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GOVERNING THROUGH TIMESCAPE: ISRAELI SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE POLICY AND THE PALESTINIAN-ARAB CITIZENS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2018

Natalia Gutkowski
Natalia Gutkowski*
Affiliation:
Natalia Gutkowski is an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.; e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Social scientists commonly know that time is a social construct and a tool for governing by those holding power. Yet, how exactly is time used for governing? This article examines how timescape (embodiment of approaches to time) works in practice as a tool of power by considering multiple networks of time that manifest in al-Batuf/Beit Netofa Valley planning policy. This valley's agriculture, mostly owned by Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel, is considered by ecologists and officials a unique traditional agriculture landscape and wetland habitat that has become scarce in Israel due to its development and wetland drainage. Assembling separate modes of anthropological inquiry that attend to time as a technique, I show that knowledge, ethics, and time management are not separate spheres of governance but rather interwoven as one timescape tool of governing. Thus, the case of al-Batuf/Beit Netofa elucidates the ways in which time is used for governing in the context of an agricultural-environmental development policy and plan.

Keywords

agricultureanthropologygovernanceIsrael/Palestinetime
Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 50 , Special Issue 3: Environment and Society in the Middle East and North Africa , August 2018 , pp. 471 - 492
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

NOTES

Author's Note: I am grateful to the anonymous IJMES reviewers and to IJMES editors Akram Khater and Jeffrey Culang for their invaluable comments. I am deeply grateful to Andrew S. Mathews, Dan Rabinowitz, Steve Caton, Ajantha Subramanian, Tamar Novick, Liron Shani, Rafi Grosglik, Talia Fried, and Shula Goulden for their feedback as this article evolved. I am also indebted to Laithi Ghanaim, Abed Kanaaneh, Hussein Tarabeih, Hanadi Hijris, Ali Waked, Iftah Sinai, Didi Kaplan, Ramez Eid, and other interlocutors for sharing their time and knowledge of al-Batuf. I thank the Political Ecology/Political Anthropology Workshop at Harvard University for useful feedback on an earlier version of this article. I also thank the PhD Program Transformations in European Societies at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and the Anthropology Department's Seminar at the University of California, Santa Cruz for offering useful suggestions in the development of this work. Research for this article was supported by generous grants from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF 932/12), the Porter School of Environmental Studies at Tel Aviv University, and the Edmond J. Safra Centers for Ethics at Harvard University and Tel Aviv University.

1 The agrarian policy in Israel is undergoing a process of transformation affected by global factors; the main factor is Israel's acceptance into the intergovernmental Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and its demand to decrease governmental subsidies in agriculture. Additionally, sustainability change is taking place as a result of internal affairs. Following a thirty-year decay of the agricultural sector, policy is adapting to global trends of best practices of agricultural management that include societal-environmental considerations. Hence, the agrarian sector and its political representatives are hoping to relegitimize the national agrarian ethos in the eyes of Israel's population. Moreover, the increasing environmental regulatory demands of European export markets play an important role in the incorporation of sustainable agriculture measures. See Liron Shani, “Liquid Distinctions: Negotiating Boundaries between Agriculture and the Environment in the Israeli Desert,” Anthropological Quarterly (forthcoming).

2 Although Sahl al-Batuf is the Arabic name of the site, the place is referred to in policy documents and on maps by its Hebrew name, Bikat Beit Netofa. The Hebrew name refers to the terrain as a valley, while the Arabic name refers to it as a plateau. I will be moving between al-Batuf and Beit Netofa to emphasize the political dynamic between the official Hebrew name and the Arabic local name.

3 Ofer Steinitz, Ministry of Agriculture, interview with the author, Beit Dagan, Israel, 12 June 2012. Steinitz had only a one-year appointment at the Ministry of Agriculture, but he has become emblematic of the ecological hiring trend that was created ever since his hire.

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20 Place names, maps, and terms are especially contested in Israel/Palestine, and naming makes an intervention and asserts power. I write “Israel/Palestine” to indicate the multiple perspectives on or contested views of the land, or to refer to the geographic space between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. I write “Palestine/Israel” when referring to the history of this space prior to the establishment of Israel. For an example of the declensionist narrative, see Orenstein, Daniel E., Miller, Char, and Tal, Alon, eds., Between Ruin and Restoration: An Environmental History of Israel (Pittsburgh: Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013)Google Scholar. The only chapter in this volume that does not adhere to the declensionist narrative is that by Noam Seligman on the environmental legacy of the Bedouins and the Fellahin. Alon Tal, although trying to avoid framing his work as purely declensionist and attributing destruction to the native population, repeats the narrative that European powers repaired the region. See also Tal, Alon, Pollution in a Promised Land: An Environmental History of Israel (Berkley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Tal, , All the Trees of the Forest: Israel's Woodlands from the Bible to the Present (New Haven: Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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23 Zionism did not invent swamp drainage. The latter was a prevalent scientific paradigm at the beginning of the 20th century that affected many other swamps. Ogden, Laura A., Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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41 Most of the Palestinian villages surrounding al-Batuf were listed as “surrendering” by the IDF forces in the aftermath of the Israeli operation Hiram of October 1948 that conquered the central-upper Galilee. Populations in surrendering villages were not uprooted. Villages such as Eilabun that resisted during the war were partially depopulated—by flight and expulsion. In Eilabun the inhabitants were allowed back. The only village that was completely destructed in the area, with its inhabitants fleeing to Lebanon or remaining in the neighboring al-Batuf villages, was Miʾar, which was conquered in July 1948. See references in Morris, Benny, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 475CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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44 The Arab Center of Alternative Planning provides this data in a study published on their website: http://www.ac-ap.org/heb/?mod=articles&ID=628, accessed 10 September 2017.

45 There are many more agricultural cooperatives in Palestinian society, including Fair-Trade olive oil cooperatives in the West Bank. Historically cooperatives were not a prominent way of organization in the agricultural sector. The extended family supported the household's agrarian production.

46 Dallasheh, Leena, “Troubled Waters: Citizenship and Colonial Zionism in Nazareth,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47 (2015): 467–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yoav Kislev, “Meshek ha-Maim shel Yisra'el” (policy paper for the Taub Center for Social Research, Jerusalem, 2011).

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49 Didi Kaplan, Ecologist, interview with the author, Bikat Yad Hanadiv, 27 November 2014.

50 Ministry of Interior Northern District Committee Minutes, 9 July 2009.

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52 Furthermore, the NPA has been significantly involved with Palestinian dispossession through the creation of national parks and nature reserves both in Israel and in the West Bank.

53 Ministry of Environmental Protection and Nature and Park Authority, Minutes – 12 January 2012.

54 Ali Shawahna, interview with the author, Sakhnin, 22 June 2014.

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68 Alatout, “Bringing Abundance into Environmental Politics.”

69 Munir Hamudi, testimony to the Israeli parliament's Economy Committee on the al-Batuf flood, 30 April 2013.

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85 Prior to the final completion of this article, I was informed that the updated regional sustainable development plan for al-Batuf/Beit Netofa approved by the Northern District Committee in December 2017 has indeed extended the borders of its predecessor. The new plan goes beyond the agrarian fields of al-Batuf, and incorporates a wider socio-economic perspective that better addresses the needs of Palestinian-Arab stakeholders. It only took five years of discussion to reach this point. Moreover, in order to reach the implementation stage, the government needs to approve and allocate funds for this plan, which will involve much red tape. Between the approval of the plan in December 2017 and May 2018, it has not advanced in any bureaucratic channel.