Hadeel Badarni

This research investigates technoscientific formations of Israeli agricultural technologies (henceforth: agritech) and their production of “high-tech” ecologies in Israel/Palestine. It explores how the making of “high-tech” agricultural life becomes scientifically possible and economically profitable. As civilian afterlives of military know-how, Israeli agritech take legacies and practices of colonial domination as their preconditions and epistemological lifeline. Once military technologies are “proven effective” in Palestinian and “hostile” milieus, subsequent agricultural systems crop up in Israel to replenish newly engineered plant life. In this order of ecology-making, that which aims to suppress life in one place is resurrected to cultivate it in another. Through Israeli economies and technologies of war and domination, new codes of ecological recognition are availed in the Israeli agricultural sector. It is this epistemic and material “reappearance” in its technological form, and within a continuum of colonial legacies and capitalist accumulation, that I desire to understand. How do Israel’s military operations and experimentations unveil new horizons of technological “know-how” in the production of agricultural life? How are thresholds of proven “effectiveness” or “ineffectiveness” determined? And what can an ethnography of Israeli agritech production reveal about the social and environmental stakes in the life sciences’ greenwashing of 21st century capitalism?