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Defining “Palestine”: Borders, News Websites, and Categorizing the Domestic
Abstract
What does the word “Palestine” mean today as both a product of struggle and a term in state-centric geopolitics? How does the difference in its meaning shift according to contexts? Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank are geographically separated by the Green Line of 1949. This boundary has legitimized 1948 Israel as a democracy, thereby masking, for some, a violent settler colonial project, and it has also contained aspirations for Palestinian Authority statehood, a project once legitimized through the PA’s claims to democratic institutions such as a free press. This paper proposes looking at Palestinian expressive practices in the West Bank and in Israel with the approach of what Shu-Mei Shih (2013) calls comparison as relation, in which units are not held apart from each other as separate but rather analyzed in their distinctiveness through historical connection, in a manner that challenges colonial logics of fragmentation. Here the Green Line itself, as a border-like structure upheld by the coloniality of international law (Anghie 2006), shapes expression. Specifically, the paper examines how “local news” and “Palestine” are defined in Palestinian news websites in the West Bank and in Israel. Despite many Palestinians’ conceptions of a shared national identity, despite their geographic proximity, and despite all being under Israeli sovereignty, these news websites identify “local” and “Palestine” in ways that undermine these shared ideologies and circumstances. This is due to a number of factors. Central among these is the still dominant (among Palestinians) Palestinian state-making project and its related politics of international recognition, a politics that has an imperial register here as elsewhere (Kauanui 2018; Rutherford 2012). Second, news organizations that claim objectivity are pressed to use terminology in ways that mirror such dominant political projects. Third, the lived Palestinian experiences of fragmentation mean that Palestinians experience locality in the day-to-day as primarily existing on one side or another of the Green Line. In contrast, as I demonstrate ethnographically, outside of news discourses, Palesitnians may define “Palestine” somewhat differently, as a metaphorical site or prize of struggle. Methodologically, this paper argues for interrogating definitions of what counts as foreign, domestic, and local guided by a lens of colonialism studies. This paper also argues for an examination of how borders and geopolitical markers that appear like borders can restrict and shape expression, even in the digital age.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Colonialism