In vino veritas? Indigenous wine and indigenization in Israeli settlements

Abstract

In recent years, wineries have proliferated in Israel’s West Bank settlements, some of which are now producing world‐class wine. However, growing grapes and making wine in this context represents more than simply commercial viticulture. These wineries are part of a trend to re‐establish ancient Jewish winemaking practices, which fosters the imagination of returning and reconnecting to biblical sites. Moreover, high‐tech grape science is now being employed to engineer wines from so‐called indigenous varietals to create a wine identity for Israel. Some religious settlers regard these developments as the fulfilment of a messianic biblical prophecy. This pursuit of indigenous wine thus bolsters a religiously inflected historical imagination of indigeneity that naturalizes the Jewish presence in this contested territory. This article shows that claims to authentic indigeneity emerging from viticulture entangle high‐tech grape science, biblical prophecy and an aesthetic connection to the land so that indigenous wine and an indigenous identity are co‐produced in a mutually constitutive process.

The metropolitanization of Israel's settlement policy: The colonization of the West Bank as a strategy of spatial restructuring

“…In the last few years, however, scholars have started to considerably broaden their analysis of ISP, focusing on the dynamics of the production of space (Schwake, 2021a, Schwake, 2020a, Schwake, 2021bShoked, 2020;Abreek-Zubiedat & Nitzan-Shiftan, 2021;Rokem & Allegra, 2016;Yacobi & Pullan, 2014) on the heterogeneity of settlers population (Allegra, 2017;Dalsheim, 2011;Harel, 2017;Hirschhorn, 2017), including studies on the haredi settler community (Rubin, 2015;Cahaner, 2017;Shoked, 2019); on the political economy of settlements' proliferation (Allweil, 2020;Maggor, 2015;Schwake 2020c;Schwake 2021c) and the labour relations with the Palestinians employed in the settlement's economy (Farsakh, 2005;Paz-Fuchs & Ronen, 2017;Vickery, 2017;Siegman, 2018); on the environmental and infrastructural dimension of colonization (Braverman, 2021); and on the process of banalization of Jewish presence in the West Bank Weiss, 2017), including deliberate settlers' strategies in this respect (Grosglik, Handel, & Monterescu, 2021;Handel, Rand, & Allegra, 2015;Isaac, 2018;McGonigle, 2019;Monterescu & Handel, 2020).…”