Virtual seminar with Prof. Irus Braverman and Prof. Mazin Qumsiyeh on Animals in Palestine

This free virtual seminar will take place on Thursday 10 October 2024, from 3–4:30 PM Irish Standard Time. This seminar is part of a series that runs in the academic year 2024-2025, organised by the Animal Studies Research Network UCD, as part of its Environmental Humanities strand.

Irus Braverman will join us to discuss her most recent book, Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel. Drawing on more than seventy interviews with Israel's nature officials and on observations of their work, this book explores the widespread ecological warfare practised by the state of Israel. Recruited to the front lines as part of this warfare are the fallow deer, gazelles, wild asses, griffon vultures, pine trees, and cows—on the Israeli side—against the goats, camels, olive trees, hybrid goldfinches, and akkoub on the Palestinian side. Such nonhuman organisms are all the more effective because nature camouflages their tactical deployment as soldiers in a human war. At the end of the day, then, the administration of nature by the state of Israel advances both the Zionist project of Jewish settlement and the corresponding dispossession of non-Jews from this space.

Mazin Qumsiyeh will join us to explain why and how the colonization of Palestine and its transformation from a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural multi-religious state to make it a "Jewish state" also led to destruction of natural communities. As there is a genocide, there is an ecocide with loss of biodiversity accompanying loss in human diversity. He articulates how working for environmental justice and for human rights is key to peace and sustainability and not just in Western Asia but globally. He also advances the notion that human and biological diversity are valued by indigenous people and how colonizers damage both forms of diversity in their quest for a monolithic Europeanized society and nature.

About the speakers:

Irus Braverman is professor of law, adjunct professor of geography, and research professor of environment and sustainability at the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY). Her books include Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (2012), Coral Whisperers: Scientists on the Brink (2018) and Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel (2023).

Mazin Qumsiyeh is founder and volunteer director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability, Bethlehem University (PIBS see palestinenature.org and review their 10 year booklet and annual reports here). He is author of 190 scientific papers and many books on areas ranging from biodiversity conservation to genetics to human rights. For more see qumsiyeh.org

The Animal Studies Research Network at UCD is organised by Deborah Schrijvers and Poulomi Choudhury.

Thanks to @Nour Tayeh via Unsplash