This paper examines a political ecology assemblage surrounding date plantations in the Jordan Valley to shed light on time politics as power struggles constituted by humans and beyond-the-humans in the borderland during our time of climate change and the recurring regional cycles of violence. Moving beyond the temporality of climate change as crisis and emergency, the paper examines the political dynamics of climate change routines, such as the distribution of new species and its containment technologies. Analyzing the borderlands’ date plantations’ timescape as constructed of ecological time, sociotechnical time, political time, and ethical market times, I argue that climate change politics in the borderlands are time politics made and remade by humans and nonhumans alike. Bringing Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian state officials, state scientists, farmers, agri-tech developers, activists and beyond-the-human actors like the Red Palm Weevil and the technologies to contain it, the paper illuminates the temporal nature of power and the temporal power of nature in borderlands. By doing so, I explore the co-constitution of beyond-the-human agencies, border politics, and the temporalities of climate change.
Abd RabouAFNRadwanES (2017) Visual symptoms and control of the red palm weevil (rhynchophorus ferrugineus) in the Gaza Strip. Palestine Nusantara Bioscience9(3): 322–329.
2.
Abu-QaoudH (2015) Date palm status and perspective in Palestine. In: Al-KhayriJMJainSMJohnsonDV. (eds.), Date Palm Genetic Resources and Utilization p.423–439.
3.
Abu al-MallaS (2021) Palestinian Authority and “whitening of settlement dates”: Fighting corruption or a storm in a cup?Al-Quds al-Arabi. November 12, 2021. (Arabic)
4.
AdamB (1998) Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards. London, New York: Psychology press.
5.
AlhammadZAwaidehM (2023) Exploring the role of dates value chains in enhancing food security in Jordan. Research Journal of Agriculture and Biological Sciences15(1): 1–6.
6.
AmiraS (2021) The slow violence of Israeli settler-colonialism and the political ecology of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Settler Colonial Studies11(4): 512–532.
BarkayTShamirR (2020) Israel Vs. BDS: Corporate social responsibility and the politics of human rights. Globalizations17(4): 698–713.
9.
BarnesJ (2024) Placing the environment in Middle East studies: Beyond the single story. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies: 1–19.
10.
BartovO (2025) Israel’s war in Gaza and the question of genocide. Critical Research on Religion0(0): 1–5.
11.
BaurPIlesA (2023) Inserting machines, displacing people: How automation imaginaries for agriculture promise ‘liberation’from the industrialized farm. Agriculture and Human Values40(3): 815–833.
12.
BearL (2016) Time as technique. Annual Review of Anthropology45: 487–502.
BozçalıF (2023) Partners in crime: Smuggling economies (Kaçak/Qaçax) and human-animal collaborations in Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands. Journal of Cultural Economy17(2): 249–263.
15.
BravermanI (2009) Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel/Palestine. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
16.
BravermanI (2017) Captive: Zoometric operations in Gaza. Public Culture29(1): 191–215.
17.
BravermanI (2023) Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press.
DaiqI (2007) Date palm economies and cultivation circumstances in Palestine. Acta Hortic736: 97–104.
26.
DavisJMoultonAAVan SantL, et al. (2019) Anthropocene, capitalocene, … plantationocene?: A manifesto for ecological justice in an age of global crises. Geography Compass13(5): e12438.
27.
DembilioÓJaquesJA (2015) Biology and management of red palm weevil. In: Sustainable Pest Management in date Palm: Current Status and Emerging Challenges. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp.13–36.
28.
DitzlerLDriessenC (2022) Automating agroecology: How to design a farming robot without a monocultural mindset?Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics35(1): 2.
29.
DolbeeS (2023) Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
30.
Du PlessisG (2017) War machines par excellence: The discrepancy between threat and control in the weaponisation of infectious agents. Critical Studies on Security5(1): 45–61.
31.
EddensA (2021) Securitizing the climate crisis: Racial geographies of empire and the agrifintech frontier. American Studies60(3): 63–88.
32.
FairheadJLeachMScoonesI (2012) Green grabbing: A new appropriation of nature?Journal of Peasant Studies39(2): 237–261.
33.
FAO (2017) “The Red Palm Weevil threatens food security and livelihoods, but it can be contained and also eradicated.”(accessed March 9 2019).
34.
FAO (2020) Red Palm Weevil: Guidelines on management practices. Rome.
35.
FAO (2021) Dates Sector in Jordan. Presentation by Engineer Nabil Assaf.
36.
FiaboeKKMPetersonATKairoMTK, et al. (2012) Predicting the potential worldwide distribution of the red palm weevil rhynchophorus ferrugineus (olivier) (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) using ecological niche modeling. Florida Entomologist95(3): 659–673.
