This paper explores how nature is negotiated and mobilized in the settler-colonial state. I present a case study of a schism between the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the civil society green movement in Israel, that has recently surfaced in the context of state-led afforestation on the historical land of Arab Bedouins in the Naqab. The study is based on interviews with activists from the Bedouin community and representatives from JNF and other concerned actors coupled with close-reading of media coverage and published reports. I argue that this schism offers insights into how nature is negotiated in relation to environmentalism and the Zionist ideology and I argue that this negotiations points to an emerging new self-image of a post-settlement state that has left pioneering behind, symbolized by the replacement of the planted forest landscape by the natural landscape as the emblem for Zionist nature. 

Within the recognized borders of Israel, in the shadow of the West Bank settlement enterprise, a new frontier is in the making. Central planning has designated the space as a burgeoning metropolitan region, and, in a parallel process, a network of Jewish-only settlements has been established. This study asks how the settlement push is narrated to the Israeli public, and thereby adds the Naqab to previous studies exploring the link between colonial settlement and suburbia, and more specifically with the community-settlement model. It analyzes audiovisual material produced by two Zionist organizations and finds that the new frontier is narrated as a space for reenactment of the mythic pioneer trope, and that this ideal is mediated in relation to the new neoliberal ethos of Israel as the “start-up nation.” The study moreover expands on the interplay of geographic scales, thus adding an important contribution to scholarly understanding of contemporary settler-colonialism. 

The Naqab is a region in south Israel, which until 1948 was mainly inhabited by Palestinian Bedouin tribes. A small part of this community continues to take their sheep and goats to seasonal grazing, a practice that carries deep and significant cultural importance but has been all but abolished by various post-1948 laws. Following a turn in forest management, grazing has become sought after as cost-effective pruning. However, mobile herds are now hard to come by as the practice has been obstructed among the Bedouins and as mobile herding is commonly thought of as an Arab cultural practice. Forests, on the other hand, have long represented the Israeli nation both as identity and territorial claim. Current regulation does not fit the new demand, making new regulation necessary. Reading Tim Ingold’s concept of ‘taskscape’ as a posthumanist approach, I explore how grazing is regulated in the Naqab in relation to both the state-Bedouin conflict and to the wider settlement-colonial enterprise in Israel/Palestine. I suggest that taskscape is a concept that can hold the complexity of natural resources, cultural identity and conflict while simultaneously countering the colonial idea of ‘empty space’ which tends to inform both state-pastoralists conflicts and grazing regulations, thereby offering a new lens through which to understand the ongoing settler-colonial project