Spring Water: the Lifeblood of the Village of Wādī Fūkīn (West Bank)

This thesis focuses on the social relationships constituting domestic water management and the use of spring water for irrigation, in the rural village of Wādī Fūkīn (West Bank). It investigates how the dialectics between power strategies exerted through water policies and local resistance practices contribute to define the meaning of community, state and citizenship. The Israeli and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA)’s projects of water modernisation and the intensive farming and irrigation techniques fostered by development actors emerge as techno-politics aimed at creating colonial subjects, farmers or citizens. The analysis of the Israeli water and territory planning brings insights into the theorisation of technical planning as a new dimension of politics of the modern-state. As a response to the Israeli strategies of de-peasantisation and land expropriation, villagers view farming activities as practices of self-representation against the threat of becoming refugees. The study highlights the role of water in the Israeli and Palestinian nation-state construction. The Israeli and the PNA’s ideological constructions of water scarcity – shown as a hybrid socio-natural process – are aimed at ensuring conflicting interests, while legitimising multiple dynamics of domination. Local practices of resistance to the PNA’s water centralisation bring to light that domestic water is a political arena in which the meaning of state and its legitimacy are contested and negotiated between the political elites ruling the PNA, Israel and other local interest groups. The local spring water management reveals that this resource mediates the construction of local dimensions of identification and differentiation shaping the tribal political organisation, which emerges as an idiom of solidarity to struggle for self-determination. This study addresses the important debate about the relationships between the State and tribal political patterns. The adoption of intensive irrigation and farming techniques has contributed to the individualisation of farming and resistance strategies. Donors’ interventions have led to the de-mobilisation of the local community and to the emergence of a new “globalized elite”, amplifying dynamics of marginalisation, in particular of women. Local farmers express their claims for autonomy and socio-ecological justice by means of the embodiment of alternative patterns of water and farming knowledge. However, in daily practices the intensive farming techniques and the local ones are juxtaposed and articulated, leading to the production of a sort of “hybrid agriculture”. The Palestinian territories are fragmented in different hydro-social networks and territories, in multiple “islands of experience” characterised by different conditions of water stress and experiences of deprivation. This leads to the imagination of multiple Palestinian nations and Palestinian “others”.