HTYHDE RPOREFSISC INT ITOHNE S MWIDaterD, PoLweEr a nEd APolSitiTcs inA IsrNaeliD NOandR PaTleHstini aAn LFiteRratIuCre A, 185 0−1950 Politics, Social History and Culture HANNAH BOAST Edited by ANTHONY GORMAN and DIDIER MONCIAUD HYDROFICTIONS 66395_Boast.indd395_Boast.indd i 111/06/201/06/20 110:140:14 AAMM 66395_Boast.indd395_Boast.indd iiii 111/06/201/06/20 110:140:14 AAMM HYDROFICTIONS Water, Power and Politics in Israeli and Palestinian Literature Hannah Boast 66395_Boast.indd395_Boast.indd iiiiii 111/06/201/06/20 110:140:14 AAMM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Hannah Boast, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd Th e Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/15 Adobe Garamond by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 43 80 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 4382 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 4383 8 (epub) Th e right of Hannah Boast to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 66395_Boast.indd395_Boast.indd iivv 111/06/201/06/20 110:140:14 AAMM CONTENTS Ackno wledgements vi Intro duction 1 1 Cro ssing the River: Home and Exile at the River Jordan 31 2 ‘Th e dense, murky water of the past’: Swamps, Nostalgia and Settlement Myth in Meir Shalev’s Th e Blue Mountain 69 3 ‘Current Liquidisations Ltd.’: Israel’s ‘Mediterranean’ Identity in Amos Oz’s Th e Same Sea 108 4 Wat er Wars: Infrastructures of Violence in Sayed Kashua’s Let It Be Morning 148 Concl usion 189 Bibl iography 198 Index 233 66395_Boast.indd395_Boast.indd v 111/06/201/06/20 110:140:14 AAMM ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS any people helped with this project and without them it would never Mhave been completed. Th is book started life as a doctoral thesis in Eng- lish and Geography at the Universities of York and Sheffi eld, and I would like to thank the White Rose Universities Consortium for funding my research. I am grateful to Jessica Dubow and Ziad Elmarsafy for their confi dence in me and for conversations that always left me with a renewed sense of why research is worthwhile. Anna Bernard fi rst introduced me to Israeli and Pal- estinian literature when I was an MA student at York and has been a constant source of guidance and inspiration since, including as a model of politically committed scholarship. Claire Westall off ered incisive readings of early drafts that prompted me to think more deeply, invariably for the better. Claire and Pablo Mukherjee gave invaluable comments on the fi nal thesis that helped it to become a book. Helen Smith gave me the opportunity to work on the Imagining Jerusalem network, through which I encountered people and ideas that expanded my understanding immeasurably. I would like to thank Sharae Deckard, Graham Huggan and the late Anthony Carrigan for treating me as an equal contributor to a shared intellectual project from the early stages of my time in academia. Dorothy Butchard, Asha Rogers and Rachel Sykes kept me afl oat as a teaching fellow at the University of Birmingham and I miss them a lot. Mike Niblett brightened the fi nal stages of this project with his support for my Leverhulme application at Warwick. vi 66395_Boast.indd395_Boast.indd vvii 111/06/201/06/20 110:140:14 AAMM acknowledgements | vii Helen Battison and Cecy Marden have stuck with me in spite of occa- sionally extreme neglect on my side of the friendship. Stef Lambert, Cat Oakley and Lucy Potter have been intellectual co-conspirators, confi dantes, and providers of solidarity and delicious food. I was lucky enough to be able to make Sheffi eld my home while writing much of this project. Many people there contributed to my intellectual and political development and were also a lot of fun. Particular thanks go to Charlotte Jones, Seán McCorry and Gabby Patterson, who have challenged me to think more deeply about the world, off ered serious emotional support and kept me aware that there is more to life than academia. I benefi ted greatly from conversations with Christine Gilmore and Will Wright and it was a pleasure to see our work grow together. Tom Langley helped to set me on this course by urging me to read Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks a long time ago. Th anks to Geoff rey Humble for kindness and a place to stay in Jerusalem, and to Jo Bridger and Murad Alkhufash for showing me environmental resistance