The village of al-Araqib has been destroyed and rebuilt more than seventy times in 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. Eyal Weizman is an Israeli intellectual and architect. He is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Image courtesy of interviewee. October 4, 2017