Wasted Lands: Zionist Development and Settler Colonialism in the Naqab/Negev A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Joseph Francis Getzoff IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Advisor: Vinay Gidwani July 2020 Copyright Joseph Francis Getzoff, 2020 © ,ךתחנ ךניד ,הממש ,ירוע !ךתוא שבכל םיאב ונא Awake, wasteland, your sentence is decided, We are coming to conquer you! - Natan Alterman שיבכה ריש Song of the Road i Acknowledgements It is impossible, perhaps, to adequately thank all of the people who had a hand in this dissertation, either directly or indirectly. Some may not even have realized how much they contributed. This dissertation project—and all the work that has spun out from it—would not have begun without the support of many friends in Philadelphia from 2006-2011. In particular, I owe Brandon West, who bravely challenged me to think more critically about Israel/Palestine, and thereafter, sending me on journey to test my assumptions and arrogance. The wonderful folks at Christian-Jewish Allies taught me how to teach, supported me in traveling to Israel/Palestine, and sent me off with a lot of encouragement to the University of Minnesota. I owe a special debt to Interfaith Peace Builders’ organizers and tour guides who, in the summer of 2011, took me through the West Bank and Israel. Finally, this project would not have been realized without the love and encouragement of Susan Landau. I want to thank my committee, Qadri Ismail, Abigail Neely, and Bruce Braun, and my advisor Vinay Gidwani for years of discussions, constructive criticism, and genuine interest in my research and writing. In particular, Vinay not only pushed me to be intellectually rigorous, but encouraged me to foreground a creative approach to analysis. He also repeatedly went to bat for me during my time at UMN and beyond, and I can’t express how appreciative I am of all of his generosity, compassion, and professional and intellectual guidance. This project would not have been possible without institutional funding and fellowships. In 2013, 2014 and 2015, I was awarded Foreign Language and Area Studies ii (FLAS) fellowships for summer and academic study of Modern Hebrew. I am grateful for that continued opportunity granted me by the Department of Global Studies selection committee to study Hebrew in immersive environments. I am especially grateful for my teachers at Haifa University, San Francisco University, and Ben-Gurion University (BGU) for their patient help. I truly owe much of my ability to navigate my research and field work in Hebrew to Dr. Renana Schneller at the University of Minnesota (UMN) in the department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies. My entire Hebrew education at the UMN is the result of years of her work, both in the classroom and in small study groups. In particular, Renana graciously stepped in to work with me in the summer of 2014 at the last minute. My field research was funded through the US-Israel Fulbright Association for a 9- month student award in partnership with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI). I truly appreciate Fulbright’s funding, but also, thankful for all of their work in connecting alumni and other scholars with each other, making research—and life abroad—more fulfilling. In particular, I thank them for their work in organizing the Fulbright MENA conference, for which I was able to travel to Morocco and meet so many other wonderful students working in the Middle East and North Africa. I also want to thank the College of Liberal Arts at UMN for their bestowal of a Thesis Research Travel Grant, which allowed me to extend my stay in Beersheba nearly six more months. Finally, the College of Liberal Arts and my home department at UMN, offered me several travel grants to help me attend the International Conference of Critical Geography in Ramallah at the beginning of my research, as well as supplement my attendance at conferences. In particular, I thank the organizers of the Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference at the University of iii Kentucky in Louisville for hosting such a wonderful setting for intellectual comradery. Writing requires funding as well. I am grateful to the Department of Geography, Environment, and Society at UMN for awarding me the Ralph Brown Memorial Fellowship that allowed me to focus on my writing and supported me through the program with many teaching assistantships. I especially want to thank Sara Braun and Glen Powell for their years (and I mean, years) of support through every stage of my time at UMN. Much thanks and appreciation to the editorial staff and anonymous reviewers from Settler Colonial Studies and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Two of my articles have been adapted into chapters in this dissertation. I would be remiss if I ignored the other types of material support necessary for such prolonged reading and writing. Much thanks to Nikhil Anand and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania for allowing me to come on for a year as a Visiting Scholar so I could access much needed materials in Philadelphia and work in their wonderful library overlooking the exhibits of the Penn Museum. I am grateful to my parents, especially my father, Harvey, for cleaning out an extra room in his chiropractic office in Marlton, NJ so that Sravanthi and I could have a space to write for the course of over a year. I spent many years of my childhood in that office and working there at such a different stage of my life was a special experience. Not to be outdone, my father-in-law, Srinavasa Rao Kollu, also cleaned out an extra room in his office in Hyderabad so that Sravanthi and I could plug away at our dissertations while in India. Not only did we have to report to him our work progress at the end of the day, but staff generously kept us well caffeinated. Finally, the last stage of my dissertation writing could not have happened without the wonderful public libraries in Massachusetts. iv I am extremely grateful and blessed to have had enjoyed such support, friendship, and comradery from the people I met in Minnesota over the years. Special thanks to Aaron Eddens, Jay Bowman, Spencer Cox, Kai Bosworth, Ivan Bialostosky, Joshua Eichen, Kwame Adovor Tsikudo, Julia Corwin, Eric Goldfischer, Aaron Mallory, Lalit Batra, Hillary Waters, Alicia Lazzarini, Jacqueline Daigneault, Elizabeth Schneider, Jessi Lehman, Maleenia Mohabir, David Hugill, Mike Simpson, Joe Witek, Jess Finlay, Michelle Grace, Adey Almohsen, Megan Buchanan, Melinda Kernik, Meryl Lodge, Kevin Van Meter, Katharine Hall, Philip Klopfenstein, Sara Nelson, Randall Cohn, Sophia Strosberg, Bill Lindeke, Laura Matson, and Jonny Oker-Blom. I am thankful for the intellectual, professional, and academic support of Abdi Samatar, Jean Langford, Arun Saldanha, Kate Derickson, George Henderson, Kurt Kipfmueller, and Scott St. George. I am also quite blessed to have met Aaron Oppelt, Alison Von Achen, Carl Thomas, Kristin Fitzsimmons, Reinhardt Suarez, and Ross, Bob and Teresa Wolf, and thank them for their friendship. In particular, I want to thank Omar and Liz Tesdell—much of my work evolved thanks to nights spent hanging out in their living room, both in Minnesota and in Palestine, and I owe much of my work to them. Over the years, thanks to conferences, delegations and other events, I was able to meet a number of wonderful scholars and friends who have helped me shape my work. Thank you to Brittany Cook Barrineau, Matt Berkmann, Rhys Machold, Gabi Kirk, Stepha Velednitsky, Sarah Salazar Hughes, and Matthew Rosenblum. My research could not have been possible without many people who gave me time and helped me navigate Israel and the Naqab/Negev. First, I want to thank everyone who gave me some time, patiently spoke to me in Hebrew, hosted me at their homes and in their v villages, and took the time to be interviewed. In particular, I want to thank Haia Noach, Michal Rotem, Rafat Abu Aisha, and Kessem Adiv of the Negev Co-existence Forum for Civil Equality. Without their help, I could not have completed my research and would have learned very little about the political situation in the Naqab/Negev. Thanks to the Negev Co-Existence Forum, I was able to meet many people in unrecognized villages in the Naqab/Negev. I am withholding most of the names of these villages and villagers in order to make sure there are no specific ramifications for them stemming from my work, but I do want to especially thank the people of Umm al-Ḥīrān —who actively asked visitors such as myself to share their stories. I also want to personally thank Khaled al-Ja’ar for his warmth and willingness to share his story about his son, Sami. I also owe an intense debt of gratitude to the numerous volunteer translators at all the events I attended, without whom it would have been difficult for me to understand the full force of issues facing Bedouin folks in the Naqab/Negev. I want to thank Ofer Ashkenazi for facilitating my connection to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) and Itay Fishhendler of HUJI for working with me throughout my Fulbright fellowship. I am also grateful to the Department of Geography and Environmental Development at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev who graciously gave me an office to work in. I also want to thank the archivists and others who helped me navigate documents and materials (in both English and Hebrew). Much thanks to Adi Portugez, Leana Feldman, and Lili Adar, at the Ben-Gurion Archives in Sede Boqer. A special thanks to Miriam Vazana at the Tuviyahu Archives at Ben-Gurion University who helped fill long days of scanning and searching with kindness, conversation, and coffee. Much thanks to the Office of Publications at BGU and to Merav Sadoff Fima for helping vi me navigate BGU’s magazine archives. I also want to thank Nili Baruch, Steven Rosen, Ismael Abu-Saad, and Clive Lipchin for their help and guidance. I am also lucky to have met many other wonderful people while in the Naqab/Negev, who became good friends and intellectual compatriots: Christine Vandervoorde, Evelyn González, Lisa Wessel, Lorenzo Gabutti, Leor Mekahel, Arielle Zimmerman, Rachel Gur-Arie, Marwa, Osama Ziadna, Lucia Paloma, Luna Goldberg, Lea Albrecht, Nili Caine, Nitsan Fire, Oriane Cohen, Yossi, Fadi, Anna Zielinska, Marta Silva, Michelle Weitzel, and Kyle Knabb, Jesse Lerner and Harvey and August Lerner-Knabb. I spent many, many days and evenings with the Lerner-Knabb family and I cannot express how much your friendship means to me. I also want to thank my various roommates who made living in Beersheba a wonderful experience: Jana Maresch, Chris Van Grimm, Jeremy Pearson, and most of all, Alex Shlimovich. Finally, a special thanks to Ari Katz, my grandfather’s cousin, who lives in Haifa and though having never heard of me before 2016, opened up his home to me. Finally, this project would not have been possible without the many friends and family who stuck by me through the whole process of joining graduate school, working in Israel/Palestine, and writing this dissertation. Some of my oldest friends have heard so much about my work that they might know it better than I do; or, at the least, they are happy that I am finished so I might stop talking about it. I thank Steve Schulze, Tom Wedlick, Eric Crane, Sarah Hunter, and Matt Price. I would also like to acknowledge Mike Daly, who has been terribly missed since 2007; I wish you had seen this work. Much thanks to my in-laws, Rao, Latha, Kumar, Atma, and Kotnis, for making me feel a part of the family and cheering me on. I also want to thank my uncles, Len and Mel, who showed incredible interest in my work throughout the process (even reading through vii he had to read “terribly long articles”) and my cousins, Daniel Getzoff, Melissa Getzoff, Steve, and Cindy and Rob Messina, and brother-in-law, Josh Fidler, who were there especially during the time of writing. Much love to my aunt, Hanne Laursen, and to my late, and forever missed, uncle Barry Brucker, and to my cousins, Meeks and Joanna. Finally, we lost a lot of people in my family during the time I was in graduate school. I wish they were alive for me to share this work with them. In blessed memory, my uncle, Jerry, my aunt Ellen, my cousin, Faye, my uncle Barry, and my grandmother, Rochelle. I also want to thank my brother and sister, Jared Getzoff and Jillian Fidler for all of their love and support. I could not have done any of this without the loving optimism of my parents, Harvey and Audrey Getzoff, who read everything I wrote, and who always told me that everything would be ok, and they were right. At last, but certainly not least, I want to thank my wife, Sravanthi Kollu. I am incredibly lucky to have such a partner in crime as we navigated almost a decade of graduate school, moved across continents, and hunkered down during a pandemic. She was there at every moment along the way. It is Srav’s work as much as mine. viii To My partner, Sravanthi Kollu, My parents, Audrey and Harvey Getzoff, And my friend, Susan Landau. ix Table of Contents Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................. i List of Figures ..................................................................................................................... xi List of Author Photographs .............................................................................................. xii A Note on Naming Conventions ..................................................................................... xiii Glossary ............................................................................................................................. xv Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 The Wild South ............................................................................................................................ 1 Zionist Wastelands ....................................................................................................................... 5 Development’s Southern Frontier .............................................................................................. 11 Bedouin Spatiality ...................................................................................................................... 17 Settler Development ................................................................................................................... 24 Chapter Summaries .................................................................................................................... 37 Introduction to Field Journals: Methodology for Fieldwork in a Settler Colonial Space . 43 Field Journal 1: Dispatch from Beersheba ........................................................................ 59 Field Journal 2: Envisioning with David Ben-Gurion ....................................................... 64 Chapter 1: A Zionist Frontier Theory: Settler Colonialism and Colonial Development .. 75 Introduction: A Transnational Settler Archive on Development ............................................... 75 Zionist Settler Development ...................................................................................................... 82 Pioneers on Transnational Frontiers ........................................................................................... 89 Colonial Settler Development .................................................................................................... 99 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 112 Field Journal 3: The Hebron Watershed / The Besor Stream .......................................... 114 Field Journal 4: A series of observations and snippets from my field note journals ....... 124 Chapter 2: The Challenge of the Wasteland: Settler Colonial Sciences in the Naqab/Negev ................................................................................................................... 129 Introduction: “A Parched and Barren Wilderness” .................................................................. 129 Shifting Territories in Shifting Sands ...................................................................................... 137 Bedouin Agriculture and Zionist Settlement ............................................................................ 144 Scientific Settlers ..................................................................................................................... 154 Michael Evenari, Zionist Time, and Desert Agriculture .......................................................... 173 x Conclusion: The Legacy and Limits of Zionist Desert Sciences ............................................. 187 Field Journal 5: The Only Democracy in the Middle East .............................................. 191 Chapter 3: Start-Up Nationalism and Neoliberal Zionist Development ......................... 196 Introduction: Start-Up Nation .................................................................................................. 196 Neoliberal Zionist Governmentality ........................................................................................ 205 Start-Up Nation ........................................................................................................................ 214 Silicon Wadi ............................................................................................................................. 226 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 232 Field Journal 6: Rawabi: The Palestinian Dream ............................................................ 238 Field Journal 7: On Violence ........................................................................................... 247 Chapter 4: Developing Bedouin: Neoliberal Settler Development and Bedouin Civic Society ............................................................................................................................. 260 Introduction: Neoliberal Wastelands ........................................................................................ 260 The Production of Bedouin Exclusion ..................................................................................... 269 Dispossession and Rehabilitation in Settler Development ....................................................... 278 Bedouin NGOs and organizations ............................................................................................ 285 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 315 Field Journal 8: Thanksgiving at Umm al-Ḥīrān ............................................................. 318 Conclusion: Green Deserts .............................................................................................. 330 Bibliography .................................................................................................................... 340 xi List of Figures Figure 1. Ben-Gurion and the Negev. ............................................................................... xx Figure 2. Beer Sheva Region Master Plan, Bimkom. ....................................................... xxi Figure 3. Map depicting all development plans in the Naqab/Negev. .............................. 42 Figure 4. Ben-Gurion working with a sheep. .................................................................... 66 Figure 5. A settler in the Negev. ........................................................................................ 89 Figure 6. Gardening work in Beersheba. ......................................................................... 135 Figure 7. Farming the Ancient Way. ............................................................................... 140 Figure 8. The UN Partition of Palestine. ......................................................................... 147 Figure 9. The Institute for Desert Research. .................................................................... 157 Figure 10. Cultivating the Third World. .......................................................................... 167 Figure 11. Bedouin Student 1. ......................................................................................... 170 Figure 12. Bedouin Student 2. ......................................................................................... 170 Figure 13. Michael Evenari. ............................................................................................ 175 Figure 14. Beersheba Hi-Tech Development. ................................................................. 226 Figure 15. We're Making Progress... ............................................................................... 232 Figure 16. Rawabi - A City to Live, Work and Grow ..................................................... 241 Figure 17. Siyag. .............................................................................................................. 269 Figure 18. Planned Settlement to Replace Umm al-Ḥīrān. ............................................. 318 Figure 19. JNF - If You Build It. ..................................................................................... 333 xii List of Author Photographs Photograph 1. Beersheba, Old City. 2015. ....................................................................... 59 Photograph 2. Shabbat sunset in the Old City. 2015. ....................................................... 60 Photograph 3. The Grand Mosque in the Old City of Beersheba. 2015. .......................... 61 Photograph 4. Cell tower over the old police barracks in the Old City. 2015. ................. 63 Photograph 5. Settle the Negev yourself at Ben-Gurion's home in Sede Boker. 2015. ... 67 Photograph 6. A transparent exhibit under the trees at the Ben-Gurion home. No label or explanation for the covered wagon, the transposition of landscapes. 2015. ..................... 69 Photograph 7. Panoramic of the Wilderness of Zin below Midreshet Ben-Gurion. 2016. ........................................................................................................................................... 74 Photograph 8. Shutdown in Old City Hebron. 2011. ..................................................... 115 Photograph 9. The slurry at the border next to the Green Line. 2015. ........................... 117 Photograph 10. The stream on the edge of Umm Batīn. The village is in the background. 2015. ................................................................................................................................ 120 Photograph 11. Besor Stream through Beersheba, called by the city the Beersheba River. Bedouins sometimes use the dried riverbed to graze sheep and camels. 2015. .............. 122 Photograph 12. The statue, the Guardian of the Negev. Erected by artist activists, Emilio and Eylon Mogilner and the people of Wādi an-Naʿam to protest the toxic effect of Ramat Hovav on the health of Bedouins nearby. 2016. .................................................. 127 Photograph 13. Approaching Rawabi. 2016. .................................................................. 238 Photograph 14. Visitors to Rawabi. Former Wisconsin Governor, Scott Walker with Basher Masri. From “Rawabi City,” Brochure. 2016. Photograph of Brochure. ............ 240 Photograph 15. Model of Rawabi in the showroom. 2016. ............................................ 243 Photograph 16. The settlement of Har Homa next to Bethlehem. 2011. ........................ 244 Photograph 17. Photograph of newspaper, Yediot Achronot. Normalizing images of Palestinian violence. October 2015. ................................................................................ 250 Photograph 18. The high school where Sami was killed. 2015. ..................................... 253 Photograph 19. Wādi an-Naʿam. 2016. .......................................................................... 320 Photograph 20. The earthworks for Chiran in the distance, looming over the village. 2016. ................................................................................................................................ 323 Photograph 21. Land Day Demonstration at Umm al Hiran. 2016. ............................... 329 Photograph 22. Construction on the northern edge of Beersheba. In the foreground, an unmarked area with several stone house foundations. 2015. .......................................... 339 xiii A Note on Naming Conventions All naming conventions in the space of Israel/Palestine are laden with political allegiance and historical meaning. In this dissertation, I generally follow a critical academic approach to labeling place. I use the conjoined couplet “Israel/Palestine,” to refer to the entirety of the 1948 British Mandate of Palestine in the present and do so in order to stress the settler colonial nature of the space. “Israel/Palestine” geographically includes “Israel” (the 1967 boundaries), as well as the “West Bank,” “Gaza,” “East Jerusalem,” and the “Golan Heights”—these four territories are considered occupied under international law. Israel considers Gaza autonomous (despite blockading it), the West Bank is under the convoluted joint rule of the Oslo Accords while it is slowing being eaten away by settlements, and East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights were unilaterally annexed by Israel. I use “Naqab/Negev” to refer to the southern region of Israel/Palestine. I use this Hebrew/Arabic couplet, rather than one or the other, to again express the settler colonial nature of the space. I sometimes use Naqab to refer to the space before 1948, or to the people who live there as Naqab Bedouin Palestinians. I include “Negev” because many of my sources are Zionist and it would be confusing to present these texts and not employ “Negev” as part of my own naming convention. Throughout the dissertation, I sometimes say Naqab Bedouins, or Bedouin Palestinians, to highlight the geographical and national allegiances of the southern Bedouin population. Mostly, I shorthand this name as “Bedouins,” but only once establishing the larger connections that Bedouins have as Palestinians. I do not employ the terms “Arab-Israeli,” or “Bedouin-Israeli,” as they erase the Palestinian national movement’s claims to self- determination and identity. I use the term “Palestinian citizens of Israel” on occasion to highlight Palestinian identity within Israel’s 1967 borders. I use the term “Palestinian” when referring to all Palestinians within Israel/Palestine. “Jewish Israeli” I use to differentiate Jewish citizens of the state from non-Jewish citizens. For other naming conventions, I sometimes employ the most recognizable names for places (in English). This relies on my own judgement, based on what I see in academic or journalistic texts. For Arabic place names, I mostly follow a transliteration style that represents the Bedouin-Arabic dialect. In particular, I draw from the Negev Co-Existence Forum’s list of transliterated names in English. Naqab Bedouin Arabic has some differences with Palestinian Arabic as a whole—most notably, the letter qaf (ق) is pronounced as an English “g,” a sound that does not appear in Palestinian Arabic. For instance, while “Naqab” is the Arabic name for the southern region, in Bedouin Arabic dialect, it would be pronounced “Nagab.” I stick to “Naqab” as it is used more frequently. Below, I also include English transliteration for specific places in deference to how they are familiarly known outside of the Naqab/Negev. For Hebrew transliteration, I favor the “ch” for the guttural chet ( ח( sound (like clearing one’s throat), rather than “h” or “kh.” xiv For the list of all Bedouin municipal place transliterations see: https://www.dukium.org/transcription/ I tend not to follow Hebrew naming conventions unless it matches with what is most recognizable in English. For Beersheba, I do not write Be’er Sheva (Hebrew), nor Bi’r as- sa’ba (Arabic), except where contextually appropriate. I do this because my sources jump between all three and seek to provide some level of recognizable consistency, especially for people who are unfamiliar with the region and its politics. Several times I transliterate Hebrew conjugations for plural form (-im (pronounced as “eem”/ masculine) and -ot (pronounced as “oat”/ feminine). For instance, the plural of kibbutz is kibbutzim. Hebrew also relies on suffixes to do the work of definite and indefinite articles. Several times in the dissertation I quote sources that use this transliteration convention. For instance, “ha” or “he” is “the”—“Hechalutz” is thus he + chalutz, or “the pioneer.” xv Glossary Terms Bedouin – From Arabic for “desert” (bedu), Bedouin means “people of the desert.” Historically, the name has referred to peoples in the Middle East and North Africa who have a semi-nomadic, pastoral socio-cultural lifestyle. In Israel, Bedouin is used as a label and self-referent for Palestinian peoples in the north and south who have historically seasonally migrated. Bedouin society is heterogenous and made up of many different tribal affiliations. Chalutz/ Chalutziut (Pioneer/Pioneering) – The figure of the chalutz (pioneer) is important in images of Zionist settlement as someone who braves the frontier to establish agricultural communes. Chalutziut (pioneering) was the ideology popularized by David Ben-Gurion that celebrated the pioneer as an ideal citizen. Transliteration of chalutz is sometimes “halutz” or “khalutz” from the Hebrew “ ץולח ”. Dunam – A dunam is an Ottoman era measurement of land equal to about 1/4th of an acre. It is still used in Israel/Palestine. Government Planned Township – The Israeli government began planning and building townships in the late 1960s in order to ‘settle’ Bedouins from villages. Today, there are seven government planned townships in the Naqab/Negev: Rahaṭ, Laqiya (al-Lagiyyih), Ḥūrah, Kseifa (Ksīfih), Segev Shalom (Šgīb as-Salām), Tel Sheva (Tal as-Sabaʿ), and ‘Ar’ara (ʿArʿarah an-Nagab). Jewish-Israelis – Over 20% of the Israeli population is not Jewish. Jewish Israeli is an identity used to refer to the Jewish collective as a whole – but Jews in Israel should not be mistaken for a homogenous group. I am using Jewish Israelis as an umbrella term for a variety of different religious and non-religious practices, ethnic heritages, and political orientations. Jewish Frontier – The name of a liberal American Jewish journal first published in 1934. The magazine published articles from a liberal Zionist perspective. Kibbutz – A kibbutz is one of the different types of farming communities used to settle Palestinian land before 1948. A kibbutz was usually communal; all members shared incomes, rotated labor, and voted on kibbutz decisions. Today, very few kibbutzim are still communal, as most have privatized to stay financially viable as municipalities. Knesset – The Israeli Parliament. There are 120 Members of the Knesset (MKs) who are elected by a representational parliamentary system from party lists, not geographic districts. Labor Zionism – Labor Zionism is a broad movement of many different organizations before 1948 and many political parties once the state was established. It was hegemonic in xvi Israeli politics until the rise of the Likud often marked by the 1977 election. Labor Zionism is associated with agricultural settlements and industrial labor used to settle Palestine. David Ben-Gurion was a major figure in the Labor Zionist movement. Midbar (Desert) – This is the term used in Hebrew to describe the region of the desert, or the biome of a desert. In Hebrew, the spelling is ״רבדמ״ . Sometimes shmamah is used instead to connote a barren wasteland. The conjugation midbur means “desertification.” See Feige 2009. Military Administration – From 1948-1966, Palestinians in Israel lived under a military regime that constricted their movement, repressed political activities, and administered access to land and employment. See Robinson (2013) and Hillel (2010). Mixed Town – The name for a town that has both Jewish and Arab residents, such as Beersheba. In the Naqab/Negev, the majority of towns are either Bedouin or Jewish as there is little residential integration. Nakba – The Nakba is Arabic for “catastrophe” and refers to the ongoing Palestinian dispossession in Historic Palestine. Some people use Nakba to refer to the 1947-1949 period in which over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from Palestine by Zionist forces. Others use the term to refer to ongoing settler colonialism and war. Naqab/Negev – The term “Naqab” is the Arabic word used for the region in the south of Palestine. However, according to some scholarship, it does not appear in pre-1917 maps of the region, thus it is perhaps a later label used to emphasize the region’s Arabness (Nasasra 2012: 87). “Negev” is the conventional term used in Hebrew for the region. In Hebrew, the verb li-nagav is “to dry out,” and in Biblical Hebrew, “Negev” referred to the compass direction of the “south.” British colonial spellings of the region used the term “Negeb,” which seems to be drawn from the Hebrew, as b and v are the same letter in the language )ב( , but also perhaps from Bedouin Arabic, which pronounces Naqab as Nagab. New Israeli Shekel (NIS) – The New Israeli Shekel was adopted in the 1980s after the Emergency Structural Adjustment Plan, replacing the Israeli Shekel. The exchange rate of NIS to US dollars has been consistently about 4:1 for much of the decade. However, Israel is very expensive; a 4:1 ratio does not mean that things cost 25% less in Israel than in the US. Israelis also make far less money than US Americans annually. Palestinian Citizens of Israel – The name for Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship. Zionist discourses often use the term, “Israeli-Arabs,” separating citizens from the larger Palestinian national movement and identity. Sometimes people say Palestinian-Israelis. Pizurah ( הרוזפ )– Means “dispersion” and is used by Israeli officials to refer to the unrecognized villages in the Naqab/Negev. The word implies that Bedouins are disorderly invaders on state land. xvii Recognized Village – In the 1990s, the Israeli government began to “recognize” some Bedouin “unrecognized villages.” The government provides few services, such as schools, and many homes in villages are still classified as “illegal” and can be demolished. Silicon Wadi – A play on Silicon Valley, as wadi in Arabic and Hebrew can mean a valley, as well as a riverbed. The name has been given to different regions in Israel with a considerable hi-tech industry. Unrecognized Villages – An unrecognized village is a term used to label Bedouin villages that the State of Israel does not recognize. There are 46 unrecognized villages in the Naqab/Negev (and some more throughout the rest of Israel). Unrecognized villages do not appear on official maps, receive state services, nor utilities. Wasteland (Shmamah – הממש ) – Shmamah can mean “wasteland” as well as “wilderness” and is seen as a place barren of civilization that must be transformed and improved. The root of shmamah also appears in words like “desolate” and the verb form means to raze a landscape. In the slogan, “making the desert bloom,” the Hebrew is often haphrachah hashmamah, literally, “blooming the wasteland.” Places Bedouin place format: Familiar English transliteration / Bedouin dialect transliteration / Hebrew transliteration (if different from familiar English) Other places names below may include both Hebrew names which may correspond to popularly used terms in English. Al-‘Araqib/ al-ʿArāgīb – A village along route 406 between Beersheba and Rahaṭ. Al- ‘Araqib is (sadly) known for the sheer number of times it has been demolished by Israeli authorities. The village has been featured in documentaries, reports from major news outlets, and has wrestled with the Israeli courts for years. Hebron / Al-Khalil / Hevron – A large Palestinian city in the southern West Bank. Currently, the city center is occupied by several hundred violent religious-nationalist settlers. ‘Atir / ʿAtīr – An unrecognized village adjacent to Umm al-Ḥīrān . The two villages are linked by family ties. Currently, the Jewish National Fund is surrounding ‘Atir with afforestation projects. Besor Stream / Hebron Stream – This stream runs from near Hebron into the northern Naqab/Negev, through Beersheba, and on to Gaza and into the Mediterranean. Beersheba / Bir as-sa’ba / Be’er Sheva – Founded as an administrative center by the Ottoman Turks in 1901, Bir as-sa’ba continued as a colonial outpost into the British xviii Mandate period. It was captured by Israel in the 1948 war. It is being refashioned as a tech-capital and regional hub for development in the Naqab/Negev. Israeli Jews sometimes abbreviate the city in English as “B7,” a play on “Sheva,” which is the word for “seven” in Hebrew. Gaza / Ghazzah / Azah – The Gaza Strip holds several Palestinian coastal cities that have historically been interconnected with regional trade. Israel is currently blockading the Strip and routinely wages war against its citizens and the Hamas government, after unilaterally evacuating its settlements in 2005. Rockets from Gaza can hit Israeli towns in the Naqab/Negev within minutes. Beersheba is about a 30-minute drive to Gaza. Many Bedouin Palestinians have relatives in Gaza due to the expulsion of Bedouins from the south during the 1947-1949 Nakba. Hura / Ḥūrah – A government planned township for Bedouins along route 31 from Beersheba to Arad. Ḥūrah is the site of many economic initiatives and is adjacent to both Umm al-Ḥīrān and Project Wadi Attir. Laqiya / al-Lagiyyih – A government planned township for Bedouins about 10 minutes east of Ḥūrah on route 31. The vicinity of Laqiya is continually affected by the siting of military bases and supports many unrecognized villages nearby. The Bedouin women’s organization, Sidreh, is located in Laqiya. Midreshet Ben-Gurion – This is the small university town next to Sede Boqer where the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research is located, along with the Ben-Gurion Research Institute and the Ben-Gurion Archives, as well as the graves of David and Paula Ben-Gurion. It is about a 30-40-minute drive south of Beersheba. Naqab/ Negev – The southern desert region of Historic Palestine. Nevatim – An air force base established in the Naqab/Negev as a result of the 1980 Peace Law that ratified relations with Egypt. Military infrastructure in the occupied Sinai was moved to the Negev after Israel returned the territory. Israeli officials used base’s establishment to depopulate several unrecognized Bedouin villages. Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) – The name given to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which, since the Oslo Peace Accords, are under a stratified system of sovereignty, which no longer applies to Gaza. Area A (large cities) are (mostly) under Palestinian Authority control. Area B (towns) are under Palestinian civil control and Israeli military control. Area C (larger open areas, farmland, some villages, including much of the Jordan Valley) is under Israeli military and civil control (and is where most settlements are located). Rahaṭ / Rahaṭ - The largest of the planned government townships. It’s population of about 70,000 people, making it the second largest city in the Naqab/Negev. xix Ramat Hovav / Neot Hovav – An area about 12 km south of Beersheba that is the only regional council in Israel with no (legal) residents. The area is a huge industrial park, focused on chemical industries and waste disposal, infamously known as the most polluted site in Israel. Sede Boqer – A Naqab/Negev kibbutz famous because it is where David Ben-Gurion ‘retired’ to live the life of a pioneer. The kibbutz council accepted Ben-Gurion as a member, but not with a unanimous vote. Siyaj / Siyag (sometimes Sayag) – Means “fenced area” in Arabic and Hebrew. A large oblong area that includes much of the northern Naqab/Negev south of the West Bank. In the early 1950s, the Israeli military moved many of the Bedouins from the western and southern Naqab/Negev into the Siyag. Today, the area of the Siyag is the most targeted for development by the Israeli government. Umm al-Hiran / Umm al-Ḥīrān – Historically, the villagers of Umm al-Ḥīrān come from the western Naqav/Negev near the present-day Israeli town of Shoval. The Israeli military moved the people of Umm al-Ḥīrān to this area in the early 1950s. As an unrecognized village, Umm al-Ḥīrān is under constant threat of demolition, especially since Israeli planners wish to replace the village with a Jewish town called Chiran. Wadi al-Naʿam / Wādi an-Naʿam – The largest unrecognized village in the Naqab/Negev with something like 14,000 residents (making it larger than several government-planned Bedouin towns). The village is adjacent to Ramat Chovav and has many incidents of cancer and other health issues related to the toxicity of the environment. West Bank – In reference to the west bank of the Jordan River, a dividing line between the OPT and Jordan. The West Bank refers to one of two Palestinian territories (the other being the Gaza Strip) that (supposedly) was to be a part of the two-state solution, a Palestinian state. Fatah controls the West Bank. There are almost 700,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem). xx Figure 1. Ben-Gurion and the Negev. Image depicting the profile of David Ben-Gurion surveying settlement throughout the Naqab/Negev. Central to the map is the kibbutz of Sede Boqer. “Sede Boker Campus – Equipment for Sports.” File No. 1416.09.002. Tuviyahu Archives, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel. xxi Bimkom, Jerusalem, Israel. Reprinted with permission from Bimkom. Figure 2. Beer Sheva Region Master Plan, Bimkom. 1 Introduction This is the South of Israel, the wild South. But the Internet is the Wild West. - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an interview with Steve Forbes in 20151 It is on this truth that the faith of the Jewish people in its future is based, and the supreme test of Israel in our generation lies, not in its struggle with hostile forces without, but in its success in gaining domination, through science and pioneering, over the wastelands of its country in the expanses of the South and the Negev. - David Ben-Gurion, “Southwards!” (Daroma)2 The Wild South In an interview with Steve Forbes in 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu identified two frontiers for Zionism. The first was the “wild South”—the Naqab/Negev desert, a “wasteland” long seen by Zionists as a frontier to be conquered. The second was the Internet, a mostly lawless “Wild West” that Israel could tame, commodify, and control. Netanyahu’s words epitomize the ideological construction of Zionist development that is the focus of this dissertation. Zionism continually claims economic exceptionalism and expertise, a state that excels at statehood, while at the same time drawing from established settler colonial narratives and images even as it persistently denies its own coloniality. Netanyahu’s brief remark hints at Zionism’s developmental imagination – one that is not only internal to the narratives of Israeli settler colonialism but 1 Steve Forbes, “How the Small State of Israel is Becoming a High-Tech Superpower,” Forbes. 22 July 2015. https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2015/07/22/how-the-small-state-of-israel-is-becoming-a-high- tech-superpower/#36a984254236. 2 David Ben-Gurion, Like Stars and Dust: Essays from Israel’s Government Year Book (Sede-Boqer: The Ben-Gurion Research Center, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The Ben-Gurion Heritage Institute, 1997): 187. 2 repurposes a complex amalgamation of global ideas and practices, summoning from circulating discourses about frontiers, wastelands, national improvement, pioneers and natives, capitalism, and Western civilization. Settler colonial ideology mobilizes development on the southern frontier, a place constructed through Zionist narrative and imagination. The Wild South, the Naqab/Negev, is only south in relation to Israel’s crowded middle. In the Zionist imagination this desert is a wasteland only because deserts seem vacant of value. This vast space is only a frontier as long as the state fails to territorialize and settle the Naqab/Negev, which Zionist discourses consistently claim is 60% of the State of Israel’s land, yet only 10% of its population, a ratio that, when repeated, supposedly elicits the common-sensical conclusion of untapped potential. The larger arid region from which the Naqab/Negev emerged is fractured by state borders, armistice lines, and zones of negligible autonomy. The Naqab/Negev’s triangle—what one commentator called an “Indian arrowhead” so that American settlers reading the Jewish Chronicle of Pittsburgh would immediately envision its shape— is cut by the Sinai Peninsula, the Jordan River and Wadi Araba, the southern West Bank, and much of Gaza.3 Its environmental and meteorological landscape is traced over by the cartographic sketches of isohyets, lines of rainfall that mark the limits of cultivation in the colonial imagination.4 In this “south,” Bedouin Palestinians—citizens of the State of Israel—have long resisted colonial and settler colonial control.5 Many Zionist and British colonial discourses framed Bedouins as traditional, savage, disorderly nomads 3 Albert Bloom, “Need Jewish Bedouin,” Jewish Chronicle of Pittsburgh. (April 28, 1977). 22193, Serial No. 9817, File No. 6027. Ben-Gurion Archives, Ben-Gurion Research Institute, Sede-Boqer, Israel. 4 Eyal Weizman and Fazal Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline: Colonization as Climate Change in the Negev Desert (Brooklyn: Steidl, 2015): 9. 5 Mansour Nasasra, The Naqab Bedouins: A Century of Politics and Resistance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 3 who not only lacked an attachment to the land, but actively destroyed it, laying waste to the region.6 In reality, Bedouins have long adapted their pastoral and agricultural political- economy to the arid environment while navigating and/or resisting Ottoman, British, and Israeli colonialism.7 If the narratives portray Bedouins as the agents of desertification, settler discourses portray Israelis as a force of modernity, technology, and civilization, all brought unto the wasteland, populating it, making it bloom, and spreading order and law.8 These discourses neatly bypass how the state has transformed the Naqab/Negev into the “periphery” of state development, a landfill for the refuse of Israel’s populous middle, the dense coast from Ashkelon to Acre along with the corridor east towards Jerusalem and the dispersion of the settlements in the West Bank. Tel Aviv’s garbage is trucked south. Settler effluence flows down the hills outside Al-Khalil/Hebron. The evaporation ponds of Neot Hovav release curtains of yellow mist over Wādi an-Naʿam. The state used the Naqab/Negev to dump impoverished Jewish immigrants from the Global South and Eastern Europe, and today the desert region is swamped by military ordinance and bases, live fire zones, chemical industries, pollution and refuse, construction debris, plants and mines and heavy industry, a nuclear facility (and, of course, The Bomb), and now, increasingly, large swaths of suburbia and pre-fab shopping malls. 6 Emily McKee, "Trash Talk. Interpreting Morality and Disorder in Negev/Naqab Landscapes," Current Anthropology 56, no. 5 (2015): 733-52; Richard Ratcliffe, “Bedouin Rights, Bedouin Representations: Dynamics of Representation in the Naqab Bedouin Advocacy Industry,” Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 15, no. 1 (2016): 97-124; Edward Henry Palmer, The Desert of the Exodus: Journeys on Foot in the Wilderness of the Forty Years’ Wanderings: Undertaken in Connexion with the Ordnance Survey of Sinai, and the Palestine Exploration Fund (Cambridge: Deighton Bell, and Co. Google Books,1871): 297. 7 Mansour Nasasra, The Naqab Bedouins: A Century of Politics and Resistance. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 8 On Zionism and modernization, see Ahmad Sa’di, “Modernization as an Explanatory Discourse of Zionist-Palestinian Relations,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 24, no.1 (1997): 25-48. 4 David Ben-Gurion, pre-state leader of the Jewish Yishuv (settlement) and first Prime Minister of the state, focused on the need to “conquer the desert,” Israel’s only great land reserve: to rapidly settle Jews in the south, develop extractive industry, and establish scientific and academic institutions.9 Today, public and private developers instead frame the region as “Silicon Wadi,” an obvious pun on the world’s preeminent technology corridor (wadi, from the Arabic for a seasonal riverbed but also for valley, is used often in Hebrew). Beersheba, the region’s largest city, developer’s say, will be the Capital of the Negev, an Opportunity Capital of Israel.10 Ben-Gurion had hoped that one day the region would be home to five million Jews.11 More recent Zionist dreams of population increase have tried to set more modest targets; the Jewish National Fund’s (JNF) Blueprint Negev promised one million by 2020.12 Currently, the region’s population is around 650,000— one third of whom are Bedouin Palestinian citizens, another ratio that greatly worries Zionist planners and demographers.13 The hope is that as a “Silicon Wadi,” the desert will finally bloom. Development will finally conquer the desert. Capitalist accumulation will mobilize settler colonialism and vice versa—at least, that’s the hope. 9 David Ben-Gurion, Years of Challenge (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963). 10 City of Be’er Sheva, “The Opportunity Capital of Israel!” Website. Accessed May 8, 2020. https://www.beer-sheva.muni.il/Eng/About/Pages/OpportunityCapital.aspx 11 Isaac Nevo, “Universities in the Negev: Conflicting Visions in the Establishment of Ben-Gurion University,” In Science and Scholarship in the Negev: The Story of Ben-Gurion University in the Negev. Volume 1: Founders, Yehuda Gradus and Isaac Nevo, eds. (Beer-Sheva, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2014): 19-20. [Hebrew] 12 Rebecca Manski, "Bluing the Desert." In JNF: Colonising Palestine since 1901, Faisal Sawalha, Jesse Benjamin and Mortaza Sahibzada, eds. Vol. 3 (eBook: Al-Beit: Association for the Defence of Human Rights in Israel, 2011): 23-44. 13 Ben Fargeon and Michael Rotem, Enforcing Distress: House Demolition Policy in the Bedouin Community in the Negev, Negev Co-Existence Forum for Civil Equality, June 2016. www.dukium.org. 5 Zionist Wastelands Each chapter in this dissertation answers a part of the question: How does development function within settler colonial space as a modality of settler-indigenous relations? I look at ongoing settler colonialism and capitalist accumulation in the Naqab/Negev region of southern Israel/Palestine as an example of a geographically specific manifestation of what I am calling, “settler development.” Settler development describes the way that settler colonialism mobilizes historically contingent colonial and capitalist circuits that operate through the discourses and practices of “development.” Some settler states employ development to justify the ongoing capture of indigenous lands and the management of the elimination of indigenous peoples. This dissertation advances a comparative approach to settler societies and the kinds of traveling narratives and mutual support that undergird their claims to land. Israel/Palestine is one node in a dynamic system of global settler development and can only perform through circulating flows of capital, ideas, and people. These systems of settler development shift and change over time. While a centralized mixed (socialist and capitalist) form of settler development was hegemonic in Israel and Zionism after 1948, today, neoliberalism is the primary political rationality for the continuance of settler domination. To understand the functioning of capitalism as a constituent part of settler development, I look at settler political economy and its particular claims to indigenous and settler subjectivities. Central to settler development in Israel/Palestine is Zionism’s consistent claims to economic exceptionalism. Zionism is a nationalist ideology that 6 declares that Jews are a unified national people (rather than adherents of a religious-cultural tradition) who deserve self-determination in a nation-state in Palestine. Zionism emerged out of the cauldron of European racialized nationalisms over the 18th and 19th centuries. Early Zionism was not homogenous, but incredibly varied in its religious and social influences and aspirations, intertwined with European arguments over socialism, capitalism, communism, secularism, liberalism, and more.14 Some of Zionism’s imperatives come from an urgent call for emancipation as many Jews faced different levels of violence and extreme social and economic marginalization throughout Europe. Perhaps as a dual rejection and internalization of European anti-Semitic claims, different Zionist movements valorized labor, especially agricultural labor. Many Zionists claimed that a mass migration of Jews to Eretz Yisrael, the religious homeland (a space larger than present-day Israel), would result in the redemption of the Jewish people. This was coupled with the redemption of the land. Meanwhile, Palestinian nationalists were also negotiating with consecutive colonial regimes, first of the Ottomans and then the British after World War I. They too sought to transform the colony into a nation-state with its own path towards national development.15 In the struggle over national self-determination, Zionist settlers sought to create their own sovereign economy, an isolated ethnic-based development, and actively worked to undermine Palestinian labor.16 Coupled with claims to economic exceptionalism, Zionists also derided Palestinian and Arab political economy as backwards, stuck in pre-modern, unproductive mercantile 14 Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (London: Verso, 2008). 15 Sherene Seikaly, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016); Jacob Norris, Land of Progress: Palestine in the Age of Colonial Development, 1905-1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 7 and agricultural pursuits. In reality, before 1948, Palestinian society was complex, both agrarian and cosmopolitan, with many who also sought to claim the fruits of development, self-determination, and capitalist modernity.17 Zionism asserts that Jews, whose productivity is to be admired, brought modernization to Palestinians.18 Today, these narratives continue to emerge as part of a Zionist Orientalist lens that claims that Palestinians are backwards and violent, woefully unprepared for their own state, arguments akin to those made by colonial powers towards the natives of occupied lands – namely, that without tutelage the colonized would linger in the “waiting room of history,” as Dipesh Chakrabarty put it in Provincializing Europe.19 In the case of the Naqab/Negev, Zionists continually erase Bedouin connections to land, employing a discourse that frames Bedouins as traditional, nomadic, and antagonistic to agriculture—thus, de-legitimizing Bedouin claims to land under Israeli law. This discourse is also intensely environmental. Bedouins are framed not only as woefully unproductive, but intentional destroyers of nature, agents of desertification. Such modernizing narratives obscure settler colonialism and capitalism as the causes for indigenous poverty, instead arguing that Bedouin poverty is due to a collision with so-called modern civilization. Zionist settler development relies on claims to expertise and exceptionalism depend on political economic claims about the improvement of the environment. In English, the words, “cultivation,” “wasteland,” and “desert” share some thematic resonance. Often, cultivation transforms deserts and wastelands. Cultivation (and agriculture), of course, share “culture,” and therefore offers a dual meaning: the growing of crops intertwined with 17 See Seikaly, Men of Capital, 2016; Norris, Land of Progress, 2013. 18 Sa’di, “Modernization as an Explanatory Discourse.” 19 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008): 8. 8 the husbandry of civilization. Often, the two are linked: to grow crops, to care for and tend to the land, was seen as a civilizing pursuit that improved empty space. “Desert” implies abandoned. Deserted, deserter, to desert, all intone disruptive and dishonorable retreats. “Wasteland,” according to Vittoria Di Palma, is a contradictory term with specific origins in 17th and 18th century Britain, used to describe disparate places with inconsistent physical characteristics. However, wastelands are marked by emptiness, “lands characterized by absence.”20 Wasteland is a malleable term, often used abstractly to label a space that “figures as the antithesis, the absolute Other, of civilization.” In English, wastelands were seen as obstacles to national development. In the 17th and 18th century British Isles, landscapes were instrumental in the “formation of individual and national identity: the character of the nation and its citizens was understood as being intimately related to its landscapes, making management of those landscapes a matter of vital concern.”21 In the battles over enclosure and arable land in Britain, landscape became defined by “use”— wastelands were underused and overused, occupying a unique space on either side of the rise and fall of civilization: the empty space full of latent potential and the trash heap abandoned after decadent denudement.22 The English for cultivation and wasteland shares some resonance with the Hebrew, though Hebrew’s etymology offers some subtle differences in connotation. In Hebrew, there are several words for cultivation, none quite representing a one-to-one translation of the English usage of “to acculture” and “to husband.” The word that appears most in Zionist texts when referencing cultivation (as a transformation of empty or degraded space) can be 20 Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014): 3. 21 Ibid., 4. Both quotations above. 22 Ibid., 3-5. 9 translated as “to bloom,” (lifrokh – חורפל ) or “blooming” (hafrakhah – החרפה ), that comes from the noun, “flower” ( חרפ ). Different conjugations and contexts of the three-letter root can indicate “flowering,” “flourishing,” “blossoming” and even a “rash”—that is, a flowering spread beyond control.23 In Hebrew, the word with most semantical resonance with the English “wasteland” is sh’mamah ( הממש ), whose root (shamaim) comes from the word for desolate, deserted, and abandoned. Sh’mamah can also mean “wilderness,” a space beyond civilization. This word and its root appear in the Tanakh (Jewish Bible) and preserve their meaning into modern Hebrew. Ben-Gurion often used sh’mamah to name land that he claimed had been previously neglected or destroyed by other nations.24 The Hebrew for the Zionist coda, to “make the desert bloom,” is “hafrakhah hash’mamah,” literally, “blooming the wasteland.” In Zionist texts, sh’mamah is often conflated with the word for “desert,” midbar ( רבדמ ), and the idea of the desert is often over-determined by its ideological imagination as a “wasteland.”25 However, a midbar, as Michael Feige, a scientist from Sede Boqer emphasizes, is not necessarily an empty place; its noun-verb form, midbur, can mean “the act of cultivating cattle,” and thus, “The midbar… is defined as an ecosystem through its social functions” unlike the sh’mamah “which is defined by absence.”26 In biblical Hebrew and in modern Zionist texts, desert and wasteland can grammatically compound each 23 Reverso Context. Context.reverso.net. This is not the only Hebrew word that can be translated into “bloom,” but is used often in Zionist texts. 24 David Ben-Gurion, “The Burden of the Wasteland. At the KKL Convention.” October 11, 1943. Ben- Gurion Archives. File: 00617. [Hebrew] 25 Michael Feige, “Midbar, Shmama, and Garbage Can.” In The Desert Experience in Israel: Communities, Art, Science, and Education in the Negev, A. Paul Hare and Gideon M. Kressel, eds. (Lanham: University Press of America, Inc., 2009): 29. 26 Ibid., 28. 10 other’s meaning; the couplet, midbar sh’mamah, means a “desolate desert” and often refers to landscapes that are obstacles to Jewish settlement.27 For Bedouins and Palestinians, “wasteland” and “cultivation” have taken on specific material consequences within the contours of Israeli rule and claims to development.28 The 1858 Ottoman Land Codes defined mawat—an Arabic word often translated as “wasteland”— as “unpossessed, uncultivated lands, including rocky fields and mountain areas,” areas not being used for agriculture, and likely to remain unused.29 However, the Ottoman Codes allowed for mawat land to be cultivated and thereby transmuted into miri, or what was defined as land owned and farmed, with the goal of increasing cultivation, taxation, and land registration.30 Ahmad Amara has looked extensively at how Israeli officials purposefully misinterpreted the Land Codes to ‘legally’ seize Bedouin lands, deeming as mawat land that was cultivated. Israeli officials did not recognize the Ottoman intent that mawat should become miri, farmed and cultivated, instead, declaring all “wastelands” property of the state. Alexander Kedar, Oren Yiftachel and Ahmad Amara call this Israeli interpretation of the Ottoman Land Codes and subsequent juridical attempts to secure governmental legitimacy over all of the Naqab/Negev the “Dead Negev Doctrine”— a series of policies that “‘emptied’ the Negev, through the distortion of the Bedouin past and the subsequent denial of their customary law, property regime, right of return, land control, freedom of movement, and collective 27 Yael Zerubavel, Desert in the Promised Land (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2019): 3- 5. 28 See Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018) for an extensive discussion on Zionist ideas of cultivation and improvement. 29 Ahmad Amara, “The Negev Land Question: Between Denial and Recognition,” Journal of Palestine Studies 42, no. 4 (2013): 27-47. 30 Alexandre Kedar, Ahmad Amara and Oren Yiftachel. Emptied Lands: A Legal Geography of Bedouin Rights in the Negev (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018): 58-59. 11 culture.”31 As a field of contestation, the environment is central to Zionist claims over development and economic expertise. Development’s Southern Frontier Zionist settler development in the Naqab/Negev has negotiated different indigenous systems and mobilized colonial juridical structures and spatial planning to consolidate hold over land. Southern Palestine, before the British Mandate, had long been central to trade networks that linked together the coast near Gaza, the hills near Al-Khalil/Hebron, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Naqab. Naqab Palestinians pursued pastoral livelihoods and seasonal migrations between different towns and routes within tribally claimed territories. There were nine major tribal confederations that divided territory in the Naqab, the largest, the ‘Azazme, who continue to claim much of the land in the Naqab/Negev today.32 Ottoman imperial authorities struggled to control these Bedouin Palestinian tribal confederations. Bir as-sa’ba (Beersheba) was founded by the Ottoman Empire in 1901 as an administrative center for Bedouin imperial subjects, at a time when the Ottomans sought to consolidate and centralize the empire.33 The Ottomans laid out Bir as-sa’ba as a grid to appease modernist sensibilities during the Tanizmat, purchasing the land from the ‘Azazme confederation.34 In World War I, British colonial troops from Australia, invaded and held “Beersheba” and it eventually fell under the Mandate of Palestine. At this time, there were many Bedouin villages in the vicinity of Beersheba. 31 Ibid., 12. 32 Nasasra, The Naqab Bedouins, 42. 33 Nasasra, The Naqab Bedouins; Emanuel Marx, Bedouin of the Negev. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1967). 34 Kedar et al., Emptied Lands, 51. 12 As the British Mandate waned, the Zionist movement worked to claim the Naqab/Negev as a land reserve for the hoped-for Jewish state. Over the 1930s, Zionists planted settlements near Beersheba and other points throughout the region. For some time, Beersheba and the area to its north were part of the proposed Arab state, even while the majority of the Naqab/Negev would go to the potential Jewish state.35 During the war of 1948—what Zionists call the “War of Independence” and Palestinians generally refer to as the “Nakba” or “catastrophe”—Zionist forces expelled about 90% of the southern Palestinian Bedouin population of around 90,000-111,000.36 Many refugees from different tribes fled to Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, and the Sinai. Israel Hebraized the name of Bir as-sa’ba/ Beersheba to Be’er Sheva. A few years later, the new Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) “transferred” Bedouin villages throughout the Naqab/Negev into the Sayig (in Hebrew and Arabic, meaning “fenced”—often spelled as Siyaj in Arabic transliteration), an oblong reservation south of the Green Line and bordering Beersheba to the north and the east, where many Bedouin villages existed.37 In effect, the Israeli military had pushed different Bedouin tribal groups and families on top of each other, creating an isolating and tense new social system with some tribes living on other’s land. Simultaneously, Bedouins, like other Palestinians who remained in Israel, were granted nominal citizenship yet confined to their villages under a complex permit system that curtailed travel, employment, and resettlement on their lands.38 Meanwhile, Jewish immigrants occupied Bedouin lands and founded new 35 Roza I.M. El Eini, Mandated Landscape: British Imperial Rule in Palestine, 1929-1948 (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 36 Many different sources tend to fall within this range. Most agree that about 11,000 Bedouins remained in the Naqab after 1948. 37 Shlomo Swirski and Yael Hassan, Invisible Citizens: Israel Government Policy Toward the Negev Bedouin, (Tel Aviv: Adva Center & Center for Bedouin Studies & Development, 2006). 38 Shira Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 13 towns and farms. This Military Administration continued for nearly two decades. The spatial concentration of Bedouins into the Sayig led to the patterns of settlement in the present. Most Naqab Bedouins’ villages and cities are within the former Siyag. Today, this region within the Naqab/Negev is under the most pressure from Zionist settler development. Before 1948, many Zionist planners and politicians, chief among them, David Ben- Gurion, saw the Beersheba region as a potential center for Jewish settlement in the entire Naqab/Negev. Central to Zionist planning was anxiety over population ‘dispersion.’39 Much of the Jewish population had historically hugged the coastal plain between Tel Aviv and Haifa. This geographical concentration undercut Zionist claims over newly captured territory. Planners and developers would obsess over how to motivate Jews to live in the state’s “peripheries,” so as not to risk relinquishing territory either to Arab states, Palestinians in Israel, or so-called ‘infiltrators,’ that is, Palestinians who tried to come home; thus, the need to create so-called “facts on the ground.” Israel, as Oren Yiftachel argues, is an ethnocratic state whose planning structures benefit the settler majority.40 Indeed, planners have long sought to “Judaize” territorial regions where Palestinian live, on both sides of the Green Line.41 Today, the developers propose to Judaize the south at a rapid rate: towns are springing up and expanding, while commercial, industrial, military and transportation infrastructure follows, displacing Bedouin villages and curtailing Bedouin use of land. 39 Yosef Jabareen, "Controlling Land and Demography in Israel: The Obsession with Territorial and Geographic Dominance" In Israel and its Palestinian Citizens: Ethnic Privileges in the Jewish State, Nadim N. Rouhana and Sahar S. Huneidi, eds. (Cambridge University Press, 2017): 238-265. 40 Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 41 Nasasra, Naqab Bedouins; Yiftachel, Ethnocracy. 14 David Ben-Gurion is often cited as the Zionist inspiration behind the development of the south. For Ben-Gurion, the desert was an existential crisis for the new state. As he wrote, “The small State of Israel, however, cannot long tolerate within its bounds a desert that takes up half of its territory. If the State does not put an end to the desert, the desert is likely to put an end to the State.”42 For Ben-Gurion, who would go on to live in the Naqab/Negev settlement of Sde Boqer to live out his pioneering ethos, it was …absolutely vital for the State of Israel, for both economic and security reasons, to move southwards: to direct the country’s water and rain, the young pioneers and the new immigrants, and most of the resources of the Development Budget, to the South: to uproot a considerable proportion of our workshops and factories and transfer them to the South; to move a number of our scientific and research institutions, dealing with the country’s geography, soil structure, vegetation, climate and natural resources, to the South. We must concentrate attention of Israel’s scientists and research workers on the investigation of the forces, whether known or latent, with whose assistance we shall be able to make the lands of the South and the Negev thrive and flourish.43 Ben-Gurion’s vision for the Naqab/Negev was one of intensive settler development. He envisioned a comprehensive transformation built on resource extraction, the pursuit of environmental knowledge, and the widespread settlement of the south. For Ben-Gurion, Bedouin tribes did not merit much attention. Only the Zionist pioneers, and later, the state, could transform the Naqab/Negev’s “desolate wastes.”44 In 2000, the Be’er Sheva Metropolitan Plan hoped to spur development in the northern Naqab/Negev by outlining a proposed expansion of existing Jewish towns and the establishment of new ones, as well as zoning large areas for afforestation, all while 42 Ben-Gurion, Years of Challenge, 199. 43 Ben-Gurion, Years of Challenge, 201. 44 Ibid., 203. 15 purposefully ignoring Bedouin land claims.45 Because of criticism from people in the Bedouin community, the plan was reworked and passed again 2012; however, it still ignored Bedouin villages: “Rather, the planners decided to adopt a ‘search area’ policy, in which special—and rather restricted—tracts of land would be declared as sites of possible future Bedouin settlement.”46 In 2005, the Negev 2015 plan introduced “economic and residential incentives in order to attract a strong Jewish population to the Negev,” suggesting developing 10,000 “unique real-estates” for Jews, as well as business and other types of tax exemptions to spur development.47 These plans intertwine with those pursued by NGOs like the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which pursues afforestation throughout the region (often hemming in Bedouin municipalities) and the establishment of new towns, most notably the Jewish town of Chiran, on the site of the Bedouin village of Umm al- Ḥīrān.48 Beersheba is being touted by developers as the next “Silicon Wadi,” Israel’s nickname for regional hubs for start-up economies and hi-tech industries (undoubtedly, Hebrew speakers chose this Arabic word it for its semantic consonance to “valley”). The state and private developers argue that the region will become a global center for hi-tech innovation. The centerpiece of the region’s development is the Gav-Yam Negev Advanced Technologies Park (ATP), which was inaugurated in 2013 by the municipality of Beersheba and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). Planners hope for the ATP to 45 Kedar et al., Emptied Lands, 225. 46 Ibid., 226 47 Jabareen, “Controlling Land and Demography in Israel,” 250. 48 It is hard to classify the Jewish National Fund. I use “NGO” here to highlight that the JNF sometimes functions as a non-governmental entity in fundraising and structure. However, there are many JNF organizations in different countries. Also, the JNF does not operate without the support of the Israeli government, and its Israeli wing, the Keren Keyemith L’Yisrael (KKL) operates almost as a governmental agency. Perhaps it is better to call the JNF a GONGO, a government-sponsored non-governmental organization? 16 become home for start-ups and technology-based private companies that will work closely with the military and the university on (amongst other things) cyber-security. Next door to the ATP will be the offices of the National Cyber Directorate and nearby an IDF technology campus. By the completion of its construction, the ATP will have around 15-20 office buildings with 10,000 engineers. International companies like Dell-EMC, PayPal, Oracle, and Deutsche Telecom (which owns T-Mobile) all have offices at the park, along with Israeli weapons technology companies like Elbit. Discourses about the campus play off of the idea of Israel as a “start-up nation.” Central to the branding about the ATP is Ben- Gurion’s vision of the Negev as a frontier for Zionist development. For instance, a video produced by Ben-Gurion University about the ATP, begins with Ben-Gurion’s famous quotation from his essay, “Southwards!” that “Israel’s capacity for science and research will be tested in the Negev.”49 The state and developers are struggling to attract a demographic wave of Jewish emigrants to the south. Thus, the military is becoming central to development plans, in order to spur a housing and commercial boom. In the 2000s, the IDF began to move much of its technological infrastructure away from the center and to the south, a plan plotted out over the next decades. At an estimated cost of 21 billion NIS, these projects are expected to catalyze a shift of 35,000 career soldiers and their families to the Naqab/Negev. In anticipation, Beersheba and other large Jewish and “mixed towns” in the Naqab/Negev are expanding their housing stock. Further, the government will provide stipends to single 49 Ben-Gurion University, “Gav-Yam Advanced Technologies Park – Shape the Future,” Youtube. https://youtu.be/bORvLx-6FTc; David Ben-Gurion, “Southwards,” In Like Stars and Dust: Essays from Israel’s Government Year Book, 174-187 (Sede-Boqer Campus: Ben-Gurion Research Center, 1993: 179). 17 officers and their families who stay in the Naqab/Negev for at least five years.50 The government is expecting to also expand infrastructure, schools, health services, recreation, and attract retailers to the south. Some of this expansion is coupled with the establishment of new Jewish towns in the midst of Bedouin “unrecognized villages.” Development for the benefit of Jewish citizens is interlocked with the expansion of enforcement regimes that demolish Bedouin houses and curtail their ability to farm and access their land. Bedouin Spatiality “Bedouin” comes from Arabic for “desert,” “badu,” thus Bedouin as people, “badawi,” and a lifestyle attached to the desert, “badaiya.”51 Bedouins also live in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and the north of Israel/Palestine, as well as in surrounding states. My focus in this dissertation is on development in relation to Naqab Bedouin Palestinians. Bedouin Palestinians in the Naqab make up about one-third of the population of the south and represent a heterogenous group of people who live in a variety of different spaces and pursue a range of careers and livelihoods within the State of Israel. Many Bedouins identify as Muslim, and like in Jewish Israeli society, some people and communities are more religious than others. Though in the south, there is a (quite) nominal celebration of multicultural identity, especially in and around Beersheba, Bedouins face a juridical regime intent on negating claims to land throughout the Naqab/Negev. Settler 50 Gwen Ackerman, “Israel Sows Cyber Hub in Desert to Make Beersheba Bloom: Cities.” Bloomberg, 15 January 2015. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-16/israel-sows-cyber-hub-in-desert-to- make-beersheba-bloom-cities. 51 Nasasra, Naqab Bedouin, 38. 18 structures linked to the state, produce incredible instability within Bedouin communities, resulting in widespread poverty and marginalization. Often, Bedouin historiography begins with the imposition of Ottoman imperial rule. Well into the late Ottoman period, Bedouins identified themselves as Palestinians-Arabs whose social systems differed from the agrarian and urban Palestinians further north.52 More recently, especially as “Bedouin” are the target of modernization and sedentarization schemes by nation-states who are intent on shoring up borders and private property, “Bedouin” has become a category of solidarity, a label for people whose indigenous way of life is under assault, as well as a very real ethnic category that delimits rights and accessibility.53 In Israeli discourses, “Bedouin” functions as a settler-colonial signifier of a specific group of Arab peoples who are culturally distinct from other “Arab-Israelis.” Israeli academic and governmental discourses reproduce Bedouins as distinct from Palestinians and erase any heterogeneity that defines the community past and present.54 The largest tribes in Israel/Palestine today are the ‘Azazme and Tarabin. Tribal difference and history can lead to somewhat fractious politics, especially in relationship to the “forced urbanization” of differing families and tribes into the same constrictive space.55 Beyond familial and tribal diversity, there is also a significant population of African Bedouins in the Naqab/Negev, specifically in Tel Sheva (a government planned town) who trace their heritage back to their slavery under the ‘Azazme.56 Some Bedouins claim status 52 Mansour Nasasra, “The Ongoing Judaisation of the Naqab and the Struggle for Recognising the Indigenous Rights of the Arab Bedouin People,” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012): 81-107. 53 Ibid. 81-84. 54 Mansour Nasasra, Sophie Richter-Devroe, Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder and Richard Ratcliffe, The Naqab Bedouin and Colonialism: New Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2015). 55 Ismael Abu-Saad, “Spatial Transformation and Indigenous Resistance: The Urbanization of the Palestinian Bedouin in Southern Israel,” American Behavioral Scientist 51, no.12 (2008): 1713-1754. 56 Steven C. Dinero, Settling for Less: The Planned Resettlement of Israel’s Negev Bedouin (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010): 37. 19 as “indigenous peoples” in order to connect their claims to land in southern Palestine/Israel to the struggles of indigenous peoples across the world. Israel does not recognize “indigenous” claims—as this would upset Zionist ideas of original Jewish occupancy. Some Palestinians are uncomfortable with labeling Bedouins as “indigenous” since it seems to imply Bedouin difference in relation to the rest of Arab-Israeli society.57 However, the claims to indigeneity have had widespread acceptance and are used to connect Bedouin resistance to the experiences and political actions of indigenous peoples, especially in multilateral forums such as the United Nations.58 While the state treated the Naqab/Negev as a periphery, the Bedouin population grew, forcing Israeli officials to consider the establishment of new Bedouin planned townships. Today, there are seven such towns in the region of the former Sayig; the largest, Rahaṭ, is just 10 km north of Beersheba, and is home to about 70,000 people (making it the second largest city in the whole south).59 Other Bedouin citizens reside in what are termed “unrecognized villages,” which the state views as illegal. The 1965 Planning and Building Law reclassified Palestinian land as “state land,” thus illegal to build on. The law also rearranged Israel’s planning governance, centralizing all local planning under state authority, issuing permits only by permission of the National Planning and Building Board.60 In the Naqab/Negev, this law essentially made all “state lands” for agricultural, rather than residential use, in one fell swoop classifying all Bedouin 57 Nasasra, et al., The Naqab Bedouin and Colonialism, 13. 58 Nasasra, “The Ongoing Judaisation of the Naqab.” 59 Population numbers as of 1 Dec 2018. National Insurance Institute of Israel, “Statistics by Localities, Rahaṭ.” Website, Accessed 19 April 2020, https://www.btl.gov.il/mediniyut/situation/statistics/btlstatistics.aspx?type=1&id=1161. [Hebrew] 60 Jabareen, “Controlling Land and Demography in Israel.” For a list of all the major plans effecting Palestinian ownership of land, see Jabareen, 241-242. For a comprehensive list of important regional, state, and Bedouin indigenous plans in the Naqab/Negev, see Kedar et al., Emptied Lands, 220-221. 20 buildings as “illegal.”61 The 1966 Physical Master Plan for the Northern Negev sought to halt “nomadism” and forced Bedouins into urban centers, a pattern that would continue for all subsequent plans and state policies.62 The 1980 Negev Land Acquisition Act aka the “Peace Law” with Egypt, established the air force base of Nevatim in the middle of Bedouin villages, constructing Kusseifa and ‘Ar’arah for their residents.63 In the 1990s and 2000s, the Israeli government did recognize a number of Bedouin villages, a victory for Bedouin activism and the community.64 However, the Metropolitan Plan for Be’er Sheva (2000) represents a return to earlier national plans that focused on increasing the Jewish population to the detriment to Bedouin localities.65 Currently, about 100,000 Bedouin citizens reside in around 40-45 unrecognized villages. Unrecognized villages do not appear on official maps, nor receive state services, including utilities, and are under constant threat of demolition. Villagers will work elsewhere in the south or in Tel Aviv and other mixed and Jewish cities, on farmland nearby, and attend university, despite the constant threat of home demolition. During the 1990s, the government of Israel began to recognize some of these villages and currently they are eleven with this status. However, recognition of villages ceased with the premierships of Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu. Today, “recognized villages” spatially resemble unrecognized villages and receive partial services, yet no real reprieve from the punitive system of demolitions and spatial constriction. “Unrecognized” is a colonial state distinction—villages are made “unrecognized.” I use the term to differentiate 61 Fargeon and Rotem, Enforcing Distress, 23. 62 Kedar et al., Emptied Lands, 222. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., 223 65 Ibid., 225. 21 the planning practices between different Bedouin localities, similar to how advocacy organizations use the term in the Naqab/Negev. The government’s policy towards Bedouins has long followed a logic of putting as many Bedouin in as small a space as possible – what has been called “forced urbanization” by Ismael Abu-Saad.66 The program of forced urbanization was first proposed in 1959 by then Prime Minister Ben-Gurion.67 One of the most recent attempts by the government to ‘solve’ the ‘Bedouin problem,’ was the 2013 Prawer-Begin Plan. The Plan sought to forcibly transfer people from unrecognized villages into planned townships and recognized villages, but widespread protests, coupled with right-wing Israeli opposition, shelved the bill. However, the Netanyahu government passed a new Arab Sector Development Plan which activists say resembles many parts of the Prawer-Begin Plan. This new plan offers funding for the development of Palestinian townships in Israel, but in order to prepare for widespread transfers out of unrecognized villages.68 Further, many of the punitive structures put in place in preparation for the Prawer-Begin plan, remain active and in force, despite the fact that the Bill never passed.69 While Bedouin citizens number close to 240,000 people, about one-third of the population of the Naqab/Negev, indicators of social and economic progress show the intense gaps between Bedouin citizens and Jewish counterparts. Bedouin municipalities are some of the poorest towns in Israel, education retentions rates are lower than that of 66 Abu-Saad, “Spatial Transformation and Indigenous Resistance.” 67 Mansour Nasasra, “Bedouin Tribes in the Middle East and the Naqab,” in Nasasra, et al., The Naqab Bedouin and Colonialism, 47. 68 Negev Co-Existence Forum for Civil Equality, “Mechanism for Dispossession and Intimidation: Demolition Policy in Arab Bedouin Communities in the Negev/Naqab.” (June 2019): 12. https://www.dukium.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Demolition-Report-Eng.2018-1.pdf 69 Fargeon and Rotem, Enforcing Distress. 