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Ponder questions of the united monarchy under Saul and David in light of current historical and archaeological evidence

Reconstructing the emergence of the Israelite monarchy involves interpreting historical research, approaching questions of ancient state formation, synthesizing archaeological research from sites in the southern Levant, and reexamining the biblical traditions of the early monarchy embedded in the books of Samuel and Kings. Integrating these approaches allows for a nuanced and differentiated picture of one of the most crucial periods in the history of ancient Israel. Rather than attempting to harmonize archaeological data and biblical texts or to supplement the respective approach by integrating only a portion of data stemming from the other, both perspectives come into their own in this volume presenting the results of an interdisciplinary Tübingen–Tel Aviv Research Colloquium.

Features:

• Essays on Israel's monarchy by experts in biblical archaeology and biblical studies
• Methods for integrating archaeology and biblical traditions in reconstructing ancient Israel's history
• New research on the sociopolitical process of state formation in Israel and Judah

A study of Palestine-Israel through the unexpected lens of nature conservation

 

Settling Nature documents the widespread ecological warfare practiced by the state of Israel. Recruited to the front lines are fallow deer, gazelles, wild asses, griffon vultures, pine trees, and cows—on the Israeli side—against goats, camels, olive trees, hybrid goldfinches, and akkoub—which are affiliated with the Palestinian side. These nonhuman soldiers are all the more effective because nature camouflages their tactical deployment as such.

​Drawing on more than seventy interviews with Israel’s nature officials and on observations of their work, this book examines the careful orchestration of this animated warfare by Israel’s nature administration on both sides of the Green Line. Alongside its powerful protection of wildlife biodiversity, the territorial reach of Israel’s nature protection is remarkable: to date, nearly 25 percent of the country’s total land mass is assigned as a park or a reserve. Settling Nature argues that the administration of nature advances the Zionist project of Jewish settlement and the corresponding dispossession of non-Jews from this space.

In Spacing Debt Christopher Harker demonstrates that financial debt is as much a spatial phenomenon as it is a temporal and social one. Harker traces the emergence of debt in Ramallah after 2008 as part of the financialization of the Palestinian economy under Israeli settler colonialism. Debt contributes to processes through which Palestinians are kept economically unstable and subordinate. Harker draws extensively on residents' accounts of living with the explosion of personal debt to highlight the entanglement of consumer credit with other obligatory relations among family, friends, and institutions. He offers a new geographical theorization of debt, showing how debt affects urban space, including the movement of bodies through the city, localized economies, and the political violence associated with occupation. Bringing cultural and urban imaginaries into conversation with monetized debt, Harker shows how debt itself becomes a slow violence embedded into the everyday lives of citizens. However, debt is also a means through which Palestinians practice endurance, creatively adapting to life under occupation.