Dwelling in Conflict: Negev Landscapes and the Boundaries of Belonging

by Emily McKee

Overview

Land disputes in Israel are most commonly described as stand-offs between distinct groups of Arabs and Jews. In Israel's southern region, the Negev, Jewish and Bedouin Arab citizens and governmental bodies contest access to land for farming, homes, and industry and struggle over the status of unrecognized Bedouin villages. "Natural," immutable divisions, both in space and between people, are too frequently assumed within these struggles.

Dwelling in Conflict offers the first study of land conflict and environment based on extensive fieldwork within both Arab and Jewish settings. It explores planned towns for Jews and for Bedouin Arabs, unrecognized villages, and single-family farmsteads, as well as Knesset hearings, media coverage, and activist projects. Emily McKee sensitively portrays the impact that dividing lines—both physical and social—have on residents. She investigates the political charge of people's everyday interactions with their environments and the ways in which basic understandings of people and "their" landscapes drive political developments. While recognizing deep divisions, McKee also takes seriously the social projects that residents engage in to soften and challenge socio-environmental boundaries. Ultimately, Dwelling in Conflict highlights opportunities for boundary crossings, revealing both contemporary segregation and the possible mutability of these dividing lines in the future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804798303
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	02/10/2016
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Emily McKee is Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department and the Institute for the Study of Environment, Sustainability, and Energy at Northern Illinois University.

Table of Contents

Contents and Abstracts

Introduction
chapter abstract

The book begins with an introduction to the lived experiences of Negev land conflict and the pessimism with which many residents view prospects for amelioration. The introduction reviews existing sociopolitical explanations for Palestinian-Israeli conflict and explains the added benefits of considering this conflict as environmental, too. It lays out the book's argument that environmental discourses have been used by people on all sides of the conflict to naturalize a binary division between Jews and Arabs. The text explains the political dwelling perspective that guides the book's analysis, drawing phenomenologically oriented notions of landscapes as the embodiments of residents' dwelling tasks together with political ecology's keen attention to the material and ideological importance of power in shaping relations between people and their environments. Discussion of the study's multiple field sites and its design of boundary crossing frames a discussion of methodology and of the ethics of researching within ongoing conflict.

1Narrating Present Pasts
chapter abstract

This chapter examines the use of several dominant environmental discourses in competing Zionist and counter-Zionist Negev land claims. A historical examination of three key discourses within the Zionist movement explains the layered meanings that references to key topics such as farming, territory, wilderness, and rootedness, hold today. This discursive genealogy continues to influence the tactics and strategies of contemporary land struggles, particularly for Bedouin Arab residents telling histories of the Naqab. On one level, reminiscences counter erasures in Zionist narratives, peopling the barren wastelands of Zionist accounts with vibrant Bedouin Arab communities. However, even those accounts that most forcefully oppose Zionist histories on the surface often rest on environmental discourses shared with Zionism, such as the power of labor in land to bolster claims.

2Seeking Recognition
chapter abstract

This chapter compares two cases of "illegal" land use to consider the stakes of environmental discourses and the land claims they support. In one case, Jewish farmstead owners built houses on agricultural land and in the other, Bedouin Arab residents built on lands declared as state-owned. In both cases the government threatened eviction, and residents sought governmental recognition of their land claims, but they faced very different public and governmental responses. The chapter develops the idea of de-cultural accommodation to demonstrate the social and political production of laws and illegality. Following the discursive genealogy in chapter one, this chapter demonstrates how dominant environmental discourses in Israel, despite being contingent because they are historically shaped and not naturally given, hold great power to carve the Negev into socially and geographically segregated spaces.

Bridge: Distant Neighbors
chapter abstract

A bridge introduces the second half of the book, which zooms in on the everyday dwelling practices and experiences of residents in the Negev in order to explore how residents shape and are shaped by the state-planned landscapes within which they dwell. The bridge introduces the social and spatial distance between the two case study towns that provide the bulk of this dwelling analysis. It depicts the region's divided landscapes by narrating the disjointed journey necessary to move from one town to the next, but it also shows residents ability to creatively use these landscapes by describing two atypical ventures into the largely abandoned buffer zone between the towns.

