Predatory Fleas, Sterile Flies, and the Settlers

Agriculture and Human Values, 2024

Understanding the meaning of land-water entanglement is increasingly important today, in an age of climate change and desertification. Despite the close ties between water and land, literature largely focuses on each of them separately or ignores the attempts to disconnect them. This paper examines the connections and disconnections between water and land in the southern desert of Israel in the shadow of political use and environmental disaster. Drawing on ethnographic research, the paper explores the challenges and successes of intensive agriculture in arid regions, and how water allocation plays a crucial role in making the desert bloom. Weaving between the theoretical framework of 'agricultural infrastructure' and 'water-land imaginations', the paper separates between the different imaginations that enable the various dimensions of the water-land entanglement, the efforts made to expand the connection or disconnect them, and between their political, environmental and cultural realization as infrastructures. Overall, this paper provides insights into the ways by which Imaginations, infrastructures and land-water entanglement shape human-environmental interactions in arid regions and agriculture projects in the Anthropocene era.

International Journal of Human Rights, 2025

It is now widely acknowledged in the scholarship that Israel maintains a settler colonial regime, which has resulted in pervasive human rights abuses. However, the relation between ecology and settler colonialism in Palestine-Israel has only recently been subject to significant scholarly theorisation, despite the growing field of environmental colonialism and the present ecological crisis. This article adds to the limited field of eco-social and ecological settler colonial study of Palestine-Israel through the case study of Al-Walaja, a village in the illegally occupied West Bank, bordering the suburbs of East Jerusalem. Al-Walaja, a village known for its natural beauty and rich agricultural heritage, particularly its ancient terraced agriculture, has been transformed by Israeli settler colonial dispossession, which has claimed 89 per cent of the village's land since 1947. This paper explores how settler colonialism and ecology intersect in Al-Walaja. First, by arguing that Al-Walaja is an example of the greenwashing and green grabbing practices that Israel uses to normalise the dispossession of Palestinians and obscure colonisation and environmental harms. Second, it examines how environmental harms, in particular restrictions on building in the village, cause the perpetuation of a settler colonial declensionist narrative and settler-native binary. Lastly, the decline of agriculture in Al-Walaja is contextualised in terms of the normalisation and erasure inherent to settler colonial projects.

Isis

This essay considers the preservation of prickly alkanet, a wild plant that is a constituent of Palestinian cuisine. While tracking the dominant practices of biodiversity preservation that justify the documentation and collection of plants in national and international systems, it ultimately suggests recipes rather than seeds as targets of preservation. For, in seed saving oriented toward community control of resources, knowledge of the plant begins with the ability to prepare it for the table, not with the ability to analyze it in a lab or cultivate it in a field. As a logic of biodiversity preservation, cooking thus serves as an expression of community solidarity and a counter-hegemonic form of knowledge, prioritizing the local sharing of resources and rituals above floristic nationalisms and the extractive complex of international food security. Such an approach calls into question the orientation of modern agricultural development, which has prioritized increasing yield in primary cereal crops. www.fao.org/climate-smart-agriculture/en/ (accessed 2 Jan. 2021). On global conservation strategies see, e.g., Gea Galluzzi et al.,

like to thank my children, River and Tamar, who joined my many fieldwork trips to Palestine-Israel and who endured my absence on so many other occasions. At its core, this book contests binaries. Binaries between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, settler and native, 1948 and 1967, domestic and wild, and mobility and immobility emerge throughout, demonstrating the violence inherent in this juxtaposed way of thinking. I dedicate this book to my son, River, who has been working through binaries himself, with courage that I can only wish upon the rest of the world. The right half of a larger poster entitled "Wild Animals of the Bible" displays an imaginary biblical menagerie in the Holy Land. The griffon vulture features at the center of this image, the Asiatic wild asses are situated behind the vulture, and the gray wolf is on her left; the gazelle is at the bottom left corner and the golden eagle appears on the top left, with camels, cows, sheep, and even a human shepherd in the distant background. Settling Nature relays the contemporary conservation management stories of many of these animals. Courtesy of D. Kalderon, www.holylandguides.com.

International Journal of Middle East Studies , 2018

Social scientists commonly know that time is a social construct and a tool for governing by those holding power. Yet, how exactly is time used for governing? This article examines how timescape (embodiment of approaches to time) works in practice as a tool of power by considering multiple networks of time that manifest in al-Batuf/Beit Netofa Valley planning policy. This valley's agriculture, mostly owned by Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel, is considered by ecologists and officials a unique traditional agriculture landscape and wetland habitat that has become scarce in Israel due to its development and wetland drainage. Assembling separate modes of anthropological inquiry that attend to time as a technique, I show that knowledge, ethics, and time management are not separate spheres of governance but rather interwoven as one timescape tool of governing. Thus, the case of al-Batuf/Beit Netofa elucidates the ways in which time is used for governing in the context of an agricultural-environmental development policy and plan.

