The Struggle for Za’atar and Akkoub: Israeli
Nature Protection Laws and the Criminalizationof Palestinian Herb-Picking Culture
Rabea Eghbariah

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Abstract: Za’atar and akkoub are popular herbs in Palestinian culture and cuisine. In
1977, however, Ariel Sharon declared za’atar a ‘protected plant’, rendering its foraging,possession or trade a criminal offense. Akkoub suffered a similar fate when it was labelled
protected in 2005. Those who pick za’atar and akkoub subsequently became lawbreakers
and in many cases were indicted and convicted. The picking of za’atar and akkoub,
nonetheless, continues while many regard it as an act of resistance.
This paper examines the clash between Israeli nature protection laws and Palestinian
herb-picking culture in light of the political, economic, and scientific forces at play. It
reviews the court decisions pertaining to protected plants and shows that the ban has been
enforced harshly and exclusively against Palestinian herb-pickers. The paper argues thatthe law mobilized highly disputed scientific claims in favour of a civilizing narrative and acompeting claim to the land. Courts engaged in affirming this narrative and dismissed along-standing agro-culinary tradition under the auspices of law and nature.1
I confess that I made a mistake. I will not do this again. I ama father of seven children. I went to forage for the household.
It is only two small bags. I guarantee not to do it again.
—Crim Case 19051-03-10 State of Israel v. Nizar Khalil (2010)
Q: Do you know that picking za’atar is prohibited?
A: Yes, I know that picking za’atar is prohibited.
Prohibited for Arabs, permitted for Jews.
—Crim Case 6652/02 State of Israel v. Marie (2003)
This is a story as green as za’atar, as thorny as akkoub – two popular herbs in Palestinian
culture and cuisine that unexpectedly became markers of struggle. It is a struggle rooted
in land, literally and conceptually, and located at the intersection of nationalism andcolonialism, food and nature, expertise and resistance, markets and households, politics andecology, and perhaps most strikingly: the law. It is a story that unfolds in between fields,
plates and courtrooms: za’atar (Majorana syriaca) and akkoub (Gundelia toumerfortii) are

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The Struggle for Za’atar and Akkoub
declared as protected plants according to Israeli law and their picking is, therefore, criminallyprohibited.2 Foraging these plants, however, continues, as each year dozens are caught,
interrogated, charged, convicted, and fined, many of whom regard it as an act of resistance.
This paper examines the prohibition imposed on za’atar and akkoub. While literature
has not paid serious attention to the clash between Israeli law and Palestinian herb-picking
culture,3 this paper provides a comprehensive account of this phenomenon by examining
the legal, scientific, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of it. The paper showsthat no solid scientific basis exists for the ban and argues that the law has mobilized highly
indeterminant scientific claims in order to dismiss a long-standing agro-culinary traditionin favour of a competing claim to indigeneity.
This paper, nonetheless, does not intend to argue that any restriction on herb-picking
must have been inherently biased or repressive. Population growth, combined with anincreasing consumption, may have led to unsustainable overharvesting of these herb-plants.
There are compelling reasons, however, that cast doubt on the authenticity of the alleged
nature protection rationale and the necessity of the harsh enforcement methods deployed.
The paper argues, in this context, that court have further maneuvered judicial review toachieve ‘pragmatic closures around epistemic claims and controversies that science alone
could not have settled.’4 The paper examines the legal judgements pertaining to picking,possessing or trading za’atar and akkoub and reveals the role of courts in reproducing acivilized/barbarian narrative under the auspices of law and nature.

A. Land, Nature, Food and Zionism
Land and nature are central to Zionism. Ever since Zionist national aspirations manifested
in an institutionalized colonial project in Palestine, Zionist agencies undertook efforts toacquire control over land, settle it, and alter the natural landscape. Ideas of ‘redeeming
the land’ and ‘making the desert bloom’ became entwined in the Jewish National Fund’s(JNF) endeavours to purchase Palestinian land as early as the beginning of the twentiethcentury. This discourse envisioned Jewish-Zionists as ‘modern’ settlers who ‘saved’ the landand nature from the ‘backward’ Arabs who ‘desertified’ it. The Zionist ethos toward land
aspired to know, to settle, to develop, to afforest, to redeem, to bloom, and ultimately to
Judaize.5 These were all acts of possession that resembled a claim of ownership: we know,
appreciate, and develop the land; therefore, we deserve it.6
The perception of land as desolate and underdeveloped, and the local people as primitive
and uncivilized, was an omnipresent theme in European colonial thought. The Zionist
movement, emerging in Europe against this background, harboured similar sentiments
toward Palestine and Palestinians. The prosecution of Jewish people in Europe and thereligious character of the Holy Land, however, complicated the traditional colonialaccount. Zionism did not merely aspire to colonize the land, but also to create a ‘national