in practice and introducing me to knafeh. Assaf Gavron generously shared unpublished work and took the time to talk hydropolitics with me in ways that informed this project. Guy Davidi helped out by sharing with me his and Alexandre Goetschmann’s documentary, Interrupted Streams. My parents, Paul and Kathryn, have supported me in many ways. My mum helped me to pursue educational opportunities that she did not have access to and I am so proud of her for graduating from the Open University in 2015 with a 2:1 degree in History. My aunt and uncle, Dianne and Kevin Leahy, similarly deserve thanks for their support and for sharing their boundless love of learn- ing. My grandparents, Gordon and Margaret Boast, and Tim and Rosemary Leahy, nurtured my environmental interests and my Lea hy grandparents helped to develop my political ones. Tom O’Shea has helped me to think in new ways and with new ideas, while being a constant source of love and care. Material from Chapter 1 was previously published as ‘ “A River without Water”: Hydropolitics and the River Jordan in Palestinian Literature’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 51(2), pp. 275–86. I am grateful to the journal for permission to reproduce it. 66395_Boast.indd395_Boast.indd vviiii 111/06/201/06/20 110:140:14 AAMM 66395_Boast.indd395_Boast.indd vviiiiii 111/06/201/06/20 110:140:14 AAMM INTRODUCTION n his 2008 eco-thriller Hydromania, Israeli novelist Assaf Gavron imag- Iines a future Israel/Palestine in the aftermath of dramatic climate change.1 Set in the worryingly close year of 2067, Hydromania presents a drastically altered political scenario in which Palestinians have won the confl ict, 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 comprising the two now overcrowded cities of Caesarea and Tiberias. Th e novel’s main theme, however, is water scarcity, with Gavron producing an Israeli version of the emerging genre of climate fi ction, or ‘cli-fi ’.2 Th e world of Hydromania is eff ectively 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 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, leav- ing them constantly thirsty. Th is state of aff airs is policed through heavy sur- veillance, including tracking and identifi cation chips in every person’s arm. In Gavron’s novel the loss of easy access to water alters every aspect of Israeli existence. Reviewing Hydromania for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Inbal Malka described it as tapping into contemporary Israeli fears. She cautioned that ‘[t]he 1 66395_Boast.indd395_Boast.indd 1 111/06/201/06/20 110:140:14 AAMM 2 | hydrofictions future that Assaf Gavron depicts in Hydromania is a prospect familiar to every anxious Israeli’.3 Yet in an age in which talk of ‘climate emergency’ has belatedly entered the mainstream, Gavron’s dystopian scenario now speaks to many more than just Israelis. Recent years have seen frenzied reporting in the Anglophone media of ‘Day Zero’ in Cape Town, California’s near-constant state of drought and the UK’s increasingly regular heatwaves, with attention (if rather less of it) focused at the time of writing on water shortages in Chennai. Gavron’s novel, however, does more than merely anticipate this trend: its specifi c national context is crucial to how we understand the concept of water crisis in the present. Israel/Palestine has become the site at which twenty-fi rst-century anxieties and hopes about our water supply coalesce. Israel/Palestine is well known as the archetypal ‘water war’. Past, present and possible future confl ict in the region is regularly framed by academics, politicians and the media as motivated by the need to secure scarce resources. Th is supposed phenomenon appears to exemplify a coming crisis accord- ing to which, as then World Bank Vice-President Ismail Serageldin famously predicted in 1995, ‘many of the wars of this century were about oil, but wars of the next century will be over water’.4 Th e Syrian Civil War and the war in Yemen are often presented as exacerbated or even caused by water shortages, seeming to show Serageldin’s prediction coming true (the reality, as ever, is more complicated).5 Curiously, Israel is described as vulnerable to water wars yet promoted at the same time as having ‘solved’ its water crisis and even having a ‘water surplus’ due to advances in desalination, drip irrigation and wastewater recycling.