Gardening in war
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Try it free at monday.com slash CRM because sales should feel this good. Ariel Sharon going in a helicopter to the settlements around them, begging them not to do it because he knew that this was going to fan the flames of conflict.

To the Middle East now, and more than 50,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the war began. That's according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry.

I'm Roland Oliphant and this is Battlelines. It's Monday the 26th of May 2025 and a bank holiday in the United Kingdom. The reporter and war photographer Lally Snow is no stranger to the crack of bullets, the crump of artillery and the other stereotypes of traditional war reporting. But she has also made a point of looking at conflict from another unique angle.

While reporting from Afghanistan in the 2010s, she noticed that many people were gardening in the middle of the war. In 2018, she turned this into a book called War Gardens, where she visited people in war zones around the world to talk to them about how their gardens were bringing them some kind of respite from the conflict. Well, I'm very pleased to say Lally is joining us for this special edition of Battle Lines, and she has recently returned from

from a trip to some of those gardeners that she visited all those years ago for her original book. Lali, welcome to Battlelands. Could you begin maybe by telling us about, well, who you are and how you came to be writing about war gardens? Well, hello. My name is Lali Gisno, but everyone knows me as Lali. I have been working as a freelance photojournalist and correspondent and sometimes filmmaker for

For about 15, 20 years, living in Afghanistan and covering conflict in Ukraine and Gaza and the West Bank and various places around the Middle East. While I was living in Afghanistan, I realized that the narrative wasn't changing and that the reasons I lived

wanted to become a journalist, which was to help inform people and to help shape the narrative around conflict, wasn't doing anything. People weren't really taking much notice. And I thought, well, as a photographer, the easy thing to do is to photograph the most visual thing there is, which in conflict is quite easy because it's just right in front of you. But I thought, how about turning away from that and photographing the opposite of

And for me, the opposite of conflict is a garden because it's peaceful, it's green, it's serene, and it's about maintaining and growth and controlling the environment, whereas conflict is...

the completely opposite to that. It's destruction and chaos. And in Afghanistan, they are a nation of garden lovers. And you have these garden nurseries selling geraniums and roses all the way up to the Hindu Kush mountains.

And behind the high compound walls, there are beautiful gardens that are maintained either by individuals or depending on people's economic situation, gardeners and guards. We had our own garden. I lived behind the wire. I mean, under the wire, rather. I didn't have any security. And I lived in a little house in a middle class neighborhood in Kabul.

And I started to build up a portrait collection of individuals using land and garden as a means of therapy, diversion, self-sufficiency, creativity. This was all started in 2012. I then went there in 2013. I'd been there before during one of the conflicts in 2009. And then found another strain of the

this use of land, which was occupation and trying to fight any kind of occupation. And in Israel and with the occupied territories, land is everything. And so I found this fitted really neatly into describing what was really going on there in terms of land. And then again, in Ukraine in 2014,

actually with your help, Ronan, it was about taking over parts of Ukraine or fighting back those who were trying to take over parts of Ukraine. And again, land was really, really important to people. And within each territory, people have their own kind of

to the land. In Ukraine, it was subsistence farming as much as anything. In Palestine, most Palestinians have ancestral links to farming and land with Israelis and very orthodox people.

In Israel, it's to do with religious meaning. And then in Afghanistan, it's to do with being very green fingered and just loving the land. One of the places you did visit in your original book is, of course, Gaza and southern Israel, including some of the kibbutz communities that were so horrifically devastated by Hamas on October 7th.

Now, I understand you went back there recently. You weren't able to get into Gaza, but you did return to the Israeli side of the border to places where you'd been. Could you tell us where did you go? What did you see? And what was it like compared to the last time you were there? Well, I ended up going to Niras, which was the kibbutz which was most affected and most hit by Hamas.

on October the 7th, 2023. I was in touch with the families of hostages, basically. And in Niroz, which is about two kilometers from Gaza, that's next to another kibbutz called Nirim,

When the October 7th attacks happened, the IDF, the Israeli Defence Force, were able to get to Nurem, but near Oz was a bit of a sacrificial lamb. And I think 75, 85% of the buildings were burned and destroyed.

