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Aquifers that originate in the West Bank and runoff direction (Courtesy of Applied Research Institute Jerusalem).
Source publication
Water grabbing' and 'land grabbing' have been referred to as a new colonialism, dispossessing small farmers and indigenous people of land and water for the sake of investors. The current 'grabbing' is driven by perceived scarcity of food and sustainable energy, and is enabled by global financial instruments and commodity speculation. In this paper,...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... the exhausting of the Coastal Aquifer (after the formation of the State), Israel turned to tapping the sea of Galilee, to provide needed water for development. There is significant conflict now over who has rights to exploit the aquifers that are recharged on the West Bank, as is seen in figure 2. Figure 1. ...
Context 2
... the rapid increase in population and demand on water since 1967, Israel has granted Palestinians of the West Bank very few permits for new water wells, all except 3 of them to be used exclusively for domestic purposes. In addition, the Israeli policy of metering all Palestinian wells served as another mechanism to restrict water use by Palestinians (Isaac, 2000). ...
Citations
... Studies that examined the connections between water and land have mostly focused on specific dimensions of these connections, such as political sovereignty and power relations (Gasteyer et al 2012;Tejada and Rist 2018;McKee 2021), water and land as an economic and social resource (Camargo 2017;Sharmina et al. 2016), their ecologicalsocial meaning (Krause 2017;Muehlmann 2013) or their material and non-human meaning (Helmreich 2011;Ogden et al. 2013). But actually, examining one of the central factors in creating the connection between these two resources, the imagination, has been somewhat neglected (Hommes et al. 2022). ...
... Overall, the Arava region epitomizes the fusion of national ideologies and settler colonialism in Israel (Busbridge 2018; Bashir and Busbridge 2019; Zreik 2016, Rouhana 2018), when national imaginaries (Taylor 2002;Tal 2007;Zerubavel 2018) are incorporated into the practices of settler colonialism (Gasteyer et al 2012;Weizman and Sheikh 2015;Davis 2016). But beyond that, the Arava region is a prime example of what happens when politics collides with nature (Underhill et al 2023;Braverman 2023;Shani 2018b), when technological optimism and ideological adherence fail to prevent the exploitation of land and water resources, the land-water nexus is broken, and environmental crisis ensues. ...
... In Zionism, like many projects of changing the space, there are elements of settler colonialism such as taking over resources, appropriating and repressing the previous inhabitants (Gasteyer et al. 2012;Grosglik et al. 2021;Salih and Corry 2022). But as many researchers claim recently, it would be a mistake to ignore national aspects of the conflict that are integrated within the case of Israel/Palestine (Busbridge 2018;Bashir and Busbridge 2019;Zreik 2016, Shani 2023). ...
Understanding the meaning of land–water entanglement is increasingly important today, in an age of climate change and desertification. Despite the close ties between water and land, literature largely focuses on each of them separately or ignores the attempts to disconnect them. This paper examines the connections and disconnections between water and land in the southern desert of Israel in the shadow of political use and environmental disaster. Drawing on ethnographic research, the paper explores the challenges and successes of intensive agriculture in arid regions, and how water allocation plays a crucial role in making the desert bloom. Weaving between the theoretical framework of 'agricultural infrastructure' and 'water-land imaginations', the paper separates between the different imaginations that enable the various dimensions of the water-land entanglement, the efforts made to expand the connection or disconnect them, and between their political, environmental and cultural realization as infrastructures. Overall, this paper provides insights into the ways by which Imaginations, infrastructures and land–water entanglement shape human-environmental interactions in arid regions and agriculture projects in the Anthropocene era.
... These strategies are not unique. Settler colonial movements around the world have utilized a characterization of local populations as poor environmental managers to justify land and resource grabbing (Gasteyer et al., 2012). For example, in the United States, national parks were created on the ancestral lands of Indigenous populations, enacting the violence of dispossession for the sake of conservation (Kantor, 2007). ...
... The US government asserted unequivocal support for Israel's genocidal crush of Gaza (Center for Constitutional Rights, 2023). A geopolitical ecology analysis of the mass violence against Gaza would trace it to how decades-long dispossession of Palestinian land, water, and sovereignty (Gasteyer, Isaac, Hillal, & Walsh, 2012) depends upon and perpetuates a dehumanization of those living in refugee camps that operates through racialized othering and Islamophobia (Abourahme, 2020). ...
... JNF's enabling of settler sovereignty over the territorial landscape they covet materialises through laws, such as absentee property law. Critical scholarly accounts, situating Zionist land and water grabbing within 'a new colonialism' framework, are useful because they shed light on the inequitable foundations found in instances like the draining of Hula Lake, which accompanied the dispossession of Palestinians in the area (Gasteyer et al., 2012). They nonetheless remain apologetic for the 'productive potential' of external investment in land through 'the application of modern technology' (Gasteyer et al., 2012: 465). ...