22 Jewish students, income is vastly differential, and Bedouins are over-policed.70 This inequality is the result of Zionist political and cultural structures that deny Bedouins access to the same benefits as other citizens. The legacy of state planning dominance over Bedouins, intense Judaization—despite consistent Bedouin resistance and adaptation—has left deep scars. Jewish and Bedouin citizens, as Emily McKee has shown through extensive ethnography, “dwell” in completely different circumstances and are in contact with the state through parallel legal structures.71 For instance, state representation of Bedouin needs is housed within the Ministry of Agriculture, which is more concerned with codifying Jewish control over land than with social services for Bedouin citizens. Jews and Bedouins only meet at specific points of contact, but these are for the most part classed, racialized, and otherwise highly circumscribed. Only 11 localities out of 126 in the Naqab/Negev are technically “mixed”—spaces where Bedouins and Jews can live side by side. This includes Beersheba. Jews are not allowed to buy land in Bedouin localities.72 Many Jewish towns in the Naqab/Negev implement “admissions committees” to screen residential applicants, to make sure that people who want to live in the municipality match the “social character.”73 The cost of living in Israel is also prohibitive, resulting in de facto ‘economic’ segregation; as Bedouin citizens tend to earn some of the lowest average incomes in the 70 Michal Rotem, “Community Under Attack: The Situation of the Human Rights of the Bedouin Community in the Negev-Naqab 2015,” Negev Co-Existence Forum for Civil Equality (NCF) (December 2015). www.dukium.org. 71 Emily McKee, Dwelling in Conflict: Negev Landscapes and the Boundaries of Belonging (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2016). 72 Michael Rotem, “Segregated Spaces: The Spatial Discrimination Policies Among Jewish and Arab Citizens in the Negev-Naqab,” Negev Co-Existence Forum for Civil Equality (NCF), March 2016. www.dukium.org, 4, 7-8, 11. 73 Ibid. 23 state, rent in specific towns (even if such places do not have admissions committees) is a persistent barrier.74 Bedouin citizens in unrecognized villages increasingly face punitive measures from the state to pressure individuals to sign away their land and move into government planned townships or recognized villages. Across the Naqab/Negev, there have been thousands of home demolitions in the last few years.75 After the Prawer-Begin Plan, specific villages have been targeted by piecemeal pressure (rather than a sweeping bill to move against all villages at once). Alongside punitive measures and direct violence, the state also pursues “development” as a means of unilaterally taking control of Bedouin land claims. In the last few years, this development has taken specific forms. Not only do “development” plans such as the Arab Sector Development Plan seem to offer opportunity (but in reality, seek to further territorially organize Bedouin citizens and capture land), but the building of new towns and apartments in existing towns favors Jewish land occupancy. Naqab Bedouin Palestinians have always actively resisted colonialism. Mansour Nasasra (2017) chronicles the long history of Bedouin resistance against successive colonial regimes. Bedouins also pressured colonial regimes to negotiate with them to respect their way of life and territorial sovereignty, often employing the colonial power’s very own legal structures.76 Bedouin resistance continues in opposition to Zionist claims over land. It is also the case that Bedouin Palestinians resist colonial attempts to frame them as anthropological objects, a distinct people cut off from a larger Arab Palestinian 74 Ibid., 15. 75 Tal Avrech and Marc Marcus, Negev Co-Existence Forum for Civil Equality, “Mechanism for Dispossession and Intimidation: Demolition Policy in Arab Bedouin Communities in the Negev/Naqab.” June 2019, 12. https://www.dukium.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Demolition-Report-Eng.2018-1.pdf 76 Nasasra, The Naqab Bedouins. 24 identity, living in an isolated place and time.77 In the last decade or so, many indigenous Bedouin scholars have been conducting critical studies of Bedouin identity and history. These academic works have joined with community activism and organization to work to both bend settler colonial legal structures towards Bedouin justice, as well as work in the international arena, connecting Bedouin demands to a larger coalition of indigenous movements globally.78 Settler Development Settler development is a concept that describes how settler colonialism mobilizes development. To construct this concept, I draw together two literatures that rarely overlap: settler colonial studies and critical development studies. Below, I will outline some of the major interventions of each. In particular, I emphasize the overlap between the way that these two literatures look at ideas of modern, progressive time and how that helps justify the ongoing rule of colonial or settler colonial states. Further, I am interested in how these narratives undergird the ongoing processes of colonial dispossession and expropriation. While I suspect that settler development will have a generative saliency as a concept in the study of comparative settler states, I also think that it could support a better theoretical understanding of settler colonialism’s role in the expansion of global capitalism. Many studies in development have been concerned with the methods of governance in post-World War II state-building, with studies often framed within world-systems analyses. In the late 1990s, a Marxist approach infused with postcolonial theory began to 77 Nasasra et al., 2015. 78 Ibid., 20. 25 expand the ideological basis of the understanding of contemporary development, mapping the emergence and circulation of different ideas as they moved through post-colonial space.79 In particular, this emerging ‘critical’ development studies looks at how colonial regimes invoked development (of colonized spaces and peoples) as the justification for ongoing rule. Contemporary development resonates with persistent colonial ideologies, with such emphasis on improvement and technocratic rule that justify and extend capitalist accumulation. However, despite the fact that critical development studies frame development as a global modality of capitalist and colonial intervention—as well as mandates that justify the rule within post-colonies—this scholarship tends to elide the question of settler colonialism’s imbrication with capitalism and colonialism on a planetary scale. Partly, this is due to the fact that development studies, drawing from postcolonial theory, tends to emphasize the legacies of colonialism in the Global South. Colonial ideas of development appeared as a program chiefly in European extractive colonies in the latter half of the 19th century, institutionalized after World War I and intertwined in the implementation of the League of Nations’ Mandate system, followed by multilateral intervention and political legitimization throughout newly independent Southern states. Therefore, “development” does not quite operate as a seamless global discourse and practice—its currency in countries like the United States is markedly different than it would be, for example, in India. In the US, American politicians do not promise “development,” rather they promise programs linked to ideas of “economic growth.” However, while “development” has little currency for current domestic policy in the United States, 79 Sarah A Radcliffe, “Development and Geography: Towards a Postcolonial Development Geography?” Progress in Human Geography 29, no. 3 (2005): 291-298. 26 institutions that work globally based in the United States disseminate developmental programs and policies internationally.80 Development operates within an ideological field enmeshed in the evolution of liberalism and ideas about modernization. Development, itself, is an elusive term, referring to many different processes and states of being over its history of use. Gilbert Rist identifies three main thematic streams embedded in the contemporary use of development as an international program: development as growth and progress, development as a process for reaching full human potential, and development, as used by the United Nations, as enlarging the possibilities of peoples’ lives within different societies.81 These three streams are further entangled in the etymology of the word itself. Development first appeared in English to mean a process of unfolding, of laying something out in order to bring it to light.82 Over time, development began to be used as something enacted, the progression of a subject towards it expected and advanced stages.83 These transitive and intransitive verb usages congeal in its present form—development “can mean both a measure of a condition, and of a process, of modernization.”84 For Rist, what is exceptional about development is how it naturalizes a specific conception of time. Indeed, development is also a reference to the processes of the physical and physiological growth of a living organism, which 80 There is scholarship on how development worked as a program of racialized and gendered interventions of individual and regional improvement in the US South, entangled in the long legacy of Jim Crow and slavery. See Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (New York: Verso, 2017) and Mona Domosh, “Practising Development at Home: Race, Gender, and the “Development” of the American South,” Antipode 47, no. 4 (2015): 915-941. Domosh has also argued that this form of development seeped into the way that the US instituted international development programs. See Mona Domosh, “International Harvester, the U.S. South, and the Makings of International Development in the Early 20th Century,” Political Geography 49 (2015): 17-29. 81 Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, 3rd Edition, trans. Patrick Camiller (New York: Zed Books, 2008): 8-9. 82 Oxford English Dictionary Online (2019), s.v. “development.” 83 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Revised Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983): 102. 84 R. Srivatsan, ed., History of Development Thought: A Critical Anthology (London: Routledge, 2012): 2. 27 accumulates metaphorical associations with irreversibility—a person cannot grow young, just as history, understood as a steady march forward in time, cannot reverse course.85 Linear time is rooted in Eurocentric modernity. Europe is ahead while others are behind. Social evolution extrapolated ideas of the individual growth of an organism into a hierarchy of humankind, thus naturalizing racial difference in relation to a universal timeline. As Rist writes of this idea of developmental modernism that positioned the West at the center, “all nations travel the same road … all do not advance at the same speed as Western society.”86 Development, then, in “likening society to a live organism” attempts to stitch together an unwieldy relationship, and “far from making it easier to understand the phenomenon, the metaphor obscures it by naturalizing history.”87 Development appears in conjunction with a cluster of ideologically adjacent terms, such as “civilization,” “westernization,” and “modernization,”88 as well as “progress, advancement,” “productivity,” “efficiency,” and “economy,” often measured in “stages,” as seen most notably in the League of Nations’ Mandate and in W.W. Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth.89 But how does one measure the distance between the civilized and the savage and the barbarous? How did “Western” nations prove their advanced position along the trajectory of history? Buttressing programs of development is a modernist and progressive conception of time, that history must move, if only asymptotically, towards an ordained climax or, in its more recent iterations, an ever-receding horizon. In its anti- and post-colonial 85 Rist, The History of Development, 27. 86 Ibid., 41. 87 Ibid., 47. Emphasis in original. 88 Ibid., 25. 89 Ibid., 60 ,93. 28 manifestations, development also becomes the aspirational medium of nation-making cast in the mold of capitalist accumulation. Thus, as Vinay Gidwani writes, development is “charged with the work of filling in and repairing that will bring fragments of the nation that are out-of-joint with time into line with the normative agenda of capitalist accumulation and economic growth.”90 Here, ‘undeveloped’ or ‘developing’ sub- populations (the nation’s marginal populations, frequently tribal, indigenous, and/or other vulnerable groups) are portrayed as in need of improvement. For imperial powers, development justified conquest on the grounds that colonial intervention and governance would improve the lives of the ruled and make better use of indigenous land and resources. Development also helped to obscure a central contradiction: namely, the simultaneity of liberalism in the metropole with illiberal rule in its colonies. Cast as a project of improvement – a civilizing mission (or infamously, ‘the white man’s burden’) – development “rescued liberalism” by providing a “normative template for colonial practices, whether land settlements or projects of social reform.”91 As Tania Murray Li argues, development, framed as improvement, masked primitive accumulation: the extraction of resources and large-scale land confiscation in colonies that poured treasure into colonial and capitalist coffers.92 Improvement was not only an economic undertaking, but a moral one as well. Development worked by “channeling and forming in desired ways errant matter of native subjects and their physical environments,” that is, of waste and wasteful behavior, in order to extract additional value.93 In this way, 90 Vinay K. Gidwani Capital Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008): xv. 91 Gidwani, Capital Interrupted, xx. 92 Tania Murray Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development and the Practice of Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 93 Gidwani, Capital Interrupted, 14. Emphasis in the original. 29 development is not only a philosophy of history, as argued by Rist, but a philosophy of capitalism as history—entangled with the kinds of moral and ideological claims made by capital’s expansion. Drawing from Jacques Derrida, Joel Wainwright argues that development is “supplemental” to capitalism—"it is a historical-geographical process taken to be outside of capitalism, and yet something always already included.”94 Therefore, “economy” (as defined within capitalist accumulation) has become a master signifier of development, a proof of both individual and societal progress, and the shibboleth for entry into modernity. Given its focus on global capitalism and coloniality, it is surprising that critical development studies do not, for the most part, include settler colonialism in analyses, neither geographically, nor as a modality of ongoing colonial rule. In concert with other colonialisms, settler societies rely on progressive ideas of time, positioning settlers as modern subjects and indigenous peoples as behind, incapable wasteful stewards in the management of land. Settler colonial societies are also intertwined with the emergence of liberalism and capitalism.95 So the question is, how does development function in a settler colonial context? How does analyzing development as a modality of governance, working in concert with settler colonialism, help scholars recognize potentially new avenues for understanding capital and the colonial? Settler colonial studies is emerging as a critical body of scholarship that investigates the typologies and structures of settler and indigenous societies in relation to each other. In a crude sense, settler colonialism is distinct from other colonialisms in that ‘settlers come 94 Joel Wainwright, Decolonizing Development: Colonial Power and the Maya (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008): 12. 95 Bruno Cornellier and Michael R. Griffiths, “Globalizing Unsettlement: An Introduction,” Settler Colonial Studies 6, no.4 (2016): 305-316. 30 to stay,’ creating a new nation and state within an indigenous territory, rather than as a mercantile extension of the metropole.96 As Patrick Wolfe famously argued, settler colonial “invasion is a structure, not an event,” that is, settler colonialism is not past, a one-off disruption, but an ongoing production of settler identity and rule coupled with the ongoing extinguishment of indigenous sovereignty.97 Settler societies disavow indigenous presence while negating their own histories of settler colonialism—for instance, in Palestine, Zionists continually downplayed Palestinian presence (“a land without a people for a people without a land”) while denying their status as settlers, instead celebrating the Jewish “return” (and thus indigeneity) to the Land of Israel. Settler colonial ideologies, like those found in the modernizing ideas embedded within development, also celebrate a conception of time as moving forward along a trajectory. This “settler time” privileges the landmarks of settler invasion and produces settler subjects as agents of change, while casting indigenous people into the “misty past of unrecorded time.”98 As Jean O’Brien extensively documents, settler histories and narratives privilege their own founding, their “firsts,” to set themselves in a superior position moving forward, while indigenous people edge towards extinction, their “lasts.” Settlers envision this relationship even though indigenous people persist all around them.99 This is indicative of the need of settler ideologies to construct their own national identities as tied into progressive modernity, often at the expense of indigenous peoples who settlers 96 Lorenzo Veracini, “’Settler Colonialism’: Career of a Concept,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41, no. 2 (2013): 313-333. 97 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 388. 98 Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010): 105. 99 Ibid., xii. 31 depict in crass and degrading terms.100 As O’Brien writes, settler extinction narratives are a legacy of racial science; if settlers defined “Indians” by tradition and blood quantum (a racialized measurement that traces fractions of ancestry), rather than by change, relations, and kinship, then settlers could define Indians out of existence. This racial science relied on an idea of a singular unitary timescale embedded in Eurocentrism; if an indigenous person adapted to modernity, then they weren’t indigenous, if they remained traditional, then they were destined to ride into the sunset, unable to live in the modern world.101 “Extinction,” or the continual narration of it, brought “racial expectations into alignment with political processes,” opening up land to settler sovereignty.102 Narration, discourses, and “scripts,” as O’Brien calls them, are key for undergirding settler identity, justifying dispossession, and naturalizing the replacement of the traditional with the modern, the savage with the civilized.103 Settler nations are suffused with historical signifiers that simultaneously celebrate and deny their very settler-ness. Kevin Bruyneel, in considering how the United States used the codename Geronimo for Osama bin Laden, coins “settler memory,” which refer[s] to the way in which a settler society habitually articulates collective knowledge of the past and present of settler colonial violence and dispossession and in the same moment disavows the political relevance of this memory by refusing and absenting the presence of Indigenous people as contemporary agents.104 100 For instance, see Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 101 O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting. 102 O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, xxvi. 103 O’Brien. 104 Kevin Bruyneel, “Codename Geronimo: Settler Memory and the Production of American Statism,” Settler Colonial Studies. DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2015.1090528 (2015): 3. 32 Bruyneel sees settler memory as upheld through “settler mnemonics,” the “functions, practices, and products of memory—of colonialist dispossession and settlement that shape settler subjectivity and governmentality in liberal contexts.”105 Memory, or the production of collective memory, helps mold the contours of settler subjectivity and extend the state’s power over indigenous peoples. Representation of settler time as universal, the disavowal of indigenous people as inhabiting the present, and settler colonialism’s racialized logic, help to uphold expropriation, dispossession, and violence. As development functions within the space of capital, so does settler colonialism in concert with capitalist accumulation on global and local scales. The political economy of settler colonialism differs from other colonial contexts in that for settlers, the goal is not the exploitation of indigenous labor, but the expropriation of indigenous land. Karl Marx’s thesis of primitive accumulation has been important to understanding settler colonialism. However, primitive accumulation differs in settler colonial spaces. Classically, primitive accumulation is understood as a mode of increasing the wealth of specific classes, while producing a new landless class who then function as a reserve army of laborers. However, settler societies are not interested in indigenous labor, instead pursuing forms of containment, expulsion, and the management of indigenous populations seen as surplus to the creation of capitalist value (which is premised here on the capture of land and resources).106 105 Ibid., 3. 106 Lorenzo Veracini, “Containment, Elimination, Endogeneity: Settler Colonialism in the Global Present,” Rethinking Marxism 31, no. 1 (2019): 118-140. 33 As a result, different scholars like Lorenzo Veracini, Patrick Wolfe, and David Lloyd understand the emergence of settler colonialism as a generalized modality of domination wielded by capital.107 As Lloyd and Wolfe write, The ongoing history of settler colonialism forms a crucial terrain through which to understand the systemic harmony between military occupation as a further version of colonial intervention and the formation and practices of the neoliberal state that have emerged to regulate and promote a new regime of capital accumulation.108 The “formation and practices of the neoliberal state” concern the management of surplus populations, the physical cantonment of the poor from the rich, the expropriation unconcerned with labor exploitation. For Veracini, drawing from Wolfe (2006), capital accumulation is more and more premised on a settler logic of elimination.109 In a settler space such as Israel/Palestine, for instance, national narratives valorize the laboring settler, though settlers had historically expunged Palestinians from many sectors of the labor market. The logic of Zionist settler colonialism has long been to produce an ethnically separate economy (of course premised on the expropriation of land and assets and support from abroad) reliant on the slow constriction of Palestinians into dense Bantustans. As such, scholars argue that settler colonialism persists through neoliberalism. This is not only apparent in the physical modes of domination and violence that states visit on indigenous peoples, but also in liberal capitalist policy. For instance, Elizabeth Strakosch argues that neoliberal modes of governance in settler states depoliticize settler-indigenous contests. Settler governments focus on individual behaviors 107 Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.”; Veracini, “Containment.”; David Lloyd and Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonial Logics and the Neoliberal Regime,” Settler Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473x.2015.1035361 (2015). 108 Lloyd and Wolfe, “Settler Colonial Logics,” 5. 109 Veracini, “Containment,” 121. 34 rather than indigenous demands for self-determination and sovereignty.110 The tropes of indigenous “incapacity” for existing in modern life help settler governments depoliticize indigenous demands, relegating solutions to an atomized, technocratic register. Capitalism twines with settler colonialism; entrepreneurial capitalist behaviors and economies, tied into a developmental conception of progressive time, become the barometers for settler modernity and indigenous backwardness. Israel, as a so-called “start-up nation,” represents itself and its entrepreneurs as the new pioneers, now conquering the frontiers of global capitalism and no longer the swamps and fields of Palestine.111 Finally, settler colonial studies offers development studies additional ways to think through the emergence of global capitalism and modernity. Scholarship in settler colonial studies has questioned the framing of the colonial and postcolonial as separate currents of inquiry, instead seeking to show that settler colonial structures and relations constituted colonial conquest on a global scale.112 As Wolfe argues, “Settler colonialism was foundational to modernity;” it is intertwined with the emergence of capitalism and globalization through its drive for land in the Americas.113 Scott Morgensen contends that understandings of colonial formation naturalize settler colonialism by failing to see how it “directly informs past and present processes of European colonization, global capitalism, liberal modernity and international governance.”114 Leaving settler colonialism out of critical analyses of the colonial privileges specific geographies and relationships. Bruno 110 Elizabeth Strakosch, Neoliberal Indigenous Policy: Settler Colonialism and the ‘Post-Welfare’ State (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 111 See Chapter Three, “Challenge of the Wasteland: Settler Colonial Sciences in the Naqab/Negev.” 112 See a very good introduction for a special edition of Settler Colonial Studies by Audra Simpson. "Whither Settler Colonialism?" Settler Colonial Studies 6, no. 4 (2016): 438-445. 113 Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 394. 114 Scott Lauria Morgensen, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now,” Settler Colonial Studies, 1, no. 1 (2011): 53. 35 Cornellier and Michael Griffiths add that many settler-nations (at least the ones linked to British colonists) are central to neo-imperialism, and “settler-colonialism, then, is not merely a global phenomenon, it is also constitutive of the global.”115 In order to understand the relational dynamics of settler colonialism, Cornellier and Griffiths call for a comparative analysis of “global liberalism” that takes into account settler nations’ “locally specific modes of colonial dispossession and capitalist extraction” in examining the workings of colonialism in general.116 Such approaches have the ability to perhaps re-orient postcolonial studies as well. As a modality of colonialism, settler colonial studies have critiqued how so-called postcolonial theory has dominated conceptualizations of the colonial. Settler colonial and indigenous scholars have been somewhat hesitant to employ postcolonial theory when trying to understand how coloniality functions in the settler colonies, asking, where exactly is the “post”?117 For settler colonial studies and indigenous studies scholars, “post-colonial,” even if it is a critique of ongoing Eurocentrism, introduces a specific chronology of colonialism that does not adequately represent its continuance into the colonial present.118 Scholars have called for a renewed framing of Israel/Palestine as a preeminent example of settler colonialism. To do so would take into account the long colonization of Palestine, rather than only on the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, a tendency that produces the conflict as a national one, perhaps solved by a “two-state solution.” As Omar Jabary Salamanca et al. argue, such an approach could “[dismantle] deep-seeded analyses 115 Cornellier and Griffiths, “Globalizing Unsettlement,” 305. 116 Ibid., 309. 117 Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 118 Qadri Ismail, Culture and Eurocentrism (New York: Rowan & Littlefield International, 2015); Sarah de Lueew and Sarah Hunt, “Unsettling Decolonizing Geographies,” Geography Compass 12, no. 7 (2018): 4. 36 and assumptions sustaining claims of exceptionalism.”119 However, as I show throughout the dissertation, as a settler colonial space Israel/Palestine is historically and presently infused with the discourses and practices of development.120 This includes a persistent ideological project that coincides with developmental thought. Zionism has long positioned Jewish settlers from Europe as ideal subjects for bringing the Jewish people into history, through the construction of a modern state. Further, Zionism frames its subjects as the pioneers that transform the frontier. This is especially the case in the Naqab/Negev, where the State of Israel continually represents Bedouin citizens as failing to modernize, thus depriving them of access to all the same opportunities as Jews. This forward/backward dichotomy establishes historical causality between not only Zionists of the present and the Israelites of the past (as we see in much of Zionist discourse), but to both colonial powers like the British and Ottomans, replicating some of their modes of land classification and ideas about waste and cultivation. Zionists also connect themselves to the what they think of as a non-Arab ancient past, such as with the scientific obsession with the Nabatean Empire’s runoff agriculture farms in the Naqab/Negev. This inscription of progressive time onto the space of the Naqab/Negev, is a consistent feature of Zionist settler development, an ideological consistency we could call “Zionist time.” “Settler development,” combines these two parallel literatures to try to understand how settler colonialism mobilizes development for the continuance of settler dominance. 119 Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabi, and Sobhi Samour, “Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine,” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012): 1-8. 120 For historical looks at development in Palestine, see Norris, Land of Progress and Seikaly, Men of Capital. For studies on the prevalence of developmental logics and practices under Occupation in the West Bank, see the special edition of Journal of Palestine Studies that looks at how developmental programs enable settler colonialism in the West Bank in particular. See Raja Khalidi, “Twenty-First Century Palestinian Development Studies,” Journal of Palestine Studies XLV, no. 4 (2016): 7-15. 37 This would allow scholars to further consider how the settler colonial constitutes the global circuitry of historic and present capital. Further, it shows how ideas of progressive time buttress specific kinds of settler projects that employ capitalist logics to define modernity by economic productivity. While I propose settler development as a concept for analyzing comparative settler colonial spaces, it also can help look at how developmental programs and interventions in the Global South draw from settler colonial states. Chapter Summaries The Naqab/Negev is a part of the global flows of capital, development, and settler colonial imagination. Each chapter in this dissertation will contribute to a deeper understanding of settler development’s relation to economic, environmental, and political claims, as well as how Zionist discourses and practices consistently rely on, as Edward Said called it, a “flexible positional superiority” towards Bedouin Palestinians.121 In pursuing this line of inquiry, my dissertation also critically assesses the shifting dynamics of Zionist ideology and its intertwined relationship with political economy. I hope to tell a story of how Zionism, as a type of settler ideology, does not operate in isolation, and often draws from other settler societies and global capitalist circuits, not only for material support, but also to justify itself. Zionism shares similarities with other settler colonial societies, but at the same time, forges its own unique practices and symbology. I also hope to present a story of development in the Naqab/Negev. This is not an in-depth history but looks at some of the ways that “development of the Naqab/Negev” has functioned as an 121 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994): 7. Emphasis in the original. 38 agenda and idea. The ordering of the chapters also follows a loose chronology of settler development in Israel/Palestine, and several chapters focus specifically on the Naqab/Negev. Chapter 1: “A Zionist Frontier Theory: Settler Colonialism and Colonial Development,” engages with settler development in a specifically Zionist context by looking at the kinds of claims Ben-Gurion and Zionists made to appeal to British colonial ideas of economic productivity. In particular, Ben-Gurion’s ideas of the chalutz, the pioneer, circulated with and drew from American ideas of the frontier. Ideas of a US American frontier, especially found in the writings of Frederick Jackson Turner, resonate within Zionist ideas about development. At the same time, Ben-Gurion’s articles, appearing in the Labor Zionist, Jewish Frontier in the United States, speak in a language that would appeal to liberal US American readers, framing Zionism as an extension of US liberty. Ben-Gurion’s writings also worked to justify Zionist development during the British Mandate by appealing to the British empire’s concern with colonial self- sufficiency. Development, in this instance, does not just function within the postcolonial space, but is an important mandate for settler colonial expansion. Chapter 2: “The Challenge of the Wasteland: Settler Colonial Sciences in the Naqab/Negev,” presents a thematic history of Zionist desert studies and the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research (BIDR). In particular, the chapter looks at how settler development relies on specific environmental imaginaries that equate settler development with progress and environmental stewardship, and indigenous, Bedouin, livelihoods as not only backwards and unproductive, but active agents in desertification and the destruction of the ecosystem. In particular, Zionist scientific and environmental discourses and 39 practices erase the long history of Bedouin cultivation, by connecting current Zionist development with the agricultural activities of past civilizations. In all, settler development, and its territoriality, are premised on environmental claims and imaginaries. Chapter 3: “Start-Up Nationalism: Neoliberal Zionist Development” offers a close reading of current claims of Zionist economic exceptionalism. It pries open an iconic book, Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, in order to understand the specific claims and rationalities that are current in secular, neoliberal Zionism today. Israel is often represented as the “start-up nation,” a trope that is regularly taken up in, especially, US American discourses, which valorizes specific ideas of political economic subjectivity while obscuring the structures of settler colonial domination and occupation that are the basis of such developmental imaginaries. Settler development here functions within a neoliberal rationality that equates pioneering with entrepreneurialism. This rationality buttresses the development of the south through the creation of “Silicon Wadi” in Beersheba. Chapter 4: “Developing Bedouin: Neoliberal Settler Development and Indigenous Civic Society” scrutinizes different kinds of NGOs that currently work in the Naqab/Negev, attending to some of the most urgent needs of marginalized Bedouin communities. Some of these NGOs work within a neoliberal settler development logic, in that they frame development as modernizing, locate Bedouin impoverishment as endogenous to Bedouin society, and elide critical analysis of the structures of settler colonial capitalism. In particular, NGOs tend to focus on Bedouin women as the principal objects of developmental intervention. However, some Bedouin NGOs, though embedded 40 in a neoliberal rationality, still manage to challenge settler colonial processes through advocacy and organizational work. I include in this dissertation some non-traditional interludes, bookending each chapter by “Field Journals.” These field journals were written while I lived in Beersheba and conducted my fieldwork and sent via email to family and friends. They have been lightly edited to appear in this dissertation, and for the most part, represent contemporaneous reflections on some of the ways that I was processing my research. Research in Israel/Palestine—as in many colonial and settler colonial spaces—is rife with the power imbalances of researcher and subjects. Fieldwork itself has a long history as a colonial method for knowledge creation and the institutionalization of power within institutions in the Global North. What I hope to accomplish in these eight journals is to modestly ‘unsettle’ some of these research dynamics, presenting myself as an embodied researcher, far from a disembodied and neutral voice merely observing subjects in their ‘natural habitat.’ Nor did I want to include essays that positioned me as the center of the story. Instead, each Field Journal wades into the quotidian complexity of settler colonialism and capitalism, and its ever-present, normalized violence. They work to interrupt the progressive narrative of the dissertation and reassert colonialism as the everyday present. This dissertation focuses on the logics of Zionist settler development. However, settler colonialism or its modalities should not be assumed to be seamless, all- encompassing, or even successful. Ideology does not appear fully formed, ready to be applied on a blank canvas, and empty land. Instead, ideology emerges in negotiation with obstacles, setbacks, and anxieties. Settlement does not always proceed as Zionists planned or wished. The idea that Bedouin ruined the desert is disproved by the fact that this is 41 obviously not the case, that Bedouin agriculture had adapted, and Bedouins had resisted every colonial encounter in the Naqab/Negev. The desert, itself, is not a passive object either; it frustrates Zionist attempts at “making it bloom.” Neither do Zionist subjects act as hoped. Not every citizen is an entrepreneur, and many, in fact, are not even sure what Zionism means. Israel is a very unequal country, not only along ethnocratic lines, but within the Jewish community as well. Zionism, in some ways, is a story to convince Jewish citizens that endemic inequality is part of a national destiny. But still, Jewish citizens have not emigrated to the Naqab/Negev in the numbers that Zionist planners have dreamed for over a century. Bedouin Palestinians continue to claim portions of the Naqab/Negev, to organize and resist and attract Jewish and international allies. Development imagines a trajectory, but like in many places, advertising falls far short of the finished product. Ben- Gurion’s vision may still be used to justify ongoing desert development, but the Naqab/Negev is still a far cry from the center of the state, nor is it the “Silicon Wadi,” of capitalist dreams. 42 Figure 3. Map depicting all development plans in the Naqab/Negev. Bimkom, Development Trends Effecting Bedouin Localities. Bimkom, West Jerusalem, Israel. Reprinted with permission from Bimkom. 43 Introduction to Field Journals: Methodology for Fieldwork in a Settler Colonial Space My research for this dissertation primarily relied on fieldwork conducted between July 2015 and May 2017 in the Naqab/Negev. This was my fourth trip to Israel/Palestine, having previously visited in 2006 with Birthright Israel, 2011 on an Interfaith Peace Builders Delegation, where we met with organizations and activists throughout Israel/Palestine, and 2013, when I attended a summer Hebrew immersion program at Haifa University. For my fieldwork, I lived in Beersheba with a wonderful Israeli roommate and a revolving door of international travelers. For the first nine months, I enjoyed a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Israel and this connected me to a wide range of US American scholars with whom I would appear at social events, tours, and conferences. My connection to Ben-Gurion University was facilitated by the Overseas Student Office, and I spent much of my social time with a smattering of English-speaking international students from the European Union (including the UK at the time) and US Americans. Upon learning that I would be in Israel, my mother’s aunt and uncle in California insisted that I get in touch with my grandfather’s cousin, whom I did not know about previously. Several times, I took the train up to Haifa to stay with Ari, who had survived Auschwitz, was held on Cyprus by the British Mandate authorities, and joined the Israeli army as a teenager in 1948. Spending time with him, I learned that much of my mother’s family had been wiped out in the Holocaust. Within five minutes of first meeting Ari, he chastised me for planning to only visit him for one night before heading back to Beersheba on the train. After I promised to come back soon, he asked, “So, how are we related?” 44 Much of the time in Beersheba, I was bored and lonely, pining for the comforts of home and would call friends and family in the States while I went on long walks through the city. To get breaks from Beersheba, I’d travel to Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and the West Bank to see friends and meet with other academics who were also conducting fieldwork in Israel/Palestine. In Beersheba, I met people at the Negev Co-Existence Forum for Civil Equality, a Jewish-Bedouin organization that worked to pressure the government to recognize Bedouin land claims. Through them, I spent a lot of time at different unrecognized villages throughout the Naqab/Negev. I also worked as a volunteer English editor, helping out with some of their human rights reports. With Jewish Israeli and Bedouin Israeli friends, I spent some evenings hanging out in apartments and houses in Beersheba and Rahaṭ, or sitting on my own roof, looking out over Neighborhood Dalet, chatting about Israeli politics, the US election (“how exactly did Trump win?” people would ask, or other times, “you guys deserve it”), and much of the time, Game of Thrones. My fieldwork was also interrupted several times when I took several shorter trips back to the United States and to southern India where my partner was conducting her own fieldwork.122 Somehow in this midst of this, we got married. I present this summary of my fieldwork to begin a discussion on methodology and frame this unconventional part of my dissertation. Throughout the dissertation, my analytical chapters will be accompanied by nonfiction writing and photographs, what I am calling a collection of “Field Journals.” I feel that they are important to include; not only 122 If one would like to experience some of the most truly awful transnational bureaucratic experiences on the planet, please apply for a tourist visa to India while in Israel. My experience involved a false website, a visa office that was not a visa office, trips up and down to Tel Aviv, phones that didn’t work, a pitched screaming battle in English and Hebrew, ping-ponging between the Indian embassy and their Israeli passport office, and a tourist visa that arrived the night before my flight. 45 do the Field Journals allow me some space to wrestle with settler colonialism in a different medium than my chapters, but they also position me, the researcher, as a person living in, and struggling with, what was happening around me. I approach my work through much of my own experience as a white settler from another settler colonial state, a Jewish person that is a privileged subject in Israel (“Are you going to make Aliyah?” Israelis would always ask me), and a cis male who could navigate the gendered contours of heterogenous Jewish and Bedouin spaces. Recognition of this embodiment, of multiple connections to place and identity, complicates the framing of research in the “field,” as a place out there, inhabited by people framed as different and Other, to be observed by the distanced and objective eye of the trained academic. Academic knowledge production in the social sciences and the humanities much of the time ask that the scholar conduct “fieldwork.” Fieldwork, as a key method of the discipline of anthropology, has a long and complex history. As Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson write, fieldwork has long been seen as the defining distinction between anthropology and other disciplines.123 Anthropological methodologies migrated into human and cultural geography which also employ such ethnographic methods. Such work is a staple of many graduate students’ research. Of course, there have been many critiques of anthropological methods from within the social sciences, and scholars have long sought to understand the colonial legacies that intertwine with the practice. I briefly visit some here in this short essay, in order to situate myself as a researcher, but also to suggest some 123 Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Discipline and Practice: ‘The field” Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology,” in Anthropological locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, eds. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): 2. 46 critical ways of thinking through anthropological and social scientific work in the “field” of Israel/Palestine. The very idea of fieldwork presupposes a geographic division of labor that segregates the space of research, the “field,” from the space where the researcher supposedly originates, a “home.”124 This bifurcation rests on colonial foundations that conceptualize an unmarked, white, male researcher subject. For researchers of color, from the Global South, or indigenous researchers, those from the space where they go to conduct fieldwork, the relationship to place is much more complicated.125 Further, the division between “home” and the “field” even for the unmarked research subject of anthropology is not so strong; in my case, for instance, I constantly negotiated a space in Israel/Palestine produced through the consistent interchange of people coming and going, the sharing of media, and in my case, physical traveling ‘in and out,’ as well as a complex relationship with the contours of my own Jewish identity and connections. My “fieldwork” did not exist only in the moments perhaps stereotypically imagined as “research” (buried in archives, furiously scribbling in notebooks while observing people) but “began” years before, has persisted years after, and constantly intertwines with my own internal world. The colonial origins of fieldwork resonate even in self-reflexive research. As Gupta and Ferguson remind researchers, fieldwork began as an activity of the natural sciences. A researcher would observe ‘authentic’ natural phenomenon, such as lives of animals and plants in their native state.126 With social anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski’s institutionalization of ethnography, anthropological methodology sought to understand 124 Ibid., 12 125 Ibid., 11, 17. 126 Ibid., 6-7. 47 different cultures in supposedly self-contained and undisturbed natural environments. The way that research has historically been conducted (and much in the present as well) inscribes colonialist extractive relationships between those in academia (much of the time coming from the ‘West’) and indigenous people.127 Besides the obvious dehumanization implicit in such methods, Qadri Ismail writes that such a methodology also spoke to how anthropology’s object of knowledge, “culture,” was perceived as a difference to be classified, labeled, understood, and placed in a hierarchy of civilizations with Europe at the top.128 The anthropologist sought to learn about “cultures,” a signifier imbricated with race that was at once a marker of cultivation (the acquisition of culture) while simultaneously one’s internal, unchanging essence. Indeed, as Ismail writes, “field” itself is a Eurocentric construction, legitimizing the disciplinary knowledges of anthropology and geography – and “incarcerates” its “object, the primitive other, in it, a place out there, afar, unknown, unwhite, and then stages such incarceration as discovery.”129 Ethnography of course bares its origins in its name, the writing of the ethnos, that is, the study and dissemination of research based on inherent human difference and race.130 While my Field Journals do follow some of my own reflections while in the Naqab/Negev, the pieces I present are more about the complexities of settler colonialism than my own scholarly bildungsroman. My goal was not to present a story of unrelenting settler dominance. The Field Journals work to present narratives which, while depicting some of the quotidian violence of Zionist settler violence and Bedouin dispossession, chafe 127 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York: Zed Books, 1999). 128 Qadri Ismail, Culture and Eurocentrism (New York: Rowan & Littlefield International, 2015). 129 Ibid., 146. 130 Gupta and Ferguson, “Discipline and Practice,” 3. 48 at easy conclusions. Instead, I hoped to show a heterogenous settler-indigenous space, one in motion, full of resistances, setbacks, anxieties, contradictions, and riddles. At the same time, I fully recognize the violence facing Bedouin people in some unrecognized villages and include pieces that respond to individuals’ call to share stories with those outside of the Naqab/Negev. My chapters also reject the idea that Zionist settler colonialism functions well, that it is a success, rather than a project threatening to be overcome by settler anxiety and the inability to fully, finally “develop” the Naqab/Negev. I also did not conduct research alone (again, that ethnographer furiously scribbling in his notepad), but was completely reliant on other people who graciously gave me time, invited me to unrecognized villages, helped me navigate the archives, translated for me, and critiqued me when it was warranted. I tried to modestly give back by working with the Negev Co- Existence Forum the entire time I was in the Naqab/Negev and have since used my research to give non-academic talks the politics of the region at churches and synagogues in the US. Of course, this is not the end of my responsibility. Geography, in particular, has a long colonial history of knowledge production reliant on imperial conquest. Much geography scholarship tries to contend with its history of coloniality by trying to “decolonize” research methodologies and practices. For geographers critiquing settler colonialism, there is a consistent lack of recognition of how settler colonial structures and relations produce the very possibilities for researchers to engage in their work.131 For instance, my ability to conduct research in the Naqab/Negev is premised on the training and support I received from a Midwestern land grant university sitting on Dakota and Ojibwe land in the US settler state of Minnesota. The ongoing 131 Stepha Velednitsky, Sara N.S. Hughes, and Rhys Machold, “Political Geographical Perspectives on Settler Colonialism,” Geography Compass (2020): DOI: 10.1111/gec3.12490. 49 geopolitical relations between the United States and Israel, and Israeli settler colonial dominance in the Naqab/Negev itself were also conditions for my research. After all, as a Fulbright Fellow, I directly received funding as a part of US American geopolitical aims (a speaker at the orientation I attended in Washington D.C. and who worked with John Kerry when he was Secretary of State under President Obama, called us “the tip of the spear” of American foreign policy). Without such critique, geographers of settler colonialism risk reifying settler colonial structures in their research and academic work.132 Even more critical analyses of settler colonialism in geography, as Sarah Hunt and Sarah de Leeuw argue, tend to employ decolonization as a concept without recognizing its different application across the colonized and settler-colonized worlds, as well as privilege theoretical work over actual, anti-colonial practice.133 Hunt and de Leeuw also caution that settler geographers who critique settler colonialism can also fail to engage with indigenous peoples on their own terms, instead producing work that foregrounds a settler self- reflexivity that in the end reifies white supremacy.134 Several of my chapters rely on archival research and the close reading of English texts. While I used Hebrew to get around and engage with people, as well as reference Hebrew texts and sources, I felt my lack of fluency in the language meant that I could not approach Hebrew texts with the same analytical methods as those in English. However, I did use Hebrew (and extremely helpful librarians!) to navigate the different archives that I worked in. As a result, the archives I accessed were somewhat more open to me than non- Hebrew speakers (but of course, a bit more closed than for the fluent researcher). The work 132 Ibid. 133 Sarah de Leeuw and Sarah Hunt, “Unsettling Decolonizing Geographies,” Geography Compass 12, no. 7 (2018). 134 Ibid., 5 50 of archives, too, is bound up in ethnographic practice and colonial knowledge production. I used three repositories of materials, two of which are more formal archives: the Ben- Gurion Archives (BGA) in Sede Boqer, the Tuviyahu Archives at Ben-Gurion University, and the Office for Public Relations and Publications at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba. The Ben-Gurion Archives in Sede Boqer is a stone’s throw from Ben-Gurion’s grave and overlooks the Wilderness of Zin. The BGA is part of a larger research center on Ben-Gurion and Zionism in general. Some documents are online in the archive’s database. Most are brought to you by the librarians in stuffy, brown folders, organized in English and Hebrew according to specific keywords and topics. Much of the documents are photocopies, or even photocopies of photocopies, and the researcher can then make additional photocopies on the machine shared with the institution’s full-time researchers. As a repository of Ben-Gurion’s legacy, it is curious that the many of the documents are faded facsimiles and for a non-native reader of Hebrew, sometimes exceptionally hard to read (is that a chet or a tav? A tet or a mem?). The building itself looks like a desert dwelling out of Buckminster Fuller catalog, designed to deflect light away from the collections and the reading room. Midresha Ben-Gurion has little shade, an inordinate number of trash- eating ibexes, and is sometimes visited by a periodic tour-group on a Birthright Israel trip, a place to stop for lunch (either pizza or falafel only), before taking young American Jews further into the southern Negev. The Tuviyahu Archives were particularly well-organized, and materials found there formed the basis for much of my archival work on desert sciences and the role of the university in settler colonialism. The Office for Public Relations and Publications was a 51 particularly interesting find; they had back copies of all of Ben-Gurion University’s public materials, which they happily allowed me to scan. Much of this material has migrated into my dissertation as photographs from magazines on development in the Naqab/Negev. It was particularly interesting to conduct research on the subject of academic knowledge and settler colonialism in Beersheba, a stone’s throw from the development project of Gav- Yam, and in Sede Boqer, a town where the Blaustein Institute for Desert Research is located, and where Ben-Gurion lived and was laid to rest. It also felt a bit grubby to be reading for Ben-Gurion’s settler ideology and the undercurrent of violence in his developmental thought so close to his grave, where people visited to celebrate his legacy as the state’s founding father. Working in the archives was an experience of conflicting emotions. With librarians, while I was somewhat forthcoming about my research topic and interests, I did not quite advertise the extent of my critiques. Similarly, I enjoyed the company, chatting with other researchers, but was also somewhat unsettled when conversations would tend to revolve around the common sense of Israel and Zionism. As Sarah de Leeuw argued, drawing from feminist historical geographies, “Overtly recognizing, and perhaps even privileging, the personal, the emotive, and somewhat haphazard connections I developed…ultimately led to considerations about the intimate and contradictory nature of colonialism.”135 The ebbing and flowing of my own confusion, identification, anger, epiphany, and curiosity with different aspects of archival research, as well as with my field work, produced in my notes a sense of constant unease. I hope my Field Journals capture some of this state. 135 De Leeuw, Sarah, “Alice through the Looking Glass: Emotion, Personal Connection, and Reading Colonial Archives Along the Grain,” Journal of Historical Geography 38 (2012): 274. 52 De Leeuw draws from Ann Stoler in considering such an approach to colonial archives. Scholars have traditionally read colonial archives “against the grain,” meaning that they seek to undermine and subvert the rule of the state and its official pronouncements, while recuperating the agency of the colonized.136 Stoler offers that another methodological approach is “reading along the grain,” that is, engaging in an ethnographic approach to understanding the way that colonial officials were not stable subjects, assured of their power, and to trace how this anxiety, these affective states, intertwine with the texts themselves. “In treating archival documents not as the historical ballast to ethnography,” Stoler writes, “but as a charged site of it, I see the call for an emergent methodological shift: to move away from treating the archives as an extractive exercise to an ethnographic one.”137 Colonial officials are moved by “epistemic anxieties [that] stir affective tremors within them,” as they struggle to retain power, to justify their order through an affective (and affected) confidence.138 It is a “colonial common sense,” as Stoler writes, that conditions the emergence of these texts, but is also under consistent assault within the increasingly uncomfortable confines of administrative rule. I approach archival documents (and other kinds of written text) as continually unsettled, less reflections of Zionist settler colonialism and more as attempts to codify power and rule. My first three chapters draw chiefly from such texts of varying genres. Chapter One looks at the emergence of a circulating discourse between Ben-Gurion, American liberal Zionists, and British colonial officers before 1948. Zionists in these texts are engaged in the production of a pioneering subject that they see as “making the desert 136 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009): 47. 137 Ibid. 138 Ibid., 19. 53 bloom,” though this was far from the material truth of settlement in Palestine. In Chapter Two, my textual genres are scientific reports and public relations brochures. As English texts, they are meant to elicit material and institutional support for Zionist sciences—and by extension, Zionist settlement—from abroad. Such reports, as I show, wrestle with both indigenous presence and with a kinetic environment, both of whom do not adhere to Zionist desires for control. In Chapter Three, my key text is Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle by Dan Senor and Saul Singer.139 As a “popular nonfiction” book—a genre that can sometimes be shallow description and flaccid legitimization of questionable research—Start-Up Nation seeks to sell Israeli economic and technological exceptionalism to non-Israeli businesses and governments. However, as I show, the text is suffused with contradictions in its argument that portrays the Israeli economy as both egalitarian and reliant on the military, yet curiously absent of violence. For such textual analysis, I draw from Mark Rifkin’s conceptualization of “settler common sense,” which he defines as “the ways the legal and political structures that enable non-native access to Indigenous territories come to be lived as given, as simply unmarked, generic conditions of possibility for occupancy, association, history and personhood.”140 Rifkin, in analyzing nineteenth century US American literature, undertakes a queer, critical close-reading to show how normative values in texts obscure the background conditions of settler colonial structures and relations. It is not the case that we need to read all texts for their explicit struggle with indigeneity to understand how indigenous dispossession 139 Dan Senor and Saul Singer, Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle. Paperback Edition. Council on Foreign Relations Book (New York: Twelve Books, 2011). 140 Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014): xvi. 54 underwrites settler texts.141 Settlers make sense of their world in how they “register and recirculate everyday modes of settlement” that reproduce the assumption of settler sovereignty over indigenous space. Rifkin analyzes settler texts for their “modes of ordinary perception” in order to “indicate how quotidian modes of sensation and sense- making provide the impetus and frame which the texts themselves emerge.”142 In addition to address the settler common sense of my texts and documents, there is an added dimension to the idea of “fieldwork” in Israel/Palestine that resonates with the settler colonial and the ideological machinations of Zionism. As I foreground in Chapter Two, the natural and social sciences in Israel have long been associated with the extension of settler claims over land at the expense of indigenous Palestinians. “Fieldwork,” therefore, is a method of settler colonialism and despite the myriad of critical anthropological and geographical work in Israel/Palestine, it remains imbricated into the colonial enterprise. Considering the word itself in relation to what I try to do in this dissertation, means looking at the way that Zionist ideology consistently mobilizes development for settler colonialism. Gupta and Ferguson point out that the anthropological reverence for the “field” carries with it a host of implicit meanings: The word field connotes a place set apart from the urban—opposed not so much to the transnational metropolises of late capitalism as to the industrial cities of the era of competitive capitalism, as befits the word’s period of origin…Going to the “field” maybe suggests a trip to a place that is agrarian, pastoral, or maybe even “wild”; it implies a place that is perhaps cultivated (a site of culture), but that certainly does not stray too far from nature. What stands metaphorically opposed to work in the field is work in industrial places: in labs, in offices, in factories, in urban settings—in short, in civilized spaces that have lost their connection with nature. As a metaphor to work by, “the field” thus reveals many of the unspoken assumptions of anthropology.143 141 Ibid., 3. 142 Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense, 3. Both quotations. 143 Gupta and Ferguson, “Discipline and Practice,” 8. 55 A “field,” then, is a cultured space, one that is implicitly different from the space that the researcher left, that is, a space of modernity, of ‘high’ civilization. But let me linger on the way that field is a space of nature/culture. It is an accessible place, not a forest, a mountain, close to civilization, not a ‘wasteland.”144 A field is either cultivated or cultivable. It is not strictly unused or unusable land. At the same time, academics have a “field,” an area of expertise that they cultivate. Academics conduct fieldwork, or work, not only in the field, but in their field. I also cannot help but notice the potential resonance of ‘fieldwork’ as a technology of Zionist ideology and control. Settlers work in the fields of Palestine, transforming wasteland, into tamed and cultivated nature. For Labor Zionism, and as I show in much of Chapters One and Two, David Ben-Gurion’s writings are often about the ability of settlers to transform Palestinian nature into Israeli modernity. This occurred in “fields,” through settlers’ labor, their “work.” Zionists have long conducted fieldwork as a way of capturing land, transforming it, and claiming it as the rightful property of the Jewish nation. In Hebrew, the word for field is sede, as in Sede Boqer (i.e. Morning Field), the kibbutz that Ben-Gurion retired to, where I conducted much of my archival research, and where the Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research—the subject of Chapter Two—is located. Not only do the implicit meanings of fieldwork in relation to Zionist ideology betray the way scientific and social scientific research has aided and abetted the settler state, but academic research throughout the last century, has been a key component in the colonial 144 See Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 56 dispossession of Naqab/Negev Palestinian Bedouins.145 British and Zionist scholarship constructed Bedouins as distinct from other Palestinians, a discrete community marked by cultural difference, something I cover in great detail in Chapters Two and Four.146 Working with Bedouin communities is rife with the kinds of colonial power dynamics that have long conditioned ethnographic research. Much of my contact with Bedouin communities was facilitated through the Negev Co-Existence Forum for Civil Equality (NCF) which worked with a large coalition of other Jewish-Bedouin groups. Many of my visits to villages were as part of English-speaking tour groups produced in partnership with a number of different organizations and specific villages and towns. This is a highly ritualized phenomenon—one that I had first experienced in 2011. Groups take participants (everyone from faith-based delegations, to politicians, to embassy officials, to activists) to specific sites and meet with individuals to “witness” the effects of Israeli occupation and racism. The goal is then for people to go back ‘home’ and to tell people what they saw, organizing to get specific countries to take action against ongoing settlement and occupation. However, though it doesn’t appear in specific form in this dissertation, I also spent a lot of time just ‘hanging out’ with Jewish and Bedouin people in villages, at bars and restaurants, events, in houses, as well as joining some volunteer opportunities to work with kids in unrecognized villages, which amounted to a lot of soccer and basketball games. These kinds of impressions and necessary breaks from the continual academic vs. subject binary also infuse the background conditions and emotional life of my work. 145 Mansour Nasasra, Sophie Richter-Devroe, Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder, and Richard Ratcliffe, eds., The Naqab Bedouin and Colonialism: New Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2015). 146 Ibid., 4 57 During my fieldwork, I continually joined the same tours—though they varied depending on who was available in which Bedouin village or town, many participants had similar reactions of anger and disgust at Israeli violence and pity for Bedouin victims. In continually going on tours, as well as joining those Bedouin individuals who hosted groups in different settings, I began to notice some of the patterns and rituals. Many of the stories people told were heart-breaking and at the same time, I sensed in some people a marked annoyance with the ritual of visiting groups’ dismay. I became increasingly uncomfortable with seeing people in distress, at some of the most awful periods in their lives, exceptionally vulnerable. However, at the same time, I felt that as an academic, I should take up work that would benefit communities I visited. As such, I worked as a volunteer English editor for NCF, making sure that their reports were in an English that would clearly appeal to an international audience. It was modest, but something I chose to do to address my own sense of frustration and anger with what I saw people experiences. I also recorded many of these meetings with photographs, notes, and audio, and have made some of them available as Field Journals. My intention is not to describe “my adventure” in an alien place—but instead, to report on what people told me to report on and allow these narratives to exist a bit apart from theoretical analysis. An overriding tension in these journals, as well in Chapter Four, which looks at NGO work in Bedouin communities, is to balance not wanting to portray Bedouin Palestinians as consistent victims, objects of pity, while at the same time documenting some of the real violence of Zionist settler colonialism. To sum up, these journals help extrapolate my methodological approach and document (of course, also in a presented form) some of the real on-the-ground research that went into the fieldwork for this dissertation. I found these two years to be one of the 58 most affecting and intense periods of my life and it profoundly altered the way I came to understand “actually-existing” settler colonialism and development. I do not think that my fieldwork makes me an expert—rather, I feel more as an imperfect vessel for descriptions of the Naqab/Negev. The Field Journals are an attempt to complicate and even sometimes subvert my own analytical positioning within my chapters. I hope that in presenting them before and after chapters, I succeed in showing some the limits of analysis and instead temper my theoretical interventions with the cold water of everyday life. 59 Field Journal 1: Dispatch from Beersheba Old City, Beersheba – September 2015 Photo 1. Author Photograph. Beersheba, Old City. 2015. Photograph 1. Beersheba, Old City. 2015. 60 Dispatches from Beersheba. Arrival through Ben-Gurion International Airport. Affiliated with Ben-Gurion University. Living on Ben-Gurion Street. * I walk down silent Shabbat streets under the dusk-lit apartment blocks that loomed out of haphazard construction sites. While the blocs are half built, in some apartments you could hear the chanting of Shabbos prayers, see the glow of candles, and shadows moving around a dinner table. Further down Rager Street, the road abruptly narrows. Now my footsteps echo in the quiet of the Old City, the Ottoman center that had since fallen into disrepair adding to Beersheba’s reputation, a city that many Jewish Israelis see as a periphery of idle waste. The old stone Ottoman buildings have been transformed into various public institutions. The Governor’s residence, built in 1906, is now the Negev Museum of Art. Next door, the old mosque with a tall minaret. I read that it was the central mosque until 1948 when Israeli forces captured the city and turned it into a detention center. The mosque served as a part of the Negev Museum of Art, before the museum’s renovation in the 2000s. Photograph 2. Shabbat sunset in the Old City. 2015. 61 The local Bedouin Palestinian communities petitioned the government to have it reconverted back into a working mosque, since, Beersheba, a mixed city that had long been a Bedouin administrative center, lacked any others. After many protests and petitions to officials, in 2011 the Israeli High Court allowed a “compromise”—that it should be turned into the Museum of Islamic Culture. A compromise specific to Israeli multiculturalism: there is a vocal respect for the idea of minorities, but material processes often favor how settlers see Bedouins. As museum pieces. As cultural artifacts. Their buildings are beautiful, but only when empty. But even its potential appeal as an Islamic center circumscribed. Israeli-Jews used the site for an annual wine festival. Others reject even the veneer of cultural bridge-building. Covering 2012 protests by activists at the wine festival, in the Jerusalem Post a writer argued that such actions by Bedouin Palestinians should “be understood as a struggle to re-Islamify unused sites in Israel.” In this article, entitled, “Terra Incognita: The re- Islamification of Beersheba,” the writer added that the mosque was a flashpoint for the clash of civilizations, writing that, “This is actually part of a global struggle by Muslims to re-assert their claims to former places of worship that were once in the Dar al-Islam, or the Photograph 3. The Grand Mosque in the Old City of Beersheba. 2015. 62 ‘domain of Islam.’” The attempt to save an important heritage site (and the only mosque in the city) constitutes a “re-Islamization.”147 Nearby, an old Turkish barracks and police station serves as an Israeli police station. An army communications tower juts into the sky, looming far above the Grand Mosque's minaret and the sandstone colors of the Old City. I pass streets with shops closed for Shabbat, though also the random open kiosk. On Keren Keyemith L’Yisrael (Jewish National Fund) Street, paved in brick for pedestrians, everything was closed except one shop where four men sit, drinking vodka and laughing, under a curious embroidered portrait of Joseph Stalin. The streets are exceptionally empty, overwhelmed by long grass and vines growing out of buildings barely ruins. Suddenly, the echo of a bassline rumbling from a long dark hallway. Looking in, just darkness, the pulsing music loud now, and one figure sitting at a white plastic table on a white plastic chair burning down a cigarette. At the end of the block, one restaurant was open. Inside, in blue lights a man in a white disco suit bobbed his head while three women in varying tight dresses crossed their arms and watched. I make my way to the Beersheba River Park, the “river” a wide, flat, dry canyon with a narrow, muddy wadi green with scrub brush. The Jewish National Fund and the city plan to “restore” the river here. How? I am not sure. They are in the midst of constructing a lake.148 Sometimes, in winter, the wadi becomes a true river, a torrent of gnashing currents after a rainstorm. But right now, it is a polluted stream barely trickling. The city 147 Seth J. Frantzman, “Terra Incognita: The re-Islamification of Beersheba,” The Jerusalem Post. 5 September, 2012. https://www.jpost.com/opinion/columnists/terra-incognita-the-re-islamification-of- beersheba 148 As of May 2020, Beersheba has its lake, the “second largest in the State of Israel (after the Kinneret) [Sea of Galilee, Lake Tiberias],” measuring 22.5 acres. I am not sure that such a comparison should be made. According to Google, the area of the Sea of Galilee is 41,019 acres/ 64 square miles. David Israel, “Israel’s 2nd Largest Lake Inaugurated in… Beersheba.” Jewishpress.com. 15 October 2019. https://www.jewishpress.com/news/travel-news/israels-2nd-largest-lake-inaugurated-in- beersheba/2019/10/15/ 63 is counting on this area to be the new green centerpiece for wider regional development. Comparisons to San Antonio. The river is hemmed in by new Jerusalem Stone balustrades with landscapes gardens pockmarked by plaques that thank donors for specific plots of grass, paths, water fountains, benches. Brought to you by, the City of Montreal’s Beth Hatikva Congregation. Thanks to the Government of Australia. Many blessings to all of our friends in New Jersey, in loving memory of ___. For a bicycle path: “The road of righteousness leads to life by way of its path, there is no death.” A “pipe bridge” extends over the river into a large area shaded by eucalyptus trees. Here seemed to be the only groups of people left in the city. Children run up and down the small green hills under the eucalyptus, kicking soccer balls, running after toy trucks, on bikes. Many families are not Jewish-Israelis: they are Palestinian citizens and East and South Asian communities. The park looks to be still under construction. Some areas are covered in a soft bed of green lawn, others all dusty sand and husks of carob trees. Photograph 4. Cell tower over the old police barracks in the Old City. 2015. 64 I walk the path north of the river as three stars appeared in the sky. It was sandy and dusty, bulldozer treads cutting across the ground. Across the river, crushed cars were hanging over the riverbed. A few meters ahead, along the river, three pickup trucks are parked next to a trailer and a tent, where several men watched a portable television and drink coffee. This is the beginning of new development perhaps. The suburbanization of Beersheba’s Old City. The ground torn open, the river less an attraction than a convenient place to stack refuse. The sun descends as workers, probably not Jewish and with nowhere to be on Shabbat, chatted over coffee to bring in the weekend. Up the hill, shining in the dusk over the dry wadi, I spy the twin golden arches of a kosher McDonald’s. Field Journal 2: Envisioning with David Ben-Gurion September 4th, 2015: Visiting the Ben-Gurion museum and home in Sede Boker with a Ben- Gurion University student tour group Jottings in iPhone 4S Notes App: [walls covered in quotes by BG about the potential of the Negev. Movies (made some recordings) of how they are selling the Negev through “settlement,” “agriculture,” “science,” etc. See photographs for what is on the walls; technological themes, desalination brings a great lesson for all of humanity (continual trope), desalination in Eliat now, mining resources, the Negev as the epicenter of minerals for Israel, research and science] 65 BG’s one on one reactions very gruff. Letter to child in which he corrects his Hebrew and tells him not to write again until he learns to write better. Early life in the state very hard, especially on kibbutzim. All you hear are idealistic happy stories. If Israel could figure out new technologies, Israel would share. Scarcity in Israel, so have to fix the problems. Israelis helping CA build desalination plants. Sede Boker people “lunatics” says BG. Tour guides parents: “What could you possibly find here?” In his will, BG wanted his house opened to the public. 200 members of the kibbutz and growing now. Most kibbutzim are privatized now. Decision making in kibbutz. When BG decided to join kibbutz, there was a process to vote on his entry. Not unanimous, but they eventually allowed him to join. [end of notes on iPhone] 66 [beginning of jottings in small black notebook] Our group was asked to simulate the arguments for and against Ben-Gurion joining the kibbutz. BG spent a year and a half in Sede Boker but was recalled to serve two more terms as PM. But he also came back and spent a lot of time in Sede Boker, calling it his primary residence. He wasn’t an equal member of the kibbutz – he tried hard work, but he was too old to keep up with the younger kibbutzniks. He ended up working 4 hours a day, half of what others do, and was in charge of checking meteorological instruments, after hurting himself while farming. He spent the mornings checking the instruments and the afternoon and evenings writing, reading, and receiving visitors. Q from tour guide: How do we reach the next generation? [this is within interactive game center to teach people about continuing Ben-Gurion’s vision. In the interactive game, all Figure 4. Ben-Gurion working with a sheep. Paula Ben-Gurion in the background. “The Ben Gurion Legacy.” Negev No. 5, Summer 1977. Department of Publications and Media Relations, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel. 67 of the Negev is included in Ben-Gurion’s vision, including energy, science, and economic development from Beersheba to Eilat] In the Bible, the prophets did not accept the waste of the Negev, blooming of the desert is of prime importance. [check Tanakh on this]. Ben-Gurion reads the prophets, focusing on when they talk about blooming the desert. Questions from the interactive game: Settlement of the Negev: True or False? The Negev is 60% of the land mass 10% of population 180 communities Most of the area is military training area Negev is rich in minerals, nature reserves, and heritage sites Settlement progress measured by ‘what would Ben-Gurion think?’ Over the years, development inspired by Ben-Gurion “special importance – open spaces are unsettled” – “Do you think that his vision has been fulfilled?” Photograph 5. Settle the Negev yourself at Ben-Gurion's home in Sede Boker. 2015. 68 Guide: Take away: as you begin your studies and go out into the world, what was it like in Israel? Way to connect and tell the story – how best to tell the story and connect. Guide: “I feel like I missed out. Would have loved to be here last century. In the marshes. A chalutzim [pioneer]. Can’t see development if you are in Tel Aviv.” – said this to H—. H— said: “Have the vision” Film: introduction screen: Abraham Lincoln, Moses, Gandhi and Herzl on introduction screen with the phrase “Who is a leader?” Film apparently has famous Israeli actors playing different parts from history. ‘Commonality between Lincoln, Moses, Herzl and Gandhi – BG saw them as freedom fighters and BG wanted to be seen as this.’ Quotations from Ben-Gurion on the museum grounds, along paths, under trees, stones along the lawn, and displayed proudly in exhibits: “The state of Israel to exist, must go south.” “Wisdom goes with south. It is written: ‘Whoever seeks wisdom, south he shall go.’” “It is in the Negev that the creativity and the pioneer vigor of Israel shall be tested.” “It is in the Negev that the Jewish scientific talent and ability for research shall be tested.” “The Negev is one of the Jewish nation’s safehavens.” “The scientist should focus on new research fields […] researching the use of solar energy.” 69 “When I saw Sede Boker I felt that here a bold and crucial attempt was being made […] the most critical one to the future of this region that constitutes half of the country.” “If only Israel could desalinate water the whole human race would be blessed.” “The Negev is a great Zionist asset […] two million Jews can be settled there with agriculture.” “New settlements are preferable to armor enhancement. “The land of Israel will be built only by diligent people, rich in substance and spirit who will come from the outside […] to create a homeland […] to transform the wilderness into a green pasture.” * Inside the Ben-Gurion Museum: Letters posted on the walls of the museum (bold face type is in original): Honorable Sir, 2.2.1954 Photograph 6. A transparent exhibit under the trees at the Ben-Gurion home. No label or explanation for the covered wagon, the transposition of landscapes. 2015. 70 In the name of Israeli Arabs in Baqa West and the high school students in Baqa West I am writing to you to tell you we are sorry that you left the government.149 We are puzzled how a man like you leave the government and go working in the deserted Negev. And to live like a pioneer to work the land. But we hope that in your new place you will cause development as you did in the government. Anyway, we all want to know how you live today in Sde Boker. And also what do you think about peace between Israel and the Arab States and how do you feel about the Arab minority in Israel amongst all Arabs. Finally, we wish you and your wife good years and good health. Rastem Said Omar High-school, Baqa West, Hadera Reply: Hello to Rastem Said Omars. Sde Boker, 5.2.1954 I was glad to receive your letter and I send my regards to all the high school students in Baqa West and to all the Arab residents of the region. I will try to answer your questions shortly. I do not believe a single man should run the state for many years. I have been prime minister for more than five years and I believe another talented man should have the opportunity to do this hard work. I am glad I could serve all the residents of Israel, Jews and Arabs, for more than five years, and now I want to serve the country as a simple citizen. 149 Baqa West is in the north near Hedeira and borders the Green Line; Baqa East is over the line. On maps, Baqa West is Baqa el-Garbiya, Baqa East, Baqa ash-Sharqiyya. 