Is building a mosque of mud and straw an environmental project? What costs and benefits come with framing it as such? In Wadi al-Naʿam, an unrecognized Bedouin village in Israel where the Israeli government deems all construction to be illegal, a village resident named Mahmud wanted to build a mosque. He gained assistance from a predominantly Jewish environmental justice group to make what commentators in the media later dubbed a straw-bale “eco-mosque.”Footnote 1 When the government threatened demolition, a network of sympathetic environmental activists rallied in an attempt to stop its destruction. Yet, this environmental affiliation simultaneously jeopardized the support Mahmud sought for the mosque from other parties. For some this project was a collaboratively built eco-mosque, for others it was a paternalistic intervention by Jews in a Bedouin community, while for still others it was an attempt to mask illegal building by Bedouins without land ownership. When demolition crews eventually destroyed the mosque, Mahmud decided to rebuild it not as an environmental project, but using conventional materials in cooperation with local Muslim leaders.
When the comanager of a very different project—restoration of the river that forms the border of Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian West Bank—described her work to me, she noted a similar challenge of maneuvering between multiple potential frames. Claire, who works with the trilateral NGO EcoPeace, found intense communication difficulties as supporters were variously invested in the project as ecological restoration, peace building, or a demand for justiceFootnote 2:
we have to use language in all of our reports that, you know, they can try to go to someone in Israel with, and they're going to take seriously . . . that we can hope to go to the PWA [Palestinian Water Authority] and they're going to take us seriously and not be like, yeah, this is normalization . . . and the same thing in Jordan. . . . We spend a huge chunk of our time just . . . trying to suss that out and figure out what is the language that we can use and what's not going to upset our respective publics.
However, Claire adds that paying too much attention to avoiding different sides’ political sensitivities can end up compromising one's message. “You run the risk,” she said, of a situation in which “you're not going to make anyone happy here. No one's going to listen to us. Except the internationals, who think this is a really cool and novel project.”
Around the world, activist projects prompt contention about what is understood to be admissible in the category “environment,” how various actors perform environmentalism, and to what ends. But the ways controversies are negotiated and the triggers that ignite disputes vary from place to place, shaped by each region's broader cultural and political context. Cutting down a grove of olive trees—or leading a campaign to protect them—means something very different in Nablus than in Naples, for example. Landscape rehabilitation efforts confront nationalist projects with their own contentious historical narratives of land use.
The Palestinian–Israeli conflict and its history are central to the cultural and political contexts within which activists in Israel and Palestine must work.Footnote 3 There are some obvious, blunt ways in which everyday ethno-national conflict and frequent violence shape obstacles and opportunities for activists. Checkpoints and other barriers bar movement in and along the Palestinian territories, and extensive mistrust divides people of different national affiliations. This conflict has also overshadowed environmentalism on national agendas and in residents’ priorities because the violence seems to be more pressing than concerns such as wilderness conservation or environmental justice.Footnote 4 But this conflict also has subtler, but deeply pervasive impacts on worldviews and communication. In particular, categorical disagreements about what counts as “environmental,” as well as the often-contrasted concepts of “social” and “political,” lie at the heart of these limitations on activism.Footnote 5
Thus, for a variety of reasons, environmentalism has long been sidelined in this region.Footnote 6 While nature conservation campaigns date back to at least the 1960s when efforts were made within Israel to protect wildflowers, such concerns were more often dismissed to meet perceived military and economic priorities, and environmentalist voices within Israel and the Palestinian territories have bemoaned a lack of strong governmental or popular support for environmentalism through the 20th century.Footnote 7 As recently as 2004, residents across these territories commonly told me, “We don't have environmentalism here.” By 2017, environmentalism had grown more mainstream, and a variety of campaigns are taking place in Israel and Palestine. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and civic groups now tackle issues that include wildlife conservation, stream restoration, air and water pollution, and agricultural reform.Footnote 8
However, significant limitations remain. Despite hopeful assertions that environmental health, natural resource conservation, and similar issues offer ideal goals for cooperative endeavors, attempts to work across Israeli–Palestinian lines largely remain stymied.Footnote 9 Some issues addressed in environmental campaigns elsewhere, such as the ecological threats of militarism and population growth, remain marginal in this region.Footnote 10 And scholars note “the still persistent rift between the environmental and social justice movements” in Israel, whereas a “fourth generation of environmentalism” that links ecological, economic, and social issues has gained prominence around the world in recent decades.Footnote 11
Why has this been the case? The work of framing gives meaning to advocacy and activism, and activists often strive to bend and stretch existing communicative frames to expand the reach of their messages.Footnote 12 Sociopolitical context shapes and limits framing in all cases of activism. Because environmentalism deals, at its foundation, with questions of what particular places should be like and who has the right to make such determinations, its pursuit in a context of intense territorial conflict will necessarily be more fraught. This article contributes to regional literature on social movements and environmental studies by examining how activists working in Israel and Palestine grapple with framing flexibility and its limits. In particular, it focuses on two campaigns: the building of an “eco-mosque” and a Jordan River restoration effort. These campaigns work on different scales, toward different goals, and in different parts of Israel and Palestine. However, they push common limits of regional environmentalism noted above: both aim to include within a single frame issues that have more commonly been approached through separate “environmental” and “social justice” frames and to reach audiences across Israeli/Palestinian identity lines. Their efforts illuminate the limits imposed on environmental activism by the intertwining of ethno-national and religious conflict that threatens people's claims to place, the efforts of activists to intervene in the reshaping of those same places, and the local legacy of environmentalism and its past political uses. I suggest that Israelis’ and Palestinians’ fraught historical and contemporary relationships with land limit the flexibility of framing, thus challenging efforts to move beyond current norms of separating “social” and “environmental” campaigns.