2023

In this highly original environmental history, Samuel Dolbee sheds new light on borders and state formation by following locusts and revealing how they shaped both the environment and people's imaginations from the late Ottoman Empire to the Second World War. Drawing on a wide range of archival research in multiple languages, Dolbee details environmental, political, and spatial transformations in the region's history by tracing the movements of locusts and their intimate relationship to people in motion, including Arab and Kurdish nomads, Armenian deportees, and Assyrian refugees, as well as states of the region. With locusts and moving people at center stage, surprising continuities and ruptures appear in the Jazira, the borderlands of today's Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Transcending approaches focused on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire or the creation of nation states, Dolbee provides a new perspective on the modern Middle East grounded in environmental change, state violence, and popular resistance.

Our special issue provides a first-of-its kind attempt to examine environmental injustices in the occupied West Bank through interdisciplinary perspectives, pointing to the broader settler colonial and neoliberal contexts within which they occur and to their more-than-human implications. Specifically, we seek to understand what environmental justice-a movement originating from, and rooted in, the United States-means in the context of Palestine/Israel. Moving beyond the settler-native dialectic, we draw attention to the more-than-human flows that occur in the region-which include water, air, waste, cement, trees, donkeys, watermelons, and insects-to consider the dynamic, and often gradational, meanings of frontier, enclosure, and Indigeneity in the West Bank, challenging the all-too-binary assumptions at the core of settler colonialism. Against the backdrop of the settler colonial project of territorial dispossession and elimination, we thus illuminate the infrastructural connections and disruptions among lives and matter in the West Bank, interpreting these through the lens of environmental justice. We finally ask what forms of ecological decolonization might emerge from this landscape of accumulating waste, concrete, and ruin. Such alternative visions that move beyond the single axis of settlernative enable the emergence of more nuanced, and even hopeful, ecological imaginaries that focus on sumud, dignity, and recognition.

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2021

In settler colonial settings, agriculture is a means of reclaiming territorial sovereignty and indigenous identity. Turning attention to the Jewish settlers in the West Bank and their multiple uses and abuses of organic farming, this article explores epistemic and political spatial operations on the colonial frontier. Applying a relational conceptualization of three spatial modalities-soil, territory, and land-we explore the ways in which these modalities serve as political apparatuses: Soil designates the romantic perception of cultivable space, territory is concerned with borders and political sovereignty, and land is seen as a space of economic value and as a means of production. While agriculture is a well-known instrument of expansion and dispossession, organic farming contributes to the colonial operation by binding together affective attachment to the place, and new economic singularity in relation to environmental and ethical claims. We argue that organic farming practices converge claims for local authenticity, spatial appropriation, and high economic values that are embedded in what we term the colonial quality turn. Ultimately, organic farming in the West Bank normalizes the inherent violence of the colonial project and strengthens the settlers' claim for political privilege. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/02637758211041121?journalCode=epda

Journal of Political Ecology, 2024

From 1919 through the early 1950s, agricultural scientists affiliated with the University of California and agricultural scientists setting up settlements in Mandatory Palestine traveled between California and Palestine on a series of research trips. Building on conversations in historical political ecology and critical political ecologies of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, this article sets out to answer: how was agricultural science part of the project of settler colonialism in both California and Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century? Through an analysis of archival materialsfield notes, professional and personal correspondence, and scholarly and popular media publications by US and European Jewish Zionist scientists-I argue that these scientists naturalized and made universal racial hierarchies through transnational technoscientific collaboration. US and Zionist scientists engaged in exchange and debate in two topics: the proper physical organization of and location of farms, and; the concept of carrying capacity of the land of historic Palestine. In both, agricultural science was used as an objective reason to elevate Western ideologies of proper cultivation and capitalist yield. This justified the dispossession of Palestinians from their land because they were "poor stewards." This historical case study holds implications for contemporary issues around land and population by Zionists in Israel today, and related debates in global sustainable development at large.

2020

Food security is a broad subject but many of its branches revert back to connectivity of land and people. Israel like any colonial power created conditions and programs that separate native people from their land while creating new economic structures that benefit the colonizers to create a new foreign society on that same land. This paper uses the example of a world heritage site (Battir and surrounding communities in South Jerusalem) to argue that agricultural resistance and food security can be done even under difficult circumstances by leveraging three areas: permaculture, biodiversity conservation and cultural heritage.