This article takes the May 2021 uprising in Palestine, known as the Unity Intifada, as a prism to map old and new political geographies between coloniser and freedom-fighter, whose significance extends beyond the temporal limits of the May event. The first part of the paper investigates the role of identity and cultural geographies in re-enforcing Jewish claims to sovereignty. It shows how the Zionist production of pink (sexed/gendered), red (racializing/indigenising) and green (environmental) markers, is used to draw the contours of settler legitimacy and intensifies when faced by growing indigenous rebellion. The second part addresses the decolonising possibilities engulfing the Unity Intifada. It examines the role of youth, including women and queer collectives, and how their actions invoke new political and material taxonomies beyond the liberal peace structure to which Palestine has succumbed since the Oslo agreements. Overall, the article advances the political geographies of decolonisation by challenging the maintenance of settler colonial violence within the popular, political, and intellectual imaginary of 'Israel/Palestine.' It does so by tracing the spatial and epistemic value of decolonisation theories that extend from interactions across indigenous, queer feminist, critical race, and eco-materialist debates.
... While the initial phase of the proliferation of desalination occurred as the nexus of cheap energy and cheap water in states with expansive oil reserves, desalination has been a formidable policy solution "on the move" recently (Baker et al. 2016). In the past decade, struggles in response to desalination and in favor of more just water solutions have been witnessed in Australia, India, South Africa, the United States (Texas, California), Mexico, and even Israel, where the practice has long been touted as a model of excellence (c.f., Gasteyer et al. 2012). ...
This interview begins a conversation about the social justice implications of an emerging socioecological concern—the desalination industry. Seawater desalination is the industrial process of creating drinking water from the ocean. This dialogue, with two activists at the forefront of contesting desalination in California, indicates how this practice, as a proposed climate adaptation strategy, is not just a matter of crafting governance reforms allowing non-state actors to price water for the purposes of efficient management, or “drought-proofing.” Instead, they highlight the ways in which the environmental justice movement now faces a world-system of shareholder, equity-partnered, and pension-funded capitalism that is fragmenting nature and crafting an ever more abstract social nature into various, segmented resource types. As the dialogue describes, desalination is not pursued for the purposes of developing affordable and sustainable water management solutions alone, but for investment in long-duration fixed capital “assets.” This piece further facilitates the programs of environmental sociology and political ecology by engaging various publics in developing a community of critical praxis. As such, the dialogue carves out new terrains of theory and action at the frontiers of nature, water, and society.
... 125 Water is also at risk of water grabbing, which can happen at community or regional level, by private corporations 126 or by states. 127 Seed sovereignty is another key issue related to corporate control of the food system, as patents prevent farmers from sharing this traditionally public good, 128 which can be detrimental for struggling smallholders. The widespread use of "improved" seeds ushered in by the Green Revolution, which often require the use of chemical inputs that are a key contributor to land degradation, has led to a decline in the use of many traditional, indigenous varieties, some of which are now critically endangered. ...
United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), part of Global Land Outlook (GLO) 2
... Land grabbed for agriculture production is not considered a good investment without the guaranteed access to water, as seen see in Sudan and other countries in the region (Mehta, Veldwisch, and Franco 2012). The colonial legacy of land and water grabs in the region is best expressed in Palestine (Gasteyer et al. 2012). The need for water to ensure food security is acting as a global war of attrition through agricultural investments in countries considered to have water potentials. ...
The objective of this paper is to investigate from a comparative perspective common denominators of the political economy of food in the Arab world. It explores alternative food paradigms and their potential deployment in the region to challenge the unequal authoritarian neoliberal food system. The first section stresses the need to recognize the power hegemony over food systems of the neoliberal international and national state apparatus in the current era in the Arab world. The second section discusses ways to politicize the right to food; a notion often deemed too legal. The third section discusses food sovereignty by highlighting specific praxis considerations to account for when applying the paradigm to the region, and finally, the conclusion explores ways forward.
... Ce qualificatif révèle la violence du jugement contre les techniques employées par les habitants avant l'insertion de nouvelles technologies. Ce jugement renvoie à bien des égards à une conception techniciste de l'irrigation et par l'usage du terme « primitif » à un imaginaire très dépréciatif aux connotations coloniales (Gasteyer et al. 2012). On retrouve ici, ce que Mehta qualifie comme « les discours sur les terres inutilisées ou sous-utilisées […] employées implicitement pour justifier la promotion d'un modèle de production agricole caractérisé par les cultures extensives, la monoculture, les hautes technologies (intrants, mécanisation, etc.) ; tout ce qui est moins « productif » en termes de rendement est perçu comme « inutilisé » ou « sous-utilisé » 508 (Mehta 2012 : 199). ...
