AGRARIAN SETTLEMENTS AND ANNUAL PRECIPITATION
MARKERS ON TOP OF AN NDVI MAP, Prepared by Jamon
Van Den Hoek, Francesco Sebregondi/Forensic
Eyal Weizman: The state of Israel accepted the designation of the desert threshold developed by a German-Russian scientist named Wladimir Köppen in 1918 — the moment when the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the “Orient” fell into European hands. Köppen’s classification established the “aridity line” at the 200 mm isohyet (isohyets are lines connecting all points that have the same amount of average rainfall per year). The rationale for this definition was simple: it’s impossible to cultivate cereals on a flat surface without 200 mm of annual rainfall. Or so it was argued. We know that this has never been true, since in fact the aridity line is not only a meteorological designation, but also one that depends on agricultural knowhow and seed types. That 200 mm threshold connects cereal cultivation with certain ideas of culture and permanent human habitation, with urbanization, economy, and the state. Between any two isohyets on meteorological maps there is a different translucent color band. In Palestine, these bands are darker blue in the north, where parts of the Galilee receive as much as 800 mm of rainfall per year. The gradient of blues thins towards the center of the country and flips over into a light spectrum of yellows over the 200 mm line, then thickens into a spectrum of oranges as one descends south. The line that crosses al-‘Araqīb is located on the same colonial meteorological shoreline that connects areas of South Waziristan to the lower Atlas Mountains in Algeria. There are different kinds of conflicts all along this line — most of them with colonial roots. More locally, Israeli land law does not acknowledge private land ownership of the people that lived and live beyond this line. They’ve developed an inescapable circular logic: it is impossible to cultivate south of this line, therefore the people living south of it must be nomads (which they’ve not been for generations), and nomads have no land rights. The Bedouins, of course, cultivated in the area for hundreds of years, but that agricultural activity was imperceptible by colonial scales of measurement.
The history of the threshold of climate zones/law cannot be confined within the borders of national states but cuts across them. So our story is at once both local and wraps around the earth like an equator, “the political equator” in the formulation of my friend Teddy Cruz. If we look along the political equator of the desert threshold we can notice an interesting process: while colonialists generally pushed the desert line south, recently another major force, desertification, which is a result of human-induced climate change at a global level, is pushing the threshold in the opposite direction, desertifying entire areas. From North Africa through to Syria we witness this counter force, which to a large extent is a consequence of the original force of colonization. The new desertification impoverishes the farmers, who in recent decades were encouraged by national regimes, from Libya to Syria, to expand cultivation beyond the desert threshold with promises of water where there was none. The progressive abandonment of these same areas today leads to urban migration, to the erection of slums, thereby contributing to urban strife. According to some recent research, the fluctuations of the aridity line — the long monster tail of colonialism — is one of the root causes for the havoc now being wreaked throughout the region. The southern Saharan Sahel — the word literally means shoreline — today represents another shifting line of conflict along its entire length.
It turns out there’s historical continuity to this phenomenon. We undertook our desert study shortly after Forensic Architecture studied drone warfare for the UN special commission Rapporteur, so we’d already gathered much of the relevant locational data about drone strikes. When I superimposed the locations of recent drone strikes in such places as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Gaza onto meteorological maps, the result was surprising: all these attacks took place roughly on or just beyond the 200 mm aridity line. But perhaps it needn’t be so surprising that today’s aerially enforced colonization via drones perpetuates the double-winged type that was pioneered in the 1920s in these very places.