Settler ecologies and more-than-One Health: From malaria to avian flu in the Hula Valley,Palestine-Israel

Abstract

The story of the Hula Valley in the Galilee region of Palestine-Israel serves as the focus of this article, which draws on the concepts “more-than-One Health” and “settler ecologies” to highlight the harmful ecological implications of settler colonial projects in this region and elsewhere. Specifically, I tell the story of the Zionist drying of the Hula wetlands in the 1950s for the purpose of fighting off malaria and advancing agriculture in the region—and then of Israel's reflooding and rehabilitation of parts of the Hula in the 1990s in support of the massive annual bird migration. In winter 2021, more than eight thousand cranes succumbed to an avian influenza (H5N1) outbreak in the Hula Valley and over one million chickens in the area's coops had to be culled. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted mainly in summer 2022, this article discusses the historical and socioecological conditions that have arguably enabled and exacerbated the avian outbreak, advocating for a more-than-One Health approach that is founded on acknowledging the settler colonial legacies of this place.

Keywords

More-than-One Health settler ecologies Hula wetland H5N1 (avian flu)decolonizing One Health preparedness & prevention,technopolitics

Introduction

The story of the Hula Valley in the northern Galilee region of Palestine-Israel is the focus of this study, which draws on the concepts of “settler ecologies” and “more-than-One Health” to highlight the disastrous socioecological implications of settler colonial projects in this region and elsewhere and the direct relationship between violence and health. Specifically, I tell the story of the Zionist drainage of the Hula wetlands—one of the oldest freshwater lakes in the world—to fight off malaria and to create agricultural land in the state's early years, and then of Israel's reflooding and restoration of sections of the Hula forty years later in support of the massive annual bird migration that used to happen there. In winter 2021, more than eight thousand cranes succumbed to an avian influenza (H5N1) outbreak in the Hula Valley and over one million chickens had to be killed in the adjacent coops.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out during the summer of 2022—and, in particular, on in-depth, semistructured interviews and observations that I conducted with roughly one dozen nature officials and ornithologists, which build on more than a decade of a broader study of settler ecologies in this region as an insider ethnographer (Braverman, 2009, 2023c)—this article discusses the historical and ecological conditions that have enabled and exacerbated the bird flu outbreak in the Hula Valley. Inspired by an emerging body of anthropological scholarship on H5N1 (especially Keck, 2020 and Porter, 2019), I undertake a multibeing analysis to illuminate the interdependencies of poultry, pathogens, Indigenous peoples, settler farmers, ornithologists, public health officials, water, mosquitoes, and soil that arguably coshape this region's socionatural worlds.

Despite its global dimensions—which are especially potent in the context of migrating cranes—this research remains committed to, and grounded in, the everyday spaces and dynamics of the Hula Valley in Palestine-Israel and traces their genealogy through the last half-century. Relatedly, in her ethnography of bird flu in Vietnam, medical anthropologist Natalie Porter points to the scalar tensions between local and global sites, insisting that although the supranational, multinational, and multilateral nature of public health institutions calls for new kinds of analyses beyond discrete territories and populations, the local still matters (2019: 20). Working in Hong Kong, Frédéric Keck, too, highlights the productive tension between regional and global scales, offering that birds carrying flu viruses and the ways that Asian societies have related to them reveal important aspects of Asia's position in the global economy.

In addition to its multibeing underpinnings, this article is part of a growing body of studies that demonstrate the way that technoscientific interventions aimed at improving a problem—here, draining a wetland to reduce malaria in the Hula and feeding birds to entice them to return to the reflooded lake—often cause a new problem that is as bad, if not worse, than the original, and that the attempt to then solve that new problem by the same means only causes further ecological devastation (see, e.g., Buck, 2019; Huesemann & Huesemann, 2011; Kolbert 2022). In the Hula, the drainage of the wetland brought about an ecological disaster; and when the wetlands were partially restored, the large numbers of cranes that had returned succumbed to a bird flu outbreak, causing a health and environmental disaster declared by the Israeli government as “the most serious damage to wildlife in the history of the country” (Euronews, 2021).

One Health is the idea that the health of humans, animals, and the environment is so intertwined that it can only be achieved when considering together all elements of this vital triangle (see, e.g., Kahn, 2023; Woods et al., 2018). Despite the differences between them, One Health approaches indeed all advance a comprehensive attitude toward health that sees human, animal, and ecological health as interdependent and coproduced (Braverman, 2023c; Kahn, 2023). The World Health Organization, a global leader in public human health, recently defined One Health as “an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals, and ecosystems” (WHO, 2021).

