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Environmental Economics and Management Seminar | הפקולטה לחקלאות מזון וסביבה

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Environmental Economics and Management Seminar

תאריך: 
א', 25/02/202413:15-14:45
מיקום: 
Ground water room - Ariowitch labs
Dr. Matan Kaminer
School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London

The Agricultural Settlement of the Arabah and the Political Ecology of Zionism

Abstract:
Agricultural settlement geared to capitalist commodity production and accompanied by massive
ecological interventions has historically been central to the Zionist colonial project of creating a
permanent Jewish presence in the “Land of Israel.” The hyperarid southern region known as the
Central Arabah is an instructive edge-case: in the 1960s, after the expulsion of the bedouin population,
cooperative settlements were established here and vegetables produced through “Hebrew self-labor,”
with generous assistance from the state. In the 1990s the region was again transformed as the importation of migrant workers from Thailand enabled farmers to expand cultivation of bell peppers for global markets. But today ecological destruction, depletion of water resources, and global warming
cast doubt over the viability of settlement in this climatically extreme region. I locate the settlements
of the Arabah within the historical political ecology of the Zionist movement, arguing that their
current fragility exposes the essential precarity of capitalist colonization.