40 members of the community were taken hostage. 50 or so were killed. My figure is that it's roughly about that. But there were hundreds of injuries. There were only 450 people near us. And in terms of devastation, I've actually never seen anything like it because although I've seen...

the effects of airstrikes in other places where I've worked and you know personal you know people missing limbs in hospital there was something about walking through a completely deserted village for for better for one word that was I mean I stay I was able to stay there weirdly for five nights

along with some cats and some peacocks and some soldiers who oddly became sort of quite friendly. I've never seen anything like it because what I was looking at wasn't airstrikes. It was hand to hand fighting, but it wasn't even fighting. It was wanton destruction and devastation.

There was food still in fridges. There was ceilings hanging down. I mean, everything was just burned and crumpled and, you know, pairs of shoes still on tables, toys. That was what really got me. Toys just left out. It was a post-apocalyptic scene.

But in a funny way, it was incredibly beautiful because it was incredibly silent. Because it had been left untended, nature was really kind of taking it over again. And so you had these climbing roses climbing through windows that had been smashed out, vegetation coming back to life. And because so much had been burned, ash is very, very good for soil.

So in a funny way, all this burning had really, really kind of given the vegetation a complete boost. So it was this total contrast of destruction, burnout, devastation, chaos, with nature just subsuming it all over again. So in a funny way, it was very humbling.

And I say sort of quiet because you're only two kilometers from Gaza. Khan Yunus in southern Gaza was being completely smashed. And so you have these deafening, deafening explosions. In the end, I actually, I could have stayed there a bit longer to kind of carry on working, but...

I needed to sleep apart from anything. And you can't sleep with that noise going on. And it was also incredibly surreal because you have, you know, I think these kibbutzim are going to become...

kind of mausoleums for visitors. And so you have this weird setup of kibbutz tourism where these, at one point there were five tour buses turning up with people being taken around to show the devastation. And it's a good kind of PR thing, I guess, for Israel to say, look what we've suffered. But that's not to do down the actual individual suffering of people who are

literally haven't done anything. And most of the people who live in the kibbutzim are peace activists and they're agricultural people, they're gardeners, they're farmers. That's what they do. They're not the settlers. They're the people that...

Did you speak to any of these survivors?

I mean, you're saying you're staying at the kibbutz at night alone. It sounds like it's deserted. But was anyone, any of the residents coming back in the day? Are they still around looking after their gardens, looking after their homes? Yeah, some of them are because they are, you know, it's been a year and a half and they're kind of like, right, we need to get on with things a little bit. There's a bit of a divide because some of them want to keep the kibbutz as it was.

as a memorial. So yes, I spoke to a number of people and then I spoke to a number of people in Nirim whose family members had been... one chap whose son was taken hostage from Nirim kibbutz and was killed in by collateral. So he was killed by an Israeli bomb but he was tending his garden again. I spoke to another gardener who, another man who

whose house had been burned to the ground completely. He showed me where his house was because it's been 18 months since it happened. I wasn't quite sure. It looked like a field. I wasn't quite sure what I was looking at. They said, no, this was where my house was. But so people are trying to return to normal. In terms of the survivors, the memories are still really, really raw.

So I spoke to the neighbor, actually, of the lady where I was staying. He now lives in Paris, but he was back. He was actually making a documentary. He was back just to kind of gather up a few things. He's in his early 40s. He's a journalist and filmmaker in his own right. But he calls himself a potato farmer.

And he described the events of the morning of the attack, 6.29 in the morning it all started. And the thing is, when you live in a kibbutz, you know you're so close to Gaza. You're used to Kisam or rockets coming in all the time. Every house has a shelter. The bus stations are also bomb shelters.

So he knew that something was happening. After about half an hour, they knew that it wasn't quite right. They could hear things a little bit more loudly afterwards.

And what had happened is they'd done a sort of a, I suppose, a standard military thing where they fired in some rockets. Everyone went into the shelters, which meant they could then break the boundaries and come through the fences. They being Hamas? Sorry, yes, Hamas. 500 fighters went to New Oz, which is over...

