Between Extinction and Dispossession: A Rhetorical Historiography of the Last Palestinian Crocodile (1870–1935)

This article presents a rhetorical historiography of the last Palestinian crocodile, tracing its circulation across colonial zoological literatures between 1870 and 1935. This was the historic period of colonial zoologists’ speculation about Palestinian crocodile extinction, and by extension, the whereabouts of the last Palestinian crocodile. The article argues that the Palestinian crocodile extinction story is intertwined with violent histories of colonial resource extraction, racialized labor exploitation, and indigenous human dispossession. By tracing the last Palestinian crocodile’s rhetorical circulation to 1935 – when a Zionist zoologist declared that Palestinian crocodiles were finally extinct – the article connects Palestinian crocodile extinction with the British Mandate and the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PJCA)-led drainage and destruction of the crocodile’s former habitat and the dispossession of the
Ghawarna who lived on that land.