Cette thèse propose de rendre compte des liens entre l’appropriation de l’eau et la production de l’espace pour penser la dimension spatiale du droit de l’eau. Elle se fonde sur l’étude du cas de la vallée d’Elqui, située dans une région semi-aride au nord du Chili. Les rapports entre le droit et l’espace sont analysés depuis l’étude des stratégies géolégales des acteurs et de leurs effets sur l’essor des activités minières, agricoles et immobilières. À cet effet, cette thèse propose la notion de système géolégal fluvial permettant d’étudier les rapports de pouvoir qui se nouent autour de l’élaboration des règles de partage, de distribution et d’administration de l’eau, dans une perspective pluriscalaire et diachronique. La thèse identifie une pluralité de modalités d’appropriation de l’eau, qui participe à l’expansion des secteurs extractifs depuis la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle. Ces modalités se déploient autour de dispositifs géolégaux qui produisent l’artificialisation du bassin versant. Toutefois, cette dernière est relative puisque subsistent des marges hydriques donnant à voir des pratiques d’irrigation et des conceptions de l’eau autres, associées à l’existence d’une économie plurielle. Le destin de ces marges reste indécis puisqu’elles font l’objet d’appropriation de l’eau qui engendre des pénuries d’eau. Les organisations des usagers de l’eau, et notamment les Conseils de Surveillance, jouent un rôle essentiel dans l’artificialisation de ces marges ou de leur protection. L’accès à la connaissance et la reconfiguration des rapports aux savoirs locaux sur l’eau expliquent la position différenciée des deux Conseils de Surveillance étudiés, dont les décisions participent à la production de l’espace de la vallée.
... The development of the Yarmouk is most accurately viewed from the political context of the wider Jordan River Basin, a context which has often been violent. Particularly from the 1950s onwards, there have been repeated military attacks, kidnappings, and several attempts to divert the river (Sosland, 2007;Wolf and Newton, 2007;Gasteyer et al., 2012). Since the signing of the water agreements, the conflict has been expressed primarily through a number of narratives that are tied to perceptions of the agreements. ...
This article explores the ways in which two international water agreements on the Yarmouk tributary to the Jordan River induce or impede transformation to equitable transboundary water arrangements. The agreements in question were reached between Jordan and Syria in 1987, and between Jordan and Israel in 1994. Following a brief review of theory and a summary of the body of knowledge on 'model' agreements, the article combines official river-gauging data with interviews and textual analysis to query the text and role of the agreements, particularly in relation to key dams and other infrastructure. Both agreements are found to i) lack important clauses that could govern groundwater abstraction, environmental concerns, water quality, and the ability to adapt to changing water quality, availability and need; and ii) include both ambiguous and rigid clauses that result in generally inequitable allocation of water and thus of the benefits derived from its use. Due to their omissions and to their reflection of the asymmetries in power between the states, both agreements are found to be 'blind' to existing use, to be incapable of dealing with urgent governance needs, and to impede more equitable arrangements.
... Anderson et al. ([52], p. 76) conceptualized rural landscapes as 'place,' or 'a symbolic landscape attributed with multiple and conflicting meanings.' This perspective recognizes landscapes as both materially and symbolically constituted, which suggests the symbolic meanings attributed to land are rooted in material and changing landscape features ( [44,[53][54][55]92]. Batel et al. ([7], p. 150) examined symbolic meanings, such as the "rural idyll" given for rural places, noting a process of "essentialisation" where objects like rural landscapes are socially constructed "as having a particular, natural and unchangeable, essence." ...
Recent research on social acceptance of large-scale renewable energy systems development has turned from an earlier focus on social opposition, such as Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) stances, toward assessing the 'symbolic fit' between meanings for place and proposed technology development that people near development sites hold. This quantitative study extends the symbolic fit hypothesis by testing how varied combinations of meanings for place and technology influence Northeast U.S. rural landowners' support for dedicated bioenergy crop production in their communities. Drawing on a survey of 907 landowners who have ten or more acres of land suitable for perennial bioenergy crops, we tested ten combinations of symbolic meanings regarding bioenergy crop technologies and land as place. We found that when combined with either protectionist or utilitarian meanings for one's land, viewing bioenergy crop production as an innovative way to address environmental challenges increased the likelihood of support for local development of bioenergy crops. Similarly, different symbolic meanings regarding one's land combined with seeing little community benefit from bioenergy crops reduced the likelihood of support. Given the important role of private landowners in many regions of Western nations considering bioenergy development, the symbolic meanings held by landowners merit attention. By recognizing the complex, conjunctural sources of meanings that inform landowners' propensities to support new renewable energy project development, new and emerging energy projects can incorporate more polyvalent views into design and implementation and approach public engagement opportunities accordingly.
