Colonial pyrotechniques in Palestine: Arboricide and fiery dispossessions

Abstract

In this article, we examine how fire—a triangle of heat, fuel and oxygen—functions as a settler colonial tool of destruction closely linked to techniques of elimination and replacement. In Palestine, we conceptualise fire as part of a broader set of pyrotechniques—elemental practices that devastate more than bodies and infrastructures by targeting and eroding the environmental conditions that sustain Palestinian lifeworlds. Drawing on ideas from elemental politics and world-making, we show how settler fire attacks materially and physically transform landscapes into desolate spaces, rendering them legible and available for colonisation. Fire is deployed not only by civilian settlers shielded by the Israeli state but also by the state itself through practices of ‘pyroterror’. Palestinians—'People of the Olive Tree’—are simultaneously dispossessed by fire and framed as ‘pyroterrorists’, revealing the racialised asymmetries embedded in colonial logics of security and dispossession. Finally, we examine the contradictions of afforestation and other landscape-engineering techniques through which settler colonialism grounds its presence and expands by overwriting Indigenous ecologies and ways of living. We argue that fire—both in its destructive and transformative capacities—is central to the ongoing expansion and maintenance of settler colonial frontiers in Palestine.