The environmental dimensions of Israel’s project of ethnic cleansing have gained greater attention in scholarly and popular media in the past ten years. Many now know about Palestinian Bedouin in the Naqab’s struggle against expulsion in the name of “environmental conservation” by the Jewish National Fund, the destruction of Gaza’s agriculture as eco-cide, and the uprooting of olive trees in the West Bank. But the daily existence of Palestinians within the 1949 international borders of Israel, of the agricultural communities in the Triangle and Wadi ʿAra whose stories are chronicled in Struggling for Time, escape international attention and sympathy. Gutkowski argues that Palestinian citizens of Israel navigate an Israeli scientific and legal bureaucracy that enacts environmental racism through neglect as much as it does through violent events of land theft. She zeroes in on the temporal dimensions of this environmental racism with a “twofold” argument about Israel’s mechanisms of control through and of time (p. 7). First, she argues that Israel, like all settler nations, “must necessarily erase native time and claim its own societal time as indigenous to inhabit and colonize the land” (p. 3), which specifically is accomplished by “articulating Palestinian agriculture as ‘biblical’” (p. 7). Second, Israel settles time by “bridging the nonaligning and conflicting ‘capitalist time’ of Israel’s industrialized agriculture time and the imagined ‘biblical time’ that Israeli agriculture allegedly stems from” (p. 7). Furthermore, the stories of ‘48 Palestinian farmers and agricultural experts do not always fit neatly into dominant ideas of resistance as spectacular moments of protest.

The book begins by situating the argument in settler colonial and critical agrarian studies, overviewing the history of agrarian land change in Palestine since the late Ottoman era, and explaining the methodological approach. The remainder is organized into four empirical chapters and a short conclusion. The chapters weave together with a cohesive through line, but each could stand on its own assigned on a syllabus. The book seeks to “prioritize the analysis of time,” acknowledging it is also “interdependent” with space and landscape (p. 13). Gutkowski seeks to dismantle a common binary set up in settler colonial studies wherein settler time is positioned as “linear” while Indigenous time is a “constant relation of the past and present” (pp. 9, 10). She “complicates” this by providing examples of cyclical settler time (p. 10). She uses the concept of “timescapes” to illustrate how for Israel’s settler state “time is a constitutive power mechanism” with “multiple layers” (p. 11). For Palestinians, timescapes center around the past, with 1948 as a “temporal benchmark” but also around the promise of return in the present and future (p. 40). Her theoretical and empirical work draws attention to both Israeli and Palestinian actions, but the reader is not left thinking these are two equal sides with two equal approaches to time. She makes clear that Israel enacts a “temporal legality” which “aims…to appropriate Palestinian peasants’ lands” (p. 16); she also highlights Palestinian victories, such as the long fought for return of agrarian lands in Wadi ʿAra.

There are moments in the book where the timescape framework feels limiting; Chapter 4, for instance, while empirically rich, may have worked better with other concepts to explain how Palestinians working for the state understand their positions. Gutkowski argues that the temporal orientation of what ṣumūd means now for Palestinian citizens of Israel may be changing, and connects these constrained choices under Israeli state power to the Indigenous studies concept of “survivance” (p. 176). Here, though, there are other concepts that if applied would complicate the argument, such as Audra Simpson’s concept of refusal—where do Palestinian state employees refuse to participate or work against the Israeli state’s interests? However, despite these moments, the theoretical interventions of the book are still rich. I finished the text with new insights not just of the settler state’s imposition of specific timescapes but also into how Palestinians are “the main agents of their own history” (p. 186). Another book released soon after, Nasser Abourahme’s The Time Beneath the Concrete: Palestine Between Camp and Colony (Duke University Press, 2025), also argues that time and not just space must be central to our understanding of the Zionist project but takes different sites and objects as his locus. Reading these two texts together would be an interesting conversation.

Gutkowski’s analysis of the Israeli state’s claims to indigeneity through time are one of the most unique contributions of the book. While it is established that the settler “moves” to replace the native, there has been comparatively little written empirically as to Israel’s projects of claiming Jewish indigeneity. This burgeoning field is greatly enriched by Gutkowski’s contributions, which tackle the ecological and scientific dimensions of Israel’s settling of social time especially in Chapters 1–3. Chapter 2 on shmita (letting the land lay fallow every seven years) is rich, going into decades of Israeli bureaucracy memoranda to show how the state mobilizes biblicism in the service of contemporary state claims and can work to smooth out contradictions quickly. Interestingly, she argues that “shmita allows Palestinians to persist in agriculture despite a history of agrarian dispossession”, complicating the notion that settler timescapes always supplants Indigenous timescapes (p. 104). However, Palestinian citizens of Israel who assert their legal rights under the state to equal attention to legal issues around land inheritance are left foundering for years. In Chapter 3, she chronicles the little-known story of how Israeli agronomists stole what would become the Barnea olive variety from the occupied Sinai Peninsula and named it after the biblical location. In doing so Israel “creat[ed] links between the Biblical past and the modern present and solidif[ied] Israel’s moral claims to indigeneity” (p. 119). Chapter 3 is more rooted in science and technology studies (STS) than the other chapters, which I found interesting and not disruptive; there is much STS can learn from Palestine as a site, and this is an excellent contribution.

