Divergent visions: Intersectional water advocacy in Palestine

Recognizing diversity in environmental justice

Environmental justice scholarship has long focused on distributive justice, or the fair distribution of environmental harms and benefits among social groups (Cole and Foster, 2001; Ringquist, 2005). More recently, it has also attended to procedural issues. Procedural justice ensures that sociopolitically disadvantaged groups participate in decision making, such as the citing of environmentally hazardous facilities, and are equally protected by the enforcement of regulations. Robust analysis of procedural injustice requires examination not only of current inequalities, but also the historical context behind current problems. For example, historical land appropriations, forced migrations, and past pollution on reservations structurally limit Native American tribes’ contemporary choices regarding resource extraction or waste disposal on their lands (Ishiyama, 2003). Multigenerational reverberations of slavery, redlining, and budgetary exclusion blend economic and racial discrimination in the disproportionate siting of waste facilities among communities of color in the United States (Checker, 2005; Cole and Foster, 2001). Thus, attention to procedural justice brings both process and history more firmly into the frame of environmental justice work.

Further deepening this focus on processes and root causes, a growing group of scholars is calling for sustained attention to recognition (Bell, 2004; Cantzler and Huynh, 2016; Figueroa, 2006; Schlosberg, 2009; Walker, 2012). Recognition justice, Kyle Powys Whyte (2011) suggests, “requires that policies and programs must meet the standard of fairly considering and representing the cultures, values, and situations of all affected parties” (200). This article joins this perspective, contending that the failure to recognize and consider the life experiences of socially and economically less powerful groups, and the situated knowledges they have developed through these experiences, compounds the historical and contemporary injustices faced by these groups.

Recognition is so important to environmental justice because the foundation of any environmental effort is its definition of environmental benefits and harms. What communities value or find to be threatening in a given environment are not universal givens, but rather, are culturally relative and socially constructed, produced through lived social experiences (Checker, 2007). Those not recognized by powerful brokers in a society are unable to contribute their “environmental identities and environmental heritages” to deciding which “values, practices, and places we wish to preserve for ourselves as members of a community” (Figueroa, 2006: 372). Thus, deep recognition justice demands ontological pluralism. Ontology takes seriously the different ways that people inhabit places and the different goods and threats they find there (Blaser, 2013), while ontological pluralism is a commitment to engaging with the world in a way that respects these differences and does not establish structures that privilege one group with a purportedly more correct (or “modern”) ontology over other groups (Wilson and Inkster, 2018).

A recognition focus is particularly strong among scholars of settler–Indigenous relations, where a refusal to recognize the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples excludes them from procedural justice (Cantzler and Huynh, 2016; Ishiyama, 2003; Whyte, 2018; Wilson and Inkster, 2018). “As an environmental injustice, settler colonialism is a social process by which at least one society seeks to establish its own collective continuance at the expense of the collective continuance of one or more other societies” (Whyte, 2018: 136). Beyond questions of sovereignty, these analyses also highlight the far- and deep-reaching impacts of conquest, as settler colonialism intersects and interferes with many aspects of life. The drive to conquer and control land and its inhabitants severs webs of interdependence and pushes people into hierarchical relations (Whyte, 2018). In particular, the capitalist expansion that is at the heart of colonialism is enabled by and further entrenches ethnic hierarchies (Altamirano-Jimnez, 2013). This same conquest works to impose a single ontology—one that is “modern,” derived from Europe, and contains a deep nature–culture binary—and renders others illegitimate (Blaser, 2013; Wilson and Inkster, 2018). While geographically and socially removed from the Indigenous societies described in this literature, similar dynamics drive the selective recognition and procedural injustice experienced by Palestinians (Abdo and Yuval-Davis, 1995; Clarno, 2017; Wolfe, 2012).

In al-Auja, Israeli settler colonialism presents a clear threat to recognition. However, focusing exclusively on Israeli–Palestinian lines of difference can obscure other distinctions that are important for achieving environmental justice. As this case demonstrates, recognition justice is complicated because asserting a cohesive set of environmental priorities within a community is not straightforward. Fundamental disagreements exist about what water is good for and how existing management authority should be wrested away from Israel and reallocated. While Israeli occupation constrains all Palestinians in the West Bank, disparate abilities among Palestinians to access capital, political power, and knowledge production shape these constraints differently.

To the extent that these multiple lines of power shape life experiences and the environmental priorities people build as a result, intersectional analysis offers important analytical tools for achieving robust recognition justice. Introduced in the 1980s by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and other black feminist scholars as a critique of mainstream feminism, intersectional analysis offers a framework for understanding social power without reductionist binaries. A basic tenet of the approach is that social categories be viewed “not as distinct but as always permeated by other categories” (Cho et al., 2013: 795). Early work pointed out that existing legal remedies failed to address the discrimination experienced by black women, because laws and policies addressing gender discrimination were based on the experiences of white women, while those for race discrimination took black men as the prototypical victims (Crenshaw, 1989). Over the past 30 years, scholars have developed intersectional theory to address numerous other lines of social differentiation (class, ethnicity, age, sexuality, national origin, etc.) and to do so in relation to a range of issues, including environmental justice (Di Chiro, 2006; Kaijser and Kronsell, 2014; Malin and Ryder, 2018; Olofsson et al., 2016).