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homeland for the Jewish people’ in it. The making of Israel in Palestine took the form ofconsolidating Jewish national life at the expense of shattering a Palestinian one. Zionism
conflated nationalism with colonialism: it aspired to construct a religiously-defined nationin the colony, rather than subordinate the colony to an existing nation.7
For Zionism, the geographical space of colonization was identical to the space of its
national inception. This spatial site had to undergo a radical transformation to match
the European-Zionist vision of the Holy Land. In 1948, following the withdrawal of
the British Mandate from Palestine, Zionist armed groups occupied 78% of Mandate
Palestine’s land, and ousted most Palestinians living in it as refugees – an event termed the
Nakba (catastrophe) by Palestinians and known as the War of Independence for Israelis.
Palestinians who managed to remain in the land that had become Israel, became citizensof the state. During the 1950s and 1960s, largescale land expropriations from Palestinian
citizens took place and created an exceptional legal land regime that concentrated 93% ofland in state ownership (excluding the Palestinian territories occupied in the aftermathof 1967).8 This had increasingly pushed Palestinian peasants living in Israel from thefield to the city, and restructured Palestinians as urban proletariat in the predominantly
Jewish-Israeli economy; a political economy that continues to reproduce sharp inequalities
organized around ethno-national lines today.
Nature, in this context, was anything but natural. Afforestation rapidly emerged as apopular tool to evoke a green European scenery in what was perceived as a desolate, oriental
landscape.9 In a process that had started during the British Mandate, and expanded after
the establishment of Israel in 1948, the JNF planted more than 240 million trees in Israel/
Palestine, mostly pine trees. As Irus Braverman shows, the assembled pine-scape became
the quintessential signifier of Zionism in the natural landscape, in sharp distinction
from the Palestinian olive-scape.10 Nature was, therefore, both the site and the productof political and legal projects over land and landscape.11 For Israel and the JNF, however,the pine trees were much more than simply a method to ‘bloom the desert’ and resurrect a
Biblical narrative: afforestation subsumed the ruins of destroyed Palestinian villages in thegreen innocence of pine trees in favor of ‘collective forgetting.’12 The natural landscape of
Israel/Palestine has therefore become a medium that symbolizes a nation-building projectinterwoven with colonial dispossession.13
Afforestation projects, however, were not the only case of national-colonial policies
legitimized under the auspices of law and nature. The overlapping function of nature asa source of food and subsistence further complicated this account. The Kafkaesque storyof livestock treatment in Israel/Palestine provides a striking example of similar tensions
located at the intersection of law, colonialism, nature, food and expertise. In her work,
Tamar Novick provides a detailed account of the goats’ history in Palestine during the
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account by scrutinizing the phenomenon of Israeli officials ‘chasing goats’ and ‘abducting
camels’ starting from the 1970s.15 For years, goats and camels were ubiquitous in the Holy
Land. But since the British Mandate was established in Palestine, the situation for goats,camels and their Palestinian owners started to grow more precarious. Certain ideas about thegoats and camels became particularly popular among the colonial British administration:
the oriental camels and black-coloured goats were perceived as inferior, unproductive, andharmful animals in comparison to the European-origin cattle and white-coloured goats.
The administration accused the former of causing soil erosion, flooding, and desertificationand sought to disincentivize their ownership under the pretext of scientific expertise.
Scientists and officials who disputed these claims from within the administration wereignored and dismissed.
By the time the British administration came to an end, however, the plans to reduce
the number of goats and camels did not materialize and their populations remained stable.
After the establishment of Israel in 1948, the state intensified afforestation projects andsought to realize the British plan to its fullest: it aspired to eradicate the goats which foundthe trees palatable. The Knesset enacted what had become known as the Black Goat Act,and put in place plans to exterminate the goat population.16 While goat herding was dejure criminalized according to the Black Goat Act, camel grazing became de facto illegal
as the state was reluctant to allocate grazing lands for the latter. In the 1970s, a newlyestablished ‘Green Patrol’ implemented large-scale enforcement operations which reduced
the number of goats and camels to an unprecedented low. Objections from scientists andthe local Palestinian population were once again ignored.
The criminalization of Palestinian herb-picking culture, discussed in this paper, issituated against this background that amplifies and reflects national-colonial narratives
through the law pertaining to non-human subjects. The interplay between law and science
as well as the ostensibly a-political nature of food and the greenwashing potential of nature,often contribute to cloak these narratives and legitimate them under alleged objectivity.
The criminalization of herb-picking, as I show in the next chapters, reveals an illuminating
dynamic that reproduces similar human hierarchies under the pretext of nature protection
and scientific expertise.

B. Za’atar and Akkoub in Palestinian Culture
Za’atar and akkoub are quintessential herb-plants in Palestinian culture. ‘Every
Palestinian knows Za’tar,’ write British scholars Grace Growfoot and Louise Baldensperger
in their 1932 book From Cedar to Hyssop: A Study in the Folklore of Plants in Palestine. ‘It is
used from one end of the country to the other as a spice or condiment and has some reputetoo, as a medicine,’ they note, and go on to mention that ‘what is more interesting to us than
this is that Za’tar is most probably the Hyssop of the Bible.’17 Despite its Biblical roots, za’atar

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The Struggle for Za’atar and Akkoub
or other edible plants did not occupy a special status among Zionists who settled in British
Mandate Palestine.18 As years passed and Palestinian modern nationalism emerged, za’atar
became a prominent symbol of resistance that signalled Palestinian connection to the land.
Za’atar is commonly featured in poetry, politics, public discourse, and folklore. In
his famous poem Ahmad Al-Za’atar, Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish usedza’atar as a motif to describe Ahmad’s character, a symbol of Palestinian refugees in exile(‘For hands, of stone and of za’atar // I dedicate this song, for Ahmad, forgotten between
two butterflies’). Palestinian public intellectual Edward Said referred to za’atar as a codeof recognition. In a conversation with Salman Rushdi, Said asserted that despite za’atar’sabundance ‘all over the Arab world, and certainly in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon’ it has
become a distinctive symbol of Palestinian households (as Said quotes his friend: ‘It’s a signof a Palestinian home that has za’tar in it’).19
The za’atar’s prominence, however, did not degrade the akkoub’s special status. Akkoub
is a highly thorny, domestic, and seasonal plant. Unlike za’atar, the akkoub had to becleansed and cooked shortly after being foraged. In her autobiography, poet Fadwa Tuqan
describes the practice of akkoub cleansing as a signifier of temporal consciousness:

