In the late twentieth century, Israeli agricultural research centers, Hebrew University, the Volcani Institute, and the private seed houses clustered around them, perfected new cultivars of tomatoes. Among them were the cherry tomato varieties that quickly conquered supermarket shelves. With hybrid vigor and long shelf life, these plants were bred for uniformity, transportability, and year-round availability. They were not designed for peasants, taste, or territorial food sovereignty. They were designed for markets.
But these breakthroughs did not emerge in a vacuum. The testing grounds for many of Israel’s commercial successes were the same lands that had been occupied since 1967, especially the Jordan Valley. There, vast greenhouse complexes were built atop dispossessed Palestinian farms. Water was diverted from aquifers and the Jordan River to irrigate crops bound for European export, while Palestinians were systematically denied equivalent access to land, resources, and markets. Seeds became another instrument of domination: farmers forced to purchase hybrids from Israeli firms, unable to save their own seeds, while settlement agribusiness thrived on expropriation.
This story is not new in the annals of food politics. The “banana republics” of Central America were reshaped in the twentieth century by U.S. corporations like United Fruit. Entire nations were bent to the logic of one crop destined for export. Governments were toppled, labor movements crushed, and landscapes redesigned to serve global markets. The banana became both symbol and weapon of imperial extraction.
The comparison extends even further when we consider what this logic has produced in our own food habits. Bananas, once the centerpiece of imperial monoculture, are now the number one item on the food waste charts worldwide. Why? Because marketing propaganda has taught consumers that a banana must be eaten at the “perfect” bright yellow stage and discarded once spots appear. The truth, known to any farmer or cook, is the opposite: a speckled or brown banana is sweeter, nutritionally richer, and more versatile. Yet the market convinces us to throw away what is still good so that more fruit can be sold. It is the same stupid, self-defeating logic that drives tomatoes to be bred for transport and shelf life rather than taste or resilience. A system that designs food not for nourishment but for waste, because waste drives profit.
Tomatoes in Israel/Palestine play a similar role. What looks like benign agricultural innovation, the convenient box of cherry tomatoes in every supermarket, rests on hidden violence: occupation, settlement expansion, destruction of Palestinian seed banks, and the conversion of biodiversity into proprietary corporate hybrids. Consumers in Europe and North America are not simply buying fruit. They are participating in a system that links a winter salad to land confiscations in the West Bank.
For those who work in food systems, chefs, farmers, academics, activists, silence is complicity. To admire the “success” of Israeli agri-tech without naming its colonial foundation is to repeat the blindness that once celebrated United Fruit as a pioneer of efficiency. The parallels are too stark to ignore: monoculture, market capture, militarized protection of plantations, and the erasure of indigenous cultivators.
Today, the context is even darker. Israeli agribusiness does not operate in isolation but within a political reality marked by dispossession, apartheid practices, and, at present, a war machine that produces civilian death on an industrial scale in Gaza. To be against this occupation and its culmination in genocide is not a matter of political taste; it is a moral duty. Anyone who claims to care about food justice, agroecology, or sustainable systems must confront the fact that cherry tomatoes and long-life hybrids are not neutral technologies. They are bound up with land theft, water appropriation, and the violent disciplining of a people.
Just as movements once rose against the banana empire, so too must food movements today stand against the tomato empire of occupation. Food is not simply calories. It is politics, land, and survival. To resist occupation in Palestine is to defend the very principle that food systems should nourish people, not dispossess them.