In the second half of the twentieth century, natural gas became the fuel of Iran’s future. During that time, gas ceased to be burned as waste in the country’s southern oil fields as the Iranian state claimed the right and the ability to exploit the vast resource. Intertwining it with broader narratives of development and national sovereignty, officials both before and after the 1979 revolution framed gas use as simultaneously making and asserting Iranian advancement. Gas and its infrastructure became sites where Iranians imagined their country’s impending greatness, becoming monumental testaments to the independence and progress they dreamed of for their country. That gas would come to play this role in Iranian society was not only a product of decades of effort and imagining by Iranians of all backgrounds, but by the very contours of Iran’s physical geography. I argue that the sociotechnical imaginaries of natural gas that shaped Iran as it developed in the second half of the twentieth century were deeply entangled with the country’s landscape and the global distribution of industrialized societies. The international firms that operated Iran’s oil fields prior to the 1979 revolution had long resisted exploiting the associated natural gas they extracted as a byproduct of oil, deeming the cost of the pipelines necessary to reach Europe, the nearest major market, as rendering Iranian gas uncompetitive. It thus fell to Iranians to make their own markets, a process shaped by the specific geologies of the country’s gas deposits, the differing compositions of the reserves they sought to tap, and the geography of Iran itself. Both the successful and failed projects that Iranians pursued were deeply shaped by the constraints and opportunities presented by the geography of Iran’s gas. They dreamed of a regional network of chemical fertilizer plants that took advantage of the proximity of Iran’s gas fields to the Persian Gulf; they built a cross-country pipeline that carried refined gas from the southern fields to Iran’s northern centers of population and industry; and worked to power cities with cleaner gas energy, helping counter local topographies that caused air pollution to accumulate in urban areas. Going beyond accounts of post-war Iran that center questions of religion, ideological contestation, and Great Power meddling, this paper sheds light on the crucial role that the country’s geography, channeled through the provision of natural gas, played in defining the Iran its citizens imagined and worked to build.

In the decade and a half following the Palestinian Nakba and Israel’s independence, the new country’s stone quarries became political, social, and economic flashpoints between the state and its most marginalized populations. Seldom mentioned in the historiography, quarries nonetheless stood at the center of several of the period’s most crucial junctures: from the Kafr Qasim massacre in 1956, through the discriminatory incorporation of recent Mizrahi Jewish immigrants into the workforce, often at the expense of the country’s Palestinian citizens, to the latter’s struggles against land confiscations and the state-directed policies of spatial “Judaization”. Meanwhile, stone quarries’ products were also integral to one of the state’s most central endeavors: carrying out massive construction operations to house unprecedented waves of Jewish immigration and to establish dominance over newly acquired territory. Stone quarries after 1948 were, in other words, critical nodes both in Zionism’s unfinished colonial enterprise and in the struggles of those who opposed it, or simply sought to survive in its shadows. It is no accident then that two of the period’s defining cultural products coming from the state’s margins, Mahmoud Darwish’s by now iconic poem “Identity Card” (1964), and Ehud Ben Ezer’s somewhat forgotten novel “The Quarry” (1963), drew a direct link between lifeworlds rooted in the quarry and between the Palestinian and Mizrahi sense of self, respectively. This paper navigates these political, social, and cultural junctures to explore how between 1948-1964, quarries emerged as testing grounds for the limits of Israeli sovereignty, bastions of Palestinian self-sufficiency, and spaces for the articulation of a new Mizrahi collective. A combination of factors at the nexus of ecology, racial-thought, political economy, and labor shaped this process. First, the geology of Palestine/Israel and the settlement patterns of Palestinians and Zionist Jews prior to 1948, meant that even after 1948 the majority of the land’s building stone deposits remained in predominantly Arab areas. Secondly, Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews were racialized by Zionist elites as inclined towards physically difficult and supposedly menial forms of labor, of which stone quarrying - previously a coveted local expertise among Zionist “pioneers” - became a prime example. Finally, post-1948 movement restrictions and land expropriation meant that many among the largely rural remaining Palestinian communities, who in the past relied primarily on agriculture for their livelihood, had to radically reconfigure their relationship to their surroundings. For some among them, the quarry seemed to offer a potential remedy to their plight.

