Occupying the Past: Colonial Rule and Archaeological Practice in Israel/Palestine

Scholars working on issues of cultural heritage politics have repeatedly argued that archaeological sites in Israel/Palestine serve as grounds for the creation of a nation-state narrative that erases other histories. Expanding on this view, my paper first explores a set of spatio-political strategies that Israeli settlers use to carve out a national space within a larger colonial landscape. Second, as I trace those strategies into the realm of archaeological work, it is my goal to highlight how practices of heritage management and colonial rule in Israel/Palestine are co-constitutive. In this context, I also consider how the occupation, confiscation, and demolition of archaeological sites take place before the background of a modernist discourse that references a universal or global heritage.     

Border Anxiety in Palestine–Israel

In this paper, I deal with representations of Palestinian women and their experiences with Israeli national security. In particular I explore how the political philosophy of Agamben and feminist psychoanalytic ideas of “abjection” could assist in understanding the nature and flexibility of the power relationships between Palestinian women and the Israeli state. I pay specific attention to moments when women carry out suicide attacks or when pregnant women in labour are forced to give birth at the checkpoint. I argue that, from a Western perspective, pregnant and exploding women's leaky bodily boundary embodies Israeli fears about the leakiness of the border between Israel and Palestine, fears which necessitated the construction of a so‐called “security fence” in order to create a hermetic border. As such, I emphasize women's capacity to produce, heighten and dissolve boundaries, bodily and political, thereby advancing a radically different kind of political geography.     

OpenStreetMap in Israel and Palestine – ‘Game changer’ or reproducer of contested cartographies?

In Israel and Palestine, map-making practices were always entangled with contradictive spatial identities and imbalanced power resources. Although an Israeli narrative has largely dominated the ‘cartographic battlefield’, the latest chapter of this story has not been written yet: collaborative forms of web 2.0 cartographies have restructured power relations in mapping practices and challenged traditional monopolies on map and spatial data production. Thus, we can expect web 2.0 cartographies to be a ‘game changer’ for cartography in Palestine and Israel. In this paper, I review this assumption with the popular example of OpenStreetMap (OSM). Following a mixed methods approach, I comparatively analyze the genesis of OSM in Israel and Palestine. Although nationalist motives do not play a significant role on either side, it turns out that the project is dominated by Israeli and international mappers, whereas Palestinians have hardly contributed to OSM. As a result, social fragmentations and imbalances between Israel and Palestine are largely reproduced through OSM data. Discussing the low involvement of Palestinians, I argue that OSM's ground truth paradigm might be a watershed for participation. Presumably, the project's data are less meaningful in some local contexts than in others. Moreover, the seemingly apolitical approach to map only ‘facts on the ground’ reaffirms present spatio-social order and thus the power relations behind it. Within a Palestinian narrative, however, many aspects of the factual material space might appear not as neutral physical objects but as results of suppression, in which case, any ‘accurate’ spatial representation, such as OSM, becomes objectionable.     

Spacing Palestine through the home

This paper explores connections that can be made between houses, homes and violence in Palestine, and representational consequences of making such connections. Drawing on ethnographic field research in Birzeit, I put recent work on critical geographies of home into conversation with geographies and geopolitics of Palestine. I criticise the tendency to represent Palestinian geographies almost entirely through the lens of the Israeli Occupation. While such studies have a great deal of value both academically and politically, this paper augments such work by developing a different focus and a different representational approach. I use detailed ethnographic vignettes and interviews to engage with the domestic practices that make particular Birzeiti homes. These intimate domestic encounters underpin my argument that there is a need for more work that apprehends Palestinian geographies as complexities that bear a relation to, but are not fully determined by, the Israeli Occupation.     

Israeli historical geography and the Holocaust: reconsidering the research agenda

The case of the Israeli historical geography demonstrates how nationalism affects academic research agenda. As in many other cases of nation-building, Israeli geographers have played an important role in the manipulation of landscapes and places to form a modern Jewish Israeli national identity. Their role in the construction of national consciousness expanded following the development of a territorial national conflict with the Palestinian Arabs. Despite the eighteen centuries of the pre-Zionist Diaspora, and the fact that more than a half of the Jews in the world live outside Israel, Israeli historical geographers almost totally neglect Diaspora lifestyles and spatialities and ignore the impact of the geographical imagination of Diaspora Jews on the (re)construction of Zionist territorial concepts and space. Following five decades of a Palestine/Israel-centered agenda, it is time for Israeli historical geographers to turn to the research of different spatial aspects of the Jewish Diaspora. This move should begin with the research of the spatial aspects of the concentration and annihilation of Jewish European communities during the Holocaust, and to more general spatial aspects of Nazism, as well as to the political and cultural geography of the Holocaust remembrance.     