Methodologically, Gutkowski’s ethnography demonstrates her long-term commitment to understanding the lives of Palestinian citizens of Israel without resorting to quick judgment or rote sloganeering. She returns to the same sites and interlocutors over a period of fifteen years, which, while a geographically small area, never feels myopic. The Palestinian farmers and agricultural experts she speaks to are neither exceptionalized nor forced to stand in as perfect models for Palestinians throughout ’48 or all Palestinians. Yet we still gain generalizable insights as to how Palestinian rural livelihoods have been impacted by Israeli settler colonialism within its internationally recognized borders, an important field of Palestine studies that has received renewed attention in recent years (and Gutkowski frequently cites works such as those by Areej Sabbagh-Khoury and Muna Dajani).

Ethnography is combined with archival materials and secondary sources to flesh out the past, although the book mostly focuses on post-1948 (and often, on the past fifty years) as Gutkowski is mostly concerned with the imposition of Israeli state structures and ideologies onto Palestinian citizens of Israel and not a longer history of Palestinian agriculture writ large. Those new to the topic would still find enough overview of Palestinian history with a focus on land tenure in the introduction and throughout the chapters. However, I feel it is more readable for a Palestine studies audience already familiar with major events and places than a general critical agrarian studies audience who may struggle to keep dates and locations straight (especially as many places are named in both Hebrew and Arabic). Historically, she mainly engages with Hebrew-language primary sources from the Israel State Archive (ISA) and official governmental reports from the Ministry of Agriculture, smaller agricultural committees, and Knesset minutes. While engagement in Arabic-language Palestinian archives is sparse, this is not necessarily a shortcoming. The ISA is famously inaccessible; its digitization about ten years ago made many of its non-scanned records even less available to researchers. It is a unique contribution to engage with and expose these materials through a critical lens instead of a laudatory one.

The book is a strong contribution methodologically and intellectually, but it is a difficult read politically now. It is not Gutkowski’s fault that we are reading her book in a post-October 7 landscape, as Israel’s bombs fall simultaneously on Gaza and then Iran; no researcher holds a crystal ball. At the moment of writing this review, Palestinians within ’48 are vulnerable to disproportionate state violence. Reports of Palestinians being denied access to collective shelters in Haifa and Akka and the deaths of four Palestinians in the Galilee town of Tamra due to insufficient civil shelter infrastructure illuminate a much more insidious and deadly form of racism and state neglect than the more mundane examples in this book. The lessons about Israel’s control of time here are perhaps more salient than ever, as she writes, “Palestinians as a collectivity experience a lack of a political horizon and recurring attacks on the mere possibility of experiencing hope” (p. 194). These attacks are all too visceral now.

Unfortunately, visions of the future in Palestine feel painful, due to the horrors of our current political moment and because Gutkowski seems to be speaking to two audiences with greatly different positions and investments. In her introduction, she acknowledges the “nuances of the settler colonial encounter in Israel/Palestine” (p. 8), in that Jews have also survived genocide. Similarly in her conclusion to Chapter 2, her articulation of how shmita could “allow us to reimagine and redefine the sorts of political communities existing in the local settler colonial condition and the future of this land” feels flattening (p. 107). She adds a caveat that “hybridity does not position the two in an equal timescape”—but the point is not that we need to have the vision of “proximity rather than a hierarchy” but that the forces of fascist power have no incentive to give up the inequality that structure the modern Zionist state and its imperialist goals (p. 108). While I doubt Gutkowski imagines those forces would pick up this book, her appeal “that the state be placed back in this dynamic” of environmental and agricultural governance is difficult to parse now, as even career bureaucrats embrace anti-Palestinian racist positions in Israel and in the US (p. 202).

In the book’s conclusion, she states her political position clearly: “Jews and Palestinians are going to continue living on this land together whether they like it or not. Then, how do time and timescape provide a tool to resist the current dynamic?” (p. 201). I agree with her assessment pragmatically and ethically. The book opens and closes with the climate crisis and visions of ecological futures and social justice. It is in these moments of intensified anti-Palestinian violence we should consider how attention to Palestinian agrarian struggles can help do the work of “unsettling both climate change and time” (p. 199).

I would recommend this book to readers in environmental anthropology of the SWANA region, global critical agrarian studies, science and technology studies, Palestine studies, and settler colonial studies.