Introduction

The Introduction provides an overview of key hydropolitical issues in Israel/Palestine. It situates contemporary debates over topics including desalination, greenwashing, water crisis and water wars in a longer historical context that includes earlier Zionist attitudes towards the environment. It relates the book to recent critical trends in Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, Geography and Postcolonial Studies, particularly Petrofiction and the Blue Humanities.

Conclusion

The Conclusion identifies future directions for research on Israeli and Palestinian hydrofictions, and in hydrocriticism more broadly. It examines the implications of the monograph for Postcolonial Studies and the Environmental Humanities. It underlines the contribution of literature to campaigns for environmental justice in Israel/Palestine and beyond.

Water Wars: Infrastructures of Violence in Sayed Kashua’s Let it be Morning

This chapter examines representations of Israel’s destruction and disconnection of Palestinian water infrastructure in Palestinian literature, focusing on Sayed Kashua’s Let It Be Morning (2004). It situates this phenomenon in the context of wider scholarship on urbicide, water infrastructure and citizenship, biopolitics, and humanitarianism. The destruction and disconnection of Palestinian water supplies by the Israel Defense Forces is identified as an act of ‘slow violence’ and a factor in ‘racial Palestinization’.

‘Current Liquidisations Ltd.’: Israel’s ‘Mediterranean’ Identity in Amos Oz’s The Same Sea

This chapter examines the role that the Mediterranean Sea came to play in Israel’s national identity from the 1990s onwards. Through a reading of Amos Oz’s The Same Sea (1999), it counters claims that a turn to the Mediterranean offered a ‘post-ideological’ identity appropriate to the era of the Oslo Accords. It shows instead that the phenomenon of ‘Mediterraneanism’, or Yam Tikhoniut, was continuous with earlier Zionist goals, notably in reaffirming Israel’s affiliation with Europe and its distance from the ‘Orient’. Oz’s novel is further identified as depicting the arrival of global capitalism in Israel through its portrayals of tourism, and through its use of liquid metaphors and formal techniques that connect economic growth at home to underdevelopment abroad.

‘The dense, murky water of the past’: Swamps, Nostalgia and Settlement Myth in Meir Shalev’s The Blue Mountain

This chapter examines the changing meanings of swamp drainage in Israel’s national mythology. Swamp drainage was undertaken in the early twentieth century by the Jewish National Fund and again after the establishment of the State of Israel. Once seen as a triumph of Zionist ingenuity, draining swamps was redefined in the late twentieth century as an emblem of Zionism’s environmental hubris. This chapter assesses this history through Meir Shalev’s magical realist novel The Blue Mountain (1988), situating Shalev’s text in its contemporary contexts of environmentalism and post-Zionism.

Crossing the River: Home and Exile at the River Jordan

This chapter identifies the River Jordan as a major feature of Israeli and Palestinian environmental imaginaries. It argues that the Jordan’s role as a water resource and a contested border gives it crucial material and symbolic functions in imagining the past, present and future of the Israeli and Palestinian nations. The first half examines the meanings of the Jordan to early twentieth-century Zionist ‘pioneers’, including its role in cultivating a sense of home and belonging. The second half identifies representation of the Jordan as dried-up or polluted as a strategy used in recent Palestinian literature to depict Palestinian exile. Texts examined include Moshe Smilansky’s short story ‘Hawaja Nazar’ (1910), Mahmoud Darwish’s poem ‘A River Dies of Thirst’ (2008) and Mourid Barghouti’s memoir I Saw Ramallah (1997).