Intersectional analysis is particularly useful for achieving environmental justice because of its consistent focus on both process and agency. As Barbara Tomlinson (2013) points out, to understand domination, we need to trace operations of power, which can be multiple and overlapping, rather than identity group boundaries. ¹ This honors the multiplicity of influences shaping our lived experiences and denies uniform group identities (and the homogenous identity politics that can sometimes arise from them). From an intersectional perspective, identity is not a simple given, but is continually and recursively constructed through lived experiences. This decenters a dominant environmental knowledge in any given setting, as it becomes one possible outcome of lived experiences among many. Intersectional analysis provides tools for understanding which social differences are used to reinforce existing lines of privilege and for decentering dominant ways of knowing (Tomlinson, 2013). This opens space for recognizing other ways of knowing, including ontological differences in what constitutes a “good environment” and a “good life,” and thus for more fully achieving environmental justice.

Al-Auja: A hydro-social sketch

Since 1967, Israel has occupied and militarily administered the West Bank through the Israeli Military Governorate and then the Israeli Civil Administration (ICA), including direct control over water infrastructure. The Jordan Valley village of al-Auja lies in a border zone within a border zone. It sits along the border with Jordan created in 1967, and its 10 square kilometers straddle zones of Israeli military (Area C) and Palestinian Authority (PA) civil control (Area A) shaped since 1995 by the Oslo Accords. Village lands along the Jordan River have been enclosed as a security zone, and other areas have been confiscated as firing ranges. Al-Auja’s partial Area A status also has enabled some infrastructure developments unattainable in other villages of the Jordan Valley, which are mostly in Area C.

Across the West Bank, NGOs, engaged academics, and Palestinian residents decry acute injustices in water distribution, particularly in terms of quantity (Gray and Hilal, 2007; Kadaman, 2013). Nearly all of the region’s drinking water is pumped from aquifers. By the Oslo II Accords, Israelis may obtain four times more Mountain Aquifer water than Palestinians (Annex III 1995). This interim allocation, originally intended to be replaced with a final agreement by the year 2000, continues to the present (Avgar, 2018; Selby, 2013; WSRC, 2018). ² Among Palestinians, access also varies widely: many rural households lack piped water, and some receive as little as 20 liters per capita per day from tankers (Selby, 2013; WSRC, 2018).

Al-Auja is a microcosm of this variability, with neighborhoods furthest from the main waterlines experiencing more frequent water cuts than in the town’s center. Irrigation wells have also grown less reliable. Several private landowners have wells drilled before 1967, but most are shallow, with increasingly saline water. Several need rehabilitation, but owners have been unable to gain the necessary ICA approvals (World Bank, 2009). Others have no access to well water at all. ³

Surface water is also inequitably distributed. The Jordan River runs just 7 kilometers from al-Auja’s center, but it is fenced off from villagers’ reach. Palestinians have no access to the river, which forms the eastern border of the West Bank, while, as of 2013, Israel used 600–700 MCM per year from the river basin (Selby, 2013). Between the 1950s and 2015, the annual flow of the Lower Jordan River dropped by 96% (Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME), 2005). Today, the river is a meager trickle of agricultural run-off as it flows south to the Dead Sea.

Spring water, historically a major irrigation source across the West Bank, has also changed dramatically in recent years. Al-Auja Spring offers one example. Though it once fed the village’s canals perennially, the spring has diminished to an unpredictable flow for two to six months most years (Trottier, 2011). The concrete canals in town are often dry, and retention ponds have become expanses of cracked dirt. Residents, hydrological experts, and other Israeli and Palestinian commentators identify a constellation of causes for the spring’s decline: Israel’s pumping of groundwater for Jewish settlements, PA wells supplying the urban area of Ramallah, and climate change. There is little agreement, either among or between these groups, about the relative weight of these factors and the timescale of their impacts on the dropping water table and rising salinity levels of groundwater (Ron, 1986; Schmidt et al., 2014; Trottier, 2011, 2013; World Bank, 2009). ⁴

Because water is a “total social fact” that connects places and practices (Orlove and Caton, 2010), water concerns cannot be separated from territorial contestations or the pursuit of agricultural livelihoods. A land–water–food nexus is clear in the West Bank, and the Israeli Military Governorate and ICA have been particularly decisive in shaping this nexus since 1967. They seized large areas of villagers’ agricultural lands for military use or to hand over to Jewish settlements (Beltrán and Kallis, 2018). The impact on agriculture is particularly stark in the Jordan Valley, as this area contains more than 40% of the total Palestinian-held irrigated land in the West Bank (PCBS, 2011). Checkpoints and border controls also restrict the movement of people and goods, making export agriculture challenging. International factors create additional obstacles. Producing in high volumes is increasingly important for export agriculture, yet many Palestinian farmers lack the capital necessary for equipment and additives to support such volumes. As a result of these impediments, Palestine has dramatically lower access than its neighbors Israel, Egypt, and Jordan to virtual water (the water footprint of traded and eaten crops) (Beltrán and Kallis, 2018), as well as to freshwater.

Al-Auja, once lushly covered in fruit trees and vegetable fields, has desiccated to a patchwork of large fallow fields, occasional bits of vegetation, and scattered greenhouses. Meanwhile, Israeli settlements visible from al-Auja’s hilly streets are full of date palms and rows upon rows of greenhouses. Why, ask residents, should these settlements gain agricultural success through the water and lands confiscated from us?

Poor water quality, particularly the risk of water-borne diseases, is also a major concern (Gray and Hilal, 2007). Because many households lack access to piped water, they rely on tanker businesses that offer expensive water with little quality control. Even households with piped water sometimes receive flows only once per week or less. Families rely on storage tanks, but the maintenance required to ensure water quality is often beyond their knowledge or financial means. Wastewater flows throughout the West Bank, including from Israeli settlements, Palestinian cities without permits for wastewater treatment plants, and rural households lacking sewage systems, are also part of the occupied landscape and now endanger drinking water through groundwater contamination (Mason, 2011; Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2020, this issue).