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The date of my birth vanished from their [Tuqan’s parents] memories in themists of time. Whenever I asked Mother, ‘But Mother, at least in what season
was it? What year?’, she would reply, laughing: ‘the day I was cooking akkub.
That’s the only birth certificate I have for you. I have forgotten the month andyear. All I remember is that I began to feel labour pains while cleaning thespines from the stalks of akkub.20
Salman Natour, acclaimed Palestinian writer, presents za’atar and akkoub as markers
of Palestinian-ness. In his well-known cynical style, Natour describes a conversation withhis friend during a journey to Paris. Challenging the notion of Paris and the West as theland of plethora, Natour asks teasingly ‘do they have za’atar and ‘akoub in Paris?’ only tobe answered with an expected negative nod. ‘I felt as if I’d defeated him with a knockout.
They don’t, do they?’ Natour summarizes and suggests: ‘we’ve made za‘atar into an effective
weapon against imperialism. They drop bombs on us and we spray them with za‘atar.’21
Za’atar and akkoub, in short, were not simply edible plants that contributed to thesubsistence of Palestinian households; za’atar and akkoub were also what it takes to makea household Palestinian. They were central to Palestinian culture and the production of
meaning. It is against this background and the continuous confiscation of Palestinian lands
that the criminalization of herb-plant picking consisted an attack on Palestinian culture
and further politicized their status as markers of land. The criminalization of za’atar andakoub has therefore borne symbolic notions of colonial dispossession.

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C. Edible Herb-Plants and Israeli Nature Protection Laws
The criminalization of Palestinian herb-picking culture is propagated through nature
protection laws. The Israeli Law of National Parks, Natural Reserves, and National andMemorial Sites authorizes the Minister of Environmental Protection to declare certain
plants as protected ‘natural values’ (hereinafter ‘protected plants’).22 Following a declaration,
it becomes a criminal offense to pick, possess or trade any amount of a protected plant.23
While the law leaves open the possibility of a maximum prison sentence of three years, themost common penalties are criminal fines, as elaborated in the next section. The authority
to declare a plant as protected and criminalize its picking is, therefore, vested in a politicalauthority, with no legal obligation to generate a baseline corpus of scientific evidence forsuch declarations.
In 1977, the authorized Minister Ariel Sharon modified the list of protected plants
to include, among other plants, za’atar.24 While dozens of plants were already listed
at that time as protected, za’atar not only stood out for being an edible plant but also a
prominent symbol in Palestinian culture and cuisine. Almost three decades later, in 2005,
Ariel Sharon, then Prime Minister of Israel and the Minister of Environmental Protection
simultaneously, modified the list of protected plants to include akkoub. The criminalizationof za’atar and akkoub was not restricted to Israel, and was expanded to the Occupied
Palestinian Territories (OPT) through military orders,25 although the criminal proceduresthat follow differ and involve military rather than civil courts.26 Those who pick za’ataror akkoub, whether in Israel or the OPT, thus became lawbreakers and were subjected tointerrogations and penalties.

Contested Scientific Basis

The clash between the Israeli law and Palestinian culture is political in nature. It invokes
national-colonial tensions and associations of dispossession. The role that scientific expertiseplays in legitimating the ban on za’atar and akkoub remains a crucial and interesting point.
For centuries, local people foraged herbs with no evidence that the practice decreased theabundance of the wild plants. The existing scientific evidence, however, further questions
the authenticity of the alleged nature protection rationale underpinning the ban. In fact,
the Nature and Parks Authority (NPA), the body in charge of enforcing the law andmonitoring the natural habitat, acknowledged there was a lack of evidence behind thedeclaration of za’atar as protected plant. In response to a freedom of information request,
the NPA wrote that ‘we did not succeed to trace any material or protocols from that time[of declaration]’.27 Elsewhere, official botanists from the NPA also acknowledged that theylack any scientifically meaningful plans to monitor the populations of these herbs.28
Evidence from both independent scientists and those affiliated with the Nature and Parks
Authority further shows that these herbs are not enlisted in any ‘red list’. namely, lists ofDraft Version: Not for Distribution or Citation

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endangered, near threatened or rare plants.29 Israeli botanists have criticized in this context
the gap between the legal protection of plants and their endangered status, emphasizingthat ‘the main danger since the 1980s for the extinction of biological species is the damage
to their natural habitat due to urban development, paving roads or intensive agriculture’.
rather than the ‘attractivity and picking concerns that instructed the protected plants’ listin the past.30 They further conclude that this ‘gap necessitates rethinking the issue of legal
protection’. and ‘changing the priorities of plant preservation and protection policies’.
As Professor Nativ Dudai, a botanist who has previously researched za’atar,31 put itin an interview: ‘No one talks about the fact that we, the Jewish [Israelis], destroy much
more za’atar than the Arabs pick. Do you know how many great za’atar populations were
uprooted by bulldozers? In Har Adar or Elyaqim interchange – locations with beautiful
amounts of za’atar, and all of it is now gone. But the Arab? He picks five kilograms and getsa fine.’32 Although Dudai suggests to ‘mark locations where the herbs are not threatened
and allow coordinated picking’, his opinion was dismissed by the Nature and Parks
Authority in favour of an absolute ban.33 Similar themes are evident regarding akkoub. The
state mobilized scientific knowledge to enlist akkoub as a protected plant, despite the factthat botanists clearly abstained from an absolute-ban recommendation.34
The disputed scientific basis that stands behind the ban on picking za’atar and akkoub
exacerbates the political tensions associated with the prohibition. Despite these indeterminacies,
historians and other researchers overlooked a critical examination of the scientific rhetoric thatenvelops the ban.35 In this context, the law further played a role in concealing the scientificindeterminacies and sealing them under the force of legal assertiveness.

Cultural Appropriation, Commercial Exploitation?

