The Conflict Shoreline
The Conflict Shoreline was made in collaboration with Eyal Weizman
By 2021, the Bedouin village of al-‘Araqeeb in the northern region of the Negev desert had been destroyed and rebuilt more than 180 times (2021), part of the ongoing “battle over the Negev,” an Israeli state campaign to uproot the Palestinian Bedouins from the northern threshold of the desert, Unlike other frontiers fought over during the Israel–Palestine conflict, this one is not demarcated by fences and walls but by shifting climatic conditions. The threshold of the desert advances and recedes in response to colonization, cultivation, displacement, urbanization, and, most recently, climate change.
In his response to Sheikh’s Desert Bloom project (part of Sheikh’s The Erasure Trilogy), Eyal Weizman’s essay incorporates historical aerial photographs, contemporary remote sensing data, state plans, court testimonies, and nineteenth-century travelers’ accounts, exploring the Negev’s threshold as a “shoreline” along which climate change and political conflict are deeply and dangerously entangled.
Publication
Text and image analysis by Eyal Weizman
Photographs by Fazal Sheikh
Book design by Fazal Sheikh with Duncan Whyte/Steidl Design
96 pages, 106 color and black and white photographs (and maps)
8.1 x 10.6 in / 20.6 x 27 cm
Tritone and four-color process
Monochrome printed paperbound hardcover
ISBN 978-3-86930-992-7
Publication date: 1st Edition June 2015
"The Conflict Shoreline makes brilliant use of aerial and other photographs to trace the settler-colonial origins of the practices that made climate into a political tool in the hands of Zionists seeking to displace Bedouin tribes from their original homes in the land of Israel. There is much to learn from this book about 'climate change' as a profoundly colonial project." Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago