J. Benstein: Proposal
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J. Benstein: Proposal
Abstract and Overview a) Background: Earth Day and Land Day
“Earth” and “land” might be similar, but ‘Earth Day’ and ‘Land Day’ are radically different. American in origin but now observed in many countries, Earth Day 1 is an annual event devoted to furthering general environmental concern and action, while Land Day 2 is the local Israeli Arab 3 commemoration of loss of life and land as a result of governmental actions. While both could be characterized as days of protest, dealing with issues that have both environmental and political ramifications (clearly in different proportions), their contrasting functions and meanings are rarely juxtaposed. The pairing invites a dialogue between the challenge of eco-threats in the ‘global village’ on the one hand (the “Earth Day pole”), with issues of justice in relation to local contexts of conflict on the other (the “Land Day pole”), and calls up the complex interactions between the environmental and the political, the global and the local, the natural and the national.
Changing circumstances have created or revealed possible bridges and syntheses between these various issues and their respective proponents. On the one hand, there is a growing awareness of the social and political roots and consequences of issues previously considered to be “purely” environmental, especially the differential apportionment of environmental privileges and risks, such as access to resources or exposure to contaminants. On the other hand, a similar recognition has developed of the environmental dimension of points of confluence and conflict previously relegated to cultural and political analysis, including power struggles and inter-group strife, competing claims to indigeneity, and questions of identity at the nexus of individual, collective and locality.
A common slogan holds that “nature knows no boundaries”. That is, animals and birds migrate, and pollution and other environmental effects are felt far from their sources. Nature indeed knows no boundaries —but people certainly do. And when we leave the realm of ecology and the natural sciences to study the political and cultural contexts of environmental issues, “the human side of the story”, those boundaries, whether geographical, socio-economic, or ethnic-national, assume central importance. b) The Project
My central research question is: given the shared environment in a context of conflict—where the environment itself is part of the conflict—what problems do Israeli Jews and Arabs try to address together, and what happens when they do? Including fieldwork documenting joint local environmental initiatives between Israeli Jews and Arabs in the Galilee, I plan to explore the frameworks of meaning that are created, separately and together, as contexts for environmental organizing, and their relation to environmental attitudes in the context of the local, civic and ethnic-national components of personal and group identity. These joint initiatives run the gamut from the highly consensual and apolitical (“let’s work together to improve our common environment”) to the highly contested and radical (deconstructing
Zionist hegemony through reapportioning land and power). This inquiry aims therefore to be a contribution both to the specific study of Jews, Arabs and environment in Israeli society, and more generally, to the developing field of environmental anthropology 4 , in particular the cultural and political analysis of forms of environmental activism.
The six sections of the proposal (followed by appendices, notes and bibliography) are:

Section I (p. 1): introduces environmentalism, environmental anthropology and the framework for the research, including cross-cultural examples;

Section II (p. 7): lays out the Israeli context of the field research: Jewish-Zionist and Arab-
Palestinian ethnic-national identity from an environmental perspective;