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2007 and 2015, and textual analysis of NGO literature. Two years of multisited fieldwork inform discussion of the mosque-building effort, including residence, participant observation, and extensive interviewing in a Jewish moshav, in a Bedouin township, and with an environmental NGO (Bustan). Examination of the river restoration campaign draws on seven months of participant observation and interviewing between 2012 and 2015 with NGO employees in EcoPeace's coheadquarters (Tel Aviv, Bethlehem, and Amman) and residents of three villages within the Jordan River watershed in Israel, Jordan, and Palestine. Framing work in each case occurred through different media and thus presents different sorts of data sets. The mosque building relied heavily on in-person communication, so analysis focused on ethnographic notes and interview transcripts, in addition to some news coverage and email communication. Because EcoPeace has worked more extensively through publications, social media, and news networks, and in order to contextualize river restoration efforts within the longer course of the organization's work, I rely more on these texts, with additional field notes and transcripts from recent years. Inductive coding of all these texts identified key frames and narratives and tracked shifts over the courses of both campaigns.
FRAMING PROJECTS
While scholars approach framing variously as primarily cognitive or interactional, strategic or unconscious, this article focuses on framing as the work that is done, both strategically and unwittingly, to define what kind of thing a campaign or project is.Footnote 13 Erving Goffman describes primary frames as those “organizational premises” that do the rough work of dividing off something in the flow of life as an event with meaning.Footnote 14 Secondary frames define more specifically what kind of event something is and tend to require more effort to maintain. Those undertaking an activist project face the challenge of achieving “frame alignment,” establishing congruence and complementarity between the goals of their movement and the interests and outlooks of their intended audiences.Footnote 15 While this external image is important for recruiting participants and changing opinions, alignment is also necessary within an organization for mobilizing the project's participants behind a common mission.Footnote 16
Rather than rigid bounding structures, frames are malleable, permeable tools, always prone to what Michel Callon terms “overflowing.”Footnote 17 Activists can set frames around various groupings of events to define them as a single issue, as when EcoPeace cited Israel's establishment of restricted military zones along the river as an obstacle to restoration, while others resisted that frame by contending that this security issue has no bearing on river ecology. In addition, a project like Mahmud's mosque can be framed in various ways—for example as environmental, spiritual, political, or social. Activist projects targeting natural resources and ecosystems are complex, involving emotional connections, ethical evaluations about access and responsibility, and the political dynamics of decision making and governance at various scales and degrees of formality. Framing selectively highlights elements of this complexity. Frames are not just superficial overlays; rather, they set the context of communication, shaping expectations and participants’ actions. Different frames can mobilize different ethical rubrics and assign responsibility to various parties, which profoundly impacts the reception of activist projects in public and governmental circles and helps to shape their outcomes.Footnote 18
Activists can find environmental frames, in particular, to be powerful, but double-edged tools. Environmental frames often help cobble together otherwise conflictual groups into a coalition or bring the grievances of a marginalized group to the fore.Footnote 19 But a “natural frame” may also exclude consideration of social responsibility, and natural frames can be used strategically as “vehicles for social interests.”Footnote 20 For example, activists who protest the planting of trees over government-bulldozed Bedouin villages in the northern Negev highlight responsibilities and citizenship rights that are absent from the “reforestation” frame used by the project's proponents.Footnote 21
Because people forge projects within particular discursive genealogies and sociopolitical contexts, frame malleability has limits. Framing works through the cueing of existing schemas.Footnote 22 Activists attempt to mobilize these schemas in new ways, but they deal largely with concepts that people already have available to them. One tendency limiting the malleability of environmental framing in many cultural and historical contexts is the prevalence of a nature/society dichotomy. Goffman identifies two kinds of primary frames in “our society”: social and natural. As he and other sociologists write, natural primary frameworks identify events as purely physical and without intention, whereas social frameworks prompt people viewing or participating in the framed events to look for intentionality and responsibility. Similarly, George Lakoff contends that an environmental frame prompts Americans to cognitively bracket out “politics” as different from “environment.”Footnote 23 Environmental justice efforts often demonstrate the stubbornness of this dichotomy. These campaigns propose frames that encompass “natural” and “political” factors, but frame maintenance is a common challenge.Footnote 24 Mainstream environmentalist movements often dominate alliances, applying more limited environmental frames that obscure political and economic justice issues.Footnote 25
Research on environmental imagery and activism shows that Israelis also tend to bracket out both “society” and its attendant “politics” as different from “environment.”Footnote 26 This is not to say that environmental campaigns ignore the influences of humans on nonhuman ecosystem elements or vice versa. Rather, it means that activists and their intended audiences tend to categorize projects as being primarily either “environmental” or “political,” even when a campaign arises from motivations and has implications that defy such straightforward categorization. One indication of this split is the common complaint I heard from environmental justice and other boundary-challenging activists that they felt pushed to categorize their work as “social justice” or “environmental” in order to attract funding and alliances with other organizations.
In the 20th century, projects in the region labeled “environmental” were often Zionist efforts to “revive” the lands supposedly degraded by centuries of Arab and Turkish rule. Since Israeli statehood, major initiatives of environmental NGOs and state bodies have included contentious projects such as tree planting to control land and the creation of national parks on lands also claimed by Palestinians.Footnote 27 Yet, these were framed as apolitical environmental projects, such as creating green lungs for the country or protecting the rural aesthetic of a place.Footnote 28 Samer Alatout notes a related tendency in Israel to separate environmental quality concerns from questions of sovereignty and territory, despite the importance of territorialized power to such issues.Footnote 29
Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, criticize such avowedly apolitical frames because they euphemize violence and domination by allowing those in power to avoid deep grievances, such as land claims and the unequal allocation of government resources.Footnote 30 Environmental and spatial justice are inextricably enmeshed for Palestinians in Israel and are addressed by NGOs, particularly in calls for sovereignty.Footnote 31 As one Palestinian employee in EcoPeace's Bethlehem office put it, “Politics is your life, basically, here. . . . Even if I don't want to care about politics, I have to. It's something that I see in my water, I see in my transportation, I see in my borders.” In contrast, even scholars advocating environmental justice perspectives acknowledge that such frames are not widespread in Israeli campaigns.Footnote 32
While Palestinians and Israelis tend to interpret environmental frames and their limits differently, they are not uniform groups. Both Israelis and Palestinians sometimes refer to territorialized or deterritorialized environmental concerns, and variously meld or separate “environmental” and “social justice” concerns along a spectrum of politicization. The work of framing highlights broad social trends. For example, differentially situated Israeli settler and Palestinian participants who were engaged in joint opposition to a garbage dump in the West Bank all “suspended” what they saw as “the political” as they strove to effectively reach an international audience of reporters.Footnote 33 Successful activists use socio-cultural savvy to identify and employ frames for their campaigns that will be compatible with the contexts in which they work. Thus, frames reflect both activists’ ideas about the key issues at stake and their evaluations of audiences.