Precisely because of its holistic breadth, One Health is often perceived as offering a potential solution to that chronic and recurring error of technofix-type thinking. To date, however, most One Health approaches have tended to ignore the historical roots of contemporary health problems, turning a blind eye toward political, social, and economic inequalities and therefore exacerbating these problems (Craddock and Hinchliffe, 2015; Porter, 2019; Zinstag et al., 2021). Hence, my article highlights that current One Health approaches, on their own, are unlikely to address the vortex of problems created by technofixing prior problems. Instead, a recognition must take place of the deeper multidimensional and structural issues at hand.

Joining other emerging calls to embrace decolonial, intersectional, participatory, multispecies, structural, more-than-One Health approaches (Baquero, 2021; Hardy and Standley, 2022; Lainé & Morand, 2020; Van Patter et al., 2023; Wallace et al., 2015; Woldehanna & Zimicki, 2015), this article specifically documents Israel's settler colonial legacies and their contemporary traces in the natural landscape so that the violence embedded in this landscape may begin to heal. I recount the Hula Valley story in six parts, each documenting one component of the settler state's active management of its settler ecologies in this place: dispossessing, draining, restoring, feeding, burying and culling, and preparing. The transformative Zionist project of drying the Hula wetlands is a powerful instance of “terraforming”: the process of substantially altering massive tracts of ecological systems and landscapes within the colonies so as to create “Neo-Europes” (Ghosh, 2021: 54–55; see also Crosby, 2015). Such terraforming projects carried out by the Zionist state have arguably set the stage for the myriad ecoviolences that have ensued thereafter. A more-than-One Health approach might illuminate the path toward decolonizing settler ecologies.

Part I. Dispossessing

The Hula Valley (Huleh in Arabic) is an area of Palestine-Israel in the eastern Galilee at the northern end of the Jordan River (Figure 1). Situated at the unique junction of Africa, Asia, and Europe, this area displayed a large variety of plant and animal species, also hosting massive numbers of migrating wildlife. The valley was divided into two areas: the lake at the southern end and the swamp in the north. As one of the oldest freshwater lakes in the world, this lake acted as a natural filtration system for the water flowing into the upper Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee. Finally, archeologists found stone tools from 73,000 BC and neolithic settlements in this area (Manoukian, 2023).

Figure 1.

Maps showing the location of the Hula Valley area including Agamon Ha’Hula and the drainage canals (left), and the location of the Hula Valley within Israel (right). Source: Litaor MI et al. (2011), “Genesis, classification and human modification of peat and mineral-organic soils, Hula Valley, Israel.”

In modern times, the valley and its swamplands were home to the Ghawarna community, comprised of deserters from the Egyptian army of Ibrahim Pasha who conquered Palestine in 1832 and Algerian refugees from the failed 1847 revolution against French rule (Salhab, 2011: 105; see also Khawalde and Rabinowitz, 2002; Sufian, 2007). The Hula area had the largest papyrus habitat in the world, and the Ghawarna harvested and weaved the papyrus and raised water buffalo (Figure 2). A Victorian adventurer named John MacGregor drew the first modern maps of the area. In 1882, a traveler wrote that the region was “among the finest hunting grounds in Syria” and that it was home to “panthers, leopards, bears, wild boars, wolves, foxes, jackals, hyenas, gazelles and otters” (Wikipedia). Mortality rates here were high due to malaria.

Figure 2.

Water buffalos and the Ghawarna community, circa 1885. Wikipedia commons.

The idea of draining the lake and swamps was conceived during the Ottoman era. In 1908, the Ottoman government granted a concession to drain the marsh to a French firm, which sold it to Lebanese businessman, Selim Salam, with the understanding that he would initiate a drainage project. The concession agreement set aside around 16,000 dunams (4,000 acres) for the Ghawarna, although the area they were farming and utilizing was much greater. When the British first conquered Palestine in 1917, they recognized the Salam concession and reaffirmed it in 1923. In 1933, Salam agreed to sell this concession to the Zionist Palestine Land Development Corporation, a company established as part of the World Zionist Organization to purchase land in Palestine with the aim of populating it with Jewish immigrants.

The initial modern Jewish settlement in the Hula Valley, Yesod Ha’Maala, was established on the western shore of the Hula Lake in 1883 during the first wave of Zionist immigration to Palestine, also referred to as the First Aliyah. In 1937, Kibbutz Hulata was established down the road from Yesod Ha’Maala. I grew up a few hours south of the Hula in West Jerusalem and as a teenager I would hitchhike my way up north to visit my uncle at this kibbutz. While there, I would wake up before dawn to harvest the watermelons before it got too hot to work in the fields. My uncle was the headmaster of the regional school in the valley and we would often talk about the history of his kibbutz, but I don’t recall hearing about the Ghawarna and their erasure from this space.

