Description:

Faculty and Grad Student Colloquium:

"Petro-Palestine: Technologies of Partition in a Mandated Land" presented by Shira Pinhas, Northwestern University

Palestine is not commonly recognized as an oil-producing country. Yet under British rule (1918–1948), it emerged as a key hub of distillation, shipment, and automobility within the global petroleum industry. This talk examines how pipelines, the Haifa Refinery, asphalt roads, and motor vehicles linking Palestine with Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Transjordan simultaneously structured spatial segregation between Palestinians and Jews and laid the infrastructural groundwork for partition. Oil, however, became Palestine’s principal energy source not only through mobility: it also permeated domestic life as the main household fuel. The local and global political economy of oil production and consumption reconfigured hierarchies between women and men, production and reproduction, Palestinians and Jews, and metropoles and colonies.