Hydrofictions: Water, Power and Politics in Israeli and Palestinian Literature Hannah Boast

Hydrofictions: Water, Power and Politics in Israeli and Palestinian Literature Hannah Boast PhD University of York English and Related Literature October 2015 Abstract This thesis examines the representation of water in Israeli and Palestinian literature, from the early years of Zionist settlement at the start of the twentieth century, to the daily violence of today’s ongoing occupation. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on disciplines including cultural geography, science and technology studies, and, inevitably, politics. At the same time, it situates these explorations in the context of the increasingly fevered contemporary debates on ‘water wars’, global water crisis, and the Anthropocene. In doing so, it demonstrates the many ways in which water intersects with Israeli and Palestinian cultures, at the same time as indicating the potential for literary approaches to deepen and critique existing political, scientific and corporate discourse on the future of the world’s water. Literary critics have so far had little to say about water. Land has always seemed more politically important and cultural meaningful. The significance of land appears dramatically amplified in the context of Israel/Palestine, where issues of land, borders and sovereignty remain painful and unresolved. This neglect of water exists in spite of a growing trend towards reading literature for its representations of resources, most prominently in the subject of ‘petrofiction’. No resource, however, is more fundamental than water. In bringing water to the forefront, this thesis has significant implications for future research in Israeli and Palestinian literary studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities. It demonstrates the potential for a focus on water to open up an array of new texts for exploration, and for literary research to productively complicate and enrich our understanding of, as well as our relationship with, the ubiquitous, and far more than merely ‘natural’ substance of water. ii Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Author’s declaration vi Introduction 1 1. ‘Current Liquidisations Ltd.’: the political ecology and cultural 53 economy of Mediterraneanism in Amos Oz’s The Same Sea 2. ‘The dense, murky water of the past’: swamps, nostalgia and 113 settlement myth in Meir Shalev’s The Blue Mountain 3. States of Scarcity: the River Jordan as national border and ‘natural’ 167 resource 4. Water Wars: Infrastructures of violence in Sayed Kashua’s Let It Be 225 Morning Conclusion 282 List of References 296 iii Acknowledgements I owe a significant debt of gratitude to the many people who have helped me along the way in this project, without whom it would certainly never have been completed. I would like to thank the White Rose Universities Consortium for funding my research and my travels in Israel/Palestine. Grants from the University of York Department of English and Related Literature and the F. R. Leavis fund enabled me to attend a number of vital conferences, and share ideas with the small but growing community of water researchers. My supervisors, Jessica Dubow and Ziad Elmarsafy, provided invaluable support, encouragement and inspiration. I am also immensely grateful to my first supervisor, Anna Bernard, for, among many things, convening the MA module which sparked the first thoughts of this project. Claire Westall offered incisive readings of early chapter drafts which on many occasions prompted me to think more deeply, invariably for the better. Claire’s efforts to nurture ‘poco-eco’ research at York have helped me to feel less like a lone voice and more like a member of a lively and exciting research community. I owe considerable thanks to the members of the White Rose Hydropolitics Network: Jess and Ziad, Graham Huggan and George Holmes at the University of Leeds, Tariq Jazeel at University College London, our honorary member Claire Chambers at York, and my fellow students, Christine Gilmore and Will Wright. It has been a pleasure to benefit from the knowledge of such a wise, committed and personally supportive group of scholars, and I never fail to leave our conversations with renewed enthusiasm for the possibilities of research. It has been a delight to work alongside Christine and Will, and to see our projects come to fruition together. iv I would not have made it to this point without the support of my brilliant friends. I am truly lucky in that there are more people I would like to include than I can name here. Particular mentions must go to Helen Battison and Cecy Marden, who have stuck with me in spite of occasionally extreme neglect on my side of the friendship. Stef Lambert, Lucy Potter and Cat Oakley have been intellectual co-conspirators, confidantes, and providers