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Borderland Infrastructures in the Greater Nazareth Area
Abstract
Since 2014, the Big Roundabout has served as the southern entrance to Nazareth—the largest Palestinian city in Israel—and the adjacent Jewish city of Nof HaGalil, which was founded on expropriated Palestinian land in 1957 in order to “Judaize” the Galilee. The Roundabout is the point of convergence for four major arteries: Tawfiq Zayyad Street, Highway 75, Highway 60, and Zionism Road, the last of which serves as the dividing line between Nazareth and Nof HaGalil. Along this cusp, traffic infrastructures are shared between and used by residents of both cities on a daily basis to travel to work, school, shopping malls, social events, places of worship, and on so. Yet, many Palestinians in the area say that far from facilitating efficient and fluid movement, these borderland infrastructures engineer intentionally uneven flows into and out of Jewish and Arab spaces. This paper, based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, examines the borderland traffic infrastructures on the Nazareth-Nof HaGalil cusp in order to sketch out, first, how the uneven urban development of Nazareth and Nof HaGalil has shaped how people experience (im)mobility and express their frustrations over waiting and congestion at these particular points of convergence. Drawing upon scholarship on mobilities and occupation infrastructures, I consider how the experiences of waiting and movement across thresholds of belonging generate shifting, contextual, and unstable citizen subjectivities. Second, I turn toward local discourses around connectivity, entry, and exit in relation to the old and new entrances to Nazareth, in order to complicate the relationship between the desire for and consequences of greater connectivity, mobility and infrastructural upgrade. Third, I consider the instability of the colonial frontier by examining the moments when the usually mundane boundary between Nazareth and Nof HaGalil is made visible and asserted through the presence of Israeli Border Police.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Urban Studies