In parallel to the criminalization of the wild species of za’atar and akkoub, some
Jewish-Israeli farmers developed domesticated types and invested in commercializingthese herb-plants. Up until then, nature was the only source of za’atar and akkoub. The
domesticated and legally permitted species, nonetheless, remained inferior in quality andmany Palestinians continue to occasionally engage in picking them from the wild. Whilesome have speculated that the criminalization of these herb-plants had been motivated bycommercial interests of Jewish farmers,36 what becomes clear is that the ban had certainly
been maneuvered to generate profit.
The story of the Israeli Ben Harut family demonstrates the exploitation of the ban
on za’atar to make profit. Ze’ev and Yoram Ben Harut started planting domesticatedza’atar for commercial use in 1977, the same year za’atar was declared protected. In
a televised interview,37 the Ben Haruts bluntly described the expansion of the za’atarcommercialization project:

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The Struggle for Za’atar and Akkoub
Yoram Ben Harut: I gave it to my father [Ze’ev] to sell it in the West Bankand we saw that it has commercial potential.
Interviewer: Did you sell?
Yoram Ben Harut: Yes! They did not have za’atar. I remember that I walked
with my father in Nablus, and they [the Palestinians] ran after us yelling‘za’atar za’atar.’ Soon after we saw that it is going well, we extended the lot, weplanted five dunams and then again another five dunams.
Interviewer: So you grow and reach within less than five years, sorry three
years, to how much?
Yoram Ben Harut: 550 dunams.
The expansion of za’atar fields came against the background of massive expropriationsof Palestinian lands by the state, sparking the historical ‘land day’ events in 1976. The
redistribution of land according to ethno-national logic has reproduced itself in the za’atar
fields. The Ben Haruts, however, not only sought to grow the plant but also to sell the
traditional Palestinian za’atar mixture in order to increase profits:
Yoram Ben Harut: […] za’atar it is all good and beautiful, we are excited, but
the business has to bring money …
Interviewer: you want to sell to the Arabs a mixture of za’atar? It is like selling
ice to the Eskimos!
Yoram Ben Harut: Exactly! I want to sell ice to the Eskimos, that’s how itsounds! But I had an idea how to do it.
This idea entailed appropriating indigenous knowledge to gain profit:
Interviewer: So how did you know what to put in the mixture?
Yoram Ben Harut: That was the whole problem! In the beginning we put
some wrong ingredients and ratios and it tasted completely disgusting, it was
totally black. So I gave it to my father, to bring it to the Arabs, people said you
will not succeed!
Interviewer: So where did you get the right recipe and ingredients?
Ze’ev Ben. Harut: Each Arab family thinks that they are the best experts ofza’atar making … The Muslims do not accept for a stranger man to talk with
their wives. But I had good friends, so I spoke with their wives. And I asked
them everything, several houses.

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The Struggle for Za’atar and Akkoub
Interviewer: They gave you the secret of the za’atar?
Ze’ev Ben Harut: I am like a part of the family, they know me for many years.
They told me exactly, you know…
Profit, however, was not the only motive. The Ben Haruts saw the appropriation ofza’atar as a national project:Interviewer: For your father, as I understand, za’atar is Zionism, za’atar is
coexistence. What is it for you?
Yoram Ben Harut: For me it is only about national pride …
Interviewer: So you want that as people say that America is Coca Cola, andItaly is Oregano, to say?
Yoram Ben Harut: Exactly! [I want people] to say that za’atar is Israel. And
this is becoming truth.

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The criminalization of za’atar and akkoub did not only take the form of nature
protection but also enabled cultural appropriation in conjunction with economic gain.
This, however, was not the end of the story. Palestinians who picked and possessed za’atarfrom the wild were often interrogated, indicted, convicted and punished in courts. The
next chapter examines the legal process and decisions pertaining to za’atar and akkoub.

D. The Za’atar Jurisprudence: Israeli Courts and Palestinian Foragers
Legal search engines yield sixty-nine Israeli court decisions involving za’atar and akkoub,
delivered between 2003 and 2019.38 While forty-one cases pertain to za’atar, twentyeight cases revolve around akkoub. A mapping of the case law not only shows that all
the defendants were Palestinian citizens of Israel, but also that indictments for picking
protected plants involve herb-plants only. Although this may initially be explained in therelative demand for herb-plants compared to other protected plants, existing information
nonetheless indicates that picking ornamental protected plants is still a wide-spread
phenomenon.39
These search results are ultimately incomplete: many court decisions are not publishedin legal databases and indictment is only one possible repercussion that herb-pickers may
face. A more common alternative is the use of on-the-spot-fines. Between 2010 and 2016,
for example, more than 750 on-the-spot-fines of about 700 NIS each were issued for either
picking or possessing za’atar. According to the Nature and Parks Authority, only elevencases involved a ‘commercial quantity’. which was informally defined as more than ten
kilograms.40 Moreover, in the occupied West Bank, for example, penalties are administrated
by the military system and often do not involve court hearings.

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The cases that result in court proceedings reveal illuminating dynamics. While mostdefendants in these procedures are old, poor, unrepresented and end up pleading guilty,
some cases nonetheless result in judicial convictions after several hearings. This chapter
discusses major themes that arise from these cases. It shows that the court serves a crucialrole in implementing and legitimizing the ban, while simultaneously reproducing an
underpinning civilized/barbarian narrative under the guise of nature protection.

‘Un-fooding’ Herbs, Protecting Nature

Food is the immediate and defining function of za’atar and akkoub. Despite this fact,courts have persistently dismissed the characterization of these herb-plants as food while
simultaneously draping their judgements in a highly professionalized language of nature
protection. Courts routinely ignore defendants’ invocation of household needs and of theplants’ food function in favor of a civilizing, retributive narrative instead. The case of Nezar
Khalil, where the court omits any referral to the herb’s function despite the defendant’s
claim ‘I am a father of seven children. I went to forage for the household’. exemplifies thisrecurrent theme. In the case of Kana’an, involving three plastic bags of za’atar, the court
similarly dismissed the food function of the plant while emphasizing that ‘in these acts
resides a harm to the core values of our society’.41 In a different case involving a 61-year-old
man that picked za’atar with his sisters, the court stressed that ‘the subject of this case is anoffense that should be faced with a substantial response, in light of the depopulation of ezov[the biblical name of za’atar] in our land following its over-picking, resulting in a harm to
the ecological balance of the Land of Israel’.42
The court has, therefore, uprooted za’atar and akkoub from the Palestinian cuisine andplanted them as criminal substances in the legal field. According to the court’s underlying
vision, these herbs belong to some purified concept of nature, invoking the ‘core values’of society and the national vision of the ‘Land of Israel’. Nature, according to this vision,
has to be protected from the ‘harmful’ effects of Palestinian culture. This vision, however,supplements the prosecution’s argumentation and resorts to scientific language to renderdisputed claims determinist facts under the force of the law.43 The prosecution’s arguments
in one case, for example, illustrate the underpinning civilizing discourse:
Although the amount [of akkoub] picked was not large … I believe thatthe court should join the prosecution’s efforts to uproot this phenomenon[of herb-picking] from its roots. Unfortunately, many defendants do
not understand the severity of their actions, when they come and tell me,
privately, that they had ‘picked a small amount for the household and that is
how we [the defendants] were raised for generations.’44

