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In the West Bank, date palm trees have been sweeping over the Jordan Valley at an accelerating rate since the 2000s. The current scientific literature has depicted this transformation as sustainable development. This article proposes a method to harness social sciences in a meaningful manner within the interdisciplinary study of agricultural transformation. Focusing on appropriation rather than bundles of rights, within an exploration of water and land tenure, allows uncovering actors and mechanisms that remain undetected by the current scientific discourse. Date palms transform both land and water tenure. As seasonal labor replaces sharecroppers that lived on site, the livelihoods, housing security, and food security of those practicing family farming are compromised. Geospatial analysis allows a triangulation of the results produced by qualitative methods. Mapping and quantifying the spatial progression of Israeli and Palestinian date palm trees between 1999 and 2016 allows assessing the number of sharecroppers displaced by date palm trees during that period. This demonstrates a Valley Clearance is now occurring, akin to the Highland Clearances that took place in 18th century Scotland. The present transformation of agriculture in the Jordan Valley has clear social and political impacts. Donors, the Palestinian Authority, and Palestinian date palm agribusinesses refer to the Palestinian water law within the perspective of a two state solution. The Israeli Water Authority and Israeli settlers further a network of wastewater reuse which stands as the only reliable source of water for date palm cultivation in the foreseeable future and contributes to the development of a one state solution. Meanwhile, Palestinians practicing family farming rely on legal pluralism to secure their access to water.

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We draw on several emerging literatures on contamination and waste and our own fieldwork on e-waste contamination in a Palestinian-Israeli border space to describe a “flowing” approach to toxic phenomena. We use this term as a shorthand to underscore the particular complexities of the socio-material-biological node called “toxics,” and the corresponding epistemic, methodological, and moral demands of studying them. Some episodes from typical days of field work assessing the dispersal of heavy metals from sites of e-waste burning illustrate our claims. Even this attempt to use straightforward techniques to measure the presence of an object of apparent elemental materiality was continually permeated and unsettled by the inescapable flowiness of toxics. Their sources, generation processes and fates were mobile and multiscalar, remarkably patchy heterogeneous and contingent in ways that mattered. At issue was not (just) inadequate knowledge, but the inescapably relational biophysical and social nature of toxics; their entanglement not only with the technical means, processes and definitions that make them perceptible, but with the multiple and often disjunct social contexts that allow, inform, and motivate attention and access to toxics sites, and the production of knowledge from them.

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