In the Divide
Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel (University of Minnesota Press), a new book by Professor of law and geography Irus Braverman, details the way Israel's nature conservation projects serve the foreseeable ends of its settler-colonial project. Environments and ecologies, whose borders are drawn by the Israeli state, are deployed as "nonhuman soldiers" in the creation of "settler ecologies." By analyzing Israeli conservation policy, Braverman shows the ways national parks and concepts of protected nature are weaponized to control the natural world as a site of total colonization, based on the exclusion of the “Other.” These ecologies are a polarizing and mutually reinforcing concept of "ecological exceptionalism," associating Palestinians with "invasive" or "problem" species such as black goats, jackals, feral dogs, and the Israeli state with “manmade springs and agrarian terraces,” the attendant notions of sublime Beauty in tow.
The human and nonhuman division of Israel’s colonial project is made especially vivid in the wake of October 7th and the indiscriminate violence in Gaza and the West Bank. We have seen examples of high-ranking Israeli officials making total siege permissible for the reason that the Palestinians are nothing but animals. There is a long history of this. Before Operation Protective Edge in 2015, Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, called for the “reoccupation of Gaza and a clean-out of the stables there.” Or Netanyahu's plans for Israel: “Will we surround all the State of Israel with fences and barriers? The answer is yes. In the area that we live in, we must defend ourselves against the wild beasts.” What Netanyahu describes is an ever-expanding prison -- once you reach the limits of the land, you reverse the meaning of the fence. What were once fences holding Palestinians in place, will become border walls isolating the ethno-state in its "right to defend itself." It is this total exclusion of the Other that lies at the heart of the state formation – that there must be a prison in order for there to be a state.
An expansion of the concept of the non-human is that of the “inhuman.” When we speak of something being "inhuman" – connoting barbarity – we speak on a ground established by the fundamental division between human and non-human; these are the divisions of human & non-human upon which our international laws of warfare and human rights are founded. The inhuman is a conceptual void that justifies annihilating violence, for it is the polar opposite of humanity. We refer to crimes against humanity, dehumanization, inhumane treatment -- and we understand what is meant by these words. But what if this language installs the possibility of the industrialized violence we witness in the world? We must struggle with ourselves to be vulnerable enough to understand that these divisions (specifically human and animal – but also life and death, presence and absence, all of those divisions that determine an exclusive concept of Being) are the justifications for the genocidal terror we are witnessing today.
The old modes of resistance/tropes of dissent will not function effectively within a political culture whose very foundations are those of an insurmountable divide between humans and their nonhuman environment. The ideals embodied in "humanism" (democracy, profound compassion, the value of human life) reach their limit when the human is transformed into an transcendent Idea, and acts of war are carried out in its name. This is a model of precarity and alienation by which we are made to unsee the ways in which our relationalities are incriminating. But there is no way out of our complicity. We are animals, disconsolate in conditions of constant warfare. We are inhuman, calling and holding each other in the divide.
Citing throughout Irus Braverman, and Joseph Pugliese’s Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence (Duke University Press)