As is clear from the preceding discussion of diminishing water access, water quality concerns, and limitations on trade and land access, Israeli occupation is one clear fault line of power in the West Bank that strongly and negatively impacts Palestinians’ environmental quality. This must be a central focus of any environmental justice campaign in the West Bank. This is not the only line of power that matters, though, for Palestinians’ experiences of environmental benefits and hazards. Close attention to multiple, intersecting lines of power highlights disagreements about al-Auja’s most pressing environmental problems and how to address them.

First, structures of military occupation and capitalist accumulation conspire to doubly limit rural Palestinians’ abilities to improve their life circumstances. As a small island of Area A land in the Jordan Valley’s sea of Area C Israeli control, al-Auja is isolated from the more bustling urban centers of commerce and politicking in Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Nablus. Commercial transactions across checkpoints and along poorly maintained hilly roads are expensive for villagers. Residents also reported feeling abandoned by the PA, and elements of the town’s water infrastructure made this disconnection particularly clear: a well in town that could have eased water shortages lay silent, I was told, because of turf battles between the municipality and the PA; a large retention dam built by the PA that was supposed to provide irrigation water lay empty, and widespread rumors blamed embezzlement and shoddy construction; and village residents spoke with some resentment about how much water was pumped from a well near al-Auja Spring and sent to the Ramallah urban area (McKee, 2019). Meanwhile, al-Auja residents describing how landowners lacking water access felt compelled to sell off their land pointed out that wealthy Jerusalemites have benefited from this plight by buying land cheaply for weekend cottages.

Second, the same maneuvers of Israeli occupation that have shaped water access across Palestine have also pushed and pulled new residents into al-Auja in successive waves (Trottier, 2013). These waves continue to define meaningful social groups and geographic neighborhoods. In 2016, the official population of al-Auja was 5214 residents (PCBS, 2016). Current residents belonging to the town’s oldest families trace genealogy either to Bedouin families who grazed sheep in the area or Jerusalemite families who bought land in the late 1800s. With the 1948 war, a wave of refugee families settled in town, building houses in what is now “Upper” al-Auja. In 1967, families displaced by Israeli land seizures elsewhere in the West Bank moved into “Lower” al-Auja. These 1948 and 1967 families generally received title to their houses but no agricultural land in al-Auja; many worked as sharecroppers for the town’s landholders. Bedouin families who more recently arrived in the outskirts of al-Auja, though likely not counted in the official figures, constitute another social group. These families generally own no land; they live on waqf lands (held in an Islamic religious trust) or under threat of displacement on state lands, usually without access to piped water.

While most residents identify themselves within farming or shepherding families, there is now widespread economic diversification. Indeed, this is one main outcome noted by residents of the recent water changes. And while landholding families were once the town’s wealthiest, without water access, land ownership still holds some social status but does not promise wealth.

As in many West Bank communities, multiple NGOs impact daily life in al-Auja, addressing housing, education, infrastructure, and employment issues. At the time of research, one NGO particularly active in the water arena was EcoPeace, a group undertaking projects to improve water access and encourage conservation in nearly 30 Palestinian, Israeli, and Jordanian communities. ⁵ EcoPeace was a trilateral organization with Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian co-directors, and staff members from each office hailing from one of the three national communities. They received funding from private donations and large, project-based grants from the European Union and the international development agencies of various European countries, the United States, and Canada, as well as grants from sustainable development and environmental foundations such as Global Nature Fund and the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

In the complex hydro-social context of al-Auja, there was general agreement that water-related challenges abounded, but disagreement as to what problems were most urgent and how to address them. The following sections use intersectional analysis to examine the heterogeneous concerns and desires that various residents and NGO employees, all Palestinians, had related to al-Auja’s waterscapes. Following the understanding that life experiences influence environmental priorities, each of these sections focuses on a shared social positioning that powerfully shapes individuals’ opportunities and limitations.

“The future is in agriculture”: Palestinian farmers

For al-Auja farmers, water and prosperity were inextricable. One winter morning, two farmers guided me through one of al-Auja’s three large vegetable-growing enterprises. Ziad, Ghassan, and I walked through fragrant herb greenhouses, then drove between fields of cabbage and arugula. Nearby lay expanses of dusty tan. Ghassan, a farm manager, explained his company’s efforts to continue export agriculture while so many surrounding farmers had folded. “Do you think al-Auja will have a better future if people continue trying in agriculture, or if they turn to other jobs,” I asked. “No, the future is in agriculture,” Ghassan replied without a pause. ⁶ He spoke of his company’s potential to buoy al-Auja’s struggling economy, if not for one obstacle: a lack of water. The landowner has plenty of fallow farmland and relationships with buyers who want his produce, and al-Auja has skilled agricultural workers, Ghassan told me. “But he needs water.” In agriculture, he stated succinctly, “there is a future when there is water.”

This focus on farming was strong among a wide swath of al-Auja residents: young and old; men and women; farmers, shepherds, and those in other careers; landowners and non-landowners. “This all used to be so green!” residents of al-Auja told me repeatedly. No matter how I introduced my research interests in water issues, residents began by telling me about their agricultural past. “They called us sallat falasteen [the produce basket of Palestine],” many said with pride, describing the bountiful bananas, citrus, and vegetables for which the village was once known. Despite the obstacles confronting agricultural livelihoods in Palestine, residents reiterated in open-ended interviews and survey responses their assessment that al-Auja needed water for a farming revival.

