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A Race Against the Wall: Origins and Development of the Palestine Marathon
Abstract
The academic research that focuses on Palestine typically looks at occupation, land, resources, institutional politics, NGOs, human rights, or conflict. This knowledge production often shows the effects of the occupation's movement restrictions on Palestinians and reveals their resilience in overcoming such restrictions. This paper explores innovative scholarly terrain to deepen our understanding of Palestinian defiance to mobility restrictions by analyzing resistance through the sport of long distance running. Outside of studies about soccer, the politics of sports in the Arab world remains underexplored. This paper engages with the academic literature on the politics of sports and attempts to fill the lacuna by considering the sport of distance running in Palestine. It details the establishment and growth of the Palestine Marathon, which has taken place annually in the West Bank since 2013. This marathon is all the more intriguing because it occurs in an environment of Israeli movement restrictions and enclosure. This research examines what political constellations allowed for the establishment of a marathon where "long distances" are marred by a broad range of movement restrictions. Specifically, the paper will explore the political and social conditions under which the Palestinian Marathon emerged, how it has changed over time, how it challenges movement restrictions, and if it produces enduring forms of political agency as well as transnational solidarities. To document the race's origins, I will detail and analyze documents gathered from field research trips to Palestine. I will also include data from interviews with founders of and participants in the Palestine Marathon to process trace its establishment and growth. The paper also considers the Palestine Marathon by comparing race data that looks at age, gender, and location distributions from the six individual marathons to see how race participation is changing over time. Finally, I provide a participant observer experience from the 2018 race to supplement the analysis of the primary documents as well as interview materials. The conclusions will produce some tentative findings that help us reconsider the role of sports in politics, the act of moving together over occupied land, political agency and solidarity, and how the marathon raises international awareness about suffocating barriers to ordinary movement.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries