The wandering frontier: Geographies of colonial herding in Palestine

Abstract

This article examines the emergent phenomenon of Israeli colonial herding outposts in the occupied West Bank, where animals—sheep, goats, cows, and camels—are deployed as instruments of frontier expansion. Specifically, it investigates how colonial herding appropriates, instrumentalizes, and weaponizes Indigenous Palestinian pastoral practices and animal bodies to erase and replace Palestinian life and life-worlds. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Palestinian shepherding communities at the forefront of frontier violence, and engaging scholarship across Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and political geography, the article unravels three spatialized currents regarding the political logics and modes of violence that guide colonial herding and unfold through it. First, by juxtaposing Palestinian Indigenous shepherding praxis with colonial herding, we conceptualize the latter as form of cultural-material mimicry and mode of appropriation, we term Playing Bedouin, which taps into the former's environment simultaneously seeking to eliminate Palestinian presence and to forge a self-indigenized settler identity. Second, the article traces how animals and herding practices become mobile infrastructures for colonial policing, vigilantism and ecological destruction— a mode of eliminatory violence that mobilizes and weaponizes the Palestinian ecological milieu and operates through it, which we term elimination through the milieu. Third, the article shows how colonial herding conjures an efficient technology of territorial expansion that transforms animals into ‘colonial subjects’ performing an extension of the settler body— a wandering frontier. The wandering frontier, we argue, offers a milieu concept for comprehending the constitutive role space, ecology and more-than-human bodies have in the making of the settler colonial frontier.

Introduction

Residents of Alon, we are happy to share with you the temporary takeover of land for a Hebrew flock of sheep near the settlement for a period of about three months. In accordance with the desire to keep in the council's jurisdiction the state land around the settlement and in Gush Adumim … another flock has been set up that will graze from Alon Road east to Mitzpeh Yericho, on the border of Wadi Qelt, and up to Route 1. All this is part of the desire to create a contiguity of settlements from Mishor Adumim to Mitzpeh Yericho. … The entire flock numbers some 200 sheep, in addition to two Jewish families with children who will live in trucks on wheels [sic], with youths who will look after the flock.

This is an excerpt from a leaked letter issued in October 2018 by the secretary of Alon, a settlement in the center of the occupied West Bank (Hass, 2018). The use of “Hebrew flock of sheep” for “takeover of land” has been an increasingly expanding colonial strategy deployed by settler outposts over the last decade, significantly intensifying in the last few years. While this phenomenon, which we refer to as colonial herding, clearly annotates a strategy of frontier expansion, and “part of the desire to create a contiguity of settlements”, it is simultaneously imbricated in frontier violence directed at the dispossession of Indigenous Palestinian pastoral communities ¹ through daily attacks, intimidation, killing, blocking access to grazing areas, and the vandalization and destruction of their ecological system, dwelling sites, and infrastructure (see Kanonich, 2025; Kerem Navot, 2022; Shezaf, 2025). As a recently published report (Ofran and Etkes, 2024) shows, herding outposts almost doubled in number since October 7^th 2023 (from 77 to 147) and are the leading actors behind the full displacement of over 83 Palestinian pastoral communities to date (B’Tselem, 2026a). During the first week of the 2026 war on Iran, settler herders use of lethal shooting intensified leading to the killing of four Palestinians (B’Tselem, 2026b). Despite being illegal under International and even Israeli law, these herding outposts are far from spontaneous initiatives by extreme settlers but an extensively funded and supported strategy by various Israeli government ministries, the Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), the military, and a myriad of settler non-governmental organizations (see also Kerem Navot, 2022). By mimicking Palestinian pastoralist practices and mobilities, colonial herding further entrenches Israel's multilayered web of eliminatory violence, but whose specificity lies in the ways it appropriates, instrumentalizes, and weaponizes Indigenous practices and animal bodies as means to erase and replace them.

This article is set to examine these three dimensions —i.e., appropriation, instrumentalization, weaponization— of colonial herding as means to unravel the political logics and geographies produced by it. Informed by (and committed to) Indigenous and decolonial methodologies (Barakat, 2018; Smith, 1999) the article approaches colonial herding by foregrounding everyday life experiences of Palestinian transhumance pastoral communities at the forefront of settler colonial violence. ² Specifically, it engages the material and spatiotemporal unfolding of colonial herding as experienced by Palestinian communities, and against Palestinian pastoralist praxis—not merely as a livelihood, but, a way of life grounded in and guided by an intimate and rooted relationship to land, plants, seasons, wind, waters, living beings, topography, spirits, cosmologies, ancestors and heritage—collectively encapsulated in the term al-Ard. Although literally translate to “the land”, al-Ard is widely perceived in the Palestinian collective consciousness beyond materialities or physical attributes of its components, but a broad paradigm by which life is understood and organized. Centring al-Ard, both as referent point and decolonial potential, aligns with Indigenous scholars’ call to attend to the “incommensurabilities’ and “interconnections” between political ecology and Indigenous studies, making way to decolonial critique and alternative to anthropocentrism and coloniality, and the institutions upholding and sustaining them (Belcourt, 2015; see also Byrd and Rothburg, 2011).

In light of this, the article draws on ethnographic and embodied methods, including walking (Ellis et al., 2021; Ingold and Vergunst, 2008; Vannini and Vannini, 2017). Yet it adapts a specific type of walking, taking cue from Palestinian shepherds’ daily grazing journey or sarha (wandering), which is neither destination nor route-oriented, but instead flows as guided by and responding to al-Ard. Furthermore, as Palestinian scholars our research emerges from within our own people whose struggle and vulnerabilities we share. Our rootedness allows us access to wide social networks on which we build our research and to whom our words are accountable. We recognize the heterogeneity that makes up Palestinians; while neither of us hails from strictly pastoralist families, both authors belong to Fellaheen families which, along with our respective genders, displacement history, set of privileges and risks under different colonial geographical jurisdictions, shape our positionalities, understandings and interpretations. Our fieldwork is premised on the first author's four wanderings with Palestinian pastoral community members in the central West Bank (between 2021–2025) as well as over 40 interviews and two longitudinal audio-visual diaries by Palestinian shepherds over several months between 2024–2025. Similarly, the article is informed by several prolonged fieldwork visits conducted by the second author in the Northern and Southern parts of the occupied West Bank (henceforth oWB) since 2017 with pastoral communities among others. As our interlocutors are at the front lines of colonial violent attacks and surveillance, we refer to them using pseudonyms and employ general regional descriptions for dwelling and shepherding locations.

Informed by these empirical and ethical engagements, the article works across the fields of Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and political geography, examining the phenomenon of colonial herding in Palestine in four sections. In the first section, we outline the fundamental differences between Palestinian shepherding and colonial herding. Juxtaposed to Palestinian shepherding's relation to al-Ard, we show how colonial herding operates as a form of mimicry of Indigenous shepherding in esthetics and mobilities. We highlight how such mode of appropriation, particular to settler colonial settings, not only seeks to eliminate native bodies, culture and history, but their very ecology (see also Coulthard, 2014; Jabary Salamanca, 2022; Whyte, 2018; Wolfe, 2013). Borrowing from Philip Deloria's (1998) formative work, and building on the colonially-constructed racialization which collapses the native Palestinian population into the architype of “the Bedouin” (Assi, 2018b), we scrutinize colonial herding through the concept of Playing Bedouin. Playing Bedouin, we argue, is a form of appropriation that works across cultural-material entanglements directed at erasing and replacing the native Palestinians while simultaneously seeking to forge a self-indigenized identity for settlers in the West Bank.