In 1948, there were 35 villages in the Hula Valley, 12 Jewish and 23 Arab-Palestinian. During the 1948 war, the Israeli military embarked on “Operation Broom”—an eerily suitable name for the methodical destruction of the Palestinian villages in the area, alongside the eviction and killing of the villagers and their animals. In “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,” Israeli historian Benny Morris writes that during Operation Broom numerous Palestinian homes were blown up by local Haganah military units, arguing that this operation had a “tremendous psychological impact” on the Palestinians in the area and that it “paved the way for their conquest and the flight of their inhabitants” (Morris, 2004: 250). On May 19, 1948, the Hula village of al-Zawiya was destroyed and its inhabitants expelled. According to the Israeli nonprofit Zochrot (“remembering” in Hebrew), orders were given to not allow any Arabs to return to the Hula. “Open fire on them all. Return fire in case of attack” (Galili in Zochrot, 2012).

By the end of the war, nearly all of the Hula's Palestinian inhabitants were expelled from the newly established borders of the state. At that point, the Israeli Development Authority transferred their “abandoned property” to the Jewish National Fund (JNF)—a semigovernmental agency that has been purchasing land for Jewish settlement since 1905, while simultaneously managing Israel's afforestation (Braverman, 2009). The path was effectively cleared for the JNF to start draining the swamp. The logic behind the drainage project was to reduce malaria in the area by removing the mosquitos’ breeding grounds, to free up the agricultural land under the lake and swamps, and to divert the water for agricultural needs. At that point, the rates of malaria were already declining because of the use of DDT and there were also warnings that the peat soil would not make for fertile agricultural land. Nonetheless, the draining project proceeded, partly to create an agricultural buffer zone with Syria (Lorber, 2012: 31). By 1958, the Hula Lake was fully drained. The final stage of the project was the draining of the swamps at the southern end of the lake. This stage was completed after the 1967 war (Lehn & Davis, 1988: 141).

Part II. Draining

The draining of the Hula Valley did not occur in a geohistorical vacuum. Acts of draining wetlands were integral to many ecological projects initiated by a variety of settler colonies, with the goals of eliminating diseases, advancing modern agriculture, and enhancing settlement and productivity. The Dutch were, and still are, considered experts in water engineering, having gained worldwide recognition for their ability to “[keep] the water out” (Bijker, 2007: 120). Heavily reliant on hydrological engineering expertise, hard infrastructure, and private capital, Jakarta's planned Great Garuda Sea Wall (GGSW) project is a recent expression of big infrastructure development in the context of water. Environmental scholar Emma Colven wrote about the project:

The design of the GGSW is underpinned by the same modernist impulses that characterized water infrastructure projects of the twentieth century—to display humankind's control over unruly nature, and to ‘modernize’ Jakarta. … The project was designed by a consortium of Dutch firms in coordination with the provincial government of Jakarta. … While Dutch expertise has travelled to a range of sites worldwide, Jakarta is distinguished as a former outpost of the Dutch East India Company and an ex-colony. (2017: 251)

Dutch science and technology studies scholar Wiebe Bijker argued, along these lines, that dykes, dams, levees, and other such “sociotechnologies,” as he calls them, are “thick with power relations and politics” (Bijker, 2007: 115). Indeed, sociotechnologies both shape and are shaped by sociopolitical structures.

Certain scholars use the term “technopolitics” to capture the coproduction of technology and politics within social and natural worlds (Colven, 2017: 252; see also; Mitchell, 2002; Sneddon, 2015). Timothy Mitchell's study in Egypt from two decades ago is still highly relevant in this context as it weaves together war, disease, and agriculture. Mitchell explains that those can only be understood through recognizing the interconnections between human and nonhuman elements—in his case study, such technologies have included dams, mosquitos, synthetic fertilizers, war, and human-made famine. In his words: “For many postcolonial governments, this ability to rearrange the natural and social environment became a means to demonstrate the strength of the modern state as a techno-economic power” (2002: 26).

The draining of swamps in the United States is another example of how drainage projects became technoeconomic powers in the hands of the state. In the United States, this power was established by the federal Swamp Land Acts of 1849, 1850, and 1851. The Swamp Land Act of 1850, entitled “An act to enable the State of Arkansas and other States to reclaim the swamp lands within their limits,” provided a mechanism for reverting the title of federally owned swamp lands to states that agreed to drain the land. Aimed at the development of Florida's Everglades, roughly 20 million acres (81,000 km²) of land in this area were transferred under this Act to the state of Florida. The Swamp Land Act also spurred drainage and development in other regions of the United States, including areas around Indiana's Kankakee River and Michigan's Lake St Clair's shores. Due to their harmful ecological impacts, most of these statutory provisions were reversed by the Clean Water Act of 1972. Nonetheless, their historical effects on development and settlement patterns throughout the United States remain evident to this day (see also Nash, 2006: 75).