Section III (p.10): presents the background, rationale and typology of joint Jewish-Arab environmental initiatives;
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Section IV (p.12): focuses on methodology: a list of the organizations, challenges to be addressed in entering the field, and guiding questions for data collection and interpretation;
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Section V (p. 16): lists the proposed chapter headings;
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Section VI (p. 16): sums up the expected contributions of the research.
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J. Benstein: Proposal
Section I. Environmentalism-s, Environmental Anthropology and Varieties of
Environmental Localism
Section I.a: Environmental as a Discourse and as a Social Movement: Overview
Environmentalism centrally refers to the social, political and intellectual movement that seeks to protect nature, improve the environment, and respond to what has come to be known as “the environmental crisis” 5 ((Pepper 1984), (Taylor 1995)). As a movement, environmentalism is arguably one of the most socially active, geographically widespread and ideologically diversified of the new social movements
((Eder 1996), (Finger 1994), (Offe 1985), (Yearley 1994)). In its early stages, what is now known as the environmental movement was primarily identified with questions of preservation and conservation, mainly regarding wilderness and natural areas ((Bramwell 1989), (Gottlieb 1993), (Nash 1989)). But in the last few decades, at least since the publication of Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring in 1964 6 , issues such as public health risks and other human-centered threats have become more central ((Cotgrove 1980)).
Social and environmental issues are now largely seen as inextricably bound up with one another: as mutually essential in evaluating the heavy prices of “progress,” ((Goldsmith 1995), (Benstein 2002)) and for environmentalist critiques of the way the world works ((Manes 1990)). Different movements and schools of thought have sprung up, offering disparate analyses of the nature of these issues in their global and local manifestations. Deep ecology and social ecology, ecofeminism, ecological economics, and green politics ((Merchant 1992), (Dryzek 1997)) critique the present state of affairs from their various perspectives, locating the source of the problems alternately in the political system, economics, society, philosophic values and/or religious worldviews (cf. also (White 1967)).
Section I.b: The Discipline of Environmental Anthropology
The root causes of environmental problems stem of course from human behavior—including value choices, public policy, worldviews, etc.—and therefore need to be analyzed with tools from the social sciences and humanities ((Redclift and Benton 1994), (Yearley 1996)).Environmental philosophy, of which environmental ethics is a branch, is a burgeoning field, as well as environmental economics. The study of history ((Miller and Rothman 1997)) and literature ((Wall 1994)) too have environmental approaches and specialists, and so now do environmental sociology ((Dunlap 1979), (Hannigan 1995)) and anthropology.
Peter Brosius emphasizes the richness of contemporary environmentalism as a site of cultural production, with anthropology playing a critical role, not only regarding understanding our impact on the physical environment, but also in showing how that environment is “constructed, represented, claimed, and contested” (Brosius, 1999:277). For the purposes of this proposal, environmental anthropology can be defined as the anthropological study of the environmental movement and all that it entails; exploration of
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J. Benstein: Proposal cultural attitudes towards, and social effects of environmental issues (Orlove and Brush, 1996); and cultural and social analysis inspired by an environmentalist social critique. It is a relatively new but growing subdiscipline at the intersection of anthropology and environmental studies ((Milton 1993),
(Milton 1996), (Crumley 2001), (Bennett 1990), (Blount 1997), (Slack and Berland 1994)). This field is growing for several reasons: the aforementioned general growth of scholarly interest in environmentalism across disciplinary lines; more and more anthropologists witnessing the “arrival” of environmentalism in their fields; and the resurgence of anthropology as ‘cultural critique’ (Marcus and
Fisher, 1986: 111; see (Brosius 1999)).
Environmental anthropology should not be confused with one of its intellectual predecessors, the
(primarily American) ecological anthropology of the 1960s and early 1970s. That research program related primarily to localized adaptations to specific ecosystems, and was relatively ‘scientistic’.
Similarly, the field of cultural ecology, according to Julian Steward, endeavored to demonstrate “the embeddedness of a way of life in its resource base.” (Weil, in (Brosius 1999): 298); cf. also (Moran
1990)). Environmental anthropology on the other hand draws its insights from a range of sources: poststructuralist social and cultural theory, political economy, and recent explorations of transnationalism and globalization, among others.
Section I.c: ‘Globalism’ vs. ‘Localism’
There have been numerous attempts at imposing order on the rather jumbled concatenation of environmentalist programs ((Pepper 1984), (Dryzek 1997), (Sale 1990)). One central distinction on which this research rests is between those who frame their analyses—and therefore their responses as well—in terms of global problems and issues, versus those who focus their vision and efforts on the local level. This is not simply a matter of physical scale. Phenomenologically and strategically, the
“globalizers” tend to construct environmental issues as a matter of identifying and solving problems, the most crucial ones being of course global problems (e.g., climate change, rainforests, worldwide resources) which require global solutions, such as international treaties ((McCormick 1989), (Luke
1995)). In contrast, the “localizers” claim that environmentalism is about taking care of places,
“reinhabiting” one’s locale ((Jackson 1996)), including strengthening grassroots participatory democracy, and not as solving global (often meaning “somewhere on the other side of the world”) problems ((Lohmann 1993)). See the table in Appendix 1 (suppl. p. 1) for a fuller characterization of these distinctions.
Of course, all dichotomous classifications are simplifications of some sort, and most environmentalists who would seem to fall squarely into one camp or the other will call for synthesis, balance, and some combination of the two levels ((Friedman 1990), (Princen and Finger 1994)). And yet, given limited resources of time, energy and funds, most people’s individual efforts, as well as the chartered focus of most organized groups, will tend to one dimension or the other ((Lipschutz 1996)). It is not the external
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J. Benstein: Proposal contrast of localist with globalist environmental perspectives that will occupy us here, but rather the internal comparisons: characterizing and analyzing the variety of localist movements and discourses in different societies and cultural settings. This defines the object of inquiry as well-suited to anthropological study: “One of the more urgent tasks in the analysis of contemporary environmentalism is to understand the ways in which particular topologies—constructions of actual and metaphorical space—are discursively produced and reproduced {such as} the many ways in which the idea of the
‘local’ is encoded.” (Brosius 1999):282).
The idea that there are in fact a variety of types of localism in environmentalist approaches and organizations is a new one. Most environmental writers relate to “sense of place” and “local culture” as undifferentiated, unitary abstract concepts: i.e., that while there is local variation in these phenomena
(which is of course the very essence of the idea), they are essentially variations on the same thing
((Gerlach 1991)). The people are different, and the places are different, but the connection between the two would be invariant: local culture, and its environmental expression and application would have an identical structure, simply with different local parameters plugged in ((Aberley 1999), (Basso 1996),
(Berry 1988), (Cheney 1989).
In contrast, I will claim that fundamentally different types of localism exist, and that it is theoretically significant and practically important to distinguish between them, and contrast their major characteristics.
In particular, I will propose three general categories, using as prototypes examples from North America
(‘new world’ bio-regional experiments), developing countries (‘fourth world’ indigenous struggles), and
Europe (‘old world’ national identities).
7 A brief description of this typology is presented in the following section. It should be emphasized that not all local environmental activities have highly salient cultural profiles such as those proposed here. Many local action groups, neighborhood quality of life organizations, or ad hoc protests against point-source environmental threats are just that: ad hoc, isolated initiatives, unrelated to broader cultural trends, and therefore not necessarily relevant examples for this study, since they do not represent what is termed here ‘ideological localism’. These may raise other interesting questions, about the nature of particular grassroots social organization, or regarding
NIMBYism 8 and wider environmental concern, but those are not the focus of this study.
The analysis of ‘ideological localism’ will draw on concepts such as indigenous/primordial vs. civil constructions of group identity ((Shils 1957)), theories of nationalism and post-colonialism ((Bhabha
1990), (Chatterjee 1986), (Rika-Heke 1997)), and the implications of depatriation (immigration, forced and voluntary) and diaspora. I am interested in exploring the cultural, social, and political ramifications of the construction of identities between people and place in environmental perspective, especially in light of—indeed, in contradistinction to—the recent emphasis in anthropological work on displacement and placelessness, including phenomena such as "diasporism" and "nomadism" ((Appadurai 1988),
(Appadurai 1989), (Hannerz 1996), (Malkki 1992)).
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Section I.d: Environmental Localism in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Bioregionalism, Indigenous
Peoples and ‘Blood and Soil’ European Localism
The primarily North American movement of bioregionalism is a self-consciously environmental enterprise designed to strengthen local identities, economies and cultures, addressing pressing issues of local ecosystem health, and community well-being through grass roots organizing and fighting global mass culture ((Aberley 1999), (Andruss et al. 1990), (McGinnis 1999), (Sale 1985)).
The term bioregionalism and its primary agenda stem from the scale and geopolitics of the United States and Canada. These countries are so vast that they include numerous watersheds and landscapes that vary considerably in their climatological, geo-morphological and ecological characteristics. Moreover, the regions that are demarcated on maps—states, provinces, and the national boundaries themselves—are often quite random when examined from the perspective of the land itself. Bioregionalism claims that the only environmentally sensible mode of social and political organization is to realign political boundaries with the natural ones, making ones ‘bioregion’ the focus of one’s economic and cultural life.
9 The impetus of bioregional groups is overwhelmingly white and middle-class: certainly not Native American, and often not even rural-agricultural in origin. While paying due homage to Native Americans, the original inhabitants, the bioregionalists themselves are of course in some sense all migrants ((Berry
1988)). In the example of the residents of ‘Cascadia’, many are very recent arrivals, flowing in with, or on the coat-tails of the hi-tech boom ((Durning 1996)). One thinker associated with bioregionalism, Wes
Jackson writes of the need to “become native to this place” ((Jackson 1996)). Their group identities are very consciously civilly constructed, and not primordialist in any deep sense.
Likewise, a certain type of ‘anti-nationalist’ sentiment is present, for in the eyes of the bioregionalists, the present national boundary between the U.S. and Canada—an ecologically arbitrary rule-line drawn across the map—is environmentally non-sensical, and needs to be abolished, along with the large scale national frameworks that go along with them. All this combines to create progressive, multi-cultural, civil constructions of communities, attempting to strike roots in the place they happen to be in
((McGinnis, House, and Jordan 1999)).
At the other end of the localist spectrum are the societies lumped together under the catchall title of
“ indigenous peoples ” and all they represent ((Durning 1992)). I include here environmental movements 10 among peoples termed indigenous, whether small scale societies and tribal peoples (“the fourth world”) in developing countries, or first peoples and native Americans in the New World ((Guha
1999), (Taylor 1995)). They differ from North American bioregionalism in their primordialism (what else could it mean to be ab-original? cf. (Gooch 1998)), and from the following European localist environmental movements in that they are the victims of colonialism, not its perpetrators (but see below).
From an environmental point of view, there is a deeper significance to this category. Much has been written in environmental literature about indigenous peoples, and in terms of my own development, the initial fascination that led me to anthropology and the study of culture(s) was with the very notion of
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J. Benstein: Proposal
‘indigeneity’—the quality or state of being indigenous, or native. Indigenous peoples 11 possess a great deal of what might be termed “environmental capital.” ((Maybury-Lewis 1992), (Redford 1991)) The simplest, most straightforward understanding of this claim is that indigenous peoples are considered the
‘natural’ residents of their homes, possessing the requisite knowledge and wisdom to live there well, to steward those places, or as we might say today: to live sustainably ((Callicott 1989), (Dasmann 1976)).
But this could be said, potentially at least, for just about any group or population living in a place. The uniqueness attributed to peoples (tribes, entire cultures) considered indigenous is of an almost mythical or metaphysical cast. The phrase “natural residents” in the above description is easy to gloss over, but what exactly does it mean? Do Native Americans, or Australian aborigines somehow have greater legitimacy living where they do (or more often: did), than the current white residents? If so, is that an expression of political right, cultural adaptation, or spiritual insight? Or something else? In addition, much of the aforementioned “environmental capital” of these groups is connected to (presumed) worldviews that are then used to contrast with, and critique, our own: we are rapacious, species-centric progress-driven monotheistic nature-plunderers; they are joyous, nature-worshipping, frugal gentle-folk living in harmony with their local surroundings and the cosmos ((Callicott 1982)). This stereotype, a version of the romantic Noble Savage (that has its roots in ancient Greece), as trite or outlandish as it may sound, has acquired wide and renewed currency in its environmental version ((Maybury-Lewis
1992), (Quinn 1992)). There has also been a backlash and attempts at deromanticizing and debunking of this approach especially in anthropological circles 12 ((Brosius 1997), (Conklin 1997), (Ellen 1986),
(Gonzalez 1992), (Jackson 1995), (Krech 1999)).
The third proposed category of localism includes examples from Europe , the developed “Old” world, contrasting with the immigrant-based “New” world, and developing countries. There is a conservative/right wing version of environmental organization, fusing national identity and environmental concern, that is expressed in things as diverse as the British National Trust and some of the more “blood and soil” variants of the value-conservatives originally (but no longer) in the German
Greens ((Dalton 1994)). These would be connected to: a) strong sense of ethnic-cultural heritage (Anglo-
Saxon; Germanic/Aryan) tending to the primordial, coupled with b) historic national boundaries that are less artificial and more closely aligned with the bioregional (insular England, some of modern-day
Germany and provinces). This would go hand in hand with a national mythology with strong autochthonous motifs: the people, the volk , having been born of the soil, have a unique connection to it, and responsibility for it in the face of social or environmental onslaughts. In the social construction of nationalism and its narratives, land goes together with language, culture and shared descent. Often these views have a strong romantic 13 anti-modernist undertone, calling for a return to an earlier, purer, idyllic time.
All these are lacking in the American, bio-regional example, and together support a much more primordialist ethnic-environmental identity. This would be a point of similarity with the second category
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J. Benstein: Proposal of indigenous peoples. And though they are the colonized and these are the colonizers, there is no paradox here: when it comes down to it, the great colonizing nations of Europe—England, France, Spain,
Germany—are only foreigners in their colonies. At home they are indigenes. Or more specifically, not having been the victims of colonization of a foreign power, culturally and politically they do not define themselves in opposition to a foreign presence.
Yet, as mentioned, some of these groups are known for having a decidedly right-wing cast which expresses itself in illiberal policies towards a different sort of foreign presence: minorities, including third-world immigrants and foreign labor. Under traditional colonialism, the “center” invaded the
“periphery”, dominating it through military and economic power. In the present situation of a globalized economy and labor market, the “periphery” is invading the “center” all over the world, and threatening it in other ways. And so, while the dominant culture in their own land, European right wingers, including localist environmentalists, feel threatened by “the other” and the forces they represent. These include tensions expressed in environmental terms: population pressures, competition for access to resources, and a challenge to the exclusivity of the “blood and soil” relationship, the indigeneity of the native population on their “home court”.
Section I.e: Implications and Questions for the Field
The cross-cultural examples presented above generate intriguing and important questions for approaching the field research and the question of environmentalism in the Israeli context, especially with regard to joint Jewish and Arab initiatives, and the location of groups and individuals on the axis of ethnic to civil narratives, in Israeli localism:

Bioregionalism: With the major fault lines in Israeli society being sectoral-demographic and not regional-geographic, attempting to apply this model within Israel 14 raises intriguing questions: Could the active pursuit of a bioregional framework enhance Jewish-Arab cooperative ventures? Could local councils be organized around watersheds rather than gerrymandered around Jewish majorities as is presently largely the case 15 ? Or does the arrow of causality point in the opposite direction: does progress need to be made on the social and political fronts before attempting something so potentially far-reaching as implementing bioregional forms of governance? On a programmatic level, could any elements of a bioregional approach be adopted and adapted to the Israeli reality?

Indigeneity : Some of the more “theoretical” questions regarding indigeneity are quite directly relevant to the fieldwork component among Israeli Jews and Arabs, where one of the potential constructions of the relations between the two groups is of “conflicting indigeneities”. For instance: can a people "become" or "cease to be" indigenous? What does it mean, then, to be labeled a "non-indigenous" culture? Is that an empty rhetorical ‘libel’, or are there significant environmental or political implications to that category? And to what extent are constructs 16 like
“homeland” “tribal lands” even “sacred lands”—the group’s ‘bioregion’ as it were—“imagined” entities, like Anderson’s “imagined communities”?
17 ((Anderson 1991)). Can there be two indigeneities living side by side in the same place, without mutual self- destruction like matter and anti-matter?

European Localism: It should be clear then how this model too is potentially relevant to the
Israeli case 18 . Below I will develop a dual model for interpreting the Zionist movement as possessing both a colonizing strain and a reindigenizing strain 19 . The relevant part here is that
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J. Benstein: Proposal whereas the European powers had the luxury of having their colonies far from their home shores, and thus could keep their identities (‘indigene’ and ‘colonialist’) well separated, in Israel, Zionist
Jews arguably are colonizers at home ((Zureik 1979)). That is, this ongoing, virtually schizophrenic conflict in identity from the inception of the Zionist movement potentially has informed the similarly conflicted cultural attitudes and public policy towards ‘the other’ (i.e., local Arabs) and the land. To what extent this is indeed a valid interpretation of the historical record will be addressed in the thesis.
Section II. The Nexus of Place and Identity: Jews and Arabs in The Israeli Context
Before expanding on the more political aspects relevant to this section, I’d like to begin with a more personal-ethnographic excursus, that highlights some of the central issues of relationship to place and personal-ethnic-national identity:
In my notes, this story is titled “You Are Building Your Grave.” I attended a talk given by the
Palestinian intellectual Raif Zureik, which included remarks on attitudes to space and place in contemporary Israeli Palestinian culture. To concretize a point he was making, he related to us remarks he had made to a friend of his, who was building his home in the village in which they both grew up. “That house you are building,” Zureik scorned, “that house will be your grave. A
Palestinian who builds a house in a village—will never get out. He will die there.”
Now, at that moment, I wasn’t thinking of the innumerable Palestinians who would “die” just to be able to build a house in their village, to get the requisite land and permits, and simply build a home.
No, just then I could only think of myself—that I too would die for something like that. To be able to build a house that I know would be my grave. That I would die there, and my children would inherit it after me. A הלחנ, a portion, a heritage; to have roots here—really, to have roots anywhere at all. A
Palestinian intellectual dreams about a public and social space that would be his, or at least completely open to him in which he can move, both literally, physically, as well as socially and conceptually, and which is denied him under the reality of Israeli hegemony. And I, a diaspora-born
Jew, completely integrated into the modern world, abhor the glitter of that so-called “mobility”, which for me is just another term for anomie and rootlessness. After all, over the course of my family’s past five generations (a number limited only by the certainty of the oral record) no one raised their children in the same place that they themselves were raised, and most not even in the same country. Each generation had its own reasons for its peregrinations, but the chances are slim that this ‘impressive’ tradition will end with me and my progeny.
For Zureik, I would imagine, the Palestinian national liberation movement and identification is a necessary (even if temporary) means to extricate himself from suffocation in provincial localism and traditionalism, to a more global cultural space. The national, then, is part of a vector from the particular and hyper-local, upward and outward to the universal. This approach reflects a theoretical stance that sees globalization and trans-nationalism as promising trends for the individual and society: towards wider horizons of imagination, lessening of violent nationalistic conflict, and promises of a fruitful cosmopolitanism.
For myself, the ‘Jewish national liberation movement’ represents virtually the direct opposite trope: from a migratory ‘global citizenship’ (rooted perhaps only in the text, a la George Steiner 20
) back down to a localized, grounded, autonomous Jewishly-defined space that is neither transitory nor random.
(cf. also (Benstein 1997), Zureik, 1999).
Of course, the opposite sort of ‘confessional’ comparison could also be made: say, between a fallah paradigmatically exemplifying Palestinian sumud (steadfastness, rootedness in the land) and a North Tel
Aviv Jewish hi-tech executive, contemplating better job offers in Silicon Valley. These experiences and perspectives clearly operate on many different levels and require teasing apart; at the very least, there is a
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J. Benstein: Proposal deep intermingling here of the very place-specific unfolding of the Zionist narrative and its Palestinian
Arab counterpart, together with the more recent trans-spatial growth of globalization, with all its social, cultural, and political ramifications ((Appadurai 1996), (Featherstone 1990), (Hannerz 1990)).
Looking at Zionism and Israeli Arab national-ethnic identities and aspirations in environmental perspective particularly, we must first note that “environmental struggles today are irrevocably tied up with identity politics” (Brosius 1999: 288)). The key components of these ‘identity politics’ are the collective sense of self, the attitude to the Other, and the role of the land, the “sense of place” in the equation. The latter is crucial precisely because of the prism of localism that is the framework of this research. “Zionism is Judaism with real estate” (a quote attributed to the late Yitzchak Rabin, cf. (Ezrahi
1992b)), and the re-territorialization of the Jewish people, via settlement and “the redemption of the land” (עקרקה תלואג cf. (Kimmerling 1983)), and therefore the “Judiazation of the territory” (בחרמה דוהיי) are inextricably bound up with the de- territorialization of the Israeli Arabs (see (Gavison and Abu-Rih
1999), ch. 5) and their cultural, political and economic responses to that ((Kemp 1999), (Kenaz 1992)).
The Israeli Arab side of the story is predominantly construed as one of colonization on the part of an invading, settler people ((Ram 1993), (Shafir 1989), (Zureik 1979)). This of course has practical political ramifications: for instance, Khatan Kanaana of the Galilee League has obtained funding for their projects from the European Community under the rubric of support for the struggle of an indigenous people. But the contemporary situation of the Israeli Arab is anything but simple: there is a large and growing literature about the conflicts and contradictions inherent in the status of the ethnic-national minority in the Jewish state, in politics, sociology and literature, inter alia ((Smooha 1976), (Rouhana 1997),
(Ghanem 1990), (Ghanem 1998), (Abdel Malak and Jacobsen 1999)). The role of land and territory in this question is paramount ((Schnell 1994), (Yiftachel 2000), (Yiftachel and Meir 1998)).
The Zionist perspective is complex in different ways. For economic and historical reasons, among others, there is criticism of the colonialist model as applied to Zionism (cf. the critical review of (Canari 1995)).
In the context I am developing here, the main contrasting trope with colonialism is what I term here
“reindigenization”, with its emphasis on return.
This being the axiomatic Zionist self-understanding, the literature on this is extensive: cf. (Hertzberg 1972 [1959]), (Segal 1987), also (Benstein 1998).
Of interest here is not the zero-sum political polemics of the conflict—whether Zionism equals racism or liberation; colonialism or return—but the potential dialogue that exists among these strands, and its role in deepening the environmental analysis here in the proposed framework of localism. Each of the above models of localism (‘fourth world’ indigenous struggles, ‘old world’ national identities, ‘new world’ bioregional experiments) implies a potentially different social construction of identities of self and other in the context of place. So regarding an interpretation of Zionism, and the current Israeli reality, the question can be framed thus: Just what type of localism is to be found in Zionism(s)?
 Like the indigenous, ‘tribal’ examples from third world countries, are the Jews an indigenous people fighting for cultural autonomy and land rights after having been ‘colonized’ first by ancient Rome and then by subsequent Diasporas?
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
Or, more like the European context, are they now, despite their colonization of another people, and representing a hegemonic political culture (at least within their own boundaries, and also feared regionally for their economic clout), trying to establish and maintain normalcy, including at-homeness in the ancestral homeland ( moledet, patria, vaterland )?