In the second section, the article outlines the various colonial modulations through which animals—their bodies and bodily capacities—and herding practices are instrumentalized and weaponized to perform mobile infrastructures for colonial policing, vigilantism and ecological destruction. In section three we conceptualize the geographical dimensions of colonial violence and frontier expansion imbricated in colonial herding. First, we situate its violence along what Paul Virilio (in interview with Lotringer, 2008) terms war on the milieu, denoting a mode of warfare that targets civilians, their social reproduction capacities as well as the environments that sustains them (see also Collins, 2010; Der Derian, 2000: 30). In Palestine, such warfare is clearly echoed in Irus Braverman's (2023: 6) concept of ‘settler ecologies’ which highlights the colonial mindset informing Israeli state (parks) authorities and the ways it translates into territorial enclosures that control and regulate the environment in the service of colonial expansion and replacement. Animals are central objects of ‘settler ecologies’ with a growing body of literature pondering, for example, the outlawing of the Palestinian ‘black goat’ (Cook, 2017), the control mechanisms imposed on animal mobility through checkpoints (Gutkowski, 2021), and the “arrest” and confiscation of donkeys, ghanam, ³ and camels (Johnson, 2019), as well as the introduction of new “biblical” animals into the landscape (Braverman, 2021). However, unlike ‘settler ecologies’ that operate through statist and static modes of enclosure and control, colonial herding obtains a ‘civilianized’ and ‘animalized’ mobile colonial formation. More precisely, we argue that colonial herding assumes a different spatiotemporal arrangement whereby the war on the milieu is conducted through the milieu itself (through animals and grazing), culminating in what we term elimination through the milieu.

Second, we extrapolate the use of animals as political markers in colonial herding, primarily their conversion into agents for frontier expansion, echoing those of sheep, pig, and cattle frontiers in other settler colonial contexts (Anderson, 2006; Cons and Eilenberg, 2024; Fischer, 2015; Franklin, 2006). We show that through appropriation, instrumentalization and weaponization, the animals in colonial herding are modulated and subjugated, governed and refigured as ‘settler subjects’ (Belcourt, 2015), becoming a spatialized extension of the settler body. This purview, we assert, attends a shift in Israeli strategies of frontier expansion that are less marked by the (human) settler body (see Aronson, 1987; Gordon, 2008) territorial enclosures (see Fields, 2010), forestation and agricultural plantation (see Braverman, 2009; Grosglik et al., 2021), or areas of “green” technology (Alkhalili et al., 2023; see Hughes et al., 2023) but the daily mobile, elastic and expandable movement of goats, sheep, cows or camels—a wondering frontier. The fourth concluding section recaps the main arguments and underscores the need for further inquiry into the decolonial openings and alternatives that al-Ard conjures.

Between Indigenous shepherding and ‘Playing Bedouin’

The frontier violence directed at Indigenous pastoralism in the oWB today is a continuation of a long history of eliminatory practices and policies throughout historic Palestine. Many of these communities which today reside primarily along the eastern region of the West Bank—from the Southern Hebron Hills to the Northern edge of the Jordan Valley—were displaced from the Naqab Desert (Negev) during the Palestinian Nabka (the catastrophe). ⁴ These communities continued to practice traditional transhumance pastoralism, adapting it into their geography of refuge in the West Bank. ⁵ Yet following the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, pastoral communities became target to a multitude of colonial strategies aimed at their dispossession. For example, the Israeli military refuses to recognize the dwelling sites of these communities and thus subjects them to continuous demolitions (see Amara et al., 2021; Green and Smith, 2016) and forced sedentarization (see Heneiti, 2016), while at the same time it fractures their socio-ecological system through the establishment of multiple designations of land use—e.g., ‘firing zones’, ‘closed military areas’, ‘natural reserves’, ‘archaeological sites’—imposing severe restrictions on movement, accessing fodder, water, and performing seasonal transhumance, all of which disrupt their livelihoods and lifeways (see Shqair, 2022). At the same time, a multitude of settler vigilante groups and organizations, backed and supported by the Israeli military, operate daily to terrorize the communities through physically attacking them and their ghanam, destroying and burning their dwelling sites, grazelands, and infrastructures (see Ghantous, 2020; Hammami, 2016; Heneiti, 2016; Shqair, 2022).

The convergences of the above-mentioned modes of control and violence significantly undermine pastoral mobility, the core organizing principle of pastoral life, cultural practices and economy. Customarily, Palestinian pastoral communities migrate between two locations in the summer and winter responding to seasonal pasture changes, water availability and weather. On a shorter temporal scale, the daily grazing journey—known colloquially as sarha— forms the backbone of the transhumant way of life and its source of subsistence, enabling the grazing of seasonal native plants across diverse microclimates, enhancing biodiversity and increasing abundance while continuing and enriching land-based knowledge systems (see Seid et al., 2016). Sarhas transverse hills, wadis, terraced and flat lands and in between built-up areas, varying with changing seasons in length and duration. Together, seasonal migration and the daily sarha, maintain a balanced system that sustains both pastoral communities and the land.

Writing on Indigenous pastoralism in the context of reoccurring Israeli military assaults on Southern Lebanon, Munira Khayyat (2022, 2023a) describes land-based pastoral practices as they thrive maneuvering through traditional grazelands riddled with mines and explosives as resistant ecologies. Khayyat argues that the “survival collectives” of goats and their human companions build on accumulated “practiced knowledge” of the landscape and incorporate the positions of the explosives within this knowledge enabling their survival (Khayyat, 2023: 152). Wandering-with Palestinian multispecies collective on their daily sarhas provides insight into the complex relationship and partnership which binds the sheep, goats, donkeys, dogs and humans together in Indigenous shepherding, and reveals the shared decision-making process through which the sarha unfolds. Illustratively, the shepherds initiate the general direction of the sarha, while the ghanam often lead. The collective of multispecies navigate the terrain, not only attuned to their respective embodied and place-based knowledge but also to the needs and temperament of each other. In this way, the ghanam and shepherds collectively decide when to rest, when to start moving, where to graze and for how long.

