Environmental Framing and its Limits: Campaigns in Palestine and Israeli
Publisher: International Journal of Middle East Studies
Author(s): Emily McKee
Date: 2018
Topics: Cooperation, Governance, Land, Renewable Resources
Countries: Israel, Palestine
As activists frame campaigns, their region's broader cultural and political context intercedes. In Israel and Palestine attempts to work across national lines and undertake activism that links ecological, economic, and social issues have long been stymied. This article examines how the fraught historical and contemporary relationships of Israelis and Palestinians with land bestow both flexibility and limitations on their framing of campaigns. In particular, it ethnographically analyzes the framing of two projects—the building of an “eco-mosque” and a Jordan River restoration effort—to examine how activists grapple with frame flexibility and its limits. It finds that an Israeli tendency to deterritorialize environmental issues and curb environmental campaigns that are “too political” conflicts with Palestinian criticism of apolitical frames because they euphemize violence and domination. These cases demonstrate how local connotations can make or break environmental campaigns. The eco-adage, “Think global, act local” is not enough. One must think local, too.