Like several other key episodes in the history of the modern Middle East, the inter-communal violence that erupted in Jaffa and other Palestinian urban centers in the summer of 1929 – conflagrations which are now said to mark Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli conflict – was informed by a an ecology that was at once social and environmental. Sectarian hotheadedness had much to do with actual heat, and in particular with global temperature variations that couched Palestine’s sweltering climate against that of colder settings like Russia. This paper – part of a larger project historicizing the effects of temperature balancing acts in the region – begins writing climate and seasonality back into the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It attends to female Muscovite Jewish immigrants arriving at the port city in shorts, and to the effects of their attire, bodily comportment, and ideas about sweat, tanning, labor, beauty and propriety on local young men, who would begin identifying as ‘Jews’ and ‘Arabs’ partly as a result of these summertime encounters. It also explores citrus cultivation and trade via this global junction (steamers arriving from Europe with passengers often returned from Jaffa loaded with oranges to metropolitan winter markets), exploring how agricultural seasonality informed communal strife, and more broadly, why most violence in the Middle East happens during the summer. Encounters in places like Jaffa, Arab port cities dubbed ‘bride of the sea’ and ‘mother of stranger’ and long accustomed to inflows of newcomers, were part of an unprecedented nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fossil-fueled migration waves from Europe. These population movements were not our present-day environmental migrations in the other direction, and usually responded to other push and pull factors than sudden or progressive climate changes. Rather, they are related to climate change as anthropogenic causes. How exactly does the process of acclimatizing to a new setting change its climate? Through exploring such questions, the paper looks into changes in the global economy, and concretizes a global division of labor between hot agricultural zones were cash-cropping depended on abundant solar energy and high temperatures, and colder settings whose coal and low temperatures were conducive to industrial processing of raw materials. These are the underpinnings of the emergence of a fossil-fueled planetary climate wherein hot zones, both geopolitically and environmentally, are connected to colder ones.

In his 1989 landmark Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Gershon Shafir placed land acquisition and labor employment as the central tenets that made continued Zionist settlement in Palestine viable. The book argued forcefully that Zionism adopted a strategy of economic separatism, not due to ideology, but rather as a result of its encounter with the land and labor markets in late-Ottoman Palestine. In a poignant critique of the book, Zachary Lockman countered that the success of Zionism cannot be attributed solely to the largely futile campaigns for Hebrew labor and land reclamation, but rather to various forms of coercion and violent conflict exercised by the Zionist movement and by the British colonial state. In recent decades, new scholarship has argued that these social developments were largely shaped by material and technological processes. This paper builds on these accounts yet offers an understudied lens for analyzing colonial relations in Palestine. It argues that the roots of Jewish-Arab separatism should be located not only in land and labor markets or in colonial coercion mechanisms, but rather in the material infrastructure that connected or segregated them. The paper explores mandate Palestine’s road-paving boom, in which the length of paved roads was extended almost six-fold. It focuses on the military roads program, which was the largest operation of road construction ever undertaken in Palestine. The program was part of the British effort to extinguish the great Arab revolt (1936-1939) by constructing roads that connected Jewish colonies, in order to bypass routes controlled by rebels. The paper argues that the various ways in which this militarized road infrastructure rearranged the mobility of labor, militants, and commodity trade were key factors in enabling the Jewish Yishuv’s survival during the revolt and in instituting spatial segregation between Arabs and Jews. Highly important was the interface between military roads and agricultural ecologies. The military roads program consisted mainly of asphalting existing gravel roads that used to flood in winter, enabling year-round mobility. This created significant economic and social opportunities for the transportation of two of Palestine’s chief crops: oranges and olives, which are harvested during the rainy season. These opportunities were unevenly spaced between Jewish colonies and Palestinian towns and villages. Unlike studies on communal formation and relations that seem to assume these processes occur in vacuum, the paper addresses the physical arteries and (mobile and stationary) spaces that perform this social function.