Naji, a shepherd, and refugee ⁶ born and raised in the central West Bank conveys how close attention to changes in the ghanam's mood is key in deciding the general direction of the sarha. He explains the lack of attention to the ghanam's mood could result in repetition of places or fodder which would cause the ghanam to become “bored and disinterested in grazing” (Naji, interview, June 2024). Shepherds explain how the sarha route is also guided by the availability of certain medicinal plants or the avoidance of poisonous ones. Issa, a shepherd from a village on the highlands North of Jerusalem explains that medicinal plants known to heal certain ailments of the ghanam are integrated into the sarha when needed. Wandering-with also allowed us to witness the sarha as a relationship of reciprocity and responsibility towards the land, plants and waters. In one sarha, Naji, stops at a communal rainwater harvesting cistern hewn into the bedrock of the wadi and used by shepherds and others as a communally shared source of drinking water. ⁷ While speaking, Naji's hands instinctively move to clear the cistern's water trap, fix a fallen stone from the catchment terrace, or weed the plants growing into the cisterns’ neck. Such everyday acts of maintenance and care, integrated into the sarha, reveal Naji's sense of responsibility to that which had long replenished him and his ghanam over a lifetime and which others equally depend on. Jaber, a young shepherd from the Jahaleen Bedouin tribe describes what guides the sarha “we will only go where we will not harm. This is the law of life.”. (Jaber, interview, 2021). Jaber further explains that as the shepherd it is his responsibility to protect young plants and seedlings from grazing, by guiding the ghanam away from these. Such ethical frameworks guiding not only the sarha, but “life”, are informed by intimate knowledge of al-Ard and attuned to what Indigenous scholar Glen Coulthard (2014: 13) calls “grounded normativity”, a praxis “deeply informed by what the land as system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondominating and nonexploitative terms”. As such, the shepherds are custodians of the land, and while they do not steer the ghanam on where to walk or graze, their role is to guide where not to graze (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

(a) Palestinian shepherds and sheep during a sarha in Central West Bank, December 2024 (photo by first author). (b) Israeli settlers walk with their sheep as Palestinian farmers and activists are harvesting olives in an area near the illegal settlement of Havat Maon, in the West Bank village of a-Twani, 22 August, 2022 (Photo by Oren Ziv/ Activestills).

Such multispecies multilevel relations and knowledge system which Indigenous shepherding depends on and reproduces, is glaringly absent from the appropriated form of pastoralism that is colonial herding. In place of care, balance and custodianship, colonial herding is a strategy for territorial conquest and expansion. This is clearly evident in the language of the letter used in the opening of the article but also echoed by abroad array of settler non-governmental organizations, that support illegal herding outposts as a means to “strengthen Jewish presence” and disrupt Indigenous relationality to the land, inversely put as “theft and invasion of state land” (see for example Hashomer Yosh, n.d.a). Whereas Indigenous shepherding is a self-sustaining system that thrives through a balanced, reciprocal relationship between land, animals, plants, humans, waters and seasons; colonial herding is sustained through the continuous flow of logistical, economic, infrastructural and military support from the settler state and its proxies. Such support includes roads, weapons, All-Terrain Vehicles (ATVs), drones, cameras, generators, and heavy machinery (Lidman and Press, 2024; Peace Now, 2024a). As Boulos, a taxi driver who often crosses al-Mu’arrajat area—a site in the Jordan Valley subject where herding outposts are most active—explains “I see them [settler herders] everyday walking their cows … no one else is allowed to shepherd here … the army checks on them twice a day, they even have a device that can summon the army, this happened once and the military plane came to their aid” (Boulos, interview, 2024). Beyond military backing and large scale land allocations to settlers through “grazing contracts”, the Israeli government funnels tens of millions of shekels to the illegal outposts annually in the form of salaries, equipment, logistics and infrastructure projects (Ofran and Etkes, 2024). Further funding and logistical support comes from a range of non-governmental settler organizations (Peace Now, 2024b, 2026). Culminating in the economic system that supports settler antivigilant violence.

Central to colonial herders’ violence is the recurrent large scale arson of grazelands and olive groves, part of a what Nieuwenhuis and Joronen (2026) term colonial pyrotechniques, a technology of environmental destruction directed at making Palestinian landscapes desolate and open for colonial expansion. Such violence towards the land is the antithesis of life-making practice of cultural burning as we have witnessed practiced by Palestinian shepherds for the purpose of regenerating growth. Jaber, a young shepherd from the Southern West Bank, explains how cultural burning is carefully practiced and only during designated seasons and weather conditions so as to regenerate the plant growth and prevent the scorching of the land (Jaber, interview, January, 2025). Settler inflicted arson of Palestinian commons, on the other hand, not only functions as a form of land appropriation (Joronen, 2025) and eradication of Indigenous lifeways, but destroys the very ecology on which they depend, erasing other forms of life in the process. Rabea’, a Palestinian pastoralist from the Jordan Valley reports that the most devastating consequence of arson is when committed during dry seeding season “usually in May and June, when plants have released their seeds […] as a result, there are plants which we no longer see.” (Rabea’, interview, October 2024)

In Indigenous shepherding the relationship between the shepherds and their ghanam is one that develops over multi generations of human and non-human life. Most Palestinian shepherds we met started shepherding at an early age, accompanying a more established shepherd from their family until they are able to shepherd on their own. Shepherds inherit, develop and pass on interspecies communication skills integral to communicating with ghanam, but also with dogs and donkeys that often accompany them, using calls and whistles to convey meanings and guide the movement back and away from certain conditions. Daily, and for the greater part of their lives the “human-animal hybrids whose combined feet and hooves move in unison and whose perception is attuned to features of the world of common concern to such compound beings” (Ingold and Vergunst, 2008: 12) walk, forage, eat and rest in tandem. This long-standing relationship of “becoming with” (Haraway, 2010) is strongly emphasized by several of the shepherds we met, aptly captured by Ali, as he recalls an incident when a settler accompanied by Israeli police falsely claimed he owns some of Ali's ghanam to which Ali remarked “ What does he mean these are his? I know these ghanam, I was born with them!” (Naji, interview, July 2024). Similarly, Yara, a Bedouin woman living on the outskirts of a village in the central West Bank explains how she is able to know which of the 200 sheep and goats moving about freely have already been expressed for milk by stating “I know them each”. By contrast, the colonial herders’ relationship to the herded animals are utilitarian and short-lived, primarily when the herders are rotating “volunteers”. In great part, such volunteer's recruitment is conducted by Hashomer Yosh, a settler non-governmental organization deeply mobilized in supporting colonial herding. In an advert boast on its webpage, Hashomer Yosh targets young Israelis and youth using nationalist, religious, ideological, and environmental framing and rhetoric:

A unique experience of national service connected to nature on farms under the framework of national security- protecting state lands … This track is especially suitable for those who love the connection to nature, spaces, animals and farm people. Intended for boys and girls exempt from military service, who will live on farms on a daily basis … for protecting the lands of the State of Israel, for Zionism and settlement. [author's translation] (Hashomer Yosh, n.d.c)

The tasks for recruited herders extend beyond herding to include surveillance and monitoring of Palestinian communities and providing manual labor that allows for the further entrenchment of settler outposts. While “armed volunteers” are explicitly recruited to be stationed “where needed”, military-style trainings in martial arts and the use of weapons are also integrated into the volunteering experience (Hashomer Yosh, n.d.d). Colonial herding volunteers become, as Ari Abramowitz, an Isreali filmmaker and educator writes “[They are] the tip of the spear. They are the eyes and ears of Israel's frontier” (Abramowitz, 2025). The operations of colonial herding are also reiterated by Palestinian pastoralists we interviewed, and where well encapsulated by Issa's description: “Every now and then a car comes with 6–7 people […] even when you only see two people herding there would be 4–5 others monitoring them.” (Issa, Interview, December 2024). As such, colonial herding is not a form of life but a colonial technology that depends on various logistical and resource flows by state and non-state agencies that make it possible in the first place: supporting, recruiting, enabling, funding, arming, and protecting it.

