The political ecology of Zionism – At UC Davis – Hunt Hall 142

Hunt Hall 142

The Zionist settler-colonial project of transforming an “Arab agricultural economy to an industrial economy dominated by Jewish capital” (Ghassan Kanafani) has always involved the transformation of indigenous ecologies. In this talk, Dr. Kaminer considers the forms which this transformation has taken before Israeli independence, during the Nakba and its aftermath, and since the shift to neoliberal capitalism in the 1970s, with a special focus on the “edge case” of the hyper-arid Central Arabah region.

 Bio: Dr. Matan Kaminer is an anthropologist and a political activist. A fellow at the Martin Buber Institute, Hebrew University, his ethnographic research on migrant workers from Thailand in Israeli agriculture addresses colonial dispossession, capitalist exploitation and ecological degradation. He is also a longtime political activist and a co-editor of a book on the history of Israel’s “independent” non-Zionist left, as well as a member of the board of Academia for Equality, a grassroots organization of over 700 radical academics in Israel and abroad.