of spare beds in York. I am grateful to friends in my adopted home of Sheffield for making me so welcome, introducing me to new ideas, and helping me to remember that (corny as it sounds) academia is not the only way to change the world, or at least, make it a more interesting place. Special thanks here go to Charlotte Jones and Seán McCorry, and to Emily Thew, one of my invaluable proofreaders. Members of the Facebook group ‘PostgRAD Study Gang: School of Hard Thinkin’’ have at times offered much-needed virtual advice and solidarity. James Goldthorpe has shown inexhaustible reserves of kindness and patience, and amazes me by having more confidence in my abilities than I often have myself. My parents, Paul and Kathryn, and my brother, Oliver, have supported me in many ways over the duration of this lengthy project. My mum, Kathryn, has helped me to pursue educational opportunities that she did not have access to, and has given me constant encouragement. I am so proud of her for graduating from the Open University with a 2:1 degree in History last year. I am grateful to my grandparents, Tim and Rosemary Leahy, Margaret Boast, and the much-missed Grandpa Gordon, for their support, and for always being interested in the sometimes strange things I choose to do. My aunt and uncle, Dianne and Kevin Leahy, similarly deserve my thanks for their support and for sharing their boundless love of learning. Kevin, as the fellow academic in the family, has continued to remind me of the light on the other side. v Author’s declaration I declare that, to the best of my knowledge, all of the work contained in this thesis is my own. Parts of Chapter Three are forthcoming in a 2016 article for Journal of Commonwealth Literature, titled ‘“A river without water”: Hydropolitics and the River Jordan in Palestinian Literature’. No part of this thesis has been previously published, or submitted for examination at the University of York or any other institution. vi Introduction In his 2008 eco-thriller Hydromania, the Israeli novelist Assaf Gavron imagines a dystopian vision of a future Israel/Palestine in the aftermath of dramatic climate change.1 Set in the worryingly close year of 2067, Gavron’s novel presents a drastically altered political scenario, in which Palestinians have won the conflict, claimed Jerusalem as their capital, and become the regional power. In a reversal of the current territorial situation, Israelis have been left with a narrow coastal strip of territory, comprising the two now-overcrowded cities of Caesarea and Tiberias. The novel’s main theme however, as its title suggests, is water scarcity, with Gavron presenting an Israeli version of the ecologically-inclined sub- genre of science fiction increasingly termed ‘cli-fi’.2 In Hydromania, the world is effectively governed by corporations from three countries, China, Japan, and, more surprisingly, Ukraine, who exercise control over every aspect of Israeli citizens’ lives through their monopoly on the highly scarce commodity of water, now known by its brand names of ‘Ohiya Water’ or ‘Gobogobo Water’. Rainfall is rare, with each event timed using sophisticated technologies, and citizens are prevented from collecting their own water, leaving them constantly thirsty. This state of affairs is policed through heavy surveillance, including tracking and identification chips in every person’s arm. 1 Assaf Gavron, Hydromania [Synopsis, Review Quotes, Sample Translation], trans. by Assaf Gavron (Unpublished manuscript, 2010) 2 The word ‘cli-fi’ is generally acknowledged as having been coined in 2007 by journalist and activist Dan Bloom, who maintains a website tracking uses of the term. Dan Bloom, The Cli-Fi Report (2015) <http://cli- fi.net/index.html> [accessed 11 May 2015]. 1 Inbal Malka, reviewing Hydromania for the left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz, described Gavron’s novel as tapping into contemporary Israeli fears. She cautions that ‘[t]he future that Assaf Gavron depicts in Hydromania is a prospect familiar to every anxious Israeli’.3 Indeed, stories about the exhaustion and contamination of Israel/Palestine’s freshwater sources appear frequently in the local and international press. Most days, we can read about topics from the water shortages experienced by Palestinian communities in East Jerusalem, to the apparent promise of Israeli water technology, to fevered predictions, by both left and right, of climate change-induced political destabilisation in Israel/Palestine, and the wider Middle East.4 Renowned Israeli architect and theorist Eyal Weizman turns in his latest work from questions of the spatial politics of occupation to the intersection of Israeli mechanisms of territorial control with conceptions of weather and climate.5 The water of Israel/Palestine has long been the

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