In addition to negotiating Israelis’ and Palestinians’ different tendencies to accept explicitly politicized or depoliticized environmental frames, activists must contend with the implicit identity politics of different frames. Environmental projects have been tools of Israeli nation building and Palestinian erasure.Footnote 34 As such, contemporary projects come tinged with unwanted (on the part of their protagonists) associations. Reforestation efforts are strongly associated with the former Palestinian villages which some of them cover, as well as the existing villages which others seek to bulldoze, and calls for river restoration evoke past interventions by foreign powers, including the United States.Footnote 35 Furthermore, because environmental efforts stake claims to places, in this region where group belonging and national identity are so inextricable from land claims, campaigns must negotiate complex and deeply historical meanings of place. In the sections that follow, I examine how activists in two campaigns grapple with these regional issues as they work to establish and maintain frames, and the ways frames influence expectations and therefore behaviors of the various parties involved.
SHADES OF GREEN
The mosque-building project in Wadi al-Naʿam that opened this article offers a case of especially dynamic framing. At the time I joined to sling mud onto straw-bale walls, the project had an environmental justice frame fastened around it. But the identity of the project was not always so clear. Frames centered on Islam, political rights, communal well-being and environmental sustainability rose and fell over the course of the project, blending and jockeying with each other. These shifts mattered for Mahmud's project because they included and excluded people and priorities, often in ways he had not intended.
Bedouin residents of the Negev, some of whom identify more strongly as Palestinian Bedouins, others as Bedouin Israelis, are citizens of the Israeli state. More than half live in governmentally approved towns and cities, and more than a third live in villages not legally recognized by the state. Like other unrecognized villages, Wadi al-Naʿam offered a more rural life than the townships, but it was also unique for its proximity to environmental hazards. A power plant with high-voltage pylons sat amidst the houses, and Ramat Hovav, a site of chemical factories and Israel's main hazardous waste incinerator, lay across the road.Footnote 36
When I met Mahmud in 2007, he was finishing his service in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and was just settling into life in Wadi al-Naʿam with his elder brother's family. Years earlier, Mahmud had moved into the planned township of Segev Shalom and volunteered for the IDF.Footnote 37 Since then, he had grown frustrated by his failure to reach parity with Jewish Israeli living standards or gain acceptance in Israeli society, despite his cooperation in both residential and military state projects. Mahmud joined the village with plans to raise sheep and goats and meanwhile drove a school bus. In 2008, he decided to build a mosque for the village community. He described his younger self as less pious and more self-indulgent, referring to such practices as dating and dressing immodestly. He had since grown more religiously observant, advocating Islam's guidance for proper moral behavior. While building the mosque, he began wearing longer clothing and keeping what he believed to be a respectful distance from women.
As he consulted with an architect, Mahmud asked Bustan, a small environmental justice group, for help finding construction volunteers. Five years earlier, to protest Wadi al-Naʿam's exclusion from the national healthcare system, this small NGO led by American and Israeli Jews had initiated the building of a health care clinic. They had gathered green building experts and an eclectic mix of volunteers, from international hippies to local conservative Muslims. Bustan used straw-bale construction and solar panels to demonstrate sustainable building while highlighting the injustice of a population abutting the power plant without access to electricity and contrasting the environmental hazards of Ramat Hovav with this green building.Footnote 38 Mahmud learned about straw-bale building through that project and saw the potential of green building to attract participants with environmentally compatible motivations, even across other political disagreements. He grew more active in Bustan's work over the intervening years, as Bustan also became a more diverse organization of Jewish and Palestinian members. In 2008, Bustan leaders responded enthusiastically to his request, drawing together labor power for the project.
Mahmud began construction that summer. He and a small crew of volunteers poured a 350-square-meter concrete base, welded a metal frame, stacked straw bales, and began the long process of slinging coats of mud and straw mixture onto the bales to create solid walls. Soon after construction began, the Israeli government issued demolition orders because the mosque was being built in an unauthorized settlement, but the crew continued building. The crew remained small during these first months. By September, a few of Mahmud's friends helped, and handfuls of boys and girls came to chat with the Israeli and international visitors and hand us buckets of mud mixture, but overall few villagers took part.
At this stage, as Mahmud spread word and gathered assistance, he combined details of his personal story and project into several shifting and hybrid frames. Mahmud wanted to build a mosque to affirm his commitment to Islam and help his community, he told me. He wanted the building to be affordable, and he was impressed by the robust insulation and other benefits of straw-bale construction. He also saw symbolic significance in mud construction. “You were made of mud, and I was made of mud. And we will all return to mud,” he told me, obliquely referencing Qurʾanic verses. Mahmud elaborated the religious significance for Arabic-language news reporters, saying that the Prophet Muhammed had built from mud and straw. Equally pointedly, he said building in this way sent a message of “sticking to” this contested land.Footnote 39
Mahmud depicted his project as both environmental and religious, both a political protest and the promotion of communal well-being. He tried neither to contain it within one frame, nor to prevent overflowing priorities or connotations. Instead, speaking individually to American visitors like me, fellow devout Muslims, and left-wing Israeli activists, he varied his emphasis on different elements of this description.
