“Making the Desert Bloom” – colonialism and environmentalism in Israel/Palestine

Abstract

As the disaster of climate change unfolds, more knowledge about desert environments is needed. Though much attention has been given to examining the relations between nature and power paying attention to tropical or wilderness, desert environments are still under-researched. Taking seriously the foundational myth of the Zionist nation-state “making the desert bloom”, this paper will focus on desert environments in Israel/Palestine as both imagined spaces and real places to examine how through the arid landscape colonial imaginations produced new subjectivities and how these were translated to support colonialist forms of social reproduction.

Contributing to an increasing body of work conceptualising environmentalism and more specifically aridity both a climat and a form of governability (Davis, 2016; Povinelli, 2016; Weizman, 2015 et al), I will focus on two different sites built in the desert in the early 1960’s – a nature reserve and a military base, to trace connections between conservation, militarism, religion, and nationalism, and to examine how these shaped nature in the desert, which then shaped human.