71 I went to the Negev—since it is deserted. Land was created to meet people’s needs and no place should be deserted. There is nothing more important than to make a desert bloom […]. I think that helping the desert bloom is not less important than being prime minister. And as for the Israeli-Arab peace—I am truly sorry we haven’t achieved it yet, but I am sure that it will be achieved some day. […] I believe a similar friendship will form between Israel and the Arab states. The Arab minority in Israel is part of the country and they have the same rights and duties as other Israeli residents. I hope that the Israeli schools and the labor laws enacted by the government will raise the economic and spiritual quality of life for all Israeli residents including the Arabs. My wife and I thank you for your greetings. Sincerely, D. Ben-Gurion Excerpt from a letter not posted on the walls of the museum: Letter to son, Amos, October 5, 1937150 Excerpt on the Negev and the Palestinian-Arab inhabitants of Palestine: 150 Journal of Palestine Studies, “JPS Responds to CAMERA’s Call for Accuracy: Ben-Gurion and the Arabs,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 41 no. 2 (2012): 245-250. In reference to the recommendation of the establishment of the Peel Commission to come to a conclusion on the future of the British Mandate of Palestine. The Peel Commission would go on to recommend a partitioned Mandate into a Jewish and Arab state. The Commission ended up proposing a division of land that would have 225,000 Palestinian Arabs transferred out of the Jewish state, and 1,250 Jews transferred from the Palestinian Arab state. Many Zionists rejected the partition plan because they saw all of Palestine as a future Jewish state, but Ben-Gurion offered a different pragmatism. While the letter shows some of Ben-Gurion’s complexity in thinking, his stated wish to avoid war and press for peace, as the Journal of Palestinian Studies notes, the logic of the letter is that the partition should be accepted as a first step for the establishment of a larger Jewish state. This letter has also been used by many Israeli historians as a piece of insight into Ben-Gurion. 72 “Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state. In such an event, the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the capability to develop it or make it prosper. They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower, financial resources, or creative initiative. It is very probably that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial, military, organizational, or scientific assistance. It is also possible that they will not agree. People don’t always behave according to logic, common sense, or their own practical advantage… [I]it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist passions and tell us: “We want neither your honey nor your sting” We’d rather that the Negev remain barren than that Jews should inhabit it.” If this occurs, we will have to talk to them in a different language—and we will have a different language—such a language will not be ours without a state. This is so because we can no longer tolerate that the vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant, and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs. We must expel the Arabs and take their place. Up to now, all our aspirations have been based on an assumption—one that has been vindicated throughout our activities in the country—that there is enough room in the land for the Arabs and ourselves. But if we are compelled to use force—not in order to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan, but in order to guarantee our right to settle there—our force will enable us to do so.” “JPS Responds to CAMERA’s Call for Accuracy: Ben-Gurion and the Arabs.” Journal of Palestine Studies, 41 no. 2 (2012): 245-250. 73 * One student asks the tour guide, while sitting outside of David and Paula Ben- Gurion’s tombs, “What did he write about the Bedouin?”151 The tour guide answers, saying he ignored Arabs generally, that this was a problem that would work itself out. She goes on. The Bedouin weren’t really using the land anyway. At the time, many early Zionists were worried about survival. Ben-Gurion just wasn’t thinking about it. The tour guide then draws the students’ attention to the graves. Large Jerusalem stone blocks, sitting under an acacia and overlooking the Valley of Zin. They moved here, she said, in order to set an example to others. To show them that anyone could come here to the Negev and assist in transforming this place. For him, moving to Israel was a rebirth (‘look at how the dates of their arrival are marked on their graves, along with birth and death’). Ben Gurion looked out over this valley and saw it with water, trees, renewable energy, agriculture, industry, desalination. Other people just saw a bunch of sand at different elevations. This area was given to Israel in the partition plan because the Bedouin weren’t really using it. Ben Gurion wanted to suck the most out of here. He wanted to conquer the desert. To do that in those days required ambition, imagination and a little bit of crazy. Today we don’t want to conquer the desert, but to live here in harmony with it. We are not conquering but “eco- building.” And we are using solar energy, desalination, and making use of this place. Another American whispered to the PhD candidate from the University of Minnesota and asked, “What exactly is this vision? Ben-Gurion was obsessed with the development of here and now, but in a thousand years, what would this place look like?” Would it not just disappear, become sand again, he asked. The PhD student wrote this in 151 The Ben-Gurion tombs are in Midreshet Sede Boqer, right behind the Ben-Gurion Heritage Institutes and the Ben-Gurion Archive. 74 his notebook – a good metaphor for my dissertation, he exclaimed in a scratchy, hurried hand. He thought that he had just experienced an epiphany, but later on, when he read what he wrote while sitting under a yellow desk lamp in front of his computer, the cool of the desert evening swirling in and out through the open window, the words did not quite make sense, their context seemed lost, and the meaning escaped him. Photograph 7. Panoramic of the Wilderness of Zin below Midreshet Ben-Gurion. 2016. 75 Chapter 1: A Zionist Frontier Theory: Settler Colonialism and Colonial Development Introduction: A Transnational Settler Archive on Development152 And what a people! And what a country! The Jews had to remake themselves and to remake Palestine. We must remember that Zionist colonization is possibly the only one, or certainly one of the very few examples of successful colonization not undertaken and not supported by a state. – David Ben-Gurion, “Test of Fulfillment,” Jewish Frontier (1942)153 In 1915, Ben-Gurion, future Prime Minister of Israel, arrived in New York to join Paole Zion (in Hebrew, Workers of Zion) in the United States. Ben-Gurion would be sent on a speaker’s tour of different cities, trying (and much of the time, failing) to drum up American enthusiasm for Hechalutz (in Hebrew, “The Pioneer”)154, an organization attempting to recruit settlers for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. American organizers found the young Ben-Gurion to be somewhat intractable, delivering didactic lectures on the need for American Jews to pledge funds and themselves should they be urgently needed as settlers.155 During his visit, Ben-Gurion found support amongst American Jews, though the prospect of living on the “frontier” in Palestine would never quite attract the hoped for wave of settlers. In New York near the end of the tour, he gave 152 A version of this chapter was published as Joseph F. Getzoff, "Zionist Frontiers: David Ben-Gurion, Labor Zionism, and Transnational Circulations of Settler Development," Settler Colonial Studies 10, no. 1 (2020): 74-93. 153 David Ben-Gurion, “Test of Fulfillment” (1942), Jewish Frontier Anthology, 1934-1944 (Jewish Frontier Association, Inc., New York, 1971): 117. 154 Throughout this chapter, I will employ the Hebrew terms ‘chalutz’ (pioneer) and ‘chalutziut’ (pioneering). Due to the nature of Hebrew transliteration, the first letter, a chet in Hebrew (pronounced as a guttural h, like softly clearing one’s throat), is sometimes rendered in English as with ‘h,’ ‘ch,’ or ‘kh.’ In deference to the most common spelling in my materials, I will spell these terms with ‘ch’ unless I am referencing a title or quotation that already uses ‘h’ or ‘kh’. 155 Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion: The Burning Ground 1886-1948 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987): 100-105. 76 a speech entitled, “Earning a Homeland,” in which he argued that the end of World War I could be an historic opportunity to realize a Jewish state. Primarily, the speech outlines the difference between Zionist settlement and colonialism, celebrating the agent of state- building, the chalutz or pioneer. In the speech, Ben-Gurion marks a distinction between British, American, and Zionist methods of colonialism. England, he said, “took India by devious stratagems and ruled it by military force,” and seeks territories “in order to get markets for their wares,” unlike Zionists. As he says: …not so we. We do not ask for the Land of Israel for the sake of ruling over its Arabs… It is a homeland that we seek, where we may cast off the curse of exile, attach ourselves to the soil—that source of quickening, creativeness and health—and renew our native life.156 Unlike the British, Zionists do not want to rule over indigenous peoples, Ben-Gurion demurred. And pioneers to Palestine have special qualities: they would not be mercantile, capitalist colonizers like the British, but redeem the country through their labor on the land. Pioneers build their state, a notion likely to appeal to his American audience: The history of American settlement shows how Herculean were the tasks of the colonists who came to find a Homeland in the New World, how many sorrows and travails they had to bear, how many and how fierce the fights they fought with wild nature and wilder redskins, the sacrifices made before they unlocked the continent for mass influx and colonization.157 Ben-Gurion instinctually compares Zionist settlement with American frontier settler colonialism, portraying Jews in Palestine as a member of the cohort of global white settlement. Like Zionists, Americans too, are productive pioneers, carving their state out of wasteland, while violently displacing indigenous peoples (who are even “wilder” than 156 David Ben-Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel, trans. and ed. Mordekhi Nurock (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954): 4. 157 Ibid., 5. 77 nature itself). In venerating the American frontier and celebrating the “mass influx” of immigration to the continent, Ben-Gurion is implying that this is a more noble form of colonization—rather than British rule centered on mercantile expansion. It also shows Ben- Gurion’s consciousness of his audience and the kind of arguments that might persuade an American Jew to imagine himself in Palestine. The disjuncture, however, between criticizing the British for ruling over different peoples, while venerating a genocidal US American campaign against indigenous nations, shows how colonialism functions at different registers in Ben-Gurion’s thought. British colonialism is extractive, while US American colonialism is simply not colonialism. It is a denial, not only of American settler colonialism but the unspoken, but clearly present, fact of Palestinian presence. For Steven Salaita, the reference of Zionists to US American settler-nationalism exhibits the “mimetic” quality of colonial discourse. “‘Mimesis,’” he writes, “also connotes a transferal of text from one object to another” wherein the projects are “not merely parallel, but confederated.” For Salaita, this particular speech by Ben-Gurion, like other instances of an “interplay” of settler rhetoric, is not only “discursive and theological” but is “situated at the median of state power, and its outflow into dialogue at the popular level [and] codified state policy.”158 Indeed, settlement in North America has long been imbued with a “Zionist” impulse, a nationalism that imagined the continent as the new Zion, a fulfillment of biblical prophecy and proof of God’s grace.159 I quote this particular speech by Ben-Gurion in order to begin my exploration of the connection between “confederated” (as Salaita terms it) settler states in ideas of national 158 Steven Salaita, The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006): 56-57. 159 Ibid.; Fuad Sha’ban, For Zion’s Sake: The Judeo-Christian Tradition in American Culture (Pluto Press, 2005). 78 development. In the passage above, Ben-Gurion valorizes a type of development, or state expansion, produced in the United States that is distinct from British forms of colonialism. For Ben-Gurion here, the US provides a model of development because it conquers nature (and indigenous nations seen as part of nature) and valorizes the personal advancement of the settlers themselves. Ben-Gurion also subsumes the violence of settler-colonial conquest into the technological and economic achievements of the nation. However, it is not only the case that Zionist settler colonialism drew from the United States to imagine its own settler development. Zionist settler development also drew from its contemporary colonial episteme and British rule over Palestine. During the British Mandate over Palestine, a decade later, Ben-Gurion would adapt colonial political- economic arguments, in order to appeal to British conceptions of development. British development justified its own rule by promising tutelage for colonized peoples, framed as not yet ready to enter the modern world. This is an important distinction: whereas colonial development nominally promised to prepare the colonized for entry into the modern world, settler colonialism frames settlers as agents of improvement and change. The native is meant to disappear, pulled out with the undertow. As in his 1915 speech, Ben-Gurion’s criticism of British rule and lauding of US American genocide, shows the way that settler colonial appreciation comes to the fore in Zionist constructions of a national future. In this way, pre-state Zionist development, as personified by Ben-Gurion, would later weave between a settler colonial valorization of conquering pioneers on the frontier, and colonial development’s focus on economic self-sufficiency and productivity. The former condones violence, while the latter relies on the technologies of governance. Both methods of rule would come to construct early ideas of Zionist settler development. 79 This chapter draws from several interconnected Anglophone sources that together comprise a transnational settler archive depicting the way that settler colonialism and development constitute each other. I focus on this archive to show how ideas of development circulated amongst Zionists in Palestine and the United States throughout the British Mandate (1920-1948). Many of the sources in this chapter are from the Jewish- American Zionist journal, Jewish Frontier. A majority of these texts seek to make the case that Zionist self-determination represents the best form of development for Palestine. Throughout Ben-Gurion’s time as nominal leader of the Jewish community in Palestine, and his two tenures as Prime Minister of Israel, the journal consistently printed Ben- Gurion’s writings and speeches and dedicated itself to the advocacy of Labor Zionism in Israel and the United States. Pioneers (chalutz) and pioneering (chalutziut) was central to much of the material in Jewish Frontier from its inception. Some of my sources are from the Ben-Gurion Archives near Sede Boqer, a library and research center that is dedicated to cataloguing Ben-Gurion’s life and body of work. Ben-Gurion produced a large oeuvre of speeches, articles, books, and more. Other articles and speeches I take from the back issues of Jewish Frontier, which can be found in university libraries in the United States (as well as in the Ben-Gurion Archives). I foreground this journal because it sought to support a particular form of Zionism for the development of Palestine, and later in the State of Israel. In doing so, it represents a transnational settler archive that circulated and translated Ben-Gurion for an American audience, in support of his political program that sought to pressure the British Mandatory power to hand over the territory to settlers, rather than Palestinians. At the same time, much Ben-Gurion’s writings that the Jewish Frontier reprinted, were meant to appeal 80 to the sensibilities of a liberal and left-leaning American Zionist audience (those who would identify with the imperatives of a Labor party)—Ben-Gurion repeatedly framed Jewish settlement as democratic, settlers as self-actualizing individuals, agents of development, and American Jewry as important for the realization of a state. Further, the imagination of settler colonialism itself circulated between these geographically dispersed Zionisms. Signifiers like “frontier,” “pioneering,” “pioneers,” “cultivation,” and “immigration,” were combined with “development” and its contemporary referents like “standard of living,” “absorptive capacity,” and “economic productivity,” to cobble together a transnational imagination of national destiny. However, as I will also show, this was a not a seamless relationship, nor mirrored projects. There is frequent evidence of discomfort, anxiety, and dissatisfaction with the level of commitment of Americans to Palestine, and in turn, disappointment with Palestinian (and later Israeli) Zionists to the sensibilities of an independent American Jewish identity. Further, Zionist developmental imperatives were also distinct from American settler development, having to make the case to British officials of the necessity of Zionist settlement for their own colonial aims. I want to note that these sources are also eclectic in content, ranging beyond Labor Zionism and Palestine/Israel; Jewish Frontier debated liberalism in the United States, philosophy, published book reviews and covered international affairs. Ben-Gurion, too, would often embed his calls for renewed pioneering and state building within detailed discussions on global history, the rise and fall of civilizations, socialism and capitalism, and Biblical exegesis. 81 As referenced in my methodology section, I close read these texts in the spirit of Ann Stoler and Mark Rifkin’s work on settler archives.160 I “read along the grain” to understand the “settler common-sense” of these texts. This involves looking at how the “legal and political structures that enable non-native access to Indigenous territories come to be lived as a given, as simply unmarked, generic conditions of possibility for occupancy, association, history and personhood.”161 Settlers take as given their claims to land and their insistence on their own place at the vanguard of history. For instance, the Zionist texts I present in this chapter already assume non-indigenous claims to land, and US American Zionists, in their support for Jewish settlement in Palestine, operate within a normative framework that celebrates the ‘American immigrant story’ without direct reference to the dispossession of indigenous nations. The continual reference to “pioneers” and “pioneering” in the Jewish Frontier (the title also a trace of its settler context), even when not explicitly connected to settler colonialism, cannot help but operate in a quotidian framework that constantly inscribed the right of conquest into the debates over the future of Palestine. But it is also case that these texts are suffused with epistemic anxieties, the need to continually formulate the Zionist project in a register that both American Zionists and British officials would accept as supplemental to their own worldviews. Further, throughout these texts, the ongoing “problem” of Palestinian society and aspirations, ensnares Zionist writings in a reflexive position, where it must validate its own ability to bring development. 160 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014): xvi. 161 Rifkin, Settler Common Sense. 82 This chapter contributes to scholarship on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Zionist ideology in light of settler colonial structures and relationships, but approaches it through critical development studies.162 Such an analysis is significant because it expands the scope of imperial and colonial history to show how settler colonialism constitutes development, usually understood in so-called post-colonial contexts.163 Zionist Settler Development Settler development generally refers to the way that settler colonialism mobilizes development, though, as I will demonstrate in this chapter, it is contingent on its temporal and geographic contexts. In particular, I focus mostly on how Zionist settler development functioned during the British Mandate. Zionist settler development emphasizes a singular, Eurocentric, racialized conception of time, imbricated with economic registers. Zionists consistently portray themselves as more advanced (and thus more productive) than Palestinians. Zionist claims to economic productivity are haunted by the long history of European antisemitism, which saw Jews as wasteful, incapable of “honest labor.”164 However, these antisemitic tropes were also accompanied by a pan-European narrative of (European) Jews as a “modernizing middle stratum of colonial society,” imperial subjects 162 Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour, “Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine,” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012): 1-8; Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (New York: Monad Press, 1973); Lorenzo Veracini, “The Other Shift: Settler Colonialism, Israel and the Occupation,” Journal of Palestine Studies 42, no. 2 (2013): 26-42. 163 Jacob Norris, Land of Progress: Palestine in the Age of Colonial Development, 1905-1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Sherene Seikaly, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). 164 Jay Geller, The Other Jewish Question Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011); Derek Penslar, Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 83 who could spur economic activity in different colonial ventures.165 Zionists reflexively sought to portray Jewish settlers as laboring bodies, individuals who could mobilize economic potential in an imperial backwater. Claims over this subject, the pioneer (chalutz), and his plan of action, what Ben-Gurion called, pioneering (chalutziut) circulated through liberal US American Zionists to create a discourse that celebrated settler colonialism while denying its existence. Development takes different forms depending on its temporal and geographic contexts. In 1920, the San Remo Treaty parsed out Ottoman and German colonies for Allied Powers to rule as Mandates (rather than as ‘colonies’). On one hand, the Mandate System produced an internationally recognized language of official decolonization; on the other hand, it extended imperial rule.166 As Gilbert Rist writes, the “League of Nations legitimated the internationalization of this intervention in the name of civilization itself, considered as a common heritage of European countries.”167 Before, colonial powers operated unilaterally—now such rule was part of the international structure of world governance. The Mandate System also introduced the idea of the “stage of development” into the international discourse, meting out grades that placed European countries at the top and different nations staggered below. In particular, the Mandate System legitimized colonial powers as the rulers of colonized territories with a responsibility of “tutelage” and of the native population based on the “stage of development” of each territory.168 165 Norris, Land of Progress, 12. 166 Susan Pedersen, “The Meaning of the Mandate System: An Argument,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 32, no. 4 (2006): 560-582. 167 Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, 3rd Edition (New York: Zed Books, 2008): 58. 168 Ibid., 60, 61 84 In Palestine, native improvement and tutelage was secondary to British concerns over economic output. In the aftermath of WWI, British officials sought a self-sufficient empire that would supply the UK with needed income and resources and primarily emphasized the expansion of colonial infrastructure to achieve this end. Coupled with a waning legitimacy, colonial policies began to focus on the development of each colony’s economy. British policy in Palestine emphasized the construction of infrastructure to expedite resource extraction, land exploitation, and the improvement of agricultural and industrial production.169 Such policies were the bread and butter of colonial extraction. However, under the Mandate System, such extraction tied to colonial development had to be justified as beneficial to the evolving welfare of the native population. Throughout the British empire, the logic of colonial development saw the emergence of a whole new regime of technocratic rule premised on the measurement of emerging economic indices. As Timothy Mitchell has argued, development coincided with the emergence of the “economy” as an object that required technical knowledge and efficient management, which technocrats frame as separate from politics (but was, of course, a deeply political process). Development could now be measured, and Zionists, seeking to obtain a state with the blessing of imperial powers, could argue for extensive settlement on the basis of their ability to secure present and future economic productivity as well as their benefit to the indigenous Palestinian population.170 169 Norris, Land of Progress, 5. 170 Timothy Mitchell, “Economentality: How the Future Entered Government,” Critical Inquiry 40, no. 4 (2014): 479-507. Beyond the scope of this article, is the Zionist reliance on measurements such as different kinds of population-scale indicators and economic indices as a way of arguing for increased Jewish immigration to Palestine. Many Zionist leaders at the time coupled arguments with detailed graphs, charts, and specific statistics meant to prove the legitimacy of their enterprise. See Seikaly (2016) for discussions on some of the kinds of statistics that Palestinian “men of capital” favored, such as calories. Caloric measurement was a body-scale way of managing individual improvement. See Chapter 3: “The Calorie, Development, and War.” 85 Histories of the Mandate period often locate Palestinians as either farmers (fellaheen) or landowners. Sherene Seikaly’s scholarship, along with Norris’s to some extent, contends that this myopic framing failed to take into account how important developmental discourses were for Palestinians as well as Zionists. By focusing her study on Palestinian capitalists, Seikaly looks at how different actors “mobilized economy as a site of social management.”171 To become modern, self-determining subjects, Palestinian men and women of capital offered their national compatriots programs for self- improvement, exhorting a program for excellence in modern “economic conduct.”172 In this way, some Palestinians sought the promised fruits of colonial development and embraced a progressive idea of time linked to capitalist expansion. The nahda, or “renaissance” or “awakening,” was a time when many Arab peoples began to embrace ideas of history as forward and progressive. Calls for tatwir and tatawwur, “development,” coincided with desire for modernization projects.173 However, despite the acceptance, or indeed, enthusiasm, for development by some of Palestine’s capitalists, the British tended to view Palestinians as the recipients of developmental programs, rather than the agents of developmental change. While making some promises to Palestinians, British colonial officers privileged the metropole’s needs and reflexively favored Zionists, in them finding a colonial accomplice that could aid their own development policies. British officials generally saw Jews and Zionists (conflating the two) as developmental and modernizing agents, rather than Palestinians.174 In this way, Seikaly argues, the Mandate was exceptional in its 171 Seikaly, Men of Capital, 17. 172 Ibid., 172. 173 Norris, Land of Progress, 19-20. 174 Norris, Land of Progress, 82. 86 endorsement of both settler colonialism and the economy as a site of developmental improvement.175 Zionist conceptions of linear time were entangled in a long history of Eurocentric thought and this epistemic context conditioned the emergence of Zionist development. As Jay Geller argues, Eurocentric thought was obsessed with Jewish difference, the seeming uncanniness of Jews in Christian theology and synchronicity. As Geller writes, “Since Christianity is the completion of Israel’s history, the persistence of Judaism after places Jews against the course of history.” In the Darwinist lens that emerged within historicist accounts, Jews were vestigial organs whose very existence no longer made natural sense.176 With Christianity firmly planted in Europe, Eurocentric thought exteriorized Jews as “eastern,” both anachronistic and anachoristic, that is, temporally mis-placed. Zionism would appeal to the epistemic logics of Christendom, incorporating a Eurocentric model of history and geography into its core ideology. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin argues that Zionism represented an acceptance of such Eurocentric and Christian-inspired attitudes towards Jews. Zionists argued that Jews could “return to history” through the establishment of a nation-state. By following the nationalist movements sweeping Europe, Zionism imagined a new modern Jewish subject as the agent of (European) historical change; the “de-orientalization of the Jews—the westernization of Jewish history.”177 As Zionism interiorized Jewish history to Europe, Jews emerged as distinct from other “Semites,” a European racial distinction that allows for the transference 175 Seikaly, Men of Capital, 4-5. 176 Geller, The Other Jewish Question, 9-10. 177 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Jewish Memory Between Exile and History,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 97, no. 4 (2007): 530-543. 87 of similar negative characteristics amongst Jews and Arabs.178 Jews moved inside and Arabs outside of Europe and its history. As Gil Anidjar writes, “Political Zionism, then, is another name for the beginning and the end of the ‘Semite,’ its paradoxical double internalization and exteriorization. The enemy within, the enemy without: the Arab, out of the Jew, and the Jew, out of Europe, exported, deported.”179 “Jew” became defined as “western,” producing intra-Jewish difference as non-European Jews were exiled to the eastern fogs of time.180 Zionist thought imagined Jews as European and thus, if beyond Europe, an extension of its civilization. We see such in Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State, when he writes that Jewish settlement in Palestine would “form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.181 Zionism, as a colonial program self-reflexively stitched together with Eurocentric critiques of Jews and the ‘East,’ projects itself onto the “stage of modernity,”182 by constantly making the case that it exceptional; indeed, exceptionally modern in whatever register modernity is judged (i.e. the most technological, the most egalitarian, the most gay, the most green, the most humanistic, etc. etc.). As Timothy Mitchell writes, claims to modernity requires the continual staging of difference by “performing the distinction between the modern and the non-modern, the West and the non-West.”183 Zionism’s core notion of its place in progressive time, as an extension of European civilization, places it in a pitched battle to 178 Gil Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008): 18. 179 Ibid., 32 180 Ibid. 181 Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, trans. Sylvia D’Avigdor (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1988) 96. 182 Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” in Questions of Modernity, ed. Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000): 1-27. 183 Ibid. 26 88 prove superiority over Palestinians. These colonial notions of development are extended into the logics of the Mandate where Zionists also claimed they could improve the lot of Palestinians by their very existence. Zionist time infuses Zionist settler development. However, one central project of Zionist colonial settler development was the social engineering of Jews themselves. To support its settler colonial imperatives, Zionism had to make the case that Jews were developmental agents, rather than developmental recipients. In order to make this case, Zionists emphasized the inherent abilities of Jews in agriculture and economic productivity once they were ‘reunited’ with their land. As Brenna Bhandar describes, this strain of improvement ideology, central to Zionism, drew from German ideas of the “volk,” an attachment to blood and soil nationalism wherein agriculture redeemed the subject.184 Zionist claims to development relied on a racialized political economy of settler labor. This synced with some British colonial programs which sought to increase Palestine’s economic output, rather than that of Palestinians’. In this context, the “pioneer” became a key symbol, an ideal citizen-subject who proved the modernity of Jewish subjects. In such a way, Zionist colonial settler development intertwined with British aims for self-sufficiency in the economic expansion of the colony’s capacity, with the symbology and imperatives of settler colonialism. While many scholars have attended to the ways that Zionist political economy functioned as a settler colonial strategy,185 I wish to broaden my analysis to consider this particular Zionist framing of development that was triangulated between the US, Palestine, 184 Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). 185 See Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Economy (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, Inc., 1983); Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 89 and British Mandatory governance. For Ben-Gurion, the imagination of the pioneer would be at the center of Labor Zionism in the US and was seen to catalyze state-building and colonial development. As a program of labor and economic expansion, “pioneering” is not the same as development—but rather a key signifier for Zionist development. Pioneers on Transnational Frontiers In this chapter, I look at how settler development functioned during the British Mandate, specifically focusing on David Ben-Gurion and the ideological school of Zionism he is most identified with: Labor Zionism. Labor Zionist ideology is an important site for understanding the particularities of Zionist settler development. It was hegemonic well into the 1970s and presided over much of the settlement of Palestine and the creation of the Doron, Elieser, editor. “The Negev: An Anthology/ The Survey on the Fight in the Negev.” Serial No. 25681, File No. 9199. 1949. Ben-Gurion Archives, Sede Boqer, Israel. Figure 5. A settler in the Negev. 90 State of Israel. It is important to include a labor history in the analysis of Zionist settler development in Palestine because the valorized figure of the pioneer (chalutz) was closely linked with that of the worker—indeed, the pioneer represents an emphasis on the labor of settlers that is found in other settler colonialisms. Pioneers were framed as part of a socialist working class that would create a new nation by laboring on the land. Within a nominally socialist definition of worker autonomy, these discourses reinforced Zionist claims over land, while also appealing to British ideas of development. They reaffirmed the economic productivity of settlers against that of indigenous people, obscuring the moral political question of settlement in Palestine. At the same time, the image of the pioneer beckoned towards an emergent Jewish autochthony in Eretz Yisrael. In addition, the pioneer/worker dyad bears some resonance with American settler ideas of frontier development, especially those of Frederick Jackson Turner. The pioneer functions as a traveling figure with economic and moral resonance in both settler states. A detailed account of the history of Labor Zionism is beyond the scope of this chapter but I do want to briefly describe some of the milieu that informed Ben-Gurion’s ideological positions and the emergence of the Jewish Frontier as a Labor Zionist periodical. The eventual publication of the Jewish Frontier was the result of decades of ideological debate and organizational coalition building. A lead group, Poale Zion, for whom Ben-Gurion traveled to the US in 1915, “considers the Jewish people as one nation dispersed in various countries and leading everywhere an abnormal economical [sic] life.”186 Identifying as socialists, Poale Zion saw capitalism as the cause of Jewish poverty and misery in Europe. For Poale Zion, Jews could only escape this cycle by creating a 186 Gideon Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1995): 193. 91 nation-state, like European nationalisms.187 A less dogmatic but more nationalistic socialist group, Hapoal Hatzair (The Young Worker), eventually joined with Poale Zion to appeal to North Americans Jews (a Left Poale Zion would form in opposition).188 In 1920, the labor movement, Histadrut (a Hebrew abbreviation for the General Organization of Workers in the Land of Israel), was founded and controlled much of the Jewish labor in Palestine, as well as the distribution of capital from abroad into the Jewish community. As the Histadrut became increasingly tied into Ben-Gurion’s ruling party after 1948, it became hard “to discern the boundary between [it] and the government.”189 While Ben-Gurion consolidated the Labor Movement in Palestine, in the 1930s in North America, Poale Zion and Hapoal Hatzair formed the League of Labor Palestine to attract English speaking (rather than Yiddish speaking) Jews. Their platform was: to unite all friends of Labor Palestine into an organized, active force for support of the vanguard of the Chalutzim [Pioneers] movement, the Histadruth Haovdim (the General Jewish Federation of Labor in Palestine), in all its activities which aim at the building of the Jewish National Home in Palestine on a foundation of free, creative labor, and the creation therein of a Cooperative Commonwealth of Labor.190 Their English periodical, Jewish Frontier, published its first edition in December 1934, with the goal of “[transforming] Palestine into a refuge for millions of Jews who felt economically, politically, and psychologically homeless” and cover issues important to Jews in the United States, especially.191 187 Ibid. 188 Ibid., 221 189 Jonathan Preminger, Labor in Israel: Beyond Nationalism and Neoliberalism (Ithaca: ILR Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2018): 5. 190 Ilan Kaiser, “Mobilizing American Jewish Liberals to Support Labor Zionism,” The Journal of Israeli History 15, no. 3 (1994): 233-234 191 Ibid., 238, 248; The Jewish Frontier would go on to be published until 2005 by the organization, Ameinu (Our People) which says it supports the American support of the development of a progressive and liberal Israel. https://www.ameinu.net/resources/jewish-frontier/. 92 Another important organization was Hechalutz, a group founded in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century, its American chapter in 1905.192 Hechalutz’s goal was to train farmers and workers, especially youth volunteers, that could emigrate to Palestine at a moment’s notice. As I mentioned in my last section, European antisemitism included ideas about the parasitic nature of Jewish economic activities. In response to such a belief, Hechalutz emphasized physical exercise, political training, and group discipline, to prepare pioneers for a life on the settlements in Palestine and thus work to reverse the economic fortunes of the Jewish people.193 Hechalutz operated some training farms in the US, one of which was established in 1940 in Hightstown, New Jersey and prepared young Americans for the kibbutz life before they emigrated to Palestine, and then Israel. The farm continued to operate as a chalutz training center until 1974.194 The farm, called Shomria was dedicated by Albert Einstein.195 Hechalutz and Jewish Frontier were interconnected, with shared contributors and advertisements and articles. Ben Halpern, eventual Brandeis University professor as well as editor and writer for the Jewish Frontier, was the security general of Hechalutz for some time and often wrote about the need to support settlers that left the US for Palestine.196 Pioneer, in English and Hebrew, has comparable definitions. In Biblical Hebrew, chalutz was the name for the vanguard in the Book of Joshua (the first after the Five Books of Moses), those sent ahead into Canaan to explore and prepare for the invasion of the main 192 Jewish Virtual Library, s.v. “He-Halutz.” Jewishvirtuallibrary.org. 193 Ben Halpern, “Hekhalutz,” Jewish Frontier 12, no. 1. (January 1945): 24-28. 194 Michele Alperin, “Hightstown farm prepared pioneers for aliya.” NJ Jewish News, May 2, 2016. https://njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com/hightstown-farm-prepared-pioneers-for-aliya/ 195 “Future Farmers for Israel Train in Jersey; Work and Discipline Prepare Youth for Life in a Kibbutz,” New York Times. Feb 9, 1964. https://www.nytimes.com/1964/02/09/archives/future-farmers-for-israel- train-in-jersey-work-and-discipline.html 196 Stephen J. Whitfield, “Ben Halpern (1912-1990),” American Jewish History 80, no. 1 (1990): 142-147. 93 body of Israelites.197 Ilan Troen notes that the word was not used in Hebrew in the Middle Ages and only appeared once Zionists revived it as a secular designation for those who settled the land to prepare for an influx of Jewish immigration.198 In English, following from French, pioneers are a special corps who go ahead of the army to clear the ground, literally, for the main body to follow.199 Central to the pioneer image was the romanticized “New Jew” (sometimes called the “New Hebrew”) and his mission to “make the desert bloom.” Zionists mostly imagined a male pioneer (and a European or American one at that) but there was also the “New Hebrew Woman,” an image of a female pioneer that performed the same labor as men.200 The image of this female pioneer played into ideas of Labor Zionism as an egalitarian enterprise, in which Israel was perceived as a social and economic utopian project. Both attested to the duality of Zionist development, focused on improving the degenerate Jewish subject (especially non-European Jewish subjects), and transforming the imagined waste and ruin of Palestine into a reclaimed garden.201 Pioneering was not the sole creation of Ben-Gurion.202 Other Zionists also combined the ideals of physical 197 For a critical reading of the Book of Joshua, the framing of Canaanites, and its implications for Indigenous peoples, see Nur Masalha, “Reading the Bible with the Eyes of the Canaanites: Neo-Zionism, Political Theology and the Land Traditions of the Bible (1967 to Gaza 2009),” Holy Land Studies 8, no. 1 (2009): 55- 108; and Robert Allen Warrior, “Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians: Deliverance, Conquest, and Liberation Theology Today,” Christianity and Crisis 49, no.12 (1989): 261-265; For Ben-Gurion’s obsession with the Book of Joshua, see Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (London: Verso, 2008). 198 Ilan S. Troen, “Frontier Myths and Their Applications in America and Israel: A Transnational Perspective.” Israel Studies 5, no.1. 2000: 304. 199 Oxford English Dictionary Online (2019), s.v. “Pioneer.” 200 Margalit Shilo, “The Double or Multiple Image of the New Hebrew Woman,” in Israeli Feminist Scholarship: Gender, Zionism, and Difference, ed. Esther Fuchs (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014): 65-90. 201 On how Zionism sought to modernize Jews from non-European countries, see Ella Shohat, “The Invention of the Mizrahim,” Journal of Palestine Studies 29, no. 1 (1999): 5-20. 202 Other Zionists rehearsed the tropes of pioneering in relationship to the development of the state. For instance, pioneering appears in the early 1900s in many texts from different figures such as Josef Trumpeldour, Berl Katznelson, Ber Borochov, and A.D. Gordon, and in the pages of many other writers. 94 labor and self-defense with that of national and historical redemption for the “Jewish People.”203 Ben-Gurion often mobilized the pioneer as the quintessential moral and economic subject for national development. This settler subject and the frontier he conquers shares some resonance with the particular kind of development that can also be found in Frederick Jackson Turner’s conceptualization of the frontier in American development. Turner was a historian in the late 1800s and early 1900s who is most famous for his “Frontier Thesis,” which argued that US American development as a nation and state was driven by the progressive advance of settlement along the frontier.204 To my knowledge, Ben-Gurion did not read Turner specifically (though it is possible) nor does he speak of him—though Ben- Gurion absorbed narratives about the American frontier, as I showed in the beginning of this chapter. Ben-Gurion and Turner were not intellectual contemporaries. While Turner gained his fame as an historian, Ben-Gurion toiled as a lonely worker of the Second Aliyah in Palestine, immersed in the world of Eastern European Zionist-socialist politics, and drifted from Poland, to Turkey, to Palestine, to the United States. However, thematically, there is a conspicuous resonance between Turner and Ben-Gurion’s conceptions of the pioneer, the tools at their disposal, the frontier challenges they faced, and how this figure galvanized national destiny. For Turner, the pioneer develops the American nation through their conquest of wilderness on the frontier. Turner describes a recurring evolutionary cycle, in which each swell of pioneers reverts to “primitive” life, a society of individuals cutting back the 203 Boaz Neumann, Land and Desire in Early Zionism, trans. Haim Watzman (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2011); Kimmerling, Zionism and Economy. 204 Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, 3rd Edition (Malabar, FL: Robert E. Kreiger Publishing Company, Inc., 1975). 95 wilderness followed by “successive waves” of capital, industry, and urban space, until new pioneers strike out again.205 Turner’s metaphors for pioneers and settlement are noticeably aqueous and anatomic: “American social development” is a “perennial rebirth,” the “fluidity of American life.”206 Each ‘wave’ of settlement is ‘civilization’ that follows “the arteries made by geology, pouring an even richer tide through them, until at last, the slender paths of aboriginal intercourse have been broadened and interwoven into the complex maze of modern commercial lines.”207 Settlement is a vast developing organism; “tongues of settlement pushed forward”208 and the laying of civilization is “like a steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally simple, inert continent.”209 For Turner, the land is a wilderness to be conquered. In this settler context, development brings improvement through conquest and cultivation of land, but also closely invokes the organic growth and advancing complexity of a body politic.210 Turner’s pioneers have the necessary cocktail of inner and outer attributes that galvanize American history: “that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless nervous energy.”211 It is true in Turner that the “coarseness” may find wasteful expression, and pioneers in their individualism are stubbornly distrustful of institutional administration and regulation. Without some sort of regulation, pioneers can become wasteful and destructive, but even so they are a “trail maker for civilization, inventor of 205 Ibid., 14-15. 206 Ibid., 3. 207 Ibid., 14-15. 208 Ibid., 16. 209 Ibid., 14-15. 210 Rist, The History of Development, 27. 211 Turner, The Frontier in American History, 37. 96 new ways.”212 Pioneers then, are the vanguard of national development, they clear the wilderness and evolve into new citizen-settler subjects. It is their improvement which is the focus of governance in settler development. Pioneers’ genocidal violence against indigenous peoples is subsumed beneath the values that are seen as expanding the contours of the nation, democracy, individualism, and the exploitation of supposedly ‘free land.’ Turner’s pioneer has an ambivalent relation with capitalism; eastern capital always follows, indebting the pioneer, or flooding each new town with a waged labor pool that drives the individual west again.213 These forces in American life undercut egalitarian society; pioneers are replaced by companies and “a new national development is before us without the former safety valve of abundant resources open to him who would take. Classes are becoming alarmingly distinct.”214 Turner’s conceptualization of development was different from colonial development in that he imagined, not a colonial for economic self- sufficiency, nor the improvement of indigenous subjects. Rather, development represented the providential trajectory of the American nation in time and space. Similar ideas of the romanticism of pioneers and the kind of values that they inhabit can be found across Ben-Gurion’s oeuvre. All Jews have “pioneering potentialities” – something which lies dormant. From the essay, “Facing the Future” in Jewish Frontier (1948), Ben-Gurion lays out the relationship between pioneers, their latent abilities, and the land itself: Man, as well as nature, conceals powers and attributes of which only a small part has been revealed. In the soul of every person there lie hidden treasures of desires and abilities which have to be uncovered and activated. The secret 212 Ibid., 270 213 Ibid., 276 214 Ibid., 277 97 of khalutziut [pioneering] lies in that it fructifies these inner forces and mobilizes them for higher human aims.215 For Ben-Gurion as well, “khalutziut” (chalutziut) / pioneering is a romantic endeavor which catalyzes the evolution of the pioneer subject and the nation. There are major differences between Turner’s and Ben-Gurion’s conceptions of pioneering. While Turner valorizes the individual that must perpetually escape the corrupting influences of civilization (rendered as the incursion of an increasingly complex capitalism), Ben-Gurion’s subjects are always part of the national collective.216 They do not seek individual gain. But there is a similar worry in Ben-Gurion over the need to curb capitalist accumulation and profit-motives and channel them, instead, for the benefit of the nation. In addition, in both Turner and Ben-Gurion, there is significant resonance in the individual characters of the pioneers, their relationships to nature and indigenous peoples. Both pioneering subjects embody supposed revolutionary breaks with European degeneration. Both are forerunners of freedom and democracy. Both are “creative” (instead of violent), transform and exploit a supine nature, and are seen to encapsulate the spirit of modernity and a universal Western humanity. In doing so, pioneers are subjects of settler development’s trajectory of improvement of land on a ‘frontier.’ Pioneers are active agents of developmental change. The resonance between the two settler projects shows what moral and economic values reinforce Zionist claims over land. Even though these ideas may have resonated between American Jews and Jews in Palestine, it was not the case that ideological exchange 215 David Ben-Gurion, “Facing the Future,” Jewish Frontier 15 (New York, December 1, 1948), 5-9. File No. 8319. Serial No. 9573, Ben-Gurion Archives, Sede-Boqer, Israel. Here, chalutziut, is transliterated with a “kh.” 216 Troen, Frontier Myths, 305. 98 resulted in mass migration from the US. The transnational settler project was not as seamless as presented. American Jews actually did not go to Palestine, or Israel after its establishment, in any large numbers. Part of this was an ideological obstacle. Ben-Gurion often spoke of the degraded state of the Jew in Galut (the diaspora) who could only reach fulfillment when in contact with Eretz Yisrael. Ben-Gurion continually returned to the same problem with Zionism in the US: American Jews represented the wealthiest and largest national Jewish population in the world, but in actuality, sent few pioneers. While receiving a good deal of funding from the US before 1948, for Ben-Gurion, American Jews were Zionists who did not want to come to Zion217 and were more likely to be driven from Zionism than America.218 For instance, in Jewish Frontier’s October 1950 issue, the editors printed excerpts from a luncheon in Jerusalem meant to honor Jacob Blaustein, the president of the influential American Jewish Committee.219 The excerpted remarks seem to press home the idea that Israeli Zionism should not disparage the choice of American Jews to remain in America. Blaustein was unequivocal: “To American Jews, America is home. There, exist their thriving roots; there, is the country which they have helped to build; and there, they share its fruits and its destiny.”220 Ben-Gurion responded by apologizing for the “confusion and misunderstanding” that had grown between the two communities since the founding of the State, and firmly said (in contradiction to words elsewhere) that American Jews “owe 217 David Ben-Gurion, Like Stars and Dust: Essays from Israel’s Government Year Book (Sede-Boqer: The Ben-Gurion Research Center, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The Ben-Gurion Heritage Institute, 1997): 92, 165, 190, 205. 218 Ibid., 165. 219 See Chapter Two: “The Challenge of the Wasteland: Settler Colonial Sciences in the Naqab/Negev” for more on Jacob Blaustein’s connection to Zionist desert sciences. 220 David Ben-Gurion and Jacob Blaustein, “Undivided Allegiance,” Jewish Frontier 17, no. 10 (October 1950): 6-8. 99 no political allegiance to Israel” and that “The State of Israel represents and speaks only on behalf of its citizens, and in no way presumes to represent or speak in the name of the Jews who are citizens of any other country.” However, Ben-Gurion did follow up, saying that Zionists in Palestine would wish for the emigration of US citizens who could bring their “technical knowledge, their unrivalled experience, their spirit of enterprise” as well as pioneers.221 The idea of the pioneer circulated between Zionists in the US and Palestine in the pages of Jewish Frontier and other writings by Ben-Gurion. The pioneer, as a subject that represents the economic and moral values of national development, resonates between settler contexts. The pioneer, and the ideology of pioneering, represented an idealized version of settler colonialism in Palestine. In the next section, I will look at how the pioneers’ economic and moral values mobilized a specific type of development meant to persuade British colonial officials to relinquish the Mandate to Zionists, not indigenous Palestinians. Colonial Settler Development In this section, I focus on pre-state arguments over development found in the speeches and writings of David Ben-Gurion, contextualized with other contemporaneous sources from the Jewish Frontier. I am calling this period “colonial settler development,” because during this time Zionists sought to appeal to British Mandate goals related to economic self-sufficiency, infrastructural expansion, and the increased productivity of 221 Ibid., 7. 100 labor and land.222 Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Frontier made the case that Zionists could orchestrate more economically productive development than indigenous Palestinians. In reality, colonial settler development hinged on the primitive accumulation of Palestinian land and resources and continued attacks on indigenous laborers, as Zionists sought to degrade, delegitimize, and physically stop Palestinians from working. Zionist actions led to the dispossession of Palestinians throughout the Mandate period. Simultaneously, Labor Zionists argued that their settlers represented a more modern, productive workforce, in order to impress British and international officials and ensure, Ben-Gurion wrote, that the Mandate would be “entrusted to the Jewish people themselves.”223 Several authors have studied the early Jewish community’s settlement program. Gershon Shafir’s influential book, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: 1882-1914 follows a comparative approach to understand how Zionists sought to control market forces through continued intervention, thereby channeling capital and labor into the construction of an ethnocratic state.224 Zionist nationalism evolved as Jewish Labor activists sought to pressure Jewish capitalists to hire only Jewish labor—Palestinian farmers and laborers became the target of Labor Zionism’s ostensibly ‘socialist’ conquest of labor. Of course, Labor Zionism was never purely socialist (even if some of its members and groups thought of themselves this way), but it often emphasized national goals and a need to confront the disrupting influence of global capitalism. Shafir, along with Baruch Kimmerling shows how Labor Zionism, especially under Ben-Gurion, sought to channel philanthropic and industrial capital towards national development at the expense of 222 Norris, Land of Progress. 223 Ben-Gurion, “Test of Fulfillment.” 224 Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. 101 Palestinians. Kimmerling argues that the Zionists’ first economic model was a “pioneering economy” meant to create the material and spiritual infrastructure that would be necessary to absorb the mass immigration of Jews to Palestine. He also shows how settlement was in reality an economically unsustainable project subsidized by capital flows from abroad.225 It was somewhat ironic, then, for Zionists to claim that their model of settlement was economically superior to that of Palestinians. To make settlement work, Ben-Gurion and other Labor Zionists adopted an ambivalent stance toward capital: they represented themselves as socialist, decried businessmen who hired Arab labor, and worried about the loss of “Jewish” land in a private real estate market, but supported the channeling of private capital into settlement.226 Arie Krampf shows how Zionist leaders in the 1930s onwards, while socialist in name, began to accept global economic ideas of Keynesianism that subordinated the free market under national sovereignty.227 Early in his career, Ben-Gurion, for instance, was more dogmatic about a need for a socialist Jewish state, whereas by the 1930s and beyond, his position softened as a larger coalition of left-leaning parties coalesced. He wrote, at the time, “Eretz Israel must serve as a refuge for all sectors and classes of the nation, capitalists as much as those without means.”228 Reflecting back on party-building in a 1950 article from Jewish Frontier, “In the Crucible,” he acknowledges the achievements of Left Poale Zion, but argues that his movement (sarcastically calling himself the “collaborator of the 225 Kimmerling, Zionism and Economy. 226 Ibid. 227 Arie Krampf, “Reception of the Developmental Approach in the Jewish Economic Discourse of Mandatory Palestine, 1934-1938,” Israel Studies 15, no. 2 (2010): 80-103. 228 Shimoni, The Zionist Idea, 204, quoting Ben-Gurion in footnote 93. 102 bourgeoisie”) did much more, creating “the Histadrut, the workers” agricultural collectives, and the chalutz movement.’229 In sum, Labor Zionism and Ben-Gurion pushed a form of development that sought to realize an ethnocratic economy – what Kimmerling called a “pioneer economy”. But there were several immediate and long-term obstacles to this vision: first, the lack of ‘free’ and readily available land, second, an economic situation that relied on Palestinian labor and expertise, and third, a lack of resources for long-term settlement and the defense of such a settler project.230 During the First and Second Aliyot, Jewish landowners and capitalists preferred to hire Palestinians—who were more skilled in agricultural labor and yet could be paid less than their Jewish counterparts. Labor Zionists feared that the capitalist profit-motive threatened the Zionist toehold in Palestine. Their ideological response to such tendencies emphasized the settlement of land through a militant Zionism that promoted a “conquest of labor” and “Hebrew labor”—in short, the monopolization of labor in Palestine by a new Jewish working class—valorized as pioneers—and the separate development of Jewish and Palestinian Arab economies.231 As Zachary Lockman has shown, this ideology of labor, in reality was “significantly shaped by the need to come to terms with the fact that Palestine had a substantial Arab population.”232 Zionist organizations, in order to retain settlers in Palestine, had to vastly subsidize the creation and maintenance of labor, carving out an “exclusively Jewish, high-wage enclave within the Palestinian economy.”233 Lockman’s work also shows how Palestinian labor activists 229 David Ben-Gurion, “In the Crucible.” Jewish Frontier 17, no. 6 (June 1950): 4. 230 Kimmerling, Zionism and Economy, xiii. 231 See Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. 232 Lockman, Comrades and Enemies. 233 Ibid., 53 103 could not depend on Zionist labor movements that were more concerned with national development and settlement than they were with a project of class solidarity under British colonial rule. Labor Zionist ideology constantly elided this complex reality—presenting the pioneer as an inherently productive worker. Besides this ideological veiling of the reality of labor markets in Palestine, writings on development by Ben-Gurion and other Labor Zionists hinged on the idea of the territory’s economic “absorptive capacity,” a category that the British began to use in 1921 to assess the question of Zionist settlement in the development of Palestine. Though the British generally supported Zionist settlement, they did not give blanket consent for all of the movement’s goals. Samer Alatout has shown how the British’s justification for the slowing Jewish immigration because of a perceived deficit of “absorptive capacity” had the unanticipated effect of creating a technical category that displaced Palestinian historical claims. As Alatout writes, Zionists could now claim Palestine as a homeland and argue for immigration by attacking the supposedly mistaken scientific methods of the British. They argued that the land could support more people and the “Zionist movement could now exploit the seemingly depoliticized nature of Jewish immigration for its own purposes.” The question became “how many immigrants to allow” rather than ‘whether immigration should be allowed at all.” 234 Ben-Gurion and Labor Zionists criticized British policies that restricted Jewish immigration on this basis throughout the 1930s and 1940s. They argued that Jewish pioneers/workers were productive subjects who would expand the absorptive capacity of 234 Samer Alatout, “Bringing Abundance into Environmental Politics: Constructing a Zionist Network of Water Abundance, Immigration, and Colonization,” Social Studies of Science 39 (2009): 369. Emphasis in the original. 104 the land and the economy. In a speech called, “Post-War Plans for Palestine” and reprinted in the August 1943 issue of Jewish Frontier, Ben-Gurion rebutted a “Reconstruction Scheme” from the Mandatory Government, arguing that the plan was doomed from the start since the British had restricted Jewish immigration. Ben-Gurion also took special issue with the plan’s stipulation that development funds had to come from “local sources,” revenue produced in Palestine. Palestine was a poor country, argued Ben-Gurion, and the success of Zionists in its reconstruction of the country had been accomplished “not [by] money accumulated in the country, but pioneering capital and pioneering labor, bearing with them the vision of Jewish revival.”235 Zionist development was a good investment: “We have experience in this country and we know that our enterprise has the seeds of blessing in it, that it bears fruit and maintains itself; we know that capital invested in the development of Palestine will return dividends.”236 This dismissal of British policies based on absorptive capacity is also found in contemporaneous articles in the Jewish Frontier. Editor Ben Halpern, for instance, criticized British claims to restrict Jewish immigration on the grounds of absorptive capacity, writing that in 1939, Sir John Hope Simpson (who reported on issues in Palestine relating to development in 1929-1930) had lauded Zionist efforts that had made Palestine a good choice for refugee resettlement: “This fact is due to the religious enthusiasm of the Jewish race and to their genius for development.”237 Labor Zionists proposed development projects into the 1940s. Already, Zionists and the British were collaborating on projects such as the mining of the Dead Sea and the 235 David Ben-Gurion, “Post-War Plans for Palestine” (1943), Jewish Frontier Anthology, 1934-1944 (Jewish Frontier Association, Inc., New York, 1971): 297. 236 Ibid., 299 237 Ben Halpern, “Palestine’s Economic ‘Absorptive Capacity’: A Common-Sense View” (1943), Jewish Frontier Anthology, 1934-1944 (Jewish Frontier Association, Inc., New York, 1971): 265. 105 expansion of the Haifa port.238 Halpern, writing again in the Jewish Frontier in 1944, focused on the benefits of a development scheme, known as the Jordan Valley Authority, that had been proposed by American soil scientist, Walter C. Lowdermilk. Lowdermilk proposed a plan that would in effect, dam parts of the Jordan Valley to make it a large producer of electricity, freeing up water for irrigation in the rest of Palestine and Transjordan, and creating energy for industrial production. This was an idea transposed from the New Deal in the United States, “on lines similar to the TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority], and endowing it with adequate powers for full development of the soil and water resources of the whole region, and for the reclamation, resettlement, and industrialization of Palestine.”239 This “unified development”—jointly developing Palestine and Transjordan—Labor Zionists argued, would allow more Jewish immigrants to settle in Palestine. Development not only justified Zionist control of territory but provided the basis for mass immigration that would shift the demographic balance towards Jewish settlement. Large infrastructural schemes like the JVA appealed to the idea that the colony could be modernized quickly, even if programs like this one did not get off the ground. Ben-Gurion claimed that Jewish immigrants could be made into economically exceptional subjects through pioneering (industrial and agricultural) labor on the land, rather than through mercantile occupations. Many Zionists shared the idea that a shift in occupations towards physical labor would socially engineer a new, progressive people. The ‘return to the soil’ would precipitate what Arthur Ruppin—a German-Jewish Zionist who 238 Norris, Land of Progress 239 Ben Halpern, “Jordan Valley Authority” (1944) Jewish Frontier Anthology, 1934-1944 (Jewish Frontier Association, Inc., New York, 1971): 356. 106 advocated agricultural colonization throughout the first half of the 20th century—called a “radical transformation of occupations.”240 The New Jew was to be everything the Old Jew was not: a subject that was productive, masculine, militant, and inhabiting a physical, laboring body.241 For Ben-Gurion, galut (or diaspora) was a condition of degradation. Pioneering would reverse galut: “the mission of the Jewish revolution is to transform the Jewish people into a laboring people.”242 This meant that Jewish immigrants had to take on manual labor, rather than the professional and mercantile professions of Europe.243 Ben-Gurion’s writings about the building of a Jewish state, often felt messianic and prophetic. His words on the practical needs of the state often veered into exegeses on biblical history. Much of Ben-Gurion’s framing of a potential Jewish state celebrated the “return to history.” For instance, in a speech before the 19th Zionist Congress, called “Realization of Zionism,” Ben-Gurion spoke of “Zionism as a new phenomenon in Jewish history.”244 Judaism held together the Jewish people in their millennia of exile and it was not until the appearance of Zionism did the hope of return become rekindled, what Ben- Gurion describes as an “old mystic dream” that “must be realized in our age through realistic rational methods.”245 The collapsing of the ancient into the modern, is a key to Ben-Gurion’s conceptualization of Zionist development. The romanticism inherent in the 240 Arthur Ruppin, The Agricultural Colonisation of the Zionist Organisation in Palestine, Trans. R.J. Feiwel (London: Martin Hopkinson and Company, Ltd., 1926): 1-2. 241 Etan Bloom, Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011): 12. 242 David Ben-Gurion, “The Imperatives of the Jewish Revolution,” in The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader. Arthur Hertzberg, ed. (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1997): 614-615. Emphasis in the original. 243 Ibid., 27. 244 David Ben-Gurion, ‘‘Supplement 2. Realization of Zionism; Address Delevered [sic] Before the 19th Zionist Congress, Jewish Frontier” (1935), Serial No. 88097, Ben-Gurion Archives, Sede-Boqer, Israel, 25. 245 Ibid. 107 pioneering subject recalls Turner’s own admiration for his settler subject’s metaphysical attributes. For Ben-Gurion, the language of the pioneer’s metaphysical attributes could be combined with economic rationality and technocratic social engineering. In “Realization of Zionism,” Ben-Gurion declared that “The great task of our generation… is to enable a million Jewish families to take root in Eretz Israel, to create a million economic units among the Jewish people in Eretz Israel.”246 Ben-Gurion’s framing of Jewish families as “economic units” challenges British claims that immigration would overwhelm the economic absorptive capacity of Palestine. Efforts by the British to restrict immigration or the economic ability of the new settlers were depicted as leading to new “ghettos” in Palestine—a viscerally salient claim even before the Holocaust. For Ben-Gurion, British restriction of Jewish immigration and land purchases led to Jews choked and trapped in a degrading economic life.247 As “economic units,” this generation would be laying the groundwork for the next, racing towards the future.248 The working class would be the primary means for bringing about a state under the Mandate. As Berl Locker wrote, in “Building a Nation” in Jewish Frontier’s March 1941 edition, “The Jewish working community in Palestine thus regards itself merely as a beginning, as pioneers and trailblazers for those still to come…to ensure its steady growth and development by new waves of immigration.”249 These ‘waves’ of pioneers, i.e. immigrants who act like settlers, would deepen development. Many scholars have looked 246 David Ben-Gurion, “Realization of Zionism.” 247 Ben-Gurion, “Post-War Plans for Palestine,” 293 248 Ben-Gurion, “Realization of Zionism,” 26. 249 Berl Locker, “Building a Nation” (1941), Jewish Frontier Anthology, 1934-1944 (Jewish Frontier Association, Inc., New York, 1971): 256. 108 at the way that Labor Zionism often made claims based on its ability to “make the desert bloom” through agricultural colonization that framed Palestine as a land of desolation, made into an Eden by the work of pioneers. However, it is important to read these claims within a context of development, set against Palestinian Arabs. To say that Palestine was a desert, was to accuse Palestinians of neglecting to not only “make it bloom,” but “make it prosper” (another meaning for “blooming” hafrachah in Hebrew). Indigenous Palestinians failed, on Zionist terms, to increase the productivity of the land, thus squandering and ceding their right to self-determination. “Cultivation” was a major field of contestation—what land was cultivated, how much, and by whom.250 In many texts, Ben-Gurion returned to the ability of pioneers to cultivate land that Palestinians proved unable to cultivate. He wrote in “Test of Fulfillment” that “practice has shown that what is uncultivated and considered uncultivable by the Arabs is cultivable and has been cultivated by the Jews”251 who successfully “increased the yield to such an extent that the same area does not merely provide for additional settlers, but makes it possible for old settlers to enjoy a higher standard of living.”252 Zionist pioneers, he claimed, improved the economic absorptive capacity of the land through their ability to increase cultivation, both on land cultivated by Palestinians and lands currently uncultivated. Zionists, in Ben-Gurion’s view, brought with them modern agricultural techniques and an influx of capital that would allow the state to increase the population of 250 For further discussion and analysis of how “cultivation” worked in Palestine and continues to structure Zionist claims to land, see Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property; Alexandre Kedar, Ahmad Amara and Oren Yiftachel, Emptied Lands: A Legal Geography of Bedouin Rights in the Negev (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018); Omar Tesdell, Shadow Spaces: Territory, Sovereignty, and the Question of Palestinian Cultivation (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2013). 251 Ben-Gurion, “Test of Fulfillment,” 102. 252 Ibid., 107. 109 immigrants.253 Again, here is the way that Zionist discourses of development supplemented British attempts to ‘render technical’ the political questions of colonization of Indigenous land by a settler movement.254 In the transnational debate over cultivation, both Zionists in the US and Palestine continue to assume that the salient factor was the level of productivity under Zionist settlement, rather than if cultivation furnishes justification for territorial acquisition at all. Similarly, in his speech, “Realization of Zionism,” Ben-Gurion, while extolling the productivity of Jewish settlers, continually derided Palestinian laborers. Many seasonal laborers, he said, added to the ranks of the unemployed and in the off-season, “sat at home or on their dung-heaps and talked politics.”255 Ben-Gurion downplayed the extent of Palestinian land-use and ownership, portraying areas as “thinly settled and cultivated in a primitive manner we can make available for intensive cultivation.” Jewish immigrants, with their “Halutzian [pioneer] genius,” are “returning to the East, but not without our Western European culture,” he declared. As I showed above, Zionist discourses often demeaned Palestinians and their use of land in order to gain traction for their calls for development. But under the British Mandate, Zionists still had to make the case that their program of development would also benefit the indigenous population. Ben-Gurion argued that “there is not a conflict of economic interests between Jews and Arabs in Palestine.”256 An article by Abba Khushi from December 1942, called “Organizing Arab Workers,” claims that the Histadrut worked to support Palestinian labor organizations in order to help the “Arab worker to liberate 253 Halpern, Ben, “Absorptive Capacity,” 268. 254 Alatout, “Bringing Abundance into Environmental Politics”; Mitchell, “Economentality.” 255 Ben-Gurion, “Realization of Zionism,” 27. 256 Ben-Gurion, “Test of Fulfillment.” 110 himself from economic, spiritual and political subjugation…” and even suggested that Jewish settlements could be instrumental in “strengthening friendly relations” with the rural populations.257 While Zionists issued such claims, ones that come off paternalistic at best, contemporaneous accounts paint a different picture of the cooperation between Jewish labor organizations and Palestinian workers. As Zachary Lockman has shown, while there was some rapprochement between Jewish and Palestinian communists and some trade unions at different times, for the most part, the Histadrut and other labor organizations linked to Ben-Gurion and Labor Zionism sought to push Palestinian workers out of the market.258 Excerpts from a 1937 article in the Arab Worker by Palestinian activist, George Mansour, challenge many of the Zionist claims to development and its supposed benefit for the indigenous population. International agreements on labor are ignored when it comes to Arab labor in Palestine, Mansour explains. He goes on to give specific examples documenting how Zionist labor practices directly attack Palestinian interests. In situations where Palestinian labor was dominant, as in the port of Haifa, Zionist funding from abroad was able to subsidize lower wages for Jews in order to push Palestinians out.259 Correspondingly, capital from abroad was used to expand Jewish industry at the expense of Palestinians. In theory, Mansour relates, Jewish socialist parties would “have been expected to be an ally of the Arab workers in their struggle against British 257 Abba Khushi, “Organizing Arab Workers” (1942), Jewish Frontier Anthology, 1934-1944 (Jewish Frontier Association, Inc., New York, 1971): 306. 258 Lockman, Comrades and Enemies. 259 George Mansour, “The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate (1937),” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012): 190-205. 111 ‘imperialism.’”260 Instead, Zionist development buttressed the political-economic strength of the growing settler colony. In “Facing the Future,” written six months after the official end of the Mandate, (an essay I previously quoted to show pioneering’s relationship with the latent value of the individual and the land), Ben-Gurion writes of Israel’s new place in the hierarchy of the global economy. The Jewish people, now with a state, “still live in an environment of Arab nations,” Ben-Gurion wrote. This means that we will live in a milieu that is sunk in poverty and disease, in ignorance and exploitation, cheap labor and low standards of living, feudal relationships and slavery. Within this environment we will have to create a ramified modern economy, based on Jewish labor and its high standards, on freedom and mutual assistance, on a high culture, a regime based on democracy, human rights, and civil and political equality. The history of our colonization bears witness to the difficulty of this task. It is true that changes will also take place among the Arabs. But social, political, and economic traditions that have grown up in the course of generations cannot be eradicated overnight, nor even in the course of a few years.261 Israel is now truly an outpost surrounded by barbarism. Arab nations represent societies swamped by the mire of economic modalities of the past; feudalism, slavery, low standards of living—an economy that leads to poverty and disease. Israel, on the other hand, will build a “ramified modern economy,” one linked to “high standards,” “high culture.” The modern economy will supplement a new kind of development based on humanistic values of freedom and equality. With the departure of the British, Ben-Gurion’s conceptualization of development begins to sound more like the post-WWII discourses that argued that development—and economic growth—expanded human freedom. Despite the obstacles, the difficulties of this new world, pioneering values will catalyze the expansion of scientific 260 Ibid., 199. 261 Ben-Gurion, “Facing the Future,” 4-5. 112 and technological advances, push beyond the absorptive capacity of the colonial era and allow for the exploitation of the land to provide for mass Jewish immigration. And finally, Ben-Gurion’s reference to “our colonization,” resonates with his speech from 1915. As he would write in “Test of Fulfillment” (1942), “We must remember that Zionist colonization is possibly the only one, or certainly one of the very few examples of successful colonization not undertaken and not supported by a state.”262 Zionism, in its modern imagination frames its colonialism as exceptional—as without the support of a “state.” In doing so, Ben-Gurion simultaneously celebrates and denies the settler coloniality of Zionism. As promised, the efforts of Zionist colonization saw the land as its object, and Palestinians not as its colonized subjects—a colonization more American than British. Conclusion Zionist settler development sought to appeal to British Mandatory ideas of development by arguing that Jewish workers were more productive than their Palestinian counterparts and cultivated the land to greater effect. These arguments were premised on the proximity of Jewish settlers to European modernity. For Zionists, claims over greater productivity meant that the Palestinian Mandate should be handed over to Jewish sovereignty. However, in reality, pioneers were not inherently the trailblazers imagined by Ben-Gurion and Labor Zionists, but instead were heavily subsidized workers who were part of a program meant to create an independent settler economy within indigenous space. By focusing on how the image of the pioneer fulfilled a dual role as agent of development 262 Ben-Gurion, “Test of Fulfillment,” 117. 113 and as a settler colonial subject, this chapter showed that colonial development in Palestine was constituted by romantic ideas of frontier conquest and economic productivity. In this chapter, I drew together settler colonial and critical development studies in order to understand how colonial development is undergirded by settler colonial relations. This particular manifestation of Zionist settler development was premised on historically and geographically contingencies, such as the negotiation with the British Mandate officials, Palestinian national movements and economy before 1948, and American liberal Zionists who processed settlement through their own history of immigration. While this chapter only analyzed this transnational settler archive up to 1948, the year marking the beginning of the Palestinian Nakba, Zionist settler development continues as the unstated program in the pages of the Jewish Frontier into the 1950s and 1960s, when Ben-Gurion was Prime Minister of the state. As the British are no longer arbiters of development after 1948, the relation between economic productivity and pioneering discursively and materially shifts. My hope is that this chapter suggests further routes for creative analyses of the way that development is epistemologically linked to the networks of settler-colonial, and liberal modes of thought and practice, especially in relation to ongoing settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel. 114 Field Journal 3: The Hebron Watershed / The Besor Stream November, 2015 – The Northern Naqab263 If you were to follow the Hebron/ Besor Stream from its source in the Hebron Hills in the West Bank, its slow gradient downhill through Israeli territory in the Naqab/Negev, all the way until it empties into the Mediterranean Sea at Gaza, you’d have followed a map of how political-national conflict is entangled with both environmental pollution and developmental aspirations. The Hebron Stream begins near its namesake, Hevron (in Hebrew), and Al-Khalil (in Arabic), the epicenter of the marble and ceramic industry in the West Bank.264 Right now, you may recognize Hebron/Al-Khalil as the epicenter of much of the reported violence in the West Bank. It has long been the epicenter of some of the more vicious attacks of right-wing nationalist Jewish settlers—a brand of Zionism that fuses convenient religious dictum and tradition with fascistic nationalism. Some Ultra- Orthodox religious Jews eschew this type of settlement, seeing it as a perverse reading of Halakhic (or Jewish law) prescription.265 Religious-nationalists the bedrock support for many of the right-wing parties in the current Knesset, as well as the activists who repeatedly ascend to the Al-Aqsa Mosque to claim the space as their own. 263 This piece was written after joining a tour with Professor Clive Lipchin for his course on environmental issues in Israel. Ben-Gurion University, 2015. Much of the information from his organizational work and I am thankful for his generosity in allowing me to join the course for this trip. 264 In order to avoid confusion with the oil company, Chevron, I transliterate Hebron in Hebrew as Hevron (the h is the guttural). 265 Some Ultra-Orthodox Jews frame the State of Israel and its nationalism as a perversion of Judaism (others do support the state as well). ‘Religious nationalist’ is a term that describes the settlement movement that is linked to a more religious group of settlers. They do not dress nor practice like the Ultra- Orthodox. 115 As part of a delegation in 2011, I met with one such member of the religious- nationalists in Hebron. He was a Mets fan from northern New Jersey and spoke through a thick, peppered gray beard. He railed against the international community for condemning them and siding with “the Arabs,” (he had no shame of saying this in a room where several women wore hijabs) the government for not providing them with enough support, and at the Palestinian Authority for inciting violence against them. Referring to the 1929 massacre of the Jewish community in Hebron as justification for the settlers’ return, he dodged questions on his community’s effect on the wider Palestinian population. The Old City of Al-Khalil/Hebron, as a result of these settlers, is all but a ghost town, populated by checkpoints, soldiers, and the Palestinian shop owners who remained, both with the paltry help of some tourists, international support, and thanks to the Palestinian Authority’s subsidies. The settlers number around 700 as of 2014 and are guarded by around 700 IDF soldiers.266 Settlers often violently take over the top floors of Palestinian houses to expand 266 +972 Magazine, says the ratio is nearly one soldier per settler. Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, “In Hebron, terror begets a reign of terror,” +972 Magazine, 25 February, 2014. https://www.972mag.com/in- hebron-terror-begets-a-reign-of-terror/; A Mondoweiss blog piece puts the number at 500 settlers: 2000 soldiers in 2010, a 1:4 ratio. Rachel Marcuse, “After Birthright: Hebron – 500 settlers, 2,000 soldiers and Photograph 8. Shutdown in Old City Hebron. 2011. 116 their various settlement enclaves. Palestinians place wire netting above all of the market alleys, to protect from the garbage and objects thrown from above. While this violence happens daily outside, the religious-nationalist settler, that we met with, complained with great zeal, that Jews here were suffering a grave injustice—that they were discriminated against in that they were not legally allowed to build in any other part of the city. A twisted definition of discrimination, to be sure. But back to the water. Hebron, the Palestinian city, was large and vibrant when I visited in 2011 and 2013. It is the epicenter of the Palestinian marble and ceramic industries. All marble counters in Israel come from here. The stream runs alongside, as a place for dumping sewage and industrial silt. This is because of the “Peace Process.” Due to the Oslo II (1995) agreements, all water issues in the West Bank can only be addressed through the Joint Water Commission, a body of Palestinian and Israeli-Jewish officials that works through consensus-based approval, rendering Palestinian water development a political impossibility.267 It is within this context that, colloquially, Palestinians say that Arafat, in the Oslo Accords, “gave away all the water.”268 They are not wrong. Much of Israel’s water comes from the West Bank, and Palestinians have little control over the use of the shared aquifer, as well as little to no legal and financial ability to build wastewater treatment plants, improve old sewage systems or build new ones, or dig wells. This settler bureaucracy, in effect, trickles down into the stream itself. As the stream picks up raw the tensest place I’ve ever been.” Mondoweiss.net. 17 September 2010. https://mondoweiss.net/2010/09/after-birthright-hebron-500-settlers-2000-soldiers-and-the-tensest-place- ive-ever-been/. When I visited Hebron in 2011, I was told the ratio was 1:4 as well. 267 See Amnesty International, “Troubled Waters—Palestinians Denied Fair Access to Water,” (London: Amnesty International Publications, 2009): 18, 28. https://www.amnestyusa.org/pdf/mde150272009en.pdf. 268 Ian Black, “Water under the bridge: how Oslo agreement robbed Palestinians.” The Guardian. 4 February, 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/world/on-the-middle-east/2013/feb/04/israel-palestinians- water-arafat-abbas 117 sewage from Palestinians and mixes with the gray silt of the ceramics and marble industries, it gurgles under the Jewish settlement bloc around Kiryat Arba, where right- wing religious-nationalist settlers came after the 1967 war. These settlers, like most, eject more waste and consume more per capita than their Palestinian neighbors.269 What was once a seasonal stream, reliant on the winter rains, is today a continuous, viscous slurry that flows downhill towards the Green Line. As the stream weaves its way under the Green Line, at a checkpoint where Palestinian day laborers move to and from the West Bank near Meitar, it enters a treatment facility designed solely to remove the sediment from the water. Surrounding the facility are Jewish National Fund forests that are 269 B’tselem, “The Gap in Water Consumption Between Palestinians and Israelis,” 1 January 2011. https://www.btselem.org/gap-water-consumption-between-palestinians-and-israelis; Jaclynn Ashly, “Drowing in the waste of Israeli settlers,” Al Jazeera, 18 September 2017. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/09/drowning-waste-israeli-settlers- 170916120027885.html. Photograph 9. The slurry at the border next to the Green Line. 2015. 118 being planted along the Green Line (so that you can see the border from space, if you wish) that also add an aura of quiet sylvan existence to the Jewish town of Meitar, one of the wealthy Beersheba suburbs. Meitar, along with Omer, the wealthiest town in Israel, is blanketed in green. Both towns’ entrances along Beersheba’s highways are adorned in date palm trees, planted in luscious green lawns, and thus stand out against the brown and tan tones of the surrounding northern Negev fields. Meitar, especially, is in the belt of new towns that the JNF and Israeli government hope to turn into the epicenter of new Jewish development, as the swath cuts through the clusters of unrecognized Bedouin villages that hug the Green Line. But the water doesn’t flow into Meitar and Omer, nor the planned Jewish-only towns, but streams towards Bedouin populations. The water’s first stop is at the treatment facility, where it passes under a barbed wire border, bookended by a pair of high concrete towers. The facility is a large gated area in a depression. Evaporation ponds pockmark its surface. A single bulldozer pushes sediment into a compactor as the sun goes down behind the afforested hills. About 200 meters away, a line of Palestinian day-laborers march towards the checkpoint to re-enter the West Bank, carrying large packs. Several cats watch us from behind the barbed-wire fence. The slurry is so viscous that if it were to be dumped onto dry ground, it would simply transform into concrete. First, it goes through a series of nets that trap all large objects of garbage (anything that wouldn’t melt in the slurry) as well as the animal carcasses that appear during the appropriate festival seasons. After being pumped through the nets, the evaporation pools collect the slurry and begin to separate the fine grains of marble and ceramic from the water. It changes from gray silt to brown sewage and then is 119 shunted back into the stream to continue south. Israel unilaterally decided to treat the water this way and send the Palestinian Authority the invoice, deducting it from their overall tax revenues (it is another part of the Oslo Agreement that Israel handles the PA’s tax collection)270. Palestinians argue that they don’t benefit from this treatment, so why should they pay? After all, the water is now going downstream, away from the West Bank. But the political solution renders treatment at the source a near impossibility. Israel will only use its revenue to build wastewater treatment sites for Hebron if it includes the settlers, thereby asking the Palestinians to de facto recognize the settlements. The PA cannot build the necessary sewage infrastructure because they will not receive a consensus vote on the Joint Water Commission. Therefore, both the illegal residents of the settlements and the Palestinians of Hebron and its village hinterlands do not have sewage treatment infrastructure. The detritus of this political impasse continues downstream, now a brown effluent resembling brackish tea left out in the sun. After passing under the Green Line and through the facility that removes all sediment, the stream weaves slowly as the elevation drops towards the Bedouin village of Umm Batīn. Umm Batīn was recognized by the Israeli government about a decade ago but the government has yet to bring electricity, water services, sewage treatment, and garbage collection to this town of 4,000 Bedouin citizens. Personally, I find Umm Batīn not much different from the unrecognized villages I have visited. On the outskirts of the houses, but squarely in the middle of their land, the sewage stream picks up garbage, agricultural chemicals, and animal waste. The stream has become a de facto trash dump, since there are 270 House of Water & Environment, “Understanding and Analyzing the Current Israeli Wastewater Practices for Transboundary Wastewater Management from Palestinian [sic]: Final Report” (Austrian Development Cooperation, 2012): 1. On Ecopeaceme.org: https://ecopeaceme.org/uploads/Transboundary_Final_Report_HWE_April_2012.pdf. 120 no municipal garbage services in many of the recognized Bedouin towns. In the summer, with the water level running lower in the intense heat, the stream clogs in the garbage, producing fetid pools perfect for mosquitos. Jafar271, a Bedouin activist who has worked since he was in high school to get the government to address this problem, is middle-aged, keeps his hands in his jacket pockets, speaks matter-of-factly with amusement, and chuckles at the facts that betray the bald, systematic, state discrimination. “It is all because they want the land,” he says. Jafar shakes his head at the children who have adopted our group of mostly white American (with the scattered German and Canadian) university students, who run around us barefoot, yelling, frenetically, “Shalom! Hello! Shalom! Hello!” and then giggle hysterically when we answer, or attempt to say, “Salaam.” He doesn’t seem angry but does put up his hands and laughs when I ask if any are his children. “No! Not mine!”272 Along with a professor from Ben-Gurion University who translates 271 The name of this activist has been altered for the sake of preserving confidentiality. 272 The following year, I joined some Americans who would go weekly to Umm Batīn to assist a Bedouin English teacher with a class full of teenagers. Usually the lessons would devolve into co-ed soccer and basketball games. Photograph 10. The stream on the edge of Umm Batīn. The village is in the background. 2015. 121 from Hebrew to English, he shows us how Bedouin cope with the water issues. We walk past piles of metal refuse next to a makeshift shop, where four men weld together a large metal plate. We enter through a corrugated fence, into a neatly kept yard, with rows of trees—orange, pomegranate, olive—and a single large solar panel. The tile floor on the porch is wet, newly mopped. We walk around the side of the house. He points to the large red pipe and we follow it to a collapsed cesspool on the other side of another fence. The villagers simply cannot keep up with the demand with the makeshift sewage system. There is also a gray pipe used for gray water (household wastewater that can be reused, such as from a sink), which goes into another system for crop irrigation. The solar cell helps power the house, though this becomes challenging in the winter, so they rely on backup generators. All of their solutions to these problems, taken for granted in the Jewish towns and cities, are in response to a lack of resources and a complete disinvestment from the government. In the official parlance, Umm Batīn is recognized—however, no building is legal, except for the government-built school. That means that while Umm Batīn appears on maps and supposedly is eligible for government assistance, at any time the government can legally decide to bulldoze their homes for failure to have official permits. They build despite this—what else can they do? Governance of Umm Batīn works through the Israeli system of municipality authority that relies on “regional councils.” Regional council boundaries are akin to American gerrymandered house districts—their lines swoop in and out trying to capture political blocs identified by racial demographics. Umm Batīn is part of the Al-Qasum Regional Council, created for recognized Bedouin villages in the area. Non-Bedouins are appointed by the government to the council, who jockey to stay in power 122 by appealing to the government decision makers. They do not come from Umm Batīn, and because of socio-economic situation of the village they do not have to answer to the residents. Another Janus-faced bureaucracy that relies on technicalities established within the law to marginalize the most vulnerable. Alongside Umm Batīn, food waste, human sewage, clothing, batteries, electronics, soda bottles, dead animals, pile up in a cleft in the land where the toxic sewage of the Hebron stream continues to flow southwest. The Be’er Sheva River Park is to be the “green jewel” of the “revitalization” of “the capital of the Negev” and the largest urban park in Israel. Campaigners for the JNF pull in capital from the United States, Canada, and Switzerland, to plant trees, flowers, and lay down lawns, and the city government uses the park to draw in investors to gentrify the Old City and produce a vast suburban sprawl. This seems to be “working” in that behind the River Park, not one, but two “Cinema Cities” are opening. One of them looks like a long, Photograph 11. Besor Stream through Beersheba, called by the city the Beersheba River. Bedouins sometimes use the dried riverbed to graze sheep and camels. 2015. 123 gray, beached leviathan, all concrete, sure to hold more theaters than I can imagine. The Be’er Sheva River Park is of course named for the Be’er Sheva River, which we previously met as the Hebron Stream. Here, it’s designation as a “river” is generous to be sure, or perhaps wishful thinking. We stand on the Pipes Bridge (named because there are water pipes across it) and look out into the river canal. The walls of the canal are built up about 10-15 feet on either side, but there is no river, just the Hebron stream, pure sewage, snaking through a plain of splotchy green growth. It would only reach such a volume in the worst of winter floods, perhaps occurring every five to ten years. It runs all year now. As our the professor tells of the path we will follow today, upstream from Beersheba, to Umm Batīn, to the Green Line, and the pollution and sewage that it collects on its way down, a herd of sheep and goats, coaxed along by two Bedouin teenagers passes underneath the Pipes Bridge. The animals step through the water, eat the green growing at its edge and drink its water. “Do people know it’s so polluted?” someone asks. The professor says that no, people just don’t realize it. “We’ve had rain, and it’s green now, so it’s a good place to bring the animals.” A jogger in neon shorts with an iPod on his arm huffs past. More towers rise along the park further southwest, following the “river” towards Gaza, a prison where 97% of the population has no access to safe drinking water.273 273 Zafrir Rinat, “Ninety-seven Percent of Gaza Drinking Water Contaminated by Sewage, Salt, Experts Warn,” Haaretz, 21 January 2018. https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium- expert-warns-97-of-gaza-drinking-water-contaminated-by-sewage-salt-1.5747876. 124 Field Journal 4: A series of observations and snippets from my field note journals Autumn 2015 – Autumn 2016 Ground snails, in their desperation to find moisture in the northern Negev parched lands in June, group together around rocks, twigs, and brush, waiting for the morning dew, any moisture to keep them alive. Here, they all died together in their desiccation. But they come back. ° Regavim, a legal group aligned with the right-wing settler movement has recently begun to target Bedouins for “allowing their camels to roam everywhere,” citing a rise in traffic accidents. The photographs they publish are horrific, camels strewn across the roadways.274 Meanwhile, the state continues to expand highways, cutting off Bedouin shepherds from grazing land. ° There is a certain oddity in the way buildings are constructed in Beersheba. There are generally three kinds of housing: homes built around the late 1800s in the Old City, when the Turkish officials used Beersheba as an administrative center for the Bedouin population, homes built in the Zionist push for early state development from the 1950s- 1970s, and then the swanky high-rises that spring up today, perhaps, some say, in anticipation of the Israeli Defense Forces’ move south, or as others opine, for the expected Anglo-American push to live in the south. As for the first, the old stone houses of the Ottoman era are romantic in some way but have long been eroding due to neglect. The 274 Regavim, “Camels are Costing Lives in Southern Israel.” Regavim. Accessed 9 May 2020. https://www.regavim.org/camels-are-costing-lives-in-southern-israel/ 125 Zionist development housing, built for the needs of transforming Beersheba into a development town, that is, for the absorption of large groups of Jewish immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, is shoddy, quick slabs of dry wall and concrete, eroding as well, and makes up most of the housing in the city. In neighborhoods like Dalet and Gimmel (D & E, respectively), the buildings seem like they can no longer stand under their own weight. The city barely touches these neighborhoods. In Dalet, most lots in front of apartment buildings are fields of weeds and high, scorched grass. Pipes and electrical lines zigzag on the exteriors some leading to nothing and nowhere since they had been replaced by other pipes, but never removed. ° A mare is tied up along route 31, eats dried grass, and watches me as I walk on the spongy loess soil under a dusty ghostly sun. Next to it, a horse carcass. ° In a line, four helicopters, red lights blinking on their tails, as they zip west across the sky. Every day, other helicopters heading east, in pairs, then back to base south of us. Driving north on route 6, fighter jets take off and land, looping around the sky, practicing. There is a constant sense living here of larger forces rallying around you, mostly out of sight. But once in a while they spring into view, erupts into earshot. The sound barrier breaks as jets zip south. A distant rumbling, a muffled explosion from outside the city in one of the many firing ranges that swallow the Naqab/Negev. Army helicopters landing on the nearby Soroka Hospital’s roof, transporting injured soldiers. This feeling is not only because of war, but the unpredictability of the environment too. Air quality suddenly drops 126 as the sun is masked by a gray, ominous haze. A change in the wind that results in the sickly-sweet smell of rotting garbage, or perhaps the sulfur from chemical dumps to the south? ° Three of us visited Neot Hovav, “Hovav Oasis,” rebranded as an “eco-industrial site.” Formerly known as Ramat Hovav, “Hovav Height,” is Israel’s most polluted site. Until the late 1990s, it would send a sulphuric odor north to Beersheba. It was built on the territory of the ‘Azazme Bedouin tribe. Today, the unrecognized village of Wādi an-Naʿam, the largest—with 10,000 to 14,000 people—is trapped between it, a power plant, and the highway south. Cancer rates and other maladies are high frequency. Protesting this, an Italian artist and the people of Wādi an-Naʿam erected the sculpture, “The Guardian of the Negev,” an Easter Island head that overlooks the highway and electrical wires. Inside the park, there are trees lining the main boulevard, empty of people. Banners on light posts advertise a Hanukah party for employees of the companies and their families. Murals on chemical factories depict sea creatures, forests, a gigantic eye. After the boulevard turns into a dusty road down a flat sandy plain, we reach a hill marked by a circle of palm trees, an oasis for visitors. The wind changes direction and the sulfur smells burn our throats and our eyes sting. We dive back into the car. Down below are the evaporation ponds. A weird yellow mist hovers over them, sweeping along in the wind. ° Signs that lack translations in English or Arabic are military sites or power plants. There are plenty scattered throughout the Naqab/Negev. In the eastern Naqab/Negev, near Dimona and Arad, the land has been thoroughly turned up in the search of phosphate. While 127 the hills in this region are bare and spongy, a real wasteland perhaps, in the valley near one plant there are vast hills of processed sand. They are gray, the same color of the dust clouds. We pass near the Dimona nuclear facility and see a spy balloon on the ground. The wind and dust were intense that day, so we assume that the balloon needed to be brought down. The rumor is that when it is in the air, it can hear conversations that take place between people in the cars far below. The balloon is huge, a white behemoth in the day’s eerie fog. The desert is for industrial waste and military secrets. ° Photograph 12. The statue, the Guardian of the Negev. Erected by artist activists, Emilio and Eylon Mogilner and the people of Wādi an-Naʿam to protest the toxic effect of Ramat Hovav on the health of Bedouins nearby. 2016. 128 Outside Ḥūrah, garbage piles up alongside the road. Municipal services for unrecognized villages do not exist. “This is your garbage,” a Bedouin friend told me. “We used to not waste anything. Now we are part of the capitalist economy. We buy and we throw out. What are we supposed to do with it if you don’t pick it up?” There are piles of construction materials: cement bags, sand, used bricks. Diapers, plastic bags and bottles, rotting fruit, animal carcasses, a television. Sometimes someone burns one of the piles. It has a particular, recognizable smell. Packs of wild dogs hunt here and there. We see two ripping into the belly of a dead sheep. 129 Chapter 2: The Challenge of the Wasteland: Settler Colonial Sciences in the Naqab/Negev Introduction: “A Parched and Barren Wilderness” I cannot expect respectable and tax-paying Englishmen to enter with much appreciation into the Bedawin[sic] question, and I know the prejudice that exists, in this country particularly, against the extinction of a romantic and interesting race. The sympathy already wasted on the Red man of North America warns me that I am treading on delicate ground, but I must nevertheless state my belief that the “noble savage” is a simple and unmitigated nuisance. To the Bedawi this applies even more forcibly still, for, whoever he goes, he brings with him ruin, violence, and neglect. To call him a ‘son of the desert’ is a misnomer; half the desert owes its existence to him, and many a fertile plain from which he has driven its useful and industrious inhabitants becomes in his hands, like the ‘South Country,’ a parched and barren wilderness. - Edward Henry Palmer 1871275 The British orientalist and explorer, Edward Henry Palmer, chronicled his adventure through Palestine in the travelogue, The Desert of the Exodus (1871). Palmer’s tour was part of the Palestine Exploration Fund’s (PEF) survey of Western Palestine undertaken to develop topographical data for British colonial aspirations. In this particular passage, Palmer draws from the colonial common sense that Bedouin-Arabs were wasteful, harbingers of ruin and violence in what was imagined as a formerly idyllic landscape. The complaint that Bedouins do not sow—a reoccurring trope in colonial texts that fashioned a great ancient battle between savage nomads and civilized farmers. The PEF was a particularly influential colonial enterprise that was an early effort on the part of the British to imagine Palestine’s developmental potential. However, what is surprising is Palmer’s persistent appearance within present-day Zionist settler colonialism in the Naqab/Negev, 275 Edward Henry Palmer, The Desert of the Exodus: Journeys on Foot in the Wilderness of the Forty Years’ Wanderings: Undertaken in Connexion with the Ordnance Survey of Sinai, and the Palestine Exploration Fund (Cambridge: Deighton Bell, and Co. Google Books,1871): 297. 130 regarding the juridical and environmental claims of the settler state vis-à-vis Bedouin citizens. For instance, as Kedar, Yiftachel, and Amara (2018) document, the Israeli Supreme Court invoked the long-dead Palmer as an ‘expert’ witness on the question of Bedouin cultivation. In al-Hawashklah vs. the State of Israel (1984), deciding the future of the al- ‘Uqbi’ family’s claims over land near the village of al-‘Araqib, Justice Eliyahu Halima stated: The Negev situation in 1870 was explored by the scholar Palmer… he found wilderness, ancient ruins and nomadic Bedouins, who did not particularly cultivate the land, did not plough it, and were not occupied by agriculture at all… the state managed to prove…[this] element that typifies mawat land.276 At issue was if the State of Israel could claim present-day Bedouin property based on the legal threshold “mawat,” a land categorization from the Ottoman Land Codes of 1858. Because the state, using Palmer, claimed that Bedouins did not cultivate the land, tracts that fall under the category of mawat, or “wasteland,” were thus ‘legally’ transferrable to the State of Israel at the detriment to its historic Bedouin-Arabs owners. It did not matter that Palmer, “did not even traverse the claimed land” as Nuri al-‘Uqbi declared; rather, the colonial narrative of 100 years prior performed the sorcery of negating an indigenous claim in the present.277 Furthermore, Palmer’s narrative reverberates into the settler colonial present not only as a witness for legal precedent over the expropriation of Bedouin lands, but as a source of information for understanding the environment of the past. Palmer appears in the 276 Alexandre Kedar, Ahmad Amara and Oren Yiftachel. Emptied Lands: A Legal Geography of Bedouin Rights in the Negev (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018): 40. Brackets in the original. 277 Ibid., 124-125. 131 influential environmental studies book, The Negev: The Challenge of the Desert written by Iaraeli scientists, Michael Evenari, Leslie Shanan, and Naphtali Tadmor. The Negev is perhaps the magnum opus of the career of influential Evenari. In it, he and his co-authors write: Palmer wrote of him…Wherever he [Bedouin] goes he brings with him ruin, violence and neglect… half the desert owes its existence to him and many fertile plains from which he has driven its useful and industrious inhabitants, become in his hand, like the ‘South Country,’ a parched and barren wilderness. Where scores of thousands once lived in prosperity, a few hundred Bedouins barely eked out their subsistence. Farm systems were left untended and allowed to fall into a state of utter ruin. The formerly life- giving floods now become a destructive force and slowly erodes away the terraces. Here and there Bedouins use small sections of former farms for growing meager crops. Thus the tremendous and sustained effort of generations came to naught through human neglect and abuse.278 Palmer’s claims helped reinforce the environmental assumptions that the desert environment was man-made—specifically, Bedouin-made—which, in turn, supported Zionist claims to the land itself. Such past colonial claims were not only the foundation for jurisdiction in the present, but also circuited through academic study and knowledge production in the Naqab/Negev. Scholars have shown how Zionist settler colonialism is mobilized by scientific claims and inquiry. Nadia Abu El-Haj argues, in particular, that the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) was instrumental in developing a nationalist discipline of archeology that would come see “Palestine” as a modern, territorial object only in relation to its Jewish and 278 Michael Evenari, Leslie Shanan and Naphtali Tadmor. The Negev: The Challeneg of a Desert. Second Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982): 27-28. The Hebrew title of the book is בגנה: רבדמב םויק-תמחלמ / HaNegev: Milkhamat-Kiyoum BaMidbar, or “The Negev: A War of Existence in the Desert.” 132 Christian past.279 For the PEF, archeology ‘unearthed’ material proof of Christian testament. In doing so, the PEF institutionalized the colonial imagination of Palestine as a land with more importance to the history of the West, than to its present Arab inhabitants. This laid the groundwork, so to speak, for later institutional archeology in the State of Israel that, El-Haj argues “produced this place as the Jewish national home… and created the fact of an ancient Israeli/Jewish nation and nation-state rooted therein.”280 In this way, archeology naturalized the nation’s history through supposedly objective scientific study. Omar Tesdell argues that the development of scientific practices and knowledge are inseparable from the emergence of the production of legal dispossession of Palestinians justified by Israeli law. In particular, Ottoman, British, and Zionist governance created “cultivation” as a category which Israel used to ‘prove’ a legal right to Palestinian land after 1948, what Tesdell calls “an index” that “allows the state to enact technologies of rule.”281 As an index, cultivation worked to measure—and thus prove—a Palestinian antagonism towards productivity and a misuse of land, a proxy for what the British and Zionists saw as their racial inferiority. Samer Alatout has shown how Zionists often mobilized scientific study to counter British policies that threatened settlement. Zionists argued that Palestine’s natural water supply meant that the Mandate could safely absorb many more millions of Jews, despite British claims to scarcity. However, having obtained statehood in 1948, Zionist scientists using the same data, now framed the state as water and land scarce—producing a scientific reasoning for Zionist aims to restrict Palestinian 279 Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001): 39. 280 Ibid., 10. Emphasis in the original. 281 Omar Tesdell, Shadow Spaces: Territory, Sovereignty, and the Question of Palestinian Cultivation (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2013): 8. 133 return.282 Scientific study often provided Zionists with a supposedly objective basis to consolidate and legitimize their nationalist goals and imagination. The sciences play a key role in catalyzing settler development in the Naqab/Negev. In particular, scientific and academic knowledge produce the Naqab/Negev as an “object of development.”283 Zionist sciences territorialize the Naqab/Negev as integral to the state’s trajectory, as key to the progressive development of the State of Israel. This meant that the desert was integral to the naturalization of Zionist time, valorizing the modern state’s connection to environmental transformation in a past devoid of Bedouins. However, as I show in the chapter, this route was not expected—instead of holding up ancient Israelite desert agriculture, as the forerunner to the modern Jewish state—Zionist scientists valorized the work of the Nabateans, a proto-Arabic people contemporary to the Roman Empire. If modern Zionist scientists could “unlock” the ancient secrets of Nabatean (and Byzantine) run-off agriculture, they could prove that Jewish Israeli ingenuity uniquely represented a superior model for global arid zone development and justify settlers’ expropriation of the state’s so-called land reserve. Zionist scientists, like other types of settlers, saw deserts as spaces to be improved. Scientific and academic research anchored Zionist claims to the land and justified the idea that the Naqab/Negev is “un-developed” a wasteland that settlers must drag into the 20th century. While my last chapter showed how ideas of pioneers and pioneering produced settler subjects who could bring economic development to colonial Palestine, this chapter 282 Samer Alatout, “Bringing Abundance into Environmental Politics: Constructing a Zionist Network of Water Abundance, Immigration, and Colonization.” Social Studies of Science 39 (2009): 363. 283 Joel Wainwright, Decolonizing Development: Colonial Power and the Maya (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008); See also, Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (University of California Press, 2002). 134 focuses on how scientific knowledge production positioned settlers as experts in arid zones. One key result of this research was to erase Bedouin knowledges of adaptation and cultivation from the historic record. Not only did these scientific claims draw from settler colonial ideas of Bedouin waste, but they also helped buttress the settler colonial practices that contemporaneously dispossessed Bedouins from land. Israeli knowledge production has gone hand in hand with colonial projects targeting Bedouin Palestinian tribal confederations.284 As Ratcliffe et al. detail in their introduction, academic scholarship produced “the Bedouin” as a specific object of knowledge. These colonial discourses saw Bedouins as culturally distinct from other Palestinians, as backwards and exotic, and functioned, especially, through academic and institutional discourses intertwined with the goals of military rule.285 In response, recent accounts foreground Bedouin resistance, indigeneity, land claims, and multiple communal connections—especially due to the emergence of many new Bedouin-Israeli scholars. While this chapter does not foreground Bedouin scholarship and experience, it does contribute to further understanding the connections between academia and colonialism in the Naqab/Negev. 284 Richard Ratcliffe, Mansour Nasasra, Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder, and Sophia Richter-Devroe. “Introduction.” In The Naqab Bedouin and Colonialism: New Perspectives, eds. Mansour Nasasra, Sophie Richter-Devroe, Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder and Richard Ratcliffe, (London and New York: Routledge, 2015): 1-32. 285 Ibid., 1-9. 135 Zionist ideas of cultivation and deserts also function in relation with larger environmental narratives of desertification, which Diana Davis has identified as intertwined with the colonial episteme. The French and British colonizers in the Middle East and North Africa blamed Arabs, in particular, for the destruction of an idyllic Biblical landscape thought to have existed in the past.286 Davis also argues that the institutional foundations of ideas about desertification rely on vague scientific definitions that often assumed deserts to be unproductive and wasteful biomes, reproducing the colonial episteme’s understanding of arid zones as sites of moral, political, and environmental decline. This complex colonial and racialized history directly influences policies and efforts to address contemporary arid zone development. 287 I employ Mark Rifkin’s analysis of “settler common sense” in engaging with Zionist scientific texts. Settlers make sense of their 286 Diana K. Davis, “Desert ‘Wastes’ of the Maghreb: Desertification Narratives in French Colonial Environmental History of North Africa,” Cultural Geographies 11, no. 4 (2004): 359-87. 287 Diana K. Davis, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016). Gardening work in Beersheba. From Abbo, Michael, “…and the Desert shall Bloom.” The Negev, No. 1, Winter 1974. Department of Publications and Media Relations, Ben- Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel. Figure 6. Gardening work in Beersheba. 136 world in how they “register and recirculate everyday modes of settlement” that reproduce the assumption of settler sovereignty over indigenous space. Rifkin analyzes settler texts for their “modes of ordinary perception” in order to “indicate how quotidian modes of sensation and sense-making provide the impetus and frame which the texts themselves emerge.”288 In short, Zionist scientific texts were produced in conjunction with unspoken settler assumptions regarding claims over the Naqab/Negev. Into the 1980s, these scientific texts echoed Zionist ideological assumptions by claiming that their work in the desert was a return to their ancestral homeland. Even if they do not explicitly celebrate settler colonialism, the texts in question consistently re-inscribe Zionist claims about environmental change and Bedouin cultivation. They represent the figure of the “Bedouin” as shorn of its interconnections with Palestinian and Arabs peoples across and within colonial borders. Thus, “Bedouin” comes to operate as a signifier of primitiveness, tradition, ahistorical stasis, and also as an environmental force of desertification. Ultimately, settler scientific projects were neither complete, nor ultimately successful. In fact, they displayed incredible anxiety about the settlers’ place in an environment that unsettled Zionists claims to “making the desert bloom.” To ground this analysis, I focus on the institutional and ideological emergence of the Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research (BIDR). BIDR is located in Midreshet Ben-Gurion adjacent to present day Sede-Boqer, the southern kibbutz that David Ben- Gurion retired to in order to personify his pioneering dream. The Negev Institute for Arid Zone Research (NIAZR, 1956-1973) and the Institute for Desert Research (IDR, 1975- 1979) preceded BIDR and collectively represent the trajectory of science in the service of 288 Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2014): 3. Both quotations. 137 Zionist settler development of the Naqab/Negev. For simplicity’s sake, I will refer to all three collectively as the “desert research institutions.” As part of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), BIDR focuses specifically on arid zone natural and social sciences with an explicit mission to develop the Negev. I draw from a range of Hebrew and English empirical materials collected at the Ben-Gurion Archives in Midreshet Ben-Gurion, the Jane Shapiro Library on BIDR’s campus, the Tuviyahu Archives at BGU’s Beersheva campus, and the Publications Office at BGU from 2015-2017.289 My aim here is not to criticize the current work of scholars at BIDR—in fact, I respect much of their work and several of its members generously granted me their time and advice as I navigated its history. However, BIDR’s emergence is interconnected with state settler development in the Naqab/Negev and BIDR is a key site for how processes of dispossession in the south are interlocked with environmental sciences and studies. Shifting Territories in Shifting Sands In The Conflict Shoreline, Fazal Sheikh and Eyal Weizman investigate the geographic conflict between Bedouins and the state by focusing on the isohyets—lines connecting shared annual rainfall amounts—on the map of the Naqab/Negev. In short, they argue that the 200 mm annual rainfall isohyet (the “line of aridity”) marks the contour of the most intense conflict.290 In 1931, Zionists instituted precise meteorological 289 In footnotes, I will abbreviate the different archives as follows: Ben-Gurion Archives (BGA), Ben- Gurion University Tuviyahu Archives (BGU-TA), and the Ben-Gurion Publications Office (BGU-PO). I do not directly cite sources from the Jane Shapiro Library in this article, but there I was introduced to many sources on BIDR and Evenari. 290 Eyal Weizman and Fazal Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline: Colonization as Climate Change in the Negev Desert (Brooklyn: Steidl, 2015): 9. 138 measurements that divided the Naqab/Negev in two. Zionists saw the north as hydrologically sufficient for agriculture, while the south would take a concerted technological effort. There, Zionists sought to chip away at this isohyet through “artificial irrigation, new seed types, intensive farming technologies, fertilizers, pesticides, and large- scale afforestation.”291 State actors celebrated these sorts of techniques as a means of surpassing the barriers posed by mawat; Zionists were the “climatic force” that would beat back the desert. Aridity functioned as a “juridical mechanism.” As Weizman and Sheikh write Decades after the State of Israel was established, a juridical mechanism based on the meteorological threshold of aridity was developed to justify these expropriations. Since the threshold of the desert marked a border beyond which permanent agricultural cultivation and settlement was deemed impossible, Israeli jurists argued that the area was not cultivated in practice and therefore no Bedouin property rights could be respected there. The threshold of aridity thereafter marked the border of a zone of expropriation at the mercy of the state and tolerated only as a matter of charity. It was an act of cartographic and territorial violence.292 In effect, the state’s territory was bifurcated into cultivable land and waste land. Because Zionists had to justify expropriation not of empty land but of land being used, this conflict between the designations of “cultivation” and “wasteland” took on contradictory and contingent meanings.293 During the British Mandate, Zionists—in their negotiations with British officials regarding land grants in the Naqab/Negev—recognized that Bedouins were cultivating crops. To buttress their own claims to land, Zionists argued that Bedouin cultivation was inferior to modern practices and thus economically infeasible. In this way, ‘wasteland’ 291 Ibid., 10. 292 Ibid., 10. 293 Ibid. 139 appeared detached from history, materializing in space and time when and wherever Bedouin Arabs lived. This Zionist conception of time, a historiography meant to serve the interests of settlers, collapsed the durée between antiquity and British rule, marking the so- called Arab Conquest (beginning in the 630s C.E.) as a period of sudden economic, cultural, and environmental decline. Alternatively, for Zionist scientists, the Nabatean period marked the height of ancient development in the desert, one that could only be reclaimed by present-day Zionist expertise in arid zones. Who were the Nabateans? The Nabateans were a semi-nomadic civilization that stretched across parts of today’s Jordan, Syria and the Arabian Peninsula, as well as into southern Palestine, from about the 4th century B.C.E. until the 2nd century C.E., overlapping with the Roman conquest of the Near East.294 To put this into a Zionist chronology, of sorts: the Nabateans established themselves in an area formerly part of the kingdom of Judah (southern Israelite kingdom), though were contemporaneous with Hellenistic-era Hebrew peoples, such as the Maccabees.295 Their capital city was Petra.296 The Nabateans did not leave much by way of written histories of themselves (in fact, the common name for them comes from Greek, “Nabatu”) and as a result, historians have relied on the writings of other adjacent peoples.297 The Nabateans thrived through the management and extension of trade routes across the Arabian Peninsula and into the Levant, and the ruins of six of their cities can today be found scattered across the Naqab/Negev. 294 Jeffrey Eli Pearson, Contextualizing the Nabateans: A Critical Reassessment of their History and Material Culture (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2011). 295 Ibid., 5. 296 See Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) which, in the spirit of the Palestine Exploration Fund (spoilers!) reimagines the Nabatean capital an ancient, booby-trapped, Christian sanctuary for the holy grail. 297 Pearson, Contextualizing the Nabateans, 2, 5. 140 Evenari and other Zionist scientists began to study the Nabatean agricultural system in the middle decades of the 20th century.298 Excavations of town ruins revealed the stratum of different eras. Gradually, the Nabatean cities joined the late Roman Empire, evidenced by the inclusion of churches.299 When Roman provinces became part of the new Byzantine Empire, walls began to crisscross the desert, around farms, towns, and cities.300 It is estimated that the population of this region reached 20,000 people due to its robust agricultural system.301 Some Zionists, following from colonial texts, claimed that the cities were destroyed during the Arab Conquest of 633 C.E. – 640 C.E., or were abandoned once the Conquest denuded the region. However, there is no archeological evidence of any sudden destruction by an invading army. The presence of a mosque in one of the cities bears 298 Evenari, et al., The Negev; Michael Evenari, The Awakening Desert: The Autobiography of an Israeli Scientist. (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1989). 299 Rosen, “The Decline of Desert Agriculture,” 47. 300 Evenari et al., The Negev, 22. 301 Steve A. Rosen, “The Decline of Desert Agriculture: A View from the Classical Period Negev.” In The Archeology of Drylands: Living at the Margin, edited by Barker, Graeme and David Gilbertson (New York: Routledge, 2000): 44-61. Showing a picture of the Avdat experimental farm, from the ancient city of Avdat. From Harry Wall, “Farming the Ancient Way.” Negev No. 7, Fall 1979. Department of Publications and Media Relations, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel. Figure 7. Farming the Ancient Way. 141 witness to co-religious simultaneous occupation.302 By the 10th or 11th centuries C.E., the agricultural systems and cities had been abandoned.303 Zionist scientists have offered three main theories for the Naqab/Negev’s transformation from a region which supported a large population and agriculture to a supposedly empty wasteland. The first reason I have already referenced in passing above, that the ancient cities and the environment were destroyed by anthropogenic forces, specifically the Arab Conquest, presently personified in the Bedouin inhabitants of the south of Israel/Palestine. This discourse appears in many 20th century Zionist texts. In his writings, Ben-Gurion connected desertification to Arab peoples, his horror over perceived environmental degradation entangled in the particular demographic anxieties of the State of Israel and its geopolitical conflicts: The Arabs have transformed more than one flourishing and populous country into a desert; the wasteland in the Arab State is no obstacle to their existence and their independence. The small State of Israel, however, cannot long tolerate within its bounds a desert which takes up over half of its territory. If the State does not put an end to the desert, the desert is liable to put an end to the State. The narrow strip between Jaffa and Haifa, 15 to 25 kilometres wide, which contains the bulk of Israel’s population, cannot survive for long without a large and firmly-based population in the expanses of the South and the Negev.304 Such claims were also echoed in other texts throughout the 20th century, some from explorers visiting Palestine/Israel.305 This nationalist claim also appeared in materials that 302 Rosen, “The Decline of Desert Agriculture,” 51. 303 Ibid., 44. 304 David Ben-Gurion, “A Call for Desert Communities and Science.” In The Desert Experience in Israel: Communities, Art, Science, and Education in the Negev. Eds. A. Paul Hare and Gideon M. Kressel (Lanham: University Press of America, Inc. 2009): 10. This piece was originally published as an introduction to Yaakov Morris’s Masters of the Desert (1961). 305 Walter Clay Lowdermilk, Palestine: Land of Promise (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1944); Nelson Glueck, Rivers in the Desert: A History of the Negev (New York: Grove Press, 1960); Yaakov Morris, Masters of the Desert: 6,000 Years in the Negev (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1961); Roy Popkin, 142 advertised academic research in the Naqab/Negev. For instance, as one author wrote in an issue of The Negev, Ben-Gurion University’s international magazine: The wars and instability following the Moslem conquest led to a rapid downgrading of the Negev’s sensitive ecosystem. Permanent settlements were abandoned, trees and shrubs were torn up for fuel, and the sheep and goats of an increasing number of pastoral nomads began to overgraze what remained.306 Bedouins destroyed the environment; Zionists come to reclaim and renew it. Zionist scientists need to “return the [Negev] to its climax” state, that is, its condition before the arrival of the “Moslem” armies.307 Evenari, too, took anthropogenic disruption as the cause of the aridity.308 In all, this theory rendered the period of Islamic influence as destructive, while fashioning Zionists as the direct heirs of the ancient ‘masters of the desert.’309 The second theory of contemporary aridity in the Naqab/Negev is that of climatic change.310 The theory of climatic change began to challenge the theory of the Arab anthropogenic disruption in the late 1970s into the 1980s. At its base was the archeological evidence that suggested that there was no sudden destruction of the ancient cities. Scholars critiqued theories of anthropogenic disruption caused by the Arab Conquest by pointing Technology of Necessity: Scientific and Engineering Development in Israel (New York: Praeger, 1971): 17- 19. 306 Lesley Hazleton, “The Challenge of the Desert.” Negev 6, Spring (1978): 27. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Publications. 307 Ibid., 27. 308 Evenari, et al. The Negev. 309 Morris, Masters of the Desert. 310 Arie Issar and H. Tsoar. “Who is to Blame for the Desertification of the Negev, Israel? The Influence of Climate Change and Climatic Variability on the Hydrologic Regime and Water Resources” Proceedings of the Vancouver Symposium, (1987): 168; Arie S. Issar, Water Shall Flow from the Rock: Hydrogeology and Climate in the Lands of the Bible. (Berling: Springer-Berlag, 1990). In Water Shall Flow from the Rock, Arie Issar even criticizes his own Ph.D. thesis, which drew from the theory of Arab, anthropogenic desertification, an example of the break with earlier theories that were the basis for the scholarship of BIDR into the 1980s. I use the potentially clunky term, “climatic change” to differentiate the subject of this theory from “climate change.” Theories related to climatic changes in historic Palestine imagined reasons for changes in past settlement—they were not referencing present-day understandings of contemporary climate change and global warming. 143 out that cities continued to exist and flourish for several hundred more years after the period of 633-640 C.E. Arie Issar, an influential hydrologist in the Naqab/Negev, argued that climatic change was brought about by the concurrence of environmental and meteorological shifts that ended a previous period of relatively benign humidity.311 Issar does not advocate a strictly deterministic point of view, acknowledging that anthropogenic impacts can alter regional climate. For the most part, he wished to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy at the time of writing.312 The third theory, what I will call a socio-economic theory of change, categorically rejects the Arab Conquest as the cause of desertification and questions the impact of climatic change on people in the Naqab/Negev. Steve Rosen, archeologist at Ben-Gurion University, points out that the abandonment of the Naqab/Negev’s formerly Nabatean cities did not occur until the 10th and 11th centuries, almost 400 years after the Conquest. Based on more recent archeological evidence, Rosen theorizes that the Naqab/Negev’s population was supported by two overlapping and integrated socio-economic systems in which farming and nomadic communities traded, connecting the northern Naqab/Negev to the south. This interconnected system continued into the Islamic period, under the Ummayad dynasty, who added their own agricultural and settlement presence.313 Rosen attributes these imperial and socio-economic systems for the success of agriculture in the Naqab/Negev’s well-established within trading routes. The significance of Rosen’s argument is that the gradual abandonment of the Byzantine cities is not equivalent to either the abandonment of the Negev or desertification, for, as indicated earlier, there is a significant Early Islamic agricultural presence in the Negev at 311 Issar and Tsoar, “Who is to Blame…?” 312 Issar, Water Shall Flow. 313 Rosen, “The Decline of Desert Agriculture,” 52-54. 144 least until the ninth or tenth centuries AD. The final abandonment of the central Negev probably in the tenth or perhaps even the eleventh centuries AD, may in fact even be associated with the beginning of climatic amelioration. In short, climate change does not adequately explain the decline of classical civilization in the desert or the reversion of the desert to desert.314 Further, such a socio-economic theory discounts Zionist claims that located the region’s environmental ‘fall’ in Arab, followed by Bedouin desertification.315 However, before the 1980s, most scientists in the Naqab/Negev drew from the idea that the region had been destroyed by the Arab Conquest. Repeated juridical and cultural discourses helped establish a cluster of scientific assumptions and vocabulary for degrading Bedouin cultivation (and thus claims to land) some beginning as early as the 18th century during Ottoman rule. Bedouin Agriculture and Zionist Settlement Zionist claims over the Naqab/Negev is premised on the colonial narrative that Bedouins fail to cultivate the land. However, colonial historical records show that Bedouin Arabs held a continuous presence in the Naqab/Negev since at least the 15th century. Ottoman records indicate that Bedouins paid taxes on land and crops in the late 16th century.316 Bedouin tribal confederations would clash, sometimes violently, for ownership of cultivated land.317 Travel diaries of some colonial visitors—contemporaries of Palmer— 314 Ibid., 54. 315 Ibid., 56. 316 Ahmad Amara, “The Negev Land Question: Between Denial and Recognition.” Journal of Palestine Studies 42, no. 4 (2013): 27-47. 317 Mansour Nasasra, The Naqab Bedouins: A Century of Politics and Resistance. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017): 68. 145 described extensive cultivation, far from an empty wasteland. For instance, one Reverend W.M. Thomson wrote in 1856 that the land was “monotonous—wheat, wheat, a very ocean of wheat” and “no less fertile than the very best in the Mississippi.” Zalman David Levontin, a member of the “Lovers of Zion” organization in the late 1880s, wrote that when he walked from Gaza to the Northern Naqab/Negev, he was “surrounded by fields and Bedouin dwellings... Both sides of the Wadi were filled with row after row of Bedouin tents accommodating shepherds. No trees in sight and all the valley sown with wheat and barley.”318 Cultivation was not necessarily uniformly spread across all parts of the Naqab/Negev, but Bedouins were engaged in extensive agricultural practices during Ottoman rule and the subsequent British Mandate. Further, after the establishment of Bir as-sa’ba in 1900 on land sold to the Ottoman government by the ‘Azazme tribe, Bedouin were actively involved in regional governance and development.319 Mandate officials pushed colonial development initiatives to ‘improve’ Bedouin agricultural techniques while also recognizing Bedouin skill. For instance, in one report from 1947: “These Bedouins are keen farmers and very much alive to the possibility of improving their agricultural methods. Tractor ploughing has made considerable strides in recent years and an increasing area is being planted each year with fruit trees.”320 British officials as late as the 1940s remarked on Bedouin cultivation. As Mansour Nasasra writes, “Archival and newspaper records refer to land cultivation by Bedouin owners in southern Palestine... Huna al-Quds, reported in 1942 that the cultivated [land] by Bedouin owners 318 Kedar et al., Emptied Lands, 128. 319 Mansour Nasasra, “Ruling the Desert: Ottoman and British Policies towards the Bedouin of the Naqab and Transjordan Region, 1900-1948,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 42, no. 3 (2015): 263-268. 320 Nasasra, The Naqab Bedouins, 75. 146 in southern Palestine was estimated at two million dunams.”321 Ahmad Amara writes that estimates of cultivated land in the early 1900s was somewhere between 2 to 3.5 million dunams in the Negev.322 Bedouin leaders consistently lobbied the British for access to additional agricultural education to better supplement their own methods.323 During this time as well, Bedouin representatives were actively involved in wider Palestinian political and institutional bodies, especially during the Great Arab Revolt against British rule between 1936-1939.324 However, it was not a relationship without conflict; Bedouin tribes frequently clashed with British colonial officers over their patterns of seasonal migration and the grazing of their herds. In 1942, the British instituted the Bedouin Control Ordinance, attempting to police Bedouin land use and movement.325 Indeed, the British were particularly troubled by the fact that Bedouins were not sedentary, demanding grazing rights, and often worked to constrict their ability to shepherd and seasonally cultivate throughout Palestine, not just in the Naqab/Negev.326 Clearly, the fact of the Bedouin cultivation and land claims presented Zionists with an ongoing obstacle, presenting a challenge to efforts to include the Naqab/Negev in a potential Jewish State.327 Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Zionists actively settled the 321 Nasasra, The Naqab Bedouins, 75. Both quotations above. 322 Amara, “The Negev Land Question,” 30. 323 Roza I.M. El Eini, Mandated Landscape: British Imperial Rule in Palestine, 1929-1948 (London and New York: Routledge, 2006): 155, 165. 324 Mansour Nasasra, “The Southern Palestine Bedouin Between Colonialism and Nationalism: Comparing Representations in British Mandatory Documents and Palestinian Newspapers, 1930-1948,” Journal of Holy Land and Palestinian Studies 15, no. 1 (2016): 86, 91. 325 Ibid., 223. 326 El-Eini, Mandated Landscapes. See 223-228. 327 The British produced a number of proposals for partitioning the Mandate into a Jewish and an Arab state. In the earlier proposals (late 1930s), the Naqab/Negev either remains Mandated territory, or is given to an Arab state. A Jewish proposal (Woodhead Report, Map 7, El-Eini, 2006: 543) seeks to include a portion of the Western Naqab/Negev north of Bi’r al-Saba’ (Beersheba) but gives the Northern Naqab/Negev to an Arab State and the West and South to the Mandate. In many later plans, the Northern Naqab/Negev, from Gaza to the Dead Sea is partitioned to an Arab State. In 1944, proposals begin to show an escalating dispute over the boundaries. By 1947 one UNSCOP partition plan (they offered several) 147 region and bought land from Bedouins and moved quickly to build fortified towns. For instance, in the period of the Yishuv, the Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund established settlements throughout the Naqab/Negev, in one case even constructing eleven in one night, Yom Kippur, assuming that the British would be caught unawares by Jewish activity on one of the holiest and most solemn days of the year.328 Settler recognition of Bedouin cultivation, (though as something to strategically deny) continued after 1948; the Weitz Committee (founded to address Bedouin land ownership claims) decided to “avoid recognizing Bedouin rights on their land even if they prove that they have cultivated it for a long and extended time.”329 During the British Mandate, Zionists argued that their settlements were economically productive, emphasizing their ‘scientific’ awarded the southern Naqab/Negev, including Bi’r al-Saba’ to a Jewish state, while another saw the city as part of an Arab State stretching uninterrupted from Gaza to the West Bank (ibid.: 549). The final UN Partition Plan of 1947 gives the Arab State Bi’r al-Saba’, its northern and western environs as contiguous with the West Bank, Gaza and some of the border with Egypt, while the region further south to the Red Sea to the Jewish state (ibid.: 550). I include these details from El-Eini (2006) not to somehow validate the colonial plans as legitimate, but to signal that throughout this decade of partition plans, the Naqab/Negev was consistently under negotiation and gradually was placed within the borders of a Jewish State (perhaps due to insistent lobbying and settlement activity by the Jewish Agency and the KKL, as well as politicians like Ben-Gurion). Still, what was supposed to be in the Arab state, Bi’r al-Saba’ and much of the Northern Naqab/Negev, are today the sites of the most intense disputes between Bedouins and the state. 328 Elieser Doron, ed. The Negev: An Anthology. (Keren Hayesod, Youth Department, 1949), Ben-Gurion Archives. Sede Boqer. 329 Nasasra, The Naqab Bedouins, 144. Portion of map of the UN Partition of Palestine, 1947. Beersheba and the area to its northeast is to be included in the Palestinian state. Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question, “Palestine, Plan of Partition.” Wikimedia Commons accessed May 07, 2020. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:UN_Palestin e_Partition_Versions_1947.jpg. Figure 8. The UN Partition of Palestine. 148 and ‘rational’ agricultural techniques. This is borne out in a series of correspondences between Zionists figures and British officials from the Ben-Gurion Archives. These correspondences show how Zionists asked Mandate officials for large swaths of the Naqab/Negev, arguing that they alone had the means to exploit its economic potential. These documents, spanning several decades, include reports and correspondences from David Ben-Gurion, as well as Arthur Ruppin, Aaron Aaronsohn, Joshua Thon, and Yitzak Wilkansky. Ruppin (1876-1943) was a German Zionist and sociologist who was central to much of Zionist planning throughout the British Mandate.330 He worked extensively on agricultural planning and wished to transform Jewish labor towards agrarian occupations.331 Through the Jewish National Fund and other Zionists organizations, Ruppin worked to purchase land for the Yishuv.332 Aaron Aaronsohn (1876-1919) was a Zionist agronomist whom Omar Tesdell describes as part of an early 20th century network of scientists focused on dry farming who traveled between the US and Ottoman Palestine. In particular, Aaronsohn claimed he had discovered the “singular wild ancestor of cultivated wheat” when, in reality, his discovery was a variety long cultivated by Palestinian farmers.333 Jacob Thon (1888-1950), from Poland, was a founder and chairman of several international Zionist organizations and was managing director of the Palestine 330 Etan Bloom, Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011), 2. 331 Arthur Ruppin, The Agricultural Colonisation of the Zionist Organisation in Palestine. Trans., R.J. Feiwel. (London: Martin Hopkinson and Company, Ltd., 1926). 332 Bloom, Arthur Ruppin; For more on Ruppin, see Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2018). Chapter Three. 333 Omar Tesdell, “Wild Wheat to Productive Drylands: Global Scientific Practice and the Agroecological Remaking of Palestine,” Geoforum 78, no. C (2017): 43-51. 149 Land Development Company, working with Arthur Ruppin and Yitzak Wilkansky.334 Yitzak Wilkansky (Yitzhak Elazari-Volcani) (1880-1955) worked with Arthur Ruppin, and was a founder for the Institute for Agricultural Studies at Hebrew University at Rehovot.335 In all, the standing of these authors in the Zionist movement attest to the importance of agricultural development in the Naqab/Negev as a pillar of settlement. In a 1918 report that pre-dated the British Mandate, Aaronsohn and Wilkansky argued that the incoming British colonial administration should give the Zionist movement 250,000 acres “in large and continuous tracts” in the Negev, to be “taken out of the hands of those who, with more or less legal rights, now claim to hold or even partly cultivate them, and to use that area for intensive food production according to the methods of Dry Farming,”336 also known as rainfed agriculture. Aaronsohn and Wilkansky’s arguments hinge on the supposed ‘primitiveness’ of non-Westerners, especially Arab farmers. But while Aaronsohn and Wilkansky sought to persuade British officials to expropriate land from Bedouins for Zionist agricultural colonies, they notably do not depict the Naqab/Negev as empty of people, nor a pristine wilderness. They could not ignore the fact of cultivation and also had to acknowledge that Bedouin methods (dry farming) had succeeded across the ‘East.’ They write: Here it was only necessary to observe critically the routine of the backward native in order to find that his methods—the methods of Dry Farming— were the same which had made possible the high state of agriculture and civilization in the arid regions of the East in the days of their past glory, the same methods which the classical authors had minutely described and 334 Jewish Telegraph Agency, “Dr. Jacob Thon, Founder of Jewish National Council in Palestine, Dies; Was 62,” JTA Archive. March 7, 1950. https://www.jta.org/1950/03/07/archive/dr-jacob-thon-founder-of- jewish-national-council-in-palestine-dies-was-62 335 Eran Kaplan and Derek Jonathan Penslar, The Origins of Israel, 1882-1948: A Documented History Sources in Modern Jewish History (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011): 103-104. 336 Aaron Aaronsohn and Yitzak Wilkanksy. “The Negev.” May 28, 1918. Ben-Gurion Archives, Sede Boker. Box: 105. File: 525/9946: 7. 150 highly praised, and that the native was wise and right in following these methods.337 Aaronsohn and Wilkansky draw from European epistemic thought by framing agriculture as existing within the colonial hierarchy that located “civilization” beyond Europe only in the past. Time flows “backwards” for Bedouins. For the West: …our cereals and our agriculture originated and attained a high degree of perfection in the Orient. During the centuries of their travelling westwards these cereals and this agriculture have undergone many changes. New methods were discovered, adapted to the new local conditions, and the old methods fell into oblivion. Science and technique, and the progress that follows in their wake, having developed during the last centuries in the [west],338 have helped us to forget or despise the traditional agricultural knowledge of the East.339 The “Orient” perfected agriculture centuries at the peak of their civilizations. As methods traveled “westwards” they move forward in time, developing into rational, scientific, progressive agriculture. The use of “our” also firmly plants the Jewish people in the space of European modernity. Palestinian practices are wasteful, as they note: “At its best the arable land in the visited area was never entirely under plough. A third part of every village land, at least, was always left fallow, a wasteful and unnecessary practice,” and many areas after the war “remained untilled” – a percentage that Aaronsohn and Wilkansky pegged between 60% and 90%. “This state of affairs must at any time been looked upon as unsatisfactory and calling for improvement,” they wrote, trying to appeal to the British’s desire to enhance economic productivity in their colony.340 Aaronsohn and Wilkansky propose that Zionists would bring “modern agricultural implements and the application of rational Dry 337 Ibid., 4. 338 The document says “wet” instead of “west,” I assume a typo. 339 Ibid., 4. 340 Ibid., 6. All quotations and information above. 151 Farming,” combined with men from “a country of the highest industrial and cultural development,” who would increase the land’s yield and educate its natives.341 In this instance, settler development places Zionist settlers within a forward trajectory attuned to the economic potential of modern agricultural progress. The ideological conviction that Bedouin cultivation is wasteful is apparent in other correspondences and documents written nearly two decades later. In minutes from a January 24th, 1935 interview with Mr. H.H. Trusted, Attorney General of the British Mandate, Ruppin and Thon say, “We were particularly interested in the Negev because in this district there were still vast areas of land which had never been touched by a plough and would not be touched for generations to come if things were left in their present state.”342 In making the case to the British, Ruppin and Thon were attempting to circumvent Bedouin landowners. However, the minutes hum with settler anxieties over the potential primacy of Bedouin land rights and ownership. The meeting seems to portray how the Zionist movement at the time was wholly dependent on British colonial governance and exceptionally worried about land speculation. Ruppin and Thon realize that they cannot take any steps without first coming to an understanding with the Bedouin who have rights (ownership or grazing rights) to this land, and without being sure of Government assistance. If we were to begin work without any such previous agreement, and if our investigations proved successful, the result would probably be that the Bedouin would not agree to sell the land at all or only at excessive prices and we would then be unable to acquire any land in this region.343 341 Ibid., 9. 342 “Minute of Interview with Mr. H.H. Trusted.” January 24th, 1935. Ben-Gurion Archives, Sede-Boqer. Box: 105: 4. 343 Ibid., 4. 152 Rather than try to buy land outright—for fear that Bedouins might raise prices—they instead want to seek permission to survey the land for water. If “water [is] to be found (and the land accordingly) should be divided between Bedouin and ourselves in a fair proportion.”344 It is here that Ruppin and Thon try to circumvent prior Bedouin land claims by employing the language of economic and scientific. exploitation of land, based on the ability of Zionists to find water, and thus serve as colonial developers for the British Mandate. Writing contemporaneously with Ruppin and Thon, Ben-Gurion in 1935 framed the Naqab/Negev as almost completely empty of a Bedouin population. Ben-Gurion downplays the size of the indigenous population (“only some thousand Bedouin migrate with their camels and sheep over this broad stretch” which is “only slightly cultivated”) and again emphasized the potential of the Naqab/Negev: “According to Hop[e]-Simpson [sic], there is an ‘inexhaustible supply’ of cultivable land in the Negev provided water is found.”345 For Ben-Gurion, the Nabatean ruins provided a key for framing the future settler potential of the region. He wrote that “The numerous ruins in this region indicate that it once must have had a large population,” and was “witness to a great ancient economy.” However, he writes that “Today, no living soul is found there. This country is No Man’s Land. It has no legal owner and anyone who cultivated it with the permission of the Government is entitled to become its owner, according to Turkish law which still prevails 344 Ibid., 4-5. 345 Ben-Gurion, David. “Secret: The Land Problem with Special Regard to the Negev and Akaba.” June 4, 1935 and June 7th, 1935. Ben-Gurion Archives, Sede Boker. Box: 0105. Ben-Gurion is referring to Sir John Hope Simpson who wrote a state report on the situation in Palestine called, “Report on Immigration, Land Settlement, and Development” (1930). In the report, Hope Simpson, though receiving much help and information from Ruppin and other Zionists, criticizes governmental policies, absentee landlords, and settlement efforts that are casting Palestinian farmers into a spiral of poverty and need. In effect, he is arguing that the government has done little to address Arab concerns which erupted in the revolt of 1929. 153 in Palestine.”346 Here Ben-Gurion recognizes Palestinian cultivation but disqualifies ownership rights with various caveats: the land is “cultivated... with the permission of the government”, otherwise it is a “No Man’s Land”. This is coupled with the emphasis on a “great ancient economy,” that of the Nabateans, as opposed to what Ben-Gurion sees as a lack of Bedouin economic activity. After the end of the Mandate and the Palestinian Nakba, the new state’s hold over the Naqab/Negev was tenuous: Jordan and Egypt had still not given up claims to the territory and borders were porous.347 After 1948, Israeli government officials argued over what to do with the remaining Palestinian Bedouins, the majority of whom the army expelled into Gaza, Jordan, and the Sinai, resulting in a catastrophic disruption of tribal identity, livelihoods, and territorial claims.348 In order to naturalize the Naqab/Negev as unquestionably the territory of the new state, Zionists embarked on a mission to draw the regions into its programs of development. The main foci of the early desert research institutions were on this kind of development, concerned with how what was imagined as a wasteland could support the migration of a large Jewish population. No longer were Zionist officials yoked to British colonial development, one premised on needing to prove developmental potential based on their productivity but could now make arguments about the new state’s developmental capacity on a global scale. 347 Shlomo Swirski and Yael Hassan. Invisible Citizens: Israel Government Policy Toward the Negev Bedouin. (Tel Aviv: Adva Center & Center for Bedouins Studies and Development, 2006): 9. 348 Nasasra, The Naqab Bedouins. 154 Scientific Settlers In the Negev, the Jewish Genius in science and research will be able to prove itself. Our scientists will have to take upon themselves to delve into new fields of research that the Western world had no use for. The Israeli scientists will have to unfold those secrets of Nature specific to our country and to find ways to control its forces—with this they will turn a new original lead in scientific research, will assist with our most leading future aim in making the wilderness bloom—and perhaps will make the greatest contribution that science can achieve, in solving most pertinent human problems: making the desert bloom, a problem which is becoming the most vital problem to all people of Asia, Africa and Australia, namely to the majority of the human race. - David Ben-Gurion quoted in epigraph of the Institute for Desert Research’s First Annual Scientific Report (1975).349 Ben-Gurion’s sermons on the Naqab/Negev are often quoted in the epigraphs or introductions of many of the desert research institutions’ documents. For Ben-Gurion, development went hand-in-hand with an increase in the Jewish population of the region which he saw as the potential center of the state, rather than the thin, urbanized coastal plain between Tel Aviv and Haifa where most of the Jewish population lived: The Negev is now both empty and arid…its most important needs are now more water and Jewish people. It is possible to establish here a dense population of several million. Moshe Smilansky stated that agriculture in the Negev could support 2 million Jews; in that case, industry can support a further 3 million.350 349 David Ben-Gurion, “Epigraph.” In First Annual Scientific Report. Dover, Shabtay, ed. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The Institute for Desert Research. December 1978. Tuviyahu Archives, Ben- Gurion University of the Negev. File No: 0804.04.003. The quotation is from January 17th, 1955. 350 Shabtay Dover, Third Annual Scientific Report. Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research. December 1980. Tuviyahu Archives, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. File: 0804.04.001. Epigraph. Moshe Smilansky was another Labor Zionist and novelist, known for his long support for binationalism in Palestine, a position he would abandon before 1948. See Gila Ramos-Rauch, “The Image of the Arab in Israeli Literature,” Shofar, 7, no. 3 (1989): 3-12. 155 Central to Ben-Gurion’s vision of research in the Naqab/Negev was the establishment of a “Jewish Oxford” to support all forms of development in the south.351 Documents from the desert research institutions often cite Ben-Gurion’s essay, “Southwards!” which focuses on the urgent need to scientifically develop the south through intensive “pioneering.”352 Scientists and university educators also quote Ben-Gurion’s essay “The Meaning of the Negev” (1955) where he opines that “The Negev will become the testing ground of the scientific and research potential of the Jewish people, and it is incumbent upon our scientists and researchers to concentrate on these new fields of research.”353 In “Southwards!” as well, Ben-Gurion links science and pioneering: “The scientific and technological capacity of Israel’s scientists and research workers, will have to overcome these natural difficulties, and develop the South and the Negev for large-scale settlement...”354 Scientific research, and technological ability, aligned with how Zionists saw settlement as part of a progressive, modernizing project. “Large-scale settlement,” or “developing the Negev,” or “increasing the population,” phrases that appear many times in desert research institutions documents, often went hand-in-hand with justifications for arid zone research. While many scientists at the desert research institutes did not share Ben-Gurion’s call for unrestricted resource extraction and wholesale settlement, many scientists presented their work as beneficial to stated Zionist goals such as population dispersion, 351 Isaac Nevo, “Universities in the Negev: Conflicting Visions in the Establishment of Ben-Gurion University.” In Science and Scholarship in the Negev: The Story of Ben-Gurion University in the Negev. Volume 1: Founders. Yehuda Gradus and Isaac Nevo, eds. (Beer-Sheva, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2014): 19-20. [Hebrew] 352 “Program of Operations.” The Research Council of Israel, The Negev Institute for Arid Zone Research. Beersheva. Tuviyahu Archives at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. 1957. File: 0804.05.009. 353 Rivka Carmi, “Foreword,” In Gradus and Nevo, Science and Scholarship in the Negev, ix. 354 David Ben-Gurion, “Southwards!” In Like Stars and Dust: Essays from Israel’s Government Year Book. (Sede Boqer Campus: Ben-Gurion Research Center, 1997): 181. 156 land control, and settlement. This created an interesting tension wherein the Zionist vision for the desert from Ben-Gurion and other state officials offered discursive templates for scientific scholarship to follow. But this was not always simply a matter of scientists echoing state claims—instead, the relationship between the state’s goals, Bedouin cultivation and husbandry practices, their continuous presence on the land, specific kinds of international relationships, and the materiality of the desert and its ‘ruins’, all shaped the kinds of claims that scientists made. Nor was this settler colonial effort ultimately successful in the way that it was framed in developmental and scientific discourses in the first decades of the state. The vision of a ‘developed’ Naqab/Negev would actually go unfulfilled; resources were not as plentiful as early Zionists had supposed, nor did Jewish- Israelis or Jews from elsewhere migrate to the south in any great numbers. In fact, the Naqab/Negev’s developmental legacy is not the story of a blank slate transformed by Zionism. Instead, scientists constantly negotiated a parallax between Zionist discourses, material realities, and indigenous Bedouin presence and land-use. Scientific discourses from the desert research institutes worked to frame the Naqab/Negev within specific histories of past and future development. “Desertification,” as a marker of man-made catastrophe in the past, present, or imagined in the future, provided the settler ideological imperative for proposing practices that would develop the Naqab/Negev. These discourses functioned through four interlocking themes. First, scientists constructed the Naqab/Negev as an “arid zone” that could only support a large population by implementing modern state intervention and particular types of settlements and cities. Second, scientists framed the desert as an unproductive space that should be made productive through Zionist scientific cultivation. While desert research institutional 157 scientists rarely say the word “wasteland,” the implication was that deserts are spaces that need to be transformed was inescapable. Third, scientists saw the Naqab/Negev as a space that had been productive in the past, as I showed in previous sections, stringing together a teleology that linked the emergence of the State of Israel with ‘mastery over nature’ of pre- Arabic civilizations. Finally, scientists framed the Naqab/Negev as a global arid zone, an experimental space to work that could serve as a model for other states with arid zones. This also had the practical effect of opening up the Naqab/Negev to international study (but not indigenous use). All of these representations of the Naqab/Negev circumscribed the desert as only ‘cultivable’ through Israeli state interventions, effacing Bedouin land claims and agriculture. Figure 9. The Institute for Desert Research. Hazleton, Lesley, “The Challenge of the Desert.” Negev No. 6, Spring, 1978. Department of Publications and Media Relations, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel. 158 This section will construct a loose chronology of three institutions and their relationship to each other: the Negev Institute for Arid Zone Research (NIAZR), the Institute for Desert Research (IDR) and the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research (BIDR). These desert research institutions emerged out of material support from existing academic and scientific institutions. Hebrew University of Jerusalem provided scholars who began surveying and studying the Naqab/Negev before and after 1948. In the 1950s, the Institute for Higher Learning in the Negev355 integrated different types of instructional and research facilities into coordinated and centralized university institutions, that later became the University of the Negev in 1969 (and renamed Ben-Gurion University of the Negev several years later (BGU)).356 The Campus for Nuclear Research in Dimona and what would become Soroka Hospital in Beersheba also made up the academic and research milieu, eventually partnering with BGU for specific projects and training courses.357 Not only Israeli institutions showed interest in scientific research in the Naqab/Negev. In 1952, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) jointly sponsored a symposium on arid lands in Jerusalem with the Research Council of Israel.358 The chair of the symposium was Walter C. Lowdermilk, a former United States Department of Agriculture official who wrote on the issues of soil erosion in Palestine and Transjordan.359 At the symposium, Lowdermilk spoke about the challenge of desert development, and that it must proceed, “in the full light of science, practice, and international cooperation,” because, he worried, “the fate of extinction will 355 In Hebrew: HaMikhone liHaskalah haGivohah )ההובגה הלכשהל ןוכמה( 356 25 Years from the Negev Institute. 357 Nevo, “Universities in the Negev,” 14. 358 25 Years from the Negev Institute, Tuviyahu Archives. 359 Lowdermilk, Palestine: Land of Promise. 159 overtake the race of man no less than it overtook the race of dinosaurs.”360 After the sessions, the symposium commenced with a tour of the Naqab/Negev, an arid zone that was imbued with global significance. In 1956, the Prime Minister’s Office requested that the National Council for Research and Development establish a research institute in Beersheba to be known in English as “The Negev Institute for Arid Zone Research” (NIAZR).361 In 1957, the first buildings were constructed, and Ben-Gurion greeted the audience at the opening ceremony with a call for a spiritual mission that would “decode the hidden message of nature in this region and provide us with the key which will enable us to make the wasteland blossom and change the age-old order in the southern half of our state.”362 For Ben-Gurion, the scientific mission of academic research was to be a disrupting force that would shake the desert from its ahistoric stupor. NIAZR would also attract international support that shared similar ideas about the relationship between deserts and unproductive wasteland. In 1958 and 1959, a second laboratory was built and dedicated to Senator Herbert H. Lehman in honor of the US government’s sponsorship of NIAZR’s desalination program. The same year, the UN Secretary General, Dag Hammerskjold visited and said that it was exciting to “witness the energy devoted to putting the desert land to useful purpose.”363 The Director of UNESCO’s Natural Sciences Department brought tidings of the organization’s interest in the work in the Naqab/Negev saying it was the “materialization of utopic ideas.”364 360 25 Years from the Negev Institute. 361 A Program of Operations, Tuviyahu Archives, 0804.05.009; ed. Max Nurock, Negev Institute for Arid Zone Research. (National Council on Research and Development. Jerusalem: Sivan Press, 1960). Tuviyahu Archives, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. 362 25 Years from the Negev Institute, Tuviyahu Archives. 363 Ibid. 364 Nurock, The Negev Institute for Arid Zone Research, 45. Tuviyahu Archives, 0804.05.012. 