Settler transubstantiations (how an arid landscape becomes a past place): Joseph F. Getzoff, ‘Masters of the Wasteland: Zionist temporal territoriality and arid zone science’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler transubstantiations (how an arid landscape becomes a past place): Joseph F. Getzoff, ‘Masters of the Wasteland: Zionist temporal territoriality and arid zone science’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2025

07Jun25

Abstract: Geographers understand territoriality as the logics of different institutions and actors that work to produce territory as part of a state. However, many geographers of territoriality tend to ignore settler colonial processes and how they may complicate relations to territory. This article contributes to this intervention by investigating specific temporal and environmental dimensions of settler territoriality in the context of the Naqab desert in Palestine-Israel. In Palestine-Israel, Zionists have often claimed that their state building project would rescue the land from Indigenous Palestinian ruin. Such narratives, and the policies that emanate from them, are supported not only by political-ideological actors, but also by scientific and academic institutions. I show how territoriality in this region relies on specific Zionist settler ideas of spatiality and temporality that attempt to efface Bedouin Palestinians’ past, present, and future connections to the land. I draw from the archives of desert research institutions beginning in the 1950s through the 1980s, as well as influential works by Zionist desert scientists, to understand how scientists constructed the ‘Negev’ as integral to state development. However, as I show through a deconstruction of my archival sources, such science is partial and flimsy, constantly negotiating with the biogeography of the Naqab, Indigenous presence, and relies on Bedouin labor and expertise.

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