Furthermore, our interlocutors are quick to point how anomalous and extractive the settler herder's relationship to the animals and the land is, as Nidal, an activist from the central West Bank explains, “when he [the settler herder] walks six kilometers to the point near the military base then brings the cows back another six kilometers … that's 12 kilometers … he is not looking for fodder; he is marking the land. Such a long walking trip is cruel to the cows. They can die on the way” (Nidal, interview, December 2024). Through their movement, cows become tools through which Palestinian pastoral and agrarian commons are demarcated, closed off and seized. Colonially herded animals are further weaponized by being driven to graze on Palestinian cultivated lands, fruit trees and olive orchards. Issa describes the way settler herders graze differently: “we wander in the jbal (hills and mountains), while they wander between the olive trees, and in cultivated lands. They are Unconcerned” (Issa, interview, December 2024). Tellingly, in their material Hashomer Yosh gives this guidance to newly recruited volunteers: “the sheep know where to go — no special talent is needed” [author's translation] (Hashomer Yosh, n.d.b). Such “freedom” to roam and graze where they choose illustrates a practice that is divorced from any ethical framework of responsibility and custodianship. It is rather provisional to the animal's ability to “produce the destruction” of the ecology that sustain transhumance pastoral way of life and therefore Palestinian continued presence on the land (Nidal, interview, December 2024).

Despite the fundamental differences shown above, Indigenous shepherding and colonial herding bare resemblance to each other. Such similarities, albeit superficial, are neither benign nor coincidental. Indeed, cultural appropriation is a theme that was prevalent throughout our interviews. Our interlocutors often expressed a wry dismay at the appropriation of Palestinian practices and esthetics by settlers. Bisan, a grandmother and shepherd from a pastoral community recently displaced from the Jordan Valley exclaims “All of a sudden, they [settlers] began to live like us! they now copy what we do!” (Bisan, interview, June 2025). While Rabea’ laments “They have stolen everything from us, even our cultural heritage. Can you believe that the settlers now carry the tea pot and make tea on a woodfire! They ride the donkeys and wanders with sheep!” (Rabea’, interview, October 2024).

Building on Philip Deloria (1998) we posit Playing Bedouin as the Zionist colonial appropriation of Indigenous pastoral esthetics, mobilities and bodies through which modes of erasure and replacing of “Palestinianness” is enacted, and a new self-indigenized identity is sought after. In his book Playing Indian, Deloria explores how performing stereotypes — through dressing up as “Indians” and act out “Indianness” — has allowed settler colonialists to materialize a forged self-indigenized identity for themselves and how this has played a role, and remains crucial in the ongoing eliminatory violence against native Americans. It is in the performative, Deloria argues, that self-indigenization becomes material and real. Such mimicry is essential in the building of a nationalist identity that facilitates and legitimizes the theft of land and the replacement of the Indigenous inhabitants (Deloria, 1998). In Zionist colonial imaginary, as represented in early colonial literature on Palestine, the figure of ‘the Bedouin’ is constructed as a racial classification that embodies notions of the ‘pure race’ as well as the ‘savage’, ‘backwards’ and ‘rootless’ Arab—an architype of the native inhabitants—through and against which a civilized national Jewish identity is constructed (Assi, 2018a). Notions of fascination, admiration (later co-option and appropriation) of native Palestinian identities and culture is prevalent throughout Zionist history, with a notable interest in Bedouins and Fellaheen who were seen by early Zionist colonizers to retain characteristics of ancient Jewish way of life. As such, early Zionist colonizers in Palestine adopted Bedouin head-dress, costume, speech, horsemanship and shepherding practices (see Assi, 2018a; Zerubavel, 2008). Colonial herding in the oWB can be viewed in light of this history. Yet rather than intangible cultural appropriation of rituals, practices and place names (see Masalha, 2015), or the appropriation of specific tangible heritage such as clothing and food (see Ranta and Mendel, 2014; Tesdell, 2017), or the political mimicking and “mirroring” that inverses power relations and with it the reversal of the ‘native’ and ‘settler’ categories (Griffiths, 2023; Perugini, 2019; Perugini and Gordon, 2015). Colonial herding appropriates the form of living of Palestinian pastoralists and taps into the same environment which they live on and through.

Accordingly, mimicry needs to be seen in the politics it performs spatially and materially. Playing Bedouin appropriates the spatial distribution of dispersed dwelling (and grazing) sites which Palestinian pastoralists practice during spring in response to seasonal abundance in vegetation and water. However, for colonial herding, such spatial dispersal is not part of a response to seasons or conditions of abundance and scarcity, but a matter of maximization of territorial control, and importantly, with the smallest number of settlers, as Rabea’ poignantly expressed “one [settler] family, is able to take over thousands and thousands of dunums … the settler provided with an asphalt road, water, electricity, and weapons at his side, so he builds wherever he wants” (Rabea’, interview, October 2024). Indeed, colonial outposts are strategically positioned to take control over the largest area of land, adjacent to, or even inside, Palestinian pastoral communities (see Ofran and Etkes, 2024), overlaying, claiming and sequestering their land, and becoming, overnight, a source of violent assaults that ultimately drives them out of it (see Kanonich, 2025; Ofran and Etkes, 2024).

The logic of appropriation, therefore, is not only intrinsically tied to the logic of colonization (Wolfe, 2013) but becomes a mechanism through which it is culturally consolidated and materially territorialized. Importantly, animal bodies are key targets of colonial appropriation subject to systematic abduction—stealing and confiscating—a phenomenon we unpack in greater detail in the following section.

Animal-modulations: Policing, vigilantism, weapons

Colonial herding, as we start witnessing thus far, is a form of appropriation instituted on mastery, exploitation and instrumentalization of the non-human animal. Accordingly, once the ghanam, cows, camels, horses, donkeys and dogs, are forced into the colonial assemblage, they immediately enter a relationship of double-violence: as objects of exploitation by the colonial body as well as instrumentalized tools and weapons against the Palestinian communities and landscapes. In the latter, animals are (coercively) modulated—i.e., undergo various relational modifications—and mobilized as an ancillary instrument feeding into the wider meshwork of frontier violence, primarily as infrastructures and agents of eliminatory control, policing, vigilante violence, and ecological destruction. It is to these colonial eliminatory modulations encompassing the more-than-human that this section delves into.