As the government's demolition threat grew more imminent, however, Mahmud and his allies approached media outlets to promote the mosque and prevent demolition. Not surprisingly, others had their own priorities and strove to fit this multifaceted project into their own discourses. Through Bustan, word circulated among environmental justice activists. American volunteers posted reports online about the “sustainable mud-and-straw-bale mosque” threatened with demolition. A blogger described the “eco-mosque,” and the catchy term spread among supportive bloggers and news reporters.Footnote 40 Whereas past mosque demolitions garnered little attention in the press, a brief flurry of articles protested these demolition orders, most opening or closing with the terms “eco-mosque” and “green building.”Footnote 41
Writers employing these “eco-mosque” references, many aiming to international Jewish audiences, strove to create an environmental justice frame. Many opened with the health risks associated with Ramat Hovav, and they consistently criticized Jewish–Bedouin inequalities, such as in access to government resources, land-use laws, and environmental health. They portrayed this demolition order as one example of these wider inequalities. These reports also described the mosque as a coexistence project, emphasizing the multifaith, multiethnic volunteer crew.Footnote 42
However, these efforts to fix an environmental justice frame were only partially successful. With heightened governmental confrontation and more public exposure, the contentious ethno-national affiliations connoted by environmentalism in Israel grew more influential, and the project's previously overlapping and fuzzy frames separated and hardened. Volunteers and villagers did not mix widely. In part, this was because volunteers did not adhere to Bedouin norms of dress, comportment, and gender segregation. They were warmly welcomed by the small cluster of villagers working on the mosque, but most villagers stayed away from the construction site.
Associations between “environmental” and “Jewish” or “Zionist” proved problematic for Mahmud's mosque-building effort. As noted earlier, Israel's history of environmental projects has featured Jewish Israeli and international Jewish leaders, and frequently worked toward central but unacknowledged Zionist aims. Local advocates of the project pitted an alternative, Bedouin solidarity frame against the environmental frame. Arabic language news and blogs addressed the mosque's straw and mud construction not as sustainable, but as a pious choice, following the Prophet Muhammed, or meeting community needs.Footnote 43 The Regional Council of Unrecognized Villages (RCUV), an advocacy group and unofficial governing body for residents of the unrecognized villages, also became more involved at this stage. The RCUV formed in 1997 to push for formal recognition of Bedouins’ land ownership rights, and it generally eschewed cooperative approaches like Bustan's. Some Bedouin residents aligned with the RCUV's approach explicitly criticized the paternalist image of Bustan, as an outside, primarily Jewish-led group, coming to save the villagers. Mahmud had gained RCUV backing and media contacts, but the “environmental” (and by extension, Jewish) image of the “eco-mosque” discouraged the RCUV from deeper involvement. By bringing Jewish Israeli and international volunteers to Wadi al-Naʿam, Bustan's involvement likely reinforced the sense of outsider imposition and discouraged more active participation from villagers.
Mahmud appealed his demolition order in court, but by November 2008, as the last layers of mud were applied to the mosque's walls, his appeals were exhausted, and he received warnings of the imminent arrival of a demolition crew. I joined a small group of Israeli and international visitors accompanying Mahmud in the mosque overnight to protest the demolition. By candlelight, Mahmud prepared us for the next day. He implored us to remain positive and demonstrate to any media that we were not against the state, but rather were “protecting this community building.” The following day, government officials arrived, but faced by visitors and news crews, they left without summoning bulldozers. A small core of visitors continued guarding the mosque with Mahmud for some time, but a month later, after visitors dispersed, a demolition crew knocked down the mosque. Bustan's environmental justice network, appealing primarily to an Israeli and international Jewish community, delayed but did not prevent the mosque's destruction.
Following demolition, Mahmud wanted to rebuild, but this second mobilization proceeded differently. English-language emails and blog posts highlighted the mosque's ecocredentials, but Arabic-language articles and mass e-mailings contained little or no reference to environmentalism. The RCUV emailed a multilingual call to action, organizing a public prayer meeting at the mosque site and urging donations. Though Hebrew and English announcements referred to the “eco-mosque” and “green building,” the Arabic announcement did not. Instead, a political frame of steadfastness against the state's injustice prevailed, describing the demolition as a demonstration of the government's “despising all humane and religious values” and calling on “all our people [ahālīnā] in the Negev” to help rebuild.Footnote 44
When I arrived at the prayer meeting, I learned how much framing had shifted. Mahmud intended to rebuild quickly this time, using brick and cement and looking to area Muslims rather than environmental activists for support. Unlike building parties for the first mosque, local Muslim men predominated. I was one of three women, all internationals, and we were all welcomed but discretely directed to the outskirts of the reception tent. This project, framed as a religious community's endeavor, excluded international volunteers, but it drew two to three hundred men from across the Negev.
This framing shift had both underlying and proximal causes, and each framing had benefits and drawbacks stemming from socio-political circumstances beyond the project. First, Mahmud's collaboration with environmental justice activists brought the labor power of volunteers and a translocal network with power to shame the Israeli government and temporarily ward off bulldozers. But its association with Jewish leadership and secular norms also alienated many of Mahmud's intended beneficiaries of the project. In contrast, approaching the second mosque as a communal Palestinian and Islamic endeavor invited them in. Donors from Kseife, Segev Shalom, and other Bedouin townships gave money to rebuild the mosque with hired labor and purchased materials, and the Negev branch of the Islamic Movement pledged 10,000 shekels ($2,800). However, this new frame turned away earlier participants, who were directly excluded or discouraged by new priorities. Bustan's involvement fizzled, and several members stated their disappointment that Mahmud had chosen the shortcut of conventional building.
Second, two days after the initial call to rebuild, skirmishes between militants in Gaza and the IDF erupted, leading to the heavy shelling of Operation Cast Lead. The previous mosque-building effort's message of Jewish–Arab cooperation lost appeal among Bedouin residents—many of whom had family members under the bombing runs in Gaza. Instead, reminder e-mails beforehand and speeches at the prayer meeting described a project of political defiance and Arab solidarity. Helicopters buzzed above the gathering as community leaders drew a confrontational frame for the crowd. “We must realize that our brothers in Gaza and we are in similar problems,” declared one speaker through the microphone. “The Israeli government destroys houses here and destroys them there. Destroys mosques there and here as well. We are both under occupation.”
At what point do different frames become contradictory? As Erving Goffman notes, “What is play for the golfer is work for the caddy,” and though “play” and “work” are very different interpretations, both can coexist, seen as reasonable to the participants involved.Footnote 45 But very few participants in this case appreciated a simultaneous environmental justice and Palestinian-Islamic frame. In the abstract, these may not seem incompatible. Indeed, the issues, values, and aspirations of both understandings melded for the project's architect, Mahmud. However, in that place at that time—in Negev landscapes torn by long-term ownership disputes and current bombings in Gaza—the context-specific political associations and ethical rubrics at play put the frames in conflict. As the project grew more public, the feasibility of holding multiple, flexible frames around it diminished. Environmentalism's legacy in the region powerfully shaped how public audiences viewed the project, as well as who was willing to associate with the groups connoted by each frame.