To explain this desire, residents described farming as “the foundation” of a decent economy. Many appreciated a subsistence economy with less reliance on cash, eating produce “for free” from their own and neighbors’ fields. Export sales, particularly of bananas, to “Jordan, Syria, and beyond” were also important. Pictures from as recently as the 1990s show expanses of the tree-like plants. As Samir, a former farmer explained, “in the past, [in] the banana season … [a man] would pay for his son’s marriage; he’d build a house. Every month, when picking bananas, every month we’d make 5,000 dinars of profit each.” Farmers also took advantage of the valley’s microclimate by rotating crops like corn and cabbage during the mild winters, and onions, okra, and other heat-tolerant crops in the summer. The Valley’s intense heat could quickly parch crops, but the formerly perennial spring quenched this thirst.

Residents rued the loss of self-sufficiency farming had enabled. Without viable farms in town, residents resorted to employment in Jewish settlements. Samir drew a strong contrast between on the one hand being a “worker,” an agricultural laborer on a settlement, which might allow one to get by, and on the other hand being a “farmer,” which allowed one to profit and support a family. “[Now] in Al-Auja,” Samir stressed, “around 80% to 85% are workers. But it was 90% farmers, who used to benefit [yistefidu].” Landowners and sharecroppers both emphasized the self-sufficiency of farming in contrast to wage labor.

When surveying villagers, I expected farmers and shepherds to prioritize irrigation while other residents would prioritize drinking water. Indeed, this trend was apparent, as farmers and shepherds were 40% more likely than other residents to identify irrigation shortfalls as their most pressing water problem, and other residents were 20% more likely than farmers and shepherds to identify drinking water shortages as their most pressing problem. However, regardless of their levels of contemporary reliance on its waters for irrigation, residents across town focused their desires for water restoration on a single source: al-Auja Spring. During interviews and casual conversations, residents of all professions regularly directed discussion to the spring and the town’s dry canals, and during surveys, 33% of respondents who did not report a lack of irrigation as their own most pressing water problem nonetheless stated that this was the town’s most pressing problem.

This agreement likely derives both from the community’s connection to farming and from key structural features of al-Auja’s waterscape. First, farming is symbolically resonant in Palestinian culture and nationalism (McKee, 2014; Sansour and Tartir, 2014; Swedenburg, 1990). Agriculture also continued to be significant in residents’ daily lives, though not necessarily on al-Auja land. Twenty-six of the 46 households surveyed reported a family member employed in agriculture, but the vast majority worked on Israeli settlements. ⁷ In addition, al-Auja’s shift from an entirely agricultural to a diversified economy had occurred only in the past decade. Thus, even for residents not currently working in the field, agriculture fundamentally shaped their water experiences.

Second, al-Auja’s water supply was designed to be bifurcated into piped drinking water on the one hand and spring-fed irrigation water on the other. Residents associated spring water with autonomous control of supply. It was “free” (i.e. no per-unit charge) to all those holding title to a share of canal waters (Trottier, 2013), and it was transparently distributed among users. In contrast, piped water reached (or failed to reach) households by an obscure process of quotas and pricing decisions involving multiple bureaucratic authorities (McKee, 2019). However, though authorities designed these two systems to be distinct, they mingled in practice. Piped water was authorized only for household use, not irrigation. However, without reliable canal water, many households used piped water to irrigate large gardens. Residents recognized that this practice exacerbated household water cuts, yet even those frustrated by neighbors “stealing” drinking water curbed their criticism, asking rhetorically, “from where else will they get water?” (McKee, 2019). Because of this intermingling, reliable spring water could ease problems in both systems.

“Shade that the family sat under”: Rural women

Amidst this vocal consensus in desires for a farming revival, closer analysis reveals some heterogeneity in the issues these rural Palestinians identified as most urgent and unjust, particularly along lines of gender. During surveys and interviews, women identified a wider variety of primary water concerns than men, including the lack of a sewage system, the impacts of water scarcity on health, and the drowning threat of uncovered water canals. Meanwhile, while women were approximately equally likely to cite drinking water (41% of respondents) as irrigation water (37%) among their top priorities, men were much less likely to do so (36% versus 50%).

Water is a critical element of both economic productivity and social reproduction, yet homogeneous national groupings and the implicit biases of capitalism both sideline this latter role (Bennett et al., 2005; Harris, 2008; Sultana, 2007). Particularly in a society with differently gendered work roles and expectations of privacy as in al-Auja, public discourse is predominantly masculine. Appreciation of men’s and women’s different water priorities requires attention to their lived experiences. In al-Auja, men were head farmers and were responsible for obtaining irrigation water, though all family members worked in the fields. Women were the primary household managers; when households went for weeks without tap water, women were most directly inconvenienced. Likewise, women usually cared for children and ill relatives, likely making them more acutely aware of water-borne illnesses and the risk of children drowning in canals.