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Za’atar and akkoub, in short, have undergone an ‘un-fooding’ process under the law, infavour of a purified perception of nature that distances Palestinian culture from it. Afterthe court dissects the herb-picking from the plate, the way is paved for depicting the picking
as a criminal act and convicting the defendants under the pretext of nature protection.

The State of Israel v. Palestinian Foragers: Prosecutorial Policies

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The fact that Palestinian citizens of Israel are the only defendants put to trial in cases
involving picking or possessing protected plants illustrates the politicized nature of
criminalizing za’atar and akkoub. As the defendant in the case of Marie put it: ‘I know thatpicking za’atar is prohibited. Prohibited for Arabs, permitted for Jews.’ These sentiments are
not unfounded. Researchers have already pointed out, for example, the lenient, non-criminal
approach that the state had undertook to mitigate damages from picking ornamental plants:
a particularly common phenomenon during the 1950s and 1960s among Jewish-Israelis.45
The harsh enforcement against picking or possessing small amounts of za’atar and akkoub,in comparison, exacerbates the national-colonial tensions associated with these plants.
The prosecutorial policy for charging a defendant in criminal court does not correlate to
the quantity of the plant or any other clear logic. The state has often prosecuted defendants
that picked small amounts of za’atar or akkoub that were clearly intended for personal
household usage.46 This has further resulted in legal anomalies and extremely varying
sentences according to the personal character of the judge: defendants who picked smaller
amounts of the herb have been frequently given larger fines.47 Additionally, the prosecution
and the courts have not only charged and convicted defendants for picking the herbs,
but also for possessing it.48 Furthermore, in the case of Abu Shamleh,49 a discriminatory
prosecutorial policy of ‘Druze exceptionalism’. namely, refraining from prosecuting Druze
women citing ‘honour’ reasons, was revealed. While the court declared the policy to beillegally discriminatory based on gender, the case may be read to not only invoke statesponsored patriarchy but also deeply politicized practices of ‘divide and conquer’ between
the Druze and other Palestinian communities.50
The defendants’ responses to their prosecution can be understood to reflect ‘everyday
forms of resistance’.51 ‘It is not important for us if we get caught, if we don’t get caught,’ says
Samir Naamnih, an experienced picker. ‘Court, trial, fees, we don’t think about it,’ he adds
and further stresses that ‘it’s part of the pressure that Israel puts on us to starve us out’.52 Other
pickers harbour similar sentiments. Ibrahim Asleh, for example, said an interview: ‘The
akkoub is prohibited, and they [the NPA enforcement officials] chase people, but what about
those whose [financial] situation is hard … Even if they chased us with airplanes, they will not
succeed to prohibit us [from picking], this is our life, what shall we do?’53 Sa’ada Nassar also
ridicules the state’s obsession with akkoub: ‘They chase us, why do they chase us? For somethorns of akkoub!’ she says and adds ‘prohibited or not, we are going to pick akkoub’.54

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Identity Judges

An interesting theme that arises from the case law is that Arab judges have a remarkably
different approach in comparison to Jewish judges. Out of forty-one cases dealing withza’atar, for example, only three cases ended with acquittals; all three of them heard infront of the only Arab judge who adjudicated za’atar cases. Beyond this striking outcome,the legal interpretation and rhetoric that the Arab judge deployed reveals an interestingly
different approach. In the case of Khetam Abu Mokh, the judge dismissed the enforcement
officials’ testimonies, preferred the defendant’s testimony and ordered an acquittal. The
judge further notes in the margins of his judgement that: ‘since the amount of za’atar was
not proven and charges referred to a box and a plastic bag, it is possible to conclude that theamount is negligible … and might have justified invoking the legal principle of de minis non
curat lex [the law does not concern itself with trifles]’. Similarly, the Arab judge reflected amore lenient approach in two other cases and acquitted defendants of possession charges.55
This lenient approach contrasts with other judgements where judges saw similar amountsof herb possession to threaten the ‘core values’ of society and justify a ‘substantial response’.
This observation, of course, does not suggest that Arab judges would necessarily acquit
the defendants. It remains illuminating, however, to note the relationship between the legal
approaches and the national identities of the judges. An additional case that reveals a uniqueapproach by an Arab judge regarding za’atar and akkoub is reflected in a tort case, where
the plaintiff claimed civil compensation following a car accident in which she was involved.
The Arab plaintiff claimed that she lost her ability to pick and sell edible wild-plants, whichamounted to her sole income. In his ruling, the judge notes that: ‘I live within my people andknow that many villagers are used to forage wild edible plants, such as akkoub, khubbezeh[mallow] and za’atar, mainly for personal consumption rather than commerce, althoughsome sell these herbs, especially impoverished families.’ Based on this assessment, the judge
overlooked the criminal ban on picking, accepted the plaintiff’s claims and compensated herfor her loss of income from edible plants. The treatment of Arab judges of za’atar and akkoub,
in sum, reveals a unique perception that stands out in the legal landscape. Lacking any otherexplanation, it seems that this perception is rooted in their identity, through which they
perceive za’atar and akkoub, at the end of the day, as food.

