Divergent visions: Intersectional water advocacy in Palestine

Abstract

This article draws lessons about environmental justice from a case study in the Jordan River Valley of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Building on notions of justice as recognition, the article argues that inclusive environmental justice agendas require the recognition of multiply marginalized groups and the fundamentally different understandings of environmental hazards and benefits they may have, and it proposes the use of intersectional analysis to do so. The village of al-Auja faces severe water-related challenges: a closed Israeli military zone blocking access to the Jordan River, which has also shrunk and grown polluted in recent decades; water wells with declining capacity and increasing salinity and a lack of permits to rehabilitate them; and the drying of a once-perennial spring. Residents, local government officials, and Palestinian staff members of a transborder nongovernmental organization agreed in identifying Israeli occupation as a key cause of water stress and articulated justice-based protests. However, while some emphasized the lack of Palestinian sovereignty over natural resources, others concentrated on the obstruction of villagers’ agricultural livelihoods and household hardships. The article demonstrates that different life experiences, particularly along lines of rural/urban residence, career, and gender, shaped divergent definitions among Palestinians of environmental benefits and harms, and thus different priorities for environmental justice work. It suggests that attending to complex, intersecting lines of social experience in the early stage of environmental campaigns, when defining problems and forming goals for improvement, can lead to more representative reparation plans, institution building, and activist agendas.

Greenwashing in Palestine/Israel: Settler colonialism and environmental injustice in the age of climate catastrophe

“…Building on expanding uses of the term “greenwashing” in the Israeli context, we further assert that regardless of any particular technology's environmental impacts, Israeli development on Palestinian land undermines Palestinian development and furthers Israel's settler colonial project and territorial goals — and, as such, challenges Palestinian collective continuance.4 In conversation with recent scholarship, we examine how the dispossession of Palestinian land is obscured through appeals to expertise in climate change mitigation, environmental protection, preservation, sustainable development, and “green” agriculture (Alatout, 2006; Braverman, 2019, 2020, 2021a, 2021b; Davis and Burke, 2011; Fairhead et al, 2012; Gutkowski, 2021; McKee, 2021; Salem, 2019; Shaveh, 2014). Drawing on Whyte's work, we argue for an expansion of “greenwashing” in settler colonial contexts, like Israel, to include any efforts to undermine indigenous “collective continuance” on the land through purportedly sustainable technologies.…”

Intersectional and Entangled Risks: An Empirical Analysis of Disasters and Landfills

“…Increasingly, gender has emerged as a key analytical focus in environmental justice research as scholars increasingly examine how environmental hazards can affect women differently than men (e.g., Rocheleau et al, 1996;Downey and Hawkins, 2008;Collins et al, 2011;Taylor, 2014;Sze, 2017;Perry and Gillespie, 2019). Researchers have also begun to analyze how gender intersects with other aspects of social life including age, immigration status/citizenship, and indigeneity to influence disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards (e.g., Merchant, 1980;Mies and Vandana, 1993;Linder et al, 2008;Collins et al, 2011;McKane et al, 2018;Goodling, 2019;Nirmal and Rocheleau, 2019;McKee, 2020). Research along these lines, using secondary data analysis, have employed female-headed primary households as an indicator of gender inequality, in which they have found gender inequality plays a role in cancer risks associated with air pollution (Collins et al, 2011) and that female-headed primary households tend to be overly represented in U.S. census tracts with high concentrations of air toxics (Downey and Hawkins, 2008).…”

The Impact of Recognition of Land and Water Settlement Revenue on the Fundamental Qualitative Characteristics of Financial Information: An Empirical Study on the “Palestinian Municipal Councils in the Northern Governorates

“…Staff of the Land and Water Settlement Authority staff to assist them in completing this service, which has had an impact on all local authority departments, what concerns us in this study is the financial aspect regarding the process of settling land and water and the revenue generated from it, whose registration must be consistent with local laws and financial regulations of local bodies. This require the financial staff to adhere to the application of international accounting standards to all the services they provide, and this was reflected in the revenue of the settlement process Land and water deficiencies in the financial statements of local authorities, so their data includes only the cash collection of revenue without looking at the realized or verifiable revenue and the revenue earned, and therefore their financial statements have become inappropriate and do not honestly represent the true reality of local authorities (McKee, 2021). Local authorities consider this cash revenue important to them in the performance of their tasks to citizens, because the revenue recognition in a correct manner is important because of its impact on the basic qualitative characteristics of financial information(Al Ajarma, Mahmoud, Arafeh, & Jaradat).…”