Modulation (1): Mobile infrastructure of policing and vigilantism

Colonial herding taps into and expands the wider regime of Israeli colonization in the oWB across its judicial and material formations. It is sustained by an extensive matrix of control— e.g., networks of surveillance, checkpoints, fencing etc.—that work to monitor, obstruct, and confine Palestinian movement, while facilitating relatively unhindered movement for Israeli settlers who constitute the ultimate subjects of protection (see Peteet, 2017; Salamanca, 2014; Zureik, 2016). Simultaneously, colonial herding works in attunement with Israel's (il)legal geographies that demarcate vast areas off-limits to Palestinians—e.g., ‘security zones’, ‘natural reserves’, ‘archaeological sites’—and those enabling land seizure and confiscation of ‘state lands’ through perpetual land use (Mishirqi-Assad and Kedar, 2025). In this (highly asymmetrical) daily struggle over being and moving in space, Israeli settlements constitute primary infrastructures (Cowen, 2014) for surveillance, policing and vigilantism all of which work to terrorize Palestinian communities and disrupt their access to land, water, vegetation etc. (see also Gordon, 2008). However, the recent extensive investment in herding practices, including the upsurge in newly established herding outposts over the last few years transformed these outposts into mobile infrastructures which increased the frequency and intensity of colonial encounters and extended their reach to more Palestinian communities. Mostly positioned on hill-tops, herding outposts draw a meshwork of disparate colonial nodes that radiate outwards through daily grazing activities “controlling all the areas below them” and inaugurating “a journey of torture for the nearby Palestinian communities” (Rabea’, interview, October, 2024). The ways in which such daily “torture” takes place, our Palestinian interlocutors emphasize, are not uniform neither predictable: “some [settler herders] would kill, some would steal, some would push you away”. (Naji, interview, January 2025). Indeed, colonial herding, as is the case with settler organizations more broadly, is a highly malleable and flexible colonial formation that quickly shifts between different surveillance, policing and vigilante roles producing a spectrum of violence (see Ghantous and Joronen, 2022; Ghantous, 2023) (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

(a) An Israeli settler grazes his animals as some Palestinians families continue to forcibly leave the village after Israelis have established a new settler outpost just a few dozen meters from the homes of Ras Ein al-Auja, in the Jordan Valley, 11 January 2026. (Photo by Wahaj Bani Moufleh/ Activestills). (b) Israeli armed settlers, one wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh, move round the West Bank village of Mughayer al-Deir, as the Palestinian residents dismantle their homes and pack belongings in preparation to leave, May 22, 20255 (Photo by Wahaj Bani Moufleh/ Activestills).

On the ‘lower-end’ of the violence spectrum, colonial herding maintains a baseline for daily mobile surveillance and policing activity that constantly roams Palestinian grazelands and warding off Palestinian shepherds and ghanam in different ways. Armed with machine guns and (settler-modulated) ferocious dogs, riding (settler-modulated) horses, and increasingly camouflaged as soldiers or accompanied by the settlement's security agents, settler herders “act as if they are security guards, as if they are authorized by the state, and they stop the Palestinians, order them what to do and where to go” as one Israeli activist who conducts protective accompaniment to Palestinian shepherds put it (Vardi, interview February 2017). Such scenery was well pictured by Hassan, an older Palestinian Fallah and shepherd from the Northern West Bank, when narrated a recent incident

The other day, again this settler … from the nearby outpost, approached me with three big dogs and her sheep, and the settlement security person came from another place. She was cursing and insulting me, trying to push me to leave, and I was shouting back that I would not leave. Her dogs got close and started barking loudly, and my donkey got crazy and ran away. What could I have done?! The settlement security personnel and a settler herder with dogs and sheep came all together against me. I had to leave. (Hassan, interview, March 2017)

In other instances, and by “just seeing a Palestinian shepherd from afar”, Jaber explains, settler herders immediately summon the Israeli military, “telling them Palestinians have invaded my ‘herding zone” (Jaber, interview, January 2017), a situation that often results in quick army presence expelling Palestinian shepherds and their ghanam from the area. It is important to highlight, however, that ‘herding zones’, in most cases, are NOT officially assigned areas by the Israeli military, neither are they physically demarcated. Rather, these are non-delineated areas that settlers constantly claim through herding and with which the Israeli military apparatus colludes (see Ofran and Etkes, 2024). But ‘herding zones’ is but one among various other pretexts, of often vaguely defined areas restricted to Palestinians, as Rabea’ promptly put it: “they [settlers and soldiers] will name whatever designation they want: ‘this is area C’, ‘this is a closed military zone’, ‘this is a protected natural area’, etc.” (Rabea’, interview, October 2024).

More recently, expulsions are increasingly mediated by drones (see B’Tselem, 2024). Settlers stationed in herding outposts fly drones in the areas around outposts “exposing all movement in the area, even hidden ones behind a hill or a mountain” as Naji explains (Naji, interview, January 2025). However, these drones do not only work to surveille Palestinian shepherds, but are also the transmitters of expulsion orders through speakers, while at times, also operate as plain weapons, as Naji narrates one recent encounter:

Sometimes they [settlers] use drones that carry stun grenades, and they would drop these on the ghanam. What happens to the herd? They become afraid, flee or are killed. They fall off the drystone walls, their limbs break, and some get lost. This happened to my brother, the drone was also making a loud sound scaring the ghanam, they kept chasing him all the way down the valley. (Naji, interview, January 2025)

On the ‘higher-end’ of the violent spectrum, however, settler herding engages unleashed vigilante violence not only in Palestinian grazelands but also inside the living spaces of pastoral communities: “they would go terrorize, beat, maim and burn” (Watan, interview, July 2024). Here, anything signifying Palestinianness as well as any element associated with sustaining it becomes a target: bodies, structures, infrastructure, animals, plants. While these attacks include a multitude of methods, their violence is increasingly attuned against Palestinian living environment and atmospheres (see Abuawad et al., 2025; Joronen and Ghantous, 2024). For example, and as noted earlier, setting fire to Palestinian grazelands, plants, groves and dwelling structures has become a dominant tactic of ecological devastation engendering various harmful effects across bodily, psychological, environmental, and economic domains (see Nieuwenhuis and Joronen, 2026). Of utmost urgency, our Palestinian interlocutors emphasized, is that the burning of the grazelands inflicts severe economic hardships on Palestinian pastoral communities, as Khalil from the central West Bank explained:

We currently buy fodder around five months, from October to February. Now when they burn everything, we are urged to buy food for the remaining seven months in which we used to wander in, it becomes too expensive. (Khalil, interview, July 2025)

Ghanam themselves are also a primary target of such settler herder's violence. There are numerous such examples, from settler herders burning ghanam barns (Issacharoff, 2010; Sawafta, 2025), assaulting them with blunt weapons such as clubs, knives, rocks, and firearms, or unleashing attack dogs on them (B’Tselem, 2020; Weiss and Neiman, 2018). More recently, as Rabea’ emphasized, “a new form of violence has emerged, of poisoning grazing lands and water sources” (see Alais, 2024; MEMO, 2024). ⁸ Rabea’ continues to narrate a recent incident in the Jordan Valley where around 50 ghanam died from poisoning, while further explicating: “we have never seen anything like it, pastoral communities never lost such numbers in one day […] we have diseases at times, and might lose a couple, three or four, but 50! that never happened!” (Rabea’, interview, October 2024). Along the poisoning, burning, mutilation or killing of ghanam, another widespread phenomenon has been increasing by the day, that of ghanam abduction (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

(a) An armed Israeli settler grazes cows inside agricultural lands belonging to the Palestinian village of Susiya, in Masafer Yatta, Southern West Bank, 31 January 2026 (Photo by Avishay Mohar/Activestills). (b) Goats, brought by Israeli settlers, feed on the fruit trees, behind the elementary school of Khalet al-Daba'a, West Bank, Masafer Yatta, June 6, 2025. (Photo by Avishay Mohar/ Activestills).

