Ecopastoralism: Sheep-Washing the Israeli Occupation in the West Bank

The second speaker of this term’s Hayvanât Talks series was Irus Braverman from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Braverman, the author of books such as Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (2012), Coral Whisperers: Scientists on the Brink (2018), and Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel (2023), drew on her ethnographic fieldwork in the Israeli-occupied West Bank to explain how Jewish settlers have been using sheep and grazing practices.

Since 2010, small herding outposts have spread across the West Bank—and their numbers have increased even more since October 2023. These outposts use Jewish-owned sheep as tools to dispossess Palestinians and to “re-indigenize” the settlers who replace them. The settlers not only use sheep to gain control over land but also treat them as living technologies to produce, instill, and normalize biblical imaginaries of the Jewish people as inherently belonging to that land.

By participating in state-backed herding activities, Jewish settlers have achieved—through sheep—the largest land grab in the occupied West Bank since 1967. Braverman noted that settlers refer to this process as a “shepherding revolution,” and explained how, through this practice of “sheep washing,” violence becomes legitimized in the eyes of the occupation regime.