160 Scientific practice in the desert was tied into the way that Zionists imagined the Naqab/Negev as a frontier for development. Prospective staff were referred to as pioneers: a “research nucleus to engender a scientific atmosphere at the desert frontier and to provide a base for the local and foreign scientists desiring to engage in arid zone research work for shorter periods.”365 Scientists pursued activities which would ‘open’ the region for agricultural development as well as more intensive settlement. They focused on water regimes and water types (the problems of brackish and saline water, desalination, and water’s movement across surface soil), desert plants (structures of plants in regards to water retention, types of plants with the best global adaptations to arid environments, germination, and propagation, especially of plants with an economic benefit), meteorological studies and climatology, solar energy, natural resources and human adaptation to arid zones.366 During this time period, scientists, including Evenari, conducted substantial research on run-off drylands agriculture.367 A program from a symposium celebrating ten years of NIAZR gives insight into the kind of research and domestic and international connections that linked the work of arid zone development in Israel with those abroad. The opening addresses for the symposium included Levi Eshkol, the Prime Minister, and panels consisted of a mixture of NIAZR scientists, ministry officials, professors from other Israeli universities, industry representatives, international academics from the University of Wisconsin, University of Adelaide, several US officials, one from the USDA, as well as Ben-Gurion, then a Member 365 Ibid., 5. 366 The Negev Institute for Arid Zone Research. “Progress Report on Research Projects.” 1962. Tuviyahu Archives, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. File no: 0804.07.001; Negev Institute for Arid Zone Research. “List of Publications: 1960-1972.” 1973. Tuviyahu Archives, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. File no: 0805.01.018. 367 Evenari et al., The Negev. 161 of Knesset.368 NIAZR would become the Applied Research Institute in 1973 (still later, the Institutes for Applied Research) merging into Ben-Gurion University’s main campus in Beersheba.369 In January 1973, the government decided to establish the Institute for Desert Research (IDR). The shift in the Hebrew name—from, literally “The Institute for Negev Research” (NIAZR) to “The Institute for Desert Research” (IDR)— spoke to the emerging global imaginary of the significance of the Naqab/Negev, more forcefully framing Israel as key node in arid zone development planning. This idea would be reified by the discourses used by Israeli officials. Scientific aims seem to always overlap with state goals. In a 1975 letter, Shimon Peres, then Minister of Defense, framed the establishment of the new institute in terms of Zionist demographic aims, the exceptionalism of Israeli science and technology, and extolled the benefit of Israeli achievements for the rest of the world. He wrote: What David Ben-Gurion had taught many years ago, has become clear today—that the future potential for developing the State of Israel lies in the arid Negev. It is with this in mind that the government of Israel decided to establish in Sede Boqer an Institute for Desert Research. This Institute is to serve as a national headquarters for desert research, in which the entire national scientific efforts in research and development of arid zones would be focused, developing the Negev into a habitat of high quality of life, contributing to its full share to the Development of Israel. I believe that Israel has a unique role in the study of arid zones and their development. This is because we belong to one of the very few countries in which two conditions exist: on one hand the development of arid zones is a 368 Negev Institute for Arid Zone Research, “Tenth Anniversary Symposium: Abstracts of Papers,” June 24-27, 1968. Tuviyahu Archives, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. File No: 0804.05.010. 369 25 Years from the Negev Institute, Tuviyahu Archives. 162 vital national interest and on the other, there exists a good scientific potential stemming from a gifted scientific community.370 Peres, invoking Ben-Gurion, situates the goals of the IDR into the teleology of Zionist thought that frames the development of the Naqab/Negev as a national priority. The region’s value is linked to state goals, “contributing its full share,” so to speak. Like in many NIAZR texts, Peres places the IDR within the context of global arid zones development, framing Israel as a central node in a worldwide network of scientific institutions. The new Institute for Desert Research was in Sede Boqer, physically alongside symbols of Ben-Gurion’s life and the research institutes dedicated to his legacy. In 1976, the David Ben-Gurion Law established the David Ben-Gurion Heritage Institute to administer his legacy and established his home in the kibbutz Sede Boqer as a landmark.371 The former would become the Ben-Gurion Archives and Research Institute and the Center for Zionist Studies. Before the physical establishment of the IDR, there were already educational institutions in Midreshet / Sede Boqer.372 The College of the Negev, a teachers’ school, was founded there to redefine the role of the Naqab/Negev, “not as a desert of attractive beauty, but as one of the pillars on which the political and economic future of 370 Shimon Peres, Unnamed Letter. October 17, 1975. In Richmond, Amos. The Academic Programme for the Desert Research Institute. The Institute for Desert Research, Sede Boqer. File No: 0863.11. Tuviyahu Archives, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. 371 The Ben-Gurion University in the Negev. The Ben-Gurion Institute and Archives. The Ben-Gurion Foundation, Ramat Gan. Pamphlet. 1981. File No: 0863.03.008. Tuviyahu Archives, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. 372 Sede Boqer is often cited as the location of BIDR and the other institutions, but this is actually the name of the adjacent kibbutz. Ben-Gurion resided in Sede Boqer. However, the new campus was founded in Midreshet Ben-Gurion, where the Ben-Gurions are buried. However, institutions often cite their address as in Sede Boqer. The reason why I highlight this geographical detail is because I do not want there to be any confusion that BIDR is an entity separate in governance from the kibbutz. Midreshet basically means a place for education. The root is similar to that in the Arabic word, madrasa. 163 Israel will be built.”373 The College was centered around educational training and lobbied for teachers to remain in the Naqab/Negev, rather than go to the more populous coast. Along with the College of the Negev, there was the Regional High School, which, founded in 1965, provided an educational center for the settlements of the Naqab/Negev.374 The Midreshet was seen as important for the development of the Naqab/Negev for the benefit of arid zones everywhere and the school continued after the establishment of the IDR.375 These institutions hosted conferences organized by NIAZR and different educational and governmental entities before the establishment of the IDR. A conference held on the second anniversary of Ben-Gurion’s death was titled, “Different Characteristics in Research and in Developing the Negev.”376 Jointly hosted by NIAZR, as part of BGU, and the National Council for Research and Development in the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, the conference provided a series of workshops on the subjects of parks and forestry, desert agriculture, (both with Michael Evenari) and water resources among other fields. The opening address by Professor Moshe Rosen, rector of BGU, connected the work of the symposium Ben-Gurion’s vision and echoed his rhetorical flourish when meditating on the Zionist task ahead. Quoting the Prophet Isaiah, he said, “Desert and wasteland shall rejoice over them, and the plain shall rejoice and shall blossom like a rose [Isaiah 35:1]…for water has broken out in the desert and streams in the plain [35:6]… and there shall be a highway and a road [35:8]377—Prof. Rosen spoke of “developing the Negev and 373 “The Midrasha of Sdeh Boker: College of the Negev.” Pamphlet. No date. No publisher. Tuviyahu Archives, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. File No: 0863.03.010. 374 Ibid., 17. 375 Ibid., 6. 376 The Institute for Desert Research and the Ministry of Energy and Industry. “Records of the Conference on the Issue: Different Characteristics in Research and in Developing the Negev.” 1975. Tuviyahu Archives, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. File No: 0863.05.001. 377 The Institute of Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University, and Ministry of Energy and Industry, National Council for Research and Development. “Conference Records on the Issue of: ‘Different Aspects in 164 making it bloom” as an unceasing vision from the days of the prophets that was going to be fulfilled by the scientists of the present. The Institute for Desert Research opened with the “Conference on Settling the Desert” in the memory of Ben-Gurion on December 4-8th, 1978 in Sede Boqer. The conference included mostly Israeli presenters, some from Israeli development authorities, such as the Jewish Agency, and the Land Settlement Department’s Negev Division. Scientists from various American academic and governmental institutions also participated, including faculty from UC Berkeley, the Office of Arid Land Studies and the Resnick Water Resources Center at the University of Arizona, and University of Nevada, Reno.378 It also included workshops on settlement design and architecture, botany and ecology of the Naqab/Negev, economic aspects of development, ancient desert agriculture, and concluded with a visit to the ruins of the city of Avdat, and a tour of a reconstructed Nabatean runoff farm guided by Evenari, himself.379 Diverging from NIAZR, the IDR (and later BIDR) would take on an expanded retinue of projects and disciplines, including, amongst others, social sciences, desert architecture, and Bedouin studies, and with it, an increasing global vision. The ideology for research continued to be justified in the language of Ben-Gurion’s vision of Zionist development, but at the same time directors and scientists worked to give the IDR’s aims a pragmatic cast. For instance, Amos Richmond, first Director of IDR, wrote in the First Research and Development of the Negev.” 1975. Tuviyahu Archives, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. File No: 0863.05.001. [Hebrew]. The translation of the Biblical Hebrew is from Chabad.org. The other translations are my own. 378 The Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, The Institute for Desert Research. “Final Program: Settling the Desert. The First Ben-Gurion Memorial Symposium and the Official Opening of the Institute for Desert Research.” December 4-8, 1978. Sede Boqer Campus. Tuviyahu Archives, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. File No: 0804.01.005. 379 Ibid. 165 Annual Scientific Activities Report for the IDR in 1978, “Settling in the desert is not just a matter of ideology based upon a pioneering spirit, it must come as a result of its attractive quality of life—as reflected in working and living conditions and in its milieu and landscape.”380 Development, as conceived here by Richmond, was to be “balanced,” reflecting tensions between industrial interests and their exploitative potential, population and planning needs, preservation of the natural environment, and attention to the behavioral and settlement pattern of “nomads,” that is, indigenous Bedouin citizens. In short, the new institute planned to supplement development in the Naqab/Negev by creating a better standard of living, addressing the failure of ideology alone to attract the Jewish population south. “Balanced development” differed from Ben-Gurion’s idea of a total mastery over a static, resistant nature. The IDR’s mission represented a slight divergence from Ben-Gurion’s Zionist ideological imperatives, seeking to adapt to the physical characteristics of the desert to the advantage of the state rather than completely transform the landscape itself. Many of the issues that the IDR and BIDR focused on in its early years reflected the specific needs outlined by the state in the Naqab/Negev: industrial pollution around Ramat Hovav, urban sewage in Beersheba, kibbutz irrigation, desert settlement planning, and the potential for alternative energies like solar power.381 While the NIAZR focused on more natural sciences, the IDR coupled these with projects in “Environmental Education,” “Building Climatology” (how to construct more adaptive buildings that make use of solar radiation and natural cooling), “Desert Architecture” (that worked on locating new settlements based 380 Institute for Desert Research, First Annual Scientific Report, 3. 381 The Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research. “Sixth Annual Report, 1984.” Sede Boqer, 1985. Tuviyahu Archives, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. File No: 0307.06.003: 5. 166 on ecological considerations, as well as architecture adapted to desert conditions), “Desert Economies” (regional economic analysis of scientific projects), “Social Studies of Urban Settlements in the Desert,” (sociological studies of “development towns”), “Desert Parks and Plant Introduction,” (concerned with the production of interlinked parks with adaptive plants throughout the region), and “Nomad Settlement” (comparative studies of Bedouin in relation to other ‘nomads’ in the Middle East).382 The name of the IDR was changed in 1980 to the Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research (BIDR) after the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Foundation donated $2.5 million, followed by more funding later. Blaustein, in BIDR materials, is described as a major American industrialist and Jewish community leader, who served for years on the Jewish American Council and sought closer ties between American Jews and Israel. He and his father founded the American Oil Company in 1910. He also worked closely with President Truman and as a delegate to the UN, worked to include the Human Rights provision in the United Nations charter.383 The IDR continued to place itself within a global network of arid zone development: “In a world beset with problems of immense complexity, perhaps the most foreboding is the prospect of ever expanding [sic] populations without adequate living space and food.” The report follows with this: Over one third of the earth’s land surface is desert or semi-desert. In many parts of the world, millions of acres of arable land are lost each year to the encroaching desert. Humanity is thus confronted with a great challenge, to convert the earth’s desiccated drylands from abandoned wastelands into habitable and productive areas.384 382 The Institute for Desert Research, First Annual Scientific Report, 13-24. 383 The Institute for Desert Research. Seventh Annual Report on Scientific Activities – 1985. 1986. Sede- Boqer Tuviyahu Archive, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. File No: 0863.09.001. 384 The Institute for Desert Research, First Annual Scientific Report, 1. Both quotations above. 167 Zionist visions of the Naqab/Negev are universalized: now, all arid zones are re- classified as “abandoned wastelands” that should be transformed into “productive areas.” On its surface, this claim positions Israeli scientists as having developed the expertise for global action. But it also serves to legitimize Israel as a geo-political force, both for foreign audiences and Israelis themselves. The IDR/BIDR forged connections with universities abroad, hosting professors and sending its own faculty for visiting positions. The institutions also hosted international guests, politicians, celebrities, and visiting scientists from the Global North and South. These kinds of visits seemed very important for IDR/BIDR administrators as they kept detailed counts of visitors, their country of origin, and their own work abroad, statistics and descriptions that would appear in the beginning of every annual scientific report. To give some examples, visitors included a professor from India who sought to establish a similar desert studies center in Pune,385 a one-day workshop for trainees from Asian and African countries,386 the director of the Del Centro Para Zone Aridas in Mexico, 385 The Institute for Desert Research, Second Annual Scientific Report, 24. 386 The Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research. Fourth Annual Scientific Report. [hard to see editor]. 1981[?]. File No: 0307.06.001: 14. Tuviyahu Archives, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Ben David, Calev, "Cultivating the Third World." Negev No 21, Summer 1987. Department of Publications and Media Relations, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel. Figure 10. Cultivating the Third World. 168 and a delegation from Chile.387 Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, and Senator Edward Kennedy all visited.388 Actress, Elizabeth Taylor also visited BIDR as a guest of BGU’s president.389 Academic exchanges evolved into more intensive programs aimed at using IDR/BIDR as a training site for arid zone scientists from across the world. By 1984, BIDR established the Blaustein International Center for Desert Studies which focused on specific outreach to people in other arid zones to offer “trainee programs for people from developing countries studying a particular topic or affiliated as individuals to the various research units at the Institute.”390 Two of the inaugural programs were for Thai professionals looking at algal biomass production (at the time seen as an emergent technology) and trainees in an international course on Ancient Techniques for Modern Agriculture in Arid Zones, including participants from Kenya, Bolivia, Switzerland, Germany and the US391 In particular, under Evenari, the run-off farms and desert agriculture units were interested in providing developing countries with their expertise. In reports, Evenari mentions the transmission of their techniques to peasants in Afghanistan who have replicated run-off agriculture.392 In particular, scientific reports of the IDR’s first years claims that farmers in Pakistan, India, Niger, Kenya, Mexico, Australia, and the Upper Volta adopted methods learned from Israel.393 Evenari saw such efforts as helpful 387 Karl Manor and Margo Tepper-Schotz, eds. Scientific Report for 1982 and 1983. Spring 1984. The Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research, File No: 0863.07.003: 29-30. Tuviyahu Archives, Ben- Gurion University of the Negev. 388 Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. President’s Report 2010. https://in.bgu.ac.il/President%20Report/PR_2010.pdf. Accessed August 2019; Ben-Ami, Alan. “The Human Touch.” Negev, No 1. Winter 1974: 17. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Publications Office. 389 The Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research. Scientific Report for 1982 and 1983, 14. 390 The Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research. Sixth Annual Report, 1984, 7. 391 Ibid., 8. 392 Richmond, The Academic Programme for the Desert Research Institute. 393 The Institute for Desert Research, Second Annual Scientific Report, 35. 169 for settling nomads in arid countries since their pastoral lifestyles threatened overgrazing of global arid zones.394 With the establishment of IDR/BIDR, Bedouins became a specific object of institutional study, linked to the overall concerns of Zionist desert studies. Dr. Emanuel Marx headed the new Social Studies and Nomad Settlement division. Marx’s influential 1967 book, Bedouin of the Negev, is an in-depth, ethnographic exploration of customs, social, and political organization. Marx looks at how the Military Administration adversely affected Bedouin livelihoods throughout the first decades of the state.395 He also extensively records and describes Bedouin agricultural and pastoral practices. Though his work is generally critical of how the state disrupted Bedouin lives, at the time, Marx, drawing from the scientific assumptions reinforced the idea that Bedouin are linked to desertification and conflated the agency of environment and people: Whenever the country was ruled by a strong hand, the sown land advanced from the north and pushed back the desert, while during periods of turmoil the farmers who remained without military protection would be exposed to the depredations of the nomads from the south. At such times the desert would penetrate deep into cultivated territory and lay everything waste. 396 In this passage, nomadic peoples are an environmental force, in some cases, the desert itself. The encroachment of sand was directly linked to the fortunes of political and territorial control. 394 Richmond, The Academic Programme for the Desert Research Institute. 395 For more on the Military Administration and how it impacted Palestinians lives in Israel, see Hillel Cohen. The Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs 1948-1967. (University of California Press, 2011). 396 See Emanuel Marx, Bedouin of the Negev (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1967): 7. 170 Figure 11. Bedouin Student 1. Figure 12. Bedouin Student 2. Two different sources, the same photograph. Student and medical student, Ibrahim Interat, is pictured in one article as an example of Bedouin nomadism and the end of pastoral livelihoods, and in another, as proof of BGU’s out-reach to Bedouin students. In one photograph, Bedouins are meant to be seen as pre-modern. In the other, a medical student juggles another job. Above: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev / The Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research. “Social Studies Center.” File No. 0863.03.009. No Date. Ben-Zvi Printing Enterprises Ltd., Jerusalem. Tuviyahu Archives, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel. Below: “Bedouin Students at BGU.” Negev No. 5, Summer 1977. Department of Publications and Media Relations, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel. 171 The social sciences at IDR/BIDR intertwined with environmental and scientific theories and reified ideas that Bedouin Arabs were a problem that needed to be solved within the contours of the state. Scientists framed Bedouins as a discrete ethnic group, not as part of a Palestinian, pan-Arab, or even trans-national identity. Their current distress was not due to the intensification of settler colonial modes of expropriation and control, but rather a cultural collision with modernity: The Nomad Settlement Unit seeks to understand and appreciate [Bedouins’] sensitivities so that on one hand, the rich development of Bedouin history and culture will not be brought to an end by modern technology and, on the other, the desert environment will not be destroyed.397 “Culture” and “tradition” were framed as the root causes of Bedouin poverty, in keeping with the influences of modernization theory. One IDR pamphlet (1978) remarks that “These people have traditions and a life style that is not easily compatible with what has come to be identified with the twentieth century.”398 Bedouin social studies at IDR/BIDR also represented Bedouin culture and lifestyle as an environmental threat—their goats and camels supposedly ravaged the delicate desert ecosystem.399 Therefore, IDR/BIDR’s environmental and social solutions to Bedouin poverty focused on transforming their “cultures” and “traditions.” Like Israeli state policy, the IDR/BIDR supported curtailing the Bedouin use of their historic lands. Bedouin citizens in rural spaces on farms represented a problem for Israeli policy makers and scientists. The IDR/BIDR offered a policy of Bedouin 397 Harry Wall, “The Institute for Desert Research.” Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheva, Israel. Tuviyahu Archives, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. No date. File No: 0307.01.003. 398 Institute for Desert Research, “Institute for Desert Research.” 1978. File No: 0804.01.003: 8. Tuviyahu Archives, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. 399 Wall, “The Institute for Desert Research.” 172 sedentarization and urbanization that would incentivize Bedouins to give up land claims in exchange for monetary compensation and plots in the new townships.400 These Israeli policy proposals from both the natural science and social science centers at the desert research institutions were intertwined with military control over Bedouins (even after the end of the Military Administration). For instance, as Ratcliffe et al., write: The colonial associations of anthropologists and Israeli experts on the Arabs have been well documented (Asad 1975) and, in some cases, have been long-lasting, since scholars were asked to produce knowledge on the Bedouin for the military government, or to help the military government in its role of governing Bedouin. Israeli academic institutions have often been committed to their national role and to the Zionist project in managing Arab relations.401 Policies pushed Bedouins to adapt to the Israeli state’s goals, mainly demographic control over land. For example, in 1980, as a result of the peace deal with Egypt, Israel began to move military infrastructure from the Sinai Peninsula to the Naqab/Negev. Bedouins in the northern Naqab/Negev faced the possibility of a staggering loss of land and villages from potential widespread expulsions. Bedouin resistance eventually pushed the government to decrease the acreage of a new air force base (now Nevatim), though it still impacted many villagers who did have to move, or remained within the base’s security zone.402 Social scientists at BIDR investigated the processes of negotiation between Bedouin and the state in regards to land and compensation in the wake of Nevatim’s establishment. Researchers reflected that if the negotiation over lands and compensation were successful, “it will serve 400 Dover, Second Annual Scientific Report, 154. 401 Ratcliffe, et al., Introduction, 15. 402 The siting of military bases and installations throughout the Naqab/Negev has been a primarily way to appropriate land from Bedouins. Many of the reserves in the Naqab/Negev are tied to the military, as research facilities, training bases, and firing ranges. The IDF plans to move intelligence bases into the Naqab/Negev in the midst of another cluster of unrecognized villages, resulting in an uncertain future for some villages. 173 as the basis of negotiated settlement of other Bedouin land claims,” framing any sort of agreement as ‘successful’ within the contours of what the state would allow.403 Bedouin towns near Nevatim are still unrecognized by the state today. In the following section, I look at how these settler colonial imperatives especially mobilized the study and projects related to run-off desert agriculture. While many different scientists worked on run-off agriculture during their time at NIAZR, IDR, and BIDR, Michael Evenari was at the center of run-off agriculture work thanks to his long collaboration with others in establishing and maintaining the experimental farms at Avdat, Shivtim, and Wadi Mashash. I show how run-off agriculture represented an ideological continuum of Zionist ideas of desertification. Furthermore, I detail how Evenari’s work contributed to specific chronologies of the landscape that can be characterized as “Zionist time”—that is, the focus on the ancient farming techniques of the past helped the state efface Bedouin cultivation. Michael Evenari, Zionist Time, and Desert Agriculture A Jewish Telegraphic Agency article from 1986 entitled, “An Israeli Helps Green the Barren Painted Desert,”404 details the two-year research stay of a BIDR scientist, David Mazigh, with the Diné (Navajo) Nation of Arizona. There Mazigh helped direct the implementation of run-off agriculture in three different communities with backing from the social justice organization, Jewish Fund for Justice and the Seventh Generation Fund, an 403 Dover, ed. Third Annual Scientific Report, 29. 404 Marlene Goldman, “An Israeli Helps Green the Barren Painted Desert.” Jewish Telegraph Agency. September 1, 1986. https://www.jta.org/1986/09/02/archive/special-to-the-jta-an-israeli-helps-green-the- bareen-painted-desert. 174 Indigenous nations’ organization that assisted in tribal economic development. The original idea for the connection between BIDR and the Diné was Jacques Seronde’s, director of the Seventh Generation Fund and a white US American who had married into a Diné family and worked and lived with the nation since 1970. “I was inspired by the book, ‘The Negev: Challenge of the Desert,’ by Michael Avenari [sic],’ Seronde told the JTA. Seronde was impressed how the Israelis conquered the Negev using runoff water and he envisioned success using similar methods in the arid region inhabited by the Navajos.” Seronda studied drip irrigation at BIDR in 1981. Mazigh and Diné participants were able to grow potatoes, corn, melons, and other crops using run-off agriculture and drip irrigation and Seronde hoped that in the future, as BIDR planned to expand the program, that Diné and other Native Nations could go to Israel, where he felt that “there is a good chance we can adapt the Israeli model to meet Native American needs.” Seronde also compared Diné communities with Israeli moshavim (semi-communal settlements). For his part, Mazigh found that this was an opportunity to teach the Diné about Israel: When Mazigh first arrived in early 1985, he said that the Navajos didn’t even know what Israel is. They could not understand why the Jewish people wanted to help them. “I told them Jews believe you love other people as you love yourself. This is my religion,” he explained. “I think they understood.” The Diné gave him the name Nihikaoojeeh, meaning “one who comes to help us.”405 This episode reveals several contradictory ideas of culture, indigeneity, and knowledge that appear as a “setter common sense.”406 The episode also illustrated how desert research institutions in Israel sought to become the source for this type of knowledge, capitalizing on the idea of Israel as a nation engaged in “greening the desert,” and “making 405 Ibid. 406 Rifkin, Settler Common Sense. 175 it bloom.” As I showed in the last section, the desert research institutions made modest progress to shape the Naqab/Negev as a critical node in a network of international arid zone development. Seronde (at least as framed in the JTA article) accepted the Zionist settler myths. Mazigh’s work supposedly helped expand the connection between Diné communities and BIDR.407 The logic of settler scientific enterprises also effaced indigenous histories of land use. Mazigh worked to inculcate in Diné participants knowledge that arrived from Israel and was expropriated—as least partially—from indigenous Bedouin Arabs. The project with the Diné also relied on the premise that Naqab/Negev was a ‘wasteland’ that had only recently returned to its former glory. The Zionist ‘re-discovery’ of the methods of ancient agriculture allowed them to bookend Jewish presence (before and after the Bedouins) in the Naqab/Negev as well as place themselves in a chronology of productivity which excluded Muslims, Palestinians, and Arabs. Scientific expertise, then, allows settlers to de-contextualize and de-politicize ongoing settler colonial structures and relations, rendering the settlers themselves indigenous inhabitants. Mazigh, when departing from his work with the Diné said, “Today I feel like an Indian.”408 This statement is tangled in the contradictory settler common sense of scientific expertise; the Israeli is simultaneously 407 Dover, ed. Third Annual Scientific Report. Page 22; Fourth Annual Scientific Report, 13. 408 Goldman, “An Israeli Helps Green the Barren Painted Desert.” Michael Evenari. Arnold Schlissel, “Water Strategies for Desert Living.” Negev No. 9, Fall 1979. Department of Publications and Media Relations, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel. Figure 13. Michael Evenari. 176 the indigenous subject and settler associate, operating in an institutional and ideological system that intertwines settler subjectivities. Michael Evenari’s work operates within this contradictory space of settler scientific expertise. Born Walter Schwartz in 1904 in Alsace-Lorraine, Evenari grew up and studied botany in Germany. Experiencing rising antisemitism throughout his youth and young professional life, Schwartz, already an ardent Zionist, decided to emigrate to Palestine after being dismissed in 1933 from his professorship for being a Jew.409 He took up a position at Hebrew University in the Department of Botany (a university at which he’d eventually serve as Vice-President). Evenari also accepted work in Aaron Aaronsohn’s herbarium because of his respect for the agronomist’s work and Zionist political dedication.410 Evenari describes his first time in the deserts of Palestine and Transjordan as an emotional, almost spiritual experience, and came to have similar feelings when visiting other deserts throughout the world in his lifetime, such as those in Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, North America, Mexico, and Australia.411 On the first pages of The Negev, Evenari et al. write how the early days of their work was “the era of hard-desert living, when we camped under the open starry sky. Many of us grew beards during the trips and on our return to Beersheba we would look like gun- packing frontiersmen from the Wild West.”412 In this moment, Evenari is not imagining himself as an Israelite returning to Zion, as perhaps expected, but an American pioneer in the lawless West. Like others embedded in Zionist settler ideologies, Evenari, born not in the US but in Germany, imagines a romanticized American frontier in order describe his 409 Evenari, Evenari, et al., The Negev; Evenari, The Awakening Desert, 43-44. 410 Ibid., 26. 411 Ibid., 48. 412 Evenari, et al., The Negev, 1. 177 own pioneering (chalutziut) ethos.413 In such a context, built on an ideology that references colonial dominance in the United States, desert runoff agriculture cannot be read outside of settler colonial structures and relations. Desert runoff agriculture, as a type of scientific knowledge that connects present-day Zionist scientists to the past, makes scientists heirs to antiquity’s ‘masters of the desert,’ wedded to the land, newcomers but always already indigenous, while its longtime Bedouins are rendered nomadic transitory invaders.414 Evenari’s signature scientific contribution revolved around the ‘rediscovery’ of runoff desert agriculture. “Runoff agriculture” is akin to “rainfed agriculture” in that it does not rely on irrigation, but instead seeks to adapt to the arid climatic regime.415 Runoff agriculture relies on the principle that rare downpours need to be collected and stored to guard against future scarcity. Often, rain in the Naqab/Negev comes in seasonal and short violent bursts. The region’s dominant loess soil forms an impermeable crust that, when wet, acts like concrete, diverting water from intense downpours.416 Runoff agriculture worked best as a system of terraces, sluices, dams, and catchments that served to shunt rain water into crop fields, designed to act as wading pools.417 These runoff systems collected 413 See Chapter 1: A Zionist Frontier Theory: Settler Colonialism and Colonial Development. 414 Hebrew does not actually have an exact word that can translate into the English word for “indigenous.” There are two words that are used: moledi and teva’i. Moledi comes from the root, ‘born of,’ sharing a root also with moledet, homeland, but is not used to define Bedouins. Teva’i means “natural,” which is problematic when considering how indigenous peoples worldwide have been often seen as a part of nature. The Hebrew for ‘Native Americans’ is even more problematic, playing into colonial tropes: Yelidi Americanim or “children of America.” 415 See Tesdell, Shadow Spaces, Chapter 3: “On the Durability of Rainfed Farming.” 416 In the Naqab/Negev’s winter (rainy season), I was warned against taking desert treks on days where there might be rain, even if it was localized and short. Because of the loess soil and topography, an intense storm in one area could cause a flood miles away (in an area without rain), and a dry wadi could easily turn into a churning rush of boulders and debris. 417 The reader may read “cistern” and think of a vase-like vessel of a small size. The cisterns in the Naqab/Negev, that Bedouin and others have used for some time, can resemble large square rooms that hold a massive amount of water and are accessible by stairway or by well. Some of these Evenari et al. (1982) describe as having a floor area of 36 square meters at a dept of 4-6 meters, and date from the Nabatean period (159). In one case, they document a cistern that fills up from one flood and is subsequently used by Bedouins for two years (161). 178 water from a wide area and then diverted as much of that volume as possible into storage pools, cisterns, and fields. Terraced wadis slowly flooded level by level to retain as much water as possible. These technologies ranged in complexity and size. A whole farm might rely on terraced wadis that shuttled all water between stone walls into large fields. In other instances, a cistern at the bottom of an incline could collect water for drinking and watering animals, while a “microcatchment,” a shallow dug around the base of a tree, irrigated individual crops and trees, an idea taken from peasants in Tunisia.418 These techniques varied in success, but on average they exponentially increased the amount of water collected from rainfall. For instance, if the most arid parts of the Negev receive 100 mm of rain on average, a runoff field could collect 500 to 750 mm in addition to direct rainfall.419 Evenari credits a Ph.D. student, Dov Koller, with introducing him to the study of the ancient farms and “run-off agriculture” or “ancient desert agriculture” in 1954. Evenari was impressed by the discovery and decided to pursue the question of how agriculture “flourished” in the desert. His first source on the subject happened to be E.H. Palmer’s book, given to him by his brother-in-law when he left Germany.420 Using planes on loan from the Israeli Air Force, Evenari and Koller were able to find “close to a hundred ancient agricultural systems” and had many questions: From the start, it was clear that we were confronted with a far more complex problem than we had anticipated. Where did the desert farmers get their water? Was the Negev a desert in ancient times as today, or did it have a more humid climate with more rainfall? Was agriculture restricted to a certain type of soil? Did they employ different farming methods? Were the Nabateans the only group to carry out farming activities in the desert? 418 Evenari, The Awakening Desert, 156. 419 Ibid., 141. 420 Ibid., 137. 179 Evenari and his team, including his wife, Liesel, began the reconstruction of the ancient farm at Shivta in 1957 with the help of the Ford, Rockefeller, and Rothschild Foundations, followed by Avdat (1958) and later, Wadi Mashash (1968) (they would later abandon Shivta because of safety concerns).421 Michael and Leisel Evenari lived at Avdat full-time and it became the center of their research.422 Later, Avdat would become the home of the Pistachio Research Center in cooperation with the Jewish National Fund.423 Their goal was to produce crops usually found in wetter regions without the use of irrigation. Reconstructed farms were the basis for testing the scientists’ theories of ancient runoff farming, the collection of data on the volume of different runoff systems and watersheds, the identification of which crops worked best under these conditions and test their suitability to arid environments, all of which was meant to supplement “modern desert agriculture.”424 Wadi Mashash was specifically used to experiment with desert agriculture on a larger scale focusing on “fruit trees, field crops, pasture plants, and vegetables” and especially almonds.425 The goal was to measure the “rentability” costs of the land, to make it suitable for Israeli farmers, Bedouins, and peasants from developing countries.426 Mashash would later be central to an experiment of controlled grazing methods for the husbandry of sheep.427 Overall, the work at the different farms were framed as “a major effort… underway to develop new crops, cropping systems and applications of water- 421 Ibid., 148-149. 422 Ibid., 6. 423 The Negev Institute for Arid Zone Research. “10th Anniversary Program, 24-27 June 1968.” Prime Minister’s Office, National Council for Research and Development. File No: 0863.03.006. Tuviyahu Archives, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. 424 Evenari et al., The Negev, 327. 425 Ibid. 426 Ibid., 324. 427 Dover, ed. Third Annual Scientific Report. 180 harvesting techniques, with particular emphasis on the needs and problems of people living in arid regions of developing counties.”428 Like the work of other contemporaneous units at IDR/BIDR, runoff agriculture research was no longer just about developing the Naqab/Negev, but arid zones in general. Evenari framed current Zionist efforts within a teleology of progressive civilization that connected work in the Naqab/Negev to the Middle East and North Africa, though, excluded Bedouins and Arabs as part of that chronological timeline: In the Negev desert of Israel and especially in the Negev Highlands around the ruins of six ancient cities (Avdat, Shivta, Ruheibe, Nizzana, Kurnub, Khaluza) extensive traces of ancient desert agriculture are to be found in an area, where today only the Bedouin graze their flocks on completed overgrazed ground. The same type of ancient desert agriculture exists in large areas of the Syrian desert and all over the desert belt of North Africa which once for many centuries was the main grain producer of the Roman empire and today is nothing but an unproductive desert.”429 Evenari, like Palmer and others who adhere to the theory of the Arab anthropogenic change in the Naqab/Negev, blamed Bedouins for the degradation of the land and imagined the past landscape under other civilizations (Rome, Byzantines, Nabateans) as uniquely verdant. Even though The Negev is filled with references to Bedouin who often provide the labor and knowledge that contributes to the farms, Evenari is unable to see and imagine Bedouin cultivation as more than the detritus of lost civilizations. He, like others of his time, saw the Bedouin as ethnographic vestiges of past peoples. Since cultivation was progress, a lack of cultivation was regress. In one episode early on in The Negev, an unexpected rainstorm destroyed the scientists’ early efforts at planting and plowing. Evenari and his team asked for help from 428 Seventh Annual Report on Scientific Activities – 1985: 42. 429 Richmond, The Academic Programme. 0863.11. 181 a Bedouin neighbor who promised them seven men, but instead, twenty-one Bedouin farmers appeared a few weeks later to help. Evenari writes: On the morning of December 4 twenty-one Bedouins appeared with their camels and plows! Soon the farm, which had been abandoned for many centuries, came to life as camels began to drag their antiquated wooden plows... The quiet desert resounded with the shouts of drivers, and an air of festivity hung over the whole valley. The sowing was completed as the setting sun cast long shadows over the newly cultivated fields. The reader can imagine our boundless joy two weeks later, when the first greenish tips of barley broke through. Soon the whole field was green and now we felt that we had made the first step on the road to our goal. (This barley crop yielded 1250 kilograms of grain per hectare, a marked achievement if we consider the primitive methods of plowing and sowing).430 The lesson that the scientists took away from this episode is that they needed to learn how to anticipate sudden rainstorms and floods.431 One would think the moral of the story would be to ask their Bedouin neighbors for more insight and help. Let us reiterate what occurred here: local Bedouin men plowed a large farm in only one day, using an already established choreographed collaboration that yielded quite a lot of barley—long a staple of Bedouin farmers. In his autobiography, Evenari writes of the Bedouin men working in rows, one from “right to left, his neighbor from left to right,” and still sees these methods as “primitive.”432 The irony is that Evenari and his team set out to understand how people could farm in the desert—but only focus on ancient civilizations, not its current inhabitants. He is not interested in Bedouin expertise and technique. He doesn’t ask why the men decided to help (so close to the Nakba and during the period of intense military rule over Palestinian citizens of Israel). He isn’t curious about their tools, the “antiquated” plows (as 430 Evenari et al., The Negev, 4. 431 Ibid., 5. 432 Evenari, The Awakening Desert, 150-151. 182 if they had been carried around since antiquity), how they trained their camels for plowing, nor where else in the Naqab/Negev they cooperated to cultivate land. Instead, Evenari continues to hold onto the idea that Bedouin only put animals to pasture and do not cultivate the land with any deftness, attuned over time. Bedouin knowhow remains ahistorical and disembodied. Though their Bedouin neighbors seem to accomplish much on this December day, Evenari does not conclude that these men have expertise and knowledge that would help him and other scientists in their experiments. Or perhaps he cannot recognize the extent of their expertise and knowledge, myopically viewing the land and its people through a settler’s eyes. Like scientific documents from the desert research institutions, The Negev is suffused with these kinds of judgements on the merits of Bedouin cultivation and civilization. Evenari and his team find ancient agricultural settlements in places where “today only Bedouin graze their flocks on completely overgrazed desert ground.”433 For Evenari et al., the Bible is a reference point for describing Bedouins in the present. There are “natural water holes…mentioned in the Bible”: These natural water holes attract all kinds of desert wild life, especially in the early evening hours. They also serve the Bedouin nomads of today, and are certainly the most primitive surface-water collectors used by the ancient desert inhabitants.434 What are wells are instead diminished as “natural water holes”—they appear disconnected from the human ingenuity of desert survival. Like the animals of the desert, Bedouin also 433 Richmond, The Academic Programme, 0863.11. The quotation is from Evenari’s article, “Ancient Desert Agriculture” in the program. The second half of this document is a collection of reports from department heads with no page numbers. 434 Evenari et al., The Negev, 157. 183 gather. The authors render Bedouins as part of the ancient and contemporary natural landscape. There is no history, only primitive survival. For Evenari, Palmer functions as a referent for perceiving contemporary Bedouin: “The Bedouin is often referred to as the son of the desert. As a result of continuous overgrazing of herds and mismanagement of the land, the Bedouin may in time also be called the father of the desert.”435 When writing on farming: “The final use of the area was by nomadic Bedouins who merely adapted the fields between the dilapidating terrace walls to sporadic patch cultivation.”436 “Merely adapted” is a dismissive way of describing Palestinian Bedouin cultivation, using Nabatean and Byzantine runoff farms. Their cultivation is “sporadic.” However, aerial photos commissioned by the scientists show more extensive cultivation437 and Evenari et al. speak of the traditional Bedouin cultivation of barley, which “[yields] 0.4-0.6 ton per hectare in good years,”438 while settler scientists succeeded in yielding 4.8 tons per hectare in 1966 alone.439 This difference in volume helped prove the settlers’ superiority in cultivation—though, of course, the success of a yield was relative to immediate need, desire to sell excess crops, and factors such as access to land, amount of laborers, and institutional support. Even when Bedouins use the terraced wadis of runoff agriculture farms—what the scientists are hoping to recreate for their own use—they are still denied credit for utilizing these technologies to survive in the desert. The tone is condescending: “Even today some enterprising Bedouins sow some of these areas to barley after an early winter flood. In 435 The Institute for Desert Research, 0307.01.003. 436 Evenari et al., The Negev, 114. 437 Ibid., 98. 438 Ibid., 192. 439 Ibid., 193. 184 many cases yields can be considered good by the standards of the Bedouin.”440 The point is not whether scientists may have produced more of a yield on average than Bedouin neighbors—indeed, they had the resources of the state and international philanthropic and scientific institutions—but rather that Bedouin cultivation could never meet a threshold that counted as expertise and knowledge, nor did contemporaneous reasons for lack of widespread Bedouin cultivation (mass population expulsion, war, displacement, and martial law) ever register in scientific texts. The marked binary between the skilled and unskilled, between the expert and the ignorant, is not only wielded against Bedouin, but also new Jewish immigrants from ‘eastern’ countries. This kind of Orientalism and racism was common in Israel from the 1950s onwards.441 In The Negev, European Jews are responsible for the tutelage of recent immigrants from Arab and South Asian countries. Evenari writes: We employed a labor force of relief workers from Yeorukham [a development town near Beersheba]. They were all new immigrants from Morocco, Tunis, India, or Pakistan, possessed scant knowledge of Hebrew, and sometimes proved rather difficult to manage. Edward Dribben of Orot, himself an excellent stonemason and experienced ranch hand, taught the workers how to work and in several instances developed the ablest of them into skilled artisans.442 In another section, attesting to the level of work that the “Eastern” Jews are capable of, Evenari calculates the time it would take for one farm to be built: The reconstruction of the Shivta farm offered a good opportunity to arrive an estimate of the work force needed in ancient times to build such a farm. We required about 2000 man days, that is, 10 men working for 200 days. The relief workers we employed were new immigrants unused to this kind of labor, and an ancient laborer would certainly have produced no less than the relief worker. It is therefore reasonable to estimate that such a farm 440 Ibid., 97. 441 See Yehouda Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). 442 Evenari, et al., The Negev, 4. 185 could easily be constructed in 2000 man days. This could have been done by a family with three or four children in about 1-2 years.443 The capabilities, skills, and labor of non-European Jews are constantly undermined (they couldn’t do worse than Nabateans). Workers (who had come to Israel, only to be placed in towns and labor not of their choosing, disoriented from losing their homes and struggling to learn a new language in a new country, and could have been professionals) are akin to “children” working on a farm. European Zionist scientists or those born in Palestine/Israel retain the position of teacher and manager while others remain the subjects in need of improvement. Elsewhere in desert research institution texts, Bedouins contribute to the projects of the scientists. For instance, in the Third Annual Scientific Report for BIDR in 1980, the report states that Bedouins gave the team 100 young sheep for their experiments at Wadi Mashash.444 The scientists again do not attempt to learn from Palestinian Bedouins, but instead immediately begin experimenting to make the sheep grazing more “economically feasible.” One of Evenari’s guards, an Ed Abdallah, remembers the existence of an Ottoman-era well that Bedouins found and cleared so they could water their animals.445 The team buys Awassi sheep from local Bedouins Ahmed and Ibrahim el Huseil for their experiments.446 They find and document hundreds of cisterns throughout the Naqab/Negev, many of which Bedouins still use.447 They employ Bedouins to clean out one of these cisterns.448 They receive information on the names of specific places from local Bedouins, 443 Ibid., 181. 444 Dover, Third Annual Scientific Report. 0804.04.001. 445 Evenari, et al., The Negev, 332. 446 Ibid. 447 Ibid., 159. 448 Ibid., 161. 186 who sometimes tell the scientists which kind of crops grow there.449 In one instance, Bedouins tell them a place is called “Wadi Sayatoun”—the “olive-tree wadi”—and yet the scientists only describe the trees there as growing “wild.”450 They collect data on animal husbandry by gathering information on the numbers of Bedouin camels, asking why there was a precipitous drop in camels between 1943 (30,000 camels) to no more than a few thousand in the 1970s.451 It does not occur to the scientists to ask what happened to decrease the camel population in the intervening years. In the perception of the scientists, settler colonialism happens in the passive tense, devoid of explanation and culpability. The reconstruction of the farm at Wadi Mashash, for instance, was delayed as the scientists had to establish our legal rights to work the land. This seemed to be a simple matter, but when we tried to find out who either owned the land or had the right to use it, we ran into difficulties. Because of conflicting interests it took some time and diplomacy to settle the question. We finally came to an agreement with the Israeli Land Authority and Sheikh Odeh Abu Mu’ammer whose Azazmeh tribe had been using the land for grazing.452 The ‘Azazmeh are not land claimants here, even though Evenari and team had to settle land use rights. Instead, they “had been using the land for grazing,” passing over its surface, nomadic and transient. To recapitulate, Michael Evenari’s runoff agriculture linked present Zionist efforts to those of antiquity. This, in effect, produces a “Zionist time” in the desert: not only does the teleology of the desert’s development link past and present in a way that benefits Zionist claims to “making the desert bloom,” but it renders the temporal period between the Arab 449 Ibid., 122. 450 Ibid. 451 Ibid., 307. 452 Ibid., 325. 187 Conquest and Bedouin life as a disruption from a great but now defunct tradition of arid zone cultivation. Not only does this efface Bedouin claims to the land because of the juridical importance of cultivation, but it renders Bedouin as ahistorical, outside of progressive time. Zionists define what type of development and for whom the benefits reach, in the end, working towards the goal of settler sovereignty and extending settler colonial structures and relations. In this way, desert research institutions repackaged Zionist settler colonialism as a type of scientific expertise, and in doing so, effaced Bedouin cultivation in the past and present. Conclusion: The Legacy and Limits of Zionist Desert Sciences Environmental desert studies in the Naqab/Negev supplemented Zionist settler development. Scientific theory and practice cannot be understood without taking into account its ongoing relationship to the state and Zionist ideology. Israeli scientific research in the Naqab/Negev coincided with the state’s ongoing Nakba, that saw continual expulsions, land appropriation, and confinement of Palestinian Bedouin citizens. Though the military administration of Bedouin citizens nominally ended in 1967,453 the policies of the state continued to appropriate Palestinian land for Jewish citizens. While the desert research institutions, especially the Desert Agriculture program under Evenari, seemed to imagine arid development finely tuned to an agricultural and ecological future based on the cultivation methods of antiquity, Bedouin citizens, some of whom had been dryland farmers and pastoralists, were now being framed chiefly as ‘nomads.’ The solution to the 453 Nasasra, The Naqab Bedouin, 6. 188 environmental and social problems of ‘nomads’ was to promote policies to settle them in urbanized dwellings geared towards a precarious capitalist wage economy. As I showed in this chapter, desert research institutions often effaced Bedouin cultivation by ignoring or degrading Bedouin land-use. This helped solidify the settler colonial juridical structures that only recognized land ownership through a spectrum of cultivation. But it also imagined a specific conception of time that excised Bedouin from a civilizational history of dryland agriculture. The legacy of such desert sciences is that it ultimately depoliticized questions of land and poverty and further displaced non-Jewish historical attachments and land claims within Israeli political possibilities. In this history, the Zionist ideological imaginations of the environment, of its past, present, and future, loom large. Desert research institutions tried to literally “make the desert bloom” and sought to develop the “wasteland.” The ideological continuity of NIAZR, IDR, and BIDR show how Zionists saw themselves, in the words of Weizman and Sheikh, as a “climatic force.”454 Zionist desert research produced two different ideological effects when it came to the Naqab/Negev desert. Zionist sciences excised any notion of Arab cultivation, connecting the contemporary Israeli present to the pre-Conquest age of antiquity, drawing from colonial texts that saw Arabs Bedouins as the cause of desertification. As a result, Bedouin cultivation was effaced from the record of the Naqab/Negev. Not only did this erase a robust history of Bedouin cultivation, land ownership, and political and social life, but eventually Bedouin were seen as “objects of development” for the Zionist state. Zionist desert scientists saw the Naqab/Negev as a blank slate, the future for their own development. Zionist sciences constructed themselves 454 Weizman and Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline, 10. 189 as heirs to the ancient “masters of the desert”—the Nabateans who had found a way to engineer the land in order to exploit its water regime. Zionists used the ‘re-discovery’ of how to live in the desert in diplomacy with other states, positioning Israel as a space for an exceptional arid zone development. In all, the work of the desert research institutions worked to efface Bedouin connections while indigenizing Zionist claims. Zionist desert research institutions were not without failure, perhaps attesting to the limits of Israeli scientific promises for development. The desert would not always conform to their expectations. The Negev is littered with moments that confirm the stubbornness of the environment. Evenari and his team had needed Bedouin help when his crops and farm were ruined.455 Drought years would come and go and scientists could not find a way to predict them, Some crops would not make it.456 Crops also suffered from pests and plant diseases that scientists failed to combat, needing to “wage the usual chemical warfare against them.”457 Evenari and his team also let slip that some of the high yields at Avdat, at least, were due to the use of modern fertilizer, hardly a tool used by the Nabateans.458 This is not to say that runoff agriculture did not succeed as well, but that it was not as successful as scientists hoped or state officials promised. The Naqab/Negev refused to conform wholly to the state and scientists’ expectations, and thus their predications for the role of the desert in the state’s future were continually falling short of contributing to the actual progress of settler development and population growth. In all, desert research institutions constructed an object of scientific knowledge called the “Negev,” by negotiating Zionist ideological imperatives, Bedouins land use and 455 Evenari, et al., The Negev, 4. 456 Ibid., 191. 457 Ibid., 192. 458 Ibid., 123. 190 history, and the very real, physical reality of the arid biome. The lasting legacy of the desert research institutions was to construct the Naqab/Negev as a specific kind of “wasteland,” one that had to have fallen in order to be redeemed. “Cultivation” became the work of scientific inquiry, in order to improve upon techniques thought to be only used in antiquity. While the present work of desert research institutions do not necessarily follow from the same assumptions of the desert as Evenari and others in the earlier years, BIDR continues to construct the Naqab/Negev as an ideal arid zone in which to learn about the possibilities of economic, agricultural, and population growth, and one in which present Zionist discourses call the next “frontier” of the state. In reality, it is an old “frontier,” that has never quite conformed to colonial expectations. 191 Field Journal 5: The Only Democracy in the Middle East July 2016 - Beersheba In July, Beersheba was to have its first ever gay-pride parade. The first gay pride event in the city took place in 2010 and the municipality pledged 15,000 NIS to help support the event. In response, more religious members of the city council attacked the mayor: “I am surprised Mayor Rubik Danilovich agreed to hold the event,” said one of them. “We need to check and determine his motives. I want the mayor to declare his sexual orientation to the people of Be’er Sheva and announce whether he intends to march with [them].”459 Ugly homophobia is normal in the ‘only democracy in the Middle East.’ Over the proceeding years, the event had been held at a youth center in Old City, but this year, supporters of gay rights wanted to have a march to City Hall. Members of the city council threatened to resign, which would pull apart the governing coalition. City Hall was somewhat non-responsive to the plans, and the police were extremely slow in granting permits to march. While the organizers had applied in May, the police did not respond until four days before the scheduled day for the march in July. The religious party council members from Shas (a Mizrahi Orthodox party) and Habayit HaYehuda (Jewish Home Party) said they didn’t oppose the parade per se but wanted the organizers to choose a route that avoided passing in front of synagogues. In my experience, synagogues in Beersheba are more common than restaurants. I live next to a synagogue on a small residential street with a dead end. We share a wall and they recently put in a new air conditioning unit that 459 Yanir Yagna, “Be’er Sheva Pledges Funds for First Outdoor Gay Pride Event,” Haaretz, 26 March 2010. https://www.haaretz.com/1.5124890 192 was nailed into our house and covered the bathroom window, our only ventilation. This is to say that avoiding synagogues it not a realistic proposition in Beersheba. This seemed to me to be a ploy to effectively stop the parade. This also meant that if organizers did find an alternate route, it would be hidden from public view as the main streets where every other city event takes place have synagogues on them. Meanwhile, the mayoral office was hostile, with one aide saying to organizers, “There will be no march in Be’er Sheva, because this is a city with a special character.”460 Anyway, somehow organizers found a route that no one could disagree with and avoided synagogues. However, part of the march was to go down Rager, the main street in the city, and police, saying they received threats to the march, diverted the route again. Internally, it was revealed that the police decided to move the march due mostly to a fear that the event could “deeply hurt religious sentiments.” When asked to release information of the threats against the march, the police declined and classified the information, only revealing it in court. The High Court ruled that the threat of violence justified moving the route of the march. Activists and organizers were angry: “Why don’t you deal with the threats, instead of punish us?” In the run-up to the event, LGBTQ activists were detained by the police with no stated reason. One activist said, “When I arrived at the [police] station they told me that I was suspected of threatening to cause harm. I sat behind bars for three hours, and when I went into the investigator she told me, ‘Okay, I have no idea why they called you in; we have nothing against you. You can go home.”461 But this same activist 460 Almog Ben Zikri, “First Gay Pride Parade Sparks Crisis in Southern Israeli City,” Haaretz, 10 July 2016. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-first-gay-pride-parade-sparks-crisis-in-beer-sheva- 1.5408389 461 Almog Ben Zikri, “Police Detained LGBT Activists in Lead-up to Canceled Be’er Sheva Pride Parade,” Haaretz, 14 July 2016. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-lgbt-activists-detained-in-lead-up- to-canceled-be-er-sheva-pride-parade-1.5410130 193 was then issued a ban that he could not enter Beersheba until Friday (a day after the scheduled march) and was also banned from joining the upcoming Jerusalem Pride March. Other activists were arrested for illegal assembly. The march was derided by more officials, calling it a “protest march” and therefore, assumed to be illegitimate or a danger. Minister of Religious Services, David Azoulay, characterized the organizers as a “group of irregulars” saying that they wanted to “orchestrate a revolution.”462 Activists cancelled the march and instead planned a protest outside of City Hall. Participants were asked to wear black. When I arrived, the entire plaza of City Hall was walled off behind police gates and armed officers stood in groups watching everyone who was approaching. There was one entrance where they checked your bag and then you were allowed to enter the “protest area.” This is a pattern in Beersheba. Breaking the Silence (BtS) is an organization meant to bear witness to the Israeli public about the horrible things that soldiers are asked to do as part of the Occupation, in order to challenge the narrative of it being necessary to protect Israel. BtS is not really that radical—but they do force Israelis to recognize what soldiers are asked to do to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Since the 2014 Gaza War, BtS has become the target of right-wing attacks that generally accuse the group of supporting terrorism and of being traitors to the state. BtS was going to host an event at a bar in the Old City called Hashan Hazmahn [aside: means “The smoking time” (as in, waste time) with the motto along with it on their sign, “There are worse places.”]. They and Hashan Hazmahn received many threats of violence on their Facebook page. One of my friends was threatened with rape and called an “Arab whore” (though she is from Europe and 462 Ibid. 194 Jewish). Police responded by telling organizers that everyone that comes to the event needed to give their name, address and phone number to the police. Needless to say, many did not want to do that. Then the day before, police decided that there were too many threats and cancelled the event. BtS moved the event to someone’s apartment in my neighborhood. What I find shocking about the way that censorship and social pressure works in Israel is how it targets things I find relatively benign. At the apartment, there were about 15 people. I leaned against the refrigerator and ate crackers. Sure, more people would have come to the event if it was at Hashan Hazmahn—and being holed away in a small apartment was the result of this kind of censure. But BtS’s event was just a former soldier showing a ten-minute video of his time in Hebron, followed by an argument led by several in the audience who disputed the idea that Israeli soldiers engaged in any type of oppressive behavior. BtS was also recently awarded a prize for their work from a department at Ben-Gurion University, but the university’s president intervened and cancelled the award. It is a sad state of democratic expression in Israel when the idea that the Israeli army negatively affects Palestinians life in the West Bank is too controversial for public discussion. You constantly hear the rhetoric of Israel as the “only democracy in the Middle East.” While projecting this idea to the international community, Israel justifies its continued colonization of Palestinian land. The argument renders Muslims as inherently non-democratic. It reflects the notion that Theodor Herzl wrote of when he promised European powers that a Jewish state would be a “rampart of Europe against Asia, as an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”463 This is secular liberalism hiding its 463 Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, trans. Sylvia D’Avigdor (New York: Dover, 1988): 96. 195 fundamentalist dirty laundry. Returning to the gay pride parade, Zionists constantly claim how bad Muslim society is for the LGBTQ community, but as one person wrote in Ha’aretz after the fight over the gay pride parade in Beersheba, “While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is fond of using gay rights as a fig leaf that ‘proves’ how enlightened and democratic Israel is, the sequence of events surrounding the Gay Pride Parade in Be’er Sheva just goes to show how thin that veneer of enlightenment and liberalism really is.”464 In order to retain power, the secular right in Israel tries to capture the energy of religious fundamentalist voters and in doing so, has created a consensus in Israel that supports the curtailing of free speech and individual liberties. Not only does this instill an authoritarian chill on Palestinian Israelis and anti-Zionist activists, but this shift further marginalizes even the liberal left. 464 Haaretz Editorial, “Court-backed Homophobia Canceled Be’er Sheva’s Gay Pride Parade,” Haaretz 15 July 2016. https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/court-backed-homophobia-canceled-be-er-sheva-s-gay-pride- parade-1.5410685. 196 Chapter 3: Start-Up Nationalism and Neoliberal Zionist Development “How, then, did this ‘start-up’ state not only survive but morph from a besieged backwater to a high-tech powerhouse that has achieved fiftyfold economic growth in sixty years? How did a community of penniless refugees transform a land that Mark Twain described as a ‘desolate country… a silent mournful expanse,’ into one of the most dynamic entrepreneurial economies in the world?” - Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, Dan Senor and Saul Singer, 2011465 Introduction: Start-Up Nation466 On December 11, 2016, Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes interviewed Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu about Donald Trump, Iran, and Israel’s “new” place in the world. Part of the interview took place on a hill overlooking the two large development projects at the north end of Beersheba: the Gav-Yam Advanced Technologies Park (ATP) and the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF) New Technology Campus. Developers, politicians, private business, and university officials all hope that the project will transform Beersheba into one of the world’s cyber capitals. As the segment from 60 Minutes uses helicopter footage to showcase Gav-Yam’s two newest buildings, Stahl provides voice-over narration: [Netanyahu] used economic and trade relations to improve Israel’s place in the world by selling, and in some cases, giving away its high-tech innovations. Israel boasts of more start-ups per capita than anywhere in the world, many based in Be’er Sheva. And nations have lined up to buy: drones, as India has, and cutting-edge agricultural technology, as China has. There’s excitement about a new innovation that extracts drinking water out of air.467 465 Dan Senor and Saul Singer, Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle. Paperback Edition. Council on Foreign Relations Book. (New York: Twelve Books, 2011): 17. 466 A version of this chapter was previously published as Joseph F. Getzoff, “Start-Up Nationalism: The Rationalities of Neoliberal Zionism.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2020). 467 60 Minutes (2016) Israel’s Prime Minister Welcomes Trump Presidency. Correspondent Lesley Stahl. 11 December 2016. CBS Interactive Inc. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-benjamin-netanyahu- us-israel-relations-donald-trump/. Video. 197 This kind of “diplomacy” relies on the idea that Israel is an expert in specific kinds of technologies, especially those of a military nature. The narrative claims that Israel is uniquely qualified to lead the world in the development of certain kinds of hi-tech capitalism, claiming economic and technological exceptionalism. The valorization of Israel as a center for capitalist technological expertise also shows how settler development mobilizes neoliberalism. No longer does settler development draw exclusively from colonial developmental imperatives, but presently functions in relation to global neoliberalism. Settler development today valorizes specific kinds of precarious labor, ‘flexible’ and ‘disruptive’ short-term companies (startups), and the proliferation of technology linked to surveillance and security. This narrative is indicative of the kind of brand-building that Zionists are assembling about Beersheba, the new “Silicon Wadi.” And since Israel’s start-up economy is intertwined with its military—which relies on its Jewish citizens who serve—hi-tech in the south of Israel mobilizes a settler economy that continues to marginalize and weaken Bedouin Palestinian land claims and development. Israel, popularized as the “start-up nation,” produces the settler state as a model for hi-tech capitalism, mobilizing neoliberalism for settler development. “Start-up nation” has gained popularity as a metonym for Israel, recasting the state as a model of successful, unique, entrepreneurial and technological activity. This chapter will analyze Senor and Singer’s 2009 book, Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (where this idea first appeared) and the discursive claims that its authors make. I understand this ‘start-up discourse’ to be part of an emerging, traveling narrative 198 about Israel’s supposed economic and scientific exceptionalism. However, this discourse segregates economic development from the long processes of settler colonial expropriation of Palestinian assets and land. Further, I argue that this discourse represents a form of “neoliberal Zionism” that valorizes an entrepreneurial ethos syncretized with Zionist claims about history, modernity, and subjectivity. This discourse claims that Israel operates as an enterprising conglomerate, a successful management model that should be replicated in other capitalist states. Start-Up Nation was published by the US American Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR is a United States based think-tank and membership organization with a long history of influence in US foreign policy. Dan Senor is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the CFR and Saul Singer writes for the Jerusalem Post, one of the most popular English dailies covering Israel.468 According to Laurence Shoup, the CFR has long been composed of business leaders, academics, and government officials who promote economic interests at home and abroad to position the US in the center of a global capitalist system.469 The CFR continually publishes position papers on foreign policy that are picked up by media organizations and government officials, and its own influential magazine, Foreign Affairs.470 CFR members have been well-represented in large US corporations and successive presidential administrations. A significant number of senior foreign policy officials have been active members of the CFR, including secretaries of state such as Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, and Condoleezza Rice, as well as several members of the 468 Council on Foreign Relations. “Start-Up Nation: Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle.” Council on Foreign Relations, 18 Feb 2019, www.cfr.org/book/start-nation. 469 Lawrence H Shoup, Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015). 470 Ibid., 70-71. 199 executive branch itself, George H.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Bill Clinton. In all, as Shoup writes, the CFR “does not operate in isolation; rather it is at the center of an extensive network of key institutions in a number of interconnected realms of US social life: politics, think tanks, finance and economics, higher education, philanthropy, media and culture.”471 In particular, the CFR has been central to disseminating neoliberalism as a preferred model for US and global capitalism.472 The Council on Foreign Relations generally portrays Israel as a geopolitical asset for the United States.473 These kinds of discourses have long been used to tie the two countries together naturalizing shared US and Israeli interests, especially after the beginning of the so-called War on Terror.474 In this way, the CFR helps produce a global discourse that celebrates Israeli innovativeness, especially in relation to its supposed technological, scientific, and economic expertise. Start-Up Nation should be read in this context. While the book was published by a US think-tank, it still reflects a particular kind of traveling discourse on Israeli ingenuity, especially in relation to the international reputation of the country’s military and security expertise, as Rhys Machold has studied in great detail.475 In this chapter, I want to focus on the way that Start-Up Nation, as representative of neoliberal Zionism in general, tries to stage Israel as a model for economic success by celebrating the state’s unique cultural entrepreneurialism premised on military 471 Ibid., 91. 472 Ibid. 473 Ibid., 255. 474 Lorenzo Veracini, “Interacting Imaginaries in Israel and the United States,” in Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual, ed. Ned Curthoys and Debjani Ganguly (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2007): 293-313. 475 Rhys Machold, “Learning from Israel? ‘26/11’ and the Anti-Politics of Urban Security Governance. Security Dialogue 47, no. 4 (2016): 275-291; Rhys Machold, “Mobility and the Model: Policy Mobility and the Becoming of Israeli Homeland Security Dominance.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 47 (2017): 816-832. 200 conscription and training. Start-Up Nation does not reflect the actual neoliberal economy in Israel—which I will briefly attend to in my conclusion—but rather reimagines tropes of Israeli ingenuity that have long been used to legitimize ongoing settler colonial expropriation and development. The discourse of Israel as a “start-up” relies on a general understanding of the virtues of this kind of economic activity. In the book, “start-up” is used to both describe the Israeli economy and its cultural attributes. It is understood that many small Israeli high- tech industries are start-ups.476 A plethora of start-ups does not necessarily mean success in the long-run—in fact, startups are frequently characterized by a high rate of failure.477 The Economist has routinely questioned the basis of such a start-up economy in Israel. For instance, start-ups rely on a steady infusion of capital investment, and often the goal is not to create a long-term sustainable high-tech business but ‘cash out’ to a company abroad. Israel has not produced a large tech multinational on the scale as those in United States, nor like other industrialized countries for that matter.478 Israel does have a high number of start-ups in relation to other states479 that also attract a lot of venture capital, but in Israel, the goal is to wield early success into contracts with large American multinationals like Google and IBM.480 476 Ori Swed and John Sibley Butler, “Military Capital in the Israeli Hi-Tech Industry,” Armed Forces & Society 41, no. 1 (2015): 123-141. 477 Daniel Cockayne, “What is a Start-Up Firm? A Methodological and Epistemological Investigation into Research Objects in Economic Geography,” Geoforum 107 (2019): 83. 478 The Economist, “Israeli Technology Companies: What Next for the Start-Up Nation?” The Economist, 21 January 2012; The Economist, “Schumpeter: The Scale-Up Nation.” The Economist, 13 December 2014. 479 Swed and Butler, “Military Capital…”; Dan Breznitz, Innovation and the State: Political Choice and Strategies of Growth in Israel, Taiwan, and Ireland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Neve Gordon, “Israel’s Emergence as a Homeland Security Capital,” in Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine, ed. Ella Zureik, David Lyon, Yasmeen Abu-Laban, and Oxon Abingdon (New York: Routledge, 2011): 153-170. 480 The Economist, “Israeli Technology Companies.” 201 But what is a “start-up”? Daniel Cockayne argues for understanding “start-up” less as a definition for a type of company and more of a “performative discourse” “produced through working practices.”481 Academic, industry, and popular sources all employ “start- up,” assuming a common-sensical definition that is, in reality, contradictory, “fuzzy,” and descriptive of a wide range of labor practices and company structures.482 For industry- based as well as popular discourses, “start-up” seems to connote informal and flexible (yet intense) work environments and small-sized businesses in the process of developing their first product who are seeking to attract venture capital to spur exponential growth.483 Start- ups are heavily associated with entrepreneurialism, innovation meant to disrupt the status quo of the capitalist economy.484 However, as Cockayne cautions these definitions can still proliferate depending on how the term is used. In what way do start-up discourses perform certain kinds of ideological work? The motif of cultural ingenuity is a distinguishing feature of the term “start-up” as employed in Zionist discourses. In Start-Up Nation, the building of the nation-state is itself marked by entrepreneurial energy, creativity, and innovation. In the book, former Prime Minister, Shimon Peres writes that the state is “itself a perpetual start-up.”485 Not only does Israel represent economic success but it is in competition with other nation-states who fail to exhibit the unique cultural cocktail of Israeli society and therefore lack an “entrepreneurial culture.”486 “Culture” is an important (and vague) marker for Israeli superiority. Backing such claims, Senor and Singer quote reporter Thomas Friedman who said, “I would rather 481 Cockayne, “What is a Start-Up Firm?” 79, 84. 482 Ibid. 483 Ibid. 484 Jesse Goldstein, Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018). 485 Senor and Singer, Start-Up Nation, xiii. 486 Ibid., 19, 106, 157. 202 have Israel’s problems, which are mostly financial, mostly about governance, and mostly about infrastructure, rather than Singapore’s problem because Singapore’s problem is culture-bound.”487 Cultural difference persists throughout the book. Start-Up Nation represents Arab countries as the antithesis to neoliberal Zionism. According to Senor and Singer, these states lack Israel’s national purpose and economic and managerial flexibility, necessary to produce innovation (Chapter 13: The Sheikh’s Dilemma). Start-Up Nation “sells” Israel as a model for economic (and thus, societal) success—similar to how Israeli models of security are being exported to the rest of the world.488 Start-Up Nation is not an isolated text. Since the publication of the book, the phrase has been employed in countless interviews, articles, institutional documents, advertisements, blogs, diplomatic communique and even in an episode of Conan O’Brien when the host visits the Tel Aviv headquarters of the popular road directions app, Waze.489 Similar claims to Israel’s business exceptionalism are appearing more and more in the world of nonfiction (and self-published) literature. With blurbs from people like Michael Bloomberg, Tony Blair, and Shimon Peres, Seth M. Siegel’s book, Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World, refurbishes the Zionist myth of the “conquest of the desert,” and argues that Israel can be a model for technological and sustainable solutions to climate change induced scarcity.490 In the last several years, there have been other titles like The Weapons Wizards: How Israel Became a High-Tech Superpower and 487 Ibid., 271. 488 Machold, “Learning from Israel.”; Machold, “Mobility and the Model.”; Jeff Halper, War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification (London: Pluto Press, 2015). 489 Team Coco, “Conan Visits Waze HQ in Tel Aviv – CONAN on TBS.” 20 February 2019. https://youtu.be/CoRKrejQBjk. 490 Seth M. Siegel, Let There Before Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World (New York: Thomas Dunne Books and St. Martin’s Press, 2015). 