Common Grounds for Social & Environmental Justice in the Jordan Valley

The Jordan Valley, a once luscious ecological, cultural, and economic bedrock of cultivation and civilization (Sawwah, 2002) is afflicted today by poverty, water scarcity, food insecurity, and ecological destruction (Food and Agriculture Organization, 2021). The imposition of a modernist, and capitalist centralization of management and resource distribution began already in the late Ottoman era but crystalized with the 1952 Imperial British Land Program, leading to land fragmentation and commodification (Fischbach, 2000; Mundy and Smith, 2007). In addition, geopolitical imperialist wars over natural resources and settler-colonialism exacerbated by neo-colonial policies displaced Indigenous communities from their ancestral territories rupturing what Escobar (2017) refers to as native ways of knowing, doing, and being.