‘States’ of Scarcity: Water, Space, and Identity Politics in Israel, 1948–59

Abstract

Between 1948 and 1959, perceptions of Israeli water resources changed dramatically from a strong belief in water abundance in the prestate period to an equally strong and unequivocal belief in water scarcity after 1959. This paper tells the story of how the water resources of Israel came to be constructed as scarce. On the substantive level, the paper tells the story of the dismantling of a network of water abundance and the emergence, instead, of a network of water scarcity and centralization, which helped to construct all of the following: water resource scarcity as ‘fact’; centralized policy-making institutions as most ‘efficient’; centralized technologies as ‘appropriate’; the national space as the only source of identity; the national scale of water management as ‘necessary’; a strong and centralized state as ‘legitimate’; legal precedents for the use of state apparatus for surveillance, discipline, and control over water resources; and, consequently, a form of citizenship that is seen as at once heroic and disciplined. On the theoretical level, in this paper I argue that the ontological distinction often assumed between scientific (eg water scarcity) and political (eg centralized nation-state) fields of practice is exaggerated, especially in literature on water politics in Israel. I further demonstrate that technoscientific debates about water availability, efficient technologies for its utilization, and appropriate institutions for its management are constitutive of relations of power and government and are themselves implicated in the construction of an Israeli style of government.