203 Thou Shalt Innovate: How Israeli Ingenuity Repairs the World, from authors with ties to Israeli and US media outlets.491 In addition, article after article reiterates these same tropes. The Times of Israel, an online English daily, has its own Startup Israel Blog (subtitle: All the News from Silicon Wadi) that tracks Israeli technological and scientific news.492 In Forbes, we find “New Silicon Valley in the Middle East,” in Bloomberg, “Israel Sows Cyber Hub in Desert to Make Beersheba Bloom,” in Foreign Affairs, “How Israeli Conscription Drives Innovation,” and “Israel’s Self-Driving Future.”493 The Economist has covered the Israeli tech industry often in the last decade, employing different iterations of the nickname to communicate either positive or negative economic futures.494 The US Embassy in Israel also employs the brand, saying that “US firms have been a big part of the Start-Up Nation story.”495 These discourses about Israel are consistently used as a way to celebrate Israeli society and represent the state as a secular, Western-oriented, capitalist nation, eliding its more complex socio-economic realities. The book and these kinds of recent discourses de- politicize ongoing conflict with Palestinians, sanitize Israel’s history of any reference to settler-colonialism, and also erases the diversity of Palestinian and Israeli identities. “Start- 491 Gil Karie, “New Silicon Valley in the Middle East.” Forbes International, 7 October, 2015. www.forbes.com; Amir Bohbot and Yaakov Katz, The Weapons Wizards: How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017); Avi Jorisch, Thou Shalt Innovate: How Israeli Ingenuity Repairs the World. (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 2018). 492 Startup Israel Blog. Times of Israel. www.timesofisrael.com. 10 November 2019. 493 Gwen Ackerman, “Israel Sows Cyber Hub in Desert to Make Beersheba Bloom: Cities.” Bloomberg, 15 January 2015. www.bloomberg.com.; Elisabeth Braw, “How Israeli Conscription Drives Innovation.” Foreign Affairs, 19 April 2017, www.foreignaffairs.com; Avi Jorisch, “Israel’s Self-Driving Future.” Foreign Affairs, 7 March 2017, www.foreignaffairs.com. 494 The Economist, “Schumpeter.”; The Economist, “Schumpeter: Beyond the Start-Up Nation.” The Economist, 1 January 2011; The Economist, “The Economy: Startup Nation or Left-Behind Nation?” 20 May 2017. 495 US Embassy Israel, “Fact Sheet U.S. – Israel Economic Relationship.” November 30, 2019. www.il.usembassy.gov. 204 up nation” discourses are not the first to celebrate Israeli ingenuity and economy. There are many who have celebrated various Israeli and Zionist achievements throughout the years, whether agricultural kibbutzim and infrastructural development, the transformation of the desert through technological progress, and Israel’s so-called unique combination of collective purpose and scientific enterprise.496 One could even look back at Theodor Herzl’s 1902 novel, Alt-Neu Land (Old-New Land) that imagines a Jewish state in Palestine which achieves great technological and economic wonder, benefiting the Middle East and the world as a whole.497 This chapter argues that the “start-up nation” is indicative of neoliberal Zionism, which emphasizes Israeli economic exceptionalism in relation to contemporary ideas about high-tech capitalism. To understand neoliberal Zionism, I will turn to scholarship that looks at neoliberalism, not merely as economic policy, but as a form of governmentality—that is, Michel Foucault’s term for understanding the way that liberal governance functions to produce its ideal subjects. This allows me to delve deeper into neoliberal start-up discourses and their present relationship to Zionism. I close-read the text, Start-Up Nation, as indicative of neoliberal Zionist governmentality. Start-Up Nation’s neoliberal Zionism refigures Zionist historiography to create a teleology of contemporary Israeli capitalism, emphasizes the role of the military in creating a unique Israeli “culture,” and frames Arabs and Palestinians as inferior, due to their perceived lack of entrepreneurial activity. I will first present a theoretical basis for understanding neoliberal Zionist governmentality as well 496 Walter Clay Lowdermilk, Palestine: Land of Promise (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944); Yaakov Morris, Masters of the Desert: 6000 Years in the Negev (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1961); Roy Popkin, Technology of Necessity: Scientific and Engineering Development in Israel, (New York: Prager Publishers, 1971). 497 Theodor Herzl, Old New Land (Altneuland), Masterworks of Modern Jewish Writing Series (New York: M. Wiener Publishers, Herzl Press, [1902]1987). 205 as identify a gap in the literature on Israel/Palestine in order to show how neoliberalism and Zionism mobilize and constitute each other, rather than exist as discrete objects. Neoliberal Zionist Governmentality Current scholarship on Israel/Palestine tends to view neoliberalism mostly as economic policy. For instance, many scholars look at how neoliberal economic policies have dismantled the welfare state, increasing social isolation and economic inequality, orchestrating changes in unions and labor organizing and in monetary and banking policy.498 An analysis of neoliberalism has also been central to understanding the changing forms of Israeli violent intervention into Palestinian lives. Scholars have examined increased capitalization of military and security technologies and expertise as a global business.499 Shir Hever, in particular, shows how foreign aid, monetary policy, custom controls and the ‘outsourcing’ of security to the Palestinian Authority, allows Israel to perpetuate the Occupation without accepting the full economic burden, all the while creating a niche for private capital to profit.500 Other scholars have also shown how neoliberalism, as economic policy, significantly impacts Palestinian governance and political aspirations. Toufiq Haddad 498 Uri Ram, The Globalization of Israel: McWorld in Tel Aviv, Jihad in Jerusalem (New York: Routledge, 2008); Jonathan Preminger, Labor in Israel: Beyond Nationalism and Neoliberalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018); Michael Shalev, “Liberalization and the Transformation of the Political Economy,” In the New Israel: Peacemaking & Liberalization, ed. Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000): 43-70; Ari Krampf, The Israeli Path to Neoliberalism: The State, Continuity and Change (New York: Routledge, 2018). 499 Halper, War Against the People; Andy Clarno, Neoliberal Apartheid: Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Neve Gordon, Israel’s Occupation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Shir Hever, The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation: Repression Beyond Exploitation (London: Pluto Press, 2010). 500 Hever, The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation. 206 extensively documents how the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, along with the US and Israel, sought to guide peace-and-state-building in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).501 Along with changes in the Palestinian Authority’s own governance approaches, multilaterals were able to shift the parameters of the peace plan from Palestinian national liberation to economic stability, defined by consumerism and protections for foreign capital. Raja Khalidi and Sobhi Samour argue that Palestinian nationalism is becoming more about “neocolonial relations and exchange” rather than about anticolonial struggle.502 While this scholarship is incredibly important for understanding the political economy of Israel, Palestine, and the Occupation, this chapter diverges from them to understand the specific manifestation of neoliberal political rationality in relation to Zionism. Geographers and other social scientists have come to understand the emergence of neoliberalism as neither globally homogenous nor locally determinative.503 As Wendy Larner writes, neoliberalism has “different variants” and scholars should pay attention to the “hybrid nature of contemporary policies and programmes, or to the multiple and contradictory aspects of neoliberal spaces, techniques and subjects.”504 Since Larner’s article, there has been much scholarly attention to the different manifestations of what is called “neoliberalism.”505 Below, I follow from these arguments to understand how 501 Toufiq Haddad, Palestine Ltd.: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory (London: I.B. Taurus, 2016). 502 Raja Khalidi and Sobhi Samour, “Neoliberalism as Liberation: The Statehood Program and the Remaking of the Palestinian National Movement,” Journal of Palestine Studies 40, no. 2 (2011): 6. 503 Jaime Peck and Adam Tickell, “Neoliberalizing Space,” Antipode 34, no. 3 (2002): 380-404. 504 Wendy Larner, “Neoliberalism?” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 21, no. 5 (2003): 509. 505 Simon Springer, Kean Birch, and Julie MacLeavy, ed. The Handbook of Neoliberalism (New York: Routledge, 2016); Kean Birch, A Research Agenda for Neoliberalism (Northampton: Edward Elgar Pub., 2017). 207 Zionism (a type of nationalism) and neoliberalism can be co-constitutive in relation to Israel, Palestine, and the conflict itself. For simplicity’s sake, I will chiefly refer to “Zionism” in this chapter. What is called “Zionism” represents the homogenization of different 18th and 19th century European Jewish groups who offered varied approaches to the so-called “Jewish Question,” that is, the Jewish future in European society. Attending to the Jewish Question relied on the formation of the very notion of Jews as an historical and territorial people, formed in relation to a European “biologically determined ethnoracial hierarchy” that excluded Jews based on their imagined difference.506 Zionism claimed that Jews were a unified national people that deserved self-determination like other nations. Over time, specific Zionist groups were able to build the organizational structure to back their aims and support a decades-long program of settlement in Palestine.507 Zionists across the ideological spectrum critically engaged with questions of political economy. In many cases, Zionists sought to counter European antisemitic tropes that imagined Jews as subversive to ‘normal’ economic activity, as usurers controlling Gentile interests, or parasitic rag-pickers and tinkers at the margins, that is, unproductive, otherwise “incapable of honest labor.”508 Drawing from dominant European nationalisms of the time, some forms of Zionism sought to prove that Jews, once given their own state, would evolve into economically productive subjects. As I have shown in earlier chapters, Zionists adopted colonial ideas of “improvement,” which often classed indigenous and 506 Jay Geller, The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011): 6-7. 507 Walter Lacqueur, A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel (New York: Shocken, 2003); Gideon Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1995). 508 Geller, The Other Jewish Question; Derek Penslar, Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001): 5. 208 non-European varieties of cultivation as ‘wasteful.’ In doing so, Zionist political-economy was especially racialized, imagining a separate Jewish nation in opposition to wasteful Palestinians.509 Pre-state Zionist settlement organizations, especially those affiliated with the Labor Zionist movement—ostensibly socialist and ethnocratic—linked colonial ideas of improvement and waste to a rejection of antisemitic tropes about labor, emphasizing agricultural work—so-called honest labor. Derek Penslar calls this the “ideology of productivization” which carried a “profound belief in the moral elevation inherent in the efficient exploitation of the soil.”510 This new Zionist subject would be the key for developing a sovereign Jewish economy in Palestine. To produce a sovereign economy, Zionists ignored their economic and social commerce with Palestinians and pushed policies that sought to exclude them from the labor market.511 In negotiating with the barriers to settlement such as the particular contours of land ownership, colonial rule, labor regimes, and Palestinian national aspirations, Zionists developed an ideological response that sought to valorize ethnocratic labor and aid in creating a bifurcated economy.512 There emerged a particular Zionist subject that would assist in the construction of this ideal state and society, what we could analyze as a nascent Zionist governmentality. The concept of governmentality, as I will explore more in-depth below, was introduced by Michel Foucault as a way to understand the operation of power 509 Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2018): 117-135. 510 Derek Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870- 1918 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1991): 30. 511 Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996). 512 Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict; Lockman, Comrades and Enemies; Raja Khalidi and Mtanes Shihadeh “Israel’s ‘Arab Economy’: New Politics, Old Policies.” In Israel and Its Palestinian Citizens: Ethnic Privileges in the Jewish State, ed. Nadim N. Rouhana and Sahar S. Huneidi, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017): 266-298. 209 in liberal societies through displaced management, rather than direct, disciplinary force. Governmentality is a way to analyze how “one conducts the conduct of men,” addressing the “management of the whole social body.”513 In a Zionist governmentality, certain kinds of behaviors and values were repeatedly re-inscribed as proper in relation to the nation itself. Jewish workers were reshaped as pioneers, infused with a nationalist fervor that celebrated the hardships of “frontier” life. Zionist governmentality sought to shape Jewish workers’ conduct through “self-conquest,” hoping they would become better adapted to the strenuous agricultural labor for which they were not as skilled as Palestinians.514 A Zionist governmentality emerged that attempted to address the challenges of Jewish labor and mass settlement by emphasizing uniqueness and exceptionalism. Zionists did not only hope to prove Jews equal to Europeans; they argued Jews would become exceptional once given a state, or as Herzl claimed, Jews “wish to be the most modern in the world.”515 Max Nordau, Herzl’s friend and fellow Political Zionist said that, in fact, Jews are “more industrious and abler than the average European, not to mention the moribund Asiatic and African” in his speech to the First Zionist Congress.516 This exceptionalism was premised on a specific European Jewish subject, at the expense of non- Europeans and non-European Jews. Sephardim, from Southern Europe and parts of the Levant, Mizrahim, or “Oriental Jews” from Arab countries and North Africa, and 513 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-79. Trans. by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 186. 514 Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 60; Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., [1896] 1988): 145. 515 Herzl, The Jewish State, 145. 516 Max Nordau, “Speech to the First Zionist Congress (1897),” in The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader, ed. Arthur Hertzburg, (Altheneum: A Temple Book, 1997): 235. 210 communities from Ethiopia, Iran, India, and elsewhere, have long been the targets of colonialist practices of improvement.517 How might we further think of Zionism through the optic of governmentality? In particular, governmentality investigates the political rationalities that inform governance and subjectification.518 Many scholars have followed from Foucault and understand governmentality, per Wendy Brown, as “a mode of governance encompassing but not limited to the state, and one that produces subjects, forms of citizenship and behavior, and a new organization of the social.”519 As Thomas Lemke puts it, governmentality “endeavors to show how the modern sovereign state and the modern autonomous individual codetermine each other’s emergence.”520 The Zionist subject emerges in relation to its specific contribution to nation and state-building. Following from Foucault, some scholars understand neoliberalism as a new kind political rationality, rather than as an intensification of capitalism;521 Wendy Brown writes, pithily, that neoliberalism is not “a bundle of economic policies with inadvertent political and social consequences.”522 In particular, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval define neoliberal rationality as the widespread use of the “logic of the market as a generalized normative logic” that forms the state and individual subjectivity and is a novel departure 517 Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims.” Social Text 19/20 (1988): 1-35. 518 Thomas Lemke, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique.” Rethinking Marxism 14, no. 3 (2002): 50. 519 Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005): 37. 520 Ibid., 50-51. 521 Lemke, “Foucault, Governmentality and Critique”; Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neo-Liberal Society, trans. Gregory Elliot (New York: Verso Books, 2013); Jason Read, “A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity,” Foucault Studies 6 (2009): 25-36. 522 Brown, Edgework, 38. 211 from liberal capitalist notions of governance.523 In neoliberal governmentalities, both states and individuals are judged according to their ability to operate as “enterprises” and “entrepreneurs,” that is, through generalized competition as the norm of social relations.524 In this way, neoliberalism seeks to be an all-encompassing theory of society and of the individual. For instance, Brown writes that “neoliberalism carries a social analysis that, when deployed as a form of governmentality, reaches from the soul of the citizen-subject to education policy to practices of empire” and does so by “extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action.”525 Neoliberal governmentalities employ the enterprise—a business or company—as their model of the state. The enterprise does not represent the “super-market society,” nor a “society subject to the commodity-effect, but a society subject to the dynamic of competition.”526 In this form, society, ‘all the way down,’ reflects “basic units of the enterprise.”527 The enterprise, “by diffusing and multiplying…as much as possible” crowds out different social forms and degrades communal reliance on large institutional or state- scale organization and becomes the “formative power of society.” Enterprises compete with each other. The state will also come to be judged as an enterprise, evaluated by economic conduct and its ability to aid in the proliferation of enterprises. As Dardot and Laval write, the state then acts as “an enterprise in the service of enterprises,”528 “governed by rules of competition and subject to efficiency constraints similar to those experienced by private enterprises.”529 The state appears in a new form, running like a business, and 523 Dardot and Laval, The New Way of the World, 18. 524 Ibid. 525 Brown, Edgework, 39-40. Emphasis in the original. 526 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 147. 527 Ibid., 148. 528 Dardot and Laval, The New Way of the World, 228. Emphasis in the original. 529 Ibid., 216. 212 valorizing specific types of economic and social relations. The very nickname, “start-up nation,” perhaps invites an analysis of Israel as an enterprise, one that is in competition with other countries and is presented as a model of business exceptionalism. An entrepreneur—another term that is liberally applied in popular discourses—is someone who takes on risk to start new businesses and find new opportunities. An entrepreneur is a dynamic subject in motion, marked by their creative ability to adapt and innovate. Ideas of the entrepreneur associated with Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian political-economist, often focus on the individual as a “creator and disruptor” who helps upend existing economic trends and assumptions, an image that is popular in tech fields.530 Neoclassical ideas also see the entrepreneur as a “heroic example of economic man, or homo economicus, the rational economic actor who populates [neoclassical economists’] theoretical universe.”531 The neoliberal entrepreneurial subject is also homo economicus.532 This entrepreneur is self-possessed, impulsively seeking to accumulate human capital – a term that Foucault draws from American neoliberal, Gary Becker.533 Neoliberal governmentality generalizes the enterprise into the entire social body. In neoliberal society, as Dardot and Laval write, there is a “homogenization of the discourse of man around the figure of the enterprise” where neoliberalism “[abolishes] any sense of alienation and even any distance between individuals and the enterprises employing them.”534 The individual is now an accumulator of their own capital. This sleight of hand abolishes the difference 530 Goldstein, Planetary Improvement, 38. 531 Ibid., 38. 532 Read, “A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus,” 31. Dardot and Laval, The New Way of the World, 259- 263. 533 Read, “A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus.” 534 Dardot and Laval, The New Way of the World, 260. 213 between worker and capitalist; the entrepreneurial subject now values their own exploitation as conducive to good economic and social conduct.535 Entrepreneurial subjects then reproduce this relationship by celebrating their own precarity536 and normalize competition as a general social form.537 In all, this valorization of the enterprise form and the entrepreneurial subject represents the novelty of “neoliberal rationality,” that is “the congruence it endeavors to achieve between a responsible moral individual and an economic-rational individual.”538 Neoliberal Zionist governmentality combines the political rationalities intertwined with neoliberal subject-making with the nationalist, settler colonial goals of Zionism to also claim economic exceptionalism. In neoliberal Zionism, the conduct of ideal citizen- subjects refigures the image of the pioneering settlers laboring on land as a forerunner to a high-tech entrepreneur, adaptive to the global market’s needs. While scholars have understood neoliberalism to produce an atomized, self-possessed individual, the neoliberal Zionist subject personifies the nation-state and its development.539 As I will show in my reading of Start-Up Nation below, Israeli entrepreneurs are made to represent Israel both metaphorically, as idealized citizens, and literally, as emissaries to foreigners. The national history and its collective are central to this neoliberal Zionist governmentality. In neoliberal Zionism, Israeli entrepreneurs are not in competition with each other; rather, the enterprise of Israel is in competition with other states and peoples. 535 Read, “A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus”; Daniel Cockayne, “Entrepreneurial Affect: Attachment to Work in Practice in San Francisco’s Digital Media Sector,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 4 (2016): 456-473. 536 Cockayne, “Entrepreneurial Affect.” 537 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics; Dardot and Laval, The New Way of the World. 538 Lemke, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique,” 59. 539 Dardot and Laval, The New Way of the World; Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (New York: Verso, 2014). 214 However, the relationship between neoliberalism and Zionism is not seamless, nor without its contradictions. Neoliberal Zionism is not necessarily a successful monolithic entity. In regard to neoliberalism, Foucault tended to assume a direct, uninterrupted link between theoretical neoliberalism and the way social and economic realities were manifest.540 It is not the case that seamless governmentalities result in perfect neoliberal subjects, but subjects are instead fractured, contradictory, and do not necessarily exhibit desired conduct.541 Neoliberal Zionism, specifically seen through Start-Up Nation and similar discourses, is indicative of a perpetual attempt in Zionism to justify settler colonialism by attuning itself to shifting political-economic contexts. I see Start-Up Nation as mired more in anxiety than confidence. The constant reiteration of Israel as a “start-up nation,” is accompanied by a subliminal hum of insecurity. Foucault also did not imagine a completely successful project, recognizing the “permanent ‘failures’ of programs” that produced unanticipated results.542 This chapter focuses on how start-up discourses work to justify specific narratives about the reality of Israel/Palestine. Start-Up Nation In the following section, I will read Start-Up Nation as representative of neoliberal Zionism and how settler development can represent itself in a neoliberal register. There are several components to how neoliberal Zionism functions in this text. Senor and Singer do not actively promote “Zionism”—instead, “Israel” functions as a signifier for a nationalist 540 Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis to Go to Waste, 97. 541 Ibid. 542 Lemke, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique,” 56-57. 215 ideology. “Zionism” is, for the most part, absent from the text (though it appears here and there without much explanation). However, the text operates as Zionist, reiterating its major historical claims in a neoliberal context. For instance, Start-Up Nation elides all mention of settler-colonialism (which would undermine any claims to a Jewish ‘return’). It also refigures Zionist socialist and non-capitalist histories in order to create a teleology of high-tech capitalism. Further, Start-Up Nation argues that Israel is exceptional because of its unique cultural attributes, that is, Israelis are entrepreneurs because of the social values that arise out of (near) universal military conscription, failing to mention is that universal conscription is far from the case in Israel.543 In fact, in the book, military service is hardly about military endeavors at all, but instead serves as a training course for aspiring start-up entrepreneurs. And finally, neoliberal Zionism produces its own brand of entrepreneurial Orientalism, wherein Israel is placed firmly in the “West” as a universal archetype of exceptional conduct. Arab states and Palestinian-Arab citizens are seen as outside of this “West,” anti-entrepreneurial, lacking in the capacity for a creative, flexible, democratic capitalism. The book frames Israeli enterprise as pitched in direct competition with Arab neighbors (failed enterprises) in order to impress upon American readers the state’s primary value as a model for business management. How does Start-Up Nation frame its enterprising and entrepreneurial subjects? Senor and Singer argue that Israel is an exceptional hyper-democratic, egalitarian, pioneering culture: with citizens who excel at science, technology, and economic activity thanks to a unique mix of cultural characteristics. While there is a brief attempt to show a strong cultural connection between Judaism and Zionism,544 for the most part, the 543 Hever, The Privatization of Israeli Security, 45-46. 544 Senor and Singer, Start-Up Nation, 61. 216 quintessential start-up subject is the secular Israeli Jew. In the formation of the entrepreneurial subject, Senor and Singer do not include Palestinian citizens of Israel nor Orthodox Jews (except as anti-entrepreneurial), nor women (except as victims of Arab patriarchy). Their purified Israeli citizen is quintessentially an entrepreneur. Senor and Singer define entrepreneurialism as having “initiative, risk-taking, and agility,”545 with “tenacity, of insatiable questioning of authority, of determined informality, combined with a unique attitude towards failure, teamwork, mission, risk, and cross-disciplinary creativity,”546 as employing “improvisation,”547 with “assertiveness…independent thinking…ambition.”548 Senor and Singer locate these characteristics both in an imagined and revised Israeli history as well as in compulsory military service (supposedly an incubator of all the characteristics named above) and even enlist David Ben-Gurion, the pre-state leader of the Jewish community and first Prime Minister, in the project of neoliberal Zionism. They reimagine Ben-Gurion as a central fore-runner of managerial success—he is no longer the nationalist leader employing socialist rhetoric, nor directing a developmentalist, centralized state. Ben-Gurion becomes instead a pragmatic, proto-entrepreneur, symbolic of past Zionist pioneering, now sanitized for contemporary capitalist consumption. He is the first “national entrepreneur,”549 or “in business terms, Ben-Gurion was the ‘operations guy’ who actually built the country.”550 545 Ibid., 106. 546 Ibid., 21. 547 Ibid., 53. 548 Ibid., 65. 549 Ibid., 29. 550 Ibid., 130. 217 The authors call Ben-Gurion a bitzu’ist, a Hebrew-English portmanteau that means “someone who just gets things done,”551 and “the builder, the irrigator, the pilot, the gunrunner, the settler. Israelis recognize the social type: crusty, resourceful, impatient, sardonic, effective, not much in need of thought but not much in need of sleep either.”552 For the authors, bitzu’ist exemplifies a uniquely Zionist type that is “a thread that runs from those who braved marauders and drained the swamps to the entrepreneurs who believe they can defy the odds and barrel through to make their dreams happen.”553 These neoliberal Zionist discourses seek to form a particular type of subjectivity that links the pioneer and the entrepreneur, the old settler and the new, reimagining the frontier itself. Palestinians here are only “marauders”—obscured as political and historical subjects. The book mobilizes the cultural symbolism of non-neoliberal Zionist governmentality to claim contemporary neoliberal exceptionalism. The pioneer of the past is constitutive of the entrepreneur of the present. Former Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, in his introduction, also revises Zionist settler history in order to imagine a seamless technological continuity that neoliberalizes the kibbutz. In Zionist histories, kibbutzim are often seen as self-avowedly socialist- communal ethnocratic farms, important for settlement, and key symbolic sites for Labor Zionism:554 The kibbutz became an incubator, and the farmer a scientist. High-tech in Israel began with agriculture. Even with little land and less water, Israel became an agricultural leader. Though many still consider agriculture the epitome of low-tech, they are mistaken: technology was 95 percent of the secret of Israel’s prodigious agricultural productivity.555 551 Ibid., 131. 552 Ibid. 553 Ibid., 132. 554 Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy. 555 Senor and Singer, Start-Up Nation, xii. 218 In Start-Up Nation, the kibbutz is a “high-tech” “incubator,”556 a precursor to technology clusters, an entrepreneurial formation wherein different public and private entities collaborate in the sharing of expertise, personnel, and networks to promote a business “eco- system”:557 At the center of the first great leap was a radical emblematic societal innovation whose local and global influence has been widely disproportionate to its size: the kibbutz… Historians have called the kibbutz the “world’s most successful commune movement” that displays, “hardiness and informality, and their pursuit of radical equality produced a form of asceticism” that was “hypercollective and hyperdemocratic.”558 In this passage, Senor and Singer refigure kibbutzniks as forerunners to the present state’s entrepreneurial citizens. The authors also rewrite the kibbutzim’s role in the settlement in Palestine, molding these familiar tropes to instead valorize enterprise and entrepreneurialism. As Senor and Singer write, “many of those entrepreneurs say they see themselves as doing the twenty-first equivalent of what their grandparents did—not draining the swamps and greening the desert, but building companies.”559 Kibbutz values are now neoliberal capitalist values and Zionist settlement (despite its ideologically diverse past) becomes a trans-historical, teleological venture. As one media start-up entrepreneur in the book says, “The new pioneering, Zionist narrative is about creating things.”560 Historical revision justifies the claim that past national cooperation and innovation produced specific kinds of entrepreneurial characteristics. However, for Senor and Singer, 556 Ibid., 134. 557 Ibid., 237. 558 Ibid., 134. 559 Ibid., 294. 560 Ibid., 275. 219 compulsory military service is the basis for the maintenance of citizens’ training and economic success in a contemporary economy. In Start-Up Nation, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) appears as a mandatory business internship. Soldiers are “battlefield entrepreneurs” (the title of Chapter 2) in a “purely merit-based institution.”561 The IDF is now an incubator of leadership skills and innovation, leading to the cultivation of business networks that extend into the civilian world. As Senor and Singer write: The IDF’s improvisational and antihierarchical culture follows Israelis into their start-ups and has shaped Israel’s economy. This culture, when combined with the technological wizardry Israelis acquire in elite military units and from the state-run defense industry, forms a potent mixture.562 Senor and Singer call these “elite units” (intelligence unit 8200, for example) the “nation’s equivalent of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale,”563 thus equating military training with an ivy- league education. Neoliberal Zionism appraises Palestinian lives in relation to their value as training sites for Israeli business experience and expertise. One of the few times that Senor and Singer acknowledge the existence of Palestinians is in the description of an operation in Nablus, a standoff with a “terrorist” who has trapped Palestinian children in a school. The moral of this anecdote is that the young Israeli commander—the “battlefield entrepreneur”—who succeeds in killing the terrorist and saving the Palestinian schoolchildren and nearby journalists—exhibits the right mixture of improvisation, horizontal decision-making, and “creative solution[s].”564 The IDF is itself the perfect enterprise, full of low-level workers showing initiative and not afraid of criticizing superiors. Neoliberal Zionism imagines the soldier an entrepreneurial subject. Since the 561 Ibid., 96. 562 Ibid., 215. 563 Ibid., 84. 564 Ibid., 56-57. 220 IDF is the prerequisite for success, for training and networking potential, neoliberal Zionism frames the Occupation as a compulsory internship.565 Compulsory military service is not the sole reason for Israeli entrepreneurialism. As Senor and Singer write, about thirty nations have compulsory service but unlike Israel, many of these states are “developing or nondemocratic or both.”566 The Israeli military, for Senor and Singer, offers a radical “egalitarian” military experience without a crystallized hierarchy thanks in part to the uniqueness of reserve service in which “taxi drivers can command millionaires and twenty-three year-olds can train their uncles” This culture reinforces the “chaotic, antihierarchical ethos that can be found in every aspect of Israeli society, from war room to classroom to board room.”567 This military institutional organization produces a cultural “fluidity” which is, “according to a new school of economists studying key ingredients for entrepreneurialism, is produced when people can cross boundaries, turn societal norms upside down, and agitate in a free-market economy, all to catalyze radical ideas.”568 This specific cultural and historical cocktail produces a neoliberal Zionist subject that out-competes other national subjects while Israel is an enterprise society that out- competes other nations. The book frames Israel as the most exceptional manifestation of Western ideas of progress. This spatial imagination constructs a division within contemporary capitalism, a (potentially) entrepreneurial West against a static, anti- entrepreneurial East (mostly represented by Arab countries): In a world seeking the key to innovation, Israel is a natural place to look. The West needs innovation; Israel’s got it. Understanding where this 565 Ibid., 56-59. 566 Ibid., 103. 567 Ibid., 60. 568 Ibid., 122. 221 entrepreneurial energy comes from, where it’s going, how to sustain it, and how other countries can learn from the quintessential start-up nation is a critical task for our times.569 Start-Up Nation’s neoliberal Zionist imagination of West vs. East reflects earlier Zionist ideas that claim Israel as a modern state in opposition to backwards Arab states. This reflects Herzl’s words from 1902, that a Jewish state would be a “portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”570 As Edward Said writes, Orientalism relies on a prior codification of a body of knowledge with a strategy of “flexible positional superiority, which puts the Western in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand.”571 Neoliberal Zionism often portrays Arab “culture” as the opposite of Israeli entrepreneurialism—or at best, a patronized recipient of Israeli expertise wholly backwards in the face of contemporary capitalist economies.572 The signifier of “Arab” as antagonistic to neoliberal Zionism appears in several guises. Peppered throughout Start-Up Nation are descriptions of Arab threats of violence and boycotts, which ultimately fail to hinder Israeli success. In particular, Senor and Singer focus on Dubai, made representative of the entire Arab world. Chapter 13, “The Sheikh’s Dilemma” begins with a long description of Israeli business practices and innovation of “clusters” that provide economic growth by combining different motivating facets of peoples’ lives. Israel not only innovates enterprising clusters but is an enterprising cluster 569 Ibid., 23. 570 Herzl, Old New Land, 96. 571 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994): 7. 572 For example, see Yadin Kaufman, “Start-Up Palestine,” Foreign Affairs July/August (2017). 222 itself; citizens have multiple commitments that grounds their business lives in family, community, and nation.573 In contrast, business people in Dubai are transient, “their emotional commitment and sense of rootedness lie elsewhere” which is “a fundamental obstacle to a fully functioning cluster, and it may also be an impediment to cultivating a high-growth entrepreneurial economy.”574 Neoliberal Zionism has an egalitarian and dynamic citizenry. Insufficiently neoliberal Arab states are stagnant, tied to the individual and familial destinies of their decadent ruling class. In producing this binary, the text again relies on “culture” as the core reason behind entrepreneurial success. Arabs, as a racialized homogenous nation, lack the ability to compete with Israel in entrepreneurial activity. Orientalism constructs the objects of “Islam” and the “Arab world” as perpetually outside of the West. In this relationship, liberalism, as Joseph Massad argues, is consolidated through the production of Islam as its external, perpetual opposite (2015).575 Neoliberal Zionism grasps established Orientalist explanations yet adds a new twist: “cultural” inferiority is now tied to a lack of neoliberal capitalist values. Turning to Israel’s ‘problem’ populations, Senor and Singer represent both Palestinian (in the text, “Arab”) citizens and Ultra-Orthodox Jews as outside of neoliberal Zionism’s governance. Both populations are defined by problematically high birth-rates, a reliance on government welfare, and their low rankings in a range of economic indicators. Both groups do not generally serve in the military, which excludes them from skills training and access to business networks.576 Other factors that Senor and Singer give for Palestinian 573 Senor and Singer, Start-Up Nation, 237-244. 574 Ibid., 244. 575 Joseph Massad, Islam in Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 576 Singer and Senor, Start-Up Nation, 269. 223 citizens’ lackluster entrepreneurial potential (which detach from a long history of settler colonial domination and expropriation) is over-population and a lack of woman’s empowerment. The authors highlight the gender gap that directly impedes the growth potential of the economy in Palestinian and Arab societies.577 While it is true that Arab women are not well-represented in the Israeli workforce, Jewish-Israeli women also face significant barriers to employment equity, including a pay gap (67% of what men make, as of 2014), over-concentration in specific occupations, and lack of representation higher up the managerial ladder, according to the Adva Center, an Israeli research centered focused on equity and social justice. It is also the case that while Arab women do participate less in the labor force (27.6% in 2014) they make slightly more money than Arab men due to their high prevalence of college degrees.578 The ease in which Senor and Singer make this argument shows how neoliberal Zionism draws from Orientalist narratives that conform to tropes of “Eastern” cultural inferiority,579 now indicative of a lack of “start-up” culture. It is also the case that in this argument, specific types of gender inequality only hinder Arab economic potential. And it is not just Arab peoples who are deemed as ‘outside’ of start- up culture. Neoliberal Zionism also frames ultra-Orthodox Jews as a homogenous demographic of anti-entrepreneurial citizens and a potential sap on state resources, thus reinforcing the ideal subject as secular. The line of cultural superiority is drawn around the secular Jew—excluding all those outside as a drain on the state’s human capital. For instance, Senor and Singer see these demographic “bombs” as potential challenges for the 577 Ibid., 258-259, 269. 578 Noga Dagan-Buzaglo and Yael Hasson, “Gender Salary Gaps in Israel 2015.” Adva Center, 22 December 2015. https://adva.org/en/equalpay2015/. 579 Massad, Islam in Liberalism. 224 start-up nation and present the “worrying” percentage that by 2028, 39% of Israel’s population will either be Arab or Haredi (a specific Orthodox group).580 Ultimately, Start-Up Nation cobbles together these components of neoliberal Zionist governmentality to try to answer the question: Why does Israel have such economic success? For Senor and Singer, “the answer…must lie in the stories of individual entrepreneurs…which are emblematic of the state itself.”581 Entrepreneurs represent all that is good about the enterprise society. However, they are not the atomized, neoliberal subject, but are rather intimately tied into the reproduction of a nationalist collective. Israelis embark on self-appointed diplomatic missions for the state in which they are not just selling their product, but the Israeli economy and, by extension, Israel as conceived through neoliberal Zionism582—the “Israelis are always making a pitch for Israel.”583 All Israeli entrepreneurs ultimately clock-in for the start-up nation. The work of an ambassador for Israeli exceptionalism is a 24/7 job; the neoliberal Zionist subject is always at work. What this neoliberal Zionism sells is an Israel whose economic and business acumen is beneficial to the United States and international capital. It is also a business model for war. Neoliberal Zionism, in its current manifestation, promotes regional conflict as economic opportunity. Senor and Singer set out to prove that, for Israel, conflict may not be an impediment to growth. As they write, “Israel has managed to divorce the security threat from its economic growth opportunities”584 because investors are confident investing capital in Israel no matter the situation. Bill Gates, for instance, traveled to Israel 580 Senor and Singer, Start-Up Nation, 270. 581 Ibid., 21. 582 Ibid., 78. 583 Ibid., 81. 584 Ibid., 183. 225 immediately after the 2006 war with Lebanon to proclaim a “defiant” business environment, while Warren Buffett portrayed Israel as safe for capital investment.585 Similarly, in 2014, after a Hamas rocket landed near Ben-Gurion airport, Michael Bloomberg criticized the US Federal Aviation Administration for restricting flights to Israel, saying that, “Hamas would like nothing more than to close down Ben-Gurion, isolating Israel from the international community and seriously damaging its economy… the FAA has, regrettably, succeeded in only emboldening Hamas.”586 It is somewhat strange to see a US business-man/ politician, who ran for president, criticize federal agencies over a perceived slight to the Israeli economy—of course, “strange” would imply that it is not expected. The “start-up nation” has cultivated such currency in the English- speaking world that these perceived virtues are almost a cliché amongst specific groups of politicians and businesspeople. Ultimately, neoliberal Zionist governmentality, as exemplified in Start-Up Nation, frames its subject as Western, secular, and unique to modernity. It celebrates the supposedly innate cultural qualities of entrepreneurialism in Israelis, revises and sanitizes Zionist history, and claims Israel can out-compete other nations since it is a perfect model for enterprising economies. Differing from other Zionist governmentalities, neoliberal Zionism refigures the political rationality of contemporary capitalism to argue for Israeli exceptionalism. Zionism, itself, is framed as a force for business management and a template for economic success and development—not just as a national settler movement. 585 Ibid., 180-181. 586 Michael R. Bloomberg, “Why I Flew to Israel.” Bloomberg, July 23, 2014. www.bloomberg.com. 226 Silicon Wadi Those of us from Mississippi understand the importance of the relationship between the US, and more importantly, Mississippi and Israel. We are almost the same size, the same type of people. We like to call Mississippi, the ‘start-up state.’ [Pause]. Yeah, I borrowed that from you [Audience laughter]. - Republican Governor, Phil Bryant at the Nextech Conference in Beersheba, Nov 30, 2016587 Figure 14. Beersheba Hi-Tech Development. Planned development of the Advanced Technologies Park and IDF Technology Campus to join eco- system of Ben-Gurion University and Soroka Hospital in Beersheba. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, “Academia as a Growth Engine – BGU Case Study.” https://in.bgu.ac.il/en/Publications/Site%20Assets/Pages/Publications/Academia-as-a-Growth- Engine.pdf. “Silicon Wadi,” has been the nickname for regional centers for start-ups and hi- tech industries in Israel. It is an obvious pun on Silicon Valley, in effect likening Israel to 587 Author field notes, NexTech Conference, Nov 30, 2016. Gav-Yam Advanced Technologies Park. Beersheba, Israel. 227 the world’s preeminent tech corridor. Today, Beersheba is being touted as the new Silicon Wadi, the place most indicative of the “Start-Up Nation.” The Gav-Yam Advanced Technologies Park is imagined to be the central hub for a sprawling industrial park, connected to both Ben-Gurion University and the IDF Technologies Campus that will make up the new Cyber Capital, or as Netanyahu claims, the “cybercenter of the Western Hemisphere.”588 These interlocking projects are intertwined with plans to develop the Naqab/Negev according to the imperatives of the settler state. Newspaper articles and other media, meant to promote ATP, often frame the park as an “oasis” in the “desert,” situate Beersheba as a city on the rise, as opposed to its peripheral status in the past, and play off of the Zionist slogan of “making the desert bloom.” Zionist settler imaginary mixed with hi-tech capitalist branding.589 This type of development in the south is wholly reliant on the brand of the IDF and private companies that capitalize on military technologies in the civilian sector. On November 30, 2016, ATP hosted a one-day conference called NexTech. The conference showcased different start-ups and companies that had offices at the ATP, such as DELL- EMC, PayPal, Oracle, and Deustch-Telekomm (who owns T-Mobile), as well as Israeli weapons companies like Elbit and IAI. Further, the park is home to the government’s National Cyber Bureau and BGU’s BGN company, which commercializes academic research and applications. All are enmeshed in cyber-security and other products that can have “dual-use” military and civilian applications, in effect commercializing military 588 Nimrod Bousso, “Desert Storm: Be’er Sheva Rapidly Emerges as Global Cyber Center,” Ha’aretz, 24 April 2015. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/.premium-desert-storm-beer-shevas-overnight- cyber-success-1.5353956 589 See Karie, “New Silicon Valley in the Middle East,” and Ackerman, “Israel Sows Cyber Hub in Desert to Make Beersheba Bloom: Cities.” 228 technology, while providing industry and academic support for the advancement of technologies of control. Over the course of the day, academics, employees at private corporations, and military officials all spoke about the way that the ATP and the adjacent university and military facilities will provide a unique opportunity for economic and technological collaboration across military and civilian worlds. The event also showcased the relationship between Israel and the US. The Republication Governor of Mississippi, Phil Bryant, was even in attendance, to talk about Mississippi’s role as the epicenter of production for the US military, nicknaming the Magnolia State, “The Start-Up State.”590 This conference was organized by Israel Defense, a subsidiary of Arrowmedia Israel Ltd., which focuses on the marketing of military technologies. They publish a magazine also called Israel Defense that gives monthly updates on the Israeli military, its tactics and weapons.591 Israel Defense, besides organizing NexTech, also organizes international conferences called CyberTech, which now are slated to occur not only in Israel, but also Singapore, Italy, and the US, Canada, Japan, and Panama—some of Israel’s biggest arms allies.592 On June 13th, 2017, for example, a conference was held in Fairfax, Virginia, with former Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, and representatives from the US government, and private arms contractors.593 These are networking and exhibition events (as was NexTech), which enable corporate, government, and military employees to meet each other, while also giving space for the exhibition of new products and designs. They try to cultivate a sense of a dynamic global market of 590 Author field notes, NexTech Conference. 591 Arrowmedia Israel Ltd., “Israel Defense,” Website, Accessed 20 April 2020. https://www.israeldefense.co.il/en/tab/arrowmedia. 592 See Halper, War Against the People. 593 Israel Defense, “Cybertech Fairfax: Working Together to Face the Global Cyber Threats,” June 14 2017. Website, Accessed 20 April 2020. https://www.israeldefense.co.il/en/node/29981 229 innovation all the while acting as an advertisement for Israeli weapons systems, and for Israel itself. Much of this revolves around Ben-Gurion University. At least since the 1990s, officials at the university, most notably University President Avishay Braverman, former World Bank employee and more recently, Member of Knesset, had hoped to build a campus where private industry and the university could collaborate.594 The current President Dr. Rivka Carmi has done much to extend the original idea and gear it towards high-tech development, which has put the development project even more on the national and international stage. As the government began to plan for the shift of the IDF south, momentum for the founding of the ATP picked up. With Gav-Yam Negev, a private real- estate developer, BGU helped plan and pull together support for the ATP. The city of Be’er Sheva, especially mayor Ruvik Danilovich, was in support of such a project that would perhaps spur development throughout the city.595 The development of the site was also supported by KUD International, a Japanese-American firm out of Los Angeles, who had representation on the BGU Board of Governors. Finally, the government also pushed through support of the ATP as the university and city were able to secure private company involvement.596 Amidst talk about the development of the economic potential at NexTech and in the media surrounding the building of the ATP, there was little to no explicit mention of the conflict or Occupation, except as the unnamed context for all of the military technologies being displayed. It was also the case that when speaking about the development of the 594 Author field notes, NexTech Conference. 595 Ibid. 596 Ibid. 230 Naqab/Negev, there was no mention of its Bedouin citizens, whose homes are at risk because of the construction of new Jewish towns and the establishment of military bases. The NexTech conference provides an example of how neoliberal settler development works to extend the settler logic of an ethnically based economy that draws heavily from international capital. Since, the development of the Negev is dependent on the export of military technology, it ends up reinforcing the exclusion of Palestinians. Bedouin, like other Palestinian citizens, do not serve in the military in any great numbers, nor do they receive the levels of training, education, and access that Jewish citizens receive in the workplace. By using the military as the engine of development, this further guarantees the production of an ethnic-based economy, at the expense of the region’s indigenous citizens. This development plan is thought to catalyze a shift south of 35,000 soldiers, their families, additional professionals in cyber-tech, in order to increase the population of Beersheba by 100,000 in the next few years, and the Negev to 1,000,000 by 2020 (from 610,000)597. Of course, this is banking on Jewish, not Bedouin, population growth. In anticipation, Beersheba and the other large ‘mixed’ towns in the Negev, Dimona, Yerocham, and to some extent, Arad, are expanding housing projects, building new neighborhoods and units to try to attract military officers and their families.598 There are some anxious rumblings about the future success of such a plan. The government worries that officers may commute from the center (since the highways and trains lines are expanding), or quit, looking for jobs elsewhere, rather than move to the south. Population migration will rely on subsidies: single officers will receive “70,000 NIS if they live in the 597Ackerman, “Israel Sows Cyber Hub in Desert to Make Beersheba Bloom: Cities.” 598 Nimrod Bousso, “Negev Towns Gearing Up for Influx from Israel’s Center,” Haaretz, February 14, 2014. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/.premium-negev-towns-gearing-up-for- influx-1.5321995. 231 Negev for at least 5 years” and families, 200,000 NIS.599 In addition, the government and the regional authorities are working to expand infrastructure, improve schools, improve health services, and bring more recreational attractions to these cities. Little is said about the pressure it will put on Bedouin citizens as the region becomes further orientated towards the military, producing a settler-based development that will amplify the inequality in the region. It is also the case that as the military shifts south, the growth in transnational organizations, tied through partnerships in intellectual property rights and research sharing, further segregates the economy. Neoliberal settler development cannot rely on the market alone. It relies on the extension of a settler economy, one that will continue to marginalize Bedouin labor and communities. Further, the plan to shift the IDF south relies on using the military to do what the market could never have accomplished. Zionist ideology is not driving settlers to the south in any great numbers. Private businesses, real estate, services, and more, all rely on the transfer of soldiers to the Naqab/Negev. Further, military installations are used to de facto deny Bedouin land claims as security regulations do not allow towns within specific distances of bases. This is one way to increase the pressure on Bedouin communities that have successfully forestalled land expropriation by organizing, demonstrations, and legal battles. In all, neoliberal settler development in the Naqab/Negev is similar to the kind of economy outlined in Start-Up Nation; the military subsidizes the market and extends settler control over the capitalist economy. 599 Gili Cohen and Zvi Zrahiya, “IDF to offer grants for soldiers who move to the Negev,” Haaretz, December 29, 2015. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-idf-to-offer-grants-for-soldiers- who-move-to-the-negev-1.5383145; These grants, while not enough to buy new homes in these cities, are a significant amount of money. For comparison, in Dimona, the average apartment is 800,000 NIS to buy, with a house going for 1.5 million NIS. Buosso, “Negev Towns.” 232 Figure 15. We're Making Progress... The discourse of the start-up nation is a developmental ideal that synchronizes with Zionist claims to “make the desert bloom.” Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, “Academia as a Growth Engine – BGU Case Study.” https://in.bgu.ac.il/en/Publications/Site%20Assets/Pages/Publications/Academia- as-a-Growth-Engine.pdf. Conclusion In this chapter, I presented Start-Up Nation as a text that exemplifies a neoliberal Zionist governmentality and development in order to show how we might understand the particular relationship that currently prevails between nationalism and neoliberalism. The book’s neoliberal Zionist governmentality emphasizes several ideological facets of neoliberalism such as competition, entrepreneurialism, and the enterprise-state. However, it also seeks to produce a citizen-subject not wholly atomized as an individual, but part of a national collective—even if this collective is imagined as a homogenous population, excluding Palestinians and non-secular Jewish-Israelis. Neoliberal Zionist governmentality 233 also sanitizes ongoing settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel and reduces Palestinian life to its value for Israeli entrepreneurs. Further, neoliberal Zionist governmentality animates present-day settler development. I showed how neoliberalism, in this local manifestation, was co-constitutive with Zionism—both seek to benefit from the legitimacy that the other offers. To conclude, I will briefly offer some additional critique of this new order in order to challenge the normalization of such start-up discourses. As I have shown throughout this chapter, neoliberal Zionist governmentality relies on the production of Palestinians and Arabs as opposites to entrepreneurial Israelis. And it is also the case that large numbers of Israeli-Jews do not benefit from the economic success claimed by start-up nationalists. Start-up discourses not only sanitize the Occupation, ongoing settler colonialism, and geopolitical conflict, but importantly obscures the inequality that has become endemic to Israeli society. First, Israeli economic success (as envisioned in Start-Up Nation) is reliant on specific industries—such as communications, computer software, and military hardware— that, since the 1970s, are overwhelmingly export-based and tied into security research and development.600 As a result, there are reasons to question the supposed success of the Israeli economy. Israel has some of the worst inequality in the so-called developed world. The Economist, for instance, calls Israel the “left-behind nation” in which, “Oligopolies and monopolies abound, and over the past decade the country’s position in the World Bank’s ease-of-doing-business index has slid from 26th to 52nd. This has meant low wages and high prices. The cost of living is about 20% higher than in Spain and 30% higher than in South 600 Krampf, The Israeli Path to Neoliberalism; Gordon, Israel’s Emergence as a Homeland Security Capital; Breznitz, Innovation and the State. 234 Korea.”601 While neoliberal economic policy has resulted in inequality most everywhere, it seems to be much worse in Israel. According to the Adva Center, in 2016, around one-fifth of all Israeli households were under the poverty line—though these numbers break down by ethnicity/national identity: 13.2% of Jewish Israeli versus 49.2% of Palestinian Israeli households. Ethiopian Jews had the highest Jewish poverty rate at 22.8%.602 Further, while Start-Up Nation valorizes the Israeli economy as a whole by focusing only on high-tech, beyond this sector, Israel’s productivity is the lowest in OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation) countries. The Adva Center links this to governmental policy of keeping wages low that was instituted after the shift towards ‘neoliberal’ economic policy. Many Israeli workers earn “low wages,” (2/3rds of the median wage), receive meager benefits, and many foreign workers toil in bad working conditions. Meanwhile, workers’ share in national income fell over the last several decades.603 Housing prices continue to rise—between 2007 and 2015, prices doubled—while wages hardly increased.604 Are start-ups a way out? A multitude of start-ups does not necessarily mean success in the long run. In fact, The Economist (hardly a critical outlet) has routinely questioned the strength of such a start-up economy in Israel. For instance, start-ups rely on a steady infusion of capital investment (and since Israel has so many start-ups, they are all competing with each other to attract foreign capital). Israel has not produced a tech 601 The Economist, “The Economy.” 602 Shlomo Swirski, Etty Konor-Attias, Aviv Lieberman, and Rotem Zelingher. “Israel: A Social Report 2018.” Adva Center, 31 March 2019. https://adva.org/en/socialreport2018/. 603 Shlomo Swirki, Etty Konor-Attias, and Aviv Lieberman, “Workers, Employers, and the Distribution of Israel’s National Income – Labor Report 2015,” Adva Center, 1 May 2016. https://adva.org/en/workers- employers2015/. 604 Shlomo Swirski and Yaron Hoffman-Dishon, “The Split Housing Market: ‘Market Forces,” The Housing Crisis and the Forgotten Vision,” Adva Center, 1 December 2016. https://adva.org/en/split- housing-market/. 235 multinational on the scale of other industrialized countries.605 Israel does attract a lot of venture capital, but since Israeli start-ups tend not to develop into multi-nationals, often these companies sell quickly to large American multinationals like Google and IBM.606 Second, this economic ‘success’ is less about a cultivated entrepreneurial citizenry and more about Israel’s specific political-economic dependence on ongoing Occupation. The Palestinian economy is dependent on the Israeli economy, especially for consumer goods, which, in turn, benefits employment in Israel, tax revenue to the government, and profits to Israeli companies, all while international aid—rather than Israeli spending— keeps Palestinians barely afloat.607 Simultaneously, international donor pressure has pushed austerity policies and consumerism in the OPT, draining the potential for economic autonomy.608 Palestinian horizons are repurposed into more policies employing start-up discourses. Instead of a negotiated political solution, Palestine is asked to mimic Israel. In Foreign Affairs, for instance, the new solution is a “Start-Up Palestine,” since “technology start-ups offer the best path forward. High-tech start-ups create well-paying jobs and support growth elsewhere in the economy while avoiding many of the roadblocks that prevent other Palestinian businesses from succeeding.”609 Occupation is diminished to “roadblocks” that undermine a self-sustaining Palestinian economy. Neoliberalism offers autonomy through the myopic horizon of the start-up. Third, the idea that the culture engendered by the Israeli military is the basis for a successful private industry is also dubious. It is a system wholly dependent on the material 605 The Economist, “Schumpeter” 2014; The Economist, “Israeli Technology Companies: What Next for the Start-Up Nation?” The Economist 21 January 2012. 606 The Economist, “Israeli Technology Companies.” 607 Hever, The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation, 38-39. 608 Haddad, Palestine Ltd. 609 Kaufman, “Start-Up Palestine,” 113. 236 support of long-term government investment.610 In the 1980s, the recession resulted in cuts to the military that precipitated a large displacement of military personnel and draftees, who not only have experience in different military technologies but move in and out of networks formed during their military service, into the private sector. In all, the military and state end up subsidizing much of the research and development necessary to commercialize technologies in a short-term oriented, volatile private sector.611 As a result, Israel not only commercializes much of its military technologies and expertise but is also a key node in the production and proliferation of weapons globally.612 Success is not cultural—nor is it success. It is an overwhelming infusion of public assets into the private sale of weapons. Fourth, Senor and Singer’s celebration of a universal Israeli subject also relies on the fallacy that conscription in Israel is universal. In fact, conscription rates have dropped precipitously since the 1980s and stand at around 48% of the total population as of 2010, 74.6% of Jewish men, and 56% of Jewish women.613 This occurs for many different reasons: the state does not often enlist Palestinian citizens and the ultra-Orthodox enjoy (for now) high religious exemption rates, especially amongst women. Further, conscription rates correlate with structural class exploitation. Drug abuse and criminal records are grounds for exemption. The IDF tends to avoid recruiting soldiers who would need additional economic support; thus, Hever argues, the increased neoliberalization of Israeli society is a reason for lower conscription. The dismantling of the welfare state has not only increased inequality and poverty, but eroded communal solidarity, normalizing the 610 Breznitz, Innovation and the State; Gordon, “Israel’s Emergence as a Homeland Security Capital.” 611 Gordon, “Israel’s Emergence as a Homeland Security Capital.” 612 Halper, War Against the People. 613 Hever, The Privatization of Israeli Security, 45-47. 237 privatization of security.614 The realities of Israeli conscription undermine Senor and Singer’s claims that the military is an egalitarian and universal ‘incubator’ for Israeli entrepreneurial subjects. Instead, it exacerbates already existing divisions. Finally, we could ask if “start-up” is even a good metaphor for the project of nation and state-building. While start-up implies certain kinds of valorized neoliberal attributes— creativity, flexibility, and innovative hard work—it also describes an enterprise in its early stages, that statistically trends towards failure.615 Start-ups quickly develop then cash out either for a public offering or acquisition by another company.616 Start-ups are also reliant on precarious labor regimes.617 In Israel, especially, start-up jobs require years of military service and training.618 What does this say about an enterprise nation? The “start-up nation” is a contradictory attempt to valorize specific types of economic activities. It channels a precarious neoliberal existence into an argument for Zionist success. It refigures the nation as a short-lived, precarious company, bending towards unsustainability, statistical failure, an exhausted, underpaid workforce, and a reliance on foreign investment. Neoliberal Zionism asks its citizen-subjects to work all the time, less for the good of themselves, but the good of the settler nation. Ultimately, the start-up nation model, repackaged and sold to US Americans and Israelis alike, seeks to obscure occupation, austerity, and inequality in the guise of national destiny. 614 Hever, The Privatization of Israeli Security, 47. 615 The Economist, “Schumpeter,” 2011. 616 Cockayne, “What is a Startup Firm?”; The Economist, “What is a Startup Firm?” 617 Cockayne, “Entrepreneurial Affect.” 618 Swed and Butler, “Military Capital…” 238 Field Journal 6: Rawabi: The Palestinian Dream January 2016 - Ramallah “Every ray of sun carries within it a beam of hope. With handover of apartment keys to their owners in Rawabi this summer, every corner of the sun-drenched city has an extra touch of beauty, as if lit from within by a sense of optimism and expectation. The earth, too, bestows its gifts on Rawabi’s neighborhoods; a profusion of wildflowers graces the hills of Wadina and the scent of those flowers is carried throughout the city on the summer breeze. Every corner of the city holds some sort of treasure for the senses, bringing delight and enjoyment to Rawabi families. Residents and visitors will be amazed at how Rawabi’s innate beauty is further illuminated in the glory of summer, making it one of the most spectacular destinations in Palestine.” – Excerpt from a brochure for Rawabi619 Ahmad’s620 car twists through the roads outside of Ramallah. The heavy winter rain obscures the surrounding valleys. A cold fog had slowly blanketed the hills while we slept. The day before, Sravanthi and I had hiked with ours friends. “It’s incredible,” says Ahmad, “There’s only water some two months of the year. We caught it at the right time.” He stoops to take a photograph of a red, poppy anemone. This flower has long 619 Rawabi, “Rawabi Home,” Brochure. Summer Edition, (2015): preface. Print. 620 I have changed the name of this friend in order to protect his anonymity. Photograph 13. Approaching Rawabi. 2016. 239 been a symbol of Palestinian nationalism and is now, since 2013, Israel’s national flower. Families from Ramallah sat here and there enjoying picnics, leaving their cars parked up along the main road before hiking down to make coffee over small Bunsen burners and sit and relax until dark, free in the landscape. We had spent the evening talking about all of the recent violence, how the IDF often stages night raids into Palestinian homes, just to post video of them on the internet in order to send a psychological message: “we can come for you any time we like.” A few weeks ago, the IDF had driven through Ahmad’s neighborhood in the middle of the night throwing flash-bangs out of their jeep windows to wake everyone up. Under the Oslo Accords, the IDF is not allowed to enter Ramallah, Area A. A week later, they would surround Ramallah, closing down roads, after an attack on Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem. We cut our own paths down the terraces, walking in and out of olive trees as the sun sank low behind the hills. We all take photographs, stopping every few feet. The air was fresh and moist, the ground wet. After months in Beersheba, I can’t stop looking at the green. We pick up fresh goat on the way home and make a curry for dinner. We all sit under the heat and talk into the night, wanting to stay out of the cold bedrooms. And then, in the morning we wake up to cold fog and freezing rain. We drive along where we hiked the day before but can hardly even see the road. Ahmad wanted to show us both Rawabi, the first planned Palestinian city, being built by American-Palestinian millionaire Bashar Masri with Qatari investment.621 John Kerry and Ban Ki Moon had made visits here recently. Leafing through the shiny brochure 621 Ibid. 240 later, I see that so had US college students, peace delegations, diplomats, and, strangely, Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin. We drive past the checkpoint with its single tower, a shaded window (we could not see if someone was inside) that looked down upon two concrete slabs that could be moved anytime to cut the West Bank in half. We then exit onto a settler road. It is a large, well- maintained throughway. Close to the village of Bir Zeit we turn onto a narrow road surrounded on two sides by old, stone walls and then we start to ascend, winding up into the fog, towards a gigantic Palestinian flag straining in the wind. There is the management office and showroom for Rawabi. On a neighboring hill, sits Jewish settlement of Ateret. The height of Rawabi must have offended them. The idea that Palestinians were above, overlooking their settlement—a reversal of the usual settler-Palestinian paradigm—must have burned a colic in their guts. As retaliation, they would steal the giant Palestinian flag as if they were summer camp rivals. Rawabi developers now take the flag down at night. We wound our way up, passing some of the new construction: large, block apartment buildings climbing the hill. A Gulf-style mosque half-constructed. They welcomed us at the showroom: “tea or coffee?” and we sat to watch a 3D film advertising Photograph 14. Visitors to Rawabi. Former Wisconsin Governor, Scott Walker with Basher Masri. From “Rawabi City,” Brochure. 2016. Photograph of Brochure. 241 Rawabi.622 A Palestinian nuclear family sits on the hills around Ramallah enjoying a picnic. Suddenly the ground begins to rumble, and they stand up, alarmed, but regain their composure and begin to smile again as the city of Rawabi begins to bloom around them. Throughout the video, children play, throw paper airplanes, and release balloons. There are wide, ordered boulevards. Shopping centers. Cafes. Palestinian dancing concerts. A mosque. It ends with people enjoying a night out in a shopping district that is bedecked in strings of lights, where underneath people smoke nargilla as fireworks explode overhead. “I have always dreamed of coming back to Palestine, and Rawabi offered me the perfect opportunity to live in a model city. My children have also always hoped to return to settle in Palestine after marriage, and to honeymoon in this beautiful city, this monument to their heritage in their own land.”623 “I am so proud to be among the first to move into Rawabi, this beautiful, well- organized city, away from congestion and pollution. It’s a place where I will raise my children in an atmosphere of civil order—a clean environment with safe playgrounds and places to run and have fun.”624 622 Rawabi City. “Rawabi – A City to Live, Work and Grow – 2013.” https://youtu.be/Z48ephxRCL0. Accessed Mar 17 2020. Video. 623 Rawabi, “Rawabi Home,” Brochure, 8. 624 Ibid., 7. Figure 16. Rawabi - A City to Live, Work and Grow 242 It is easy to be critical. The new town resembles an Israeli suburb, or perhaps more so, an Israeli settlement. When I look at the developers’ rendition of how it will look when completed, I cannot help but see Har Homa, the large Israeli settlement outside of Bethlehem. It is the case that new development in the West Bank by Palestinians sometimes resembles the settlements in architecture and urban layout. The settlements are usually tightly planned rings of houses on hilltops that face outwards onto the landscape. Some scholars have observed that they are fortress-like by design, that they simultaneously separate the inhabitants from their surroundings, while serving as an extension of Israeli surveillance and as a way to remind Palestinians of the true sovereignty here.625 There is a new neighborhood of Ramallah for instance, out amongst the hills where we had hiked, that I mistook for a settlement in 2013. No, Ahmad said, it’s just a new neighborhood, albeit, in the same form, the same shape. Why is this? It is as if Palestinian developers are drawing from the same models as Israelis? Or is this the new urban planning? A floating model to from which to draw inspiration? Are all new suburban towns in this era of globalized development meant to be fortresses: separate and secure? But it is also the case that the project of Rawabi shows (and as represented best in the video) in some sense, a way out of the Occupation. It shows normalcy, transcribed through the real estate, recreation, and commerce of capitalism. The shopping districts of Rawabi will look like those in the new gentrified Jerusalem, in the promenades of suburban New Jersey. It is a desire, perhaps, to live a ‘normal’ life, something open, clean, and free amidst all the roadblocks, the everyday grind of life under occupation. Sure, C says, it is capitalist and it is drawing from settler colonialism, but we can’t quite write it off… It is being called “The 625 See Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (Verso Books, 2012). 243 Palestinian dream” by developers, but is the dream people should be having? Are these suburban settlements meant to prescribe to us a certain type of living, to narrow how we can imagine the world? “These first families of Rawabi will become part of its legend and its history. Future generations of Palestinians will honor the courage and vision of those who saw their own futures in Rawabi even before the cornerstone of the new city was laid. Rawabi’s first families will be respected for standing steadfast in spite of challenges, committed to a life in a city born of Palestinian vision and built with Palestinian hands, stone by stone. Sustained by a dream of a bright future in their own homeland, hundreds of Palestinian families stand poised to take the first step towards the vision of a new Palestine.”626 When traveling in the Galilee in 2011, Palestinian Israeli guides, repeatedly called Jewish towns here, “settlements.”627 Indeed, in the 1970s, the government of Israel had pushed a housing and settlement policy to “Judaize” the Galilee, a place where most Palestinians that had not been expelled from the 626 Ibid., 6. 627 The Galilee falls within the borders of Israel. Photograph 15. Model of Rawabi in the showroom. 2016. 244 state remained after 1948. During the 1970s, protests against this building program, and the continued cantonization of Palestinian towns and land, led to the establishment of Palestinian Land Day. The towns built in this push resemble West Bank settlements: they are on hilltops, red-roofed (so that the Israeli Air Force can spot them from above) and are designed to be suburban fortresses.628 Actually, I should say that the settlements in the West Bank resemble the “settlements” in the Galilee; here the architecture and planning came first and was replicated in the West Bank. Right now, Israeli ministers say they are embarking on a “Judaization” of the Negev.629 It is hard to reverse a settlement once people begin living there. Israeli politicians know this and often talk about creating ‘facts on the ground.’630 In the Negev, there are at least 15-20 new settlements in the process of being built or being planned. Some of them are planned to be built on top of Bedouin unrecognized 628 See Weizman, 2009 629 Mansour Nasasra, “The Ongoing Judaisation of the Naqab and the Struggle for Recognising the Indigenous Rights of the Arab Bedouin People,” Settler Colonial Studies, 2:1 (2012): 81-107. 630 Weizman, Hollow Land, 95. Photograph 16. The settlement of Har Homa next to Bethlehem. 2011. 245 villages. While Bedouin citizens are protesting the continued dispossession of their land, some Jewish citizens also oppose this building. Why produce new localities, they ask, when the cities—Beersheba, Dimona, Arad, and Yerocham—suffer from so much underdevelopment, so much poverty? Why not ‘thicken’ these places, since it would be cheaper, more environmentally friendly, and ultimately benefit more people? Instead, the government seems intent on building new towns that are upper middle-class, sure to draw wealth away from the big cities. ‘Class on the ground.’ I am not saying that Rawabi is comparable to an Israeli settlement, but the politics of building in Israel/Palestine is complicated, drawing from a mess of differing histories, bureaucratic designations, and class wealth. It is interesting to ask what the future is that the planners and developers imagine of Rawabi: Will it somehow reverse Israeli settlement? Or is it playing the same game, in some way, that is, grabbing the mountaintops, a geopolitical checkerboard? “Rawabi represents a new and successful tactic in our struggle for sovereignty over our land. The developers of Rawabi achieved what decades of negotiating politicians could not; they wrested a tract of land away from the designs of Israeli settlers. Rawabi proudly flies the Palestinian flag. It is a fact on the ground, a fait accompli,” says Brig. Gen Museimi.631 The director of marketing meets us in the showroom after we watch the film. He is in his late 20s or early 30s, with a shaved head, wearing a nice, purple-striped button-down shirt. The showroom is wide and well lit, swanky even, with a reflective sheen across the floor. It is interspersed with models of the city, of the neighborhoods, lit up like a train set. Along one side of the room sit a series of banking offices behind glass, so one may set up a loan to purchase an apartment on the spot. “Rawabi will be completed in 5-7 years,” says 631 Rawabi, “Rawabi Home,” 4. 246 the director. He also tells us, as we look at the bathroom interiors, that it took them four years to get permission to have water piped in, as it had to pass through Area C and near the settlement. In this way, Rawabi is a strange microcosm of the absurdity of the Oslo Accord’s legacy of Area A (Palestinians civil and military control), B (Palestinian civil, Israeli military), and C (Israeli military and civil control - and where most of the settlements are, representing a large chunk of the West Bank). “The showroom is in Area A, but the amphitheater where you watched the film is Area B.” He says. “So, we were under Israeli military control in there…? I ask. The access road to Rawabi in is in Area C, so developers will not be able to widen it from its current width at barely a lane and a half. “You can see Tel Aviv from here,” says the director as we look through a telescope sitting by a sliding glass window, down at the faint lights through the fog and clouds. Indeed, you can make out the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv and the sea behind it. Rawabi developers hope for 40,000 total residents. Right now, they have somewhere around 1,000 in the first built neighborhood. Our guide vacillates between official marketing rhetoric of how houses are selling (rumors say otherwise) and its popularity and press: —“We were covered by the New York Times!”—and a fatalism about the situation itself: “It’s a crazy project, by crazy people in a crazy place.” “Rawabi is a national success story. It is really a very patriotic act, taking head- on the Zionist plan to confiscate our property by utilizing our land to build homes for our own people and employing our countryman. It is a distinctly Palestinian narrative highlighting our civility, our humanity as well as our creative capacity— and announcement that we genuinely cherish life and deserve to live in dignity.”632 From an article called: “Rawabi City: A Civilized Approach”: “The Palestinian flag stands over its land and hills in stark contrast to a predominant attitude of 632 Ibid., 9. 247 acquiescence; a sense of powerlessness and a fear that we have not managed to accomplish anything of significance for the Palestinian people. Rawabi marks the path for Palestinian society towards modernity and civilization.”633 Why does the international community look towards Rawabi, one must ask? What does it represent for them? What kind of peace? What kind of solution? And if Rawabi is successful, if it fills up its apartment blocks with 40,000 people and becomes a shining Palestinian city on a hill, what will happen next? Is this really about national self-determination, about dignity and a future, or is it another game of neoliberal capture the flag? Field Journal 7: On Violence October 2015 – Beersheba and Rahaṭ Dear family and friends, For this email, I wrote about ten different iterations. The last month in Israel- Palestine has been incredibly, terrifyingly violent, and I have been trying to find a way to share what is going on and what I am feeling. I decided in the end to cut most of my email and just give you a straight narrative of one event. This narrative is below and is almost all the words of the person telling it, Khaled al-Ja’ar, a Bedouin Palestinian man living in Rahaṭ, the largest Bedouin “planned town” of 70,000 people, just ten minutes from Beersheba. 633 Ibid. 248 What I had previously written tried to wrestle with how violence works here, who is allowed to be violent, who is allowed to be the victim of violence, how the qualifiers of “terrorist” and “Jewish terrorist” delineate different legal realities, how Jews can be mistaken for Arabs and vice versa, how Palestinian citizens of Israel, when protesting, are often made out in the daily news to be the vanguard of a Third Intifada, “inciters,” part of a “wave of terror,” that is decontextualized from the day to day violence that defines Palestinian life. Re-reading what I was going to send you seemed to do nothing but try to intellectualize what is going on, and frankly, it went nowhere. On October 18th, I receive a flurry of messages on the WhatsApp group for our overseas program—a shooting was reported at the central bus station (the only way to travel south of Beersheba), and our program leaders ask us each to check in and to call everyone who does send a message.634 In about an hour everyone was accounted for. By then the news of the “shooting” has morphed into news of a “terrorist attack” in which, reportedly, two attackers opened fire on a crowd commuting on a busy Sunday. Videos circulated of one of the “attackers” lying on the ground in his own blood, having been shot by security personal as several Israelis (at least one a soldier) attack him: kick him in the face, the ribs, and others scream, “Kill him!” Another man—Israeli-Jewish—tries to protect him from the attacks by putting a metal chair over the man. It comes out later that evening that this man, an Eritrean refugee, was not an attacker, but a bystander, having been “mistaken” for an accomplice. (“Mistaken” became a point of argument in our group at Ben-Gurion University, a marker of race: he had dark skin and therefore in the split 634 Al-Jazeera. “Deadly attack hits bus station in southern Israel.” 