Between olive trees and rooftop hydroponics, daily life in the West Bank is shaped by land and improvisation.
This article is part one of WHAT ENDURES: Land, Life and Repair in Palestine, a Sublime three-part editorial series exploring land, environmental justice and repair. Part 2 – Part 3
PART 1 – Rooted in Resilience: Sustainability, survival and daily life in the West Bank
For much of her adult life, Dimple Agarwal built a successful career in the corporate world, an experience that gave her a close understanding of systems – how they are constructed, how they justify themselves, and how quietly they decide who belongs and who must adapt.
Although Dimple is no longer part of that world, the perspective it offered continues to shape how she thinks about power, responsibility and the normalisation of inequality.
In the past two years, one place has come to occupy her thoughts with particular clarity.
“Palestine has become the lens through which I see the world, because it exposes how injustice is structured, defended and made to feel inevitable.”
That connection is inseparable from her own lived experience. As a brown immigrant woman living in London, shaped by a childhood in India where patriarchy and sexism were part of everyday life, she learned early how authority operates and how resilience is often demanded of those with the least power.
Later, as Dimple built her career in the UK, she encountered subtler forms of exclusion – systems that claim neutrality while quietly reinforcing who is trusted, who is visible and who must continually prove their worth.
“This isn’t about religion,” she says. “It’s about land, control, and whose humanity is allowed to count.”
For a long time, Dimple’s engagement with Palestine took place from afar, through protests, fundraising and conversation. Over time, however, she felt the distance too greatly. When Eyewitness Palestine sought volunteers to support the annual olive harvest, she applied, guided by her conviction that presence matters.
Learning from the land
What struck Dimple most on arrival was not tension, but rhythm. Life in the West Bank certainly revolves around constraints, but it also revolves around community, routine, and care.
Markets open each morning, bread is shared without ceremony, and people adapt with a fluency that speaks to collective intelligence.
Olives are central to the Palestinian economy, generating significant value in the West Bank each year, but their importance extends far beyond economics.
The north-west of the West Bank is covered with ancient trees growing along terraced hillsides, their roots embedded in soil worked by generations. In Tulkarm, Dimple spent days harvesting olives on a cooperative farm near the separation wall. The land here is not owned so much as tended, its value measured in continuity rather than yield alone.
The harvest unfolds slowly through physical labour. Ladders are leaned carefully against trunks as olives steadily fall onto the tarpaulin spread beneath the branches.
“It became almost meditative,” Dimple reflects. “You focus on one branch at a time. And all you hear is the sound of olives landing.”
“Harvesting olives is not just agricultural work – it is a way of saying ‘we are still here’.”
Dimple worked alongside Palestinian farmers and men from Gaza who have been stranded in the West Bank since October 2023. “We talked constantly, about land, about family. By the end of the week, we felt like family.”
In Bethlehem, where she spent her first week, Dimple worked in and around the Aida refugee camp.
These camps – initially intended as temporary – have existed for decades, now hemmed in by concrete walls, watchtowers and surveillance systems. Families live in tightly packed concrete homes with limited access to water and unreliable electricity.
Growing food conventionally is impossible, so instead, life moves upward, shaped by improvisation. On rooftops, Dimple and other volunteers assisted in installing hydroponic systems constructed from recycled plastic bottles. They also planted seeds of Swiss chard, pak choi, mustard, and leafy greens so that families could continue growing food long after the volunteers left.
To grow something here, Dimple observes, is not merely practical but affirming, a reminder of capability in circumstances designed to erode it.
“Land scarcity defines everything. Hydroponics use a fraction of the water, and it might seem small, but when you’re denied land, growing food becomes an act of dignity.”
Water structures daily routines, yet it also reveals the strength of social bonds. Israel controls all the infrastructure, selling water back to Palestinians. In some homes, water arrives only two or three times a month.
“Imagine planning your entire life around when water might come?” Dimple ponders. “Water is life, but natural springs have been cemented over, and aquifers poisoned. Access has been deliberately restricted in the West Bank, because if you control water, you control people.”
During her stay, Dimple and her group experienced their own temporary shortage, resolved not through bureaucracy but through generosity: a neighbour arranging for water to be delivered as a matter of course.
“The Palestinians are extraordinarily generous people,” she says. “Even when almost everything has been taken away from them.”
What Dimple carried home most vividly were her conversations with the people she met, which revealed a striking clarity about what matters most: family, dignity and connection to land.
Continue reading Dimple’s firsthand experience of volunteering in the West Bank.
WHAT ENDURES: SUBLIME EDITORIAL SERIES | LAND, LIFE AND REPAIR IN PALESTINE
Part 1 – Rooted in Resilience: Sustainability, survival and daily life in the West Bank
Part 2 – The Land Remembers: Seeds, soil and the work of preservation.
Part 3 – To Walk Again: Repair, dignity and the future being built for Gaza’s children
This editorial series, by Sublime journalist Jen Marsden, “What Endures: Land, Life and Repair in Palestine,” draws on the firsthand experiences of Dimple Agarwal and explores themes of sustainability, land stewardship, environmental justice and repair. It is part of Sublime’s commitment to highlighting stories that matter and illuminating practices of resilience, care and continuity in challenging contexts. The perspectives shared here reflect personal engagement and observation and aim to inspire reflection on the connections between land, community and sustainable action.
For more information about the series or collaborations contact: victoria@sublimemagazine.com
