Your buying power can help sustain traditional Palestinian culture
Presenter: The genocide in Gaza is so far away—on the other side of the planet—that it may seem like there’s nothing you can do. Morgan Totah says you are more powerful than you know.
Morgan Totah (Handmade Palestine, founder): The one incredibly powerful tool that people have is their power as a consumer. And sometimes when you feel really powerless that you can’t reach your representatives, you’re not heard when you go to demonstrations, your buying power literally can crush companies or it can build companies.
The boycott movement—BDS: boycott, divestment, and sanctions—these are the three tools that we have. And we’ve seen this right? South African apartheid fell fell because of the BDS.
And people don’t have to feel alone with their buying choices that, ‘Okay, I’m boycotting this, but nobody else is,’ because there’s a movement and boycott is very targeted. BDSMovement.net is an amazing resource.
So I really believe that that is the only true power we have to affect change, not only for the Palestinians who have faced decades and decades of injustice and violence and colonial violence, but also like in general, that is our power as a community to create change locally, to create change nationally and definitely internationally.
Presenter: She says that you can use your economic power to help preserve Palestinian culture. Morgan Totah:
Morgan Totah: So, Palestinians are so deeply rooted in their land, which is something I’ve talked about.
Palestinian cultural heritage as we see it today comes out of the Fellaheen culture, which is really badly translated into English as peasant farmers, but it’s really like the people who are the caretakers of the land and, and it’s their relationship to the land that has created so much of the crafting, like the woven baskets, which is the straw harvested from the wheat being harvested, right?
We have a woman that we work with who lives in a village pretty near Ramallah and her husband is amongst the many men who lost their permit from the Israeli military to go to his work on October 8. And so he has no work.
She used to farm a bit, to grow and dry and make za’atar. Za’atar is a wild thyme, and it’s dried and then it’s made into a powder, and it’s mixed with sesame seeds and sumac (which is also from a native tree in Palestine) with salt and olive oil.
And this is turned into kind of like a powder blend that Palestinians dip bread into olive oil and dip bread into the za’atar. It’s a staple in every Palestinian home.
And this amazing woman does this all by hand on her land, and she grows and dries other things like figs, all of these kind of traditional, agricultural production she does, and this is the entire income generation for their family since her husband lost his work.
A few weeks ago, a group of settler teenagers—so illegal Israeli settler youth, who are being encouraged and even armed to go around and be gangs—came down into their land while they were harvesting and they had a pickaxe with them and they took that pickaxe and they attacked her husband, who has been in the hospital since and gone through two surgeries.
And with their boots and their fists they attacked this woman who does the za’atar with us, and they left them beaten and broken and so traumatized, and then they stole the entire harvest and went back up to their settlement to make their version of Palestinian za’atar.
Because cultural appropriation is really huge for the Israelis. So you know, hummus and the olives and the olive oil, but also, you know, making za’atar or making Palestinian traditional dresses and saying that these are Israelis doing all that stuff.
This family was left so devastated. The husband, like I said, two surgeries on his arm and all they have is land. That’s it. And the land is constantly at risk and being confiscated by the Israelis, being stolen.
My dad put this in my mind while we were driving from California up to Portland. He was talking about homesteading and how in Nevada people are still homesteading. And so we talked about this concept ’cause I didn’t really understand it, that it could still be happening today.
And I thought, ‘Man, that’s so crazy,’ because that’s exactly what’s happening. You have Indigenous people on the land caring for the land, and then you have these colonizers coming in and just putting a stake in the ground and saying, ‘This is now mine. You don’t like it, I’m going to kill you.’
And they literally are killing Palestinians to take their land and take their properties and take their homes. And it’s so insane that in 2026 that’s happening.
And I looked at my dad and I said, ‘Of course, you know, Americans are largely allowing this, protecting this, enabling this, funding this, because we still haven’t even made reparations to the Native Nations here.’
Like, our world is still just saturated in generational injustice and trauma and we need to move past that. And I feel like we’re all looking for—because it’s so hard to take on the system, it’s so hard to take on colonization and colonial powers—we’re all still looking for ways of doing that individually.
And I think boycott, the flip side is buycott. It’s choosing where to support. So when you shop, for example, from Handmade Palestine, and you buy the za’atar bundle that comes with this woman’s za’atar, you are literally sustaining her livelihood, but you’re also sustaining her ability to stay on her land and to exist, which is a form of resistance for Palestinians.
But you can do that too and participate in the buycott and support Indigenous communities here and immigrants’ communities here. There’s so much that our buying can do ethically, and I think if there’s one message I can give that is it.
Presenter: Handmade Palestine will be participating in the Asian Celebration, sponsored by the Eugene-based group People for Justice and Peace in Palestine. You can learn more by checking the websites, AsianCelebration.org and HandmadePalestine.com.
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