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Access Denied: Temporal Mobility and Circulation at the Ibrahimi Mosque
Abstract
The contested city of Hebron, or Al Khalil, in the Palestinian West Bank is well known for the spatial disintegration it has endured under the Israeli Occupation. The division of the city into Palestinian and Israeli “zones,” and the accompanying Israeli military force that oversees and upholds this artificial territorial arrangement, renders Hebron a critical fieldsite for the study of mobility and spatial politics, even as it generates extreme life challenges for its residents. This paper takes the Ibrahimi Mosque at the heart of the Old City as a microcosm of the spatial, material, and phenomenological quandaries that residents face and analyzes the mosque as a site of two intersecting regimes of mobility. Access to the mosque (both on the approach and inside) is governed by a spatial regime comprised of choke points, checkpoints, walls, tunnels, passageways, and flows. Yet access and use is likewise managed via a temporal regime, perhaps less familiar, but no less impactful. This regime governs and structures mobility in accordance with epochal, seasonal, and daily rhythms as well as temporal dynamics such as synchronicity, sequence, and duration. In this formulation, time itself, alongside more visible and tangible artifacts, becomes a force that underlies mobility and generates particular political orders. Hebron is reconfigured as a space bounded not purely by physical materialities, but rather by a series of relations that include temporal divisions, use-patterns, and alternating sovereignties. This paper is based on fieldwork and interviews conducted in 2015, 2016, and 2018.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
None