Struggling for Time: Environmental Governance and Agrarian Resistance in Israel/Palestine

Time is central to agriculture, in growing seasons, harvesting cycles, and market temporalities. The mediation of time is also essential to claims of power, to inhabit or colonize land. With this book, Natalia Gutkowski examines how time is used as a mechanism of control by the Israeli state and a site of resistance among Palestinian agriculturalists. Struggling for Time tells a nuanced story about the relations of Palestinian citizens with the Israeli state, showing how Palestinian citizens both unintentionally assist in fulfilling the state's Zionist claims to indigeneity, yet also uphold their own native intergenerational connection to the land.

Traveling across both policymaking arenas and agrarian sites in Israel, Gutkowski follows the multiple ways that Jewish-Israeli citizens and Palestinian citizens, state officials, scientists, planners, and agriculturalists use time as a tool of collective agency. She unpacks notions of time as power structures and shows how settler society lays moral claim on native time through various agrarian policies, science, technologies, landscapes, and bureaucracy. As Gutkowski argues, agriculture is a field uniquely amenable to governance through time. In an era of climate change and increasingly limited resources, time politics will take on greater urgency as societies and governments plan for an uncertain future.