Gaza, Palestine, and the Political Economies of Indigenous (Non)-Futures

Charrett, Catherine

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-68643-7_9

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…The separation of “ecology” from “territory” within Israeli environmental discourse operates as a mechanism of power that brackets out Palestinian land claims while allowing Israeli environmental actors to proceed with development projects (Alatout, 2006). Even in cases like that of Israeli-governed desalination plants, whose benefits do (ostensibly) extend to Palestinian communities, the Israeli government ultimately maintains territorial and technological control; it retains the power to provide or deny access to environmental resources (al-Charrett, 2021; Shalalfeh et al, 2018) and may gain a strategic advantage in negotiations (Katz, 2021). When read as settler moves to innocence, then, green technologies “represent settler fantasies of easier paths to reconciliation” (Tuck and Yang, 2012: 4) that bypass demands for the return of land, advancing Israeli territorial management over the ecologies of Palestine without ever challenging the terms of these relations.…”

Section: Greenwashing As Settler Apparatusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Greenwashing in Palestine/Israel: Settler colonialism and environmental injustice in the age of climate catastrophe

Hughes

Velednitsky

Green

2022

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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Israeli innovations in “green” technology are ostensibly aimed at sustainable resource management and climate change mitigation. But sustainable development and environmental (in)justice in Palestine/Israel need to be examined through interdisciplinary perspectives that account for the broader settler colonial and neoliberal contexts in which they occur. Taking into account the historical and geographic context of Israel's scientific development, we argue that Israel's green technologies are fundamentally structured by the Zionist project of appropriating Palestinian lands. Within settler colonial analysis, environmental injustice comprises part of a broader pattern of settler domination of Indigenous ecological relations, requiring attending not to ‘equity’ in relations with the state and environment but a reckoning with settler privilege and the return of land to Indigenous communities. We analyze the use of environmental infrastructures—specifically in the areas of waste management, renewable energy, and agricultural technologies (“agritech”)—as mechanisms for land appropriation and dispossession in Palestine/Israel. Our analysis of ‘greenwashing’ as a rhetorical strategy asserts that regardless of the ecological impact of individual technologies, in Israel's settler colonial context they further indigenous dispossession and elimination and are therefore incommensurable with long-term socio-ecological resilience. Through this analysis of Israeli greenwashing, we discuss Israeli sustainability initiatives and technological innovations not as ahistorical discourses, commodities, or technologies, but as elements of a historically situated settler colonial project.

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