Struggling for Time

"Time is central to agriculture, in growing seasons, harvesting cycles, and market temporalities. The mediation of time is also essential to claims of power. 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 agriculture professionals. Struggling for Time investigates how Palestinian citizens uphold their native, intergenerational connection to the land while they also grapple with the Israeli state's Zionist claims to indigeneity. Traveling across both policymaking arenas and agrarian sites in Israel, Gutkowski follows the multiple ways that Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian citizens, state officials, agronomists, planners, environmentalists and agriculturalists use time as a tool of collective agency. She unpacks power structures to show how settler society lays moral claim on native time through agrarian policies, science, technologies, landscapes, and bureaucracy. By shifting the commonly observed analysis in Israel/Palestine from land and space to time, this book offers new insight into the operation of power in settler colonial societies and in agrarian environments at large. As Struggling for Time demonstrates, in our era of climate change, time politics will take on ever greater urgency as societies and governments plan for an uncertain future"--