Some women, though sharing a focus on farming and the need for irrigation water, also expressed ambivalence as they discussed their experiences provisioning households. They appreciated some conveniences of the economic diversification that had grown as a result of declining opportunities in agriculture. For example, Rasha, a middle-aged woman living near town-center, and her mother Najma expressed a mixture of nostalgia and appreciation. “Life has become better,” Najma asserted. Rasha agreed, speaking of al-Auja’s modest business development, with salons, clothing shops, and grocers opening in town. “People used to always have to go to Jericho to buy things, but now almost anything you need can be found in al-Auja.” Yet, in the same conversation, this appreciation for material conveniences was tempered by assertions that a cash economy has made life precarious and stressful. “We used to have everything at home,” Rasha explained, “chickens, sheep, vegetables and fruits.” Najma nodded, listing more household staples. “Now,” continued Rasha, “we buy everything from the market. It all costs a lot.” The big problem, she explained, is the gap opened by this market economy. “I, for example, have money, so I buy everything. But someone else [who] doesn’t have money [has] to take on loans to buy everything.” Her mother agreed heartily as Rasha concluded, “In the past it was much better!” Residents valued the conveniences of nearby shops, but also the predictability of farming, whereby families produced their own staples, rather than relying entirely on the precarities of wage labor to purchase them.

Al-Auja Spring’s decline has desiccated not only the fields to which the canals lead, but also lands along the canal that used to be shaded by small orchards and other greenery. It was women, in particular, who mourned the village’s loss of water not only in terms of economic opportunities, but very pointedly in terms of lost landscapes and practices. As Najma asserted, along the canal and throughout the center of town, “You wouldn’t see any empty land. It would be all bananas, citrus, poplar trees, useful as shade that the family sat under. You would eat lunch, drink tea, make a picnic.” She lamented, “Today, this all is gone.” It was common for women to comment to me and among themselves that “the past” was a time of greater security when “you wouldn’t even lock your door.” Such discussions intermingled with nostalgic reminiscences of water flowing through the canals and of more socializing, of shaded family picnics and walks between neighbors. Rasha insisted that “even the weather itself” was more pleasant,

because there was water in the canal in the valley, and it was cultivated, for example, with bananas and orchards. It used to draw down the heat…The vegetables and the big trees reduced the heat. The weather was cooler. Anytime, then, we used to visit each other in the past. Now, only during a special occasion, only.

“This river, we rightfully have a share in it”: Urban NGO staffers

While al-Auja residents focused on their drying spring, the NGO EcoPeace directed attention elsewhere. The group ran many projects simultaneously, but its cross-cutting focus at the time of research was rehabilitation of the Jordan River. Two initiatives were particularly invested in al-Auja. EcoPeace built the EcoCenter on a municipally approved plot in town in 2010. Employing seven to nine staff members, mostly from al-Auja, the center included a building with guest rooms, meeting space, and a kitchen; outdoor demonstration areas of graywater recycling, biogas production, and gardening; and a playground open to the town. The center conducted environmental workshops for school groups from al-Auja and across the West Bank and hosted international tourists. A second (linked) initiative, EcoPeace’s “Save the Jordan” campaign, proposed Jordan River rehabilitation and ecotourism to protect ecosystems, economically revive the Jordan Valley, and promote peaceful relations between Palestine, Israel, and Jordan. NGO staffers from three head offices worked through multiple scales and strategies: lobbying their respective governments, publishing eco-tourism materials and training tour guides, teaching school groups, and hosting international visitors along the Jordan River. In projects reaching beyond al-Auja, EcoPeace integrated the Jordan River into their Youth Water Trustees leadership development programs; created a set of guidebooks and training sessions to engage Christians, Jews, and Muslims in faith-based advocacy and eco-tourism; gathered international consultants to recommend a Master Plan for management of the Lower Jordan River Valley; and proposed a Basin Commission governance model for the river region.

At the time of research, EcoPeace employed 10 Palestinian staff members in its Bethlehem office, as well as one or two international interns on a rotating basis. The Palestinian staffers hailed primarily from cities and generally held at least bachelor’s degrees. Formal environmental activism is relatively recent in Palestine, becoming standardized in primary school curricula after even the youngest of EcoPeace staffers were children. Some staffers developed concerns about the public health impacts of pollution early in their lives, but many entered careers in environmental protection indirectly. Training in engineering or governance, they found jobs with EcoPeace and developed environmental concerns through their work. They took various paths toward EcoPeace, but the Bethlehem staffers shared significant social experiences. Many had worked in other NGO and governmental settings and shared friend and family connections. Several had studied or worked abroad, and most had experience, either before joining EcoPeace or through their work, meeting with international colleagues and PA officials. In contrast, while staffers expressed strong national solidarity with residents in the villages where EcoPeace coordinated projects, they had little social experience there.

Because each of EcoPeace’s projects was co-coordinated across its three offices, Bethlehem staffers worked in teams through regular video conferencing and periodic cross-border meetings with their Jordanian and Israeli colleagues. In addition, one staff member, Sami, coordinated activities at the EcoCenter in al-Auja; he rented an apartment in the town and also met regularly with colleagues in Bethlehem. The remaining EcoCenter staff members, all al-Auja residents, worked as caretakers and tour guides. They were employees of EcoPeace, but were not involved in campaign planning or project administration. There was ongoing discussion of plans to make the EcoCenter more self-sufficient, both financially and managerially.

EcoPeace’s published materials justify their Jordan River projects through deep appreciation for a past of vibrant ecosystems and flourishing civilizations along the river and concern over the river’s present and future degradation. The Jordan “connects the eco-systems of Africa and Asia, forms a sanctuary for wild plants and animals, and has witnessed some of the most significant advances in human history,” notes a central document in the Save the Jordan campaign (EcoPeace, 2014: 3). With vibrant imagery and ardent language, brochures, reports, and essays contrast this vaunted past with the polluted trickle to which the river has been reduced and the political strife and economic stagnation that has come to characterize the surrounding valley (McKee, 2018).

