected places. Photo by Mohamed Sharawna via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Mallow then emerged with her soft green leaves, and spoke in a voice like mist rising from rain:
“I am Mallow. I know I’m simple—not a ceremonial herb, not a song’s melody—but I was always there when things got tight. I am not just a weed that sprouts after the rain, I was survival itself.
When bellies were empty with not a shekel in one’s pocket,
I was the meal. I didn’t wait for cultivated soil, I grew between stones, by the roadside, in backyard gardens, between the cracks in pavement.
Women knew my season. They’d rise at dawn, a basket in one hand, a knife in the other. They’d gather me, wash me in a basin, and cook me with garlic and oil. We’d sit around the pot, mallow and taboon bread, a large dish in the center. They’d dip the bread in, give thanks to God.”
“People used to joke:
You invited me to dinner, and it turned out to be mallow? Oh God, really?
But I wasn’t a joke. I was the [just enough] meal, but I was also pride.
And when the cities were besieged, when every path was blocked, I came back. I returned from the land without permission, without a permit, without a map. I returned to say: We can still live, we can still go on.”
In 2011, the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael), in coordination with the Nature and Parks Authority, issued internal memos expressing “growing concern about the increasing phenomenon of wild plant foraging by Arab citizens,” labeling this practice a threat to open-area ecosystems. Mallow was named explicitly in these reports, cited as a species suspected of being gathered in large quantities during certain seasons, especially by women in Palestinian villages near so-called nature reserves.
This concern prompted official calls to “regulate the phenomenon,” and efforts began to amend the 2025 appendix to the Plant Protection Law, to include more species under “legally protected status”—among them, mallow. Under this classification, foraging mallow in designated natural or state lands became a legal offense, punishable by fines or criminal charges. Repeat offenses, or suspicion of foraging for commercial use, could trigger legal files and prosecution.
And so, mallow—the stubborn herb that grows in wild fields, on roadside edges, through sidewalk cracks and beside fences—was transformed from a symbol of survival and abundance to a legal offense. But the irony lies in the law’s inability to contain her. The very act of holding a small knife and plastic bag on a spring stroll could be interpreted as a threat to the state, while the plant herself kept sprouting quietly beneath the asphalt, as if to remind us that what rises from the soil cannot be easily fenced off, nor confiscated by decree.
A hush fell among the plants—not from weariness, but from the weight of seasons caught in their throats. It was as though the earth bent closer to their stories, drawing near, watching, breathing. Each plant carried, in its leaf, the name of a woman: A mother from al-Rama rising before dawn, wrapping her headscarf and climbing the hills of Beit Fajjar to gather sage. A grandmother from ‘Arraba al-Battouf tying thyme with green thread, storing it in a wooden chest among old books and the scent of musk. An aunt from Yaabad cooking mallow with fresh oil, telling the neighborhood children about the first rain that drowned the seedlings after a dry season.
This wasn’t just farming—it was legacy, harvested and preserved,
Held in the fingers that remembered the paths, the scents, the stories.
With every mention of an iron gate, a fine, or a seized plot of land, memory responded with an image of a home— a modest evening meal on a woven mat, or an ululation at a wedding where baskets of thyme stood as guests.
From there, the tone of the stories began to shift. No more laws, no more reports— only the voice of a grandmother counting the days, telling the plant her secrets, the rhythm of her seasons, how she always came to her by the same path, and swore she’d never cook her except with oil from this year’s harvest.
Each plant replied with a quiet smile, carrying in its rustle the weight of a seed-gatherer, a woman who gave her life collecting it.
*************************************
Israel has established various laws and regulations that ban Palestinian women from foraging for native herbs, under the guise of “protecting ecosystems.” Photo by Rami El-Sabban.
Thyme grew more animated, and began recounting “Teta Zahra’s Shock: House Arrested Because of Me.”
On a warm afternoon, Teta Zahra sat by the window, eyes fixed on the distant mountains where she used to gather thyme between the rocks, inhale its scent before even touching it, run her fingers over its small leaves as if to bless it, murmuring softly, “It used to grow for us, and we grew with it.” She knew it in all its forms: the wild thyme, sharp and bold in taste; the softer, village kind that melted on the tongue; and the early spring thyme, covered in tiny purple flowers, calling out to be picked. In her home, thyme was ever-present, at breakfast, with olive oil; in hot tea to soothe the chest; and in small twigs tucked under pillows to ward off insomnia.
But now it was distant, locked away behind laws she never understood.
That morning, returning from the mountain with a handful of thyme in her hand, as she had done all her life, she never expected to end up in an interrogation room. She was questioned as though she’d committed a crime, confined to a corner like a suspect, as if she had stolen something that wasn’t hers. She couldn’t fathom how thyme could belong to anyone but the land itself.
“They told me it was forbidden, that it belonged to the state. But who do herbs belong to, if not to the soil that grew them? The earth waters them on its own, will they imprison the rain too?”
