ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Colonial Hump: Cameleering as Settler Science in Palestine

• In Event: Disruptive Encounters: Historicizing More-Than-Human Lives in Palestine

English Abstract

The introduction of European cement and silicate bricks to the Ottoman Mediterranean at the turn of the twentieth century made sand the most crucial component of modern Palestinian construction. Extraction of coastal sand along the Sinai and Levantine coasts, and its transportation to booming construction areas from Gaza, through Jaffa and Tel Aviv, to Haifa, quickly developed into an insatiable magnet for human labor and animal power, first and foremost camels. By the interwar period, vast peasant and Bedouin populations, husbanding thousands of camels, had integrated into these urban economies, sharply shifting the cultural and demographic patterns of the coastal plains from Egypt to modern Lebanon. Between 1924 and 1926, the contemporary press estimated, for example, that around 5,000 Arab camel drivers worked in the Tel Aviv area. A camel per 6-7 people. Camels thus became part and parcel of the urban experience of the time and a subject of competition between Palestinians and Jewish Settlers. The paper explores 20th-century cameleering in Palestine as an up-and-coming field of expertise, indispensable and conditional in the race for modernization. Mastering camel husbandry required developing new protocols for knowledge of veterinary science, climate, nutrition, and place-making that were foreign to European settlers. Unlike farm animals raised according to European practices in the Jewish colonies, camel husbandry was ironically practiced by urbanites who previously had no connection to farming, creating networks of informal knowledge sharing. Training European migrants to be Hebrew cameleers, therefore, involved both reliance upon and dispossession of Palestinian camel merchants and owners. Orientalization of the camel in colonial literature and art was also used to promote these Zionist goals, albeit often without much economic success.

Author

• Dotan Halevy, Tel Aviv University