The Stones of Contention: The Role of Archaeological Heritage in Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

Archaeology plays a fundamental role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The practice of archaeology in Israel is embedded in the national identity construction discourse and has severe repercussions on domestic politics. From archaeological remains it is demanded to give proof of precedence and legitimate claims over land. The relation between nationalism and archaeology is a topic that became increasingly popular in scholarly works of the past 20 years. The full UNESCO membership of Palestine is projecting the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in a globalized dimension, but at the same time the heritage of humanity’s politics reinforces the nation-states concept and could pave the way to new political scenarios.     

An Independent Palestine: The Security Dimension

If negotiations produce an end to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict then a sovereign, independent Palestine may emerge. But what is required for it to succeed? Nothing is more important than the security of a Palestinian state–for itself, for Israel, and for the region: security trumps all else. In addition to the problem of dealing effectively with opposition to a peace agreement within Palestine or directed against it from outside, the nature and magnitude of the security challenge will depend in large part on three issues: the drawing of borders between Israel and Palestine–and whether they are porous or marked by a rigid line of barriers; whether Israeli settlements are withdrawn, or in part incorporated into Israel, perhaps through land swaps with Palestine; and what arrangements are made for Jerusalem. One answer is the creation of effective Palestinian military forces (in addition to police), but this course could be divisive; a second is the development of a series of Israeli–Palestinian confidence‐building and share–security measures, including intelligence cooperation; a third is progress towards reducing external threats to Israel–Palestine, including success in Iraq and in defusing other Middle East problems. Most useful, however, would be the creation of an American‐led peace enabling force, ideally modelled on NATO. This force would need to be agreed by both Israel and Palestine; it must be adequately staffed, trained and equipped; its duties and rules of engagement must make sense to all parties; and it must be part of a network of dispute‐resolution and confidence‐building measures in full partnership with Israeli and Palestinian authorities.     

“Over our dead bodies”: Placing necropolitical activism

Analysing a struggle between Palestinian campaigners and Israeli authorities over an ancient Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, this paper explores the role of necrogeography in contesting urban boundaries, asserting historical legitimacy and realizing emancipatory spatial practices. The article bridges an existing gap between the geographical study of death spaces, and the necropolitical realities of conflict in late modernity. The case-study analyses one arena of contemporary urban geopolitics of death in Israel–Palestine, and the myriad of factors that shape its dynamics of struggle and power relations. The article argues that the multiple avenues of nuanced and creative political action found in necrogeographical research over the past two decades offers a lived alternative to the politics of despair that often dominates the prevailing conceptualizations of necropolitics.     

Border collapse and boundary maintenance: militarisation and the micro-geographies of violence in Israel–Palestine

Drawing upon subaltern geopolitics and feminist geography, this article explores how militarisation shapes micro-geographies of violence and occupation in Israel–Palestine. While accounts of spectacular and large-scale political violence dominate popular imaginaries and academic analyses in/of the region, a shift to the micro-scale foregrounds the relationship between power, politics and space at the level of everyday life. In the context of Israel–Palestine, micro-geographies have revealed dynamic strategies for ‘getting by’ or ‘dealing with’ the occupation, as practiced by Palestinian populations in the face of spatialised violence. However, this article considers how Jewish Israelis actively shape the spatial micro-politics of power within and along the borders of the Israeli state. Based on 12 months of ethnographic research in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem during 2010–2011, an analysis of everyday narratives illustrates how relations of violence, occupation and domination rely upon gendered dynamics of border collapse and boundary maintenance. Here, the borders between home front and battlefield break down at the same time as communal boundaries are reproduced, generating conditions of ‘total militarism’ wherein military interests and agendas are both actively and passively diffused. Through gendering the militarised micro-geographies of violence among Jewish Israelis, this article reveals how individuals construct, navigate and regulate the everyday spaces of occupation, detailing more precisely how macro political power endures.     

