Bananas and the imaginary of progress: Eco-nationalism and agro-capitalism in Mandate-era Palestine

This article examines the role of banana plantations in the settler-colonial, capitalist transformation of Mandate-era Palestine. A microcosm of Zionist settlement and Indigenous Palestinian resistance, the cultivation of bananas reveals competing visions of development and national legitimacy, rooted in the cultural politics of ecological and economic nationalism. Framing banana cultivation in Palestine as a site of eco-nationalist struggle, the article details the convergence of capitalism, agriculture and ecology at the heart of the Zionist-Arab conflict. While bananas were not new to Palestine, efforts to significantly expand production under the British Mandate were constrained by the region's poorly suited soil and climate, giving rise to competing discourses of scientific knowledge and cultural rootedness. Neither native to Palestine nor grounded in biblical tradition, bananas evoked in the settlers an ersatz ‘secular’ imagination of their inherent capability and expertise, which clashed with the lived reality of the Indigenous people's deep familiarity with the local ecology and comparative agricultural success. Drawing on extensive primary sources, the article traces scientific discourses and cultural representations of banana cultivation in the districts of Beisan and Jericho, shedding new light on the ways in which agriculture shaped the Zionist-Arab conflict, including the role of the Palestinian capitalist class in resisting settler-colonial dispossession. The article thus explicates the role of bananas in uneven regional development and the struggle for control over land, demonstrating the usefulness of eco-nationalism as a lens to better understand economy and ecology as tools of capital accumulation and control.