Or are Jewish Israelis like the North American civil examples, best conceptualized as a collection of immigrants trying to make a home for themselves in the Levant, creating a nativity that was either never theirs, or so lost in the depths of quasi-mythological history as to be irretrievable?
See (Kimmerling 1985) for a discussion of civil versus primordial constructions of Zionism and attitudes to the Land. Of course the answers to these questions determine the relationship to the other as well. Are the Palestinian “locals”:
 role models in their indigeneity (certainly some denizens of the Second Aliyah, judging by things like dress and language, thought so), or competitors therein;
 johnny-come-lately interlopers (similar to the backward ‘periphery’ invading the enlightened, progressive ‘center’);
 accomplices and fellow citizens (a la the Canaanite movement in Israel, active in the 50s and
60s, and also professed by many liberal left-leaning Israeli Jews, among others).
In exploring the phenomenon of localism in comparative perspective among Israeli Jews and Arabs, one must not ignore the various levels of experience, from the global to the ‘truly’ local. For instance, an important strand here is the question of the local expressions of global diasporas, ‘refugee’ status and mentality, and immigration/emigration—both Jewish and Palestinian Arab. This component has cultural, economic, demographic and political ramifications. And on the other end, regarding the deep connection to very particular places: rural Israeli Arab culture evinces strong attachment to local places, native villages and estates of family inheritance, as can be seen from evidence as diverse as regional dialectal differences, and the widespread rejection of proposals for resettlement of Israeli Arab citizens in the emerging Palestinian authority.
This is different for Israeli Jews, for many of whom on some level all places in Israel are interchangeable: tokens as it were of some ideal type of the Land. Much has been written about the need for the nascent yishuv and the early State to create roots in the land, and an ideology of ‘homeland’
((Arieli 1997), (Bar-Gal 1993), (Doleve-Gandleman 1987), (Newman 1997)). Some argue that Judaism indeed lacks an unproblematized, or natural concept of homeland: Sagiv condemns Zionist attempts at borrowing the ‘autochthonous myth’ from organic European nationalisms (Sagiv 1998), and similar critiques of Zionist territorial ideology in light of traditional Jewish bibliography, from very different political vantage points, are made by (Boyarin and Boyarin 1994) and (Gurevitch and Aran 1991).
Given that, the fieldwork component for this research will focus on one fairly well-defined locale, the
Central Galilee, which includes the Jewish regional municipal area of Misgav and a number of Arab towns and villages.
21 This area can be considered the “eye of the storm” regarding the differential treatment of Arabs and Jews concerning resources and infrastructure, and in particular surrounding land
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J. Benstein: Proposal expropriations ((Rekhess 1977)), because of the context of the “Judaization of the Galilee” project. This development project, begun in the early eighties, was designed to combat the growing Arab majority in the region, and the fears that this would lead to calls for autonomy, considered seditious (Shtampeter
1990). Much has been written about the policies surrounding this project, from a variety of perspectives
((Falah 1989), (Falah 1990), (Law-Yone and Lipschitz 1991), (Schnell 1992), (Yiftachel 1991),
(Yiftachel 1992b)).
I have foregrounded the politically-motivated environmentally problematic policies of the Israeli authorities (such as land expropriations) and the question of the joint ability of citizens to confront these.
But no less relevant are the similarly politically-motivated, environmentally destructive actions of Arab groups or individuals, such as the numerous cases of arson in Galilean forests, 22 and the attitudes of joint groups to them.
Some central questions underlying my research regarding Jewish and Arab relations as expressed in joint action on social-environmental issues are: what are the limits of a shared civic environmentalism? How do ethnic narratives become integrated into these projects? How do the pervasive conflicts and desires for reconciliation (including the calls for redress of grievances) express themselves in these joint efforts?
All of the above issues are quite relevant, from the presence of trans-national diasporas for both population groups, to civil versus primordial constructions of place, et al. In addition, the discussion surrounding the nature of Israeli democracy is also quite germane, since the possibility of joint, transethnic localism is linked to and overlaps the possibility of joint citizenship. Thus addressing whether
Israel is a standard consociational democracy, an ethnic democracy or an ethnocracy is part and parcel of this study (for loci classici of this debate, see (Ghanem, Rouhana, and Yiftachel 1998), (Smooha 1989),
(Smooha 1990), (Yiftachel 1992a), (Yiftachel 1993), among others.).
Section III. Joint Environmental Initiatives: Background, Rationale, Typology
In my fieldwork I will document and analyze the development of selected joint Jewish-Arab environmental projects within Israel, focusing on initiatives in the lower Galilee.
These activities, more in number and larger in scope than in the past, have begun to proliferate recently as a result of several developments. One is the changes in the political reality since last fall. The Jewish public has been made painfully aware of the objectively difficult situation within the Arab sector, and the need to address it. Likewise, many Israeli Arabs are also searching for politically acceptable and effective channels for redressing their grievances. So while other, more generic co-existence projects might have seen a decline, due to the loss of trust on both sides (but especially reflected in interest and involvement in the Arab sector), work on focused “special interest” topics such as this have grown.
Another significant development is the changing nature of environmental activism itself. While many of the most acute problems that Israeli Arabs face can be expressed in environmental terms (lack of access
10

