In November 2017, a social media company for athletes named Strava published their Global Heatmap. Strava collects data from the activity routes of individual users and generalizes them as the number of instances increase. At the time, 27 million users registered 13 trillion GPS points from users who opted to share their runs, bike rides, hikes, and swims with others in the global exercise community. What a consumer of Strava’s Heatmap data notices is that lots of people use their GPS watches and workout in rich, typically western economies and locations. Such locations are lit up like a lightbulb. In underdeveloped economies of the Global South, there is mostly darkness outside of major cities, which are dimmer or less active than Western cities. The narrative that unfolds is “Westerners” run and move and “non-Westerners” do not. Yet, Strava’s big data renders some running communities invisible with darkness. When examining the data provided by Strava for Palestine/Israel, the same broad pattern emerges: Israeli cities are bright and their inhabitants are active while the West Bank is dim and inactive. Gaza exists in abject Strava darkness, suggesting that no one is running, hiking, or tracking steps there. This paper’s purpose is to challenge the narrative of this big data because it fails to accurately represent foot exercise in the West Bank and Gaza. To counter the narrative Strava produces, which was dependent on expensive GPS devices as well as people willingness to share on social media, I rely on interviews with Palestinian runners and their Right to Movement grassroots running communities. I support this methodological tool with original and unpublished results from a survey with over 80 responses from Palestinian runners. My argument shows that socio-economic reasons mean few people have GPS watches and Palestinians approach running differently compared to the perceptions of runners based in the Global North. These factors are simply not captured by Strava’s big data. Therefore, this paper questions Palestine’s darkness and critiques the conclusions propagated by Strava’s Heatmap. By engaging the theoretical literature on mass data as well as mobility justice, this paper provides novel insights from a political economy standpoint about an under-researched running community in the Middle East while additionally sharing the findings of an original survey.

2017 witnessed one of the longest Palestinian prisoners' hunger strikes since the inception of the prisoners' movement in the early days of the Israeli occupation. The forty day long "freedom and dignity strike" and the significant manifestations of support and solidarity that accompanied it brought the prisoners' issue back to the forefront of the public agenda in the OPT and re-opened the discussion over the prospects of a mass-based popular resistance against the Israeli occupation. Indeed, in view of the steady decline of the prisoners' movement, the predicament of the "Intifada of individuals", and the countless failed reconciliation attempts between Fatah and Hamas, the persistence of a collective, jointly orchestrated prisoners' strike instilled high hopes. These found ample expression in addresses and commentaries by Palestinian public figures, officials and community leaders alike, which highlighted the image of the prisoners' movement as a vanguard of the national movement. Accordingly, as the strike unfolded, it was frequently portrayed as an opportunity for the return of the prisoners' movement to a pivotal standing, and thereby for the revival and reorientation of the Palestinian resistance as a whole. Yet, once the strike ended, the popular upheaval it aroused was quick to dissolve. Based on findings from a socio-historical research on the Palestinian prisoners' movement and its impact on the public agenda in the OPT, my paper examines the role of the prisoners' movement as vanguard. Testimonies of former prisoners' leaders reveal that during the 1980s, the political factions in prison accorded crucial importance to the political and ideological instruction of prospective cadres, so that upon their release they would assume central organizational positions on the level of the community, the union, the district, and the region. These efforts proved especially fruitful in the wake of the prisoners' exchange of May 1985, when hundreds of well-trained, newly released prisoners engaged in the creation and expansion of a network of popular committees and organizations throughout the OPT; these would subsequently become the backbone of the first Intifada. In light of this record, I maintain that the role of vanguard was predicated upon the capacity to utilize organizational skills and political education that were developed by the movement inside prison for the expansion of the resistance to the occupation outside it. I then turn to analyze the present fragmentation of the prisoners' movement, explaining why it cannot resume the role of vanguard today.

Cartography has long been framed as a central technology of Israeli state formation as well as a key medium employed to represent Palestinian dispossession. Rarely discussed, however, is how global digital platforms like Google Maps are transforming the terms through which Israel’s occupation is portrayed. This article examines how the use of Google Street View in Hebron, Palestine contests a colonial partition of vision. Tracking one Palestinian user’s employment of the platform—uploading user generated street-view images of a city otherwise occluded from Google’s maps—I delineate how Wesam’s impulse to “show his city” rubs up against Google’s claims to provide a purportedly object and neutral depiction of the landscape. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Hebron and interviews with Wesam, I argue that, while what Wesam brings into view of the segregated city is severely curtailed by Israeli policies, his ability to make visible a reality of occupation on the ground forces us to reconsider the potentials of such extra-state digital platforms. Indeed, to move through Hebron with Wesam, users of Google Maps must pass through Israeli military checkpoints, Palestinian marketplaces covered with barbed wire to shield pedestrians from stones hurled by settlers, and backroads that circumnavigate partitioned roads. Building on Eyal Weizman’s articulation of Ground Truth, I ultimately argue Google Maps enables an alternative visual economy that brings the structuring effects of Israel’s occupation into relief.

This paper explores how temporality becomes a means of dispossession and a problem for collective land politics in the West Bank. It does so through the story of fraud, land sales, and speculation in Bidya, a town located southwest of Nablus. As Israeli residential settlement expanded in the West Bank in the 1980s, land in places like Bidya—located along the the trans-Samaria highway near to the Green Line—was sought after by Israeli companies seeking to expand settlement through real estate development and profit. Through archival research, court case analysis, and interviews, I trace how Palestinians responded to early attempts to acquire land through the market, the collapse of this strategy in the late 1980s, and its revival in recent years. In the 1980s, settler capital sought to combine real estate development with colonization, providing investment opportunities and housing options for Israelis being priced out of urban spaces. Drawing heavily on fraudulent documents provided by land brokers, these companies sought to move as quickly as possible to maximize profits. However, the need to provide buyers with secure title forced them to formalize their acquisitions through a legal process that provided Palestinians a chance to object. As a result, an anti-market land defense arose that sought not only to prevent the transfer of title, but also to rebuild social relations damaged by the distrust and suspicion fraud left in its wake. The settler market collapsed at the end of the 1980s, but this was not the end of private settlement. Today, land purchases are happening again in Bidya—often on the basis of forged claims from the 1980s—reviving old fears and demanding new collective responses. While Mandate land sales have been studied extensively, there is almost no scholarly work on land sales in the West Bank after 1967. This paper brings Palestine into dialogue with other settler colonial land market histories to explore how different temporalities of dispossession—produced by cycles of capital accumulation, needs of investors, revelations of fraud, and years- and decades-long court cases—shape Palestinian land politics. Foregrounding temporality (rather than space), allows us to see how land sales require a constant, drawn out set of practices to reproduce collective life against the tendency of settler markets to poison social relations and atomize individual property owners.