Modulation (2): Ghanam abduction – from Indigenous subjects to colonial objects

While the activity of settler herding is extensively sustained and funded by multiple state, non-state and quasi-state (e.g., WZO) bodies, it also expands through the abduction of ghanam from Palestinian pastoral communities. The abduction of ghanam, as our Palestinian interlocutors explicated, include several deceitful and violent methods initiated by settler herders and backed by the Israeli army and police, such as the one articulated by Rabea’ (see also Al Jazeera, 2024):

The settler raids ghanam pens and takes photos of the ghanam … then a week later he calls the army and shows the photos and say: they [Palestinians] have stolen my ghanam … and so he brings with him the military and they take 30–40 heads from a family! (Rabea’, interview, October 2024)

Since October 7^th 2023, settler herders’ methods of ghanam abduction started taking on a less “sophisticated” strategies and were replaced with outright blunt theft (see Hass, 2024). In these cases, the Israeli army and police operate with full complicity with the settlers, as well encapsulated by Rabea’ when referring to a recent such incident that took place in al-Mu’arajat area:

Settlers stole 25 heads of ghanam, they ear-marked them one by one in front of the [Palestinian] shepherd, two metal stamps in each ear giving the impression they are settler's ghanam, and then they called the army and the police. When the police arrived it did not only confiscate the marked ghanam but also arrested the shepherd for five days, and on top of that he had to pay 1700 nis to be released. (Rabea’, interview, October 2024)

Another form of ghanam abduction is their confiscation by the Israeli army or settlement councils. In these cases, the confiscation of Palestinian ghanam and their subsequent quarantine suggests a continuation of the long and ongoing history of Israeli imprisonment and enclosure regimes against Palestinian bodies (Gutkowski, 2021). Put differently, here the securitization and criminalization of Palestinian bodies and their movement in space is also extended to wandering animals. In most of these cases, Palestinian shepherds are unable to retrieve their ghanam due to the extremely high costs demanded by the military regime such as high fines and extortionate costs for transport, veterinary checks, feeding and quarantining of ghanam. Such policy, as Natalia Gutkowski (2021) further shows, is not driven by profit making as much as it is about the dispossession of the Palestinians, given that unclaimed ghanam are later sold in auctions (to which Palestinians have no access) for extremely cheap prices—e.g., a donkey that costs around 1000 nis [260 euros] is sold for 78 nis [20 euros].

Alongside military confiscation, in recent years also settlement councils started initiating their own practice of ghanam confiscation. Interestingly, these “confiscations” are illegal according to Israeli state's laws and military regulations yet settlement councils continue to pursue them, at time in mass numbers, invoking “security” and “safety” pretexts and taking advantage of Palestinians’ unfamiliarity with and distrust of the Israeli military and judicial systems (see Yesh Din, 2024). ⁹ These confiscations, as Rabea’ affirmed, amount to the “destruction of life and livelihoods of the community”, as he relates a recent incident:

The settlement's council seized around 600 heads of ghanam and gave people a time limit to pay to retrieve them, so people had to sell their gold, ¹⁰ others borrowed money … it was a huge amount, 150,000 nis [39000 euros] for one family! The ghanam are their source of livelihood! and what if they are held for days without proper care and the like, what would happen to the ghanam that are pregnant!? (Rabea’, interview, October 2024)

In light of the above, ghanam abduction comes to operate as a violent revolving door mechanism that seizes and rips away the animal from its interwoven web of relationalities to its kin and to al-Ard, from being an Indigenous subject, and transforms it into a colonial object of control and instrumentalization, and which subsequently is also transformed into a weapon.

Modulation (3): Animals as weapons

Alongside assuming a mobile infrastructure of policing and vigilantism, colonial herding also transforms animals themselves into roaming weapons directed against Palestinian landscapes. While such weaponization pertains to and is often accompanied by other animal modulations —e.g., attack dogs or horses used as transportation means to navigate the terrain— or the disruption of ecological balance through the unleashing of wild boars into Palestinian villages (Amira, 2021), here the focus is on a less-familiar agent of violence such as sheep, goats, camels, and cows.

All our Palestinian interlocutors insisted that settlers guide their herd into their cultivated and planted areas, as Nidal angrily stressed: “they only graze where there are trees, to destroy the olive trees […] they are the new weapon Israel uses to exercise complete control over our lands!”(Nidal, interview, Decemeber 2024). Many of our interlocutors experienced such weaponization of ghanam, which comes to inflict significant harm when roaming in areas cultivated with seasonal crops or newly planted trees, as was the case with Hassan:

The other day, again the same settler, she also has sheep and takes them to the people's lands to eat the vegetation, also in my land, the land I told you about earlier, where I planted chickpeas, I also have olive trees there, the settlers’ sheep destroyed everything! (Hassan, interview, March 2017)

However, sheep and goats do not “produce large-scale destruction to the land” as Nidal noted when comparing them to the expanding introduction of cows which “sweep and consume everything in their way”. Due to their size, the ways they eat but also their capacity to eat, cattle raising has become a synonym to greater devastation to Palestinian landscapes as Nidal's comparison illustrates:

The sheep is not very high and so it only can do harm to a certain height … its harm is relatively minimal […] But the cows ravage, I can show you the valley area after the cows have been there, it becomes like an empty playground […] The cows eat everything that comes its way, the crops, the trees, whatever they find. (Nidal, interview, December 2024)

As these experiences show, colonial herding works as weaponization of animals’ bodies, primarily their innate capacities to move and eat, resulting in ecological devastation to Palestinian lands and groves. The destruction of plants and trees has significant effects on Palestinians’ livelihoods, as Hassan told us, “it is a catastrophe what is happening here!” and further expressed with notable frustration:

I have Za’tar [Thyme] there [in the land], I sell one kilogram for 30 NIS [7.5 euros], … I have Okra, 1 kilogram I sell for 10 NIS [2.5 euros]. I have almonds and olive trees! I live from this! (Hassan, interview, March 2017) (Figure 4)

Figure 4.

(a) Palestinian grazeland, in the outskirts of a Palestinian town in the central West Bank, burnt by settlers (Photo by first author). (b) Sheep injured in an attack by Israeli settlers on al-Daghameen family, in Samoa, south of of Hebron, West Bank, 23 December 2025 (Photo by Mosab Shawer/ Activestills).