I think it's like over one-to-one. Everyone obviously in the kibbutz is connected via WhatsApp, as we all are. So the WhatsApp and the Facebook groups we're going mental with. They're here. I can hear them outside the house. I can hear them. They're trying to break into the door. They're in my house. I don't know what to do. My baby's crying. I need to keep it quiet. There's smoke coming in. I mean, complete fear, the total fear and terror, which is still very palpable if you're ever walking around Newroz.

The father that I spoke to in the neighboring kibbutz where the army had managed to get there, he described trying to get a hold of his son. Son's in his late 20s, early 30s.

living in an apartment with his partner and trying to get a hold of him. And then the army coming and it all being okay, but having lost touch with his son. And then a day later when they sort of, not quite the dust settles, but they're trying to kind of work out because, you know, this happened over a long period of time. Maybe it was that evening. He goes over to his son's apartment, sees signs of a struggle and realizes that his son has taken hostage and

And then later killed by Israeli fire. You know, I asked him, it's really hard because you ask somebody how they feel and it's not like, how do you feel you've got a cold? How do you feel you've lost a child? He couldn't speak English.

He actually couldn't speak. And I've interviewed hundreds of people about losing family members in my career. And this is one of the saddest, I think, because it came out of nowhere. In War Gardens, in the book, a lot of what you write about is how people in war use gardening as a source of resilience, about finding little oasises of calm and places to deal with grief. It kind of sounds to me

From what you're saying that in near Oz, although it was a place full of really beautiful gardens, that maybe it's a bit early for lots of people to go back, that it's not a place where people really want to garden anymore. Did you find that or did you find that people are going back to their gardens?

The lady whose house I stayed in, she's called Rita Lifshitz. Her grandfather-in-law, so her ex-husband's father, was a guy called Oded Lifshitz. And he was a cactus grower. And he has the third biggest collection of cacti in the world in Nero's kibbutz. She went back to the kibbutz very quickly after the attack because she wanted to show people that

nature was carrying on, that the kibbutz will live on, that the roses are still growing. So she herself, she gardens and she tends her neighbor's gardens and sends people pictures. And she ended up going around and taking a photograph of every single person's garden that she could and flowers to send, I guess, via a community WhatsApp group.

to show people that life was still going on. And then you have the head gardener, Ran, who basically built the kibbutz from scratch. He was one of the Nahal founders in the 50s. He tends to what he can. He's an elderly man now.

But then he knows that a lot of it is going to go untended. The kibbutz has its own, he calls it a botanical garden. It was more of a nursery, literally in the Gaza envelope. So out of the kibbutz, more like a kolomos area from Gaza. So people were definitely veering that way. But I think the people who've lost family members and some of the brutality of children watching their parents being shot or beheaded, there was

there was an old lady who was killed in the bath. There's a movement there, but there are many people for whom it's just too soon and they can't go back. So Lali, after southern Israel and the Gaza border, you went to the West Bank, which is of course, I mean, it is in a way, it's part of the same story. It's the same long running conflict, but it's

I mean, there are obvious kind of political and military differences between the two situations. But there's also, since we're talking about gardens, it's quite a different landscape, isn't it? I mean, down there in the southern Israel, Gaza, it's pretty flat. It's quite hot. It's kind of, you're almost getting into the desert down there. West Bank's much more mountainous, different kind of climate almost. What did you find? And what were people in the West Bank doing with their gardens?

My fixer took me to the camps, Tulkarm camp. There are two refugee camps outside Tulkarm city. And by refugee camp, they're not tents. They're permanent. They were built in 19...

I believe, 56. So they're just miniature cities, basically, incredibly densely populated. Tulkarem was... Lots of grey concrete. Lots of grey concrete and breeze blocks and tiny alleyways, not much air and a lot of heat because obviously concrete absorbs the heat.

So we went inside to speak to a lady in Tulkan camp who, the camp itself had been hit by an airstrike a year after the October 7th attacks and had been bulldozed. The main thoroughfare has been completely bulldozed and there's a vast swathe of people who have nowhere to live now, who are now scattered actually through football stadiums and makeshift buildings here and there.