Conclusion
The criminalization of za’atar and akkoub had gone unnoticed for years. Recently,
however, the story accumulated growing public and legal attention and undertook aninteresting turn.56 In January 2019, Adalah – The Legal Centre for Arab Minority
Rights initiated a request on behalf of za’atar and akkoub pickers, demanding from theEnvironment Protection Minister, the Attorney General and the Nature Protection
Authority to cancel the absolute ban on picking za’atar and akkoub.57 After several months

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The Struggle for Za’atar and Akkoubof correspondence and against the background of growing public criticism, the Ministerof Environment Protection and NPA agreed to reconsider their prosecutorial policies,
without cancelling their legal status as protected.58
In August 2019, the NPA declared that starting from 2020, it will permit picking za’atar
and akkoub in certain amounts. Even after these declarations, the story evolved to reveal astruggle over narrative: the NPA persistently refused to acknowledge the past injustice andinsisted that the change of policy was the result of independent assessment, unrelated to
any legal demands or public criticism.59 Several contradicting publications regarding theallowed amounts, however, followed and as of March 2020, enforcement incidents werestill reported despite the announcements. Most recently, the NPA published a temporary
policy that would allow picking small amounts of za’atar and akkoub in areas that are notconsidered natural reservations.60 The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, however,resulted in the suspension of this policy. The future of za’atar and akkoub, much like thefuture of their pickers, remains pending.

Notes
1.

2.

118

3.

4.
5.

6.
7.
8.

This paper is a continuation of a previous research project that was written in Hebrew and published in
Studies in Food Law (Yofi Tirosh and Aeyal Gross eds., 2017).
For a more detailed account on the legal framework, see section C. Maramiya (Sage), an additional
popular herb, is also declared as protected. This paper focuses on za’atar and akkoub due to space
limitations and given that the vast majority of court judgements deal with these two plants. For a reviewof the court decisions see section D.
A remarkable exception is Brian Boyd, A Political Ecology of Za’atar, EnviroSociety Blog (Jun. 15, 2016)
https://www.envirosociety.org/2016/06/a-political-ecology-of-zaatar/. Other scholars mentioned theban on za’atar briefly as an example of politicized nature. See, e.g., Meron Benvenisti, Conflicts andContradictions, 24 (1986) (‘the military order banning the picking of za’atar is also a strong political andideological statement’); Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: The 1936 – 1939 Rebellion and thePalestinian National Past, 59 (2003). Other scholars did mentioned this ban without examining it
critically. See, e.g., Uri Mayer-Chissick and Efraim Lev, ‘Wild Edible Plants in Israel Tradition Verusis
Cultivation’, in Medicinal and Aromatic Plants of the Middle-East 9 (Zohara Yaniv and Nativ Dudaieds., 2014).
Sheila Jasanoff, ‘The Practices of Objectivity in Regulatory Science’, in Social Knowledge in the Making
307, 309 (Camic, Gross, and Lamont, eds., 2011).
Political scientist and previously deputy-Mayor of Jerusalem, Meron Benvenisti, described the central
ethos of yedi’at haaretz (knowledge of the land). Benvenisti writes that ‘those who coined the phrase
were undoubtedly aware of the biblical meaning of yedi’a, an act of sexual possession: “And Adam knew
Eve, his wife.” Yedi’at haaretz features in the school curriculum and in army instruction courses as a
subject in its own right, incorporating geography, geology, history, ethnology, botany – and all this isdirected not simply to increasing knowledge but to nurturing a deep attachment to the country:‘instilling youth with love of country’ is the closest you can get to the Hebrew term describing theobjective of the subject’. See Meron Benvenisti, Conflicts and Contradictions, 19-20 (1986).
Id. at 24.
See also Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioningin Israeli Society, 2 (2002); Raef Zreik, ‘When Does a Settler Become a Native (With Apologies to
Mamdani)?’, 23 Constellations 351, 359 (2016).
Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel (Inea Bushnaq Trans., 1976); Alexander Kedar, ‘The Legal
Transformation of Ethnic Geography: Israeli Law and the Palestinian Landholder 1948 – 1967’, 33
N.Y.U.J. Int’ l L. & Pol. 923 (2001).