The wandering frontier: Elimination through the milieu

In light of the above, colonial herding encompasses a more nuanced and increasingly dominating eliminatory technology where “the body is not solely the thing to be eliminated” (Simpson, 2016: 443) but through which Palestinian collective peoplehood is targeted (see Kelley, 2017) that extends to life-sustaining infrastructures, ecologies, as well as ways of being in, and relating to, the world (Amira, 2021; Coulthard, 2014; Dader and Joronen, 2025; Jabary Salamanca, 2022; Whyte, 2018). As such, colonial herding clearly resonates with John Collin's (2010: 203) application of Paul Virilio's conception of Israel's conquest in Palestine as a war on the milieu wherein “war waged directly on civilians, their capacity for biological and social reproduction, and the natural and built environment that ensures their survival” (see also Virilio, 1998: 30). Animals are central targets within such warfare, best epitomized by the slogan “another acre, another goat” widely attributed to Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in the early 1900s (quoted in Said, 1995). Indeed, being a primary animal raised by Palestinians and central to their life-making, the ‘black goat’ was targeted through an the Israeli law that banned and criminalized it in the 1950s (see Cook, 2017). ¹⁰ This logic continues informing Israel's multiple civic and military laws and regulations which include, for example, the control of animal mobility and transport through checkpoints (Braverman, 2023; Gutkowski, 2021), the “arrest” and confiscation of donkeys, goats, sheep, and camels (Gutkowski, 2021; Johnson, 2019); as well as the mobilizing of highly destructive native animals into Palestinian areas (Amira, 2021), or the introduction of new “biblical” animals (Braverman, 2021). These eliminatory technologies targeting Palestinian ecology are informed by what Irus Braverman terms “settler ecologies” referring to the colonial (scientific) logics and mechanisms that “operate on territory through its statist and static enclosure […] exert[ing] control over bodies through the regulation and mobilization of animals, plants, and other forms of life” (Braverman, 2021: 6; emphasis added).

Colonial herding, however, is not (primarily) enacted by state bodies or underpinned by settler colonial scientific knowledge, neither does it conform to static forms of enclosures and management that operate on the milieu. Instead, it embodies a fluid and mobile ‘civilianized’ and ‘animalized’ colonial force that partakes a particular spatiotemporal arrangement whereby the war on the milieu is conducted through the milieu itself. Here the appropriation of pastoralist communities’ mode of living, animals, and movement is modulated and subsumed within a settler messianic force that unfolds in an unbounded elastic and mobile form of frontier violence (see also Ghantous, 2026; Weizman, 2017). Herding outposts thus provide a colonial mobile infrastructure from which daily eliminatory violence operates in and through the milieu, assuming perpetual motion that extends over vast areas in which pastoral communities dwell: attacking, terrorizing, warding-off Palestinian bodies and animals as well as destroying, burning and poisoning pastoral communities’ dwelling sites and lands. In such sweeping violence, ghanam abduction (confiscation and theft) establishes a sort of an eliminatory ‘revolving door’ mechanisms that simultaneously works to reduce Palestinian animals and pastoral communities’ capacities for livelihood, while enlarging colonial herding and its capacities for destruction. Accordingly, colonial herding engages a mode of elimination through the milieu whereby the destruction of the native ecology is increasingly attuned to and operating through the ecology itself; primarily through the exploitation and weaponization of animals and their capacities to roam, trample and eat plants central to Palestinian subsistence. In short, in colonial herding animals become extensions and expansions of settler violence, signifying and embodying “a security buffer to which you [as a Palestinian] are not allowed to get close to” as Nidal contended.

Elimination through the milieu thus adds another layer to Israel's ‘war on the milieu’ by fuzing through it, furthering the intensity, frequency and density of colonial violence. Despite that, crucially, such intensification is never absolute—total, complete, or all-encompassing—as much as Palestinian pastoralist communities are not merely passive recipients. As we encountered in our fieldwork, Palestinian communities engage the multiplicities of al-Ard in their efforts to develop various forms of resistance and sumud (steadfastness) for maneuvering, obstructing, and countering colonial herding. Although there are multiple such examples, for instance the tilling of the land to hinder and obstruct the movement of settler cows, or the development of collective tactics of shepherding that utilize intimate knowledge of al-Ard to evade colonial violence, these remain enquiries to further pursue rigorously, on their own right, and along thorough and careful ethical considerations.

Crucially, moreover, such mode of elimination through the milieu and its devastating effects seek enhancing continuous settler land use paving the way for settlers’ occupancy and frontier expansion (Mishirqi-Assad and Kedar, 2025). It is part and parcel of frontier assemblages (Cons and Eilenberg, 2019) that operate through hybrid formations—“legitimate and illegitimate partners: armies and bandits; gangsters and corporations; builders and despoilers” (Tsing, 2024: 27)—and whose intensified violence and eliminatory objectives escape straight line demarcation and unfold through “depth” (Weizman, 2004). Within that, importantly, colonial herding conjures animal bodies into its hybrid formation and transforms them into spatialized extensions of the settler body as to become frontier makers and “markers”. If Israel's “border”, as former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir put it “is where Jews live, not where there is a line on the map” (Aronson, 1987: 14), then today, the Israeli frontier is extended to where the settlers’ herd roams. Taking a broader view, colonial herding establishes a web of herding nodes dispersed in the depth of oWB, and from which settlers navigate the initial direction of the herd which is then left to roam in an unfixed and unbounded movement (see Hughes, 2020), assuming a mobile expansive and fleeting frontier markers, a wandering frontier: “a settler starts grazing in a small piece of land, then say he extends 300 meters, then 500 meters, then 1000 meters, wherever the ghanam reaches he marks that and continues” (Nidal, interview, December 2024).

The wandering frontier, importantly, conjures settler colonial and capitalist entanglements in what Glen Coulthard (2014) depicts as ongoing process of ‘primitive accumulation’ (complementing the Marxist notion) directed at breaking-up indigenous/native societies and commons through privatization, commodification, and dispossession making way for territorial capture, extraction and exploitation (see also Harvey, 2003; Nichols, 2019; Simpson, 2014). Within that, however, colonial herding seems to embody a specific intensified political economy of racialized dispossessive violence wherein notions of efficiency, optimization and speed pertain to both the means of dispossession as well as the dispossessive-effects (of accumulation and replacement). Albeit incentivised and protected by Israeli state bodies (primarily the military and ministry of agriculture), colonial herding takes on a form of outsourcing of frontier expansion whereby small numbers of ideologically motivated settlers/ volunteers conjoined with exploited and weaponized animals seek to, as Khalil put it, produce “a very fast, efficient, and cheap tool” wherein “one settler herder can take over around 12,000 dunums [around 3000 acres] and preventing Palestinians access to that land completely” (Khalil, interview, July 2025). In similar vein, settler NGOs’ extensive logistical supply (e.g., food, clothing, animals, surveillance technologies etc.) via crowd-funding campaigns as well as their engagement in recruiting settler volunteers (“guards”/“herders”), add another layer of colonial outsourcing. The Hashomer Yosh settler organization is an exemplary case of outsourcing that minimizes (state) investments in the means of dispossession while simultaneously optimizes the dispossessive-effects, a logic it proudly states on its webpage: “The pasture area covers thousands of dunams, more than any other agricultural settlement. The average pasture area is the size of a medium-sized city in Israel” (Hashomer Yosh, n.d.b). In cases that the wandering frontier manages to sever Palestinian pastoralist communities’ presence in and sustenance from al-Ard, Palestinian community members, especially young men, come to be forced into seeking work in Israeli settlements as plantation and factory wage laborers, becoming along with the “labour” of abducted animals, and usurped land, part of the settler colonial loot of frontier expansion (see Englert, 2020). Indeed, the wandering frontier embodies a heightened version of settler-capitalist logics of speedy accumulation (territorial/fiscal) with minimal resources, in comparison to the more sedentary, confined (and confining) agricultural settlements or forestation policies (Braverman, 2009; Grosglik et al., 2021; Handel, 2014). As such, the wandering frontier can be seen as performing a new settler entrepreneurial role that seeks to accelerate frontier expansion, accumulation, and replacement, akin to what Ghantous and Joronen (2022) term dromoelimination.

