The Nakba marked a rupture in the sustainable relationship the majority of the Palestinian people had with their land. Since then, forced urbanization has become a tool to further dispossess the Palestinians from their land. Israeli colonial policies and practices have constrained the development of rural areas to overcrowd Palestinian cities and refugee camps with Palestinian bodies. The current stage of Israel’s necropolitical settler colonial elimination has been characterized by an unprecedented scale of urbicide espousing the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Israel’s destruction of Palestinian urban spaces has also extended to the West Bank, mainly refugee camps. The annihilation of Palestinian urban spaces has disrupted everyday life, aiming to facilitate the mass dispossession of Palestinians, especially in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s current restructuring of the Palestinian spatiality, and the resultant environmental destruction reproduce the Palestinian space of life and being in the world as sacrifice zones of slow, gradual death. Although the sacrifice zones represent a liminal space between life and death, Palestinians have been able to carve out spaces of eco-social resistance throughout their anti-colonial struggle. Through popular resistance and everyday practices of eco-sumud (eco-steadfastness), Palestinians have represented to us an optimistic attempt to break the life-death binary of Israel’s necro-politics. Amid the increasing omnipotence of Israeli violence, two questions beg themselves: What spaces of resistance, if any, have been left for the Palestinians? What is the role of rural areas, lying outside urban spaces in epitomizing eco-social resistance in a dialectical relationship with spaces of forced urbanization?
Manal Shqair is a climate activist and researcher from Palestine. Currently, she is doing her PhD in sociology at Queen Margaret University, where she taught undergraduate modules in public sociology, feminist theory, critical pedagogies, and decolonial sociology. In her PhD research, Manal examines the role of Palestinian semi-nomadic women in Masafer Yatta, southern Palestine in resisting Israeli settler colonial dispossession. Manal has published works on Israel’s environmental colonialism and Palestinian resistance to that from a gendered perspective.