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The Struggle for Za’atar and Akkoub
9. Afforestation played a remarkable role also under British and French colonial regimes. Mahadav Gadgil
and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1993); Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and
French Colonialism Expansion in North Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007). See also Richard
H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins ofEnvironmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Gregory Allen Barton,
Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
10. Irus Braverman, Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine (2009).
11. As the Supreme Court of Israel stated in a decision dismissing a challenge to afforestation in confiscated
Palestinian lands: ‘Afforestation in desolate land has proclaimed a central position in the [Zionist] ethosthat led to the establishment of Israel, such as the development of the land and blooming the desert …
The love of ha’aretz [the Land of Israel] is related to trees since the times of the Bible … The planting andafforestation are thus part of our vision.’ See CA 4067/07 Jabareen v. State of Israel (Jan. 3, 2010).
12. Palestinian intellectual Edward Said recollects: ‘I had the opportunity to visit a number of sites offormer Palestinian villages that have been variously reshaped through tree-planting and related JNF
projects, in ways that would appear to promote “collective”, if selective, forgetting.’ See Edward Said,‘Memory, Invention and Space’, in The Landscape of Palestine: Equivocal Poetry (Ibrahim Abu-Lughod
et al. eds., 1999). These projects involve 46 out of the 68 JNF forests in Israel and cover more than 89
demolished Palestinian villages. See Eitan Bronstein Aparicio, ‘Most JNF – KKL forests and sites arelocated on the ruins of Palestinian villages’, Zochrot (April, 2004) https://zochrot.org/en/article/55963[https://perma.cc/5LGZ-KWA7].
13. As Meron Benvenisti reflects, making the desert bloom often materialized through the removal of thePalestinian treescapes: ‘I myself ‘made the desert bloom’ by uprooting the ancient olive trees of al-Bassa[a displaced Palestinian village] to clear the ground for a banana grove, as required by the ‘planned
farming’ principles of my kibbutz, Rosh Haniqra’. See Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape. The Buried
History of the Holy Land since 1948, 2 (2000).
14. Tamar Novick, Milk & Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land, 1880 – 1960 (Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2014).
15. Rabea Eghbariah, Chasing Goats, Abducting Camels: Land, Landscape, Livestock, and the Law in Israel/
Palestine (unpublished LL.M. thesis, 2020).
16. See the Plant Protection (Damages of Goats) Law, 1950.
17. Grace Growfoot and Louise Baldensperger, From Cedar to Hyssop: A Study in the Folklore of Plants in
Palestine (1932).
18. Benny Furst, ‘A Morphology of Cultural Change: The Campaign to Rescue Wild Flowers as an
Influential Factor on Spatial Design’, 78 Ofakim Be-Geographia 26 (2012) [Hebrew].
19. Edward Said, Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969 – 1994, 115-6 (1995).
20. Fadwa Tuqan, A Mountain Journey: An Autobiography, 13-14 (Olive Kenny Trans., 1991) (‘akkub is aspiny herb of the Compositae family growing in the Nablus mountains. Its season spans three months:
February, March, and April. Like all our people Mother dated events by relating them to outstanding
occurrences’).
21. Salman Natour, The Journey Without (Shoshana London Sappir trans., 2018) https://levantine-journal.
org/the-journey-without/.
22. The National Parks, Natural Reserves, and National and Memorial Sites Law of 1998 replaced the 1963
Law of National Parks and Nature Reserves. Article 33(a) of the 1998 law authorizes the Minister ofEnvironment to declare ‘natural values’, including plants, as ‘protected’.
23. Article 33(d) of the law sets the prohibition on picking, possessing or trading any ‘protected naturalvalues’, and article 57(a) sets a respective sanction up to three-years-imprisonment.
24. National Parks and Nature Reserves Declaration (Protected Natural Values), 1977. This declaration waslater replaced by the National Parks, Natural Reserves, and National and Memorial Sites Declaration(Protected Natural Values), 2005, which was replaced by the National Parks, Natural Reserves, andNational and Memorial Sites Declaration (Protected Natural Values), 2019.
25. The Nature Protection Order (Judea and Samaria) (No. 363), 1969 vests similar authorities in the
military’s hand. According to this order, za’atar was declared as protected plant in 1978. See Protected

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Natural Values Declaration (Amendment No. 2) (Judea and Samaria), 1978. Akkoub was added to thelist in 2004. See Protected Natural Values Declaration (Amendment No. 2) (Judea and Samaria), 2004.
26. See, e.g., Akiva Eldar, ‘The State of Israel Versus the Hyssop Pickers’, Haaretz (Sept. 26, 2005) https://www.haaretz.com/1.4875929.
27. The Nature and Parks Authority response to a FOIA request by Adalah – The Legal Center for ArabMinority Rights in Israel (May 7, 2019) https://www.adalah.org/uploads/uploads/Nature_Autority_
FOIAreply1_070519.pdf
28. Zafrir Rinat, ‘The Ezov Stands in the Midst of a Clash Between Tradition and Law’, Haaretz (Apr. 25,
2017), https://www.haaretz.co.il/food/foodmagazine2/.premium-1.4039616
29. See lists of endangered, near-threatened and rare plants, published in the Nature and Parks Authority’s
website: https://redlist.parks.org.il/affix/redbook_intro/#page-48
30. Id.
31. Nativ Dudai et. al, ‘Environmental Factors Affecting Flower Initiation and Development in Majorana
Syriaca L. (= Origanum Syriacum Var. Syriacum)’, 38 Israel Journal of Botany 229 (1989); Nativ Dudai,‘Domestication and Breeing of Wild Medicinal and Aromatic Plants – Thirty Years of Experience inIsrael’, in The Proceedings of the 1st International Symposium on Medicinal, Aromatic and Nutraceutical
Plants from Mountainous Areas (Carlen, Baroffio and Vouillamoz eds., 2011).
32. Dror Feuer, ‘Divisive Discourse: How Even the Cancellation of the Ban on Picking Za’atar Became a
Narrative Battle between Jews and Arabs’, Globes (Oct. 20, 2019) https://www.globes.co.il/news/
article.aspx?did=1001303934
33. Id.
34. Didi Kaplan, Dror Pevzner, Moshe Galilee, and Mario Gutman, ‘Traditional Selective Harvesting
Effects on Occurrence and Reproductive Growth of Gundelia Tournfortii in Israel Grasslands’, 43 Israel
Journal of Plant Sciences, 163 (1995).
35. See, e.g., Mayer-Chissick and Lev, supra note, at 11 (‘The tradition of gathering wild edible plant isdisturbed by the modernization of the Arab village, the invention of the fridge for example, enable thefamily to pick more than the amount needed for the season and freeze it for the summer. This excessive
gathering combined with the growth of the community brought almost to a disappearance of some ofthe plants, and some of them like the wild (Syrian) mar- joram (Origanum syriacum) and the tumble
thistle (Gundelia tournefortii) had to be declared protected by law and their gathering is forbidden’).
36. Swedenburg, supra note 1.
37. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS8hCbxCaMs
38. Two additional cases, excluded from this paper due to space limitations, deal with maramiya (sage).
39. Furst, supra note, at 43.
40. Additional 151 on-the-spot-fines were issued in between 2016 and 2018 for both za’atar and a’ koub. See
Feuer, supra note.
41. Crim Case 2033/05 State of Israel v. Kanaan (May 7, 2006)
42. Crim Case 28894-03-10 State of Israel v. Daief (Jan. 20, 2011)
43. Since the plants are declared as protected, no evidence is needed to prove the damage of the act. Onepage opinion written by a Nature and Parks Authority scientists, however, is occasionally submitted tothe courts by the prosecution to stress the ecological damage of picking the plants. Based on thisopinion, the prosecution asks the courts to impose harsher penalties on the defendants.
44. Crim Case 1688-04-09 State of Israel v. Bushnak (May 25, 2010)
45. Furst, supra note.
46. See, e.g., Crim Case 1822-02 State of Israel v. Abbas (Feb. 12, 2004) (involving ‘few leaves of za’atar’);Crim Case 1623/04 State of Israel v. Abd AlHameed (Jun. 30, 2004) (involving 0.5 kilograms of za’atar);
Crim Case 2106/05 State of Israel v. Shibli (Nov. 3, 2005) (involving a ‘small bag of za’atar’); Crim Case
1233/07 State of Israel v. Eghbariah (May 29, 2008) (involving 8 kilograms of za’atar); Crim Case 115206-08 State of Israel v. Jabareen (Jan. 21, 2010) (involving 2 kilograms of za’atar).
47. Compare, e.g., Crim Case 18766-03-09 Nature and Parks Authority v. Ali (Jun. 22, 2009) (involving 1.5
kilogram of za’atar and a 1,500 NIS fine) with Crim Case 42277-10-10 State of Israel v. Marzouk (Jan.
20, 2011) (involving 15 kilograms of za’atar and a 1,500 NIS fine). Compare Crim Case 1152-06-08 Stateof Israel v. Jabareen (Jan. 21, 2010) (involving 2 kilograms of za’atar and a 1,000 NIS fine) with Crim

