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“Making the Desert Bloom” or Desertifying Palestine?
Abstract
The popular Zionist trope that Israel is "making the desert bloom" continues to play an instrumental role in greenwashing its colonization of Palestine. By falsely portraying the Holy Land as an area that was devoid of people and vegetation, prior to the plantation of the settler colony, Zionists attempt to erase the history and continued existence of Palestinians, or defame them as neglecters of their land to justify the ongoing Nakba. Simultaneously, Apartheid Israel is concocted as an environmental pioneer. I argue that the Israeli green propaganda succeeds due to the entrenched Orientalist depiction of the Middle East as an entirely deserted landscape and its inhabitants as backward, violent, and naturally, unsustainable, as well as the Western human-nature binary that suppresses human rights in the name of environmentalism. In fact, this paper will highlight Palestine’s varied climate, high biodiversity, remarkable agricultural history, and rich environmental knowledge, having, after all, constituted a part of the Fertile Crescent. Then, I will expound the devastation Israel’s White supremacist, misogynistic, and capitalist machinery unleashed upon both the Indigenous Palestinians and the environment, desertifying the landscape, clarifying the intrinsic link between human and ecological interests.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Palestinian Studies