Israel's Settler-Colonial Water Regime: The Second Contradiction of Zionism

This paper questions the ecological sustainability of the Zionist colonial scheme in Palestine. It outlines an ecologically-based narrative of the Arab-Israeli struggle by juxtaposing colonial Zionism and ecological Zionism to re-narrate the Arab-Israeli conflict using a recent interpretive mode that assumes as a principle concomitant environmental and colonial histories. Examining both the role of water in the history of the Zionist colonial scheme and Zionist agricultural practices, it argues that, similar to previous colonial European ventures, the sustainability of colonial Zionism is challenged by both Palestine's scarce hydrological resources and their mounting exploitation, spawning what I call the ‘inner tension of Zionism’. Given this dialectic of Zionism – that considering, among other things, the nature of Zionist colonial agriculture and settlers’ Western life style, the necessary increasing exploitation of Palestine's scarce resources challenges the sustainability of the colonial venture – th...