But this lady, she didn't want to leave Tokaram camp because she had a whole load of plants that she'd spent years looking after. She didn't have any children. So the soldiers by and large left her alone because they were looking for fighters. And if you're a fighting age man, then your family is going to be seen with suspicion regardless of whether they're fighters or not.

We arrived at her front door and it was complete darkness. And she literally kind of opened the door ajar and then we had to scurry inside like ladybugs or something and then sort of sit in the darkness because she was afraid that the next set of soldiers were going to come around and start harassing her again. So did she have a garden? And if she did, I mean, how do you garden in this landscape of narrow alleys and grey concrete? She put them outside her front door.

So she lined her front door and the wall around her front door. She had a ground floor apartment. She lined the windows with, I guess...

Yeah, because the, I mean, how do you describe it? I mean, imagine a front door and just houseplants along the wall by the side of it. And she had a corner. And then a lot of them were growing up and around it. But she had some geraniums, jasmine, roses, those I could identify. She had a climbing cactus. I think it was a climbing cactus.

And then the plants themselves, because she doesn't have any running water, so she was struggling to actually keep them alive. But what water she did, how she put them to the plants. There was one that had some kind of variegated leaf. I mean, to be honest, I didn't recognise many of them. It sounds very much like ornamental flowers rather than growing vegetables. What did she say about the importance of the flowers and her plants to her?

She said, I have big plants, many plants. I love it. And it's my passion to buy new plants whenever I see something I've never seen before. People walk past my house and are jealous of what I have. And so I give them cuttings. She's got 21 real and fake plants inside her house. And she said, in the last three months, it's been very difficult to access water. I'm a little bit closer to the main city, but we've been cut off entirely.

There used to be a thousand families in this neighborhood, but there's no one now, just me. She was born in that camp, in that house. And the house where she lived, the building, it used to be the garden of her parents' house. But obviously due to expansion and building up, the garden then became subsumed as part of the building. When you're in a camp and there's nowhere else to build, land is a commodity. She liked rose and jasmine the most because of the smells.

Parents, grandparents lived there. They used to go to Israel all the time. The bulldozers have been here recently and the soldiers came into my house three months ago and one month ago. I don't have any children and I live alone. So now I don't have any sons who could be fighters. They did break through and smash up my television and they keep asking me to leave. But what should I do? Where should I go? I've got no money to go anywhere.

I know they're just obeying orders. And then she said, at night, it's definitely quiet unless there's a raid. In that case, I hide. I'm afraid because I'm alone. And when I tidy my house, I try to be as quiet as possible so the soldiers don't hear me. I think it's striking that you're talking about

Not just gardens as we think of them, but even small pot plants in the street and how they can serve the same use. And there was another woman you spoke to. I believe her name was Salha. Tell us about her and about the very modest garden that she was keeping. She's a double refugee. She now lives in a football stadium in a squalid little room. I think possibly was an office with her brother who is half blind and limp.

And it was a really filthy, filthy place with sort of just tea bags on the floor and all the women are in one bit and all the men are in another bit. There's no privacy. But she was a teacher and she used to have her own balcony.

On it was all the herbs that she liked cooking with because she liked cooking. And actually when we met, she was cutting up some courgette for the community lunch, I suppose. And she missed the smells of her garden. And she thought she used to sit on her balcony and think, you know, this is it. There's nowhere else I'd rather be. This is the sum of my life. I've worked hard. My family's worked hard. And I'm surrounded by my plants.

And all she had with her was a bunch of mint, you know, quite sort of wilted mint that she got from the market. The sound of bombing never leaves you. I can still hear it in my head. I was truly terrified. One night I was just cooking food and they stormed my house. I happened to have a knife in my hand, just a kitchen knife. The soldiers kept asking me about it. I explained I was cooking, but they threatened me and confiscated it.

It's a little old lady, basically. You know, it's absurd. And after being in Tulkarm, I accidentally ended up in Nablus overnight, just after there'd been a riot between soldiers and residents. So not settlers, but soldiers, which has been happening more and more. And Nablus is another place where there are camps. The Balata camp is a massive, it's one of the biggest refugee camps in the West Bank.