She was forced to sign documents she couldn’t read. Released only under the condition of house arrest—not by chains, but by walls—walls that were enough to keep her from the mountains and the ritual she had carried with her since childhood.
Marium Eum Imal, a farmer in the Jordan Valley area of the West Bank. In 1950, the Knesset passed a law that was framed as environmental protection from goats, but its real aim was to drive Palestinian farmers and herders off their lands and weaken their presence in rural life. Photo by Trocaire (Alan Whelan) via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
Then Sage sighed and said she too had a story about her favorite aunt: “Khala Azziyeh: A Story of Soil, Scent, and the Bullet.”
Each morning, Khala Azziyeh would sit on the threshold of her home, her hands busy sorting bundles of sage. She separated dry leaves from fresh ones, tying tight strings around small bunches with practiced care. A young man would pass by the alley and smile, “Good morning, Khala. Still gathering sage?” She’d laugh, shaking her head, “Sage is ours, habibi, not theirs. What we pick with our hands, the land waters with its blood, not like the sage they sell in the supermarket.”
To Khala Azziyeh, sage wasn’t just a herb; it was medicine and sustenance, a companion to the cold, a guardian for mothers. When a child’s stomach ached at night, mothers would rush to brew a cup. When men came home exhausted from the fields, they poured boiling sage tea to restore their strength. When sorrow gripped the women, each tucked a handful beneath her pillow, hoping to dream of something lighter than this world burdened by barriers.
She knew every type of sage:“This one’s the village kind: its leaves are oily, just pinch it and the scent stays on your fingers. That one’s longer, bitter in taste, but lasts longer in the body. And this here is named ja‘diyyeh, good for cramps.” She’d explain this to every little girl who came to learn from her, to every boy who asked, to every visitor unaware that sage here wasn’t just an herb, it was a grandmother’s will to the land.
But Khala Azziyeh no longer went to the mountains as she once did thirty years ago. That day, she set out as usual, basket on her back, singing with her neighbors an old song:
Mama, we planted sage at the door, Palestine is calling to the revolutionaries,
Mama, give me the fedayee even for free, He entered the occupied land with his rifle in hand…
She didn’t get to finish the song. The soldiers appeared at the foothill—stood before her like a wall, ordering her to stop. At first, she didn’t understand. But soon, she realized. The mountains were no longer hers. She could no longer reach out to pluck even a single leaf without fear.
When they returned her to her home, she sat on the steps and stared at the distant ridge. In her hands were a few sprigs she’d managed to hide beneath her dress. She smelled them slowly, her eyes drowning in the distance. That evening, she lit a fire, boiled water, dropped in the last remaining leaves, and poured herself a cup of hot tea. Lifting it gently, she whispered to herself before taking the first sip: Sage is ours. And anyone who tries to forbid it is trying to forbid the land from breathing.
As a result of Israeli regulations, mallow was transformed from a symbol of survival and abundance to a legal offense. Photo by Cynthia Ghoussoub.
Now Mallow grew excited, eager to share her story: “Hajjeh Siham: The Poor People’s Herb That Troubled the Law.”
“Can you believe it, habibi? Mallow! It’s banned!”
Hajjeh Siham laughed a long, hearty laugh, as if trying to find logic in absurdity. She sat on her doorstep, sorting soft green leaves while sunlight streamed through the courtyard.
Hajjeh Siham knew mallow as well as the lines in her palm. As a child, her mother would hold her hand in winter, lead her to the village outskirts, and they’d both bend down to gather the leaves, one by one. Her mother would say: Mallow is the herb of the poor, but no one ever goes hungry with it. It’s enough and more, grows on its own, and asks for nothing but a bit of sun and rain.
As she grew older, mallow became more than a kitchen staple—it became a memory, a winter provision, a thread between generations. When picked, it was washed well, spread on the table, mixed with flour, onions, and oil, transformed into warm dishes that could feed an entire family.
But things had changed. One day, she went to the nearby fields, as she always did. With her cloth bag in hand, she walked with other women, laughing as they always had. Their laughter vanished when a soldier appeared, face frozen, voice flat:“Picking is forbidden here. This is a protected area.”
“Protected from who?” Hajjeh Siham asked, hands on her hips, disbelieving. Mallow? We can’t pick mallow?
There was no debate. The women returned to the village, but Hajjeh Siham wasn’t let off so easily.She was summoned more than once, traveling long distances to appear before the law. She spent hours waiting, treated as though she’d committed a serious crime. In the end, after endless delays, the verdict arrived: a monetary fine.
In many cases, the charges weren’t just about picking wild plants. They were really about a Palestinian woman standing on her land, practicing a ritual inherited from her mother and grandmother. Women were fined obscene amounts simply for possessing one or two kilos of thyme or akkoub (gundelia).
In every case, the same image repeated: A woman carrying a small basket, not a weapon, facing an entire legal system that portrayed her as a threat to “nature reserves” and “ecological order.”
