The New Jewish Shepherd: Land Grabbing and Redemption in the Occupied West Bank

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the recent deployment of sheep and grazing practices by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank. The wave of herding outposts that has swept through the West Bank recently involves the use of Jewish-owned sheep to undermine and dispossess Palestinians and to re-indigenize the settlers in their place. The sheep have thus become potent yet clandestine agents of control as well as animated technologies for producing, instilling, and normalizing biblical and spiritual imaginaries of the landscape and of the Jewish people as authentically belonging to it. Backed by the state, the settlers’ mundane shepherding activities have already enabled the largest land grab in the occupied West Bank since 1967. My article contemplates this new “shepherding revolution,” as the settlers call it, situating it amid sheep-related practices in other settler colonial contexts and vis-à-vis shepherding in the state's early years. Ultimately, I argue that studying Jewish shepherds in the West Bank expands our understanding of settler colonialism and illuminates how sheepwashing practices that position settlers as ecopastoralists are used to justify violence in the eyes of the occupying regime, exacerbating the problematic settler ecologies practiced here.