And there is supposedly, I think, lots of fighters and jihadists have been hiding there. And again, after the October attacks, everything's been rammed up in terms of security and rattling the cages. I couldn't get a bus back to Ramallah where I was meant to be staying. So I stayed overnight in Nablus and saw the post-riot kind of chaos. And the next day went to visit a lady whose son was 19 and had been killed in January of this year.

Because he was killed by soldiers, he became a martyr. Who was he fighting for? Was he a member of Hamas or some other group? No, she didn't go into it. And sometimes it's not very comfortable...

between you and me running. It wasn't very comfortable kind of asking because you're in a camp full of people who are a bit dodged. But you say there's something that really struck you about this family. What struck me was that this complete devastation of losing a child. And, you know, I've now got three children, which 10 years ago I didn't. And, you know, the idea of losing a child is just unbearable. And the fact that she was saying she knew that something was going to happen, he knew that something was going to happen. He kept

And he kept on saying the days after when he died, I think I'm going to die this year, Mum. I really, really love you. I just want to let you know that I really, really love you. But I think I'm going to die this year. And then the morning of when he was killed, she just knew something was up. And then he was killed, shot in the arm and the bullet penetrated his body. He'd already been wounded in the same arm. So lightning, in that case, really does strike twice. And he was killed, taken to hospital, but he was already dead.

What was extraordinary was that when he was buried, normally in Islam, the graveyards are quite, they're just big slabs of marble and the graves. This particular graveyard on the outskirts of this camp, she had planted his grave with plants, which is very unusual. And she put, she just mentioned a few plants, but actually she planted two different types of basil, geraniums, some kind of marigold,

There was a lavender. I mean, there must have been about 15 or so different plants. And I said, how do you, you know, did you do this before? I've never planted anything in my life. I said, well, how are you, how do you know what to do? So God tells me. But then the image that sticks in my head is of her at her son's grave, which is covered with his posters as much as the flowers. The graveyard is surrounded by these trees.

jihad posters, these martyr posters of these young guys, 17, 18, 19, 24 years old, smiling, carrying assault rifles with text saying, kill the martyr on whichever date. And so these camps of thousands of people, instead of having, you know, we go around, you know, our urban centres are filled with posters of Strictly Come Dancing or whatever TV show, Race Across the World or Muller Yoghurt or

These camps are covered with posters of martyrs. So the young children who then became quite obnoxious and started throwing things at me, they're also surrounded by these posters. The aspirations are in front of you. Become a martyr and you're a celebrity. It was so dark and so sinister and yet totally normal. And so that's just like another layer. And I think the biggest takeaway of this entire trip

is how many onion layers there are to the conflict between Israel and Palestine. It's not just, it's about land. It's so much more than that now. After the break, Lally meets the radical Jewish settlers who have their own very deep relationship with the soil.

Did you know that foreign investors are quietly funding lawsuits in American courts through a practice called third-party litigation funding? Shadowy overseas funders are paying to sue American companies in our courts, and they don't pay a dime in U.S. taxes if there is an award or settlement. They profit tax-free from our legal system, while U.S. companies are tied up in court and American families pay the price to the tune of $5,000 a year. But

But there is a solution. A new proposal before Congress would close this loophole and ensure these foreign investors pay taxes, just like the actual plaintiffs have to. It's a common sense move that discourages frivolous and abusive lawsuits and redirects resources back into American jobs, innovation, and growth. Only President Trump and congressional Republicans can deliver this win for America.

and hold these foreign investors accountable. Contact your lawmakers today and demand they take a stand to end foreign-funded litigation abuse. This episode is supported by Brex. Brex helps finance teams unlock their peak performance with the world's smartest corporate card, banking, expense management, and travel, all on one AI-powered platform. See why 30,000 companies across every stage of growth use Brex at brex.com slash grow.