19 October 2015. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/10/israel-attack-beersheeba-151018173020191.html 249 second it took to fatality wound him he didn’t ‘scan’ as Israeli-Jewish).635 After the man died from his wounds in the hospital, the government arrested and charged four Jewish men with attacking him, calling it an attempted “lynching,” and reversed their earlier chauvinistic calls for civilian vigilantism in the face of Palestinian terror. The whole story unraveled a couple of days later—a Bedouin man from a nearby village walked into the central bus station, shot a soldier, took his automatic rifle and opened fire on soldiers and police (Bedouin Palestinian community leaders promptly condemned the man). The Bedouin man was shot dead and the Eritrean man was fatally wounded. 10-11 people were listed as “injured,” and there was reason to believe that some were harmed by “friendly fire,” caused by the confusion of the attack, and perhaps, the fact that many Israeli-Jews at the moment are jumpy and are walking around with semi-automatic weapons, a combination that does very little to calm my nerves. How do we think about this, or react, or talk about how violence affects us within such an environment? The mixture of fear, culpability, racism, confusion, and violence has accompanied multiple incidents this last month. I began walking around Beersheba differently, double guessing all of my travel choices, wanting to stay away from the central bus station (nearly impossible) and from large groups of Israeli soldiers (a consistent target of this particular spate of attacks). The events also elicited a strange combination of responses from people in my program and from Israeli Jewish people in general: some were 635 Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields write of “racecraft” as [definition] which is “pieced together in the ordinary course of everyday doing.” As Fields and Fields write of racism’s effect: “Everyone has skin color, but not everyone’s skin color counts as race, let alone as evidence of criminal conduct. The missing step between someone’s physical appearance and an invidious outcome is the practice of a double standard: in a word, racism.” And on an incident where a white officer mistook his black colleague (out of uniform) for an assailant and fatally shot him, “Racism did not require a racist. It required only that, in the split second before firing the fatal shot, the white officer entered the twilight zone of America’s racecraft.” Karen E. Fields and Barbara Jeanne Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (Verso, 2014): 25. 250 alarmed and upset, sad and angry—others shrugged, projecting a bravado that often the initiated to this place hold over the newly arrived—“ah,” they say, “welcome to the Middle East” or “this is life here,” statements devoid of reason and analysis, a naturalization of violence and its everyday affects. And beyond checking in after our immediate physical safety, the university did nothing to ask us, indeed, these students who came here to live for a time, ‘How are you? Are you ok? How are you feeling?" The silence seemed to say, it’s normal—deal with it. Photo: From Yediot Achronot, a popular Israeli daily newspaper. This is from the coverage of protests in Jaffa, a predominantly Palestinian city connected to Tel Aviv. The heading of this section is "My Yafo (The Hebrew name of the city)" and has two testimonies from Israeli-Jews--nothing from Palestinian citizens. The one on the right is entitled, "Co- existence shattered" and the left is "A place to worry about." The main article (above, not pictured) describes an "intifada" in the streets of Israel. At no point are the protesters Photograph 17. Photograph of newspaper, Yediot Achronot. Normalizing images of Palestinian violence. October 2015. 251 interviewed nor is the reader (most likely Jewish-Israeli) reminded that the people protesting are citizens of the state. The picture to the left, does not seem like it could have come from the event, and indeed there is no caption. It is of a Palestinian girl holding a Hamas flag (these flags were seen at the rally)—asking the reader to draw their own conclusions... * Below, I am reproducing someone else’s narrative as best I can. Khaled al-Ja’ar wants his story shared and gives permission to use his name. On November 7th, [2015] I joined a group meeting with Khaled al-Ja’ar, whose son, Sami, was killed in January by the police in Rahaṭ. Sami’s picture adorned the metal walls of their reception room, which was lined with plastic chairs, had a modest stove, and cushions where they were no chairs. Khaled’s two younger sons, one a teenager, the other younger, served us coffee and sweet tea. Khaled, in a blue t-shirt, and black gym pants, no shoes, reclined on several pillows as he spoke, held his phone in one hand and wiped away tears from time to time with the other. At his son’s funeral, another man named Sami Ziadna was killed by inhalation of tear-gas fired by the Israeli police. Both deaths sparked large protests across the Bedouin and Palestinian communities throughout Israel this year. The police officers in the story are Jewish-Israeli. When asked how many Bedouin police officers there are in Israel, our guide chuckled and said, "Maybe 4 or 5." 252 The guide, whose first language is Arabic, translated, so the following is as close as I can get to the spirit and words of the story (and also render it into a particular narrative). This it is not a straight dictation of what was said, but I believe that I was able to capture it as closely as possible. I wrote this piece only hours after the meeting took place. The order of the narrative is almost completely preserved, though in one or two places I condensed a bit in order to clarify the meaning. The meeting was organized by the Negev Coexistence Forum along with a Black Lives Matter delegation from Atlanta. Khaled al-Ja’ar:636 “They call us Arab-Israelis, but we call ourselves Arabs of ’48. We don’t feel equal even before the courts of this country. At my case the High Court judge said, ‘For minorities, it is important that they feel comfortable and that they get their rights.’ But, I am still trying to get justice against those who killed my son.637 “When my son died, the whole family suffered, and we have been dealing with injustice since. There is discrimination everywhere. It is hard to talk about and it is even harder to talk about the killing, itself. When somebody is killed, whoever killed them should be prosecuted. In Israel, even Prime Ministers go to jail, but when it is Arabs vs. Jews, Arabs do not have any rights. We [can] live in peace with our Jewish brothers: fifty Jewish activists came to my trial [on Monday]. Once I gave a tour to the American ambassador to Israel. After this last thing, I thought about visiting him again. “In 2000, Israel killed 13 Palestinians and the number has climbed since.638 When a police officer kills someone, they blame it on the victim. In one case, a police officer hit a man in the head and killed him. The court ruled that the man’s head was weak. I am tired 636 The narrative is translated from Arabic into English. 637 At the time, al-Ja’ar was taking action to push the government to press charges on the police officer who killed his son. 638 This is a reference to the killing of 13 Palestinian citizens of Israel in 2000 during demonstrations. 253 of telling this story to groups, but it is all I can do at this point and I wish it on no one else. I had to see my son die. People say that over time, your sadness decreases. This is wrong. I have dreams about him all the time. I am scared for my other sons. I am now very attached to them and want them to stay close to me. I remember once Sami fighting with his brothers and I screamed at him a little. He yelled back that he ‘didn’t love me,’ and I was very sad. His mother, my wife, said, how did you make him like this? How did he get to this point? After he died, I discovered that there were these pictures of him that I didn’t know about, from when he was little. My daughters showed them to me. Wish he could see them now. I love my son, always. “Police brutality is a real problem. They take the law into their own hands. In America, black people suffer from police brutality too. I don’t blame the cops themselves. You are how you are raised by your parents. But how they treated me in the hospital… They beat me, they put their feet on my head, spit on me, broke my arm. They yelled, ‘Dirty Arab. Dirty Palestinian.’639 These men are sick. The sickness is from how they are raised. They are not police. And it is not my body that was shattered by them, but my mentality, my feelings today. I have bad back problems now. They want me to get an 639 This occurred the night Sami was killed and al-Ja’ar was detained as he tried to bring Sami to the hospital. He details this below. Photograph 18. The high school where Sami was killed. 2015. 254 operation, but I am not willing to do it. I don’t trust them, even if they say it is 90% likely to be successful. I don’t trust in the state, the country. If they killed my son, why would they save my back? “On the 14th of January, the police came here from the Rahaṭ station. They came because they had information that someone was selling drugs at the school. The young people always sit in the parking lot of the school. They have nowhere else to sit because there just aren’t these places for the public in the village. My son used to work in a factory for chemicals. On the same day, they had a strike at the factory because they had thrown out the Arab workers. My son called me to be picked up. I came and since he had time— he usually gets out of work too late—he went and visited with family. Afterwards, he took a tuna sandwich and an energy drink over to the school parking lot. Just minutes later, the screaming started. “I ran across the street without my shoes. I thought it was a fight amongst the youth. When I arrived, I saw my son lying on the ground and there was blood everywhere. The cop was hitting him in the head with his gun. I was shocked and screaming, ‘My son!’ For two months I had been calling the police to come arrest a man who was selling weed at the school. Then they come and do this to my son. When I started screaming at him, the officer hit me in the face. I pushed him back and he fell, then jumped up and put his gun against my head. ‘Leave the area now.’ I left and came home and then heard gunshots. Sami arrived and said, ‘Take me to the hospital, I can’t see.’ He washed his face of the blood. “I can’t see,” he said, “I can’t see.” The cops followed him. They took an M-16 out and pointed it in the air and began shooting. Then they pointed the guns at us. There were 15 people here, in this room, women and children. Two of the women had witnessed one officer put his 255 laser sight on Sami and then fire. Sami picked up his shirt to show me and said, ‘They shot me, father.’ He was dead seconds later. “I couldn’t find my keys. I was in shock. A neighbor came with a car to take him to the hospital. We put Sami in the car to take him to the closest clinic. We were driving and up ahead we saw the police, blocking the way to the clinic. I told my neighbor, ‘Don’t stop. Keep driving.’ They followed us to the clinic. The doctor got us out of the car. When we were outside, I saw the officer who shot Sami. I pointed at him and said, ‘You killed my son.’ He jumped on me and put me in handcuffs. They took me to the station and beat me, broke my bones. At the station, they were like a gang, a mafia. They put me in a small room with a table. Six officers cuffed my legs and hands. They began to beat me on the face, on my back, on my balls. I was saved by a Jewish ambulance driver. He was beating on the door, wanting to take me to the hospital. He got in and began screaming at the police who yelled back. The driver brought in another officer to help, but he only looked down at me, disgusted. I was ugly to him. The others spat on me and cursed. ‘Palestinian dog. Bastards. Hamas dogs. Grown up and can talk.’ “At the hospital, only an Arab doctor would help me. He got them to take my handcuffs off and he saw that my hands were swollen, broken. They kept my legs in cuffs. I spent eight hours in the hospital. In the morning, they took me to prison. I asked them, ‘What is the charge?’ ‘Attacking police officers.’ With my own two eyes I saw the police breaking the window of their own car. Then they took my shirt and wiped up the glass with it. I spent four days in prison and the mayor bailed me out. I was in court the next day. They told me to come at 8:00 AM and I showed up. My lawyer was surprised, he said that the court didn’t open until 9:30 AM. He had me go to the security guard and have them 256 record that I had been there. At my case, the judge talked and talked. ‘Since he assaulted them, he should remain in jail.’ My lawyer said, ‘Jail for four days? Why? And never once did they interrogate him. They made him come at 8:00 when there is no court.’ The judge eventually decided I could leave jail. “For my case, I have until Dec. 31st to have charges or not.640 It’s been 9 months. The internal office for police didn’t do anything until almost one year is up. But still no charges. When an Arab is killed they close the file within 6 months. No one has been charged yet, and it is never the police’s mistake. There was a young man killed before Sammy was. There is a video that showed the murder and the policeman was never charged. Since 2000, 70 Palestinians641 have been killed by police and the brutality continues all the time. “20,000 Palestinian-Arabs came to Sami’s funeral for a march. The mayor made a deal with the police. The march would not go towards the police station and in return, the police would stay away. We marched towards the graveyard and avoided the station. They came anyway. The youth were angry. They attacked the police car. The police called for backup. Fifteen cars came. They began shooting in the air. People were throwing rocks. They shot tear gas at the march. Another man named Sami died from gas inhalation…642 The cops did not let it go peacefully. The next day, the police said that we were not allowed to have a big funeral and that none of our leaders from the North could attend.643 Before the funeral, leaders had come to Rahaṭ for a small protest. After the funeral, there were 640 Al-Ja’ar is pressing charges against the police. 641 Palestinian citizens of Israel. 642 This is Sami Ziadna. 643 In northern Israel, there is very large and politically active Palestinian population. The leaders of the political parties and civic organizations often come down to the south to show solidarity with Naqab Bedouin Palestinians. The north also has a Bedouin Palestinian population. 257 protests at the university and students were arrested.644 25,000 people came to the other Sami’s funeral. There were large protests. They protested in front of the police station in Beersheba, where the cop who killed my Sami had been transferred. He had admitted to killing my son, but said it was an accident. He was promoted and works in the office for the sheriff of the Negev. “The President of Israel even came to Rahaṭ.645 He said that he would work to prosecute the cop. But I guess he forgot. He came again, months later, and ignored me when I tried to get his attention. He had said, ‘My heart is with you, but I can’t do anything.’ “It is hard to fight a country.” * “What is happening to you in the states?” Khaled al-Ja’ar asks, addressing the group, made mostly of black social justice organizers from Atlanta. One woman in her twenties, who works for Rise Up Georgia, says, “We are fighting an industry that makes it a crime to be black. They fear our existence. Cops shoot first and ask questions later. This has been happening for a long time. In 1999 they shot Amadou Diallo. He was an immigrant who got stopped by the NYPD. He was searching for his ID and they thought he was reaching for a gun. They shot him 46 times. There have been a lot of movements since. Recently there is #BlackLivesMatter. That started after this man named George Zimmerman shot a young man named Trayvon Martin. The media validated it because Trayvon had been wearing a hoodie.” Khaled in English: “But didn’t Obama come and say that this was wrong?” 644 Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba. 645 President Rivlin. The president in Israel is separate from the Prime Minister. 258 1st Women: “It is all talk.” Khaled in English: “No one is sorry when an Arab is killed. When they killed my son, no one came.646 When people see the police act like this, they assume they are all criminals. We don’t know what they will do. We are afraid of them. It’s always been like this. The other day I saw a cop stop three kids on bicycles. He asked, ‘Where did you kids steal those bikes?’ I said to the police, ‘why would you do this? They are just kids.’ They were arrested. It is a crime to be a Bedouin. Now, what will this child feel when they grow up and see a cop? Does a Jewish child ever have to experience this? Never.” 2nd Women: “I relate. In the US there are so many stories that never make it to the news. My nephew is 11 years old. He was stopped by the police after walking home from playing with some friends. They asked how he was in this neighborhood, assuming he didn’t belong. He was ‘trespassing’.” Man: “In the US, black parents have to have the talk with their kids. We have PA announcements about how to stay alive when you are confronted by the police. Do you have to do the same here?” Khaled in English: “I told Sami, that if a cop ever stops you, give them respect. I was a cop once, and I know that not everyone has respect for the police. Two months before he died, Sami went up to Jaffa with some friends to go to a restaurant. On their way back, around 1:00 AM, the Border Police stopped his car. My phone was ringing, and I was scared. I answered and Sami told me what happened, and had forgotten his ID. They didn’t believe that he was Israeli. The police yelled at him to get off the phone or he’d put him in the back of the police car. I heard Sami say to him, ‘I’ll put you in the back of the police 646 From the government. 259 car.’ I cringed, hit my head. I asked him to put the police on the phone. I talked to them. I told them my name and gave them my son’s ID number. I sent them a picture of it from my phone. Please, I said, leave my son alone. They said to me, only because you were a police officer, that we’ll let him go. It is sad. It was just an ID. There is no trust anymore.” 260 Chapter 4: Developing Bedouin: Neoliberal Settler Development and Bedouin Civic Society We shall transform the Bedouins into an urban proletariat—in industry, services, construction, and agriculture. 88% of the Israeli population are not farmers, let the Bedouins be like them. Indeed, this will be a radical move which means that the Bedouin would not live on his land with his herds, but would become an urban person who comes home in the afternoon and puts his slippers on. His children will be accustomed to a father who wears trousers, does not carry a Shabaria [the traditional Bedouin knife] and does not search for vermin in public. The children would go to school with their hair properly combed. This would be a revolution, but it may be fixed within two generations. Without coercion but with governmental direction… this phenomenon of the Bedouins will disappear. - Moshe Dayan, Haaretz Interview, 31 July 1963647 Dispossession and rehabilitation are the two contradictory forces that together define the economic landscape of post-colonial capitalism. - Kalyan Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development, 2014648 Introduction: Neoliberal Wastelands On March 3rd, 2016, a chilly, overcast day in Beersheba, about 300 to 400 Bedouin citizens, Palestinians from the north, and Jewish allies protested the Israeli High Court’s recent rejection of petitions to halt home demolitions in the Bedouin unrecognized villages of Umm al-Ḥīrān and ʿAtīr.649 This was the latest in a series of protests, marches, and demonstrations that have become commonplace amongst the Bedouin citizens of the northern Naqab/Negev. In 2013, much of the population demonstrated against the “Prawer- Begin Plan” (aka the Bill on the Arrangement of Bedouin Settlement in the Negev), which 647 Shamir 1996 quoted in Ismael Abu-Saad, “Spatial Transformation and Indigenous Resistance: The Urbanization of the Palestinian Bedouin in Southern Israel.” American Behavioral Scientists 51, no. 2 (2008): 1731. 648 Kalyan Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post- Colonial Capitalism (Routledge India, 2014): 64. 649 Author field notes, March 3, 2016. 261 sought to relocate Bedouin citizens from unrecognized villages, “solving” the “Bedouin problem” in one definitive stroke. About 40% of the 240,000 Naqab/Negev Bedouin- Palestinians live in some 40 unrecognized villages.650 The government’s tactical shift from the Prawer-Begin Plan principally dispersed state violence to the a more individualized scale; rather than attempt to implement a sweeping expulsion of all people from the unrecognized villages at once, the new policies adopted piecemeal demolition and harassment, village by village, house by house, person by person. 651 Unrecognized villages (of which Umm al-Ḥīrān and ʿAtīr are two) do not appear on official Israeli maps. The Prawer-Begin Plan aimed to move residents of these villages into the government planned Bedouin townships with a stick and a carrot: the violent threat of home demolitions combined with the denial of health care, education, and utilities, in exchange for monetary compensation for each family and a plot in a planned town. At work here was the paradox of Israeli settler colonialism, in which Bedouin land claims are only recognized as they are relinquished.652 A magic trick in which property only appears as it disappears. The Prawer-Begin Plan was the latest in a long series of what Ahmad Amara calls, “extrajudicial attempts to solve the Negev question,” that is, Israeli governmental attempts to ensure that land in the south would be demographically and legally controlled by a 650 Negev Coexistence Forum, “Enforcing Distress: House Demolition Policy in the Bedouin Community in the Negev.” (Negev Co-existence Forum for Civil Equality, 2016). 651 Israeli authorities often serve Bedouin residents with a demolition order (much of the time pasted to the door of their house). Usually there is a range of dates in which the demolition can be carried out, so residents do not know exactly when authorities will arrive. Bedouins can ask courts to stay the order, but this is not guaranteed. Some people have lived under demolition orders for years. See: Negev Co-Existence Forum for Civil Equality, “Mechanism for Dispossession and Intimidation: Demolition Policy in Arab Bedouin Communities in the Negev/Naqab” (June 2019): 12. https://www.dukium.org/wp- content/uploads/2019/07/Demolition-Report-Eng.2018-1.pdf 652 Shlomo Swirski and Yael Hassan, Invisible Citizens: Israel Government Policy Toward the Negev Bedouin. (Tel Aviv: Adva Center & Center for Bedouin Studies & Development, 2006): 25. 262 Jewish majority, often pursued through punitive measures and directed by a number of different agencies.653 Such state pressure involves what Ismael Abu-Saad calls, “forced sedentarization,” that is, the ‘legal’ measures and regulations that sought to impede Bedouin movement, curtailing their so-called “nomadic,” pastoral lifestyles.654 Policies of forced sedentarization were most extreme during the first decades after the Nakba, when the State of Israel confined Bedouin Palestinians to the Siyag, an area in the northern Naqab/Negev close to Beersheba and the southern Green Line. Here, like elsewhere in Israel, the Military Administration ruled over Palestinian life by constricting movement, economic opportunities, and collective rights.655 Following this period, the Israeli government embarked on a program of “forced urbanization,” an effort to ‘transfer’ (the usual euphemism) Bedouin citizens from declared what the state declared as state land to plots in crowded urban spaces, failing to respect the cultural, economic, and social needs of Bedouin residents.656 The Prawer-Begin Plan represented the most recent and perhaps one of the more extreme state efforts since the Nakba and the decade after to implement sedentarization and urbanization policies. However, due to widespread opposition— demonstrations from the Bedouin population, as well as intense criticism from the Zionist right in the Knesset (who felt it did not go far enough)—the sitting government shelved the Prawer-Begin Plan. However, activists and advocacy NGOs in the Naqab/Negev claim that the Prawer- Begin Plan continues ‘in spirit,’ as enforcement bodies engage in a low visibility conflict 653 Ahmad Amara, “The Negev Land Question: Between Denial and Recognition,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 42, no. 2 (2013): 29. 654 Abu-Saad, “Spatial Transformation…” 2008. 655 See Mansour Nasasra, The Naqab Bedouins: A Century of Politics and Resistance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); Shira Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 656 Abu-Saad, “Spatial Transformation…” 2008. 263 for control of the land in the south.657 Since 2015, the number of demolished homes has increased; in 2015-2016, 417 homes were demolished. In 2017, 536, and in 2018, 604.658 Authorities have also doubled the rate of demolition for different structures in and around villages between 2016 and 2017 (from 1,158 to 2,220). This includes everything from fences, to animal pens, to orchards, and other structures used for day-to-day subsistence.659 Home demolitions, when threatened, can sap the energy not only of the family whose home is targeted, but the resources and time of the entire village. Further, the effects ripple outwards as NGOs, other villages, and sympathetic political actors mobilize to support the affected family through lawsuits, protests, and other types of advocacy. Even so, the vast majority of home demolitions are carried out by the homeowner themselves. These are known as “self-demolitions.” People choose to dismantle their own homes when there seems no other hope because the government often threatens Bedouins with large fines if state agencies demolish the house. Self-demolitions also perversely provide some meager form of stability; people can have a modicum of control, choosing when they demolish their home, removing their belongings, and shielding children from the traumatic experience.660 As authorities continue to exercise the enforcement provisions of the Prawer-Begin Plan, in 2015, the Netanyahu government announced the “Economic Development Plan for the Arab Sector 2016-2020” (Government Resolutions 922) which promised to allocate 9.7-15 billion NIS over five years towards the stated goal of reducing the disparities 657 Interview with anonymous informant from the Regional Council for Unrecognized Villages. February 2016. 658 Negev Co-Existence Forum, “Mechanism for Dispossession and Intimidation, 12. 659 Ibid., 11. 660 Ibid. 264 between the Jewish and Arab communities in the state.661 Despite its stated intent, the plan has been criticized by different advocacy organizations for its lack of transparency, its woefully inadequate funding promises, and an absence of detail for necessities like health and education.662 In addition, Bedouin and Palestinian municipalities are still not receiving the full allocations as different Jewish-Israeli ministers withhold funding.663 The Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality (NCF—also known as “Dukium” or “co-existence” in Hebrew) and the Regional Council for Unrecognized Villages (RCUV) has criticized the Five-Year plan as another “mechanism of dispossession.” They detail how several of the more recent plans for the Bedouin community, including Resolution 922, only distribute resources to recognized villages or government planned towns. Residents of unrecognized villages (who make up 1/3rd of all Bedouin citizens in the Naqab/Negev) are excluded from the plan.664 Even while presenting these development plans, government ministers pushed for “statutory enforcement” that seeks to pressure Bedouins residing in unrecognized villages to move into government planned townships. In the midst of a plan that is supposed to reduce the economic, educational, and health disparities between Jewish and Palestinian communities in Israel, the government’s Five- Year plan allocates 30 million NIS towards tree planting on “lands that were evacuated” 661 Mossawa Center, The Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel, “The 2019 State Budget and Government Resolution 922.” http://www.mossawa.org/eng/Public/file/12019%20State%20Budget%20and%20Government%20Resoluti on%20922.pdf. 662 Ibid. 663 Mossawa details how the Ministries of Education, Economy, Welfare and Social Services, Construction and Housing, Science, Culture and Sport, Transport, Health, Agriculture and Rural Development, Justice, and other government offices are all withholding funding and not implementing the guidelines in the plan as of 2019. 664 Negev Co-Extensive Forum for Civil Equality and the Regional Council for Unrecognized Villages in the Negev, “The Arab Bedouin Indigenous People of the Negev/Naqab – A Short Background.” https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Housing/IndigenousPeoples/CSO/National%20Coexistance%20F orum%20for%20Civil%20Equality.pdf 265 and an additional 42 million NIS to continue enforcing Israel’s construction and planning laws that are being used to demolish Bedouin homes.665 Settler colonial initiatives continue to receive exponentially more funding than developmental programs in Palestinian communities. The Plan does allocate money for recognized Bedouin municipalities to build more housing, but this too is a poisoned chalice. Already, recognized Bedouin towns have a much higher population density than Jewish municipalities and less ability to provide educational and health resources to additional residents. This housing, acutely lacking in many places, is not for residents of government planned townships, but thought to be reserved in anticipation for a population ‘transfer’ from unrecognized villages. “Development,” as promoted by the State of Israel, integrates deficient provisions and services with violent enforcement mechanisms, relying on the NGO sector and austere Bedouin municipalities to manage already meager resources. Zionist development has long claimed that Bedouins are Jewish settlements’ indirect beneficiaries. Development in Israel has insistently promoted a bifurcated economic system, wherein Palestinians (citizens and those from the OPT) are tangentially integrated, exploited as temporary labor, and/or left to make do in the post-Oslo donor regime. Within Israel, the existing state and economic structures separately condition development depending on ethnic identity. National Plans often focus exclusively on expanding Jewish municipalities while planning laws target ‘illegal’ Palestinian dwellings.666 Bedouin services, budgeting, and governance are spread between several ministries, among them Agriculture and the Interior, as well as the special Bedouin 665 Ibid. no page numbers. 666 Yosef Jabareen, "Controlling Land and Demography in Israel: The Obsession with Territorial and Geographic Dominance" In Israel and its Palestinian Citizens: Ethnic Privileges in the Jewish State, Nadim N. Rouhana, Sahar S. Huneudi, eds. (Cambridge University Press, 2017): 238-265. 266 Authority (designated “The Authority for the Development and Settlement of Bedouin”)— what has been called a “state within a state.”667 Historically, the governance structure incorporating Bedouin citizens had been so vulnerable to the whim of Jewish politicians that Ariel Sharon, former Prime Minister, retained control over the Bedouin portfolio as he moved from ministry to ministry throughout his political career.668 These governance structures place Bedouin Palestinians outside of the direct relationship that Jewish citizens enjoy between governmental ministries and access to services. “Development” in Palestinian municipalities must continually pass through ministries whose portfolios allow them to exercise control over land. Zionist NGOs like the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the Or Movement are able to establish new towns directly targeting Bedouin villages. Since 1948, the State has employed juridical methods to justify the widespread dispossession of Bedouin Palestinians from their land claims.669 Such policies produced extreme socio-economic marginalization of the Bedouin community, one of the poorest groups in Israel. The poverty rate amongst Bedouin families was 58.6% in 2016, three times higher than amongst Israeli Jewish families (13.3%). The individual rate for Bedouin children in poverty is 68.2% compared to 23.9% in the Jewish community in the south.670 Since Israel withholds provisions and access to necessary utilities in order to force Bedouins off of “state land,” Many NGOs, sometimes partnering with universities or international donor agencies, often fill in to provide services. Richard Ratcliffe calls this 667 Swirski and Hasson, Invisible Citizens, 2006 quoting Adalah, 38. 668 Ibid. 669 Alexandre Kedar, Ahmad Amara and Oren Yiftachel, Emptied Lands: A Legal Geography of Bedouin Rights in the Negev (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). 670 Negev Co-Existence Forum for Civic Equality, “Violations of Human Rights of the Arab Bedouin Community in the Negev/Naqab,” International Day of Human Rights, 2019. https://www.dukium.org/wp- content/uploads/2019/12/NCFs-Human-Rights-Report-International-Day-of-Human-Rights-2019-Dec.- Eng.pdf 267 the “NGOization of Bedouin life,” wherein some advocacy organizations portray Bedouin citizens as sites of risk, both vulnerable and dangerous to Israeli citizens.671 Settler governmentality functions through attention to the indigenous population as a whole. Power is dispersed across individual indigenous bodies, regulating behaviors and judging capacity in relation to the normative (settler) citizen. Neoliberal settler colonialism mobilizes what Elizabeth Strakosch (2015) sees as the liberal distinctions of the “capable” versus the “incapable” citizen.672 In the context of the Naqab/Negev, neoliberal modalities support “human development,” that focuses on educational initiatives and specific kinds of job training. Some of these initiatives are tied into the focus on Bedouin entrepreneurialism, as I explored in Chapter Three. Programs that focus on training, tend to celebrate the nominal success of specific Bedouin individuals as they adapt to Israeli economic and educational norms. Some discourses and practices, as I detail in this chapter, frame Bedouins as the recipients of development, rather than as active participants. The overall effect of such initiatives is to emphasize ‘cultural difference’ as the core of Bedouin ‘incapacity,’ rather than the structures of settler colonialism and neoliberal economic policies. Settler development offers the barest inputs while promising integration in Israeli economic life. However, some Bedouin NGOs also find ways to mobilize community resources and address both short-term urgency and long-term political necessity—some actively framed as anti-colonial or decolonizing activities. Bedouin organizations negotiate, repurpose, and redeploy neoliberal settler developmental imperatives for a broad spectrum 671 Richard Ratcliffe, “Bedouin Rights, Bedouin Representations: Dynamics of Representation in the Naqab Bedouin Advocacy Industry,” Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 15, no. 1 (2016): 97-124. 672 Elizabeth Strakosch, Neoliberal Indigenous Policy: Settler Colonialism and the 'Post-Welfare' State (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 268 of aims with varied effects. For Ratcliffe, such work can open up the possibilities of anti- colonial action as Bedouins identify themselves in opposition to the racialized divisions of Zionist discourse and Israeli society and see themselves as part of a larger Palestinian nation.673 This chapter analyzes NGO developmental work with Bedouin communities in the Naqab/Negev. I am especially interested in NGOs that are neither wholly tied to the State of Israel’s goals, nor political organizations whose main goal is to challenge Israeli settler policy. This ‘middle ground’ is an important part of the space of development in the Naqab/Negev and offers no simple template. I will focus on three specific organizations: AJEEC-NISPED, Sidreh, and Project Wadi Attir. All engage in project-oriented development efforts and pursue varying levels of cooperation with international donors and Zionist NGOs and institutions. They each offer different pathways for addressing specific issues of Bedouin economic integration. It is my contention that while these NGOs operate in the “wasteland” of settler capitalism to ‘bring’ development to marginalized communities, they still find ways—consciously or not—to subvert Zionist representation of Bedouin poverty as the result of a cultural clash with Western modernity. Such a study can contribute to work that explores how Bedouin NGOs chart their own strategies to reframe and repurpose settler development. 673 Ratcliffe, “Bedouin Rights, Bedouin Representations.” 269 The Production of Bedouin Exclusion Figure 17. Siyag. Cropped close-up of the Siyag in a map popular with advocacy groups in the Naqab/Negev. The original map was commissioned by the Regional Council for Unrecognized Villages (RCUV) in 2006. The Siyag is outlined with perforated dashes in black. Blue dots represent unrecognized villages. Scan of map given to author by Negev Co-Existence Forum for Civil Equality. Most NGOs working with the Bedouin community operate in the Siyag, the oblong area of 1.2 million dunams between Dimona, Arad, and Beersheba that formerly operated as a reservation for Bedouin Palestinians during the Military Administration of 1948- 1966.674 This area represents the greatest concentration of Naqab Bedouin Palestinians and 674 Swirski and Hasson, Invisible Citizens, 12. 270 is home to most of the recognized and unrecognized villages and the seven government planned townships. The Israeli military moved many Bedouin communities from different areas of the Naqab/Negev into the Siyag in the years following 1948. The 1965 Planning Law converted all Bedouin land into “state land” and the state began to adopt planning policies to concentrate Bedouin populations into urbanized towns. This was to ease the capture of land but was also intertwined with modernist narratives that imagined that the State of Israel could civilize Bedouins out of existence (see Moshe Dayan’s infamous passage that is an epigraph to this chapter). Today, the Siyag figures prominently in Israeli state and private development plans and is the site of the most intense legal conflicts over land. The state plans to establish some 15-20 future Jewish towns in this area.675 While the land of the Siyag had initially been seen by Israelis to be unproductive, it is now increasingly viewed as a potential economic and development corridor by planners. Israel’s long-term policy has been for the most part to concentrate the growing number of Bedouin citizens in as little space as possible.676 While this system most visibly relies on state violence towards an indigenous population, it also reinforced through the constant reproduction of legal and popular discourses that frame Bedouin citizens as incapable of integration into a modern, Western Israeli Jewish society. The conjoined processes of land appropriation and anti-democratic rule consistently portray Bedouins as lawless security threats, nomadic, and pre-modern (and thus, unfit for self-governance), echoing earlier colonial discourses that were apparent in British colonial and pre-state 675 Negev Co-Existence Forum for Civic Equality, “Segregated Spaces: The Spatial Discrimination Policies among Jewish and Arab Citizens in the Negev-Naqab,” March 2016, https://www.dukium.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/03/IDARD_ENG_WEB-1.pdf; Interview with anonymous informant at Bimkom, February 2016. 676 Swirski and Hasson, Invisible Citizens, 18. 271 Zionist framings.677 The Israeli government often refers to plans to expel residents of unrecognized villages as “regularization” and the Bedouin population in these villages as part of the “diaspora” or “dispersion.” This official language betrays some of the ways that the Israeli state considers Bedouins as invaders and their settlements as ‘disordered,’ a blight on the landscape. The language of “invasion” and “dispersion” attests to Zionism’s reliance on willful amnesia about Bedouin continuity in the Naqab/Negev. Alongside these ideas are also narratives and representations that reproduce Bedouin Palestinians as populations whose traditional, patriarchal society is the root cause of their distress, conveniently obscuring settler-colonial dispossession that casts many to the margins of a capitalist economic system dependent on precarious wage labor and subsistence.678 Indeed, the state’s continued punitive measures shunts Bedouin citizens into manual or service occupations, under-or-unemployment, and labels many cultivation activities that Bedouins undertake to survive as illegal. In Chapter Two, “The Challenge of the Wasteland,” I detailed how colonial and settler-colonial discourses depicted Bedouins as antagonistic to settlement, agriculture, and environmental stewardship during the British Mandate period and into the 1980s under Israeli rule.679 Present racist attacks against Bedouin Palestinians resonate with similar environmental, economic, and moral elements. As Emily McKee has detailed, it is commonplace for Jewish-Israelis to link Bedouins to waste and disorder.680 These 677 See Chapter Two: The Challenge of the Wasteland: Settler Colonial Sciences in the Naqab/Negev. 678 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Griecci Woodsum, Himmet Zu’bi and Rachel Busbridge, “Funding Pain: Bedouin Women and Political Economy in the Naqab/Negev,” Feminist Economics 20, no.4 (2014): 164- 186; Ratcliffe, “Bedouin Rights, Bedouin Representations…” 679 See also Diana K. Davis, "Desert ‘Wastes’ of the Maghreb: Desertification Narratives in French Colonial Environmental History of North Africa," Cultural Geographies 11, no.4 (2004): 359-387. 680 Emily McKee, "Trash Talk. Interpreting Morality and Disorder in Negev/Naqab Landscapes." Current Anthropology 56, no. 5, (2015): 733-752. 272 representations usually draw from colonial and settler-colonial discourses that equate primitivism and nomadism to the production of waste.681 The logic of settler development in the northern Naqab/Negev demands the ordering of Bedouin space and the normalization of Bedouin conduct in conformity with Zionist environmental, economic, and moral values, even as Bedouin land is designated for expropriation. These pejorative representations of Bedouin conduct operate simultaneously with other tropes that valorize Bedouin traditions and their indigenous, desert livelihood. As Ahmad Amara writes, these narratives of a pre-state Bedouin society romanticize Bedouins as ‘noble savages,’ weaving a history of lawlessness that was tamed by the enlightened imposition of colonial and then state rule.682 Many of these narratives arise out of Israeli academic knowledge while also aping Anglo-settler narratives elsewhere. Some Israeli social scientists and institutions tend to frame Bedouin men as stubbornly adhering to tradition and, in turn, produce Bedouin women and children as specific objects in dire need of state paternalism. Indeed, much of the social intervention into Bedouin lives hinges on the production of women as subjects who stand to benefit from contact with liberalism and modernity.683 While there is definitely serious violence and marginalization of women within the patriarchal structures of Bedouin society, to detach these issues from the larger context of settler colonial dispossession is to reproduce the imperial tropes that fashion brown women as victims to be rescued from brown men by (white) Western liberal values.684 681 Davis, ‘Desert ‘wastes’…”; McKee, “Trash Talk…” 682 Ahmad Amara, “Beyond Stereotypes of Bedouins as ‘Nomads’ and ‘Savages’: Rethinking the Bedouin in Ottoman Southern Palestine, 1875-1900,” Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 15, no. 1 (2016): 59- 77. 683 Shalhoub-Kevorkian, et al. “Funding Pain.” 684 Ibid. 273 These representations of Bedouins resonate with Zionism’s relationship to Palestinians as a whole. As Ahmad Sa’di argues, Zionism frames Israeli-Jews as agents of modernity.685 The construction of “the” Bedouin as a figure that is in need of state intervention to help ease a transition to modern life (represented as a capitalist wage- economy) is intimately tied to the notion of “nomadification.”686 As I have previously shown, colonial worldviews – in spite of telling contradictions – portrayed Bedouins as using land in only the most cursory manner, which, in turn, has served Zionist juridical and ideological claims to Bedouin land. Since Bedouins did not engage in commercial or profit-oriented large-scale farming, they remained illegible as cultivators of the land to Zionists.687 Israeli discourses, when not outrightly hostile, can produce a narrative of “our Bedouin,” a paternalistic claim to ownership that homogenizes and erases the varied history of an entire group of people.688 Conveniently, they also erect an anthropological cordon, cleaving Bedouins from Palestinians. Meanwhile, Israeli institutions continually investigate ‘pathologies’ of Bedouin life in a vacuum from settler-colonialism. Bedouins emerge in this research as denizens who can be potentially integrated into Israeli (Jewish) society—as “good Arabs,” who support the state, serve in its military, and adorn the desert with their traditional cultural spectacles and artifacts.689 The Bedouin as Other is sited in a liminal space as subject-object: partially enabled to ‘enter modernity’ as Israeli economic 685 Ahmad Sa’di, “Modernization as an Explanatory Discourse of Zionist-Palestinian Relations.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 24, no. 1 (1997): 25-48. 686 Ratcliffe, “Bedouin Rights…” 687 Amara, “Beyond Stereotypes…” 688 Mansour Nasasra, “The Ongoing Judaisation of the Naqab and the Struggle for Recognising the Indigenous Rights of the Arab Bedouin People,” Settler Colonial Studies, 2, no. 1, (2012): 88. 689 Hillel Cohen, Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 274 subjects, but also anointed as bearers of tradition and objects of fascination. As Ratcliffe observes, The Bedouin as an object of development obviously renders the Israelis not only as modern, but also as the people who bring modernity. In this, the Bedouin are made into terra nullis, and a socia nullis, a modernity to be made. As an object of development, actually existing Bedouin were an anachronism.690 For many NGOs, it is Bedouin women who are the principal targets of development. Bedouin women are not a homogenous population by any means. The very designation of “Bedouin women” risks reproducing the colonial categories that constructed “Bedouin” as separate from “Palestinian” and assumes “women’s” relationships with settler colonialism, with Bedouin men and within their societies are homogenous. Critical Bedouin scholarship has warned against the constant academic reiteration of colonialist labels. However, in the case of the Naqab/Negev, it is important to highlight—with an aim towards dismantling colonial systems—the shared circumstances of women who live in similar circumstances in Bedouin communities. My use of the category, “Bedouin women,” should not be confused with how this phrase often accompanies developmental NGOs—that of “Bedouin women” as objects for liberal intervention. Critical development scholars have documented the frequent failure of development policies to confront how colonialism functioned through widespread exploitation and expropriation, producing structures and social relations that underlie present-day poverty.691 Many scholars have also critiqued the way that women in the 690 Ratcliffe, “Bedouin Rights, Bedouin Representations,” 108. 691 Sarah Radcliffe, Dilemmas of Difference: Indigenous Women and the Limits of Postcolonial Development Policy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 275 Global South, in particular, are framed as objects of developmental intervention that need “saving,” eliciting donations and support for small-scale projects, while reinforcing ‘Western’ white feminist norms.692 In the Naqab/Negev, Development practitioners consistently frame Bedouin women through an Orientalized framework whose “logics echo a colonial understanding and ordering of the world into racial hierarchies which become entrenched in political economy.” As Shalhoub-Kevorkian et al., write, Bedouin women are often “positioned as objects of funding but rarely as subjects of change[.]”693As a result, there is an entire funding apparatus tied into the representational economy of Bedouin women as marginalized individuals within a patriarchal and oppressive society, which elicits the support of development practitioners and their expertise. This of course elides settler colonial planning policies, racial discrimination in Israeli society, and the de- development of Palestinian communities by the Israeli state.694 Add to this the reality of home demolitions as among the most economically and socially destabilizing events that women can face.695 As Rawia Abu Rabia argues (in reference to polygamy) the liberal settler state actually reinforces, rather than alleviates, oppressive gender roles and norms.696 For Palestinian civil society, in the OPT and within Israel, international donors and development organizations have inhabited an uncomfortable political space. Toufiq 692 Nandita Dogra, “The Mixed Metaphor of 'Third World Woman': Gendered representations by international development NGOs,” Third World Quarterly, 32, no. 2 (2011): 333-348. 693 Shalhoub-Kevorkian, et al. “Funding Pain,” 166. 694 Ibid. 695 Rashida Manjoo, “Continuum of Injustice: Women, Violence, and Housing Rights,” In Indigenous (In)justice: Human Rights Law and Bedouin Arabs in the Naqab/Negev, Ahmad Amara, Ismael Abu-Saad, Oren Yiftachel, eds. (Cambridge, MA: International Human Rights Clinic, Human Rights Program, Harvard Law School: Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2012): 195-226. 696 Rawia Abu Rabia, "Redefining Polygamy among the Palestinian Bedouins in Israel: Colonialism, Patriarchy, and Resistance," American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law 19, no. 2 (2011): 459-93. 276 Haddad (2016) has shown how, after the Oslo Accords in the early to mid-1990s, the international donor community, working with US American and Israeli officials, transformed the contours of the Peace Process from one focused on self-determination for Palestinians to a platform that celebrates individual consumerism and neoliberal economic policies meant to attract foreign investment. For women, especially, international NGOs have had trouble navigating communal notions of Palestinian women’s solidarity against Occupation, instead foregrounding Western notions of individual empowerment.697 For Palestinian organizations in Israel, the post-Oslo period has also been especially complex; many Jewish organizations in the US, for instance, raise money for Palestinian (citizens of Israel) civic organizations. As Oded Haklai argues, this is because many liberal Jewish communities in the US view the strengthening of Palestinian civil society a potential benefit to Israel’s security and democracy in the long-term.698 Curious alliances circulate in the networks of international organizations and donors. It is not always the case that the receipt of funding from a (liberal) Zionist organization results in a softening of political commitments. For instance, organizations that are critical of Israeli policies, like Adalah, the legal advocacy group for Palestinian citizens, receives some of its funding from the New Israel Fund.699 Developmental NGOs in the Naqab/Negev negotiate issues specific to the region’s colonial and social contexts. While some Bedouin women have held traditional roles that center around community participation and economic activities, the shift towards forced 697 Eileen Kuttab, “Empowerment as Resistance: Conceptualizing Palestinian Women’s Empowerment.” Development 53, no. 2 (2010): 247-253. 698 Oded Haklai, “Helping the enemy? Why Transnational Jewish Philanthropic Foundations Donate to Palestinian NGOs in Israel,” Nations and Nationalism 14, no. 3 (2008): 581-599. 699 Ibid., 591-592; many other organizations that work to challenge policies and support Bedouin land claims also are funded by the New Israel Fund and other like organizations. 277 urbanization or unrecognized status has resulted in many women becoming reliant on precarious wage labor and subsistence activities in order to supplement the meager earnings of male relatives and husbands. It is even more precarious for women in polygamous marriages or who are divorced or unmarried. Combined with patriarchal practices that have in some cases been exacerbated by Israeli law—for instance, polygamy is illegal in Israel, but is allowed in Palestinian Muslim communities—women find themselves in increasingly constricting situations of enforced gender norms.700 Further, because travel from unrecognized villages (and recognized villages and planned towns) is difficult, women are less likely to seek jobs, opportunities, and work beyond the household. Sometimes women are uncomfortable traveling alone (via bus, or taxi) and it is also the case that some men discourage or bar their wives from being away from the house at certain times of day without a chaperone. Divorced women and women in polygamous marriages sometimes face even harder circumstances.701 Women are increasingly relegated to spaces with little economic opportunity.702 Sarab Abu-Queder et al. (2018) argue that the settler colonial context overwhelmingly shapes the political economy of private spaces. Bedouin families rely less and less on traditional cultivation and pastoral economies and more so on meager wages, now sought out in the “market.” In turn, factors like male travel to jobs, a dispersed consumer economy centered in Israeli-Jewish centers, and the need for money for everything from educational fees to utilities to groceries, causes women to turn to increased 700 See Abu Rabia, “Redefining Polygamy…” 701 Ibid. 702 See Shalhoub-Kevorkian, et al. “Funding Pain,” 2014; Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder, Avigail Morris, and Heather Ryan, “The Economy of Survival: Bedouin Women in Unrecognized Villages,” Journal of Arid Environments 149 (2018): 80-88. 278 subsistence to supplement diets and incomes, but without the dispensation of a more ‘traditional’ management of the family household, centered around agriculture and husbandry.703 Lest the reader chastises me for describing something akin to the claims of modernization theorists, please note that my analysis places the blame, not on the inability of Bedouins to change, but rather on the kinds of dispossession that mobilizes settler colonial capitalism. Settler aligned NGOs then appear to shepherd women through this “transition” without a critique of the historical conditions that create ongoing marginalization. This “dispossession” followed by “rehabilitation,” to use Kalyan Sanyal’s words, is the space of developmental work in the Naqab/Negev. Bedouin improvement is now hinged less on overthrowing the ravages of settler capital and more on remedying and enhancing the individual capacities of Bedouin subjects to become entrepreneurs supplemental to an ethnocratic capitalist accumulation. Dispossession and Rehabilitation in Settler Development Developmental governmentalities often present technocratic and apolitical solutions to colonial dispossession and marginalization, shaping behavior and conduct, harnessing evolving practices of capitalist productivity to achieve “improvement.” NGOs in the Naqab/Negev negotiate the contours of Zionist settler development. As more and more of the Naqab/Negev is transformed into a space for a settler economy, the political- economic possibilities for Bedouin citizens is reorganized, transformed, and/or expropriated. Many NGOs try to assuage the resultant precarity facing Bedouin citizens 703 Abu-Rabia-Queder, et al., “The Economy of Survival: Bedouin Women in Unrecognized Villages.” 279 and employ developmental language and practices that represent their goals as helping Bedouin subjects integrate into the ‘wider’ Israeli economy. In this section, I consider how these practices of “integration” into the Israeli economy are part and parcel of the mechanisms of neoliberal settler development. Critical development studies have long foregrounded the relationship between NGOs and the neoliberal capitalism. Often, it has focused on the interventions that states and international donors make into the lives of formerly colonized peoples. Here, Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality has been a favored analytic for capturing the logic of state and institutional intervention—not as a form of discipline, but as a form of productive power.704 Often, post-colonial governmentalities draw from traveling developmental knowledges and discourses that are reproduced and disseminated by global institutions.705 Localized narratives, practices and knowledges can also find their way back into the global circulation of developmental discourses, which are often intertwined with Eurocentric and modernist theories of transition and progress.706 Development imagines a telos that places faith in a template of actions that can incite a trajectory, which will precipitate a desired result. This incitement includes, vitally, interpellating a subject whose behaviors incline toward the imagined goal of ‘improvement,’ thereby aligning with liberal ideas of economically efficient—and hence, morally worthy—conduct. 704 Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development, 2014; Tania Murray Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development and the Practice of Politics (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2007). 705 Michael Goldman, Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 706 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Vinay K. Gidwani, Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development. 280 As Uday Mehta (1999) and Domenico Losurdo (2011) have forcefully shown, illiberalism has always been at the heart of liberalism. Liberal states justified colonialism by framing their domination as the improvement of colonized populations—a civilizing mission. Moreover, liberalism has consistently operated through the exclusion of certain populations from its normative white, male, bourgeois body politic—the bodies of the slave, of the indigenous person, of women, of the working classes have been exploited and sacrificed at the altar of further ‘freedoms’ and confrontations with ‘tyranny.’707 Liberal settler state ideologies often excuse colonial control of indigenous peoples as necessary for preserving their own “proper” citizens’ freedoms and liberties.708 How have settler discourses and practices of indigenous management adapted to a neoliberal era? Elizabeth Strakosch looks at how Anglophone settler states shift towards management models that reject calls for indigenous rights, citizen entitlements, and self- determination platforms, instead embracing discourses and techniques that seek to change indigenous behavior. Policies repeatedly frame indigenous communities as “dysfunctional,” as dependent on welfare and as undeserving recipients of jobs and social reform.709 According to Strakosch, this is where the “intellectual projects of neoliberalism and settler colonialism” intersect, where “ongoing settler colonial hierarchies have been rearticulated through, rather than revived or transcended by, neoliberal frameworks.”710 In this way, neoliberal settler policies extend liberal governance, which prescribes definitions of “capacity” as the barometer for the benefits indigenous people should receive by right 707 Uday Singh Mehta. Liberalism and empire: A study in nineteenth-century British liberal thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History. Trans. Elliott, Gregory (Brooklyn: Verso, 2011). 708 Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 709 Strakosch, Neoliberal Indigenous Policy, 1-2. 710 Ibid., 3. 281 of citizenship.711 The state’s neoliberal governance decides who is deserving and who is not. In Strakosch’s words: The neoliberal transition pushes us to admit that settler colonialism exists not despite but via the constant reallocation of Indigenous subjects outside and inside liberal regimes of freedom. It is the capacity of the liberal settler centre to make this assessment in the first place, and in unilateral terms, that ultimately grounds colonial hierarchies and allows them to persist through different phases of liberalism. Despite being first outside, then inside, and then in the borderlands of liberal citizenship, at all points Indigenous people are framed within the wider settler liberal order which encompasses multiple regimes of freedom and coercion. At a deeper level, this order rests on the fundamental and unquestioned link between liberal ‘capacities’ and political freedom, which drives ongoing attempts to reformulate Indigenous subjectivity and dissolve Indigenous polity in the name of this freedom.712 Liberal settler states continuously exclude indigenous peoples and create a narrow path for indigenous aspirations for sovereignty: to receive state benefits, they must accept settler norms that define colonialism as a condition of the past. In its neoliberal incarnation, the settler state locates the causes of present poverty within incapable indigenous communities. Citizenship, then, is not a guarantee for equal rights within a settler state, but rather an asymptotic horizon whose benefits must be incessantly earned.713 Thus, the settler state implements both disciplinary force and indirect rule. The threat of violence, or the austerity of life and death, haunts the state’s negotiations with indigenous people. The alternative policy is one that slowly extinguishes indigenous rights. Lorenzo Veracini argues that modes of settler colonial domination are intertwined with the kinds of widespread dispossession we see at work in the neoliberal global 711 Ibid., 5. 712 Ibid.,17-18. 713 Ibid., 22; Also see Shira Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 282 economy.714 This is vividly borne out in the production of so-called “surplus populations” and the phenomena of “exclusion” and “containment” that expel people beyond the realm of the capitalist market. As I have discussed, settler colonialism is uninterested in a sustained exploitation of indigenous labor—rather, it is indigenous land that settlers desire.715 To put this in Marxist terms, settlers secure the conditions for their own social reproduction while undermining the capacities of indigenous societies to do the same.716 Veracini briefly references postcolonial scholar, Kalyan Sanyal’s work, to describe the expulsion of populations from the realm of capital in postcolonial development. This expulsion necessitates a broad management of such populations. However, Veracini foregoes the breadth and subtlety of Sanyal’s analysis, instead claiming that the mechanisms of the neoliberal present are more geared toward elimination and containment than management.717 I believe this conclusion is misguided, because containment/ elimination and management intertwine, enabling each other. In the case of the Naqab/Negev, the violence of elimination and containment is clearly evident and accompanied by NGO work that strives to manage Bedouin life under settler development. Sanyal looks specifically at how spaces of exclusion and marginalization—what he calls the “wasteland of the dispossessed”—are part of postcolonial capitalist development. Sanyal is responding to orthodox Marxist analyses that theorize primitive accumulation only as the prior condition for a ‘transition’ into exploitative wage relations.718 Instead, as Sanyal argues, this “wasteland,” the “outside,” is a necessary feature of capitalist 714 Veracini Lorenzo, “Containment, Elimination, Endogeneity: Settler Colonialism in the Global Present,” Rethinking Marxism 31, no.1 (2019): 118-140. 715 Ibid. 716 Ibid. 717 Ibid., 136. 718 Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development. 283 development in the postcolonial context. There is no transition towards exploitation in the form of the wage relation, nor a universal trajectory toward enlistment in the “reserve army” of capital. Instead, the dispossessed remain outside of capitalist social relations and adapt through a “need economy” that enables them to eke out (for the most part, barely self-sufficient, non-capitalist) livelihoods within the larger space of capitalism.719 Sanyal calls this the “decapitalization of the means of labor,” a “reversal of primitive accumulation,” because people are “reunited” with the output of their labor, yet not for the benefit of capital.720 The dispossessed of this wasteland do not enter into formalized wage relationships but are “reintegrated into the economy in the space of development.” That is, they participate in petty commodity production and engage in precarious labor in what is called the “informal economy.”721 Development manages this space, maintaining the dispossessed in an uneasy stasis within and without capital. As Sanyal writes, Development can now claim the legitimacy of capital’s existence only by addressing poverty and deprivation in terms of governmental technologies with the aim of ensuring subsistence to the dispossessed, to the inhabitants of the wasteland that surrounds the world of capital. This requires that a part of the capitalist surplus be transferred from the domain of capital for implementing anti-poverty programs; development now means a reversal of primitive accumulation.722 In short, development governmentality is about incrementally improving the conditions of those dispossessed and excluded by capital.723 The professional cadres of developmental organizations parachute into this space of the dispossessed, and work to channel so-called 719 Ibid., 59. 720 Ibid., 59. 721 Ibid., 65, both quotations 722 Ibid., 174 723 Ibid., 175; 236 284 ‘informal’ labor—the result of the dispossessed’s need for subsistence—into activities now identified by development as entrepreneurial and enterprising, a bridge of entry into the formal economy. However, this is mostly symbolic; development depoliticizes capitalist dispossession that banished people to the informal economy to begin with and obscures the causes and effects of such expropriation. People are reunited with their labor, but not as wage-earners. Turning to the technocratic field of experts and professionals, development now manages this twilight space, which is simultaneously the result of, and a new justification for, capitalist accumulation.724 Myriad internationally connected NGOs in the Naqab/Negev emphasize the need to alleviate Bedouin poverty. In Israel/Palestine, settler development renders the management of indigenous populations who have been dispossessed of their land and livelihoods a global imperative. International networks of NGOs function within Israel/Palestine at the behest of the settler state, indeed, supporting the management of the indigenous population for the state’s benefit. In the case of Bedouin Palestinians, labor is rendered precarious and marginal, while NGOs valorize subsistence activities as entrepreneurial and empowering. This developmental work is intertwined with discourses that reproduce Bedouin ‘culture’ as a ‘known’ object, representative of people being unwillingly wrenched westward into the present. Settler development, in this case, operates through a governmentality which valorizes the ongoing marginalization of indigenous subsistence, rather than the conscription of indigenous labor. 724 Ibid., 108 285 Bedouin NGOs and organizations Not every NGO in the Naqab/Negev operates within this developmental approach to managing Bedouin poverty and some actively oppose Israeli settler policies. The Regional Council of Unrecognized Villages (RCUV) for instance, emerged in opposition to Israeli-run regional councils that denied Bedouins local representation. They have since worked with other entities like Adalah (legal advocacy), Bimkom (planning advocacy), and the Negev Co-Existence Forum for Civil Equality (NCF) (policy advocacy) to appeal to international and domestic actors in an attempt to pressure the State of Israel to respect Bedouin land claims, recognize unrecognized villages, and treat Bedouins as citizens with equal opportunities and state benefits. However, many of the NGOs in the Naqab/Negev, eschew “politics” and instead work with international donor networks to support small- scale development projects. I will look at three different organizations and the way that they address the relationship between Bedouin citizens and the Israeli economy. In particular, I pay attention to how they understand the causes of Bedouin dispossession and the relationship of Bedouin citizens to ideas of capitalist modernity. I also describe the kinds of activities each organization proposes as part of job training, educational programs, and political activism. The first, the Arab-Jewish Center for Equality, Empowerment, and Cooperation (AJEEC) and the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development (NISPED) (known collectively as AJEEC-NISPED) is headquartered in Beersheba and focuses on creating economic, educational, and health support structures in various Bedouin municipalities (recognized and unrecognized). Sidreh is based in the government planned town of Laqiya and is a women’s organization that promotes craft-oriented commodity 286 production, small business support, and healthy dietary projects, while also using its work to raise awareness about settler colonial policies in the Naqab/Negev. Project Wadi Attir (PWA) is an experimental farm on the outskirts of the government planned town of Ḥūrah and promotes indigenous practices as a model for sustainable development in arid zones. All three organizations emphasize small, donor-supported, localized projects. Some of these projects reflect neoliberal models of development, emphasizing individual improvement and the economic value of ‘untapped’ human capital, or rely on colonial tropes that seek to help Bedouin subjects adapt to transitions into “modern life.” For instance, Dr. Mohammed al-Nabari, mayor of Ḥūrah, worked to expand entrepreneurial opportunities in the city, focusing on what he calls, “social enterprises”—private sector investments in community needs.725 Much of this work has centered on women in Ḥūrah: job training centers, organizations that support women who are marginalized within polygamous marriages, as well as a new communications factory strictly for women’s employment. Dr. al-Nabari frames Bedouin poverty as stemming from “the transition state between simple life [which was] very stable socially and economically, to modern life, which is not stable, socially nor economically.”726 For Dr. al-Nabari, the solution to Bedouin collision with modern life, is tied to education and entrepreneurship, especially initiatives that target women and children. As a result, Ḥūrah has invested roughly 65% of its budget in education.727 To provide this kind of support, these initiatives must rely heavily on governmental and philanthropic largesse, sometimes from Zionist 725 Interview with Dr. Mohammed al-Nabari, March 2016, Project Wadi Attir. 726 I edited this quotation for simple clarity. 727 Author site visit, Ḥūrah, February 2016. 287 organizations, a reason why some Bedouin activists feel uneasy about some of Ḥūrah’s programs. One Bedouin activist expressed discomfort with these kinds of social enterprises in Bedouin communities, noting that they were failing to take responsibility for the rights of Bedouin peoples and were allowing the government to avoid responsibility for their own citizens.728 The activist also remarked that such projects were “not fighting the policies but the conditions”—donor support did not equate political challenges of the “undemocratic behavior” of the government. Overall, this activist said they are not personally against such projects, in principle, but that they should be coupled with an approach that challenges the state’s policies. A further problem is that when organizations do work in the Bedouin community, or institutions support Bedouin citizens—in education or employment for instance—they leverage these actions to raise more money and connect with new donors.729 I raise the example of Ḥūrah to begin to illuminate different approaches to development throughout the Naqab/Negev in various Bedouin communities. Dr. al- Nabari’s framework could be called neoliberal, because of his emphasis on individual entrepreneurial activity. Yet, at the same time, training and education in Ḥūrah does not necessarily lead to Bedouin integration into the Israeli labor markets; rather, the economy is still based on segregation. Ḥūrah’s social enterprises largely circulates back into the Bedouin community, creating a closed loop. Developmental organizations still enthusiastically invest in Ḥūrah. This is the dilemma of many NGOs in the Naqab/Negev— can they deliver “development” to improve the lives of people Bedouin community? Or will their work be subsumed into Zionist philanthropic and non-governmental 728 Interview, RCUV, February 2011. 729 Ibid. 288 organizations? What is the place of developmental work in the political landscape of the Naqab/Negev? Can organizations reframe and repurpose settler development to their own ends? Below, I present three cases of Bedouin NGOs negotiating with settler development. a. AJEEC-NISPED The Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development (NISPED) was founded in 1998 with a focus “on the civil society: the voluntary, people-centered, non- governmental groups and organizations who seek to work with each other on the issues which are central to conflict resolution and to the advance of sustainable human development.”730 Such language of “conflict resolution” and the emphasis on strengthening “civil society” in Israel and Palestine emerged after the Oslo Peace Accords. The goal of such developmental programs was to avert political violence against Israel by improving the economic opportunities for Palestinians. As Toufiq Haddad details, much of this work focused on developmental projects in the West Bank and Gaza.731 However, many international organizations began to invest in Palestinian civil society within Israel as well. Some of these organizations ostensibly supported Zionist goals and much of the funding came from liberal organizations in the US Jewish community. Their goal was to support a model of development that would offset some of the worst offenses of the State of Israel towards its Palestinian citizens, hoping to avoid the full alienation of non-Jewish minorities in the state. These kinds of efforts often frame Palestinian civic society as in need of 730 Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development (R.A.) (NISPED), “About NISPED.” (Beer Sheva, Israel. Brochure, Print). 731 Toufic Haddad, Palestine, Ltd.: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory (London: I.B. Taurus, Published in Association with the Centre for Palestine Studies, London Middle East Institute, 2016). 289 “strengthening,” a proximate term for development that would create economic opportunities as well as address some of the most egregious structural discrimination of the state.732 In general, such efforts differ markedly from right-wing Zionist organizations that frame Palestinian citizens as a subversive “fifth column.” NISPED focuses on teaching, training, and development projects in Bedouin communities, and promote entrepreneurialism, small enterprises, and free markets as key activities for securing democratic representation.733 NISPED claims to work in dozens of developing countries, training thousands of students and “cooperatives leaders,” to replicate their methods and models for conflict resolution.734 Many programs focus on the economic and educational activities of Bedouin women. One initiative is the Economic Development of Rural Palestinian Women, a joint project with other NGOs that focuses on the raising of domesticated animals, farming using greenhouses, and small business development like hairdressing.735 NISPED’s international programs also emphasize the wellbeing of women and include projects focusing on education, maternal health, rural development, and emergency preparedness and resilience.736 One of NISPED’s specific programs is the International Center for the Promotion of Small and Medium Enterprises (ICEP-SME). Emphasizing why Israel/Palestine is a good place for this project, NISPED says, “it has experienced two major economic processes: first, the shift from a basically centralized economy to an open, free market, and second, the development of alternative 732 Haklai, “Helping the enemy?” 733 NISPED, “About NISPED.” 734 Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development (R.A.) (NISPED), “NISPED,” Brochure, Print; AJEEC-NISPED, “International Programs,” Website: Accessed 15 Mar 2020. http://en.ajeec- nisped.org.il/?page_id=1035. 735 Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development, “NISPED in Israel/ NISPED in the Middle East,” Brochure, Print; Sheila H. Katz, Connecting with the Enemy: A Century of Palestinian-Israeli Joint Nonviolence (Austin, TX: University of Texas, 2016), 167. 736 AJEEC-NISPED, “International Programs.” 290 sources of income as an answer to agricultural communities.”737 The who and what of this history hides behind the technocratic euphemisms that marks developmental discourses. The “shift” from a “centralized” to a “free market,” economy references the general neoliberal narrative that in the past, Israel’s “socialist” economy had hindered growth and individual opportunity. “Agricultural communities” is mostly a euphemism for Palestinians whose agricultural livelihoods have been historically restricted by the structures of settler colonialism. Such narratives naturalize the arrival of neoliberal economic policies and governance. This model promotes a “scaling down” to “small and medium enterprises” which circumvents any confrontation with larger structural issues. The Arab-Jewish Center for Equality, Empowerment, and Cooperation (AJEEC) focuses primarily on the Bedouin Palestinian community. They have developed a host of vocational training programs and entrepreneurial undertakings in the Naqab/Negev, having grown out of NISPED. Some of their projects include: Single Mother’s Catering Kitchen (a partnership in Ḥūrah), support for cooperatives, a Bedouin Small Business Women’s Forum, as well as programs that focus on Jewish-Arab partnerships. One such program partners Jewish and Bedouin students to work on social projects in the period between high school and the joining the military (for Jewish citizens).738 AJEEC-NISPED’s main office is in Beersheba and the mostly Bedouin staff works throughout the government planned townships and villages, both recognized and unrecognized. AJEEC-NISPED’s philosophy and projects emphasize free market approaches to conflict resolution and poverty reduction. The organization tends to avoid political 737 Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development (R.A.) (NISPED), “The International Center for the Promotion of Small and Medium Enterprises – ICEP-SME.” Brochure, Print. 738 Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development, “NISPED Internationally,” Brochure, Print. 291 advocacy. The framing of their projects sometimes intertwines with modernist narratives that obscure the social and economic results of settler colonial structures. For instance, on their website, AJEEC-NISPED’s educational program is described as follows: The Arab Bedouin society of the Negev contends with economic hardship and a lack of social services, as well as limited access to opportunities and resources to enable its effective integration into general Israeli society. Likewise, the community is in deep crisis as it undergoes a forced and rapid transition from a traditional to a Western lifestyle; a crisis that most predominantly affects women and youth.739 As perhaps can be expected from such narratives, Bedouins are produced as outside of a “general,” thus normative, “Israeli society” in which they must be “integrated.” But what does integration mean exactly? “Integration” in this passage works as adjacent to ideas of developmental (and thus, modern, Eurocentric) time. The figure of the “traditional” Bedouin is contrasted to a “Western lifestyle.” But what is this “Western lifestyle?” Set as opposite to tradition, perhaps “Western lifestyle” means “modern,” producing a host of images related to employment, consumerism, even living arrangements—perhaps Dayan’s image of the Bedouin man coming home from work to well-groomed and well-behaved children, no longer carrying a knife, but perhaps wearing slippers. But throughout the Naqab/Negev, Bedouins do work in such jobs, they do come back to houses (as many as are allowed to remain standing), and use cellphones, WhatsApp, and Facebook, and go on family outings to malls and restaurants. So where exactly is “tradition” located in opposition to a “Western lifestyle?” Where is Bedouin difference located in such language? What is the crisis? The discourse of forced, rapid transition seems to conceal a marker of difference. First, there is an assumption embedded here that “tradition” encodes Islam, 739 AJEEC-NISPED, “Education,” Website, Accessed 15 March 2020. http://en.ajeec- nisped.org.il/?page_id=758 292 which appears as the ghostly opposite of the West. Such encoding naturalizes the idea that Islam (uniquely) marginalizes women. Thus, settler expropriation dissipates as the reason for the hinderance of social reproduction, of the loss of land as the basis for how people subsist and survive. Such encoded claims work to represent Bedouin Palestinians as donors expect them to be. Donors are called to “save” Bedouin women and children, a call to action that justifies specific models of neoliberal development, an emphasis on small-scale projects that provide individual entrepreneurial activities.740 Again, this is not to dismiss the marginalization that women face; however, such narratives locate “culture” as the key marker for such vulnerability, not the ravages of settler colonialism and capitalism. Such activities are the model for supporting vulnerable women, especially those who are divorced, in polygamous marriages, or are already enrolled in Israeli welfare programs. A social business provides not only income but a “social package” which includes money towards education, mandatory informational activities, summer vacation, and even a reduction in university fees for older children.741 These businesses also provide about a quarter of the revenue for AJEEC’s projects.742 Many of AJEEC’s other programs focus on promoting volunteerism in the community, leadership development of young people, and the training in health and emergency services, especially for service in unrecognized villages. AJEEC, as its name implies, also seeks to connect Palestinian, Bedouins, and Jewish citizens through its project and initiatives. A key Bedouin informant high-up in the organization described the model as one that rejects the label of “co- existence,” preferring instead a “shared society approach.” The problem with co-existence, 740 Dogra, “Mixed Metaphors…” 741 Interview with Anonymous Informant at AJEEC-NISPED, December 2016. 