Description
This paper focuses on ways in which environmental discourses and practices can be utilized in contesting colonial forms of control. The existing literature has demonstrated that policies and actions pertaining to the protection of nature and sustainability can be utilized to legitimize acts of violence and dispossession, and even entail physical violence directly. I intervene in these debates by arguing that while this is indeed the case, the environmental registers of political activities provide space to at least somewhat disrupt these practices and rationales of control.
I discuss these dynamics with regards to activities of Israeli environmental organizations which are, to different extents, opposed to the Israeli regime of domination and control over the Palestinians. Drawing on interviews with the members of the concerned organizations and analysis of their materials, I propose that these organizations do strategically mobilize the notion of environmental protection as a self-evident public good to criticize the Israeli state policies and their impact as ecologically detrimental for all between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
At the same time, I show how these discursive formations are still embedded in modernist frameworks of improvement and efficiency. As such, the environmental resistance to the Israeli rule is still indebted to local as well as global hierarchies of worth and modernity.