Welcome back. Lali, you've given us a very vivid story about the gardens of Nero's, the devastated kibbutz, about the gardens of Palestinian families living in the refugee camps in the West Bank. But let's go down another onion layer in this conflict. I believe after that, you went to see some of the radical settlers in illegal settlements in the West Bank living not that far away from the

Obviously, they're on a completely different side of the conflict from the Palestinian families you were just with, but...

Do they also have a different attitude to gardens and gardening or is it remarkably similar? We started off at basically a commercial ranch that was started 30 years ago. I wrote in my notes that it reminded me of something equivalent to Daylesford Organics because this was a family, she was called Sharona and her husband Avery. They were part of the Hilltop Youth Settlers back in the day and

And they went from hilltop to hilltop from a settlement called Itamar. It was just in the same area where I was. So the Northwest Bank. Itamar is an illegal settlement. And then the hilltops around it, you get families that go from hilltop to hilltop, put an outpost, then to the next hilltop, put an outpost, next hilltop. She's got 10 children, because obviously if you're going to settle the land, then you need population to do that.

She said, all of my children were born on the hilltops. And she founded this ranch, which is incredibly beautiful. It was really well run. There was grass. There were flowers. There was irrigation. It was green. There was a coffee shop. They sell their own goat yogurt drinks. They sell honey and lavender soap. They sell all over the West Bank. Totally illegal. Totally illegal.

Totally illegal. So we got there and there were these farmhands kicking back and I thought, oh, this is quite pleasant. This is sort of unusual. It's like being, I don't know, it just didn't feel like

any of the refugee camps which were just down the road, except that these farmhands had pistols tucked into the back of their jeans. They really casually just sort of, you know, you leave a table and you pick up your phone and your keys, you put them in your pocket, you put your gun in your back pocket. So she started after being on these various hilltops. She said there wasn't a tree when we arrived. She and her husband founded that place in 1998.

Because after the Oslo Accords, where the administration of the West Bank was totally different, she and her husband were like, well, we've got to do something. This was their activism, was to go and start settling the Israelis back in the land of Judea and Samaria, which is what Israelis call the West Bank.

She was actually American. She came from California, but she'd lost a lot of her words and her accent was more Israeli than American. She said it was the political situation which inspired me to do this, to give myself to the settlement movement. It was a clear-cut thing. We wanted to build ranches on the hills with Israeli workers, and she wanted chickens and goats and

The government was against us because it was a new thing. We were the first people to make these ranches, but people thought it was politically problematic. And he describes Ariel Sharon going in a helicopter to the settlements around them, begging them not to do it because he knew that this was going to fan the flames of conflict. They said it would minimize the chances of peace if we carried on.

So we decided that we'd stop where our washing line was. So literally she was like, all right, we'll stop then. Because they were going to just carry on going from hilltop to hilltop. I asked her about the October the 7th attacks. And with settlers, you've got to be really careful when you... They know that the world is against them, more or less.

But you've got to be careful because, you know, even my fixer, he was quite savvy. He said, if I say we go, we go. Because it can take the turn of a knife, you know, the turn of a pin. The situation can change. So I was being nicey-nicey. And I said, oh, you know, after the 7th of October attacks. And she actually lost her son in the October 7th attacks. He was a soldier fighting in one of the kibbutzim down in the south in Kfar Azar. So that had another layer for her.

But with the settlers, when you talk to them and everything sounds quite normal, but then they say something incredibly religious because that is their life. Everything has to do with the land that should be settled according to the scriptures. This is quite an incredible picture. And I'm imagining a hilltop bursting with greenery and

And for her, you're saying this is a duty. This is all part of a religious mission, a religious calling. That's exactly it. It's a religious mission. And she has plants that have religious meaning. That's right. She says lands, land. This is Joseph's land. This is the connection to my ancestors. It's something in the energy in the air. It's the heart of the nation. Abraham and Jacob came here. It's where I belong.

And then I spoke to another lady who just had a little garden outside her house. We were basically driving around settlements looking for people who looked like they might be gardening. And then this lady was very suspicious, but we told her where we'd been before on this round. She said, oh, okay, fine. But then she started taking pictures of me while I was interviewing her, which...