37.
GlazerE (2024) Affective Currents of the Present Tense. In: TimothyPACooperMESimpsonN (eds) In “Back to the Present”. American Ethnologist. website, January 26, 2024.
GoldshteinECohenYHetzroniA, et al. (2020) The spatiotemporal dynamics and range expansion of the red palm weevil in Israel. Journal of Pest Science93(2): 691–702.
40.
GoldshteinESorokerVMandelikY, et al. (2022) Analyzing spatiotemporal species spread by three declustering methods utilizing monitoring data based on national programs and citizen science. Ecological Informatics72: 101916.
41.
GreenS (2022) The hedgehog from Jordan: Or, how to locate the movement of wild animals in a partially Mediterranean context. In: RommelCViscomiJJ (eds) Locating the Mediterranean: Connections and Separations Across Space and Time. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. 199–221.
42.
GrosglikRGutkowskiN (2025) Dual-Use Politics: Cyber Sensors, the Emerging Military-Agri-Tech Complex in Israel/Palestine, and the Battle Against the Red Palm Weevil in Middle Eastern Date Plantations. 5th ISA Forum of Sociology, 6-11 July 2025. Morocco: Rabbat.
43.
GrosglikRHandelAMonterescuD (2021) Soil, territory, land: The spatial politics of settler organic farming in the West Bank. Israel/Palestine. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space39(5): 906–924.
44.
GuptaA (2021) Infrastructure as decay and the decay of infrastructure. Decay: 37–46.
45.
GutkowskiN (2018) Governing through timescape: Israeli sustainable agriculture policy and the Palestinian-arab citizens. International Journal of Middle East Studies50(3): 471–492.
46.
GutkowskiN (2021) Bodies that count: Administering multispecies in Palestine/Israel’s borderlands. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space4(1): 135–157.
47.
GutkowskiN (2024) Struggling for Time: Environmental Governance and Agrarian Resistance in Israel/Palestine. Stanford: California. Stanford University Press.
HaddadT (2018) Insurgent infrastructure: Tunnels of the Gaza Strip. Middle East-Topics & Arguments10: 71–85.
50.
HandelARamMMustafaH, et al. (2024) The politics of time: Political entropy, settler colonialism and urban ruination in Hebron/Al-Khalil, Palestine. Political Geography111: 103093.
51.
HaniehAAHasanAAssiM (2020) Date palm trees supply chain and sustainable model. Journal of Cleaner Production258: 120951.
52.
HetzroniASorokerVCohenY (2016) Toward practical acoustic red palm weevil detection. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture124: 100–106.
ICA (2022) Israeli Civil Administration Agricultural Report, August 2022. Hebrew: Beit El.
55.
ICJ (2024) Summary of the Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024, Case186 - Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, 186-20240719-sum-01-00-en.pdf INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE, The Hague, Netherlands.
56.
IsaksonSR (2015) Derivatives for development? Small farmer vulnerability and the financialization of climate risk management. Journal of Agrarian Change15(4): 569–580.
57.
JasanoffS (2004) The idiom of co-production. In: States of Knowledge. London, New York: Routledge, pp.1–12.
58.
JODA (2021) Date Palm Cultivation Strategy in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan 2020-2030, (Arabic). Amman: The Jordan Dates Association (JODA).
59.
JohnsonP (2019) Companions in Conflict: Animals in Occupied Palestine. Brooklyn, London: Melville House.
60.
JoronenM (2021) Unspectacular spaces of slow wounding in Palestine. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers46(4): 995–1007.
61.
KaminerM (2022) Saving the face of the Arabah: Thai migrant workers and the asymmetries of community in an Israeli agricultural settlement. American Ethnologist49(1): 118–131.
62.
KeckF (2015) Sentinel devices: Managing uncertainty in species barrier zones. In: Modes of Uncertainty: Anthropological Cases, pp.165–181.
63.
KehatM (1999) "Threat to date palms in Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian authority, by the red palm weevil, rhynchophorus ferrugineus.”. Phytoparasitica27(3): 241–242.
64.
KhayyatM (2022) A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon. Oakland, California: Univ of California Press.
65.
KhazaalN (2021) “The Press outside the West: Displacement, Refugees, and Nonhuman Animals in Bulgaria and Lebanon.” In Like an Animal: Critical Animal Studies Approaches to Borders, Displacement, and Othering. Leiden, Boston: Brill.
66.
KirkG (2024) “A fairly good crop for white men”: The political ecology of agricultural science and settler colonialism between the US and Palestine. Journal of Political Ecology31(1): 888–908.