Ultimately, however, this process of establishing an expansive non-delineated wandering frontier is followed with frontier delineation and codification by the Israeli state and the WZO which formally (and often retrospectively) allocate ‘grazing areas’ to herding outposts. Before the 7^th of October 2023, the Israeli military issued very few ‘grazing area’ permits to herding outposts, most of which were not publicly announced. At the time, only 6 out of the approximately 50 herding outposts had officially demarcated ‘grazing areas’ amounting to around 6600 dunams [1630 acres] (see Ofran, 2021). While these are the official figures at the time (2021), colonial herding expands well beyond the designated areas, as clearly stated by the Hashomer Yosh settler organization, which declared the control of over 52,000 dunams [12,900 acres] within the same time period. But this is exactly how the wandering frontier operates: it constantly roams in vast areas creating fleetingly marked “facts on the ground” later codified by the Israeli military through official designation of ‘grazing areas’. Further, and albeit codified and marked on maps, ‘grazing areas’ do not entail physical demarcations on the ground, keeping the space open for further expansion. Even more, they are charted in a (patchy) way that entraps swathes of Palestinian privately owned lands, and thus making it impossible for the Palestinian communities to access them (for example see Figure 5). However, since the 7^th of October 2023, colonial herding intensified and expanded at an unprecedent rate: more than 148 new illegal outposts have been established, mainly herding outposts (Peace Now, 2026, for a map of colonial herding outposts see [Haaretz, 2025; Shezaf, 2025]); supply of weaponry, ATVs, and drones surmounted (Lidman and Press, 2024); many settler herders became soldiers stationed in their own outposts (Levy and Levac, 2023); and since February 2025 ‘grazing areas’ more than doubled in size (ICA, 2025; see also Figure 5). Such empowerment of colonial herding—which so far culminated in the dispossession of around 83 pastoral communities and the seizure of more than 14% of the total area of the oWB (Ofran and Etkes, 2024)—has bolstered an overarching climate of terror that the remaining pastoralist communities still endure:

Today, they [settler herders] don’t need the military, few settler herders managed to dispossess around 18 pastoral communities in our area alone since the 7th of October. What Israel could not do during decades, settler herders did it in less than 10 months! They now ravage tents, carry out arson, steal ghanam openly, attack everyone […] today the plan is mass dispossession and complete annexation […] if you try to resist, they will slaughter you without any problem, with impunity. (Watan, interview, July 2024)

Figure 5.

Map issued by the “Israeli Civil Adiminstration” allocating newly designated ‘grazing areas’ for settler herding outposts. (ICA, 2025; translation by authors).

Conclusion

In this article we have offered an analysis of colonial herding through the vantage point of those whom it targets, mimics, and works to replace: Indigenous shepherds and pastoral communities. Drawing on extensive research with Palestinian pastoralist communities in the oWB, including embodied multispecies wanderings, the article reveals the settler colonial and capitalist logics which underwrite and guide colonial herding as eliminatory violence unfolding through animal bodies and the land. We conceptualize colonial herding as an animalized spatialized extension of settler bodies, a roaming eliminatory colonial infrastructure that makes and marks a perpetually expanding frontier—a wandering frontier. As such, the article expands understandings on the spatial workings of Israeli colonial power on, through and against human and nonhuman bodies, and advances new insights on colonial appropriation and its spatial and material manifestations.

In addition to its theoretical and empirical contributions, the paper offers methodological intervention that furthers the “dismantling [of] persistent reproduction of epistemological violence in knowledge production” (Sabbagh-Khoury, 2022: 46) by foregrounding Indigenous epistemologies, lifeways and practices as primary analytical lenses through which frontier making, and resistances to it, are theorized. Acknowledging that “theorizing is itself a political practice (not separate from it) in the subaltern case” (Sabbagh-Khoury, 2022: 46). The paper also expands the understanding of frontiers not only as spatiotemporal categories but at once as the violent appropriation and erasure of a relational, living and generative terrain of al-Ard. Further, by centring al-Ard, as both the guiding framework and source of Indigenous praxis, the article sketches tentative decolonial openings of continued regeneration, posing counter logics (and affects) to the wandering frontier and its settler colonial-capitalist modes of commodification, extraction, exploitation and elimination in Palestine and beyond (see also Salih and Corry, 2021). Palestinians are not merely passive recipients to the intensified violence and speedy expansion that the wandering frontier imbodies and produces. Palestinian communities, as we show, engage the multiplicities of al-Ard in their efforts to develop various forms of resistance and sumud (steadfastness) as means to maneuver, evade and counter colonial herding and its human and nonhuman agents. Such examples and others, which could be seen as resistance through al-Ard, deserve further substantial attention, which we consider an important path for future inquiry. This is especially pertinent today when forces of life are being subsumed by annihilatory death and destruction, that we engage what Palestinian and other minoritarian modes of being in the world teach us, as Anna Tsing (2015: 22) convincingly put it “to look around rather than ahead”, to al-Ard.

Article highlights

• Colonial herding is a mode of colonial violence that operates through the appropriation, instrumentalization, and weaponization of indigenous pastoral practices and animals as means to erase and replace Palestinian pastoralists and their life-worlds.

• Mobility, a core organizing principle, of Palestinian pastoralists’ lifeways, is undermined by settler colonial violence and systems of control, while colonial herding mimics Palestinian pastoralists, esthetics, and spatial and material characteristics for settler expansion.

• Colonial herding reflects a spatialized shift from what Paul Virilio terms as ‘war on the milieu’ – on civilians, reproductive capacities, and the environment – into the mobilization and exploitation of the milieu itself and through it.

• Animals are transformed into ‘colonial subjects’ performing a spatialized extension of the settler body, a roaming eliminatory colonial infrastructure that makes and marks a perpetually expanding frontier – a wandering frontier.

• The wandering frontier, is thus a milieu concept for comprehending the constitutive role space, ecology and more-than-human bodies have in the making of the settler colonial frontier.