(Im)possibilities of Ecological Survival in Palestine

Vortrag von Muna Dajani (London School of Economics)

This lecture pays tribute to the Wadi Gaza River valley, a landscape that has remained recalcitrant and resistant to erasure. Today, Wadi Gaza stands as an emblem of the ongoing brutal genocide in Gaza over the past two years and, more broadly, of the Palestinian condition. The lecture draws inspiration from Winona LaDuke’s question on “How do we grieve the death of a river?” in the aftermath of the catastrophic dam collapses at the Rio Doce in Brazil in 2016. Her reflections on how to offer condolences for a river to those for whom the river lies at the centre of their world frame the theoretical and affective approach taken here. Wadi Gaza similarly evokes profound registers of loss and grief for dying waterways. It speaks to upended lifeworlds and to the deep dislocations produced by settler ecological violence, in a region where rivers such as the Jordan/Shari’a are enclosed and securitised, and even rainfall is claimed as state property. These forms of dispossession sever Palestinians from longstanding relationships, practices, and rituals with water. The lecture positions Wadi Gaza as a microcosm of the Palestinian condition: marked by abrupt disconnection from its source, by stagnation and toxicity, yet also by a persistent, unrealised capacity for resurgence that is most clearly expressed in its cyclical, insistent return through annual flooding.