Settler Colonialism Unsettled: Israel's Mode of Environmental Apprehension

Settler-Colonialism Unsettled is an inquiry into Israeli settler-colonialism through the lens of its environmental and military technoscience. It explores the epistemologies, practices, drives, fantasies and anxieties through which Israel attempts to apprehend (understand, learn, and capture) the high-tech environments it claims to subsume and “make bloom.” Based on archival and ethnographic research in Palestine (on both sides of the Green Line), this dissertation explores why and how an emergent settler-colonial project ascending in the mid-twentieth century strove to pioneer itself as a markedly technoscientific force of nature. Latent in the primacy of modern technoscience that possesses the Zionist imaginary is what I describe as Israel’s environmental alienness and historical lateness. While anti-colonial liberation movements gained momentum in the Levant and as the post WWII imperial order began dislodging itself from its colonies abroad, the settler colonization of Palestine appeared to be an anachronism in its conceptual and territorial surround. Taking shape under historical conditions and in psychopolitical terms that do not merely remodel North Atlantic colonial orders anteceding it, Israel offers a site to reexamine the modern arrival of a settler-colonial world and the world as a settler-colony. 

By tracing contemporary and earlier projects of Israel’s military-agricultural technoscience alongside the terraforming thrust of its colonial security apparatus, I examine the material conditions and psychosocial dispositions under which Israel designs, tests, and weaponizes its ever-refinable means of high-tech destruction to expand and resettle its alienness environmentally. I demonstrate how Israel’s projects of afforestation, water trafficking, Green Patrolling, and drip irrigation materialize an environmental adventurism in which the answers of science are, in the final analysis, a reply to militarily formulated questions. The environmental formations that these questions motivate and effectuate are not simply coeval, co-present, or homological with military reason and action, but logically and empirically internal to them. Israel’s mode of environmental apprehension thereby arises committedly articulated in military terms. It is by these terms that concepts like “smart growth” and “precision agriculture” are put to work in Palestine, systematizing emergent fields of knowledge to be rehearsed globally. I contend that the disciplinary and industrial inextricability of Israel’s military and agro-ecological technoscience casts Palestine not merely as Israel’s laboratory or “proving ground,” but as an insurmountable impasse whereby settler agency finds itself anxiously tethered to the very objects it aspires to eliminate: Palestinian life, anti-colonial resistance, and indigenous knowledge of the land. 

Israel’s mode of environmental apprehension invites us to reconsider what modern settler colonialism has been and what it is now becoming. Shorn from an older model of colonial rule and imposed onto a region redrawn by shape-shifting capitalist empires, Israel has come to see itself less as the Denmark or Holland of the Middle East than as their advanced and enhanced future form. The reality of this form marks the externalization and intensification of hitherto displaced principles and emergent modalities of power, relaunching a high-modern settler project to be trialed and erred in Palestine. The unfolding of modern settler colonialism in Palestine, I propose, illustrates a protracted temporality of an unfinished settler conquest in which basic tensions between the reality of being alien to the land and the primal fantasy of indigenously knowing it are apprehended militarily.

Building on environmental anthropology, science and technology studies, and anti-colonial theory, this project joins long standing efforts to understand how environmental orders of settler-colonialism, militarism, and industrial technoscience coevolve, shaping actionable concepts such as expansion, finitude, abundance, threat, and collapse.