Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-nptnm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-13T08:13:10.588Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“The Tree Is the Enemy Soldier”: A Sociolegal Making of War Landscapes in the Occupied West Bank

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Irus Braverman
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

War landscapes have a particular sociology; they are also formed through distinct legal technologies. By examining the genealogy of trees as totemic displacements in the occupied West Bank I demonstrate how the Israeli/Palestinian war is deflected onto the landscape and how this deflection erodes the boundary between law and war. Dealing with issues of colonization, nationalization, and the way that these implicate landscape as a “natural alibi,” the article examines the intricate making of politics into nature. Further, it explores the ironic nesting of colonial processes from Ottoman, to British, to Zionist, and finally to the new Jewish settler society that seeks to unsettle the old colonial landscapes of this place. Utilizing a detailed interpretation of a range of interviews and participatory observations, the article unpacks the mutually constitutive relationship between law, technologies of seeing, and landscape, illustrating how this relationship is played out by various actors in the occupied West Bank.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , September 2008 , pp. 449 - 482
Copyright
© 2008 Law and Society Association.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I would like to thank David Schneiderman, Mariana Valverde, Davina Cooper, Duncan Kennedy, and Jean Comaroff for their invaluable comments on this article. Special thanks to Gregor Harvey for his editing assistance and moral support.

References

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila (1991) “Writing Against Culture,” in Fox, R. G., ed., Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.Google Scholar
Amenta, Edwin (2007) Professor Basketball. Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Amir, Shaul, & Rechtman, Orly (2006) “The Development of Forest Policy in Israel in the 20th Century: Implications for the Future,” 8 Forest Policy and Economics 35–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities, 2d ed. London and New York: Verso.Google Scholar
Banner, Stuart (2000) “Conquest by Contract: Wealth Transfer and Land Market Structure in Colonial New Zealand,” 34 Law & Society Rev. 47–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bardenstein, Carol B. (1999) “Trees, Forests, and the Shaping of Palestinian and Collective Memory,” in Bal, M. et al., eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall and the Present. Hanover, NH, and London: Univ. Press of New England.Google Scholar
Blomley, Nicholas (1998) “Landscapes of Property,” 32 Law & Society Rev. 567–612.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Braverman, Irus (2007) “Tree Wars: A Study of Natural Governance in Israel/Palestine and in Four North American Cities,” SJD thesis, University of Toronto, June.Google Scholar
Callon, Michel (1986) “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fisherman of St Brieuc Bay,” in Law, J., ed., Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? London and Boston: Routledge, Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Clifford, James, & Marcus, George, eds. (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, Shaul Efraim (1993) The Politics of Planting: Israeli-Palestinian Competition for Control of Land in the Jerusalem Periphery. Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Comaroff, Jean, & Comaroff, John L. (2001) “Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse and the Postcolonial State,” 27 J. of Southern African Studies 627–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coronil, Fernando (2001) “Smelling Like a Market,” 106 American Historical Rev. 119–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cronon, William (2003) Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, 2d ed. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Darian-Smith, Eve (2004) “Ethnographies of Law,” in Sarat, A., ed., The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Daston, Lorraine, & Galison, Peter (1992) “The Image of Objectivity,” 40 Representations 81–128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DiCenso, James J. (1996) “Totem and Taboo and the Constitutive Function of Symbolic Forms,” 64 J. of the American Academy of Religion 557–74.Google Scholar
Duneier, Mitchell (1999) Sidewalk. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972–1977. Ed. Colin Gordon New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Fox, Richard G., ed. (1991) Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund ([1950]1989) Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Trans. James Strachey New York and London: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Guha, Ramachandra, & Gadgil, Madhav (1989) “State Forestry and Social Conflict in British India,” 123 Past and Present 141–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gupta, Akhil, & Ferguson, Jim, eds. (1997) Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.Google Scholar
Hilgartner, Stephen (2000) Science on Stage-Expert Advice as Public Drama. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jasanoff, Sheila (1998) “The Eye of Everyman: Witnessing DNA in the Simpson Trial,” 28 Social Studies of Science 713–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kedar, Sandy (1998) “Majority Time, Minority Time: Land, Nationality and Adverse Possession Laws in Israel,” 21 Iyuney Mishpat 655–746 (in Hebrew).Google Scholar
Kedar, Sandy (2001) “The Legal Transformation of Ethnic Geography: Israeli Law and the Palestinian Landholder 1948–1967,” 33 NYU J. of International Law and Politics 923–1000.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno (1986) “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with eyes and hands,” in Kuklick, H. & Long, E., eds., Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press London, distributed by JAICON Press 1986.Google Scholar
Leach, James (2002) “Drum and Voice: Aesthetics and Social Process on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea,” 8 J. of the Royal Anthropological Institute 713–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lehn, Walter, in association with Uri Davis (1988) The Jewish National Fund. London and New York: Kegan Paul International.Google Scholar
Locke, John ([1690] 2003) Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration. Ed. Ian Shapiro. Book two, second treatise. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Long, Joanna Claire (2005) “(En)planting Israel: Jewish National Fund Forestry and the Naturalisation of Zionism.” MA thesis (Geography). The University of British Columbia, July 2005 (cited with permission).Google Scholar
Lutz, Catherine (2001) Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Malkki, Liisa (1992) “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees,” 7 Cultural Anthropology 24–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mamdani, Mahmoud (1996) Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle (2000) “Crossing Boundaries: Ethnography in the Twenty-First Century,” 23 PoLAR 127–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle (2004) “Colonial and Postcolonial Law,” in Sarat, A., ed., The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Don (1996) The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape. Minneapolis and London: Univ. of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Mitchell, W. J. T. (2000) “Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness,” 26 Critical Inquiry 193–223.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, Sally Folk (2001) “Certainties Undone: Fifty Turbulent Years of Legal Anthropology: 1949–1999,” 7 J. of the Royal Anthropological Institute 95–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Navaro-Yashin, Yael (2003) “Life Is Dead Here: Sensing the Political in ‘No-Man's Land 3 Anthropological Theory 107–25.Google Scholar
Ortner, Sherry B. (1995) “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” 37 Comparative Studies in Society and History 173–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riles, Annelise (1994) “Representing In-Between: Law, Anthropology, and the Rhetoric of Interdisciplinarity,” 1994 University of Illinois Law Rev. 597–650.Google Scholar
Riles, Annelise, ed. (2006) Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, James (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Shafir, Gershon (1989) Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 1882–1914. Cambridge, United Kingdom, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Shapin, Steven, & Schaffer, Simon (1985) Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Shehadeh, Raja (1982) “The Land Law of Palestine: An Analysis of the Definition of State Lands,” 11 J. of Palestine Studies 82–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shehadeh, Raja (1993) The Law of the Land: Settlements and Land Issues under Israeli Military Occupation. Jerusalem: Passia Publications.Google Scholar
Sluglett, Peter, & Farouk-Sluglett, Marion, eds. (1996) The Times Guide to the Middle East. London: Times Books.Google Scholar
Thirgood, J. V. (1987) Cyprus: A Chronicle of Its Forests, Land, and People. Vancouver: UBC Press.Google Scholar
Troen, Ilan (2000) “Frontier Myths and Their Applications in America and Israel: A Transnational Perspective,” 5 Israel Studies 301–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zamir, Eyal (1985) State Land in Judea and Samaria: A Legal Review. Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies [in Hebrew].Google Scholar
Zerubavel, Yael (1995) Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar

Cases Cited

HCJ 606, 610/78, Suleiman Tawfiq Ayyub et al v. Minister of Defense et al, Piskei Din 33(2) 113, 120–122 (1978).Google Scholar
HCJ 390/79, ‘Azat Mahmad Mustafa Dweikat et al v. State of Israel et al, Piskei Din 34(1) 1, 29 (1979).Google Scholar
Criminal Appeal 149/81, Ahmad Yussef Alian Sallah vs. the State of Israel, Padi 38(3): 374 (1981).Google Scholar
Civil Appeal 148/62, the State of Israel v. Said Salah, Padi 16:1446 (1962); Civil Appeal 479/62, the State of Israel v. Salah Kir, Padi 17, 631 (1962); Civil Appeal 567/83, Rashid Said Abass v. the State of Israel, Padi 41(3): 741 (1962).Google Scholar

Statutes Cited

Hague Regulations, Articles 46, 52 (1907). See http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/WebList?ReadForm&id=195&t=art (accessed 1 June 2008).Google Scholar
Registration of Previously Unregistered Immovable Property Law, No. 6 for 1964, in Planning, Building and Land Laws in Judea and Samaria, ed. Maj. Aharon Mishnayot (of the Judge Advocate's Office, the Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria) [in Hebrew], p. 503.Google Scholar
Military Order 59 on Governmental Property, Article 1 (1967). See http://www.israellawresourcecenter.org/cgi-bin/browse.py?sectionname=laws&action=view&item=1 (accessed 1 June 2008).Google Scholar
Military Orders 1034, 1091 (1982). See http://www.israellawresourcecenter.org/cgi-bin/browse.py?sectionname=laws&action=view&item=1 (accessed 1 June 2008).Google Scholar
Order of Appeal Committees #172 (1967). See http://www.israellawresourcecenter.org/cgi-bin/browse.py?sectionname=laws&action=view&item=1 (accessed 1 June 2008).Google Scholar
Ottoman Land Code. Article 78, Ottoman Land Law in Planning, Building and Land Laws, p. 528 (1858).Google Scholar