J. Benstein: Proposal to land and other resources, lack of municipal infrastructure, greater exposure to environmental risks from pollution, waste or toxic substances) these pressing issues have not been championed in general
(that is to say, Jewish) environmental circles in Israel before. For instance, the desperate need for more land for growth and development in the Arab sector has been perceived as being in direct conflict with the ‘traditional’ environmental emphasis on preserving open spaces, leading to antagonism rather than cooperation in these areas.
23
This view stems from environmental activism having classically been seen as somehow transcending politics, since it is “about” nature and the (physical) environment, which is after all our common home, and therefore deals with issues of equal concern to us all. In contrast, the ethnic-national inter-relations between Jew and Arabs in Israel have usually been understood as having very particular—and very controversial—social, political and economic dimensions, which are something quite apart from the
“global”, theoretically consensual, concerns about the environment.
These are the “Earth Day” and “Land Day” poles mentioned in the overview, which the joint initiatives under analysis here bring into dialogue. Indeed, the whole environmental justice movement signals a coming of age in this regard, exposing the mutual inter-relationships between environmental, cultural and political issues, between civic narratives and ethnic ones, and the ways in which these are all inextricably intertwined. The attempt to act collectively on deeply felt environmental concern, whether as an end in itself or as a means to other social and political goals, whether activist or educational, in a context of highly-charged and politicized inter-ethnic conflict, creates fascinating and significant tensions that have not been studied in detail. It is a particularly auspicious time to document and explore these various initiatives, and through them explore the more general questions outlined above.
For an initial mapping, I propose a provisional model which classes the joint environmental initiatives under discussion into three broad categories, which can be termed ‘apolitical’, ‘civil-egalitarian’ and
‘radical’. For each of these levels, and the inter-dynamics between them, there is a need to provide a nuanced analysis of the explicit and implicit objectives and motives of the different Jewish and Arab populations involved (recognizing also the significant intra-group variations), both in their presentation of themselves and their issues to the ‘other’, as well as in the way they tell their stories to and among their own reference groups.
 The ‘ apolitical ’ type consists of shared activities which are both socio-politically nonthreatening, and in relation to the actual environmental challenges, relatively trivial (such as onetime clean-up efforts). These are usually sporadic projects which happen to use the environment as a means to their coexistence ends, and which could just as easily have chosen soccer, music or something else as their focus for joint encounter. They also connect to a certain de-politicized approach in environmentalism that sees each individual as an equal victim (of risk) and perpetrator (of wrong) and therefore sharing in equal responsibility, with no reference to power structures, institutional discrimination, etc. These initiatives are of little interest for this study, except when they lead to deeper levels.
 The ‘ civil-egalitarian
’ group consists of activities that are much more significant environmentally, and also more challenging socio-politically, yet remain within a broad frame of consensus. It is hard to disagree that providing decent infrastructure in Arab villages—no sewage
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J. Benstein: Proposal flowing in their streets or in the wadis , parity in municipal budgets, etc.— is an issue of basic human justice, and also leads to overall environmental improvement. On one level, we see that
Jewish and Arab environmentalists coming together to create a joint agenda for activism can easily focus on these as priority issues.
But a more critical analysis reveals additional actors, with other social and political motives, in this sphere. For instance, Israeli Arab activists, bent on social and political improvement for their own communities, are open to framing their issues as environmental ones, and enlisting (Jewish) environmentalists to further their causes. For Israeli Jews, on the other hand, primarily Zionist leftists seeking to address basic injustice and right wrongs which they feel are distortions of the
Zionist project and not “necessary consequences” of it, defining the parity issues as environmental ones allows them to adopt quasi-radical causes, without questioning their own self-identity and basic political orientation. For, while representing significant political achievements, and raising real questions of the possibilities of joint citizenship, addressing these issues does not present difficult challenges to accepted Zionist discourse, or to the standard
Jewish-Israeli identity. But even more than the former category, in dealing with these issues activists are likely to be drawn to the third and most contested category.
 That level, here labeled as ‘ radical’ , focuses on the most critical challenge to inclusiveness in the Israeli polity: land and equal access to land for Arab towns and villages. Building a muchneeded sewage treatment plant for an Arab town is one thing; allowing that town to build noless-needed housing on land which would otherwise be zoned for Jewish residences or industry
(or green spaces—a social-environmental dilemma in itself) is quite another. To call for reapportionment of land in urban and regional planning, to reject strongly preferential treatment for Jewish settlements and allow for expansion of Arab ones, is tantamount to calling for Israel to become a “state of all its citizens”, the seemingly innocuous catch-phrase which signifies the ultimate dismantling of the Zionist enterprise ((Gavizon and Hacker 2000)). Defining the focus of my fieldwork as the lower Galilee, the focus of governmental efforts in the eighties and nineties to “Judaize” the area ((Gavison and Abu-Rih 1999)), including large scale land expropriations ((Rekhess 1977)) brings this particular category into sharp relief.
24
It is instructive to cross-reference this tripartite distinction with Smooha’s four-part typology of ideology among Israeli Arabs ((Smooha 1989) cf also (Ghanem 1990)). Roughly put, the ‘apolitical’ type corresponds to his accomodationist stance; the ‘civil-egalitarian’ to the reservationist and oppositionist stance, and the ‘radical’ almost exclusively to the oppositionist stance. (Members of Smooha’s fourth category—rejectionist—are characteristically opposed to cooperation on most social and political fronts, and so it is unlikely that rejectionist Israeli Arabs will participate in joint Jewish-Arab initiatives, environmental or not). Of course, similar typologies regarding Israeli Jewish attitudes to the integration of Israeli Arabs in the Israeli polity and public sphere, including a range notions from classical Zionism to post-Zionism (and anti-Zionism) will be referenced. The study will refine and test these categori- zations, while exploring how Arabs and Jews negotiate these issues, both in relation to each other in jointly initiated projects, and amongst themselves in the various personal and national issues that arise.
Section IV. Methodology
This section focuses on the planning and implementation of the fieldwork component of the research.
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J. Benstein: Proposal
Section IV.a: Joint Initiatives: An Introductory List of Organizations
The groups and projects which will be the focus of my research are of different sizes and organizational make-up. The key criteria for inclusion are simply the joint involvement of both Israeli Jews and Arabs in major aspects of the initiative 25 , and the focus of their concern having some environmental component
(land, air, water, resources, infrastructure, waste, environmental awareness and practices, etc.). A partial listing of the groups active in this area includes:
AlaS – Citizens for the Environment in the Galilee; LINK; “Makom Lekulanu” (A Place for All of
Us), sponsored by ‘Life and Environment’; JEMS (Joint Environmental Mediation Service) project, sponsored by IPCRI (The Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information); The Jewish-Arab
Youth Council, sponsored by The Nahariya Environmental Organization; and The Society for the
Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) – Arab Department.
Other possible examples would be:
Shemesh (Shorashim- Misgav-Sha’ab, a small local organization initiated by Jewish residents of the
Misgav region for cooperation with neighboring villages); and the environmental units of the Towns
Associations in Sakhnin, the Northern Triangle, the Southern Triangle. (governmental offices, linked to the Ministry of the Environment but under the auspices of local municipalities, which have initiated some form of cooperative venture in the recent past).
See Appendix 2 (suppl. pp. 2-3) for short characterizations of each major initiative listed here.
Comprehensive coverage of all of the above is neither possible nor necessary; the list represents the candidates for in-depth research. Further contacts and investigation will narrow the field to those that engage in the most fruitful activities for the purpose of the study. The prime candidates will be those who provide rich and nuanced reflection on the questions of part IV.c, and in general the theoretical questions regarding the possibility for environmental and civic localism . The actual fieldwork will involve more general organizational exploration of most of the above examples for the purposes of breadth and comparison, together with more in-depth analyses of a select few, including personal interviews with key activists and others associated with the initiatives.
As the above initial listing shows, the number of organizations that fit the criteria for this project is not insignificant. But since the phenomenon of joint initiatives is still rather circumscribed in the larger social context (especially regarding Arab participation), they will be compared with other organizations that have environmental perspectives or agendas, but are not joint efforts. The Galilee League for Health and Social Research, based in Shfaram, is one such organization, and others will be located.
Section IV.b. Specific Methodology: Data Gathering and Potential Challenges
The fieldwork called for here is multi-sited (see (Clifford 1986)), not the residential type, and will involve a range of interactions with the populations and activities that are the focus of the study, including (but not limited to):
 ongoing participation in meetings and activities of selected organizations;
 in-depth interviews with key participants, as well as key non- (or anti-) participants;
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J. Benstein: Proposal
 study of written matter, archives, media, videos and other materials produced by the groups themselves and others;
 if relevant, compose a questionnaire for wider distribution.
The strengths of my placement in the field come from my professional involvement in environmental education and activism in Israel. I am co-founder and educational director of the Heschel Center for
Environmental Learning and Leadership, a national research and educational ENGO, which is wellregarded as a politically non-aligned and highly professional organization in the field. I am the codirector of the Center’s Environmental Fellows program, a prestigious year-long inter-disciplinary leadership training course for Israeli Jews and Arabs involved in environmental work. Through this and other work, I have good relations with some of the staffs and leading personalities of the major organizations listed in the previous section.
I could imagine there being a certain degree of antipathy among Arab activists to an American-born
Jewish researcher such as myself. Indeed, my own biggest difficulty will be my lack of background or academic familiarity with the Israeli Arab population. At present, I don’t speak Arabic (though I plan to begin learning), and while this won’t influence the more organizational fieldwork—all meetings, etc. take place in Hebrew, since after all very few Israeli Jews speak Arabic either—it might hamper the establishment of rapport on a personal level with individual Arab participants and informants, or interpretation of relevant literature.
However, the Heschel Center (and myself within it) has taken strong stands on issues of environmental justice in the Arab sector, and several of the activists in the initiatives themselves have similar biographies to my own. Therefore, I don’t expect antagonism or difficulty in entering the field. Indeed, the problems may be of a completely different nature, stemming from “over-acceptance,” which is a drawback for the above-mentioned familiarity, and in my established status as activist in this field.
The standard ‘participant-observer’ model classically began with being an observer first in a strange or foreign field, and gradually overcoming the distance implied by that stance and engaging in explicit participation in cultural affairs, etc., which, in theory at least, should yield a deeper, more “-emic” ethnography. Ethnographic documentation of political activity of necessity requires a different definition for “participation”: producing an anthropological account of a terrorist organization should not oblige the researcher to become a terrorist—or even allow her to.
As an already perceived player of sorts in this arena, my observer status could at times be potentially compromised. At the meetings of certain organizations, I have already been asked my opinion of the activities of the group, or to take on a task or assignment, and thus in the course of events, I could have undue influence on the object of inquiry. This is more a question of timing than of some essentialized criterion of ‘non-interference:’ clearly some organizations express interest in my research, hoping that my results will be of use to them in improving their organizing, efficacy, or even their fundraising
14