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The Struggle for Za’atar and AkkoubAppeal 267/08 Omar v. Nature and Parks Authority (Jan. 7, 2009) (involving 2 kilograms of za’atar anda 5,000 NIS fine).
48. Unlike prohibited drugs in criminal procedures, za’atar and akkoub are not subjected to laboratory
examination, but rather destroyed or burnt on the spot. This situation has resulted in an interesting legal
question in the case of Basem Jat, where the defense argued that the prosecution failed to prove that the
herb was the prohibited wild type of za’atar (Majorana Syriaca), in contrast to the commerciallydomesticated and legally permitted type. Despite the fact that the Nature and Protection Authority’s
enforcement officials confessed that they are incapable of differentiating between the wild anddomesticated types of the herb, the court concluded that the enforcement officials possessed sufficientexperience that qualifies them to be regarded as expert witnesses in legal procedures. The court has,
therefore, overlooked the evidential damage of destroying the herbs in favor of an interpretation thatwidens the net of criminality.
49. Crim Case 7577-05-12 State of Israel v. Abu Shamleh (May 28, 2014).
50. See Kais Firro, ‘Reshaping Druze Particularism in Israel’, 30 Journal of Palestinian Studies 40 (2001);
Lisa Hajjar, ‘Israel’s Intervention among the Druze’, in Power and Politics of Difference: Minorities in the
Middle East (1996).
51. James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985).
52. Shira Rubin, ‘For Israelis and Palestinians, a Battle over a Humble Plant’, Salon (Feb. 18, 2020) https://www.salon.com/2020/02/17/for-israelis-and-palestinians-a-battle-over-a-humble-plant_partner/
53. Rami Nassar, ‘Interviews with Akkoub Pickers’, Bokra (Apr. 7, 2015) https://bokra.net/Article-1293516
54. Id.
55. Crim Case 1146/05 State of Israel v. Abadi (Dec. 14, 2005); Crim Case 2025/05 State of Israel v. Leibovitz(Feb. 12, 2007). Interestingly, the Hebrew name appearing in the latter case is explained in the first lineof the judgement: ‘Sari Hani Azzam, who ‘Hebrewcized’ his name – probably due to his security job –into Alon Ben Hani Leibovitz, is the defendant in this case’.
56. For publications in English and French, see, e.g., Ronit Vered, ‘How Za’atar Became a Victim of theIsraeli-Palestinian Conflict’, Haaretz (May 7, 2017), https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.
premium-1.5466747 [https://perma.cc/R7LF-Y37W]; Eeta Prince-Gibson, ‘Wild plant feeds anotherthorny conflict between Israel, Palestinians’, Al-Monitor (Apr. 24, 2019), https://www.al-monitor.com/
pulse/originals/2019/04/a-thorny-conflict-over-aqub-between-palestine-israel.html [https://perma.cc/ZJE2-2UVU]; Zafrir Rinat, ‘Reversing Decades-old Policy Israel to Allow Some Harvestingof Wild Plants’, Haaretz (Aug. 6, 2019), https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.7620743[https://perma.cc/WMC4-MJG5]; Claire Bastier, ‘En Israël, les cueilleurs de plantes aromatiques neveulent plus être criminalisés’, Le Monde (Sept. 6, 2019), https://www.lemonde.fr/m-le-mag/article/2019/09/06/en-israel-les-cueilleurs-de-plantes-aromatiques-ne-veulent-plus-etrecriminalises_5507058_4500055.html [https://perma.cc/27ZN-TQYD]; Shira Rubin, ‘For Israelis
and Palestinians, a Battle over a Humble Plant’, Salon (Feb. 18, 2020), https://www.salon.
com/2020/02/17/for-israelis-and-palestinians-a-battle-over-a-humble-plant_partner/ [https://perma.cc/5NY9-JQB4].
57. The author of this paper is involved in these requests.
58. In December 2019, the Minister of Environment Protection published an updated list of ‘protectednatural values’ that includes za’atar, akkoub and maramiya.
59. Dror Feuer, ‘Divisive Discourse: How Even the Cancellation of the Ban on Picking Za’atar Became a
Narrative Battle between Jews and Arabs’, Globes (Oct. 20, 2019) https://www.globes.co.il/news/
article.aspx?did=1001303934; See also Itay Ilani, ‘The Battle over Za’atar’, Yedioth Ahronoth, (Aug. 20,2019) https://www.yediot.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-5572535,00.html.
60. https://www.parks.org.il/new/tavlin/

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