She said she wanted to take it to her family. But for all I know, she was sending it to a wider community of people

and these were non-violent settlers, but she could have been sending it to the wider group of, I don't know, the settlers WhatsApp group, if there was one, to say, look out for this person. She's asking suspicious questions, which I suppose I was. She had olive trees. Her house was only 20 years old. And she had these really old olive trees in her garden. And I said, oh, so, you know, were these olive trees here before? She said, no, no, no, nothing was here. It was just the hilltop. And I said, what about the olive trees? And she said, oh, they came from somewhere else.

Which was quite clearly, the way she said it was, they were taken from an olive grove. They were ancient olive trees that had been dug up and replanted from probably from some land that wasn't hers. We promised to fill the land with things, she said. Land has no meaning if you don't give it the stage to perform. It has no value without being worked on. And just a minute, Lally, to clear up this business with the olive trees...

Your feeling is that those trees, they had grown there or that they'd been stolen from elsewhere? No, I think they'd been stolen. I think they'd been stolen. The olive for both sides in that conflict is incredibly... It's mentioned in the scriptures and it's deep within...

deep within both sides. Lally, thank you so much for guiding us through this quite unique look at this conflict. And this is obviously a very specific conflict. It's a current conflict, but it could be one of many. And I think this way of

of looking at war literally from the ground up, from the soil up, from the flower bed up, rather from that rather bird's eye strategic view we often take on this podcast is really, really humanizing and really important. I was rereading War Gardens and obviously you go to Ukraine, you go to this part of the world, Afghanistan obviously, and the common thread in all of those places is of the garden as a kind of, as an oasis of peace, as a place where people find peace

find an escape from the dehumanization of war. The romantic in me wants to see a thread of hope there. Think of the garden as a common ground, a place where people can come together because everybody shares this relationship with the garden in war. But listening to everything you've just said, I wonder whether actually the connection with the land, far from creating a common ground for peace, in a way...

actually exacerbates conflict and competition, especially when a war is very much about land. Yes, that's exactly right. I was hoping to find common ground and like a thread of hope before going out there. And actually I found the opposite. There was another settler I interviewed who was on an even further extreme of an outpost, which felt very sketchy going to

Amazingly, my fixer had taken another journalist down. It hadn't had quite the success because he opened the door to me because we were able to talk about his garden.

But while he was talking, I was like, this is so messed up. Like he is literally in an illegal, he's like in a permanent caravan on a hill with his six kids, a 39-year-old guy from Connecticut who'd taken Aliyah, so the religious return to Israel. He'd moved. He and his wife,

decided that they wanted to live more rurally. And of course, to be a settler, it's also cheap to live because you don't have to pay as much in rent if you're renting accommodation. He was living with 30 families and they're really crammed conditions. So imagine 700 square feet, 800 square feet. And then I mean, really like, you know, windows falling out of their frames and then total scrub land around it. And then you'll bang next to another one for the sky. Yeah.

um, you well, I thought he was going to laugh at me when I said, can you tell me about your garden? But he was like, absolutely come, come and have a look. And in amongst the crap all over the floor, the children's toys and the washing and there was a time plant or, um, a mallow or as a little fig tree and oats that he was going to harvest for him. It was something. And then we went around the back and,

where there were tyres that he was using as pots. But for him, it was totally religious. And he backed onto an olive grove. And I said, so he lives there. He owns that. And this guy looked like a hilltop youth settler because he was wearing a white jumper and a white shirt and brown trousers. And he had been farming. And his dream was to have a farm. But again, non-violent, I say with inverted quotes, because he wanted to have a farm where non-Jews could also live.

But he was already living in an illegal place. And he said, he told me he had a good relationship with his Palestinian neighbors. But without speaking to them, it'd be impossible to know. I couldn't speak to them because they weren't allowed to go to their land. So I wouldn't have been able to find them very easily. And it was getting dark, etc. We're talking about how you went out there looking for a thread of hope and unification.

And you found the opposite. I found the opposite because I didn't feel there was any hope with the land being taken away and the land being so divisive and Palestinians being so much more restricted than they were before. If you restrict a nation, you're not going to have peace. It's like a child. If you tell it not to do things, tell it not to do something, tell it not to do something, after a time it will just snap and just rebel.

