Hydro-Hegemony and the Performance of Sovereignty in Israel-Palestine

The salvo of a Two-State Solution, with an equal state for both Palestinians and Israelis, now feels like a far-off dream. Scholars and policymakers who perceived this as a viable solution have failed to prevent burgeoning violence between the two populations, crippling poverty and destitution amongst the Palestinians, and the consolidation of power by Israel to become the only legitimate state in what was once Mandatory Palestine. While these stakeholders rightly point to several key issues that can explain parts of this dilemma, they have failed to ascertain the key reasons why Palestinian sovereignty has remained elusive. While scholarship remains focused on Israel's monopolization of the use of violence in the region, they fail to address important developments in the field of state-building that require states to control the biopolitics in their territories. In this thesis, I propose a framework that broadens the concept of sovereignty by positioning biopolitics as a central component, allowing a more effective analysis of the issue at hand. I argue that biopolitics is a fundamental part of state sovereignty, with water, as a core element of biopolitics, being used by the Israeli government to undermine Palestinian sovereignty. States can coercively bind citizens to the state and inductively shape their polity. They do so by extending statehood-and the biopolitical benefits it confers-to those it deems part of its demos. Through this control over citizens' lives, sovereignty can be understood as the authority to legally decide who lives and who dies within a state's territory. Within this theoretical framework, a sovereign state seeking to deny another state's sovereignty can seek to control the latter's biopolitics. By coercively regulating lives without offering the benefits of statehood, it can undermine the other state's governance structure and autonomy. This thesis combines quantitative analyses of water consumption and dispersal, geospatial analyses of the restructuring of the watershed using Israel's infrastructural capacity, and a review of the historical record to understand the ways in which Israel's policy of hydro-hegemony, the use of water politics to impact sovereignty, has prevented the establishment of a Two-State Solution.