Palestinian staffers generally shared the concerns published in EcoPeace documents. However, their primary concerns during conversations and interviews were more “eco-nationalist,” closely linking national integrity with environmental control (Dawson, 1996). Specifically, they discussed the practical importance of Palestinians having access to the landscape and waters of the Jordan River. “If we end up liberating Palestine,” said Hamdi, a member of the Bethlehem office, “and we find out that our environment and our water is actually destroyed, then [what’s the] point? We will end up taking a crappy land.” Staffers also stressed the symbolic importance for a future Palestinian state of being recognized as a riparian sovereign. Omar, another Bethlehem staffer, protested that

the Jordan River is not under Palestinian control, and it’s impossible for the Palestinian committees [working on our project] to reach the Jordan River, or the Dead Sea, even though we are partners in this project to protect Palestinian rights. This river, we [rightfully] have a share in it, and we have a share in the Dead Sea.

Most Palestinian staffers spoke of Israeli occupation and their desire for statehood as being implicated throughout their everyday lives. As Hamdi said, “politics is basically your life here. … I mean, when you’re hungry, … when you’re afraid about your life, you don’t think much about the environment.” Knowing that fellow Palestinians saw environmental activism as less pressing, sometimes even an act of complicity with Israel that distracted from their struggle against occupation, staffers like Omar consistently emphasized the direct benefits of EcoPeace’s work for Palestinians: “This foundation serves us as Palestinians and [it] pushes on the Israeli side in an extraordinary way [b’shekel mish tabi’i], in order to attain Palestinian right[s] for Palestinians” (McKee, 2019).

Projects in al-Auja and other villages were crucial for promoting Palestinian eco-nationalism. Daoud, an influential member of the Bethlehem office, said he was proud EcoPeace had put al-Auja “on the map,” meaning that international awareness of al-Auja’s problems has risen. But, he clarified, al-Auja is most important as a case study: “We chose al-Auja as an example for all the Jordan Valley communities.” Through the EcoCenter there, EcoPeace raises awareness of Palestine-wide problems, he explained.

EcoPeace asserts that an ecologically vibrant Jordan River will tempt tourists and provide opportunities for entrepreneurs in the Jordan Valley. For example, Sami, the EcoCenter coordinator, spoke passionately about a “green initiative economy” and the opportunities this could create for al-Auja entrepreneurs, particularly women. He described the tour guide trainings and women’s handicrafts bazaar they had hosted and the EcoCenter’s recent expansions to host more ecotourists. Staff members saw ecotourism as a burgeoning sector that could strengthen the economies of Jordan Valley communities and do so with less reliance on water than other economic sectors, while also raising awareness of Palestine’s struggle against Israel’s social and environmental domination.

Divergent visions

All the people discussed in this article decried the unjust distribution of water in Palestine and called for the restoration of depleted and polluted water sources within the Jordan Valley. All lived as Palestinians under Israeli occupation and condemned the movement restrictions, resource extractions, and other elements of symbolic and material subjugation this entails. In this sense, they were allies. However, their different lived experiences fostered divergent understandings of environmental harms and benefits. Lines of career, land ownership, and gender shaped al-Auja residents’ water priorities, and particularly stark disagreements coincided with differences in NGO involvement.

A lack of awareness of these differences impeded the formulation of an inclusive water agenda. EcoPeace leaders and employees strove to involve residents across partnering communities in their campaigns and to tailor their community development projects and political demands to the perceived priorities of three different national audiences. Their longevity as an organization and residents’ participation in some projects suggest consonance. However, I also witnessed mixed enthusiasm among al-Auja residents. Some contended that EcoPeace “normalized” Israeli occupation by cooperating with Israelis, though I heard strident versions of this objection more rarely in al-Auja than in urban Palestinian areas (McKee, 2018). Enthusiasm was particularly low for development projects concentrating on Jordan River restoration. Instead, residents called for spring water. Najma, Rasha, and others lovingly detailed al-Auja’s lush, canal-fed past landscape and former agricultural strength and identified these as key to al-Auja’s future.

Residents rarely mentioned the Jordan River, and those mentions depicted it either as something definitively lost or a simple marker of space. Until 1967, families in al-Auja and other villages farmed along the river. Following that war, Israel made a 1-kilometer-wide strip along 145 kilometers of the river’s winding banks inaccessible to Palestinians. In 2011, a single civilian access point opened, under the guard of Israeli soldiers, to allow tourists into Qasr al-Yahud (seen by many as the site of Jesus’ baptism).

Several families spoke of the agricultural land their families own by the river, to which they lost access when it was “shut off in Area C.” For example, Ziad’s mother remembered farming and fishing along the river. After the 1967 war, she said, “the Jews (al-yahud) … made us leave, even with all our crops still there. Now they grow dates on the land.” Most al-Auja residents were too young to personally recall experiences with the river, but they shared tales of dispossession passed down within families. Ziad recounted, in even more vibrant terms than his mother, how, “just as the watermelons were ripening, they closed it off.”

In the present tense, residents spoke of the Jordan River only as a geopolitical boundary or distance marker. For example, one resident describing a person’s house as distant, “way down the road toward the river.” As a line on a map, residents had little reason or opportunity to consider the river’s ecological state. Poignantly, Ziad’s wife asserted that “the river is now all dried up,” not because she had ever stood on the riverbanks, but because she saw it through a bus window during a rare crossing into Jordan.