And you can't let a nation be like that, regardless of whether they got fighters and jihadists or not. There has to be dialogue, there has to be negotiation, but it also has to be wider understanding of the more complex issues in hand, which from Gaza to the Northwest Bank, the Southern West Bank are very, very different, which is, I guess, why we're still at a stalemate.

all these years later. And these settlers, you know, he's this guy, he said, God chose Israel and the Jews because Israel is a moral and spiritual guide. It gives us different moral responsibilities. And when nations recognize this, there will be no more war. So you've got people who are that

way inclined, they're not going to sort of say, well, you know what, you've kind of got a point, we should probably give the Palestinians back their land. Well, it sounds like on this particular trip, the gardens didn't find you any hope. It sounds quite bleak, actually. Only in the kibbutz.

In the kibbutz it did. In the kibbutz it did, even though you were saying for a lot of people in the kibbutz that day, it was too early to go back and they couldn't really face it. I think because you could see it was very visual. So as a photographer, it was sort of like walking around an art gallery. You could see the way that nature was doing its thing regardless. And I think that's what gave me kind of hope. And also that

Kibbutz people are much more left-wing or left-leaning. And although October 7th attacks have changed a lot of people's opinions, and some of the people who've been very pro-peace now think they annihilate them. So former peace-loving people that I had met before, that I went to meet again in the Northwest Bank,

they had been peace-loving, were then saying the exact opposite. This couple that I met who had a permafarm in Tulkarm, their farm had been destroyed on October the 8th. Every greenhouse, polytunnel slashed, bees let go, fish left to dry up in tanks, land burned, acres and acres of permaculture farming completely slashed and burned. The couple who were peace activists said,

there can't be peace now. A Palestinian couple? Yeah, who had won awards around the world for their work in permaculture, peaceful activism, land activism, said, no, there can't be peace now. I was expecting them, because I'd met them before, I was expecting some hope to come from them, but I didn't see that. Darlene, I just want to end on a personal note. You spend a lot of time talking to soldiers and especially civilians in war zones.

and about how gardens and gardening has helped them and what it means to them. Is it something that's also helped you or something you've resorted to, given your own background, given all the time that you've spent in conflict zones as a reporter? You write in your book quite powerfully about some of the stuff you had to face and deal with in Afghanistan. Do you too find refuge in your garden? Yes, it has.

gardening has definitely helped whether it's a symptom of becoming not quite middle-aged but heading that way depending on how long I live whether it's something to do with that or

It's just, there's something about gardening, which just is very grounding, not because you've got your hands on the soil and you see things growing, but because you see how small we really are as people on earth. There are young trees, which are still older than us. And they're considered to be young. It kind of just makes you think, oh, you know what? Does it matter? How silly are we all to do this to each other time and time and time again?

And then in terms of sort of having a young family, finding the time to do any gardening is quite tricky. But then when I do, it's incredibly satisfying. And again, it's,

I think 10 years ago, people used to do lots of colouring in for mindfulness. Well, I think gardening has the same effect as slowing you down. You know, I've got a peony, my favourite flower. I've only ever produced one bloom, but it's got three buds that are opening, about to open. And I'm just like, every day I'm checking them with my daughter, going, oh God, is it going to happen today? Is it going to happen today? And that's a wonderful thing. Lally Snow, thank you for joining us on Battlelines.

That's all for today. We'll be back on Friday with our weekly Trump edition. In the meantime, that was Battle Lines. Goodbye. Battle Lines is an original podcast from The Telegraph created by David Knowles and hosted by me, Roland Oliphant and Venetia Rainey. If you appreciated this podcast, please consider following Battle Lines on your preferred podcast app. And if you have a moment, leave a review as it helps others to find the show.

To stay on top of all our news, subscribe to The Telegraph, sign up to our Dispatches newsletter, or listen to our sister podcast, Ukraine The Latest. You can also get in touch directly by emailing battlelines at telegraph.co.uk or contact us on X. You can find our handles in the show notes. The producer is Peter Shevlin and the executive producer is Louisa Wells.

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