CONTESTED RESTORATION
While the mosque case shows the importance of framing for establishing a project's basic type, even a more undisputedly environmental project involves intricate framing work. The following case of a river restoration campaign demonstrates how activists attempt to control the context of communication within a project embedded in Palestinian–Israeli power struggles, material inequities, and identity politics. Across Palestinian, Israeli, and Jordanian borders, EcoPeace's work was challenged by different expectations of environmentalism to be avowedly territorial, socially engaged, or apolitical.
EcoPeace consists of Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian staff members, three codirectors of these nationalities, and a handful of international interns; they cooperate with resident groups in twenty-eight communities across these three territories, as well as professional consultants.Footnote 46 The “environmental peacebuilding” group strives through governmental lobbying, youth education, collaborative research projects, and public advocacy to promote “cooperative efforts to protect our shared environmental heritage.”Footnote 47 Save the Jordan (STJ) is one of several interwoven campaigns. It aims for more and cleaner water to be allowed to flow through the Lower Jordan River (the section south of the Sea of Galilee) in order to protect groundwater, preserve biodiversity, and conserve the shrinking Dead Sea. The initiative has garnered significant support, including from residents within partnering communities, international donors, and the Israel Water Authority when it decided in 2013 to regularly release fresh water from the Sea of Galilee into the Lower Jordan.
One could also expect opposition to such efforts, particularly from competing water users, such as farmers and factory owners in the Jordan River Valley, or from Jordanian, Palestinian, and Israeli officials vying for more water to serve these sectors and quench growing populations. Indeed, none of the three governments has officially adopted EcoPeace's proposed Regional Master Plans, and during fieldwork in recent years, many valley residents questioned the wisdom of allowing water to run “unused” down the Jordan River rather than withdrawing it.Footnote 48
However, these objections alone cannot explain the highly politicized, nationalist opposition that these self-described environmental projects have prompted. The “normalizer” label, a damning one among Palestinians and Jordanians, has been leveled frequently against EcoPeace. The term may denote those actively aiding the Israeli military or those perceived to be treating the occupation as a normal, legitimate state of affairs by cooperating on governance issues such as water restrictions and allocations. Alongside accusations, the Jordanian codirector was shot at by a fellow Jordanian, the Palestinian director received threats from fellow Palestinians, and the group's activities have been curtailed in schools and rejected by some municipalities in Palestine and Jordan. In less dramatic ways, too, I heard mothers refusing to let their children participate in EcoPeace activities and residents criticizing their neighbors who worked with EcoPeace while invoking normalization critiques. Israeli staffers told me they had been called “Arab lovers” and received harsh emails. Since 2001, with the rise of a more conservative and hawkish political atmosphere, accusations of “collaborating,” “delegitimizing Israel,” and being a “public enemy” of Israel are directed more frequently at left-leaning organizations, including EcoPeace.Footnote 49
In all its campaigns, EcoPeace struggles with mainstream expectations for “environmental” projects, as it aims to maintain a frame that is environmental and also politically progressive. A focus on STJ from 2005 to 2016 shows that EcoPeace has dealt with tangled lines of affiliation and exclusion and adjusted its framing in various ways. Early information and advocacy materials use a mosaic frame that depicts the need for Jordan River rehabilitation as simultaneously a matter of ecology, cultural heritage, and contemporary peace building. “Crossing the Jordan,” a “concept document” written by Palestinian, Israeli, and Jordanian experts, encapsulates this early approach. It was published in 2005 and distributed at a media event held on the Jordan River Island of Peace, which touted the patronage of Jordan's Prince Hasan bin Talal.Footnote 50 At this time, the Second Palestinian Intifada was ending and many residents of the region felt renewed optimism for a lasting Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement through negotiations.
“Crossing the Jordan” frames the river both as in peril and as constituting a valuable ecosystem worth saving. In so doing, it hails potential supporters as fellows of a shared environmental heritage. The document begins with a list of the river's values, which is dominated by ecological roles, such as being “a flyway for over 500 million birds twice each year,” and ancient historical importance as the “pathway of early human migration out of Africa” and home to “great Roman cities and crusader castles.” Though competitive Palestinian and Israeli rights to water are mentioned once, the dominant frame clearly showcases the Jordan as a shared place in need of revival. The report cites a diminishment of more than 90 percent of the Jordan's previous flow rate and notes the diversion of water by Israel, Jordan, and Syria, but without discussion of proportional responsibility. Similarly, only one photograph vaguely suggests conflict—a fence restricts access to a canal—while twenty-four show natural landscapes and ancient ruins, and another dozen include people engaged in benign individual dwelling practices, such as diving into the water or sorting a few crates of okra.