J. Benstein: Proposal strategies. This is completely acceptable to me, and I plan to use the potential value of my research for the “objects of inquiry” as an incentive to encourage their cooperation.
Section IV.c: Data Collection: Challenges and Questions for Fieldwork
The main general questions and challenges for data collection and analysis regarding the organizations and their members which are the foci of the field research are as follows:
 Data Focus: ‘Agendas’ - What are the agendas of the groups and how were these arrived at? a. Challenges: Public agendas of groups are generally published and accessible. The existence of hidden agendas, or the story of the inner dynamics of the development of the group will require delicate interviewing of a variety of ‘players’, particularly well-placed and candid informants, sorting out conflicting stories (cf. fn. 24), reconstruction/interpretation of events, etc. b. Questions for Analysis: What issues are addressed and what avoided? To what extent is there dynamism or fluidity among different issues and types of issues: do groups progress from “apolitical” through “civil-egalitarian” to “radical” approaches, or conversely— moving the other way, retreating from the more politically charged issues to the more consensual? As distinct from ideologies, what are the narratives of the people involved, i.e., what stories do the actors tell about what they’re doing and why?
 Data Focus: ‘Success’ -
What initiatives have succeeded or are succeeding, and which fail?
a. Challenges: Here too there is a need for comparing different viewpoints and narratives, and
evaluating competing criteria and perspectives.
b. Questions for Analysis: What are the explicit and implicit criteria and time frames for evaluation for success and failure of the groups themselves? Do other, external criteria exist and are they relevant? c. Follow-up directions: What types of environmental issues are best addressed by cooperative
Jewish-Arab ventures—and what are not addressed? Are they an effective way of dealing with the most pressing issues?
 Data Focus: ‘Actors’ - What are the profiles of the people attracted to, and conversely repelled by these groups? What are the self-definitions of the participants, their own presentation of identity and place, their motivations for activism, etc.?
a. Challenges: These questions go beyond collecting and analyzing information about
organizational dynamics, into the realm of the personal, and my success in painting this picture with the fine detail it deserves will depend on the rapport I succeed in building with the range of informants. The participants are organized in the groups being studied; non-, and anti- participants will need to be located and profiled as individuals. b. Questions for Analysis: What roles do the respective ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds play in the groups and their projects? Personal biographies? What about economic, class and gender differences? How do settlement patterns—urban, rural, suburban—and their concomitant lifestyles in the Jewish and Arab sectors, shape the groups, the discourse and the agenda? What about age: what differences exist between those for whom ‘48 is a living memory, or ’76 (Land Day), or ’87 (the first intifada)?
 Data Focus: ‘Ethnicity’ -
How do the personal and collective agendas of the Jews and Arabs active in these groups mesh or differ?
a. Challenges: This focus combines the personal with the organizational, and requires a great deal of familiarity with general social and cultural questions, internal Jewish and Arab issues, etc. b. Questions for Analysis: How do the participants relate to members of the other group, and to
members of their own reference groups? What are the comparative relationships of Jewish and Arab environmentalists to their non-environmentalist compatriots, especially those with a strong social agenda?
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J. Benstein: Proposal c. Follow-up directions: How are issues of culture and tradition related to? To what extent does traditional knowledge exist on both sides and play a role in inter-group activity?
How do these initiatives compare to other types of joint Jewish-Arab projects and programs? Does the environmental focus play any sort of special role, either positively as a clear object of common concern, or negatively, as a highly politicized and conflictual source of tension and division?

Data Focus: ‘Discourse’ - What is the nature of the discourse in the groups that meet in these
contexts? How are various types of conflicts—ideological, political, historical—mediated in the working of the group?
a. Challenges: A problem which I would imagine to be relevant to all types of non-residential
fieldwork, and particularly salient here: being in the right place at the right time, and considered enough of an insider to witness and document the significant interactions.
b. Questions for Analysis: What type of environmental discourse—localist (cf. section Id) or
otherwise—is prevalent? What kind of participation models (cf. section III) are adopted by the Arab participants? c. Follow-up directions: In what ways does specifically environmental activist cooperation further or impede inter-group relations and the creation of a ‘trans-ethnic’ Israeli identity?
Section V. Proposed Chapter Headings
The proposed chapter headings for this thesis are:
1.
Environmentalism as Cultural Discourse and Social Movement: The View from
Anthropology
2.
Different Routes, Different Roots: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Variety of
Environmental Localisms
3.
Nature and Its Boundaries in the Israeli Context: Jewish-Zionist and Arab-Palestinian Ethnic-
National Identity in Environmental Perspective
4.
The Olive Tree and the Pine: Cultural, Social and Economic Introduction to Jews, Arabs and the Environment in the Galilee
5.
Pragmatism and Ideology in Personal and Organizational Narrative: On the Inner Dynamics of Joint Jewish-Arab Environmental Initiatives
6.
What Works for Whom and Why? The Impact of Joint Initiatives on People and Places
7.
Local, Civic and Ethnic-National Perspectives: Environmental Discourse in Israel Between
Consensus and Subversion
8.
Conclusion – Place and the Other, The Place of the Other: Problems and Prospects
Section VI. Expected contributions to the field
This study will contribute in three distinct directions:

To the relatively new field of environmental anthropology, including the cultural and political analysis of forms of environmental activism, and in particular, a deeper cross-cultural understanding of localist approaches in environmentalism;

To understanding social-environmental discourses in Israel, particularly as they pertain to highly contested areas of land resources and issues of environmental justice;

To the continuing discussion regarding democracy, citizenship and Jewish-Arab relations in
Israel, and the possibility of the construction of an ‘inclusivist’ trans-ethnic Israeli localism.
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J. Benstein: Proposal
Appendix 1: Comparison of Global and Local Tendencies in Environmentalism
Focus
“Globalizers”
The “big” challenges are global ones: ozone depletion, global warming, rainforests, development, global biodiversity, etc.
Address issues, solve problems, policy,
“top down”
“Localizers”
Most important to address local issues: land degradation, people/communities
(health, planning, participation), local
(incl. urban) quality of life
Take care of places, change values, “bottom up”
Characteri- zation
Mutual critique
Strategy
Acting locally misses the point
(undershooting). Anti-provincial
Typical organizations: Greenpeace,
WWF, large umbrella groups
Forge global/transnational alliances, treaties, fundraise, lobby government policy, INGOs
Rationale
Personal significance
‘Fight fire with fire’: need big global responses to global problems, frameworks, which can co-opt and redirect globalization
Lifestyle is important (only) re consumption and resources
Acting globally is unrealistic, rather focus on ‘backyard.’ Anti-cosmopolitan, indigenous, grassroots and bio-regional groups
Fight large-scale policy instruments develop personal place-based environmental practices, citizen empowerment, civil society
Distrust anything big, global—growing too big is selling out, only way to fight pernicious colonizing globalization is through localism
Lifestyle in general is key -- “reinhabitation”, direct democratic participation, personal transformation
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J. Benstein: Proposal
Appendix 2: Joint Jewish-Arab Environmental Initiatives: Introductory Annotated
List
Following is an annotated list of the leading initiatives that are relevant for this study.

