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Securing and Contesting a Settler Frontier: Policing and Politics in Occupied West Bank Commercial Spaces
Abstract
What does it mean to secure a settler-colonial frontier, and with what possibilities and limitations on the politics of the colonized? Since the year 2000, Israel has militarized West Bank cities and routes in ways unprecedented since the beginning of the military occupation in 1967; in seeking to theorize a “colonial present” in the Middle East, scholars have profitably compared this (partly privatized) securitization to the security practices in American theaters of occupation since 2001. This paper explores Israeli colonization not only in militarized spaces like military checkpoints and raids, but in the civilian, commercial contexts that point to this occupation’s distinct settler character. Some 50,000 Palestinians work in Israeli settlements and industrial zones. How are their bodies, utterances, and general economic and political prospects, policed and constrained, by Israeli security forces as well as civilianized settlers? How does this rely on longer historical processes of dispossession, which, in this case, leave indigenous people living amidst the settler society, drawn on for their labor but also abandoned and walled out? And what claims to sound, space, publicity, and perhaps politics, are Palestinians able to make against and through such limitations? This paper is based on a year and a half of ethnographic work, comprised of participant-observation and interviews. Following informal workplace political debates and contested media spheres, including uses of humor and playfulness, the paper outlines some distinct forms of critical practice that Palestinians have developed amidst heavily policed commercial contact with Israelis. It then considers these contact practices in light of what seem to be quite different strategies: growing boycotts of Israeli commerce by organized Palestinian movements, from local urban activists to allies abroad. While many have focused on the international registers of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, I explore both the gaps and resonances between these everyday and more organized engagements at multiple scales. In the process, the paper puts historical theories of large-scale settler colonial processes into conversation with a detailed ethnography of political contestation through commercial spheres.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
None
Sub Area
Colonialism