Elsevier

Political Geography

Volume 25, Issue 6, August 2006, Pages 601-621
Political Geography

Towards a bio-territorial conception of power: Territory, population, and environmental narratives in Palestine and Israel

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2006.03.008Get rights and content

Abstract

In this paper, I investigate recent Palestinian and Israeli environmental narratives as effects of power. I also read differences between both styles of narration as differences in conceptions and experiences of power. While Palestinian environmental narratives for the most part build on a Weberian perception of power (sovereign-territorial), their Israeli counterparts subscribe to what could be described as a Foucaultian perspective of power (bio-power). These underlying perceptions of power lead to forms of resistance that are focused on property rights and questions of sovereignty in Palestine and on concerns over quality of life of the population in Israel. By constructing theoretical distinctions between territory and population, Palestinian and Israeli environmental narratives continue a strongly entrenched tradition in theories of state, power, and governmentality. In this paper, I provide a critique of this ontological distinction between territory and population and argue that the distinction itself should be recognized as an effect of power: by attending to its territorial forms, power's exercise on the level of population (gender, class, color) is rendered benign; and, by focusing on quality of life of the population, power's expression in territorial forms is often deemed irrelevant for environmental knowledge and action. This critique of power calls for further research on and discusses implications of a bio-territorial conceptualization of power, as well as attendant forms of resistance.

Introduction

Recent literature on environmental narratives poses serious challenges to a number of environmental concepts that have been taken for granted by conventional environmental sciences and policymaking. Especially important for the purposes of this paper are works that explore ecological categories (e.g., conservation, desertification, overpopulation, and resource scarcity) as sites for conceptualizing relations of power.1 Diana Davis (2004), for example, argues that narratives of desertification predate Aubreville's 1949 work on tropical African forests and extend back to French colonial adventures in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco during the nineteenth century. She further demonstrates that desertification was a distinctly colonial narrative of the French experience in North Africa; it justified “land expropriation, changes in land tenure, forest appropriation and the criminalization of traditional land use” (Davis, 2004: 1). Similarly, Saul Halfon (1997) suggests that narratives of overpopulation are not necessarily or exclusively driven by demographic ‘facts’, but are rather constituted through complex negotiations over theories of modernization, security, gender, and North/South relations (Halfon, 1997). In my own work on water politics in Israel and Palestine (Alatout, 2000, Alatout, 2003), I demonstrate that narratives of water scarcity were the result of a specific historical and political struggle (during the 1950s) over the meaning and identity of the Israeli state, its institutional apparatuses, and its centrality in constructing a new Jewish identity.2 Water scarcity, in other words, was a particular statist narrative that justified state control over water resources and immigrant populations. It legitimized a host of institutional and technical arrangements for prescribing acceptable uses of water, monitoring those uses, and intervening when rules and regulations were somehow transgressed (Alatout, 2003).

In this paper, I focus on dominant Palestinian and Israeli environmental narratives, circulating in discussions, interviews, public debates, reports, and speeches. I treat Palestinian and Israeli environmental narratives as effects of power.3 I see them reflective of dominant conceptions of power relations within which they are constituted. This should not be taken to mean that narratives are the end result of power relations, rather, that narratives are constitutive of power relations; they are part of the context within which power relations emerge, develop, and stabilize. In this sense, central differences between Palestinian and Israeli environmental narratives reflect divergent conceptions of power relations in the two communities.4 While I do not mean to suggest that environmental narratives can only be constituted along national lines (they are also constituted along class, ethnic, racial, and gender lines), I do argue that paying attention to different styles of narration along national lines, especially in regions where protracted political conflicts have been defined in national terms, might explain different conceptions and experiences of power.

In this paper, I address five important questions: (1) If it is true that Palestinian and Israeli environmental narratives reflect dominant conceptions of power, then how can we understand and explain the differences between those narratives? (2) In practice, how is power conceived by the narrators and how does it translate into two different forms of environmental narration and activism, one Palestinian and another Israeli?5 (3) What forms of resistance do these conceptions of power engender in environmental activism? (4) What are the theoretical and practical limits of such narratives? (5) And finally, what are the implications of this discussion for research on environmental narratives, power, and resistance?

Section snippets

Preliminary notes

Throughout this paper, I will be making a distinction between territorial and extra-territorial forms of power. I use territorial forms of power to a great extent as defined by Robert Sack (1983: 55): “a strategy for establishing differential access to things and people.” Notwithstanding the importance and the inclusive character of such a definition, I use it coupled with three qualifications. First, I find problematic Sack's argument that there could be a theory of territoriality that is

Theoretical framework: power, territory, and population

Building on the work of a number of political sociologists, influenced by Max Weber, and recent studies of governmentality, influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, it is possible to identify two distinct schools of thought on the place of territory and population in state theory and theories of governmentality (Burchell et al., 1991, Evans et al., 1985, Weber, 1978). The differences between the two schools of thought could be described in a number of ways that cross individual and thematic

Territory and population in Palestinian and Israeli environmental narratives

The lines of divergence among Palestinian and Israeli environmental narratives are multiple and irreducible to one or a few elements. They combine a multiplicity of ideas and materialities, including those of race, ethnicity, class, and gender, which fracture and resist an exclusively nationalist interpretation of either of these narratives. However, being aware of the multiple and discontinuous should not lead us away from addressing what otherwise stays stable and singular. In this paper, I

Conclusion

In this paper, I provided a critique of dominant conceptions of power in Palestinian and Israeli environmental narratives. I argued that Palestinian narratives build on a Weberian understanding of sovereign-territorial power and that Israeli narratives use a Foucaultian conception of bio-power. The two rest on an overemphasized, ontological distinction between territory and population.

My argument recasts the relationship between environmental narratives, power, territory, and population in

Acknowledgments

I presented an earlier version of this paper at the Palestinian and Israeli Environmental Narratives Workshop at York University in Toronto, 6–9 December 2004. I am thankful for the insightful comments I received from the participants of the workshop and, in particular, from Stuart Schoenfeld. I am also thankful for the helpful comments I received from Daniel Kleinman and Staci Lowe on an earlier draft. My undergraduate assistant, Tammy Shapiro, also was of great help in organizing and

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