By Jamil Dababat

JENIN, Saturday, December 15, 2018 (WAFA) - Three Palestinian experts, including a woman, are cautiously approaching a room that may be among the coldest in the Palestinian territories. The temperature inside it is minus 20 degrees Celsius. There is an obvious alarm of standing without heat insulation clothing, even for a few seconds, at its door.

As clouds cleared after a rainy day, some of the staff of the Palestinian National Agricultural Research Center stood outside the room to get some heat from the sun before entering the cold room.

In the room, a handful of country lentils reproduced after a long lost journey in the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean were placed.

At the door to the room, Dr. Ziad Fadda, who runs the research center, a government institution, said: "Here we keep the country lentils." Plastic containers that are supposed to be kept here for half a century are placed on several shelves in two cold rooms.

During the last century, the Palestinians lost some specific types of the original country seeds that they planted in the historical plains of Palestine. For some reason, some seeds were sent outside Palestine.

This type of country lentils has totally disappeared and no one would see it anymore in the fields.

"We are trying to regenerate the lost seeds," said Fadda.

Palestinian seeds are the product of thousands of years of natural adaptation and selection. In historic Palestine, they have been known among rural peasant communities, and local names have been given to them that can now be seen in specialized scientific journals.

The fame of some local production of lentils and others has preceded them to areas far from Palestine at the beginning of the last century.

This can be seen in official British reports dating back to the period of the Government of Palestine during the Mandate period.

Sometime between September 29, 1922 and November 29, 1947, the Mandate government kept a handful of Palestinian country lentils with international institutions involved in the collection of country seeds to reach years later to the headquarters of the seeds bank in the Syrian city of Aleppo, where ICARDA, or the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, is located.

There is no sign of drought in the coastal area around the Palestinian Agricultural Research Center near the town of Qabatiya in the northern West Bank. The rain that fell during the current winter season covered parts of the plains of the area. But the drought is a general phenomenon in the Palestinian territories that have winter seasons with uneven quantities of rainfall affecting the quantity of national seeds production.

The handful of lentils we are looking at today as one of the Palestinian national products has gone through several wars in the region.

With the beginning of the internal Syrian war, according to international reports, ICARDA moved the precious seeds to Lebanon and Morocco, where two banks were set up to keep them.

A handful of those lentils reached the Palestinians.

"We have recovered some of these seeds following an official request from ICARDA," said Dr. Fadda.

This was done before the seeds were transferred to Lebanon.

This process took place between 2009 and 2010. "We got about 100 grams of lentils that were kept there under the name of Palestinian country lentils," Fadda told WAFA during an interview in front of the cold rooms.

Researchers at the center said that the minute the handful of lentils has arrived here they were given a number and the process has begun in preparing them for planting in the next year to obtain a larger amount of seed. They were planted at the center, a historic agricultural building in the northern West Bank, with an area of 87 dunums (87,000 square meters).

Two years ago, the Palestinians established a seeds bank, or germplasm bank, where the lentils were kept. But before that, researchers there said they were placed in refrigerators, which no longer can accommodate the growing variety of seeds.

Lentils and other seeds were stored at two levels of low temperatures.

"A portion of each type is stored at 20 degrees below zero and is stored for 50 years, and another at four degrees above zero and is stored for five years," said Ala Merie, a specialist in the study of seed properties and its conservation. But to avoid fears of power outages or damage to the cooling rooms, a third reserve sample is stored in the same building in small refrigerators.

The rooms where the seeds are placed are very cold, and entering them causes the limbs to shiver.

Day after day, the number of seeds from different types of plants is multiplied.

This has exceeded 400 types of seeds brought into Palestine through a process that may be described as not easy.

Experts say the seeds bank is one of the signs of national sovereignty.

According to Fadda, Israel tried to sabotage the bringing of the handful of lentils by claiming copyright of the product. But in the end, the lentils were kept in international records under the title Palestinian country lentils.

In the last century, Palestine was able to achieve an international reputation in the cultivation of many varieties of seeds and fruits, some of which were exported to Arab and Western countries until the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967.

Here in Jenin, a coastal area located at the border of Marj Ibn Amer plains, one of the most fertile plains in historic Palestine, lentils were planted until they were lost.

However, says Fadda, productivity of this type of lentils is very low, but it is possible to take advantage of its excellent genetic qualities that resist drought and diseases in the hybridization of other types of lentils.

There are about 1800 samples of different types of seeds preserved at low temperatures.

Years ago, Palestinians from the plains lost one of the most famous watermelon plantations in this region, which also caused concern of losing it forever.

The Palestinian production of the watermelon, called al-Jadu‘i, was effectively lost. Through intensive research, staff at the research center found quantities of seeds with some farmers, which were re-cultivated after dealing with the causes of their disappearance, which was a bacterial disease that infected the soil in Jenin.

Its seeds are kept now in the seeds bank.

About 25 technicians with high degrees, including five with a doctorate degree, work in the very cold bank. Over the past years, they have been able to obtain the most famous types of wheat that disappeared completely from the Palestinian fields and are called the Black Hitti, which are known historically for their resistance to drought.

This one is also a fascinating story of Palestinian seeds that have been lost over the years, as agricultural engineers say.

M.K.