Civilian consciousness of the mutable nature of borders: The power of appearance along a fragmented border in Israel/Palestine

What is the role of citizenship in a protest? How are civilian rights used as a source of power to craft socio-spatial strategies of dissent? I argue that the growing civilian consciousness of the “power to” (i.e. capacity to act) and of the border as public space is enhancing civil participation and new dissent strategies through which participants consciously and sophisticatedly use their citizenship as a tool, offering different conceptualizations of borders. This paper examines the role of citizenship in the design and performance of dissent focusing on two groups of Israeli activists, Machsom Watch and Anarchists against the Wall. Using their Israeli citizenship as a source of power, these groups apply different strategies of dissent while challenging the discriminating practices of control in occupied Palestinian territories. These case studies demonstrate a growing civilian consciousness of the mutable nature of borders as designed by state power. Analyzing the ways actors consciously and sophisticatedly use citizenship as a tool in their dissent, which is aimed at supporting indigenous noncitizens, I argue that Machsom Watch and Anarchists against the Wall enact and promote different models of citizenship and understandings of borders, in Israel/Palestine.     

“This is our land”: collective violence,property law,and imagining the geography of Palestine

This study seeks to explain the origins of two types of violence occurring on the Palestinian landscape, the erasure of Palestinian farms and the demolition of Palestinian homes. Such violence has two sources. One source derives from an enduring practice of meaning-making about geographical places that has inspired groups with territorial ambitions to seize control of the landscapes they covet and is referred to by Edward Said as the crafting of “imaginative geographies.” The second source focuses on changes in property rights that follow when groups with territorial ambitions succeed in seizing control of coveted land. It is the imagined geography of Palestine as a homeland for the Jewish people, first framed by Zionists of the late 19^th century and absorbed into the practices of Israeli state-building, and the changes in property rights inscribed into the Palestinian landscape following Zionist and Israeli military conquests in 1948 and 1967, that lie at the core of violence directed against the Palestinian farm and home today. This process of imagination, legal transformation, and violence is part of a longstanding lineage of dispossession that includes the English enclosures and the taking of land from Amerindians on the Anglo-American colonial frontier.     

Towards a bio-territorial conception of power: Territory,population, and environmental narratives in Palestine and Israel

In this paper, I investigate recent Palestinian and Israeli environmental narratives as effects of power. I also read differences between both styles of narration as differences in conceptions and experiences of power. While Palestinian environmental narratives for the most part build on a Weberian perception of power (sovereign-territorial), their Israeli counterparts subscribe to what could be described as a Foucaultian perspective of power (bio-power). These underlying perceptions of power lead to forms of resistance that are focused on property rights and questions of sovereignty in Palestine and on concerns over quality of life of the population in Israel. By constructing theoretical distinctions between territory and population, Palestinian and Israeli environmental narratives continue a strongly entrenched tradition in theories of state, power, and governmentality. In this paper, I provide a critique of this ontological distinction between territory and population and argue that the distinction itself should be recognized as an effect of power: by attending to its territorial forms, power's exercise on the level of population (gender, class, color) is rendered benign; and, by focusing on quality of life of the population, power's expression in territorial forms is often deemed irrelevant for environmental knowledge and action. This critique of power calls for further research on and discusses implications of a bio-territorial conceptualization of power, as well as attendant forms of resistance.     

Refusing to be Toured: Work,Tourism, and the Productivity of “Life” in the Colombian Amazon

Starting from the contention that exercising a “right to tour” is predicated on the work of producing tourability, I examine how tourability itself is a contested process involving relations of land and labour. Examining the current “resource boom” of ecotourism in the Colombian Amazon, I use an analysis of work and capital accumulation to unravel a seemingly small act of refusal by the community of Nazaret that has barred tourists’ entry to their land. I argue that this act of refusal opens up space for critically examining the relationships of land and labour, especially through the production of “life”, in the accumulation of tourable places in contemporary global capitalism. Engaging literature on both tourism studies and land politics in the Amazon region, I contribute to the scholarship on tourism and work while examining how Indigenous landscapes are being made productive towards the ends of capitalism.     

