As Israeli settler colonialism has deepened and spread across the West Bank, enclosure as a modality of Israeli rule seeks to deny Palestinians the right to self-determined mobility. This control extends to the physical movement of people but also the movement of ideas. As an anti-colonial response to this program of enclosure, Palestinians use public transportation to connect their fragmented communities and also to communicate the details of their struggle to the outside world. In this paper, I examine the role of the bus in three sensational acts of Palestinian resistance to Israeli settler colonialism: the Palestinian Freedom Rides of 2011, the torching of a new segregated bus line in 2013, and the annual, mobile Palestinian Freedom Bus workshop. Each of these actions was directed at both a domestic and an international audience to one extent or another. The selection of the bus as the vehicle, literally and symbolically, for these events was a matter of strategy in three ways. First, by choosing a mobile venue, each of the actions implied a demand for the right to self-directed mobility, rejecting enclosure as one of the central features of Israeli settler colonialism. Second, using the bus in these actions enabled Palestinian organizers to develop international solidarity by invoking analogies to other historical instances of racial segregation, now defeated in part due to international campaigns to provoke the disapproval of global civil society. Third, and most importantly, the bus as a universally recognized symbol of mass transit allowed the organizers to elicit an educated solidarity. They used the bus to teach their audiences about the conditions of Palestinian life in the West Bank with a particular focus on Israeli control over movement.

This paper explores the concept of indigeneity, its origins and mobilization for displacement as well as resistance. What role does the concept of indigeneity and its assignation play in the unmaking and remaking of place and peoples’ relation to it? How does indigeneity as a concept conform to the state’s parameters of belonging and imagined history and landscape? Does this concept have a role to play in discursive forms of resistance? This paper takes a two-fold approach to indigeneity and mobility: (im)mobility is at once part of a de-indigenziation of Palestinians and the indigenization of Israeli Jews. Initially, Palestinians were cast as mobile, that is as nomadic, to justify their lack of attachment to place and to enable their removal. On one hand, coerced mobility was thus initially cast as acceptable if not indeed normative for an imputed nomadic and/or migratory group. On the other hand, those to be newly indigenized enjoy unencumbered mobility that allowed them to claim the resources of those rendered (im)mobilized. I explore the discursive construction of the category of the indigenous, its relations to territory and the state, and tie together mobilities, territory, indigeneity, and resistance as a lens through which to grapple with the policy of closure and a state bent on territorial expansion, displacement, and replacement. In a critical vein, however, it must be asked: what are the implications of including Palestinians in the category of the indigenous? How flexible is the concept, what are its boundaries of belonging, and what are the promises and pitfalls of placing Palestinians in this category? Is its invocation a means of forging alliances with other groups? As Zionists claim indigeneity, and attempt to forge links with Native American groups, has the concept of indigeneity become a contested discursive and politically strategic device?

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.

Michel Foucault remarks in Discipline and Punish that the hallmark of modern power is the capacity to regiment and control the movement of human subjects within and across territorial space. The Gaza Strip is arguably one of the most extreme examples of Foucault’s insight about the interplay of modern power and mobility. In Gaza, an entire population lives under conditions not only of a military occupation but also a blockade imposed on it primarily by the state of Israel that constrains and even prohibits the movement of people and goods in and out of the territory. At the same time, one of the basic freedoms codified in the UN Declaration of Human Rights affirms the right of individuals to circulate unimpeded within countries and across borders of different nation-states, rights considered by geographer Tim Cresswell as fundamental to the human condition. This paper seeks to profile specific features of the enclosed landscape in the Gaza Strip while outlining the impacts of the system of enclosure on economic life and the collective psyche of Gaza residents. The data for this project derives from fieldwork – interviews along with photographic work and first-hand observation — undertaken in the Gaza Strip during the past ten years but especially since 2014 in conjunction with the Gaza Community Mental Health Program (GCMHP). This paper represents an effort to frame the foundations for a new book project on the enclosed landscape of Gaza that will continue themes from my recent book on this topic but will examine more systematically the stories of individual Gazans and their efforts to resist these conditions.