The second half of the document suggests strategies for change, focused on intergovernmental cooperation. Engagement with existing international conventions, such as UNESCO “World Heritage,” is suggested to propel the nascent rehabilitation efforts. These conventions highlight the values of sites, but national governments’ involvement is necessary to organize, fund, and enforce any conservation projects under their auspices. EcoPeace attempts to activate a “boomerang” pattern of transnational activism, whereby international pressure pushes one's national government to engage in cooperation with one's neighbors.Footnote 51
The campaign's ability at the time to prompt change from national governments through a frame of humanistic and ecological stewardship proved limited. Equally critically, the frame entails locally powerful negative connotations. The choice to gloss over zero-sum claims to the river and frame the value of the river instead in terms of ecological restoration and shared ancient history is not uncommon for conservation campaigns.Footnote 52 Such framing aims for common ground by avoiding politically sensitive issues, and indeed EcoPeace received international recognition, such as a SEED Award and glowing press coverage, that cited their work in these terms.Footnote 53
However, EcoPeace's regional watershed approach also alienated Palestinians. “Many people [in Palestine] were criticizing that this is an Israeli organization,” a Bethlehem staffer, Fadil, explained. Fadil noted the greater visibility of the Israeli office in the partnership and the “weakness” of the Palestinian side at the time. The peace building seemed driven by Israeli concerns. This aligns with scholarly critiques of the “hydro-hegemony” driving Israeli–Palestinian water relations more broadly, whereby the Joint Water Committee established during the Oslo peace process is purported to share decision-making power but actually gives a stronger veto role to Israel.Footnote 54
Such dynamics have a long history in the region. Samer Alatout describes how, in the 1950s, President Eisenhower's administration led negotiations to resolve disputes involving the Jordan River, with American, Israeli, and Arab teams each proposing solutions based on different “hydro-imaginaries.”Footnote 55 The Americans sought “an efficient arrangement of water supply” that “does not consider political factors or attempt to set this system into the national boundaries now prevailing.”Footnote 56 Though this agenda was unappealing, and even threatening to the other parties, the Americans pushed their plan for regional cooperation by constant reference to the Jordan-Yarmuk watershed as a natural phenomenon that could only be dealt with through regional cooperation. This naturalization of socio-political conditions framed related dispute issues, including Palestinian refugees and water sovereignty, out of the picture. The Eisenhower administration's intervention was just one example of a longer pattern of heavy-handed international negotiations over water, environmental conservation, and unilateral water use. This legacy cast deterritorialized and apolitical connotations on EcoPeace's focus on cross-border watersheds, which influenced Palestinian reception.
The multiple connotations of environmental framing have created internal challenges, too, as the cross-border staff works from a motley collection of motivations. During interviews with staffers about their roles in EcoPeace and during meetings and community organizing in which I participated, there were marked differences in how co-coordinators from the three offices framed the priorities of the same project. Coordinators shared short-term goals for particular improvements. However, project coordinators from Israel consistently highlighted their aim to foster cooperation across borders, whereas such cooperation was buried later in interviews with Palestinian coordinators, often in response to my questions about job challenges. The Tel Aviv office also had prominent displays of their publications in Hebrew, English, and Arabic, whereas the Bethlehem office displayed Arabic and English brochures. Some staffers assert an internationalist motivation that echoes early materials like “Crossing the Jordan,” eschewing debates about water rights and sovereignty, and emphasizing desires to preserve “globally important ecosystems” and regional environments. However, time and again during interviews, most staff members from all countries emphasized that their work is not just ecological, but also starkly nationalist. As one Amman staffer stated, “I see that I'm serving the country. I'm serving Jordan before anything else.” Conversely, an Israeli staffer said, “What we're doing is good for Israel. And you know, we're going to make a better Israel by better sharing our water. Okay, it's not because we love the Palestinians. It's because we love Israel!”
Following its initial concept document, EcoPeace addressed these challenges through flexible framing across its tripartite structure and multiscale campaigns. Three head offices in Bethlehem, Tel Aviv, and Amman are led by Palestinian, Israeli, and Jordanian codirectors. They coordinate work at national, local, and interpersonal scales. Staff members urge their respective governments to negotiate equitable water-sharing agreements and cooperate on infrastructure projects, such as the building of wastewater treatment plants, and projects connect mayors across international borders to sign memoranda of understanding affirming their commitments to protecting shared water sources. At the interpersonal scale, scientists of different nationalities do joint research and speak out about ecological threats, while staffers lead groups of Jordanian, Palestinian, and Israeli “Youth Water Trustees” who gather periodically for retreats to learn and plan advocacy campaigns. With this structure, the group can tailor materials aimed at different national governments to some extent, and having staff grounded in each territory allows for even more heterogeneous strategies and messaging at local scales.
Critiques of each government's policies came from “insider” voices and in politically and culturally appropriate forms. Private meetings were held with high-ranking government officials in Jordan. Critiques of Israeli policies came from Jewish Israelis using an avowedly nationalist frame. For example, a 2007 report proposes shifting some of Israel's water allocations away from agriculture and toward nature restoration because this would “serve society's welfare in Israel,” including national security and economic development, and meet the “needs of nature in Israel.”Footnote 57 Ruti, a member of the Tel Aviv office, confirmed that this targeted messaging is common across EcoPeace's reports, as they strive to “highlight what we know will go best with [each] culture.” Of the STJ materials, Ruti said,
for the Israeli audience, we will talk much more about [how] . . . Israel has taken the most water from the river, and should give back the most. And that we can say to the Israeli audience. But for the Palestinian audience, we'll talk much more about riparian rights. . . . And we'll say that maybe to Israelis, but in a fleeting moment, and we won't ponder on it. The Palestinian audience will understand that that is our mission for the Jordan River, that we are here to try to get those Palestinian rights back to the river.
She emphasized that the overall vision of rehabilitating the river is the same, but that in Arabic and Hebrew reports there's “a difference of how we portray it, you know, to each country, so that it will be acceptable.”
At the same time, with deepening Palestinian political divisions between Fatah and Hamas after 2007, outbreaks of war between Israel and Hamas, and growing public pessimism about the peace process, EcoPeace increasingly aimed its proposals for practical intervention not to government leaders, but to various segments of the three national publics. As one codirector explained the emphasis,
political figures all the time change. And lots of decisions are driven by the political environment. While, if you want to change sustainable things on a larger scale, you need to work with people who really suffer, who are really in need. . . . And since also the environment requires lots of awareness, education, you need to work with the students, with the kids from the early stages.
A focus on self-interest, or improving one's local community as the end and cooperation as only the means, became key to EcoPeace's framing, particularly at the local level. Staffer after staffer emphasized during interviews the importance of framing EcoPeace not as an advocacy organization, but as a bringer of tangible improvement, such as cleaned-up streams, new wastewater treatment plants, and water recycling systems for schools. In fact, when I referred to cross-border cooperation as being at the heart of what EcoPeace does, one of the codirectors corrected me: “It's not the heart, but it's an important component. We actually think that the issue that goes to the heart is the education that takes place on each side. And the realization of self-interest is core. That's the core.”
