Table of Contents for Struggling for Time
Acknowledgments
Agriculture is one of the last human practices tied to natural cycles, rhythms, and times. Encounters with state officials reveal the constant work of turning agrarian time into a seat of power. The colonization of time is also central to settler colonial societies and time is a focus of power in agrarian environments' politics during climate change. The chapter delineates the timescape and agrarian imaginary analytical lenses that are featured throughout the book. It illustrates the Palestinian-Zionist agrarian timescape through four temporal modes: temporal legalities of dispossession, agrarian modernization/tradition binary, labor time exploitation, and "return" as a central temporality of agrarian practice in Israel/Palestine. The chapter discusses the author's fieldwork, the research methodology, and the outline of the book's chapters.
Map of Fieldwork Sites in Israel/Palestine
Agriculture is one of the last human practices tied to natural cycles, rhythms, and times. Encounters with state officials reveal the constant work of turning agrarian time into a seat of power. The colonization of time is also central to settler colonial societies and time is a focus of power in agrarian environments' politics during climate change. The chapter delineates the timescape and agrarian imaginary analytical lenses that are featured throughout the book. It illustrates the Palestinian-Zionist agrarian timescape through four temporal modes: temporal legalities of dispossession, agrarian modernization/tradition binary, labor time exploitation, and "return" as a central temporality of agrarian practice in Israel/Palestine. The chapter discusses the author's fieldwork, the research methodology, and the outline of the book's chapters.
Introduction
Agriculture is one of the last human practices tied to natural cycles, rhythms, and times. Encounters with state officials reveal the constant work of turning agrarian time into a seat of power. The colonization of time is also central to settler colonial societies and time is a focus of power in agrarian environments' politics during climate change. The chapter delineates the timescape and agrarian imaginary analytical lenses that are featured throughout the book. It illustrates the Palestinian-Zionist agrarian timescape through four temporal modes: temporal legalities of dispossession, agrarian modernization/tradition binary, labor time exploitation, and "return" as a central temporality of agrarian practice in Israel/Palestine. The chapter discusses the author's fieldwork, the research methodology, and the outline of the book's chapters.
1.Draining the Swamp
In al-Battuf Plain/Beit Netofa Valley's planning policy, multiple networks of time manifest as a tool of power. This agrarian terrain is mostly owned by Palestinian citizens and is considered by state ecologists to be a unique traditional agriculture landscape and wetland habitat, which has become scarce in Israel due to wetland drainage history. Palestinian small-holder agriculture, denigrated in the past by the Zionist movement, allowed a wetland habitat to survive. The historic colonial narrative on the land's stewards is upturned. Israeli agricultural sustainability policies for al-Battuf encapsulate timescape as governance. These include bureaucratic procedures' perpetual delays, governing through relations of ecological knowledge and time, and a replay of the treatment of Palestinian agriculturalists as non-modern, but now because they wish to develop agriculture rather than conserve it. Through the timescape governance, a green grab occurs, an appropriation in the name of biodiversity and landscape conservation.
2.Returning to the Seventh Year
Once every seven years, Israel allegedly sells its land to a non-Jew, to practice the biblical commandment of shmita. The shmita regulation has increased over the last decades posing challenges to the state by making the bible a policy paper. Shmita is the most profitable year for the Palestinian agriculturalist, whose agriculture merely survives otherwise. The shmita regulation and time mediation are compared with the state's neglect of the Quranic tradition of inheritance. Palestinian agriculturalists' ways of agrarian survival and their entanglements with shmita system are examined. The recent regulation of shmita embodies settler nation-making through the calendar and Zionist reclamation of biblical traditions to claim Jewish indigeneity in the land. Shmita sheds light on a cyclical temporality of the settler society and therefore questions the temporal dichotomy between settler and native that has been defined as a structure in settler colonial scholarship.