Unfastening Israel's Future from the Occupation: Israeli Plans for Partial Annexation of West Bank Territory

Israeli plans to partially annex West Bank territory have mainly been perceived as frustrating the two-state solution, and as putting Palestine/Israel on a path leading to the one-state alternative. This paper analyses partial annexation plans without assuming that the future of Palestine/Israel would necessarily abide by either statist resolution. It argues that by ostensibly distancing Israel's hold of the West Bank from an identifiable configuration of a belligerent occupation, partial annexation is offered to Jewish Israelis as a path for detaching the futurity of the two nations, and as a trajectory for normalising the Israeli state, without having to make what much of this public would see as painful concessions. It further explores settlers’ objections to such plans, claiming that even a partial incorporation of West Bank territory into formal Israel is expected to erode the exclusivity of Jewish domination which Israel has been upholding in its settler-colonial frontier.     

Archaeology and Folklore of Material Culture, Ritual, and Everyday Life

Archaeologists often make distinctions between ritual material culture and everyday or utilitarian material culture. I examine this differentiation model for understanding the complex relationships among material culture, ritual, and everyday life. Using folklore recorded in Scotland in the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, I suggest another, continuum-based model, and suggest how this model can enrich archaeological understanding of the meanings and beliefs that form the cultural contexts for the artifacts, features, sites, and landscapes we study.     

Hope in Hebron: The Political Affects of Activism in a Strangled City

The negative affects of this violent occupation—fear, threat, humiliation—quell hope, setting limits on the potentials of political agency. This article documents the corporeality of the Occupation in Hebron, evoking the body as materially contingent to explore agential capacities within the delimiting affects of the violent sensorium. Drawing on fieldwork with Palestinian activists engaged in providing political tours of Hebron, I argue that by reappropriating the violent affects of occupation, this form of activism demonstrates agency that resists “political depression”. Theoretically, I argue further, at hand is an empirical account of the “autonomy of affect” giving rise to critical hope amid a sensorium of fear. The research presented, therefore, contributes to addressing a key question for resistance in Palestine (and beyond): how fear—a predominant affective register of contemporary politics—might be harnessed towards (renewed) political agency and resistance to oppression.     

The Muslim Settlement of Late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine: Comparison with Jewish Settlement Patterns

In the late Ottoman and Mandatory periods, Palestine's rural landscape underwent a great transformation. This study examines how the Muslim population expanded beyond its traditional inhabitation in the highlands and settled the fluid inventory of marginal lands in the coastal plains and unpopulated valleys of Palestine. In settling these marginal landscapes their settlement dovetailed with Jewish settlement patterns. While most studies have emphasized the competitive aspect of this process, examining Zionist and Arab national claims, this research points to a different aspect of this new settlement—mainly how much the Jewish and Muslim settlement patterns mirrored one another and how they were part of similar physical processes and complemented one another. Relying on censuses, aerial photographs, and period maps, as well as other archival sources, this is the first systematic research to examine the full extent of new Muslim settlements in Palestine in the late Ottoman and Mandatory periods, and to draw parallels between this phenomenon and the settlement endeavors of the Zionists.     

Reframing Bi‐nationalism in Palestine‐Israel as a Process of Settler Decolonisation

This paper examines some of the emerging critical civil society debates in relation to the one‐state solution being the most appropriate geo‐political arrangement for the articulation of freedom, justice and equality in Palestine‐Israel. This is done with reference to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions’ 2012 statement in support of a bi‐national state and the ensuing critiques it attracted from Palestinian supporters of the one‐state position. Drawing on these debates which have largely revolved around Jewish Israeli rights to political self‐determination in Palestine‐Israel, this paper proposes that alternative versions of self‐determination as cultural rights for the established Hebrew‐speaking national community represent a more inclusive form of self‐determination in the eventuality of decolonisation.     

Moving Towards Transformative Democratic Action Through Archaeology

Archaeologists have explored how politics affect the way we see the past. They have investigated how constructions of the past naturalize present political conditions, and have explored uses of the past in current politics. Few have examined how politics in archaeology can relate to the future. In this article I develop ideas on a transformational politics in archaeology that focuses on critiquing oppressive relations in the past and present, and works towards building more just relations for the future. I examine how we can achieve this through building more democratic relations in the places we work.