'War through the milieu’: Israeli colonial herding against Palestinian pastoral communities

Keywords: Colonial herding, frontier expansion, Palestine/Israel, more-than-human, shepherding, war through the milieu
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Frontier expansion has taken on many forms throughout Israeli settler-colonial conquest of Palestine. Over the last few years, a distinct form of political violence, land control, and Palestinian elimination has emerged in the occupied West Bank: colonial herding. Small in scale, and manned by few settlers, the ‘agricultural outposts’ started applying a new method of territorial control through grazing sheep, goats, and cows. This new strategy is deemed as an efficient mode of frontier expansion whereby few armed settlers graze vast areas, push away Palestinian shepherds and pastoral communities, and create ad hoc territorial control on a large scale.
Conceptualizing colonial herding against the backdrop of Paul Virilio’s concept of ‘war on the milieu’- i.e. the targeting of the environment and the living conditions that sustain life - we identify colonial herding as a form of ‘war through the milieu’. Here, it is not only that the Palestinian milieu (people, animals, ecologies) becomes a target of colonial violence, but it is rather the morphoses of Israeli settlers into “herders” and the weaponization of animals that becomes the means of eliminatory violence. It is a mobile mode of policing, violence and territorial control that appropriates Indigenous Palestinian ways of life and works through various ecologies as a means to colonize and eliminate Palestinian pastoral communities. Through analysis of settler literature and interviews with shepherds, activists and Palestinian pastoral community members, we demonstrate how colonial herding operates as a distinct form of frontier expansion that utilizes non-human bodies to achieve its goals.