Multiple inventories and divided archaeology in the West Bank: An assessment of databases in the Etzion Bloc

This paper presents and discusses an assessment of the scope, priorities, and coverage of existing archaeological datasets, via database comparison and on-the-ground re-survey of all accessible known sites in one region of the West Bank, the Etzion Bloc. The main goal of this survey was to assess the current inventories listing archaeological sites in the Etzion Bloc, an area that brings together an interesting range of archaeological and geographical issues that result directly from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This database assessment and review of listed archaeological sites included the verification of site existence and the examination of sites’ modern context, accessibility, current condition, potential threats, and the accuracy of their recorded location. The results of this fieldwork demonstrate the importance of keeping data up-do-date, provide suggestions on how to enhance the structure and contents of current inventories, and help prioritize and inform plans for further archaeological fieldwork in this region.     

True exchanges or thought crime?

Academic boycotts are obnoxious weapons that imperil the principle of freedom of expression and intellectual exchange and people who advocate an academic boycott of Israel open themselves to charges of hypocrisy and mendacity.     

Trapped in mirror-images: The rhetoric of maps in Israel/Palestine

The map of Israel/Palestine has long been used by both Israelis and Palestinians, from their unequal power positions, as a celebrated national symbol. It is virtually the same map, depicting a sliver-shaped land between River Jordan and the Mediterranean, two overlapping homelands in one territory. Thus, a single geo-body appears to contain two antagonistic and asymmetrical nations, locked in a bitter struggle. The article interprets the uncanny mirror-maps of Israel/Palestine by drawing on recent work in critical cartography. One approach has read maps as rhetorical claims for power and over territory; indeed, the mirror-maps of Israel/Palestine are often read as indications of maximalist territorial ambitions and hidden wishes to “wipe the other off the map”. However, this article suggests an alternative, de-territorialised reading of political maps as “empty signifiers” of multiple meanings. Following analysis of maps as objects of performance, whose meaning depends on users and contexts, the article emphasises the ritualistic sacralisation of the Israel/Palestine map. Embedded within discourses of memory and history, maps are tools of narrating the nation, often in diasporic contexts, carrying with them vast emotional significance to both peoples. These issues were largely left unaddressed by the territorial paradigm which has dominated scholarship and political negotiations. Moving the discussion of geography beyond narrow territorial claims towards an appreciation of the richness and heterogeneity of space is crucial, yet faces formidable challenges both politically and conceptually.     

“Refusing to be a victim,refusing to be an enemy”. Form-of-life as resistance in the Palestinian struggle against settler colonialism

This paper focuses on practices of non-violent resistance as they are played out in the ongoing Palestinian struggle against the Israeli settler colonialism in the occupied West Bank. By looking at the resistance of expanding settlements, demolition and land confiscation orders, and livelihood destruction in two Palestinian sites, the paper shows how Israeli settler colonial apparatuses, and the variety of techniques and practices of erasure they mobilize, can be fruitfully studied through site-specific ways of Palestinian resistance. In order to do so, the paper turns to discuss a peculiar form of non-violent resistance grounded in what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘destituent power’. It shows how the acts of destituent resistance in the two sites under study function by playing with the apparatuses of control in creative but non-violent ways; namely, by using the potentialities of that form-of-life that the settler colonial apparatuses try to cancel, overrule, control, weaken, criminalize, and erase. The idea of ‘destituent play’ is hence elaborated, and special attention paid to its ability to slow down and hamper the repressive functions of the settler colonial apparatuses through the creative use of the potentialities of Palestinian everyday life.     

“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.     

“Operation Exodus”: Israeli government involvement in the production of Otto Preminger's Film Exodus (1960)

This article explores the Israeli government's enthusiastic and substantial role in the production of Otto Preminger's Exodus (1960), the influential pro-Zionist film on the creation of Israel which was loosely based on the highly successful novel by Leon Uris. This involvement followed a decade of mostly unsuccessful Israeli government endeavors to encourage its many supporters in Hollywood to produce films in and about Israel: both for their potential economic rewards and for international propaganda. Utilizing archival sources in the United States, Britain, and especially Israel, this article charts Israeli efforts to encourage Hollywood productions in the 1950s and the extent to which Israeli officials provided encouragement and assistance to Exodus: first to the novel and then critically to the film. The article shows that the film producers took into account British and Arab observations too. However, the degree to which Exodus served Israeli propaganda themes is finally demonstrated by the eager efforts made by Zionist bodies and Israeli government officials to promote its international distribution.     

Women’s Lives Beyond the Checkpoint in Palestine

This article brings women to the fore of a discussion of checkpoints in Palestine to understand better the ways that Palestinian women’s lives—even as they may not regularly cross checkpoints—are affected by Israeli security infrastructure. Drawing on fieldwork near Checkpoint 300 between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, we examine women’s lives in the context of a gendered system of permits and the nearby checkpoint that makes men’s days of labour both long and exhausting, a fact that has profound effects on the family home in terms of restricted mobilities and the division of domestic labour. The article thus builds an account of checkpoints that: (1) situates women’s everyday lives in Palestine in the context of Israel’s military occupation; (2) extends the temporality of checkpoints beyond the checkpoint itself; and, therefore, (3) enables an understanding of the effects of borders beyond the immediate space of the border.