Ecopastoralism: Sheep Washing in Isreali Occupied West Bank

Ecopastoralism: Sheep Washing in the Israeli-Occupied West Bank

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this talk explores the recent deployment of sheep and grazing practices by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank. The wave of small herding outposts that has swept through the West Bank since 2010, and that has accelerated since October 2023, employs Jewish-owned sheep to dispossess the Palestinians and to re-indigenize the settlers in their place. The sheep have thus become potent agents for control as well as animated technologies for producing, instilling, and normalizing biblical imaginaries of the landscape and of the Jewish people as authentically belonging to it. Partaking in mundane shepherding activities backed by the state, the Jewish takeover of territory via sheep has already amounted to the largest land grab in the occupied West Bank since 1967. The current talk contemplates this new “shepherding revolution,” as the settlers refer to it, situating it amidst…