Other modern drainage projects include the swamps in Tamil Nadu, India (Baka, 2013: 413), Australia (O’Gorman, 2021), Panama (Cramer, 2013: 974), California (Dillon, 2022), and Iraq (Hussein & Asal, 2023). In all of these sites, the draining of waterbodies caused a significant decline in biodiversity. In Iraq, the project of draining the wetlands led by Saddam Hussein's government during the uprising of 1991 resulted in a massive displacement of the Marsh Arabs, the local Indigenous semipastoral community (ibid.). Following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, waterflow to the marshes was restored and the ecosystem began to recover (ibid.). Similarly, the Netherlands is currently initiating reflooding projects in drained areas (see, e.g., the New York Times, 2017).

In 1951, the JNF began draining Lake Hula and the surrounding swamplands. Israeli environmental historian Alon Tal describes the prevailing mindset at the time:

As its first major land reclamation project after Israel's independence, the JNF announced its intention to drain what it called the ‘Huleh Swamp’ to make way for the agricultural cultivation of 100,000 dunams. To the JNF, the Huleh region in the northern Galilee was the epitome of forsaken land crying out for reclamation. Insects and disease had kept it nonproductive except for modest papyrus harvesting and some fishing. (2002, n.p.)

Although it was perceived as a monumental achievement for the state of Israel, and for the Zionist settlement project more broadly, the damages of this transformation of the swamp into agricultural land soon became evident. In the words of Israeli geographer Moshe Inbar:

This man-made project marked the termination of one of the oldest documented lakes and wetlands in history, with a rich diverse aquatic biota. … Agricultural development of the reclaimed land was unsuccessful, and soils were affected by continuous underground fires [which resulted from the post-drainage drop in the water table]. Weathered peat soils, without a vegetation cover, were eroded by wind. Another ecological effect was the release of nutrients by the decomposing peat, with the nutrients carried by the Jordan River floods into the entropic Lake Tiberius [Kinneret]. (2002: 155)

It is now widely accepted that the draining of the Hula wetlands resulted in an environmental disaster in the region of epic proportions. According to environmental historian Rachel Gottesman et al., in the Hula, “Zionism's project of heroic abundance turned out to be an ecological disaster and an agricultural fiasco” (2021: 344; see also Anton, 2008: 77, 79; Gorney, 2007: 470; Salhab, 2011: 108; Sufian, 2007: 101–102, 336; see also Ben Hamo, 2022; Berger 2021). In an interview we held in 2019, Palestinian zoologist and director of the Palestinian Natural History Museum in Bethlehem, Mazin Qumsiyeh, described what he referred to as the three most harmful ecological projects of the Zionist enterprise. Draining the wetlands of the Hula Valley was the first item on his list. Qumsiyeh detailed the massive loss this project caused in irreplaceable ecosystems, species extinction, and viral outbreaks. Fifty years later, the Zionists regretted “each and every one of these major projects,” he told me, but “by then it was too late.” Borrowing the term used by Palestinians to denote the catastrophe of the 1948 war, Qumsiyeh called the devastation wrought by Zionism's ecological projects an “environmental Nakba” (interview, quoted in Braverman, 2023a: 34–35).

The failure of the massive draining project in the Hula simultaneously marked the birth of the modern Zionist environmental movement. At the request of nature lovers, the JNF set aside a small area of approximately 3.5 square kilometers of recreated papyrus swampland and in 1964 declared it as the first nature reserve in Israel. The concerns over the draining of the Hula also provided the impetus for the establishment of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI), still the largest and strongest environmental nonprofit organization in the country, setting the stage for founding the Israel Nature and Parks Authority (as it was later named) in the 1960s. The Hula Nature Reserve is listed by the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands as a Wetland of International Importance (Ramsar, 1996) and is managed by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority (herein, INPA).

Part III. Restoring

After years of failed attempts to turn the Hula Valley into productive agricultural lands, in the 1990s the JNF decided to reflood the lake. In 1994, parts of the valley that included areas unsuitable for farming were flooded after heavy rains, and the JNF left the flooded area intact. The initial plan was to build hotels on the new lake shores, modeled after safari lodges in Africa. As part of that plan, the JNF sought to introduce into the area safari animals such as zebras and giraffes. But the SPNI challenged the JNF in court and won, and the plan was stashed. The new lake that was created in this space was named “Agamon Ha’Hula” (in Hebrew: the “mini-lake”; see Figure 3). Alongside the rehabilitation of the lake, the JNF designed a system of crop rotation, raised the water table, and redirected the Jordan River to its previous path, newly capturing the nitrate-rich water that flowed to Lake Kinneret and using it for agriculture. While highlighting the importance of its rehabilitation activities, the JNF underplayed the original destruction it wrought 40 years earlier. From the organization's website:

Creating the lake is [] good for nature conservation. … In the rehabilitation project, KKL-JNF [the Israeli chapter of the JNF, IB] has turned an area covering 75 square kilometers from an ecological hazard into an area in which a wide variety of plants and animals flourish and has turned the Hula Valley into a tourism center with birdwatching sites, canals filled with fish, recreation areas in nature, land animals and birds, which offers abundant opportunities for touring by car, by bike or on foot. (KKL-JNF, 2022)

Figure 3.