67.
KohlbryP (2023) To cover the land in green: Rain-fed agriculture and anti-colonial land reclamation in palestine. The Journal of Peasant Studies50(7): 2666–2684.
68.
KosekJ (2010) Ecologies of empire: On the new uses of the honeybee. Cultural Anthropology25(4): 650–678.
69.
KurtiçENuchoJR (2022) Infrastructural politics in the Middle East and North Africa: Pasts, presents, futures. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space40(6): 967–974.
70.
LiTM (2017) Rendering land investible: Five notes on time. Geoforum82: 276–278.
LynterisCPoleykettB (2018) The anthropology of epidemic control: Technologies and materialities. Medical Anthropology37(6): 433–441.
73.
Maan News Network (2020) “Aman demands that those involved in the case of whitening settlement dates be referred to court”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EF-TJ6eSPk (accessed June 6, 2023). (Arabic).
74.
MarxK (1977) Capital: A critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol.1. Pelican Marx Library. New York: Vintage Books.
75.
MascoJ (2014) The Theatre of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
76.
MathewsASBarnesJ (2016) Prognosis: Visions of environmental futures. Journal of The Royal Anthropological Institute22(S1): 9–26.
77.
MavhungaCC (2018) The Mobile Workshop: The Tsetse Fly and African Knowledge Production. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
78.
MayJThriftN (2003) Timespace: Geographies of temporality. Vol. 13. Routledge, 2003.
79.
McKeeE (2019) Water, power, and refusal: Confronting evasive accountability in a Palestinian village. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute25(3): 546–565.
80.
McKeeE (2021) Divergent visions: Intersectional water advocacy in Palestine. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space4(1): 43–64.
81.
MendelZVoetHModanN, et al. (2024) Seismic sensor-based management of the red palm weevil Rhynchophorus ferrugineus in date palm plantations. Pest Management Science80(3): 1053–1064.
82.
MeneleyA (2008) Time in a bottle: The uneasy circulation of Palestinian olive oil. Middle East Report248: 18–23.
83.
MOAG (2020) Israel's Position as a Date Exporter to European Union Countries Compared to Other Sources of Supply. Kahal Y. and Gurevich E. for the Ministry of Agriculture, Israel, Beit Dagan (original text in Hebrew).
84.
MurphySTBriscoeBR (1999) The red palm weevil as an alien invasive: Biology and the prospects for biological control as a component of IPM. Biocontrol News and Information20: 35N–46N.
85.
NadingAM (2014) Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health, and the Politics of Entanglement. Oakland California: University of California Press.
86.
NimmoR (2011) Actor-network theory and methodology: Social research in a more-thanhuman world. Methodological Innovations Online6(3): 108–119.
87.
NixonR (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press.
88.
NovickT (2023) Treasures, Palestine/Israel, 1979. In: BlackerSBrownellENagA, et al. (eds) The Planning Moment: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. New York: Fordham University Press.
89.
NyeJ (2017) Soft power: The origins and political progress of a concept. Palgrave Communications3(1): 1–3.
90.
OzgucUBurridgeA (2023) More-than-human borders: A new research agenda for posthuman conversations in border studies. Geopolitics28(2): 471–489.
PaxsonH (2021) Protecting perishable values: Timescapes of moving fermented foods across oceans and international borders. Current Anthropology62(S24): S333–S342.
93.
PCBS (2022) Palestinian Agricultural Census 2021. Ramallah: Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. (Arabic).
94.
PelhamN (2012) Gaza's tunnel phenomenon: The unintended dynamics of Israel's siege. Journal of Palestine Studies41(4): 6–31.
95.
PetrynaA (2022) Horizon Work: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
96.
PortmanMETeff-SekerY (2017) Factors of success and failure for transboundary environmental cooperation: Projects in the Gulf of Aqaba. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning19(6): 810–826.
97.
Reis-CastroL (2021) Becoming without: Making transgenic mosquitoes and disease control in Brazil. Environmental Humanities13(2): 323–347.
98.
ReismanEFairbairnM (2020) Agri-food systems and the Anthropocene. Annals of the American Association of Geographers111(3): 687–697.
99.
RotzSGravelyEMosbyI, et al. (2019) Automated pastures and the digital divide: How agricultural technologies are shaping labour and rural communities. Journal of Rural Studies68: 112–122.
100.
RussellE (2001) War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
101.
Samimian-DarashL (2013) Governing future potential biothreats: Toward an anthropology of uncertainty. Current Anthropology54(1): 1–22.
102.
Samimian-DarashL (2022) Uncertainty by Design: Preparing for the Future with Scenario Technology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
103.
