By Usama Nicola, Bethlehem, Palestine
During a recent visit to a butcher shop in Bethlehem, I met Abu Ali, an 85-year-old butcher whose stories hold half a century of economic history. He smiled as he remembered, he said: “Fifty years ago, people asked for the price of 250 grams not a kilo.”
Life was simpler, and meat was a regular part of the household table. When refrigerators became common, families began buying meat by the kilo, a sign that purchasing power was improving and life felt a bit more stable.
Today, the scene has reversed. With prices soaring, many customers come in asking for just 20 or 30 shekels’ worth of meat, tiny portions meant to stretch thin budgets. It feels like time has looped backward, but with a much heavier burden.
This simple moment inside Abu Ali’s shop opens a window into a larger story: the deepening economic strain across the West Bank and the daily negotiations people make just to get by.
Roots of the West Bank’s Economic Crisis
The West Bank’s economic crisis isn’t sudden. It’s a long accumulation of policies, restrictions, and political pressures that make ordinary life increasingly difficult.
At the core is the Israeli occupation, which imposes a maze of checkpoints and closed crossings that choke movement and trade. Goods struggle to move from one Palestinian city to another, let alone let alone rising fuel prices. Even established economies would buckle under such constraints for a fragile one like ours, the impact is devastating.
The Palestinian economy’s dependence on international aid adds another layer of vulnerability. As global priorities shift, aid has declined, hitting employment, public services, and household incomes.
Weak infrastructure, limited investment opportunities, and chronic high unemployment, especially among young graduates deepen the crisis. Meanwhile, settlement expansion drains water, land, and other resources essential for agriculture and industry.
The result is a slow, grinding stagnation that shows up on every grocery shelf, utility bill, and job search.
Why Meat Prices Are Skyrocketing
The spike in meat prices is just one visible expression of this broader breakdown.
Global prices for animal feed have soared, raising local production costs. Import taxes and customs duties make foreign meat more expensive. Herders face constant attacks and restrictions that limit their access to grazing land. The movement of goods is slowed and made more costly by checkpoints and military control.
Then there’s the Paris Economic Protocol, which limits Palestinian control over imports. The 12,500-ton quota shared between the West Bank and Gaza falls far short of actual need, creating shortages that push prices even higher.
Pressure builds from every direction, and families like those visiting Abu Ali are left to adjust their diets and expectations accordingly.
Meat as Cultural Lifeline
Despite the rising cost, meat remains central to Palestinian cultural and family life from traditional dishes like maqlouba and qidreh to weddings, feasts, and holidays. Serving meat has long symbolized hospitality, generosity, and community connection.
Today, these traditions persist, but the portions shrink. Families still try to honor guests, gather for meals, and keep their heritage alive sometimes by stretching just a small amount of meat across a table full of loved ones.
Bulldozers Erase a Seed Legacy
While rising prices strain daily life, another blow quieter but just as devastating hit Palestinian agriculture and food sovereignty.
On July 31, 2025, Israeli forces bulldozed the seed-multiplication unit of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) in Hebron. The facility, built since 2010, housed more than 70 varieties of indigenous heirloom seeds many of them found nowhere else in Palestine.
The destruction was sudden and deliberate. In minutes, bulldozers erased tools, propagation systems, and the living archive that generations of farmers built. According to UAWC, it was “a direct blow to Palestinian efforts to preserve local biodiversity and ensure food sovereignty.”
This wasn’t just an agricultural loss; it was cultural erasure.
Seeds: Memory Under Attack
Seeds hold memory, stories, landscapes, inherited knowledge.
The targeting of seed systems fits into a long pattern of destroying the ecological and generational ties that anchor Palestinians to their land. From uprooted olive groves to Gaza’s destroyed Baladi seed bank, and restrictions on grazing and farming, agriculture has become a battlefield, acts as cultural genocide, ecocide, and even crimes of extermination. Destroying seeds is not collateral damage. It is a direct attack on a community’s ability to survive, rebuild, and remember.
The destruction of the Hebron seed facility links directly to the everyday struggles in the butcher shop. They are different expressions of the same reality: a systematic campaign that undermines Palestinians’ ability to feed themselves, shape their economy, and maintain cultural continuity.
Heirloom seeds, grazing land, local herds, and affordable food are all part of a single ecosystem. When one part is attacked whether by bulldozers or by economic restrictions the entire system collapses.
One Struggle, Many Fronts
The loss of the seed bank doesn’t just affect farmers. It affects families at dinner tables, children inheriting fewer traditions, and entire communities whose food futures become uncertain.
What I saw in Abu Ali’s butcher shop, customers buying a few shekels’ worth of meat, traditions shrinking under pressure, is not separate from the bulldozers that erased a decade of Palestinian seed preservation. Both are pieces of the same story: a people fighting to hold on to their sustenance, their land, and their memory.
Economic hardship is visible in the markets, but the deeper wounds are in the soil, the seeds, and the knowledge passed between generations.
Resilience in Every Meal
And yet, Palestinians continue to adapt, preserve, and resist stretching meals, saving seeds, rebuilding what is destroyed. In every household meal, every preserved tradition, and every planted seed, there is a quiet insistence on survival.
Despite everything, the story is not only about loss. It’s about the determination to stay rooted, even when the ground itself is under attack.