Ever since Patrick Wolfe published his 1999 book Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, scholars have been quoting his famous pronouncement that settler colonialism should be understood as an invasion, and such an “invasion is a structure, not an event.” Settler colonialism, according to Wolfe, is different from other forms of colonialism because the settlers come to stay and put in place a social, economic, and political structure based on “elimination of the native.” Perhaps because the prospect of decolonization has primarily been concerned with dismantling its structure, far less attention has been paid to the “when” of settler colonialism. Drawing on a multidisciplinary body of work including that of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Gary Fields, and Gil Anidjar, in addition to settler-colonial theorists Maxime Rodinson, Gershon Shafir, and Lorenzo Veracini, this paper considers the case of Israel/Palestine from a temporal lens. It asks how thinking through periodization, beginnings, repetition, and patterns can enrich our understanding of settler colonialism in general and Israel/Palestine in particular. Thinking through temporality raises questions about presumed causality, the kinds of “problems” that require our attention, and reveals continuities that might otherwise be obscured. This paper is based on over two decades of ethnographic fieldwork in Israel/Palestine and builds on my most recent book that argues for expanding some of Wolfe’s arguments, including his ideas about assimilation as a form of elimination. Here I expand on what we might think of as “invasion,” tracing its roots to early English enclosure and the invention of private property that coincided with a remarkable shift in Christian moral thinking. The continuity of that moral ideology, I will argue, is another way of thinking about the Christian nature of the self-proclaimed Jewish state. Shifting the focus to the temporality of the structure also allows for consideration of the scope of the structure(s) that require dismantling for decolonization to take place.

This article focuses on the implementation of an ecological rehabilitation project in the northeastern uplands of Turkey. In the last decade, the Çoruh River has been transformed into a series of reservoirs through the construction of ten large dams. While dams lead to drastic socio-natural transformations, the long-term maintenance of these big infrastructures depends on environmental conditions such as the amount of sediment that the rivers carry over long distances, which over time accumulates in the reservoir. Foresters have therefore been conducting a watershed rehabilitation project in Çoruh’s uplands to protect dams from the effects of soil erosion and sedimentation. The rehabilitation project casts uplands – seemingly far away places from the dam construction site – as places of ecological and infrastructural value, whose recovery is infrastructural to the maintenance of dams. The suggested ecological recovery in the uplands is, however, interwoven with longer histories of rural depopulation and land abandonment. In this context, quaking aspen trees start to proliferate on the formerly cultivated and grazed lands. For the foresters, such abandonment ecologies are glorified registers of nature’s recovery: the forest’s comeback to reclaim spaces once occupied by the villagers. Overgrown lands, simultaneously, index a history of neglect and desolation for upland inhabitants, engendering feelings of pity and dislike. Quaking aspens, saplings, and bushes that spread over formerly cultivated lands become markers of the gradual and silent dissolution of a lively landscape—a landscape which inhabitants once took care of and maintained by means of labor-intensive livelihood practices.

Research Question: This paper examines the icon of “Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls”, a modern Byzantine-style icon written atop the Palestinian face of the Israeli Separation Wall in Bethlehem. Engaging visually and aesthetically with the icon and the narratives that surround her perdurance, this paper queries how Palestinian Christians of Bethlehem believe “Our Lady” to be a “living icon” with a dynamic presence. It seeks to understand how, despite her unorthodox canvas and composition, she is theologically imagined as, and venerated for, sacralizing this borderland at the interstices of the Israeli colonial project. Thesis Statement: “Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls” is a “living icon”, actively present in time and space. The icon of “Our Lady” dynamically performs her signification as a holy figure within this highly contested and divided landscape. This is because the emplacement of this icon seeks to counter the unholy profane space of the Wall as an infrastructure of evil and reveal higher truths about redemption and salvation. Methodology: This paper is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork that comprised part of my doctoral research project on the subject of the contemporary crafting of traditional icons by local Palestinian Christian iconographers in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. This paper specifically is based on participant observation that first began in 2013, primarily amongst members and congregants of the nearby Emmanuel Monastery, who commissioned the writing of the icon of “Our Lady” in 2010. My visual tracing of the “life” of “Our Lady” extends until the present moment. Results & Significance: This paper takes seriously the intersections of theology and politics, as it analyzes the politics of aesthetics amongst a particularly understudied religious community of the Middle East. The icon has a long history in the Holy Land, but also in historic Palestine, as a local style of iconography production in Jerusalem emerged as the first, distinctively Palestinian pictorial tradition in the late 18th century (Boullata 2011). The icon in Palestine thus bears an affective potentiality rooted in its history, as this paper seeks to make explicit. This paper also contributes to a theorization of the borderland space of the Israeli Separation Wall as it considers how the life of “Our Lady” dynamically intersects with the infrastructural constraints of the Israeli Occupation. The icon of “Our Lady” wages symbolic violence, as its sacrality irrupts and interrupts the structural violence that the Separation Wall wages on Bethlehem’s community.

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.

Identifying, sharing, and preserving heritage are challenging tasks, as cultural and historic landscapes are often disputed. UNESCO's ongoing heroic attempts at creating a unified list of places 'worthy of conservation', overruling local, sometimes competing, narratives, are often contested, as trying to evaluate places and sites as 'heritage' brings up questions of both space and substance – which values? whose heritage? Exposing archives has long been discussed as an issue of post-colonial 'order of things' and extensive attempts are being made to expose hidden archival collections, sometimes termed 'contact zones' for disputed communities. The digitization of archival material, providing important documentation for identifying cultural heritage, is considered an important step towards making such material available, and allowing the production of different narratives. The task of digitization – which includes identification, digitization and most of all, cataloging the archive – is as much a matter of personal and cultural interpretation as it is of technical exposition. The process raises such critical questions as, which material is considered important enough to be digitally handled? Which platforms are most suitable for the creation, analysis and visualization of digital archives and collections, reaching out to as many communities as possible? Which sets of maps should be used for the geographical layout of narratives, and which historical frameworks should be used as reference? And finally, which terms and names are used for identifying people or places, or, to use more professional terms – which vocabularies and semantic data should be used for categorizing databases of various cultures, societies, and national imperatives? This paper is based on an extensive project of heritage documentation and digitization: 'Jerusalem Archives', a joint venture of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, and the Jerusalem municipality, which aims to locate, expose, and digitize official and personal documentation pertaining specifically to the city's modern building and planning. I will claim that the actual exposition of archives and their digitization contribute directly to the creation, recreation and the support of historic narratives and examine possibilities for making archival documents accessible, not only technically, but also essentially.