Organized Violence and Organized Abandonment Beyond the Human: the Case of Brucellosis among Palestinians in Israel

This article explores how brucellosis became a racialized disease in Israel, where almost all patients are Palestinians. Informed by legal and historical research, the article demonstrates how colonial and settler-colonial policies have targeted Palestinians and their goats and contributed to the distribution of brucellosis along ethno-national lines. Goats, once ubiquitous to the landscape, became enemies of the Israeli state and were blamed for the “destruction” of nature. Under Israeli rule, legal policies not only seized and confiscated Palestinian land but also targeted goat grazing and led to a steep reduction in the number of goats. The resulting depeasantization and concentration of Palestinians in dense poor townships shaped goat grazing as a backyard practice with lack of trust in the hostile state and its brucellosis eradication campaigns. We argue that state policies of organized violence and organized abandonment have shaped the current ecology of brucellosis as a racialized disease. IMPORTANCE The importance of this article is the novelty in combining public health, colonial studies, and legal research to understand the ecology of human brucellosis. This approach allows us to move from a “snap-shot” reading of diseases and cultural practices toward a reading of bacteria, animals, and humans within their political and historical context. The article uses a settler colonial lens to examine the racialized distribution of human brucellosis in Israel and traces colonial policies toward Palestinians and goats—both seen as unwanted intruders to the newly established Israeli nation state. We place these policies in a context of organized violence and organized abandonment, building on the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore to read the power hierarchies of humans, animals, and diseases and how they shape practices and disease.