Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that Israeli and Palestinian identities are constituted in important ways through the material and metaphorical meanings of water, particularly the water of the River Jordan.

Paper long abstract:

Control of water resources in Israel/Palestine has been a major cause of conflict, and the River Jordan, as water source and national border, has focused the attention of political scholars (Selby 2004, Allen 2002). While the Jordan's waters have been the subject of intensive political-ecological discussion, there has been little consideration of their social and cultural significance, in spite of a growing turn elsewhere towards the meanings of water (Strang 2004; Hahn, Cless and Soentgen 2012).

In response, this paper considers ways in which Israeli and Palestinian identities have been constituted in relation to the River Jordan. Drawing on Bauman's comments on the properties of liquids (2001), I argue that the capacity of the hydrological cycle to represent time and change is central to the value of the Jordan as a means to imagine Israeli and Palestinian communities, and also to assert ownership of the river. I discuss a number of striking literary examples of engagements between Israelis and Palestinians and the waters of the Jordan, exploring the sensory and material entanglement involved in swimming in the river (Smilansky 1910), as well as the relationship between the lack of circulation of today's ecologically degraded Jordan and the restricted mobility of Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories (Barghouti 2003).

This paper shows that the Israel/Palestine struggle over access rights to the Jordan has a neglected dimension, in that it also involves a conflict between national identities that is played out through, and in, the medium of the water.