Thus, rather than battling against the territorial ties of the ethnic, national, and religious identities of potential audiences, EcoPeace attempted to mobilize them to convince people that conservation is in their own best interests. Projects of tangible improvement allow staffers contending with normalization or collaboration concerns, whether among residents being recruited for grassroots campaigns or officials being lobbied, to assert a frame of self-interest and establish some trust in the messenger. As ʿUmar, a staffer in Bethlehem, justified his own participation, “This foundation serves us as Palestinians and I can say that it pushes on the Israeli side in an extraordinary way [bi-shekel mish ṭabī ʿī], in order to achieve and attain the Palestinian right for Palestinians.” Indeed, as I interviewed residents in the Palestinian and Jordanian towns where EcoPeace has active projects, those who approved of the group's work spoke primarily of the material improvements it had brought (such as repaired water networks and household greywater systems) and their vocal advocacy of Palestinian water rights.
However, this tailored messaging has limits, as EcoPeace remains a unified NGO advocating cross-border peacebuilding. In particular, different media pose different possibilities for flexible framing. In the localized and ephemeral medium of face-to-face communication, staffers may tout the organization's efficacy in confrontational terms that would never be included in an organization-wide platform. For example, while accompanying me for interviews in a border village in 2013, one Jordanian EcoPeace staffer countered normalization implications from the interviewee's friend by telling him how EcoPeace staffers, even the Jordanian codirector, had recently been denied visas to enter Israel. This impasse demonstrated EcoPeace's legitimacy, he claimed, because it was a response to EcoPeace's willingness (including among Israeli coworkers) to directly challenge the Israeli government.
Publications, particularly internationally circulated reports, did not cue this nationalism, but instead continued to frame projects in terms of regional cooperation. The contradictory pulls for cohesive versus tailored messaging within EcoPeace's online content has been especially difficult. When they initiated a website, Ruti told me, EcoPeace leaders collectively decided to include only English-language materials, to have an “international face,” and to avoid normalization accusations. However, to make material more accessible, they began including reports in Hebrew and Arabic. By 2012, “a real big wound” had been opened in the organization, as Ruti put it. Some wanted a single, multilingual website, highlighting EcoPeace's regional structure, while others insisted that an Arabic site have no connection whatsoever to a Hebrew site, to protect Palestinian staffers from backlash. Furthermore, the push to not simply translate documents but also tailor the messaging would create a daunting workload and also bring into stark relief—both for external readers and EcoPeace staff members—incongruities between the regional and national frames of their work.Footnote 58
As the stalemate between Israel and the competing Palestinian authorities dragged on, even in internationally aimed materials the regional peace-building frame faded. From 2012, STJ materials increasingly exhibit two alternative frames for coordination. One frame speaks the language of scientific researchers and infrastructure planners who must already correspond across borders in ways not hailed as “cooperation.”Footnote 59 Whereas early STJ documents opened with a description of “peace building” and “cooperative efforts,” reports in 2013 replace such language with a statement that
“Protecting the Environment” means to change our global perception: to change from a culture (and policy) that enables and even encourages excess consumerism that creates more and more system-wide problems and consumes natural resources, to a culture (and policy) based on wise consumption and maximum efficiency, that will improve the quality of life of the consumers and not only the volume of consumption.Footnote 60
Quantitative data predominates in these reports, and expert consultants take on increasingly central roles in research and report writing.Footnote 61 Reports use hydrology and environmental economics to pinpoint infrastructure improvements, water-pricing adjustments, and ecotourism development that would make Jordan River restoration economically feasible and argue that a coordinated regional plan will do so most efficiently.
The second post-2012 frame depicts the Jordan River as a heritage site for adherents of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam and mobilizes religious schema to prompt protection of the river. This religious frame was present, but relatively thin in earlier materials, then became prominent in 2013. When EcoPeace staffers traveled abroad to share their work and build support, they were often hosted by religious groups, and these audiences continued to express interest in peacebuilding efforts, even as local residents grew skeptical. In 2013 EcoPeace hosted an interfaith conference of religious leaders, publicized these leaders’ signing of a “Covenant for the Jordan,” and distributed three “toolkits” (informational booklets) titled “River out of Eden.” As in nationalist frames, these toolkits mobilize key social identities to frame restoration, but EcoPeace attempts to scramble nationalist lines of affiliation through a frame of shared Abrahamic heritage.
The three toolkits separately solicit adherents of the three faiths, but also use parallel structures and share some content.Footnote 62 The Judaism booklet is published in Hebrew, Christianity and Islam booklets are in Arabic, and all are available in English. All three begin with the same “Covenant,” which highlights their shared religious heritage connection to the river:
We recognize that the Jordan River Valley is a landscape of outstanding ecological and cultural importance. . . . Not least, the river runs through the heart of our spiritual traditions: some of the founding stories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are set along its banks and the valley contains sites sacred to half of humanity.
Each booklet then frames the Jordan's demise in language resonant with a particular religious tradition, such as a section titled “A River of Miracles” in the Islam toolkit and “The Garden of the Lord” in the Christianity toolkit. Essays by spiritual leaders and intellectuals then marshal scriptural passages to advocate nature protection, and educational resources draw on religious teachings. Through each religious perspective, the text clearly makes rehabilitation a matter of returning to traditions. Muslims are urged to turn away from “reckless industrialization and materialism,” and Jews are exhorted to “see clearly that our traditions mandate us to be shomrei adamah, defenders of God's creation.” All three toolkits end with the same suggestions for convincing others of the need for rehabilitation, including elected officials.
EcoPeace's most recent STJ effort suggests a possible melding of these two frames, bringing together religious affiliation and a focus on economic returns by encouraging religious heritage tourism along the Jordan River. The group hosts tours for Christians, Muslims, and Jews. This is part of a larger push for ecotourism, based on the reasoning that people will more likely rally to rehabilitate the Jordan if they visit and witness its current predicament.Footnote 63 EcoPeace published “Come Together at the River,” a “tour guide's guide to the sacred sites of the Jordan River,” which includes information about all three religious communities’ beliefs and affiliations with the river, and they have conducted trainings with tour guides, leading them to recommended sites throughout the east and west sides of the Jordan River Valley.