In contrast, while their sociopolitical identity made the Jordan River inaccessible for all Palestinians, EcoPeace staffers gained economic and political resources and social ties that gave them flexibility to evade some occupation barriers. Bethlehem office staff members were regularly barred from the Jordan River, including during attempts to monitor flows and water quality. However, they immersed themselves regularly in maps and data on the river, and work trips to Jordan allowed them to reach the eastern bank. Omar, for example, worked with international researchers and government officials tracking the river’s hydrology and ecology for a regional master plan. This involved intense reflection on the river’s past, present, and future. Some staffers even reached the river in militarily restricted areas for research collaboration with international teams, and a few swam there in EcoPeace’s “Big Jump” media campaign. Thus, staffers existed between the restriction experienced by al-Auja residents, their fellow Palestinians, and the relatively free movement of international NGO workers.

Despite living further from the Jordan River, staffers’ job experiences tied them to the river as a contemporary resource and Palestinian landscape more strongly than al-Auja residents. Staffers felt invested in the Jordan as an “environment that should be saved.” A notable exception to this attachment, which reinforces the trend, was Sami. He mentioned the Jordan to me only once, to state its loss: “All the water that’s coming out of the Jordan River, it’s only sewage, agricultural sewage. So, we lost one of the [village’s water] sources.” Sami grew up elsewhere in Palestine, but moved to al-Auja to work with the EcoCenter, a job that did not involve him in river research projects. Sami’s experience of the Jordan was closer to al-Auja residents than his fellow staffers in Bethlehem.

One further “exception that proves the rule” of al-Auja residents feeling connected to the Jordan only in the past came from Hakim. He offered the sole mention by an al-Auja resident of a future vision—though no expectation—of river access, suggesting, “If they opened the Jordan River and we could go farm there, we would have work and [freedom of] movement.” Hakim was a lifelong village resident, but he had also worked at the EcoCenter for several years, and though he was not involved in EcoPeace research or project planning, he proudly identified with the organization. He was one of the two most EcoPeace-involved residents with whom I spoke. It seems likely his experience with EcoPeace projects expanded his temporal relationship with the Jordan River.

Residents and EcoPeace staffers also viewed agriculture’s future divergently. All rued the loss of income as a disastrous impact of irrigation water loss. But while residents desired a farming revival, EcoPeace promoted a vision common in international environmentalism and answering to the demands of a capitalist economy: they promised ecotourism jobs through river rehabilitation. This potential job creation would not truly address the self-sufficiency widely prioritized by residents, who valued both the respectability and subsistence security of farm ownership. Residents already feared a precariously cash-dependent future. Despite the best intentions of ecotourism proponents, an economy dependent on tourism could exacerbate these concerns, as studies elsewhere have shown that such development tends to benefit small groups of local elites and bring costs that accumulate among economically precarious residents (Carrier and Macleod, 2005; Laudati, 2010). Nor would ecotourism projects revive the physically comfortable environments and greater social belonging that women associated particularly strongly with the landscapes fed by spring irrigation water.

Contrary to residents’ enthusiasm, agricultural livelihoods were suspect in EcoPeace publications and largely absent in conversations with Palestinian staffers. This disagreement about the role of farming in al-Auja’s ideal future is not simply a matter of degrees of attention, but of differing environmental convictions. First, EcoPeace documents warned of competition between the water demands of irrigation and riverine ecologies. They directed warnings most explicitly to Israelis for their diversions through the National Water Carrier (Tagar, 2010), but also to Jordan (Gorskaya et al., 2010). Because the PA could not draw waters from the Jordan, Palestinian farmers were only an implicit future threat. Second, NGO documents dismissed rural residents’ desires for agricultural revival as troublesome resistance to change, sometimes referred to as “cultural constraints.” Its 2012 regional economic benefits study, for example, suggests, “the rehabilitation process can face several challenges stemming from the potential resistance of the local, largely agricultural populations that currently reside in the Jordan Valley, to any change in their community” (Bamya et al., 2012).

This is a mischaracterization of the aspirations for change and improvement that al-Auja residents expressed within their desires for agricultural revival. ⁸ Large-scale farmers wanted more spring water and rights to drill wells in order to advance organic farming and/or to grow their labor forces to employ more Palestinians in the valley. Meanwhile, other residents desired irrigation water for small greenhouses to supplement their incomes as shopkeepers or office workers, often to fund the higher education of family members. Even women who spoke nostalgically of past waterscapes wished for their revival alongside social and economic improvement. Each of these avenues represents change for the Valley. Residents simply viewed different aspects of past water uses—and the landscapes and relationships those uses nourished—as worthy of revival than did NGO staffers.

Conclusion

The inclusion of diverse residents in final decision-making processes, like the citing of environmentally hazardous facilities, is crucial for environmental justice efforts. But deeper procedural justice requires that residents also take part earlier, when defining problems and forming goals for improvement. Because we all experience our dwelling places and fellow inhabitants in socially constructed ways, the lines of power that are socially and politically meaningful in a society are also likely to mark certain ontological differences: what is good or harmful about our environments, who has agency, and how that agency should be understood (Yates et al., 2017).

Nicole Wilson and Jody Inkster (2018) identify this ontological heterogeneity as a basic feature of settler colonial encounters over water, asserting in their examination of water management conflicts in Canada that, “although rarely articulated explicitly, water conflicts are rooted in ontological differences between Indigenous and settler views of water” (516). Yukon First Nations elders in this study understood water to be agentive, like a kin relation, and believed that interactions with water should respect this relationship (Wilson and Inkster, 2018). These understandings formed through lived experiences with water that differed significantly from those of non-Indigenous government officials, who viewed water as a resource to be managed. A settler definition is enshrined in Canadian law, which becomes the basis for environmental justice claims, while Indigenous conceptualizations are ignored. This is ontological exclusion—exclusion from the basic definition of benefits and harms by which environmental justice claims are evaluated. This, in turn, renders invisible many of the harms incurred by Canadian water systems on Indigenous peoples.

