Conducting a Normalized Difference Enhanced Sand Index on the area that constitutes Gaza in 2020 reveals a thin blue border outlining the strip. Through this spectral analysis and false color composite, pixels rendered in blue and green indicate a spectral signature of sand and arid land. This borderland, which has dictated the supply of essential goods into Gaza along with the restriction of all persons moving in and out of the region, is also an ecological and environmental phenomenon, physically inscribed into the earth.

Drawing on scholars Andrew Herscher and Ana María León, I focus on the construction of the border not only as the formation of property regimes and colonial land expropriation but primarily as the cartographical and epistemological designation of environmental zones consisting of sand or soil. By constructing borders along and with environmental divisions, I argue, colonial states seek to further naturalize their formation. In the case of the British Mandate and later the Israeli state, this naturalization is deeply entangled with colonial temporal discourses that project these borders, and colonial ontologies of land more broadly, into the past and future. By tracing the history of these borders across colonial projects, I seek precisely to unsettle this enduring temporal premise, asking how environmental divisions come to constitute borders in settler colonial contexts, and how settler colonial borders become environmentally defined.