Agamon Ha’Hula after rehabilitation by the JNF. Photo by author, July 2022.

By transforming parts of the valley “back” into a wetland habitat, the JNF has attempted to transform its own image from a destroyer of nature to its savior. This eco-Zionist retelling of the Hula history thus legitimizes, through greenwashing, the impactful actions by the JNF, which are aimed toward the project of purchasing land and (re)settling it with Jewish inhabitants only (Braverman, 2019). The settler state's perception and promotion of itself as an ecological enterprise that focuses on nature protection and conservation as its primary mission is an important tenet of “settler ecologies,” a concept I coined elsewhere to highlight the recruitment of nature and its management for advancing the colonial project (Braverman, 2023a). Environmental restoration emerges in the Hula as a form of colonial erasure.

As for the state's approach toward the different local communities dwelling in the Hula Valley, the asymmetry could not be starker: while the draining project was enabled through the dispossession and elimination of the Ghawarna community from the valley, the Jewish Israeli farmers residing in this place have been active participants in the rehabilitation process. Donating their land rather than being displaced, these farmers, mostly residing in kibbutzim (a type of settlement that is typically associated with the elite, European-Ashkenazi, Zionist society), stipulated that an alternative means of income from the land must be included in any plan if they were to cooperate with the state.

But Israel's settler society is not homogeneous: it contains peripheral communities that have themselves been marginalized through processes of internal colonialism (Tuck & Yang 2012). In the 1950s and 1960s, Israel settled the hills surrounding the Hula Valley with marginalized Arab Jews from northern Africa, Iraq, and Iran. To this day, these communities receive subsidies for their chicken coops, which supply the vast majority of eggs to the Israeli market. Simultaneously, electoral politics have limited the regulation of these coops, causing them to lag behind international industry standards. Such inner colonial dynamics within the Zionist settler state toward the non-European Jews living amidst it will become important later in this story.

After its restoration, Agamon Ha’Hula has come to cover an area of one square kilometer, interspersed with islands that serve as protected bird nesting sites. Within a few years, this new waterscape transformed into a stopover destination for tens of thousands of common cranes migrating from Finland and Siberia to Ethiopia every winter. Accordingly, an estimated 59,000 acres of the northern Hula Valley, which includes the nature reserve, was recognized by BirdLife International as an Important Bird Area (one of 13,000 such sites worldwide; BirdLife International, 2024a, 2024b). This is where the next part of my story begins.

Part IV. Feeding

A few years after the reflooding of sections of the Hula Valley, the cranes became a central attraction for hundreds of thousands of tourists, who have flockedf to this area from around the country and the world to witness what was soon dubbed the “eighth world wonder” (Rinat, 2017). At around the same time, the Jewish farmers in the valley transitioned from cotton farming to cultivating maize, peanuts, and chickpeas. The combined impact of reflooding and agricultural changes caused an exponential incline in the number of cranes who stopped over at the Hula, strengthening the attractiveness of this site for tourists but sowing devastation in the farmed fields.

Provided with ample food, water, and environmental protection, soon half of the 100,000 cranes passing through the region opted to winter at the Hula instead of continuing to Africa, creating a conflict between the farmers and the birds. One of the region's ornithologists explained to me that because of the importance and strength of the agricultural sector in Israel, INPA had to intervene quickly and present immediate solutions. The nature authority researched how other countries have resolved similar conflicts. Killing the common cranes was how the United States managed a similar conflict—but that was not how the Israeli nature officials decided to resolve the problem in the Hula. Instead, they opted for concentrated feedings at contained sites. That way, the cranes would be fed, the ecotourism project would continue unhindered, and the farmers would not suffer frequent damage to their crops. The state purchased large amounts of crane food to avert the conflict. This bird–human resolution lasted for about two decades (Naveh, interview).

As part of the resolution, conservation managers developed digital technologies to chase the cranes away from farmlands that they were not supposed to visit. The latest development on this front is toward the use of laser pointers. “Believe it or not,” BirdLife ornithologist Nadav Yisraeli told me, “there's actually one guy in Israel who is designing a system with towers, cameras, and lasers in the field that will be controlled from a center somewhere else using AI technology. The cameras will identify the cranes and will automatically point a laser on them and chase them away.” “It's like Star Wars,” he said, chuckling, and added that: “The army is operating similar systems on the border fences with Lebanon and Gaza.” As I have shown elsewhere, digital technologies easily spill over from nonhuman to human uses, in turn naturalizing, normalizing, and thus legitimizing them (Braverman, 2023a: 220). With the help of such Star Wars technologies, soon “[e]veryone got a bit addicted to the idea to that the cranes would be fed in this area of the lake and everyone would chase the cranes from all the other fields and crops and the problem would be solved,” INPA's deputy chief scientist Uri Naveh told me. He continued:

The cranes stay there for the night, and they don’t have to travel far from the roosting area to the feeding area. It's like a crane ‘bed and breakfast.’ The cranes started teaching their hatchlings that there is no need to migrate any more to Ethiopia—why not stay halfway in the Hula Valley and have a nice winter in Israel? There are generations of cranes who never learned that there is Africa on the other side of the migration route. … [But] no one really paid attention to this—until the outbreak last year. (interview)

As is typically the case with technological solutions to ecological problems, instead of attending to the source of the problem, such solutions merely push the problem further so that it manifests differently, often enhancing it in the process. The realization of the inevitable failure of technological solutions for large scale ecological problems brings me to the next part of the Hula story.

Part V. Burying and culling

In winter 2021, more than eight thousand cranes succumbed to an avian influenza outbreak in the Hula Valley and over one million chickens in the area's coops had to be culled. Avian Influenza A, or H5N1, is a highly contagious zoonotic infection that is often fatal in birds but considered low risk to human health. It was first detected in 2014 in the Americas. Many factors came together that culminated in the H5N1 outbreak in the Hula Valley in Palestine-Israel: the densely concentrated crane populations in the valley, the underregulated chicken coops on the surrounding hills, the proximity of wild and agricultural birds in this relatively small area, and the global insurgence in avian flu. In light of the risk to the country's poultry industry and to humans, the state of Israel declared the H5N1 outbreak of 2021-2022 a national security crisis. According to Israel's Minister of the Environment, this outbreak has wrought “the most serious damage to wildlife in the history of the country” (Euronews, 2021). At the time of the eruption, roughly 30,000 cranes were roosting in the lake. Soon after, the lake was covered with crane corpses (see also in Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Dead cranes in the Hula Valley in 2024. Photo by Yoram Malka, February 14, 2024. Courtesy of INPA.

The state's veterinarian, Roni King, was alerted to the scene to inspect the bodies. He entered the water with no protection. King explained to me later that: “H5N1 wasn’t even on our radar at the time—it was never recorded on such a scale in cranes before. When we first sent photos to our colleagues abroad … they instructed us to look for poisoning. And when we suggested H5N1, they said, ‘You must be wrong. It can’t be’” (interview). Ornithologist Nadav Yisraeli recounted, similarly, that: “in 2021 and at the beginning of 2022 we were seeing things that we have never seen before in H5N1” (interview).

Specifically, Israeli authorities cautioned that the outbreak among chickens is partially due to the Israeli poultry farmers on the hills surrounding the Hula Valley, who have been operating using unsanitary conditions with little monitoring and reporting. Notwithstanding, these unmodernized chicken coops produce the majority of Israel's subsidized eggs. On their end, the farmers were up in arms over the emerging proposals to remove their quotas for egg production and to open the industry to local and international competition. A 2022 report issued by the Israeli Ombudsman on the state of Israel's egg production painted a bleak picture of this industry, indicating that 92% of the coops do not operate under official permits and that the vast majority do not comply with the size standards set by the European Union: 750 square centimeters per cage. In Palestine-Israel, the size of most cages is 400 square centimeters (Ombudsman, 2022).

INPA's deputy chief scientist explained that: “The influenza virus [moves] between wild animals and poultry, back and forth like [a] ping pong ball. [Yet] there is almost no biosecurity in the poultry industry in Israel. Any wild bird can enter into any hen house or poultry farm and bring the influenza or carry the influenza out.” This official also explained why reforms in the egg industry near the Hula have been so difficult. The main problem, he lamented, lies in the social and political sphere. In his words: “The [Jewish] people who settled in the north [of Israel] came from African countries in the 1950s and … it serves the interest of some of the [political] parties to preserve their problem rather than solve it. … In terms of the environment, this is a disaster” (Naveh, interview). This explanation about the social injustice undergridding the unhealthy animal and ecological conditions in the valley, articulated by a top Israeli official, illuminates the expansive scope of colonialism, which impacts not only Indigenous communities but also the settler society itself.

Another exacerbating factor of the outbreak in the Hula was the lack of communication between the different agencies managing the valley. This is not too surprising when one considers the historical tensions between the JNF and Israel's environmental groups, for example regarding the country's afforestation project (Braverman, 2019) and going back to the project of drying the Hula Valley itself. Major disagreements between the agencies have erupted in this context as well—for example, about whether to feed the cranes and how. To tackle these challenges and in light of the increasing risk of repeated outbreaks with spillover to humans, the Israeli government established a One Health committee. Although it assembled representatives from all the relevant agencies, the effectiveness of this committee has been limited mostly due to a lack of collaboration and transparency between the agencies. An observer in the commission on behalf of Israel's BirdLife did not know, for example, if and how many cranes died in the area designated as a nature reserve as he was only provided data for the zone he was responsible for under JNF management. Simultaneously, the Ministry of Health, also a member of the committee, cut the water flow from the Hula Valley into the Sea of Galilee, apparently without consulting or even notifying the other agencies on the committee. The result was an increased concentration of H5N1 virus in the lake's water, which increased the risk to the health of the bird populations on site (Naveh, interview).