742 Ibid. 293 I was told, is that it only promotes temporary interactions that fail to produce long-term partnerships. In contrast, a shared society model produces contexts in which Arabs and Jews have to work together, thereby intertwining their lives and needs. The informant traced the model’s origin to the peace plan in Northern Ireland.743 Such shared society approaches take many forms, from a multi-ethnic workforce, to shared social projects, the joining of Jews and Arabs in volunteer teams, and more. AJEEC, at the time of the interview in 2016, was also working to scale up their work, replicating their approaches and programs in other Palestinian or mixed cities in Israel, such as Ramle, Lod, and in the north.744 In some cases, the Israeli government, or other Zionist organizations, provide grants to support specific projects. I asked how the organization navigates helping the Bedouin community, while working with the very institutions that may carry out home demolitions or direct policy that further impoverishes Bedouin citizens. The informant explained that AJEEC attempts to stay away from political activism and demonstrations because such actions could hinder their work on the ground. But AJEEC is discrete about who they chose to work with: Now, how do we deal with “schizophrenia”? On the one hand, working with organizations and knowing that the organizations are actually the cause of some of the problems here… There are a number of organizations that we don’t work with, because we know that if we work with them will damage our relations with the community. Because I cannot work with an organization that is aiming at house demolishing and then the next morning come with blankets. That’s ridiculous. People are intelligent. There are a number of organizations that we know in terms of their philosophy and our philosophy that we just won’t work together. But not many, there are a few. 743 Ibid. 744 Ibid. 294 And I think the other thing is in terms of trust building. To be clear. Everything is on the table, there are no hidden agendas here.745 The goal that drove their approach, in other words, was to make sure they could retain the trust of different Bedouin communities, so they could continue managing different projects. “Trust” is the most important asset they have. This approach has does not always work seamlessly; the informant alluded to the fact that AJEEC has lost some partnerships (both Zionist and Bedouin) due to their organization’s working philosophy. The question of providing services to Bedouin municipalities—especially unrecognized villages—is also a point of contention. AJEEC does not want to become the de facto service provider with the retreat of governmental support: I ideologically believe that Bedouins should access services directly through government offices [informant tapping table to emphasize each word]. Not via mediators. Not this so-called development authority, this or that. That’s my belief. I am glad to say that this is our organization’s belief… We have a lot of discussions about [this], that we are losing money. I was getting very generous offers here from certain government and non- government organizations saying you don’t have to worry about money from now on. But we have to say no thank you. Because that is not going to help me implement services… I believe that as a mechanism of active citizenship, people should get their services directly from government officers. They don’t need mediators. Why does Tel Aviv get services directly, from the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Economics, the Ministry of Health, and Rahaṭ has to go through another mechanism? Or Laqiya, or Tel Sheva, or whatever…? This is an ideology… We are not willing to compromise on that.746 On one hand, AJEEC-NISPED is offering a neoliberal response to the absence of governmental services by promoting small scale businesses, educational training, and 745 Ibid. This quotation is slightly edited for clarity and grammar. 746 Ibid. This quotation is slightly edited for clarity and grammar. 295 health and employment support. However, AJEEC-NISPED resists becoming the de facto service provider, believing that the Israeli government is responsible for the welfare of its citizens. AJEEC-NISPED’s model does not challenge the political and settler contexts of development in the Naqab/Negev. However, AJEEC-NISPED’s philosophy, based on the model of ‘social business,’ is about addressing the urgent issues in the day-to-day realities of Bedouin life in the Naqab/Negev’s most vulnerable communities. In this way, AJEEC- NISPED resists some of the imperatives of neoliberal settler governance that negates social or communal demands. As Strakosch writes, neoliberal settler colonialism is more rather than less likely to take place in the depoliticized policy register, and through decentralised economic and social processes. In its distrust of state juridical procedures, in its suspicions of rights claims, in its deconstruction of the collective into atomistic individual, in its valorisation of ‘organic’ market processes, in its focus on the ‘defective’ subjectivities of the disadvantaged, neoliberalism pushes Indigenous-settler relations out of the visible spaces of sovereign encounter.747 AJEEC-NISPED chafes at the attempt of the Israeli government to externalize its responsibilities contained in the promise of citizenship. Nor does AJEEC-NISPED hope to extinguish Bedouin claims—it instead navigates an uncomfortable space where it rejects some forms of neoliberal governance, while simultaneously employing neoliberal economic models for individual improvement. Similar to Sanyal’s ‘need economy,’ social enterprises, a developmental model with some traction in the Bedouin community, manages poverty through projects that emphasize individual economic possibility. Social enterprises, like the Single Mother’s Catering Kitchen in Ḥūrah may seem as though they are integrated into the ethnocratic 747 Strakosch, Neoliberal Indigenous Policy, 4. 296 settler economy, since, as Dr. al-Nabari told me, they are now providing meals to some Jewish Israeli schools.748 However, Bedouin projects are mostly segregated from the Israeli economy as a whole. Such social enterprises exist in the space of development, inside and outside of capitalist accumulation. Their main work is to manage women’s poverty, without challenging the structures that produce this poverty in the first place. AJEEC-NISPED’s other programs operate in similar developmental spaces that are premised on the idea of Bedouins as subjects incapable of competing in the “modern” economy. However, AJEEC-NISPED negotiates the political implications of working with Zionist institutions, as well as organizations like the JNF, who are directly involved in pressuring Bedouins to relinquish their land claims. The organization refuses to take over government services completely. In doing so, some benefit from their work because they attend to the day-to-day needs of more vulnerable members of the population. This represents a sort of negotiation with neoliberal settler development—on one hand, they accept some of the prescriptions of settler temporal superiority, on the other, they seek to create active citizens who can demand equality from a stronger position. b. Sidreh In February 2016, I accompanied the Negev Co-Existence Forum on an advocacy tour with an international group. Our last stop of the day, after touring Umm al-Ḥīrān and Ḥūrah, was lunch at the Laqiya Weaving Cooperative run by Sidreh. Sidreh is named after the Arabic for the iconic Middle Eastern ziziphus (lotus) genus mentioned in the Quran. At the home, Bedouin women of the cooperative weave long, hand-dyed rugs made from 748 Interview, Dr. al-Nabari. 297 Awasi sheep wool. The house is constructed of various types of ill-fitted stone surrounding a beautiful courtyard with a tree that shaded the long, covered table where we ate lunch, provided by the Sidreh. I learned later that the house was constructed of the rubble of demolished Bedouin homes.749 While Sidreh focuses on similar types of small-scale development projects like those of Sidreh, their meeting place symbolizes the centrality of political action to their work. Women’s development in the Naqab/Negev Bedouin community is the mainstay of Sidreh’s mission, and the Laqiya Weaving Cooperative, founded in 1991 (before Sidreh), is their most visible project. Managed by Bedouin women, the cooperative has partnered with different vendors and organizations to sell their rugs and crafts locally and exhibit them internationally.750 Sidreh’s Desert Gardens project works with eight different unrecognized villages to construct and maintain a variety of differently sized gardens for Bedouin women to use to supplement their family’s diets and incomes.751 Sidreh also promotes health education and financial literacy through training courses. It mobilizes its projects to inform international and domestic visitors of Bedouin political issues in the Naqab/Negev. Sidreh also collaborates with other political advocacy organizations, such as the Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages (RCUV) and Bimkom; jointly, they worked to produce an alternative Master Plan for Bedouin villages. The goal of this plan was to pressure the government to implement policies that would recognize and develop all forty-six recognized and unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Naqab/Negev.752 749 Author Visit, Sidreh, Feb 21, 2016. 750 Sidreh, “About Lakiya Weaving,” Website, Accessed Mar 10 2020, http://www.sidreh.org/category.aspx?catid=15. 751 The informant is not Bedouin nor Israeli Jewish. 752 Bimkom. Alternative Master Plan for the Unrecognized Bedouin Villages in the Negev. Executive Summary. Planning Team. Oren Yiftachel, Nili Baruch, Said Abu Sammur, Nava Sheer, Ronen Ben Arie. Abridged Version, 2012. 298 Sidreh’s state mission is the “empowerment” of women. As Eileen Kuttab argues, “empowerment” programs in the occupied Palestinian Territories reflects a neoliberal shift towards individual-scale interventions into the lives of women, de-emphasizing collective political engagement.753 However, Sidreh’s empowerment model is self-consciously collective. A website page called “Rights Program” describes their organization’s goal as “to promote gender equality, strengthen the collective voice of women and their meaningful participation in all spheres of life, and the realization of their rights.”754 Their programs therefore not only seek to attenuate the effects of settler colonialism on Bedouin women’s lives through economic development. But this is accompanied by the creation of alternative spaces for women to organize political action to challenge the dual pressures of Israeli settler colonialism and Bedouin patriarchal systems.755 Such work utilizes developmental models to challenge settler policy. Zionist and modernist accounts intentionally misread Sidreh’s work, downplaying its political advocacy and aims. For instance, in one article entitled, “Weaving Bedouin Tradition into their Future” (the author unable to resist neither the modernist binary of Bedouin/past, Israeli/future nor the pun) only covers Sidreh’s commodity craft production and non-political education.756 The article’s narrative begins Sidreh’s story after 1948 when Bedouins are depicted as wandering aimlessly through the Naqab/Negev. The Israeli government appears and charitably moves Bedouin citizens into towns. Once settled, “women became aware of their illiteracy, and [that] their society’s rule against mingling 753 Kuttub, “Empowerment as Resistance.” 754 Sidreh, “Promoting Gender Equality and Women’s Rights,” Website, Accessed 27 March 2020, http://www.sidreh.org/article.aspx?id=24 755 See Abu Rabia, “Redefining Polygamy.” 756 Karin Kloosterman, “Weaving Bedouin Tradition into their Future.” Israel21c. January 8, 2013. https://www.israel21c.org/weaving-bedouin-tradition-into-their-future/. 299 with men who are not related to them, severely hampered their progress in the modern world.” The article celebrates the achievements of women in Sidreh, and the success of their projects but only through one of the multiple relationships of domination: that of Bedouin women to Bedouin men. The impact of settler colonialism becomes benign and a vague “modern world” seems to stand in for everything challenging to a traditional subject. Because of the modest actions of the Israeli state, the “women of Sidreh have found a new way to weave ancient skills into the newly developing culture.”757 The author describes their products as the “last traces of the unique Bedouin heritage”—a kind of “lasting” of an anthropological ‘culture,’ similar to what Jean O’Brien identifies in the discourses of American settler colonialism.758 Bedouin economy, through this Zionist lens, is only about a piecemeal commodification of their culture. Sidreh’s advocacy work addresses the political-economic needs of the most marginalized of Bedouin women, sometimes using the language of markets. For instance, their Economic Development Program equates economic “growth” with a “more competitive private sector in the region.”759 This includes programs like business development courses and a women’s small business forum. However, despite the positioning of capital as a mode of improvement, Sidreh’s programs also foreground the fostering of political advocacy. All of its programs and activities address the underlying instability of Bedouin women’s lives within a settler colonial context. 757 Ibid. 758 Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 759 Sidreh, “Building Financial Resilience of Bedouin Women,” Website, Accessed 15 March 2020, http://www.sidreh.org/article.aspx?id=23. 300 One of these programs is the Desert Gardens project. The project provides a small- scale stopgap measure for Bedouin municipalities. In particular, the project offers Bedouin women an alternative way of obtaining healthy food options, supplementing their family’s diets. At the time of my interview with the then director of this program, Sidreh had successfully worked with eight different villages to establish a variety of gardens. These ranged in size from small box gardens to 100 square meter spaces accompanied by rain collection systems.760 While Desert Gardens is funded by a Dutch Organization, and the team is directed by a European immigrant to Israel, the project consciously is run by Bedouin staff and planned through Bedouin managerial direction. The gardens address issues of economic marginalization and social isolation. Due to the collective uncertainty of unrecognized status, people in these villages often struggle financially struggle and men sometimes travel for work. Many women are often left at home to care for the house and children. Some social family dynamics restrict the time that women can spend outside of the house. Even if some women do work outside the house, their potential employment is circumscribed by norms regarding what are appropriate times for women to be away from home. The marginalized state of unrecognized villages makes this even more difficult. It can be extremely difficult for women to get to a place of employment from an unrecognized village, especially if she cannot drive or does not have access to a car. Israeli highways pass by Bedouin settlements, but roads within Bedouin towns are often either unpaved, or in other states of disrepair. Thus, gardens fill an essential need. A trip to a supermarket may be a logistical headache: with a car, it can mean driving to Beersheba. Without a car, a woman may have to walk miles to the closest bus stop, or 760 Interview with Anonymous director at Sidreh, 20 March 2016. Beersheba. 301 to small groceries in Bedouin towns that may not have the same access to a wide variety of healthy food. In all, the dual pressures of social norms and the colonial infrastructure of the Naqab/Negev make some simple tasks incredibly difficult.761 In addition, the garden projects also have to contend with the whims of the settler state. If a garden does not sit within specific boundaries in the village, they risk demolition by Israeli authorities. Having a source of healthy food in close vicinity to a home can make an important difference in the quality of a family’s life. Gardens also help fight the endemic issue of women’s social isolation in unrecognized villages. Some require the labor of more than one person and thus serve as a meeting place where women can meet, work together, and form social and cooperative bonds. Neither do Bedouin communities automatically accept Sidreh’s work. As my informant told me, it can be difficult to establish individual and communal relationships and navigate all of the day-to-day barriers that women face. The director of the Desert Gardens project talked about some of these challenges in an interview: Sometimes there are women that we should reach but we cannot reach. If there is a woman in the village that we actually could work with but her husband will not allow her to participate, then we cannot reach her…and for me it is a very painful situation because we know there are women that we should help, but we cannot. Working with a woman against the will of her husband would put the woman, first of all, the team, and eventually the organization in danger. And its immensely frustrating. But, if you look at unrecognized villages, there is no woman that is not, as you say…vulnerable. There is no woman that is not vulnerable. Every woman there is vulnerable, some more than others. And it’s also related to her personal relations with her family and husband, but eventually, in the main points, they are all in the same situation. Hard economic situation, very strict social rules, lack of independence, lack of personal space… And restricted to a very, very small place physically and not physically…762 761 Ibid. 762 Ibid. Passage edited for clarity. 302 Navigating such localized political issues and gendered norms is extremely challenging and have to be approached with great care. But it should be noted that the relationship is facilitated between Bedouin women, rather than an organization parachuting into unrecognized villages. Like for AJEEC-NISPED, Sidreh wrestles with the question of how responsible they should be for the provision of governmental services. There is always the danger of a project like Desert Gardens disappearing, which leaves a large gap that the government will not fill. The goal is to make sure that these projects can continue to fulfill their economic and social functions but be less reliant on external funding: Well this is the one of the things with project funding, you get funding for a project and then you have to come up with really good ideas and have a really good fundraiser to make sure that your project goes on. Not in Sidreh, but in other places you see more than one great project die because of that/ It’s not like the need has gone away just because you had a great project… Eventually here, you know, all the NGOs working, especially in the Negev Bedouin community, the black hole that has been left by state authority is so huge you could have three times as many NGOs reaching ten times as many people and you’d still only scratch the surface of what is needed. And this are some ethics discussion that NGOs sometimes have… With education, should Sidreh really be responsible for teaching Bedouin women to read and write? Is this really our job? This is actually the job of the government. We shouldn’t make the life of the government easier by taking on their task. Maybe we should be making a lot of noise and bringing a lot of Bedouin women to the government making sure that they do their job. Instead of somehow actually perpetuating the system, by just somehow privatizing the work that the government should be doing.763 Like AJEEC-NISPED, Sidreh’s model of development may begin at a point where it is about the shaping of Bedouin women’s conduct, but it is not about commodifying or de- 763 Ibid. Passage lightly edited for clarity. 303 politicizing their subsistence activities. They repurpose a neoliberal NGO model that assuages the worst effects of settler development, but also directly confront its structures of dispossession. Sidreh negotiates barriers caused by settler colonial structures and tries to produce Bedouin subjects who can meet some of their own immediate needs. However, the focus on immediate need is always tied to political action and the construction of a solidarity movement. Sidreh takes the subsistence activities of the ‘need economy,’ repurposing settler development. It uses the small-scale, craft and gardening economies it creates to forge connections with other advocacy organizations and inform international and domestic visitors about the specific ways that the Israeli government’s expropriation in the Naqab/Negev impacts Bedouin lives. c. Project Wadi Atir – “A Model Sustainable Desert Community” On the loess plain near the south end of Ḥūrah, sits Project Wadi Atir (PWA), an experimental farm that seeks to combine “traditional” Bedouin cultivation and animal husbandry with Israeli “hi-tech” environmental expertise.764 On its 400 dunam (100 acre) plot of state-granted land located between the unrecognized villages of al-Grīn and Saʿwah, Project Wadi Atir seeks to demonstrate a novel framework of sustainable development for addressing desertification.765 Many of the on-site staff are Bedouin, though there are Jewish-Israeli academic consultants from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) assisting with specific projects. PWA is part of an NGO model in the Naqab/Negev that 764 Abigail Klein-Leichman, 2015. “New Israeli tech, old Bedouin ways at Wadi Attir.” Israel21c.org. July 26, 2015. Accessed October 8, 2016; JNF (Jewish National Fund). Undated. “A Model Sustainable Desert Community.” Project Wadi Attir. www.jnf.org. Accessed 8 Oct 2016; Zafrir Rinat, “Wadi Attir Farm Project Offers Sustainable High-tech for Negev Bedouin.” Haaretz.com. June 22, 2015. Accessed September 28 2016. 765 Interview with Co-Founder of Project Wadi Attir, April 2016. 304 actively seeks to produce Bedouin subjects who will represent efforts to address agricultural issues caused by climate change. PWA celebrates indigenous knowledges, but within a settler colonial framework that emphasizes Bedouin cultural attributes and obscures indigenous connection to land. PWA serves as a rallying point for a host of visitors, supporters, and donors, many from the United States and Europe. The project is meant to transform the political-economy of Bedouin communities by disseminating sustainable dryland agricultural techniques, and thus become a central hub for (settler sanctioned) Bedouin techniques and knowledges related to cultivation and animal husbandry. Some in the Bedouin community are critical of PWA because of its connections to the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and governmental ministries that, while supporting PWA, also carry out home demolitions and seek to expel people from unrecognized villages. While the co-founders and workers at PWA are personally ambivalent about Zionist ideological goals at best, PWA does work directly with such Zionist organizations. In doing so, PWA advocates sustainable development, and its subsequent economic possibilities as an apolitical alternative to the conflict in the Naqab/Negev. PWA provides training in animal husbandry, medicinal plant cultivation, cheese- making and other activities. There are some plans to introduce medicinal plants and dairy products from PWA into the Israeli market. While much of PWA’s activities commodify Bedouin knowledges, obscures Bedouin attachment to specific land claims, and serves to legitimize Zionist institutions as partners in development, some aspects of the project potential could unsettle Zionist claims to the lack of Bedouin attachment to the Naqab/Negev. For instance, PWA valorizes indigenous knowledges that, while attached to 305 culture, rather than land, really could have only emerged through a long history of Bedouin agriculture and knowledge production specific to the region. In doing so, PWA simultaneously upholds and subverts the temporal and geographical claims of Zionist settler development. PWA locates Bedouin knowledges and agricultural and pastoral practices within an Israeli model of sustainable development. Often a slippery term, sustainable development was popularized by the 1987 Brundtland Commission with the general aim of meeting the resource requirements of the present while planning for the potential needs of future generations.766 Scholars have shown how sustainable development discourses are often used for strategic ends,767 promoting “sustainable development” as a remedy to sustain capitalist accumulation.768 In the case of the PWA, there is a concerted effort to present the experimental farm as a model for sustainable development practices that can be replicated in other arid zones. PWA is conceptualized as one node in a larger network of “eco-zone” specific “lab centers.” While PWA acts as the arid zone laboratory, Sustainability Labs has also fostered relationships in Bhutan, the Galapagos, and Costa Rica. Sustainability Labs also has an agreement with the University of Amman to replicate PWA in Jordan.769 Like the work of other NGOs, PWA’s model focuses on providing social and economic support to women and children, with philanthropic backing of many international and state institutions that fund a whole range of apolitical initiatives in the Bedouin community. PWA started its project with 50-50 matching funds from the Israeli 766 Michael Redclift, “Sustainable Development (1987-2005): An Oxymoron Comes of Age,” Sustainable Development 13, no. (2005): 212-227. 767 W.M. Adams, Green Development: Environment and Sustainability in a Developing World. 3rd Edition. (London and New York: Routledge, 2009). 768 Redclift, “Sustainable Development,” 2005. 769 Interview Co-Founder, Project Wadi Attir. 306 government.770 JNF-USA was heavily involved in PWA’s initial construction and continues to provide it with funding.771 This is the same wing of the JNF that provides construction equipment for the demolition of Umm al-Ḥīrān in order to establish the Jewish town of Chiran in the same space. The JNF proudly displays its flags at the construction site of Chiran.772 Governmental bodies, such as the Ministry of Agriculture and the Bedouin Authority also provide support. In addition, PWA receives support through other Bedouin NGOs connected to international philanthropy. PWA’s developmental activities focus on training staff and individuals who can, in theory, replicate specific knowledges to then share with the rest of the Bedouin community. Staff, volunteers, and visitors engage in silviculture, husbandry, and crop cultivation. The farm also uses solar power to off-set energy use and recycles its own water. Its “green buildings” are meant to use as little energy as possible to adapt to the desert environment. On a portion of their plot, PWA has planted a number of different tree species with limans (indentations in the earth designed to collect rare rainwater) and are also working to cultivate indigenous desert plants. One of its major projects is in the production of Bedouin medicinal plants for eventual sale.773 Another is a seed bank of indigenous plants. PWA raises sheep and goats that they use for producing six different products which is supposed to counter how expensive the keeping of domestic animals has become for Bedouin farmers in the Naqab/Negev.774 770 Interview with Dr. Al-Nabari. 771 Interview, Co-Founder Project Wadi Attir. JNF-USA is structurally separate from JNF-Israel, otherwise known as the KKL. 772 Author visits to Umm al-Ḥīrān, 2015-2016. 773 Walking tour and interview with anonymous employee at Project Wadi Attir, March 2016. 774 Ibid. 307 PWA hopes that the production of medicinal plants and cosmetics will become a major income generator. The project has some 60 paid staff but trains visitors who are involved in Bedouin education outside of PWA: administrators and teachers, for instance, and some who are Palestinian citizens of Israel from the North.775 The focus on childhood education is similar to other Naqab/Negev Bedouin projects. Children from kindergarten to high school visit PWA.776 In 2016, PWA hosted an ‘eco-camp’ for 35 local 3rd to 5th graders who spent nine days “caring for and observing animals, doing science experiments, making eco-art, building teepees, playing team-building games and lots, lots more.”777 These projects are meant to change the social and economic behavior of Bedouin Palestinians, hence the emphasis especially on education. One employee at PWA told me that the work with students is supposed to change the inner narrative of Bedouin value in Israeli society. Students come to PWA to see Bedouin “success,” rather than rehearse the tropes of “failure” and “frustration.”778 These sentiments were echoed by Dr. al-Nabari, who talked extensively of the need to change the way Bedouins focused on their own narratives of victimhood, to get away from frustration with the state, and towards individual and communal success.779 This narrative reorients Bedouin frustration away from the structures of settler colonialism and towards the individual actions of oneself. This is the production of a specific type of Bedouin entrepreneurial subject who can commodify their 775 There is a significant number of Palestinian citizens of Israel from the north who come to the Naqab/Negev to teach in Bedouin schools. 776 Sustainability Labs, “Educational Visits to Project Wadi Attir,” July 6 2016. Website, Accessed 11 October 2016. www.sustainabilitylabs.org. 777 Sustainability Labs, “Closing Ceremony of first ever Project Wadi Attir “Young Ecologist” Summer Camp,” July 28 2016. Website, Accessed 11 October 2016. www.sustainabilitylabs.org. 778 Walking tour, Project Wadi Attir. 779 Interview with Dr. al-Nabari. 308 own indigenous identity, but only to supplement the contours of an already ethnocratic national economy. PWA’s brochures and online materials tend to rehearse similar discourses that frame Zionists as modern and Bedouins as premodern. For instance, the JNF writes on their website that PWA is: Designed to combine Bedouin aspirations, values and experiences with sustainability principles, modern day science and cutting edge [sic] technologies. The project was initiated in order to showcase a breakthrough approach to environmentally-sound sustainable development. It will make a real different [sic] locally and will serve as a model for arid regions in other parts of the world.780 The idea that PWA combines Bedouin tradition and Israeli technology is a constant refrain of the project’s media appearances. Haaretz, for instance, quotes co-founder, Michael Ben- Eli saying that the project is, “designed to leverage Bedouin traditional values, know-how and experience with modern-day science and cutting-edge technology.”781 Another article titled, “New Israeli Tech, Old Bedouin Ways at Wadi Attir” also writes of the “cutting edge Israeli approaches and traditional Bedouin knowhow to establish ecologically sound income-generating activities.”782 Ben-Gurion University, involved at PWA, sees the project as a “unique sustainable agricultural project which fuses traditional Bedouin agricultural and husbandry practices with modern renewable energy technology and framing techniques.” It further adds that the “Bedouin Arabs’ extensive knowledge of the desert has gradually disappeared as a result of the influences of modern life. The Wadi 780 Jewish National Fund, “A Model Sustainable Desert Community.” 781 Rinat, “Wadi Attir farm project…” 782 Klein-Lechman, “New Israeli tech…” 309 Attir’s project primary objective is to preserve and nurture traditional Bedouin agricultural knowledge, while providing income.”783 These kinds of discourses continually reproduce the Israelis/modern and Bedouins/traditional dichotomy that supports a program of development that is state- centric. They assume, again, that Bedouins have to be brought into modernity. These particular discourses locate the site of Bedouin incapacity in knowledge production and application, similar to how Zionist discourses have long valorized settler exceptionalism and expertise over that of Palestinians. Bedouins do not have expertise, they have “knowhow,” a folksy way of framing knowledge as picked up through experience, rather than academic study. Settlers, instead, wield “cutting-edge technology,” a long reoccurring trope of Zionist discourses. This dichotomy represents Bedouin agricultural and pastoral activities and knowledges as discrete, unchanging, and pre-modern—while Jewish Israelis at the forefront of discovery. Merging the two supposedly discrete knowledge again reiterates Israel as a site of exceptional agricultural techniques and reinforces superficial claims to a multicultural state. Such discourses obscure the extent to which PWA relies on long history of Bedouin cultivation as the basis for its program of sustainable development. Not only does PWA redirect Bedouin subsistence and political economy into the managed space of development, circuiting such practices into the settler economy, but it also erases the very material and historical conditions that undergird the emergence of such practices to begin with. It assumes that Bedouins conjured a knowledge of cultivation activities out of thin air. There is no settler recognition of the centrality of time and place, nor of the particular 783 Ben-Gurion University, “Wadi Attir Project Launched,” Website, Accessed Feb 2 2016, www.bgu.ac.il. 310 geography of the Naqab/Negev, to such agricultural knowledges. As a result, these kinds of neoliberal settler developmental models “displace” Bedouins from the Naqab/Negev— theirs are “indigenous practices,” but indigenous to nowhere. As Zionist desert sciences (as detailed in Chapter Two) emphasized global arid issues at the expense of Naqab Bedouins, this entrepreneurial Bedouin subject is produced by a neoliberal settler development that expropriates indigenous knowledge for developing sustainable economies elsewhere. PWA was able to leverage such expertise to join the 12th United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in Ankara, Turkey in October 2015. Stemming from the convention, PWA launched an educational website documenting their efforts and conceptual framework.784 As such, PWA is meant to be a “sustainable desert community,” a model to be replicated. The model can be replicated – but the model does not include the particular settler colonial context of the Naqab/Negev. So how does PWA address the politics of land conflict that define the Naqab/Negev today? In the midst of an interview with one of the founders of PWA, I asked about the overall political context in Israel and its connections to arid zones elsewhere. First, the co- founder said that when they started their work, it was not necessarily to solve issues in the Naqab/Negev of concern to the Bedouin community. Instead, it was about establishing a “sustainable desert community,” emphasizing the importance of the site as a model for attending to desertification globally.785 I then asked how this theoretical approach applied in this specific case—why is the Negev a good experimental site for this kind of vision? They said: 784 Sustainability Labs, “Projects in Development.” Website, Accessed 22 May 2016. www.sustainabilitylabs.org 785 Interview with Co-founder, Project Wadi Attir. 311 There are two big issues in the Negev that are relevant. One is that the Negev is obviously under growing pressure for development. This is the land reserve of the country, right? And the idea is to settle the Negev, right? And to develop the Negev, starting from Ben-Gurion onwards, right? That’s where it links to your Zionism thing.786 I want to note that the interviewee, in my estimation, did not believe in Zionism as a driving force for PWA but rather understood it as the context in which they had to work. In fact, this statement was delivered in a somewhat ironic tone, because I had asked about Ben- Gurion earlier in the interview. This echoed other experiences I had with key informants in environmental NGOs. For instance, at Earth’s Promise, an urban agricultural NGO in Beersheba, my informant said that they knew that “make the desert bloom” was a powerful narrative that attracted certain kinds of donors and governmental support.787 The informant at PWA continued to speak about the relationship between their work and the land conflict: Two is that the Negev is home to the Bedouin community, so there is a conflicting interface between the interests of the community and the pressure of development. So, how do you put the two together in a harmonious way? [...] And third, how do you have development in the Negev that is mindful and sensitive, not only to the communities that are here but also to the environment itself. Although, most people look at the desert as a desert [chuckle]. The desert is a very complex ecosystem with a lot going on and a lot of it is invisible. […] For example, just the existence of all those pieces of medicinal plants that are not known to science yet, but are a very potent, important resource. […] So, these three things have to come together and because we are trying to deal with them in Project Wadi Attir, I think it becomes a model of how you do effective development in the Negev. It doesn’t deal with urban issues and so forth, but it does provide the microcosm. One of the interesting things is that Wadi Attir is a small project, in a small corner with a small community, with no significance globally. But if you look at the project, if you strip it from the obvious manifestation of what it is [chuckle], 786 This is an approximation of the raw transcript, edited for readability and clarity. 787 Interview with Anonymous Informant at Earth’s Promise, November 2015. 312 it’s really a microcosm for the planet. It’s the same approach you want to take for the planet as a whole.788 Throughout, the interviewee emphatically said that he was not driven by Zionist goals and concerns—however, the settler colonial context of how their work is structured in the Naqab/Negev cannot be ignored. This development conjoins global arid environmental concerns—despite the fact that the project has “no significance globally”—and Bedouin economic marginalization. According to the informant, the project is less about solving particular issues related to poverty and Bedouin land claims in the Naqab/Negev, and more about creating an exportable model for sustainable development. However, this means that the model is reliant on the very structural conditions of Bedouins in the Naqab/Negev in this particular corner near Ḥūrah. The specific plot of land was available for PWA due to state claims over Bedouin land. The Bedouin Palestinian community in this part of the Naqab/Negev were seen as good subjects for intervention, again, because of a long history of colonial and settler colonial expropriation. The funders and partners of the program are the very organizations working to demographically dominate the Naqab/Negev and restrict Bedouin autonomy. PWA relies on the material conditions of Zionism’s emergence as well as the modernizing developmental discourse of the un-developed, even as it plots a development that is “mindful and sensitive” to the environment and indigenous community. The key site for intervention is not the colonial conditions in this part of the Naqab/Negev, but the behavior of Bedouin subjects. It is a settler governmentality that tries to produce indigenous people as recipients of marginal development that transforms 788 Interview with Co-founder of Project Wadi Attir. 313 subsistence activities into ‘projects.’ With the material and ideological support of Zionist institutions and international donors, Bedouins are pushed to become what the liberal settler imagines as “safe” indigeneity—that is, indigeneity of cultural identity but not of land. However, PWA also produces subjectivities that—while perhaps helping to deepen some forms of capitalist and Zionist domination—also counter the environmental discourses of Bedouin “waste,” (see Chapter Two) even if they still function within a modernist teleology. PWA recasts Bedouins as environmentally attuned and inherently sustainable. PWA therefore unconsciously recognizes Bedouin past and present use of the Naqab/Negev. PWA’s framework does subvert Zionist claims to land, but it does change some of the terms of indigenous identity in the Naqab/Negev, in relation to the Zionist production of knowledge. For instance, take this story from a Bedouin employee at PWA: The manager of the medicinal plant [project] knew about every kind of plant […] We have seventeen kinds of desert plants but [in the future] will have one hundred for seventy-two dunams. [For one plant there was] no academic research and it is expensive. And we grew it and when the government let us sell our cosmetic products we will be the professional organization that will know this plant... [The director of the medicinal plant project] looked for the seed for four years. He celebrated and had a ceremony. […] A lot of people came here, the Ministry Agriculture and the KKL [Jewish National Fund, Israel], and they said they will teach him how to grow the plant and he said, ‘No, I will show you.’ Without nylon or plastic. […] They have to be endemic. From here. The Arava too. And we will grow even farther than us. We have indigenous vegetables which are from the borders of Jordan and Syria, from the Bedouin community and researchers.789 789 Walking tour, Project Wadi Attir. I omitted the name of the plant. This passage is edited for grammar and clarity. 314 This story unsettles several Zionist modernist discourses that justify intervention in the Bedouin community. First, it emphasizes that expertise within the Bedouin community is superior to that of the Jewish community and its governmental and NGO institutions (the plant manager could grow this plant without the “cutting-edge” technological methods of Israelis), such as the Ministry of Agriculture and the KKL/JNF. The medicinal plant manager will do the teaching, not the other way around. Second, the story shows how the work on these plants actually produces an identity and subjectivity that is larger than the project itself. The identity linked to Bedouin knowledges is not only rooted, discretely, in the Naqab/Negev. It links Naqab Bedouins with Palestinians in the north. PWA benefits from the material realities of settler development, in three different ways. First, PWA is interconnected with Zionist institutions and organizations that see an opportunity to advertise their work in the Bedouin community, obscuring the ongoing dispossession of Bedouin Palestinians throughout the Naqab/Negev. Second, the very land that PWA uses for its experimental farm is available because of Israeli capture of Bedouin land in this region. Its location within the Siyag is due to this land becoming available for a continued surge of settler development. Third, PWA mobilizes the modernist tropes that justify continued Israeli intervention into Bedouin life. Its particular effect is to produce indigenous knowledge as disconnected from an actual material history on the land. As an NGO with international backing, PWA operates within the contours of capitalist settler development as it manages some of the most detrimental effects of Zionist settler colonialism: dispossession from land, the de-development of the Bedouin agricultural economy, and the exclusion actual control of capital. PWA functions to channel Bedouin knowledges and activities towards commodification, especially as an exportable product 315 to other places in the world. However, PWA also produces a space wherein Bedouin employees and volunteers can reconnect to indigenous knowledges that can form a basis for making claims as a community. The project opens up the possibility for a (well-funded) space for reconnecting to specific types of agricultural knowledges and labor. Subjects may not do as Zionist institutions and organizations desire, but instead valorize their labor as part of a Palestinian national identity, in a sense, challenging colonial definitions of Bedouins. Conclusion In the Naqab/Negev, Zionist settler colonialism is intimately intertwined with developmental discourses and practices that scholars have mostly located as part of the post-colonial condition in the Global South. What I sought to show in this chapter is that similar conceptualizations of development also function within a settler colonial context as a way to address the inequality that is the result of specific kinds of settler colonial capitalism, especially ongoing neoliberalization. In doing so, I complicate the application of settler development, arguing that it does not only function at the behest settlers but look also at how it appears within the discourses and practices of NGOs working with Bedouins in the Naqab/Negev. As a result, settler development is something leveraged against indigenous peoples’ attachment to land, but it is also navigated, reworked, and repurposed to address some issues that urgently face the day to day lives of Bedouin Palestinian citizens in the Naqab/Negev. Neoliberal developmental imperatives—such as individualization of political issues, the commodification of craft economies, the emphasis on the conduct and capacity 316 of indigenous people, and the management of the exclusion brought about by settler capital—mobilize settler imperatives. At the same time, neoliberalism is not seamless nor over-determinative. The NGOs that I analyzed in this chapter all recognize that the settler state wants to leverage NGOs to provide the services it will not grant. AJEEC-NISPED organizationally rejects this as its role. Sidreh takes the opportunity of provision to politically mobilize its members and international visitors. Project Wadi Attir, however, is more willing to work with organizations like the JNF that some Bedouin citizens would find abhorrent, and leverage Bedouin knowledges within a Zionist grid of value. While all three organizations focus on individual self-sufficiency, they differ in how they negotiate and/or cooperate with Zionist settler development. At the same time, they repurpose capitalist imperatives to address the urgent needs of Bedouin life. These organizations must draw from international donor agencies that expect specific types of Bedouin subjects and focus on small-scale projects. However, in such a “schizophrenic” situation—as my informant at AJEEC-NISPED said—one makes do with what one has. These organizations also have different ways of imagining Bedouin subjects in relation to Zionist modes of settler development and international donor discourses and imperatives. Richard Ratcliffe (2016) argues that such discourses about Bedouins mobilize how they are governed. Israeli institutions and Zionist narratives frame Bedouins as “traditional” and thus claim their present predicament is due to structural issues internal to a homogenous Bedouin society and its collision with modernity. This implies a deficit in Bedouin capacity, who then must be educated and trained to have marginal value within an ethnocratic capitalist economy. However, much of the discourses and images related to Bedouin activities in the Naqab/Negev is interconnected with the ongoing logic of 317 elimination that systematically attacks most aspects of life for Palestinians in the Naqab. People are shunted into precarious wage labor to supplement living in underserved communities and unrecognized villages. The “need economy” that develops to fill the gap left by the state is commodified and circumscribed by NGOs and allows for the extension of settler development. Bedouin women, especially, are not only subjects whose behavior must change, but objects constantly reproduced as the most marginal in the Naqab/Negev due not to the colonial exacerbation of patriarchy, but again, to the stasis of Bedouin society. Development practitioners focus especially on women’s training, education, and small business development. However, organizations like Sidreh also take this opportunity to develop a Bedouin cooperative approach dedicated to politically mobilizing Bedouin women. Sidreh’s practices repurpose a neoliberal governmentality; they may seek to shape conduct, but it is in the purpose of political action and communal solidarity. Finally, these cases help give a sense of how the inside and outside of capital functions within a settler colonial space. Settler development works through a settler imperative to mobilize capitalism in the interests of the settler population. This expels (rather than exploits) Bedouin labor, attempting to expropriate and control Bedouin land. While Bedouins are relegated to smaller and smaller spaces and forced to further supplement themselves through subsistence, due to alienation from an agrarian economy, they are tacitly invited back to capital, but only as dispersed, exhausted, isolated. The space of development appears to order and manage subsistence, to channel and attach Bedouin activities to the professional arenas of expertise. 318 Field Journal 8: Thanksgiving at Umm al-Ḥīrān November 2016 – Umm al-Ḥīrān I woke up at a quarter past five in the dark confused. Usually, I wake up with the light that seeps in through the slats in the skylight in my room. I had been anxious the night before, unsure of what to expect at the village, Umm al-Ḥīrān, the next morning. It was Thanksgiving. Before bed, I read about the water protector at the Standing Rock Camp who had been maimed by a concussion grenade thrown by the police. Her father had described the sinews erupting from her arm with the bone. It was terrible to read. Schematic of the planned settlement of Chiran in relation to the existing village of Umm al-Ḥīrān. Bimkom. “On the Map: The Village of Umm al-Ḥīrān and the Chiran Master Plan.” Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality. https://www.dukium.org/on-the-map-the-villages-of-atir- and-umm-al-hiran-and-the-hiran-master-plan/. Figure 18. Planned Settlement to Replace Umm al-Ḥīrān. 319 This Thanksgiving, I visited a Bedouin unrecognized village, Umm al-Ḥīrān. Bedouin claim indigenous rights to the Naqab (Negev in Hebrew), the stretch of land that makes up southern Israel. I’ve been to Umm al-Ḥīrān many times over the course of my research year. I’ve heard them tell the history of the village over and over again to international groups and diplomats coming to see the situation in Israel/Palestine. We were pushed from the west, from our land. We were displaced three times since 1948. Finally, in the early 1950s, the military put us here. They promised to move us back. Then they promised to recognize us. Today, they call us unrecognized and want to demolish us. They are building a new Jewish town on top of us. They want to call it “Chiran.” You see, a smile from the person telling the story, they want to take away our land and our mother. Basem, a resident of the village, has told this story a hundred times.790 He doesn’t really even look at us when he speaks. He keeps an earbud in one ear sometimes. It is probably so he can answer the phone and hear it in the wind that blows through Umm al-Ḥīrān, but I like to think he’s listening to music, maybe the same song every time. At another unrecognized village, Wādi an-Naʿam, a man welcomes a group of embassy staff. Wādi an-Naʿam has 10,000 – 14,000 people in it, living along the route south from Beersheba. They are sandwiched between a power plant and Israel’s largest chemical production and cleanup site that houses more than a dozen companies, all built with the villagers already there. This obviously affects their health. The government wants them to move into Segev Shalom nearby, a planned township with half their population. At the end of the story of the village, this ritual that every visitor hears, the man says, “You 790 I changed the name of this person to protect their anonymity. 320 come every week for years. And yet, nothing changes. What are you going to do this time? I’ll die before something changes.” I feel guilty. True, what have I changed? On November 20th, the court of Beersheba had ordered that the demolitions in the village of Umm al-Ḥīrān had to be carried out by November 30th. It was reported that a private contractor who won the bid to destroy people’s homes would come on November 22nd with the police. The villagers, activists, people from NGOs, and four Members of Knesset from the Joint Arab List came to show solidarity and try to stop the demolition. Some slept there the night before, the rest arrived at dawn. The contractors and police never showed. Around 9 AM, there was a report that the demolition would not be carried out—they usually happen early in the morning. On November 23rd, nothing happened either. There was a call for people to come to the village on November 24th, Thanksgiving. Photograph 19. Wādi an-Naʿam. 2016. 321 Dara picks me up at the end of my street.791 Windows in houses are beginning to open and illuminate, birds are chirping, and some light is beginning to seep into the sky. It is a cold and beautiful morning. She is wearing layer upon layer of clothing. Umm al-Ḥīrān, she says, “is the coldest place in Israel.” I ask her about protocol with the police. Do I stand back? What’s safe to do versus not? As an American am I more or less vulnerable? She said it’s her job to stand back to take photographs and report. I’ll stick with her. People from the village will stand in front of a house. The police tell them to move. Sometimes they move, sometimes they don’t. If they don’t the police push them out of the way. She says that she doesn’t think anything will happen today—every time she goes to a village the police decide not to go that day. She then tells me a story about calling the police because the intersection on a major road had a traffic light that was showing green all around. Cars were going through, almost hitting each other. She was passed from jurisdiction to jurisdiction—no one knew who was responsible for the traffic light. Finally, one police officer chastised her for “leaving the scene.” She cursed him out. “I have to go to work; I’m not going to do your fucking job!” Dara works like crazy, seethes at the gall of people who do the wrong thing at the wrong time and tells off people who cross these lines. She often approaches the insanity of her job and this place by projecting a fatalist and wry sense of humor onto everything. Sometimes this veneer slips. In the midst of her posting one week regarding the situation with urgent unrecognized villages, she writes of a dead kitten she found outside. She broke down as she buried her. A photo of a small dirt mound with a flower. 791 I changed the name of this person to protect their anonymity. 322 The sun was stronger now, but still hidden behind the hills of the northern Naqab. Umm al-Ḥīrān was on a ridge of hills that undulated into the West Bank, visible from the highway. We drove quickly through Ḥūrah, a Bedouin planned township where some houses have pens for sheep and goats. The road climbs and you can see down towards Beersheba, its white apartment buildings beginning to glow in the dawn. Beyond Ḥūrah, the landscape is parched. The loess soil is rich, but it dries out quickly and then moves from hill to hill with the wind. I can see how Europeans and Zionists formed an imagination of empty desolation if they saw this place in winter. They probably saw the way the haze cloaked the hills and choked on the dust as it coated their tongues. It becomes hard to look directly at anything with the wind and the haze. In Umm al-Ḥīrān, people are just waking up. A few people go here and there tending to farm animals or waking up children to get ready for school. The wind seethes through the village and because of the construction of the houses, everything seems to be clanging together. A baby goat escapes its pen and bays as a little girl grabs at it. Three puppies watch us approaching and then run off to play in a pile of branches. Two older dogs yawn and watch us approach. The village is a mixture of plaster and stone houses and corrugated metal sheets that look like patches on clothing. There are piles of things discarded or held for future use. Clotheslines run between houses overhead. Up the hill are the villages’ olive groves but behind them are the Jewish National Fund’s tree plantations. They are lined up in small limans, trees just a few years old and slowly crawl towards the village, restricting their access to land. People tend to graze there anyway. Another village, ʿAtīr, further down the road from Umm al-Ḥīrān is also facing demolition because the 323 government wants to expand the Yatir Forest. ʿAtīr and Umm al-Ḥīrān are from the same large family and came to this place at the same time in the 1950s. Across the wadi, on the western edge of the village are the new earthworks for the Jewish town of Hiran. The machines, even this early in the morning, are working, pushing the dirt upwards to level out the land. The Hiran master plan locates one of its neighborhoods directly on top of Umm al-Ḥīrān. I had never seen these earthworks before, they must have just come in in the past two months. The future residents from Hiran come from a settlement in the southern Hebron Hills. They are currently living in trailers in the middle of Yatir Forest, waiting. Photograph 20. The earthworks for Chiran in the distance, looming over the village. 2016. 324 There are a few cars parked at the entrance to the village, activists who had gotten here before dawn, or had arrived in the middle of the night and slept in their cars. They are Jewish-Israelis from different parts of Israel responding to the Facebook call last night to come to the village. One guy got a ride from Tel Aviv. Another drove from up near Haifa to arrive in the middle of the night. Some of them had never been here before, didn’t know anyone but came anyway. The guy from Tel Aviv had been here on Tuesday when there was a large crowd. Today there was a debate in the Knesset on Amona, so perhaps this is why the Members of the Knesset did not come. Amona is a Jewish settlement in the West Bank that was built without government permission. The debate is now whether to evict them or to make them “legal” (as if the settlements are not all illegal to begin with). Much of the government is rallying behind cries that say that a demolition of their houses will be a threat and betrayal of the Jewish people despite the fact that they are situated on privately owned Palestinian land and not on land that the Israeli government claims is “state land” in the West Bank. It would be ironic if it wasn’t expected. We meet Ghalib as he is hanging clothes up on a line.792 He is barefoot, while I wear heavy socks and warm shoes. He is wearing a headscarf and a long gray cloak I had seen him wear at Al-Araqib. His feet are calloused, like an extra pair of shoes. He says, “Boker Tov,” to all of us white Jewish folks and some of us reply, “Sabah Al-kher.” Basem and Ghalib tell us to sit in a reception room in their house. It was this area of the village, Ghalib and his sons’ homes, where demolitions are supposed to happen. So, we wait here. The room is square, and cushions and pillows line the wall for sitting. In one corner is a 792 I changed the name of this person to protect their anonymity. 325 generator for the solar panels and an older TV. The room is cold, the roof is metal and breaths in and out and the wind batters the walls constantly. Some of us sit under blankets. In the morning, I hadn’t thought to make coffee and at the time I thought, they’ll probably have coffee for us in the village. I chastised myself on the ride in for this thought—that people facing such a personal catastrophe would care enough to provide this luxury for me. But sure enough, in a few minutes, Ghalib came back with black sweet tea that warmed out hands. He put some fresh pita on a small foldable table and some containers of humus, eggplant dip, and salami. He said in Hebrew, “Everyone, eat!” and I was the only one to obey. Immediately, I felt rude, but wasn’t sure why. In the other room, Ghalib’s wife was pounding beans for black coffee. More Jewish-Israeli activists emerge out of the trees up the hill. Activists always have backpacks. Two of them are from Israel’s Social TV, an activist channel covering all sorts of news. One is an intern from Denmark. The other is Israeli and promptly falls asleep in the corner on a cushion. The activists tend to stick to nuts and oranges, things they have brought. Eventually a few take bread. We keep refilling coffee while everyone chats. Children’s voices echo from inside. One activist, tall and gaunt with a graying beard, speaks back and forth in Hebrew and Arabic, but in a moment switches to English, merely to say “parking” and I detect an American accent. One jokes with the Basem and Ghalib in Arabic and English. At some point someone calls Basem and he puts his phone on speaker. So far, no sign of the police at any of the major road junctions. There is speculation that the police are too tied up with the fires around Jerusalem and in the north to care today.793 Indeed, evacuations are beginning, and people are relocating south to escape. The 793 Throughout this time period, there were a series of intense forest fires in and around Haifa. 326 Palestinian Authority has even sent four fire-fighting teams and a giant Boeing 747 outfitted to carry 70 tons of fire retardant is on the way from the US. The fires near Jerusalem are swinging back and forth over the Green Line, from route 1 and route 443, built as a commuter highway for Israelis in the West Bank. The guy from Tel Aviv jokes, “even the fire doesn’t respect borders.” Ghalib begins comparing when everyone showed up that morning. He pokes fun at the guy who slept in his car. One usual guide for all visitors to the village, Ibrahim, shows up and goes in a circle saying hi to everyone. He tries to plug in his phone, but the electricity has suddenly gone out. We spent some anxious minutes trying to see what happened to the solar generator, but nobody knows. Amidst the chatting and joking, there are periodic silences, where everyone looks down and anxiety floods the room. The guy from Social TV starts snoring. Ghalib smiles and covers him with a blanket. A German reporter shows up with a photographer from Spain. They have been wandering around the last few days. I had seen them both at the Al-Araqib vigil a couple of days earlier. Al-Araqib is perhaps the most famous unrecognized village when it comes to international media attention, probably because of the sheer number of times it has been demolished, now over one hundred since 2010. It had once been a village centered around an old graveyard with houses for over 100 families. Now it is just a few families, the hard- core village activists, and the sheikh. He jokes with us every time we come for the vigil, held every week at a major road junction. He wishes us happy holidays in the middle of the Jewish high holy days. I’m kind of in awe of him, nervous to chat and sound stupid in my slow Hebrew. This week at the protest, everyone seemed tired. The person with the banner was late by a half hour. People sat around on their phones. A lone Israeli police 327 officer came by and waited for us to put up our hands in peace signs before taking a picture. They used to have several special police there to watch the vigil, but now they mostly don't bother. A couple of people go outside for a smoke. It is much warmer, the sun overhead now. I overhear Dara speaking with the German reporter about the situation with another unrecognized village Rakhama. Rakhama is right next to Yerocham, a development town south of Beersheva. Yerocham has been trying with the village to find some way to incorporate them so they can receive utilities and other services, but the government keeps saying no. As a result, the detritus of living without state support creeps into Yerocham— garbage burns and waste spills. Rakhama residents still have to use all the other services of Yerocham. It just makes it worse for everyone when the government holds fast to its stubbornness. Dara then told them that factory that makes the slabs for the Separation Wall with the West Bank is in Yerocham. It is right next to Rakhama. When they finish slabs, they stand them up next to the Bedouin town. Dara says, “You really should go there just for the photograph.” I overhear the German reporter talking to the photographer. He is talking to him about using the wind as a metaphor for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He apparently is writing about everything. I am not sure how it is a metaphor, or why you need one. Around 8:30 Dara and I decide to leave. Handshakes all around. We collect the paper cups from our tea and coffee and throw them into a trash bucket. No demolition today apparently, and it won’t happen on Friday or Saturday, Shabbat, the weekend. Maybe Sunday. The court said it had to happen before the 30th. People will have to prepare every night in anticipation. They will have to move everything out of their homes to save what 328 they can, then move back in later in the day, once it is apparent that no police are coming. They have to get up every morning, schedule this ritual into their day, one that will sever them from any semblance of making a normal life when it finally occurs. As we walk back to the car, the wind is kicking up dust everywhere, so much so I have trouble keeping my head up. Waves of dirt come off of the earthworks where they are building Hiran and blanket the bulldozers. As we drive back, the dust moves like a curtain across the landscape; you can’t see Beersheba from the high road in Ḥūrah anymore. The sky is a paper bag brown. I can feel sand in the cracks in my lips and it grinds in my teeth. At home, there is a thin layer of dust covering the toilet. I say hello to my roommate who is just waking up, fill a hot water bottle and climb into bed, exhausted. In a couple of hours, I will be on campus surrounded by undergraduates in the library on their cellphones, studying on their computers, hanging out on the grass, getting drinks later at the bars nearby, or sharing coffee in the cafes. In the archives, I’ll chat with the archivist in English and Hebrew. She tells me about how people think the fires in the north were started by arsonists. Later, I meet a friend from Long Island at a hamburger joint. We watch Beersheba’s soccer team play in the European tournament against Spain. He seems preoccupied with his last few days. I don’t tell him about my day, instead we talk about baseball, where our families will be for Thanksgiving, the cold night and the wind. 329 Photograph 21. Land Day Demonstration at Umm al-Ḥīrān. 2016. 330 Conclusion: Green Deserts No square inch of land shall we neglect; not one source of water shall we fail to tap; not a swamp that we shall not drain; not a sand dune that we shall not fructify; not a barren hill that we shall not cover with trees; nothing shall we leave untouched. - David Ben-Gurion, 1938, quoted in Orenstein 2013794 As I have shown throughout this dissertation, settler development in the Naqab/Negev is historically contingent, changing in concert with the shifts in the global circuits of capital. Zionist settler development over its history has reinvented itself to appeal to new global actors, responding to imperial imperatives, scientific and environmental sciences, neoliberal governance, and Bedouin persistence. At the same time, many of its core imperatives have remained remarkably consistent: Zionism’s need to claim economic exceptionalism, its emphasis on the improvement of Jewish settlers, obsession with the land and its transformation, and the narrative of cutting-edge historical agency shift and reappear over time. Many of these persistent components of Zionist settler development are particular to Israel/Palestine. At the same time, they are cobbled together through traveling narrative, shared settler solidarity, and crisscrossing networks that link localized development in the Naqab/Negev with international NGOs, arid zone development, American geo-politics, and indigenous resistance. My key claim in this dissertation is that Zionist settler colonialism functions through the ongoing mobilization of global developmental imperatives. For instance, Zionists appealed to the British Mandate’s emphasis on the economic self-sufficiency of 794 Daniel E. Orenstein, “Zionist and Israeli Perspectives on Population Growth and Environmental Impact in Palestine and Israel,” in Between Ruin and Restoration: An Environmental History of Israel, Daniel E. Orenstein, Alon Tal, and Char Miller, eds. (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013): 82-105. 331 its colonies by claiming that a Jewish state would fulfill their developmental goals. Similarly, Israel now claims that its unique model of economic success should be replicated in other states. Zionist modalities of indigenous dispossession have shifted as well. Early Zionists feared that they would forever lack access to indigenous land, so they had to argue that they could make it more productive. Later, the state expelled Palestinians and then implemented a series of juridical actions to ‘legalize’ the capture of land within the laws of the settler state. In the Naqab/Negev, modernist narratives, intertwined with state violence, helped to justify ongoing expropriation of Bedouin land. All of this was done in the name of Zionist development, premised on the building of a state for the Jewish people. Theoretically, this study contributes to a growing body of scholarship that connects settler colonialism to the global circuits of capitalism. It also contributes to studies of comparative settler colonial modalities and geographies that have become more and more a part of the discipline of geography’s critical engagements. One of the places that I would like to go in future work, is to consider how sustainable development, as a kind of eco-economic idea, functions within settler colonial space. My original project proposal has been nearly written out of this version of the dissertation. The original subject of inquiry was going to be a century-old international organization, founded during one of the first Zionist Congresses, incorporated originally in the United Kingdom, and has long been known in the Jewish community in the United States for one simple act: planting trees. These trees were planted with the help of loose change (we thought) dropped into their iconic “blue box,” the pushke, to raise tzedakah, or charity, to help “make the desert bloom.” It was a simple way to express a vague sense of 332 national belonging, tied into environmental imagination. The story was that somewhere, out in the desert, your tree was growing, taking root. The Jewish National Fund (JNF), or Keren Keyemith L’Israel (the Fund for the Perpetuation of Israel - KKL), has been the subject of countless academic studies and the target of many activist campaigns. I learned in my early twenties how JNF forests were used to cover the ruins of Palestinian towns whose residents the Israeli militias expelled in 1948. Later, about how their forests constrict Palestinian towns so they cannot expand.795 Still later, how its iconic tree, the Jerusalem or Aleppo Pine (depending on one’s political orientation) was practically an invasive species, poisoning and crowding out its competition. One day, in the mail, I received a JNF newsletter, called “Together” (I was on their mailing list) that advertised their Blueprint Negev campaign.796 The campaign aimed at bringing 500,000 new Jewish citizens into the south. It had not occurred to me before that the JNF was so intertwined with the development of the state. I had previously only thought of them as an environmental organization, “greenwashing” a history of Zionist settler colonialism. My dissertation prospectus proposed that I would spend half of my time during my field research in the Naqab/Negev interviewing JNF officials, scientists, and perhaps even foresters, and the other half in Jerusalem digging through various archives on the history of the JNF-KKL. By doing so, I would look at how such nationalist environmentalism was part and parcel of development, how Zionism was branded as “green,” and thus, its development made “sustainable,” despite the 795 Shaul Ephraim Cohen, Politics of Planting: Israeli-Palestinian Competition for Control of Land in the Jerusalem Periphery (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993); Irus Braverman, Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/ Palestine. Cambridge Studies in Law and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 796 Jewish National Fund, “If You Build It… The Ripple Effects of Blueprint Negev,” Together, Fall 2013. Print. 333 organization’s record of ecological destruction.797 In effect, the JNF- KKL’s first priority was nationalist, second, environmentalist. At the time, I considered settler colonialism to be part of the context of my research, and less so a way of understanding development and the global flows of capital. So, what happened? I remember being cautioned against relying too much on one organization by my committee in my preliminary exam defense. Early efforts to contact the JNF-KKL yielded only mixed results. At some point, someone in the organization must have realized how much they were being mined for the academic production of critical analyses of nationalism and nature. But I did find myself surrounded by the JNF, nonetheless. Parks, roads, and centers bore their proud signs. I’d go hiking in their eerie forests, which were devoid of animal activity, cleared of underbrush, and with trees laid out in straight lines like long rows of corn. They seemed to fund mostly every environmental NGO I came across. And of course, as I learned more and more about battle 797 Guy Rotem, Amos Bouskila, and Alon Rothschild, Ecological Effects of Afforestation in the Northern Negev, May 2014. Trans. Zev Labinger. Society for the Protection of Nature. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Guy_Rotem/publication/272161151_Ecological_Effects_of_Afforesta tion_in_the_Northern_Negev/links/54dc6d6a0cf28d3de65fc4f0/Ecological-Effects-of-Afforestation-in-the- Northern-Negev.pdf Cover of Together. Jewish National Fund. Fall 2013. Print. Figure 19. JNF - If You Build It. 334 over land in the Naqab/Negev, I saw their bulldozers sitting, waiting, next to unrecognized Bedouin villages. In particular, JNF-US (the American wing) and the Or Movement, what can perhaps be described as a settler organization now at work within the Green Line, are leading efforts to demolish the Bedouin villages of Umm al-Ḥīrān and ʿ Atīr. ʿ Atīr is mostly surrounded by the saplings and limans of a new JNF forest. Umm al-Ḥīrān is to be demolished to make way for the Jewish town of Chiran, whose future residents hide in trailers in the shade of JNF trees in the Yatir Forest. Historically, JNF’s mobilization of Zionist environmental narratives justified its almost science-fictional efforts at afforestation. Palestine is Mars. Settlers venture into the unknown to terraform an alien planet. And yet, in much science fiction, settlers arrive to a space marked by absence, a Wild West of only cowboys and no Indians. This is the imagined “wasteland,” what settlers see from the ship and then produce on the ground. Deserts stand in for alien landscapes. Alien landscapes exist to be transformed. But something that I did not address in this dissertation: How does Zionist settler development reckon with global climate change? What happens when the land is changing out from under you, the settler? The JNF’s materials and that of other “green Zionist” sources are shifting to position Israel as the model for addressing global climate change. This is sustainable settler development. The JNF writes in their Negev 2020 Plan, “Were David Ben-Gurion alive today he would be proud of us. All over the world in arid and semi-arid countries, desertification is a pressing problem as a result of over-exploitation, a 335 process that is exacerbated by climatic changes. KKL-JNF is helping us and the world solve these issues.”798 Indeed, the JNF frames the trees themselves—the active objects of settler colonial land grab—as the technology that will save the world. JNF trees “absorb and capture pollutants,” and protect “the soil from erosion and depletion,” conserve biodiversity, and act as carbon sinks for greenhouse gases.799 Because Israel has more forests today than it did 72 years ago, the logic goes, it is one of the few countries that is combating deforestation and addressing the juggernaut of mounting CO2 parts per million.800 But of course, Zionists do not plant forests over Palestinian villages, nor surround Bedouin lands with pine and acacia, in order to combat soil erosion and absorb carbon. Samer Alatout writes about how Israeli biopolitical governance produces specific kinds of territorialities. The “environment” in Israel governance becomes something to be managed and controlled. This, in turn, justifies Israeli settler control and depoliticizes Palestinian territorial claims.801 Alatout extends Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics into a spatial analysis. Zionist discourses create a “territorial effect” or a “bio-effect,” wherein the health and wellbeing of the Israeli Jewish population justifies the continual control of Palestinian land but also geopolitical wrangling beyond Israel’s borders—whether it is about the flow of the Jordan, the health of the Dead Sea, the effluence flowing into the Naqab/Negev, or, perhaps more recently, the natural gas “Leviathan” deposit in the 798 KKL-JNF, “The Negev 2020 Plan,” Website, Accessed 21 Jan 2015, 2012. www.kkl.il/org/eng. 799 Moti Kaplan, NOP-22. Kaplan, Moti. 2011. National Outline Plan for Forests and Afforestation: Policy Document (NOP-22) (Jerusalem: Keren Keyimeth L’Yisrael, 2011): 22, 34. Website, www.kkl.org. 800 Ibid., 34. 801 Samer Alatout, “Towards a Bio-Territorial Conception of Power: Territory, Population, and Environmental Narratives in Palestine and Israel,” Political Geography 25 (2009): 601-625. 336 Mediterranean.802 I would extend Alatout’s analysis here. When Zionist organizations make claims about the efficacy, indeed, the necessity, for the planting of trees to obscure genocide, are they not extending Zionist governance beyond the boundaries of Eretz Yisrael? Why exactly is Zionism so obsessed with making claims of its global singularity? Is it only about justifying ongoing Occupation? About existential anxiety? About branding and advertising itself? There seems to be something about the way that Zionist imaginations, its “territorial effect,” must keep projecting itself onto a global scale. But perhaps too, this is settler colonialism, an insecure anxious movement, constantly running up against its own boundaries and which, in its realization that the whole thing may come crashing down, keeps imagining and actively building its next frontier.803 Zionist settler development offers a “sustainable” settler colonialism in relation to the idea of the global “environment” as a manageable object. The idea of the “environment” as such is an object endemic to Zionism. Zionism promises to “conquer the desert,” or “make the desert bloom.” Agriculture, afforestation, swamp draining, and more, are the practico-ideological activities that see the environment as a canvas to be filled. Nature is supine and passive. It gives settlers what they demand of it. There are no surprises when it comes to the environment in Zionism. In the Naqab/Negev, Zionist desert studies seemed to argue that, since settlers did it—they learned how to live in a desert—we can teach you too. 802 Tova Cohen and Ari Rabinovitch, “Israel Gets First Gas from Leviathan with Exports to Follow,” 31 Dec 2019, Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-natgas-leviathan/israel-gets-first-gas-from- leviathan-with-exports-to-follow-idUSKBN1YZ0H9 803 Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (Metropolitan Books, 2019). 337 Settlers did not consider what would happen if they ruined the land, if it began to degrade, if the assemblage of climate, biome, flora and fauna, geology, hydrology, meteorology began to “act” in ways beyond their control. What if sink holes opened up along the coast of the rapidly sinking Dead Sea?804 What if the Yarkon River was filled with deadly bacteria?805 What if the heat index was steadily rising, making it impossible to go outside in summer?806 How can one make the desert bloom when the soil is eviscerated? The most unreflective variety of Zionism cannot let go of its legends, nor retreat from its frontier. Instead, like with start-up nationalism, Zionism operates through a manic optimism. Israel still has all the answers, even as the waters rise. Or does it? The JNF is being criticized by its own affiliates, its members, and other Zionist organizations. Let’s return again to the central symbol of the Zionist nationalism and the JNF, the tree. One key study by the Society for the Protection of the Environment in Israel (SPNI) was published in Hebrew in 2013 and in English in 2014 (and was shared with the JNF for comments before it was released).807 In the report, the SPNI notes that southern Israel has historically lacked forests, raising questions about the viability, and indeed, the sensibility of widespread planting. The very act of planting is itself terribly damaging to the Naqab/Negev. The JNF’s machines and herbicides destroy much of the delicate desert ecosystem before they even plant their trees.808 The way that the JNF clears 804 Melanie Lidman, “As the Dead Sea Drives, its Collapsing Shores Force a Return to Nature,” The Times of Israel, 13 February 2017. https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-dead-sea-dries-its-pit-pocked-shores- precipitate-return-to-nature/ 805 Alon Tal, Pollution in the Promised Land: An Environmental History of Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): 1-2. 806 Zafrir Rinat, “Israel Saw Significant Rise in Temperature in recent Decades, Study Shows,” Ha’aretz 25 June 2019. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-saw-significant-rise-in-temperature-in-recent- decades-study-shows-1.7409694 807 Rotem, Bouskila, and Rothschild, Ecological Effects of Afforestation. 808 Ibid., 4. 338 the land accelerates erosion.809 The appearance of trees in the south has given certain predatory bird species perches from which they have almost wiped out indigenous lizard populations.810 Trees are planted in monocultural plots, and the Aleppo Pine’s acidic needles kills off other plants. In the northern Naqab/Negev, the trees do not seem to be reproducing naturally. Foresters have to continually plant; the forests cannot sustain themselves. Nor do the forests mitigate the effects of climate change.811 The forests create localized heat islands because of their density and dark color and may continue to do so for some 80 years after they are planted.812 The state has existed for 72 years. Further, in the effort to produce forests that resembled those in Europe, the JNF planted forests in dense stands. Now the trees are drought vulnerable and heavily stressed, increasing the potential for forest fires. In December 2010, Israel experienced one of its worst forest fires in its history. In November 2016, a similar fire swept through parts of Haifa. The JNF’s legacy of afforestation and management makes such fires potentially more damaging and uncontrollable. This also undermines Israeli security. In 2006, for instance, Hezbollah fired rockets into forests on purpose, burning over 2 million trees, or 20% of Israel’s northern forests.813 Is Zionist settler development “sustainable?” How can Israel be a model for the world when it struggles through its own climatic crisis? When inequality in the state is so severe compared to other countries in the OECD? When it operates through an ethnocratic logic that attunes to capitalist accumulation? What are the long-term prospects for a “start- 809 Ibid., 6. 810 Ibid., 22. 811 Ibid., 5. 812 Ibid., 6. 813 Irus Braverman, “Planting the Promised Landscape: Zionism, Nature, and Resistance in Israel/Palestine,” Natural Resources 317 (2009), quoting the JNF, 357. 339 up?” Environmentalists call the JNF’s forests, “pine deserts.”814 Zionist settler development makes its own wastelands. Photograph 22. Construction on the northern edge of Beersheba. 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