Over the years, EcoPeace has used a variety of strategies to deal with local limits on environmental framing. An Israeli tendency to deterritorialize environmental frames and question the legitimacy of environmental campaigns that are “too political” meets with Palestinians’ wariness of environmentalism's regional historical association with Zionism and colonialism. This creates a socio-political context in which environmentalism is politically suspect to many in their potential audience, particularly Palestinians, and rehabilitation is especially controversial. Like Mahmud with his mosque building, EcoPeace initially used a mosaic frame, a “big tent” approach aiming in this case to invite participation from across national borders. However, many Palestinians and Jordanians perceived environmental framing to selectively depoliticize, and thereby normalize Israeli occupation. EcoPeace then diversified its approach, targeting different groups with distinct frames: nationalist, religious, and economic development. Each frame attempted to mobilize people's self-interests, whether along group identity or rationalist economic lines. This evolving use of framing has involved trade-offs. As it employed more diversified framing, EcoPeace struggled against the fragmentation of its overarching regional goals. Diversified frames have contributed to EcoPeace's ability to bring together Israeli and Palestinian activists for more than two decades and to reach growing public audiences in Israel, Jordan, and Palestine, but these public audiences largely remain in national silos.
Recent Abrahamic framing aims to broach these silos, but it, too, involves trade-offs. Compared to a dominant nationalist frame in which Israel and Jordan control the Jordan River, an Abrahamic heritage frame expands the group of people with legitimate ties to the Jordan River to include Palestinian Christians and Muslims as well as international adherents of all three faiths. But a religious frame has its own exclusions and, for these hierarchical religions, comes with its own power dynamics. Religious leaders become accepted authority figures, while other voices risk becoming muted.
CONCLUSION
Environmental paradigms shift, making new frames popular and pushing others out, often as international trends in activism are taken up in new places. Many authors have documented the influences that shifting paradigms have had on environmental practices in Israel and Palestine.Footnote 64 But, as these case studies demonstrate, local connotations have great power to make or break environmental campaigns. These campaigns may be based on terms and tactics commonly used in environmental campaigns around the world, but the eco-adage, “Think global, act local” proves not to be enough. One must think local, too. This requires attending to local historical and concurrent environmental interventions—including activist campaigns, legislative measures, international involvement, business ventures, and other modes—and how these legacy and ongoing interventions matter to those who perceive themselves to be their winners and losers. Because such perceptions are shaped not only by personal benefit or harm, but also by group affiliations, thinking locally requires careful attention to the reinforcing and crosscutting currents of locally salient identities, including nationality, religion, ethnicity, and class, among others.
In this case, framing analysis attuned to the local socio-political and historical context suggests specific pitfalls and promising framing efforts vis-à-vis cross-border and environmental justice work among Israelis and Palestinians. It highlights at least two double binds that faced both campaigns. First, environmental framing can motivate involvement from a wide swath of people, as shown by Mahmud's mosque building. But the same framing also alienates some groups. The regional history of environmentalism and restoration to serve Zionist and colonialist purposes prompts lingering associations that make it difficult for Palestinians, whether Israeli citizens or not, to endorse.Footnote 65 Second, public exposure is necessary for the success of advocacy projects, but it also rigidifies frames along well-worn lines of oppositional identity. While EcoPeace project coordinators could use nationality-tailored frames to reach local audiences through personal communication, these tailored frames became untenable in online publications. Similarly, as Mahmud's mosque project gained publicity, environmental and religious community frames that had previously been melded became contradictory. Because contentious identity politics are so tied to the very landscapes environmental activists wish to protect, tactics used elsewhere to gather heterogeneous coalitions (as in the anti–World Trade Organization and Occupy movements, for example) may be particularly challenging under public spotlights in Palestine and Israel.
Framing analysis could also be usefully applied to examine other elements of environmental campaigns that are common elsewhere, but which are particularly controversial in Israel and Palestine. Campaigns addressing overpopulation and the Earth's carrying capacity, for example, would need to deal with the pronatalism and competitive “political arithmetic of Arab versus Jew” that encourages reproduction in both Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms.Footnote 66 Calls to preserve open spaces, which are common in environmentalist campaigns, would need to contend not only with the grievances noted above of Palestinians and allies who see those lands as unjustly seized by that state, but also with the sacrosanct status that many Jewish Israelis bestow on the military uses that currently dominate so many tracts of uninhabited lands.Footnote 67 In addition, colonial powers’ promotion of environmental restoration may resonate differently and therefore present different challenges for environmental campaigns elsewhere in the Middle East.
Because of these local environmental legacies and political interpretations, environmental paradigms are likely to change not in a clear and natural succession, as the common parlance of “first generation, second generation” etc. of a movement would imply, but rather as palimpsests change.Footnote 68 Framing always solicits existing schemas for organizing reality, and for this reason, even the most forward-looking activist project must draw on the past to be successful.Footnote 69 Both Mahmud and EcoPeace strove to align their frames with the perceived perspectives of various constituents, reconcile contradictory expectations about what environmental activism is and should be, and contain the overflow of unwanted connotations into their campaigns. But activists also prompt change by introducing new frames and engaging in flexible framing. EcoPeace's efforts to link frames of national self-interest with regional frames of riverine conservation suggest ways that conservation can also challenge territorial domination and serve common health and livelihood needs. Some of their nationally tailored frames propose the relevance of environmental justice to anticolonial struggles, while others build on Israel's small but growing environmental justice efforts. Mahmud's mosaic religio-ecological-political framing brought together unusual partners and showed how Islam can motivate sustainable building and sustainable building can serve social justice concerns.
While frames add new layers of meaning and old associations are gradually obscured, the rates at which paradigms change depend on shifts in embedded normative definitions of “nature,” “society,” and “politics” as much as the efforts of activists. Far from being abstract analytical questions, these categorical definitions have intensely material implications. They shape what is allowed in a conversation about “the environment,” who is allowed to speak on its behalf, and what kinds of arguments can be mobilized to gain access to resources like clean water. They delimit the potential of conservation projects to bolster or challenge territorial and population control. Flexibly fixed, “environmental” frames are both dependent on and formative of social change. They are windows into socio-political worlds and elements of a society's ever-changing sociopolitical collage.