ALaS - Citizens for the Environment in the Galilee : Founded in 1990 as an explicitly Jewish-
Arab environmental organization in the Western Galilee, ALaS is one of the oldest such groups.
According to their mission statement, they “work with the Arab and Jewish communities in the
Galilee believing that genuine coexistence with one another and the environment is what will ultimately enable us to conserve and protect the land we all love from environmental destruction.” They have addressed issues such as toxic waste, municipal waste, and groundwater contamination, via public campaigns, court cases, and education including a number of Jewish and Arab elementary schools in a project entitled: “The Green School:
Environmental Conservation and Coexistence in Education”.

LINK : Another prime example in the field, LINK is a small Galilean Jewish-Arab environmental non-profit (or environmental non-governmental organization – ENGO), that has been functioning formally since 1999 (and informally since 1994). It sponsors projects in solid waste management improvement, local environmental leadership training, and community participation in urban planning. While some of their activities are for Jews or Arabs separately, many are joint, and the organization itself is jointly staffed and run (see below for a description of the intriguing problematic of one LINK sponsored initiative).
 “ Makom Lekulanu ” (A Place for All of Us), sponsored by ‘Life and Environment:’ ‘Life and
Environment’ is a national environmental umbrella organization, with scores of member groups, and a variety of projects. They are a prime example of an existing, primarily Jewish environmental NGO responding to the events of last fall by initiating a joint Jewish-Arab activist group, whose main focus is social-environmental issues in the Arab sector, both land and resource issues as well as the level of environmental knowledge and awareness.
26 The name
“ Makom Lekulanu ” (A Place for All of Us), seemingly ‘innocuous’ to the untrained ear, expresses a definite political bias, suggesting what are still perceived as quite radical notions of completely joint citizenship and equal rights and treatment.
While nominally a national group, the main activists in this group are centered in the Wadi Ara area and the lower Galilee. And since ‘Life and Environment’ is an umbrella organization, many of the individuals active in “ Makom Lekulanu ” are active in other groups which also
 engage in joint Jewish-Arab environmental projects.
JEMS (Joint Environmental Mediation Service) project, sponsored by IPCRI (The Israel
Palestine Center for Research and Information): This initiative is an example of a large-scale project that was redirected from the Israel-Palestinian Authority arena to working with Israeli
Jews and Arabs. Under the auspices of Prof. Larry Susskind of M.I.T., and his international mediation center, CBI (Consensus Building Initiatives), Jews and Arabs are taught mediation skills to be applied in the resolution of environmental controversies. One of their first projects is a case of development and preservation in the Nachal Tsalmon region in the Galilee.

The Jewish-Arab Youth Council , sponsored by The Nahariya Environmental Organization:
This is a new attempt, from the beginning of this year, to gather a group of students from
Jewish and Arab high schools in cities, towns and villages in the Western Galilee, provide an extra-curricular framework to familiarize them with environmental issues, and facilitate a process whereby they plan and implement joint projects in these fields.

The Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI ) - Arab Department. One could claim that the SPNI’s activities in this area are not pertinent to this study: they are primarily educational, rather than activist, and they are on the whole ‘segregated’, with few joint Jewish-
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Arab ventures. But the fact that the SPNI, which traditionally combines nature with history and archaeology in a somewhat romanticized Israeli, very mainstream Zionist cultural identity, has an Arab Department at all is quite relevant, and indeed, provides a sort of reference point for assessing other types of undertakings. Precisely the questions that are the focus of this study, questions of identity in relation to environment, are raised in the application or translation of conventional SPNI ideology for Israeli Arab citizens: what kinds of identities and roots are being encouraged? What activities are undertaken, and what avoided? Just who is attracted to and involved in these activities? What is the training, experience and perspectives of the Arab professional staff? How has their mission changed over time? How is the SPNI and its agenda perceived in Israeli Arab society? How does it respond to ‘current events’? Etc.
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1 The first Earth Day was April 22, 1970, in the United States. It consisted of a nationwide collection of demonstrations, involving well over a million people, designed to call attention to environmental issues, and galvanize public and political support for addressing them.
For a description of the development and current activities under the Earth Day banner, see www.earthday.net.
Many people consider Earth Day to mark the beginning of the mass environmental movement, at least in North
America.
2 Land Day originated in demonstrations on March 30, 1976, near the town of Sakhnin, protesting the expropriation of land from Arab residents and settlements in the Lower Galilee for military and governmental use,
(and which were later used for constructing Jewish residential settlements and commercial industrial zones).
During the course of the protests, 6 Arabs were killed and dozens wounded by army and police, and ever since the day has been marked as a yearly commemoration characterized by marches and protests, calling in general for an end to discrimination against Israeli Arabs, and in particular, redressing grievances regarding expropriations and the lack of availability of land for the expansion or establishment of Arab urban and rural settlements. Indeed, the day is considered a turning point in the establishment of a collective national-ethnic identity among Israeli Arabs, whose focal point is the struggle for land. ((Gavison and Abu-Rih 1999):35)
3 The terminology used to refer to the Arab citizens of Israel varies in different sources and contexts. Possibilities include: Palestinians, Israeli Palestinians, the Arabs of ’48, Arab citizens of Israel, and of course, Israeli Arabs.
The general terms group together Moslems, Christians, Druze and Bedouin; urban and rural; northern, central and southern; secularized and traditional; etc., though, of course, each group, in different degrees, has its own history, cultural forms, inner social dynamic, and so forth.
For the sake of brevity, avoiding confusion (i.e., reserving the term Palestinians for residents of the Palestinian
Authority), and to remain as ideologically neutral as possible, the term Israeli Arabs will be used throughout.
Note, though, that this too is not uncontested. As political activist Aeeda Toma-Suleiman of Acre remarked when asked about this very question, and how she felt about the term “Israeli Arabs” (in Heberw, arviyei Yisrael, lit.
“Arabs of Israel”), she responded with the Hebrew equivalent of: “Listen, honey-- I ain’t nobody’s Arab!”
4 See below, section Ib, for a presentation of this discipline.
5 While there is no single, uniform definition of the “environmental crisis”, the term is commonly used to refer to an amalgam of developments (often tied to modernization and industrialization in the West) including: species extinction and the loss of biodiversity, resource depletion, the accumulation of pollutants in air, water and land, over-population and over-consumption, global climate change, and public health problems related to the above, among others. See (Orr 1992), (Pepper 1984).
6 Carson’s classic tract was preceded by an even more trenchant and comprehensive critique of industrial capitalist society by Murray Bookchin. Though no stranger to public debate, apparently out of fear of corporate backlash
(which was indeed Carson’s fate) he wrote the book under the pseudonym of Lewis Herber ((Herber 1962).
7 I intentionally leave the reference of the term “local” undefined across a range of possibilities. When contrasting with “global” it can mean anything from the very-small scale communal level, up to and including the national--- especially when the latter bears an anti-globalizing trope. While the main emphasis of “the local” in the Israeli context will indeed be municipal and regional (e.g., Coastal Plain, Misgav, Galilee), I agree with Brosius that the significance of the national level needs to be re-asserted: “Our interest in the ‘local’ has been either truly localized, rarely extending to the metropole or the nation, or linked to the transnational realm. We have been so fixed on local social movements, transnational NGOs, and globalizing processes that we seem to have forgotten about the need to understand how national political cultures might mediate between these” ((Brosius 1999):285).
8 “Not In My Back Yard”: a derogatory term denoting excessive focus on the well-being of one’s own immediate environment, with no concern for the parallel well-being of others’. Some claim that a NIMBY approach can never be truly environmental, since it is not opposed to the pollution a factory produces per se, only its proximity.
Others however see a NIMBY perspective as a legitimate starting point, since people are most motivated when responding to a deeply-felt personal threat, and can be motivated to widen their horizons later, as part of the process of ‘environmental consciousness raising.’