3Coping with Lost Land
chapter abstract

Chapter three focuses on life in 'Ayn al-'Azm, a government-planned township for Bedouin Arabs. Recalling former homes with more rural lifestyles, many residents viewed their moves into the planned township as a shift from freedom to restriction, intra-family closeness to inter-family friction, and self-sufficiency to dependence. Government plans for "modernization" and efficiency created landscapes that felt uncomfortable to many residents and prevented agricultural and pastoral dwelling practices. Residents coped with this urban planning with taskscapes that ranged from acquiescence (e.g., establishing a nuclear family household and taking up wage labor) to "making do," in de Certeau's sense of the term (e.g., staking a tent in front of one's concrete block house), to public advocacy (e.g., a heritage tourism venture). Most formed ambivalent attachments to the township, feeling felt strong ties to family and neighborhood, but alienation from the township as a collective landscape.

4Reforming Community
chapter abstract

This chapter presents the Jewish moshav of Dganim, settled by new immigrants from Cochin, India in the 1950s. Striving to meet Zionist priorities of nation building, moshav residents built a cooperative farming community. However, this farming role collapsed in recent years, leaving not just agriculture but also cooperative work in jeopardy of disappearing from the moshav. As residents have sought out new endeavors to support the moshav, many have viewed Cochini heritage tourism as the moshav's best hope for cooperative success within Israel's new economic climate. In the course of their economic transitions, residents have chosen taskscapes that affirmed moshav lands as Jewish and separated them from nearby Bedouins. Throughout the chapter, comparisons and contrasts drawn between Dganim and 'Ayn al-'Azm show how two very different experiences with government planners have led residents to develop different senses of place and different understandings of their own power to shape place.

5Challenging Boundaries
chapter abstract

This chapter probes the potential of deliberate engagement with the everyday politics of dwelling to shift dominant environmental discourses. It examines three environmental justice campaigns run by Bustan—political and environmental educational tours, an alternative energy campaign, and sustainable design classes—attending to their successes and stumbles. Through practical involvement in home building, energy provisioning, and personal and governmental planning, these campaigns aim to change norms of land ownership and ethno-political identification in Israel. The group proceeds through "bricolage activism," resourcefully re-deploying existing ideas, practices, and rhetoric about Bedouins and Jews, citizenship, and society and nature. This activism attempts to re-signify divisive discourses with more inclusive frames of co-residence, stewardship, and socio-environmental sustainability. The chapter considers the potential and limitations of Bustan's efforts to challenge the status quo of land conflict through a politics of boundary softening, rather than purely confrontational activism.

Conclusion:
chapter abstract

The conclusion pulls analysis forward to more recent developments in the Negev. Analyzing debates about a government proposition for settling Negev land claims known as the Prawer Plan and a proposal to develop new Negev towns, it demonstrates that well-worn binary oppositions between Jew and Arab, progress and tradition, and culture and nature continue to guide discussion in implicit and explicit ways. The conclusion suggests how the insights of the book's political attuned dwelling analysis can be used to develop interventions, such as integrated planning and boundary softening, that may be capable of achieving just and lasting solutions to the stymied conflict.

Editorial Reviews

"Dwelling in Conflict is a rare book. Few could have written about this fraught place with such detail, balance, and sophistication. Emily McKee beautifully reveals the underlying environmental imaginaries and discourses—among both Jews and Bedouin— and shows the potential for more environmentally friendly policies and more peaceful, just relations in the Negev."

University of California, Davis - Diana K. Davis

"Rarely does an ethnography simultaneously provoke intellectual and theoretical engagement, invite a carefully balanced rethinking of an aforethought intractable conflict, and contain such beautifully crafted prose as to inspire furious page-turning...[R]eaders come away from Dwelling in Conflict with a nuanced appreciation of how day-to-day interactions among Bedouin Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel are filtered through the lenses of history, narrative, memory, stigma, pride, family and heritage, agency and strategy, violence and suffering, and embodied understandings of material environments."

Human Ecology - Tanya J. King

"McKee's well-written, readable book attends to the Bedouin voice from below and the way it expresses both historical and contemporary connection to place...[S]he conducts a sensitive analysis of how the Bedouins have been constructed within the Zionist perspective as the ultimate Other...Dwelling in Conflict invites readers to understand Israeli Jewish-Arab relations as constructed in conditions of inequality, segregation and separation."––Safa Aburabia, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review

From the Publisher

"Emily McKee's study of land issues in the Negev is a highly rewarding read. Her keen ethnographic eye reveals a parallel existence: Bedouins morphing from agropastoralists to the marginalized poor, living alongside Israeli settlers conditioned to view the natural environment, complete with its Orientalized others, as a frontier battlefront. The result is an engaging and cohering account of the Israeli-Arab conflict from a perspective seldom utilized before."

Tel-Aviv University - Dan Rabinowitz