3.Cultivating Time in an Olive Tree
Following the creation of new olive breeds, the emergence of water for Jewish olives, harvest technique changes, the marketing of olive oil as a Jewish traditional product, and claiming of olive terraces as both biblical and sustainable landscapes this chapter traces the politics of the olive time. The settler society reclaims indigeneity and materializes its national ethos through olive agriculture. State scientists are central actors promoting this transformation. Meanwhile, attributing notions of "biblical" landscape to the Palestinian terraced olive agriculture erases the significance of olive agriculture to Palestinian heritage. The latter dynamic ignores the endeavors of Palestinian agronomists who are changing the production modes of Palestinian agriculture. Through these agronomists, the narrative of the settler state on Palestinian agriculture is contested to show that native 'modes of being in time 'are not intrinsically opposed to that of the settler society. The transformation of olive agriculture reflects a "time grab".
4.Freeing Time Like a Palestinian Agronomist
Palestinian Arab agricultural professionals who have been working for the Israeli state navigate a work environment that has been institutionally hostile to Palestinian agriculture for decades. Although they cannot overcome dispossession through their bureaucratic encounters at state work and may even strengthen the state system during their working hours, they contest the social order through their agrarian imaginaries, timescapes, and free time activities or as they retire. Their initiatives are characterized by a polychronic and non-binary timescape, embracing Western sociotechnical expertise and science agendas with Palestinian traditional and new societal structures, timescapes, and situatedness. By attending to the free time activities of these agronomists alongside their temporal agency narratives at work, I reorient the discussion on native professionals' strategies of coping in the state system and point out their mundane modes of resistance which were so far invisible to the research community.
Conclusion
While a Palestinian agronomist reviews the story of Palestinian agrarian dispossession and survivance a few questions emerge: What are the possibilities of a future Palestinian agriculture regeneration? Can a collective political imaginary on the importance of Palestinian agriculture rise in the face of climate change? Who are the actors who can lead such a process of change? The chapter elucidates how Israeli timecapes of the environment and agriculture fail to address resource equity, economic considerations, or attend to Palestinian resource sovereignty creating opposition among Palestinian professionals to environment and sustainability advocacy. By highlighting that their local agrarian struggle is not defined in the contours of hegemonic experts' environmental and climate discourses I reflect on the imaginaries that need to be cultivated to unsettle time and agriculture.
Notes
While a Palestinian agronomist reviews the story of Palestinian agrarian dispossession and survivance a few questions emerge: What are the possibilities of a future Palestinian agriculture regeneration? Can a collective political imaginary on the importance of Palestinian agriculture rise in the face of climate change? Who are the actors who can lead such a process of change? The chapter elucidates how Israeli timecapes of the environment and agriculture fail to address resource equity, economic considerations, or attend to Palestinian resource sovereignty creating opposition among Palestinian professionals to environment and sustainability advocacy. By highlighting that their local agrarian struggle is not defined in the contours of hegemonic experts' environmental and climate discourses I reflect on the imaginaries that need to be cultivated to unsettle time and agriculture.
Bibliography
While a Palestinian agronomist reviews the story of Palestinian agrarian dispossession and survivance a few questions emerge: What are the possibilities of a future Palestinian agriculture regeneration? Can a collective political imaginary on the importance of Palestinian agriculture rise in the face of climate change? Who are the actors who can lead such a process of change? The chapter elucidates how Israeli timecapes of the environment and agriculture fail to address resource equity, economic considerations, or attend to Palestinian resource sovereignty creating opposition among Palestinian professionals to environment and sustainability advocacy. By highlighting that their local agrarian struggle is not defined in the contours of hegemonic experts' environmental and climate discourses I reflect on the imaginaries that need to be cultivated to unsettle time and agriculture.
Index
While a Palestinian agronomist reviews the story of Palestinian agrarian dispossession and survivance a few questions emerge: What are the possibilities of a future Palestinian agriculture regeneration? Can a collective political imaginary on the importance of Palestinian agriculture rise in the face of climate change? Who are the actors who can lead such a process of change? The chapter elucidates how Israeli timecapes of the environment and agriculture fail to address resource equity, economic considerations, or attend to Palestinian resource sovereignty creating opposition among Palestinian professionals to environment and sustainability advocacy. By highlighting that their local agrarian struggle is not defined in the contours of hegemonic experts' environmental and climate discourses I reflect on the imaginaries that need to be cultivated to unsettle time and agriculture.