Socializing Landscapes, Naturalizing Conflict: Environmental Discourses and Land Conflict in the Negev Region of Israel.

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes how historical narratives, state policies, and the everyday practices of residents shape contemporary land conflict in the Negev/Naqab region of Israel. Jewish and Bedouin-Arab citizens and governmental bodies vie over access to land for farming and homes and over the status of unrecognized Bedouin villages. To understand the vehemence and persistence of this struggle, I focus on environmental discourses, a range of rhetoric, bodily practices, and institutional norms that define and demarcate relations between and among people and landscapes.

Combining eighteen months of multi-sited fieldwork in the Negev with historical analysis, my investigation traces environmental discourses across the typically separated domains of planned towns for Jews and Bedouin Arabs, unrecognized villages and single-family farmsteads, Knesset hearings, news media, and activist projects. The first study of environment and land conflict in this region to engage ethnographically across Jewish and Arab settings, this dissertation offers unique insight into the hardening of these oppositional group boundaries and social conflict. Specifically, I find the instantiation of an increasingly rigid and pervasive binary frame reducing the Negev's social complexity to nested oppositions of Arab and Jew, nature and culture, tradition and progress.

To examine environmental discourses across these disparate realms, I integrate phenomenologically influenced understandings of landscapes and dwelling with Foucauldian notions of power and discourse. Past scholars have applied a dwelling perspective to rural groups and focused on cooperative relationships between humans and fellow landscape occupants. However, by employing critical historical analysis and attending to the ways powerful, large-scale participants such as state agencies and global markets also shape local landscapes, this study reinterprets a dwelling perspective for globally connected and conflictive socio-environmental contexts.

This dissertation also explores the sociopolitical projects of some residents and grassroots NGOs to “de-naturalize” hardened group boundaries and inequalities. These projects occur in the Negev's segregated landscapes and within existing discursive fields. Thus, in seeking public acceptance, activists sometimes rely on the same oppositional environmental discourses they wish to counteract. As a result, these social change efforts hold potential to soften conflict through incremental modification of dominant discourses, rather than through sudden and radical change.