Excerpts from
The Struggle for Za’atar and Akkoub:
Israeli Nature Protection Laws and the Criminalization of Palestinian Herb-Picking Culture
by Rabea Eghbariah
Rabea Eghbariah is a Palestinian human rights lawyer and legal scholar, his work has gained international attention for his proposal to recognize the Nakba as a legal concept within international legal frameworks.
Part I
The criminalization of Palestinian herb-picking culture provides an example of how repressive policies against Palestinians are enforced under the guise of scientific expertise and nature protection. Israeli nature protection laws authorize the Minister of Environmental Protection to declare plants as protected “natural values”.
Following such a declaration, it becomes a criminal offense to pick, possess, or trade any amount of a protected plant from the wild. Based on this authority, in 1977, Israeli minister Ariel Sharon declared two herb-plants popular in Palestinian culture as “protected plants”: za‘atar and maramiya (sage). The criminalization of another herb-plant, akkoub, followed in 2005 .
Since these declarations came into force, Palestinians who have foraged these plants have been subject to sanctions and face threats of being caught, interrogated, charged, convicted, and fined.
While there is no solid scientific evidence that supports imposing such an absolute ban on picking these herb-plants, the harsh enforcement of the law, levied solely against Palestinians, makes it clear that the ban has served as a tool to criminalize Palestinian herb-picking culture and Palestinian relationship to land and nature. In this context, courts regularly penalize Palestinian defendants who pick these plants, and produce a “civilizing narrative” that not only treats these herb-plants as criminal substances but also their Palestinian pickers as enemies of nature.
In 2019, after a legal battle led by Adalah - The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, and after the lack of conclusive scientific evidence had been exposed, the prosecutorial policies changed to allow limited picking of these herb-plants. Picking these plants, however, remains a highly politicized activity that can lead to criminal charges.
Part II
Akkoub is a highly thorny, domestic, and seasonal plant. Unlike za‘atar, the akkoub has to be cleansed and cooked shortly after being foraged. Poet Fadwa Tuqan describes the practice of akkoub cleansing as a signifier of temporal consciousness:
The date of my birth vanished from my parents’ memories in the mists 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 and year. All I remember is that I began to feel labour pains while cleaning the spines from the stalks of akkub.
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 with his friend during a journey to Paris. Challenging the notion of Paris and the West as the land of plethora, Natour asks teasingly ‘do they have za‘atar and ‘akoub in Paris?’ only to be 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.’
Copyright © 2026 awakeworld.co.uk - All Rights Reserved.