Lecture | Research Seminar
The Tree as Weapon: (non) state securitization of trees in the Negev/Naqab
- Date
- Monday 12 May 2025
- Time
- Location
-
Pieter de la Court
Wassenaarseweg 52
2333 AK Leiden - Room
- t.b.a.
Trees are significant for their economic, environmental, and spiritual value, and for the way they symbolize people’s rootedness to the earth. They green our surroundings, and more importantly, they are the lungs of our earth. The momentum of this environmental awareness, however, can also have a darker, less visible side. States and non-state organizations promote tree planting as an environmental or economic “magic bullet,” aiding nationalist political agendas by “greenwashing” them (de Freitas Netto et al. 2020). Because of their significance for people, trees can become powerful political tools for both state and non-state actors.
In this presentation, I will look at trees as part of Israeli securitization and extend the notion of securitization to include the planting of/planning for trees in efforts of continued Judaization of the Negev/Al Naqab. While Israel is known for attaching a powerful symbolism to tree planting (Braverman 2009; Long 2005) representing the rootedness of the Jewish people in the “Promised Land,” both settler movements and the Israeli state are also involved in tree-related politics for so-called security reasons and to gain control over land. Here I will scrutinize the planting of forests, as part of such a securitization quest, before they come into existence. I will ask what powers, ideologies, and actors are involved in its planning and how complex state-non-state entanglements, which include mostly extreme right Zionist actors, are involved here.
About the speaker
Erella Grassiani is an associate professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam. She studies the Israeli security industry and its effects on human rights worldwide. She also works nationalist militias and social movements in Israel and she studies the politics of trees in her project on arboreal nationalism. In the past she has done extensive research on the Israeli military and published a book on the topic: Soldiering under Occupation processes of Numbing among Israeli soldiers in the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2013 Berghahn Books). She is the co-editor of Security Blurs: The Politics of Plural Security Provision (2019 Routledge). She further is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Conflict and Society: Advances in Research (Berghahn).