Violent pacification through water commodification: land appropriation and agricultural production in Palestine/Israel

My thesis explores the intricacies of water management in Palestine/Israel in light of the legal, ecological, social and political embeddedness of water within the terrain in which it exists. Responding to alarmist scholarship according to which water conflicts pose a threat to international security -"water war" theories -and to theories, including Virtual Water scholarship, that argue that what we are witnessing is best understood as a "water peace" resulting from trade relations, I suggest that the varied ways in which water has come to be conceptualised as a commodity have effects on how water is being managed and shared. This commodity-form of water means that water relations are pacified; facilitating structural violence without the use of brute force necessarily. I, thus, analyse the wider process of what I call "water commodification" and how this process attends to the particularities of water as a commodity. I employ a theoretical approach drawing on political ecology theories, while deploying socio-legal research methods with Palestine/Israel as a case study. Engaging water management issues relating to the varied dimensions of water commodification that characterise it while observing water use on the terrain of Palestine/Israel, I show that water commodification enables other forms of control. These other forms of control, dispossession and appropriation as they emerge from my fieldwork are shown to take place vis-à-vis land and agricultural production. Ultimately, I argue that the commodification of water in Palestine/Israel leads to a violent pacification of water conflicts by promoting solutions to water sharing that de-politicise and abstract water from its material-social context, forcing the compromise of Palestinian rights and the erosion of Palestinian sovereignty.