Abstract
Examining Israel’s planning policy within the framework of its military rule-of-law approach, the paper emphasizes the ongoing legacy of international law’s violence in colonial settings. Combining field work with the study of original planning documents alongside the analysis of the law, I develop an analytical framework regarding the use of urban planning in the service of settler-colonial territorial expansion and native removal. Focusing on Hizma, a Palestinian village in the Jerusalem Governate arbitrarily separated from it by Israeli military and civilian infrastructure, I show how the Oslo Interim Agreement (“Oslo II”), established in 1995, designated ninety percent of Hizma as Area C (namely, under full Israeli civil and military authority). I go on to show how Israel uses Hizma’s lands, located in Area C to expand the existing settlements as well as a network of roads to justify further territorial dispossession and Palestinian displacement. In its expansionary efforts, Israel has securitized the Palestinian residents of Hizma and subjected them to various modes of surveillance, policing, and movement restrictions. The paper’s focus on security tactics of enclosure, surveillance, arrest, and racial profiling used to incapacitate Palestinian resistance to their dispossession and removal, highlights how the law helps to produce and shape racialized subjects.
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