In May 2023, the World Organization for Animal Health reported that the avian flu epidemic season has erupted on a global scale, with 48 outbreaks in poultry and 33 in nonpoultry birds over a period of three weeks, mainly in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. About 1.5 million poultry birds died or were culled during this one season (Guardian, 2023; Quammen, 2023). Prominent One Health advocates such as Chris Walzer of the Wildlife Conservation Society have long cautioned that the continued “siloization” across sectoral boundaries is one of the central barriers to effective One Health practices (Walzer in Braverman, 2023b). But while the application of One Health in the Israeli context has been less than ideal from an intersectoral perspective, even a more intersectoral, implementation of One Health would have arguably missed the mark. This, because of the blindness of Israel's One Health approach to the historical legacies of this place and to the settler colonial dispossessions and violence that have ensued here. In the next—and final—part of the story, I point to some of the problems of the current governance practices in the Hula Valley and signal how these might be tackled.

Part VI: Preparing

Over the years, One Health has taken multiple forms and variations (Braverman, 2023c) and was recently adopted enthusiastically by politicians and international organizations as part of their responses to the COVID pandemic (see, e.g., Carbis Bay Communique, 2021). Increasingly, One Health approaches have veered away from prevention, instead planning and preparing for anticipated outbreaks. In his book “Unprepared,” anthropologist Andrew Lakoff examines the history of preparedness as a style of reasoning and a set of governmental techniques for approaching uncertain threats (2017: 8). Within a span of a few decades, Lakoff documents, preparedness has become the prevalent form of global health governance for future pandemics. Such a focus on preparedness is part of a wider globalization and securitization of health, which redefines disease outbreaks not only as a threat to local human health but also as a global health concern that poses a threat to world security. According to Porter, these accounts demonstrate how institutions and humans organize global networks and assemblages to predict and prepare for the coming plague (2019: 4). Effectively, she writes, “a new ethos of preparedness animates global policies and practices” (ibid.). Along these lines, the work of anthropologist Frédéric Keck in Hong Kong studies “how techniques to prepare for influenza pandemics have transformed our relations to birds” (2020: 2). Keck writes in this context that:

Billions of poultry have been killed all over the world to eradicate potentially pandemic pathogens from jumping over the species barriers. Migratory birds have been monitored to understand the spread of flu viruses outside of their place of emergence. … If the deadly pandemic bird flu virus still remains to come, its anticipation has already modified the world in which humans live with animals, wild and domestic (ibid.).

The bird experts in the Hula Valley, too, highlighted preparedness above all other reasons for governing health across the human-nonhuman divide. I recorded the following statement from SPNI's ornithologist: “You have to understand that in wildlife, there is very little that we can actually do to either prevent the eruptions or to minimize the damage. There is not much we can do but prepare.” And yet, he added: “As I see it, we will not be prepared for the next outbreak” (Yisraeli, interview).

Despite its heightened focus on preparedness and many other other problems with the traditional One Health approach, it would have been a step in the right direction when governing health in the Hula Valley. Working across sectors to address the interconnection between chicken and wild birds and to coordinate responses among the various agencies operating in this space would have gone a long way toward mitigating the damages of flu outbreaks. However, a more radical application of One Health is called for if we seek to stop and heal from colonial violence. Such an application has been referred to in the literature as “more-than-One Health” (Hinchliffe, 2015).

Elsewhere, I documented three aspects of the turn toward “more-than-one” health: first, a move beyond One Health's hyper regard of humans; second, a push against One Health's typically heightened emphasis on zoonotic diseases; and third, a transition of One Health from its mostly exclusive focus on scientific discourses to incorporate local, Indigenous, and transdisciplinary discourses (Braverman, 2023c). This latter aspect would also incorporate scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences (Baquero 2021; Hardy and Standley, 2022; Lainé and Morand, 2020; Law, 2011; Van Patter et al., 2023; Wallace et al., 2015; Woldehanna and Zimicki, 2015). This scholarship suggests, in a nutshell, that to heal ourselves and the planet, humans should aspire beyond unitary, one-world ideas of governance toward plural understandings that reveal and address racism, capitalism, and colonialism. The comments I recorded from INPA's deputy chief scientist intuit this kind of future oriented and hopeful perspective. Since his intervention is uniquely important, I quote it here in full:

