The slow violence of Israeli settler-colonialism and the political ecology of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper uses the concept of ‘Slow Violence’ in a Palestinian village to explore the political ecology of the Israeli settlers-colonial paradigm. Slow Violence is violence that manifests gradually and often invisibly, in contrast to spectacular violence that more frequently garners media and political attention. My research explores and maps out the structure of slow violence in Palestine, where the politics of the curtailed Palestinian National Authority and the Israeli settler-colonial enterprise converge. It addresses a significant scholarly gap as attention to these issues focuses almost exclusively on violence as a spectacle, overlooking the centrality of nature as a productive political and developmental space in settler-colonial discourse and practice. Here I focus on three aspects of the slow violence of settler colonialism and its relationship to political ecology: the unleashing of wild boars into Palestinian villages and the decimation of seasonal agriculture, the dumping of sewage waste of Israeli settlements onto Palestinian villages, and the curtailment of indigenous centered modes of production and mobility. These practices transform the meanings of security and stability for Palestinians. They have served to weaponize landscapes against Palestinian inhabitants.