SchaefferFA (2022) Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
104.
SelbyJ (2013) Cooperation, domination and colonisation: The Israeli-Palestinian joint water committee. Water Alternatives6(1): 1.
105.
ShaniL (2023) Predatory fleas, Sterile flies, and the settlers: Agricultural infrastructure and the challenge of alien-native dichotomies in Israel/Palestine. Cultural Anthropology38(1): 87–112.
106.
ShaniL (2024) Invasive species or legal alien? Confrontation and controversy in protecting sabras in Israel. American Anthropologist126(4): 608–621.
107.
SimpsonA (2016) Consent’s revenge. Cultural Anthropology31(3): 326–333.
108.
SlesingerI (2020) A cartography of the unknowable: Technology, territory and subterranean agencies in Israel’s management of the Gaza tunnels. Geopolitics25(1): 17–42.
109.
SmilV (2004) Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.
110.
SorokerVBlumbergDHabermanA, et al. (2005) Current status of red palm weevil infestation in date palm plantations in Israel. Phytoparasitica33: 97–106.
111.
Stamatopoulou-RobbinsS (2018) An uncertain climate in risky times: How occupation became like the rain in post-oslo Palestine. International Journal of Middle East Studies50(3): 383–404.
112.
Stamatopoulou-RobbinsS (2019) Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
113.
SundbergJ (2011) Diabolic caminos in the desert and cat fights on the Rio: A posthumanist political ecology of boundary enforcement in the United States–Mexico borderlands. Annals of TheAssociation of American Geographers101(2): 318–336.
114.
SurM (2020) Time at its margins: Cattle smuggling across the India-Bangladesh border. Cultural Anthropology35(4): 546–574.
115.
SurM (2021) Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
116.
TanferriM (2025) Growth waves, sliding average and technical calculations of plant lives: A glimpse on time as organized by digital agriculture tools. In: Food System Temporalities Conference, Cambridge, United Kingdom, January 9-10, 2025.
117.
Tawil-SouriH (2022) Speculation on infrastructural ecology: Pigeons, Gaza, and internet access. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space40(6): 1064–1081.
118.
TesdellO (2017) Wild wheat to productive drylands: Global scientific practice and the agroecological remaking of Palestine. Geoforum78: 43–51.
119.
ThompsonEP (1967) Time, work discipline, and industrial capitalism. Past and Present38: 56–97.
120.
TicktinM (2022) Borders: A story of political imagination. Borderlands Journal21(1): 138–170.
121.
TrottierJLeblondNGarbY (2020) The political role of date palm trees in the Jordan Valley: The transformation of Palestinian land and water tenure in agriculture made invisible by epistemic violence. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space3(1): 114–140.
122.
TsingAL (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
123.
UNCTAD (2015) The Besieged Palestinian Agrarian Sector. Geneva, New York: UNCTAD.
124.
UNDP (2017) Agriculture in Area C. UNDP Palestine.
125.
Vaughan-WilliamsN (2015) “We are not animals!” humanitarian border security and zoopolitical spaces in Europe.”. Political Geography45: 1–10.
126.
WandererE (2020) The Life of a Pest: An Ethnography of Biological Invasion in Mexico. Oakland, California: Univ of California Press.
127.
WhiteT (2023) Sparks from the friction of terrain: Transport animals, borderlands, and the territorial imagination in China. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space41(3): 433–450.
128.
Who Profits (2014) Made in Israel: Agricultural Exports from the Occupied Territories, Who Profits from the Occupation Research Center and Coalition of Women for Peace, Tel Aviv.
129.
WhyteKP (2017) Indigenous climate change studies: Indigenizing futures, decolonizing the anthropocene. English Language Notes55(1–2): 153–162.
130.
WhyteKP (2018) Indigenous science (fiction) for the anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space1(1–2): 224–242.
131.
Workers Hotline (Kav Laoved) (2022), Palestinian workers in settlements in the Jordan Valley: A marginalized population with little bargaining power, and no intervention on their behalf. 26.12.2022 (Hebrew).
132.
YaacobiGSalameLGlazerI (2023) Persistence of the entomopathogenic nematode Steinernema carpocapsae on red palm weevil-infested date palm trees in an arid environment. Nematology25(6): 669–675.
133.
YacobiHMisgavCSharonS (2020) Technopolitics, development and the colonial-postcolonial nexus: Revisiting settlements development aid from Israel to Africa. Middle Eastern Studies56(6): 937–952.
134.
YouattR (2022) The moving walkway is ending: A speculative essay on climate-driven SpeciesMobility and planetary politics. Borderlands Journal21(1): 201–224.
135.
YusoffK (2018) A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press.