J. Benstein: Proposal
9 For example, the bioregionalists of the Pacific Northwest (primarily in the conventional states of Oregon and
Washington, and the Canadian province of British Columbia) have declared their home “Cascadia”, defined by the watershed region of the Columbia River and its tributaries ( (Durning 1996) ).
10 Not all movements among indigenous peoples are best described as environmental ones, though most are relevant for this study. The location of many indigenous peoples in sensitive ecological areas make movements focusing primarily on land rights, or cultural self-determination environmentally significant. Even where it is primarily a rhetorical or strategic ploy, the connections often made between bio-diversity and cultural diversity, or the stress placed on traditional land management methods make these groups highly relevant ((Alcorn 1993),
(Beckett 1996),(Bodley 1988), (Clay 1988)).
11 Indigenous peoples is the label most often used regarding tribal societies of Africa, Asia, South America the third, or developing world. They are also known as first peoples (Canada), aborigines (Australia), and ‘natives’, such as Native Americans. As such they hold pride of place in anthropology as well, in the classic image of the anthropologist coming to “the bush” to study “the natives”. It is clear that these labels were created in opposition to other peoples, non-indigenous and non-native, against whom they were defined. It is no accident then that the single common factor that binds the hundreds, if not thousands, of societies and cultures around the world termed indigenous is that they are oppressed, disenfranchised, or in some way engaged in conflict with other, politically dominant cultures ((Burger 1990), (Stevens 1997)).
12 Brosius writes: “Uncomfortable with the way we see otherness essentialized in indigenous rights campaigns, acculturative processes elided in an effort to stress the authenticity of indigenous peoples, and concepts such as
“wilderness” deployed in environmentalist campaigns, we have taken it as our task to provide critical commentary.” ((Brosius 1999):279)
13 Much has been made of the environmental sensibilities of Nazism in this regard. See (Bramwell 1989) for a comprehensive discussion.
14 Any serious wide-scale implementation of a bioregional vision would go well beyond the bounds of presently defined Israel, and have to encompass a much larger chunk of the Middle East. The (ecologically) arbitrary boundaries between Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria are a result of either: the pencil-lines drawn in European board-rooms by the post-World War I French and English colonial powers (such as the ecologically highly problematic 450 kilometer border running through the middle of the Jordan River and its valley from the Golan to
Eilat-Aqaba), or the geopolitical struggles of military campaigns and strategic negotiations on both sides.
Certainly, political questions of “rational” or “defensible” borders notwithstanding, a purely environmental critique could be leveled at the Israeli-Palestinian attempt at reaching a settlement with the Oslo accords, and almost any attempt to completely disengage and create two separate sovereign political entities between the
Jordan and the Mediterranean, which perforce must share the same aquifers, not to mention limited land resources, and essentially the same air as well. While the introduction of environmental concerns to the arena of regional realpolitik is to be lauded, a bioregional vision for the Middle East is (sadly) probably the most utopian of pipedreams, in a region noted for all sorts of highly ‘creative’ solutions to the perpetual conflicts with which it is plagued.
15 Or as one informant put it: minimum Jews on maximum territory. There are the very obvious examples of local councils, such as the Misgav Regional Authority and its strained relations with the surrounding Arab municipalities of Sakhnin, Arrabe and Dir Hanna, which is the geographical focus of much of my field work. In addition, on the ‘federal’ level, according to one governmental source, the defining boundary of the entire
Northern District of governmental ministries (Interior, Health, Labor and Welfare, etc., including, significantly,
Environment) has been drawn to insure a Jewish majority therein.
16 In fact, to connect this with the previous section, one reading of bioregionalism as a cultural approach is as the active, attempted application of lessons learned from "indigenous" cultures to "non-indigenous" ones-- i.e., the translation of certain values from pre-modern, tribal societies to modern, industrial ones. But this is potentially highly problematic: a serious question for bioregionalism is whether a non-primordialist localism is at all possible over the long term, or is it doomed to be so artificial and constructivist as to not be capable of commanding anybody’s loyalties?
17 For Israeli and Palestinian perspectives on Anderson’s thesis, see (Tzur 1999) and (Bishara 1999).
18 Not to press a linguistic point too far, but even the German blut and borden , ‘blood and soil’, is not nearly so alliterative as the Hebrew equivalent, dam ve-adama -- with the ‘ adam’, human, there as the pivotal central link.
19 This overlaps with external and internal understandings of Zionism, but is not identical to them. It is certainly true that most Zionist Jews who immigrated (‘returned’) to what they termed ‘the Land of Israel’, in the late 19 th and early 20 th century saw themselves as reborn Middle Easterners (finally) coming home, and most Palestinian
Arabs saw these same people as Europeans coming to colonize the Levant. However, reindigenization implies a more romantic and less modernizing ethos, which only characterized some Jewish immigrants and some Zionist ideological schools of thought. The implication though is that the reindigenizing tendency (represented by thinkers such as A. D. Gordon and others) would be more sensitive to environmental issues such as taking care of the land,

J. Benstein: Proposal and the heavy price of development-oriented modernization, whereas a colonial approach would treat the environment as so many raw materials for extraction. For a somewhat different environmental historiography re
Zionism, see (De-Shalit and Talias 1994).
20 Cf. (Steiner 1985), and more recently: (Ezrahi 1992a).
21 According to (Gavison and Abu-Rih 1999), in 1998 Misgav included 28 small settlements, numbering 8000 residents, stretching over 183,000 dunam, while the Arab towns (including Sakhnin, Arrabe, Dir Hanna, Kaukab,
Ibelin, and others) contain more than 100,000 residents and have effective control over (only) 50,000 dunam.
22 This is of course far from clear cut vandalism, since the “Jewish” pine trees, planted by the JNF, serve to claim land and landscape for the State, and often literally cover ruins of depopulated Arab villages. For a literary and historical treatment of the JNF planting and the phenomenon of arson, see (Zerubavel 1996).
23 This would include the examples of the conflict of the residents of Beit Jann and the Meron Nature Reserve (for analysis, see Schwartz, forthcoming), and the problems incurred by the residents of Ein Khud, an unrecognized village in the Carmel Reserve, established by refugees of what is now Ein Hod, in the aftermath of the 1948 war.
24 A relevant example here (though at the time of this writing having been discontinued) was the project of the
Central Galilee ENGO, LINK to reclaim and restore the springs of the Arab village of Kaukab, near the Segev region. After initial success in building relations with the villagers, receiving funding, engaging in educational and environmental activities, the project has broken down, and the springs remain in their degraded state. While one person involved in the project attributed the failure to ‘simple’ political in-fighting in the village, others suggested more complex reasons. The springs, though known as Ma’ayanot Kaukab, and historically serving the villagers, are actually (now) outside the jurisdiction of the village—because the land has been expropriated by the Israeli government, and transferred to the authority of the Misgav Regional Council, as has much of the Arab lands in that area. At least some residents of the village insist on retaining the springs in their present state, and not beautifying them in any way, to preserve the memory of ‘the Naqba’ and subsequent occupation, and to symbolize their ongoing situation as mirrored in the land. To compound local misgivings, the American origin of one of the
Jewish initiators of the project, as well as the Jewish-Zionist institutional source of the project funding, have aroused fears among some Kaukab residents that the spot would be overrun with Jewish tourists from Israel and abroad, and that the whole project would be co-opted for Zionist public relations purposes.
25 Of course, their will be many different levels and types of “cooperation”, from fig-leaf tokenism to truly egalitarian and bilateral projects. This will of course be highly relevant in the final mapping of activities, and investment in in-depth follow-up research.
26 This is the consensus at present. There is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction in the focus on the Arab sector from some Jews who feel that environmental threats that are of particular concern to them, and are legitimate topics for the group are being slighted. It will be interesting to see how this thread plays out, in terms of the cultural and political construction of the issues deemed worthy of engagement.

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