A tiny sign from the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority was enough to militarize the space and chase down those who tried to breathe the land back into their lungs. The courts never saw these women as carriers of living ecological memory. They reduced them to legal violators.
Once again, the settler cast himself as the guardian of nature, while the Palestinian woman was recast as “ignorant,” “destructive,” or “trespassing.”
But beneath these accusations lies something deeper: An attempt to uproot women from their land, to sever their bond with the plant, the body, and with time itself.
It’s not thyme that’s being targeted, but the woman who knows when to pick it, how to dry it, and which herb belongs in evening tea.
Thus, the law becomes a tool to erase women from memory, from the field, from the sacred relationship they’ve maintained with the herbs they’ve nurtured as they’ve nurtured their children.
The women whose stories we will continue to tell were not simply “picking.” They were practicing a form of resistant existence. What’s being persecuted isn’t the quantity, nor the herb, but the hands that still sow, gather, and teach.
The courts never saw Palestinian women as carriers of living ecological memory. They reduced them to legal violators. Photo by Rami El-Sabban.
The wild plants, as if speaking from the very soil they sprang from, asked: “Do you think our targeting was random? Do you believe that forbidding our harvest has nothing to do with the bodies of Palestinian women?”
Under an occupation that seeks to fence in both land and flesh, this a hidden chapter in the war on women: on their fertility, their inherited knowledge, their tools of survival and continuity.
Sage, which grandmothers once simmered in copper pots to strengthen the womb, balance hormones, and prepare the body for birth— was never just a herb. It was an extension of a woman’s sovereignty over her body, her ability to renew life despite oppression. Sage contains compounds that balance reproductive hormones and support fertility—helping women adapt to harsh environments. It insists on giving Palestinian women another chance to take root.
Thyme, daily guardian of the stomach and colon, natural soother of menstrual cramps—was never just a folk remedy. It is part of women’s traditional medicine, passed down from grandmothers to mothers, carried by young girls in cloth pouches on early-morning foraging walks. Thyme tea regulates cycles, eases period pain, and relieves tension-induced digestive issues. It is a physical and political companion for women who carry the burdens of both home and field.
A hush fell over the mountain. Not the silence of endings, but the fullness of being.
A silence like dew trembling on a mallow leaf, like Teta’s sigh as she lifts the lid from a dish of thyme, like the moment just before tears fall, when the throat holds more than words can bear.
The plants exchanged glances— not to confirm what had been said, not to say goodbye, but as if looking upon each other with dignity and silent gratitude.
There was no need for a heavy farewell. They would meet again, and again, at a kitchen window, on a stone beneath a fig tree, in the arms of the fierce grandmothers.
Tonight’s gathering was not an exception but a continuation— a celebration of what remained alive, despite all efforts to make it wither.
Then, the moon—our storyteller—returned,
With a voice that never needed to rise,
For it came from the belly of the earth:
“What I heard tonight was not a tale, but a reclamation. What gathered around this fire was not just herbs speaking, but a living archive of a land that remembers its names, that knows who walked it and who was barred.
The women were the true narrators—not because they spoke, but because they remembered.
In every mallow leaf sprouting by an abandoned road, in every sage bundle dried by a weathered hand, in every pouch of thyme smuggled past a checkpoint. There is a story not recorded in UN reports, nor announced in the weather forecast.
There is a battle taking place with no weapons. A battle of survival in the recipe, in the tale, in the scent, in the hand that knows what it’s doing when it holds the knife—not to wound, but to free a mint leaf from its stem, gently, as if in prayer.
The laws that besieged these plants were not to protect nature— but to dry out knowledge.
Not to preserve herbs, but to forget the grandmothers.
They wanted a land without memory, without women who know when to pick mallow, when to steep sage, and when to store thyme for a winter that always arrives with war.
But tonight, the voices were heard.
And as long as there is a plant in the earth,
a woman in memory, a gathering on the mountain, the roots will not be severed.
Even if every field becomes a forbidden reserve,
And the fences rise taller than the sun’s shadows.”
Then the moon dimmed.
And a warm breath of wind whispered through the branches:
“They were here.”
Sage, Thyme, and Mallow— imprisoned in law, but free in memory.
Banned flavors, yet they know the way back, to the soil, and to the women who carry them in morning baskets.
Ghayad el-Khatib
Ghayad is an architect, animator, video game designer, and visual artist from Nazareth. Ghayad is a co-founder of the Pelest platform, which focuses on critical and liberatory architectural heritage, urban planning, and infrastructure. Her research interests include the metaphysical aspects of Palestinian Arab myths and folklore, their social extensions, and their relationship to space. Ghayad founded Ghaym, a hub for artistic and architectural endeavors that include tattooing, posters, ceramics, dialogues, writing, and various artistic fields to preserve Palestinian artistic heritage, and Mayd for material conservation, experimenting in different mediums of art and elemental aspects of nature and architecture, and coordinates field tours that trace Palestinian artifacts and Arab landmarks in depopulated villages and across the historical map of Palestine.
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