If you want to look at the broader picture, then we need to change our entire perspective toward what used to be swamps or aquatic areas. In many instances, these places were used for fisheries. But because the fishery economy collapsed, they turned into solar panel farms. Rather than giving back to nature in terms of trying to turn the old fisheries back into natural habitats, people are still trying to make money in another way. They call it renewable or green energy, but in five or ten years this is not going to be economically viable. Instead, [we should be saying]: we made these mistakes again and again. Perhaps this time we should try to do things differently? The main problem with all these outbreaks, I think, is [that] because the birds lost so much of their natural habitat, they need to use a very small percentage of what's left and it's just not enough. I think the government needs to start changing its perspective toward One Health. If the environment would be healthier, then the cost of health budgets would lower dramatically. But unfortunately, everything is viewed in the short term and not in the long term. And no one tries to solve the problem through the ecological lens, only through [the] political one. (interview, Naveh)

Unlike this individual official's vision, Israel's formal version of One Health does not openly regard the historical and political factors operating in this region, nor does it adopt a long-term perspective. Instead, the state is blind to its settler colonial legacies and to the version of racial capitalism that has evolved here. The memories from and traces of the Ghawarna community are actively and continuously erased from this space and so is the ongoing marginalization of the Jewish Arab community sent by the state to settle in what was then considered a peripheral frontier or “frontiepheria” (Yiftachel & Zfadia, 2008).

Conclusion: Can more-than-One Health decolonize settler ecologies?

This article has attempted a cursory spatiotemporal sketch of nature management in Galilee's Hula Valley from the 1950s until recently. Malaria, heat, peat soil, the Hula Lake, and the Jordan River have figured in this story alongside Indigenous basket weavers, water buffalo, bird and health experts, Israeli agricultural and chicken farmers, migratory waterfowl, and poultry. These complex multibeing relations have culminated in the latest eruptions of avian flu in the valley in 2021 and 2022. Seen from a broad historical viewpoint, the malaria parasite and the bird virus are intrinsically connected through the massive terraforming project that has been taking place here and that has been so central to Zionism's settler ecologies.

The technoscientific logic of tackling malaria through drying up the freshwater lake and the entire watershed ecosystem surrounding it—the violence inflicted in this process on the earth and its more-than-human forms of life—has transformed the natural landscape so profoundly that it has arguably created the conditions for the recent and extreme eruptions of bird flu. Such violence, when inflicted upon the environment, results in heightened vulnerability, in turn translating into further vulnerabilities and vortexing into more and more violence. But could the colonial foundations of conservation management be reversed so that they might serve to restore and heal rather than spread ruination? One Health claims to do just that.

Yet One Health has not gone far enough. The problem with One Health generally, and with the partial application of a One Health model in the Hula Valley in particular, is that it has become a catchphrase for benevolent ways of seeing health through a one-world perspective. Such a view, although a step in the right direction in terms of linking human health to that of more-than-humans and ecological systems and thus broadening the scope of the discussion, too often does not account for the systemic issues underlying the current unhealthy course of events. Specifically, the state of Israel has yet to recognize the myriad forms of violence it has inflicted and is still inflicting on both humans and nonhumans through its settlement project, which includes the drying of the wetlands and the eradication of the native communities that dwelled there. Similarly, in her work on bird flu in Vietnam, Natalie Porter has called to develop “a more inclusive politics that challenges the separation of nature and culture, and that advances nonhumans as significant social and political actors.” This, while remaining “attentive to violence and its inequality, displacement and dispossession that animate livestock economies.” To get there, however, one must expose the biopolitical efforts to “prioritize certain life forms and lifeways over others” (Porter, 2019: 20).

This article has attempted both to raise awareness of the continued violence of settler ecologies in Palestine-Israel and to advocate for a more nuanced form of One Health governance. These two missions are intertwined: a sincere acknowledgement of the traumas inflicted by the colonial project is the only way to heal the socioecological fissures that continue to make this place sick. A radical ecological mode of thinking that includes a retelling of history and a deeply compassionate way of envisioning the present moment is thus the only path for unsettling colonial traumas and for transitioning toward more hopeful futures. Certain Israeli officials are already there, lamenting Israel's past choices and calling to do better in the future. Engaging in more-than-One Health would usher the state of Israel toward decolonizing settler ecologies in the Hula Valley and beyond.

Highlights

The drainage of the Hula wetlands in Palestine-Israel was a settler colonial project that served to eliminate native Palestinian communities.

The settler ecologies in the Hula Valley have more recently manifested in the avian flu outbreak in the region.

A more-than-One Health approach to the Hula outbreak would require recognition of past and ongoing settler colonial dynamics.

The Hula Valley story demonstrates the interconnection of settler ecologies and health.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to dedicate this article to the memory of Henry Buller, a brilliant colleague and generous soul. My last encounter with him was during a workshop on One Health, where we discussed some of the ideas I write about here.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This article was made possible by funding from the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, the University at Buffalo, SUNY.

ORCID iD

Irus Braverman

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