Wilson and Inkster’s (2018) aim in highlighting the multiple meanings of water is to “unsettle dominant ideas of water as a resource and contribute to rethinking ‘ontological pluralism’ in water governance” (519). Such rethinking is one instantiation of a deep commitment to recognition. This Palestinian case demonstrates the need for ontological pluralism along multiple lines, and the usefulness of intersectional analysis to do so. This pluralism would entail recognition of not only legal rights to national self-determination, but also the legitimacy of long-term residents’ definitions of environmental harms and benefits.

Being multiply marginalized by colonialism and the uneven development of global capitalism, rural Palestinians have often been exploited as pools of labor, and their lands have been treated as sinks of natural resources, without their reaping the profits of capitalist accumulation. Women, in particular, have been multiply marginalized by these powerful structures, bearing unremunerated responsibility for social reproduction amidst the hardships of life in occupied Palestine. From this vantage, al-Auja residents scrambled for a foothold in the structures of colonialism and capitalism—by creating small businesses, gaining college degrees, and working on Israeli settlement farms when they could not find other work—but many also countered the detached calculations and developmentalist assumptions that tend to drive resource management for capitalist accumulation. Women in particular pointed out the sacrifices entailed by these pursuits and yearned for lifeways that balance some elements of market capitalism with attention to priorities that are often sidelined in its pursuit: continuity, social equity, tradition, and noncompetitive social time.

Unfortunately, it is in conflict zones that both the need for and difficulty of intersectional recognition are particularly strong. In nationalist and anti-colonialist struggles, identity lines tend to become understood monolithically. Intersecting lines of belonging—and the people whose interests are shaped by membership in those identity groups—often become sidelined, whether because actively repressed or simply unnoticed in the glaring light of urgent nationalist movements (Anderson, 1991; Chatterjee, 1993; Seekings and Nattrass, 2008). Those striving for environmental justice in such contexts face significant challenges, as justice requires attention to the deep hierarchies that often characterize even strong solidarity groups (Whyte, 2018).

Following common patterns of nationalist and anti-colonialist struggle elsewhere, in the face of expansionist Zionism and the daily hardships of Israeli occupation, a framework of Palestinian national unity has existed in tension with cross-cutting lines of identity like class and gender for decades (Peteet, 1991; Seikaly, 2015). As EcoPeace entered the social context of al-Auja, it was wading through this minefield of Palestinian–Israeli politics. Its staffers were dedicated to improving life chances for Palestinians, in al-Auja and elsewhere. They saw environmental protections as crucial to strengthening residents’ political standing as members of an independent nation with economic opportunities. But while Palestinian staffers shared with al-Auja residents experiences of occupation and desires for resource sovereignty, different experiences also shaped divergent definitions of environmental harms, benefits, and “the good life.” ⁹

Though not based on malice or intentional exclusion, the incongruities between the visions upheld by Palestinian EcoPeace staffers and Palestinian residents of al-Auja are particularly consequential because these proponents stand on unequal footing. EcoPeace’s proposals gain attention among scholars, journalists, and policymakers (e.g. Becker et al., 2014; Tsur, 2015), while residents’ focus on al-Auja Spring and their firm desires for agricultural livelihoods have not done so. The same life experiences and relationships that shaped different environmental priorities also placed people along existing hierarchies of expertise and authority—urban or rural lives, mobility through NGO networks or embeddedness in a farming community, living as men in leadership positions or as women in supporting roles.

Whether striving for environmental justice through NGO, informal civic coalition, or governmental initiatives, an intersectional framework offers tools to build campaigns based on the recognition of multiple environmental ontologies and coalition building. A first step is to ask sensitizing questions that encourage people, both in activism and in research, to trace threads of oppression across relevant social contexts. Mari Matsuda (1991) refers to this process as “asking the other question”: if the obvious topic is sexism, one asks what class interests are at play, for example, or if the clear concern is colonial domination, one considers how gender hierarchies matter. At the same time, a historical perspective is critical. This requires that participants investigate the structural inequalities that have preceded and exacerbated contemporary environmental concerns (Kaijser and Kronsell, 2014). Contemporary water access inequities in Palestine, for example, are shaped not only by Israeli occupation, but also by long-standing class and gender structures, some of which predated occupation.

These intersectional tools help environmental justice proponents to acknowledge complex, intersecting lines of privilege and domination. However, recognition justice is not only a matter of identifying inequalities, but also of making space in environmental projects for the priorities of all affected parties (Whyte, 2011). This requires the valuing of situated knowledge and the understanding that all environmental preferences and priorities are socially constructed. Helping privileged members of coalitions to appreciate how their own fundamental definitions of environmental benefits and harms have been shaped through lived experiences can help to decenter dominant ontologies and create more space for others. This creation of space can begin in a number of ways: consistently asking for the explanation of value statements, not only from those holding minority views, but also from those viewed as authoritative; promoting the authority of people with diverse lived experiences; and learning from works in feminist, Indigenous, and anthropological studies that vividly depict the formation and deployment of situated knowledge (e.g. Checker, 2007; Choy, 2005; Dove, 2011; Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2019; Wilson and Inkster, 2018). In these ways and others, ontological pluralism in environmental movements, grounded in intersectional definitions of power and identity, may lead to more representative reparation plans, activist agendas, and governing institutions.

Highlights

Contributes to environmental justice theory through a case study of water-related environmental justice work in the Palestinian West Bank