This paper interrogates the eco-political life of camels in historic Palestine and modern Israel, examining the ways in which their regulation, cultural symbolism and commodification reveal how state power, markets and the environment work in conjunction to set boundaries, reinforce order, authority (or lack thereof) and hierarchies. Historically, the unique physiology of camels has facilitated and maintained the semi-nomadic life of the indigenous Bedouins of historic Palestine. Camels like their owners have been marked as a cultural and physical threat to modernity, that from the coastal dunes to the Negev landscapes, regress ecology and physically tress pass state borders. Their usage in Bedouin life quickly came into conflict with colonial and Zionist visions of modernity, nature, development and the environment. This has resulted in camels becoming an object of control and derision by first the British and then Israeli governments and constricting regulation of camels and criminalizing their grazing, was one tool in achieving British, Zionist and later state visions and imaginaries of nature and order. However, in recent years, in the context of climate changes and with the emergence of the “Anthropocene”, which conceptually challenges ideas of nature, culture, and “modernity”, the status of camels has seemingly taken a turn, with camels emerging globally as a commodity with large and diverse possibilities for ecosystem services and climate change adaptations. This paper examines these shifts, drawing on theories in political ecology on “conservation”. We describe first how concepts of conservation are used by states to reinforce their hegemony by outcasting camels. Second how their commodification has the potential to continue such a process and lastly how Camels-Bedouin trespassing has the potential to transform ecological and political realities.
