Abstract
Speaking of effects of the security barrier on both Israelis and Palestinians, a Cornell scholar of the subject once said, “Sometimes it’s like a gestalt switch: You understand … why each does what they do.” 1 Started in 2002, the ‘separation barrier’ has emerged as a highly polarizing symbol of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Like all contentious issues linked to the conflict, the terms used to refer to the barrier are politically charged: on the Israeli side, it is usually referred to as the security or anti-terrorist fence while the Palestinians have been calling it Apartheid or colonization wall.
The wall has given birth to a wide range of scholarship, and this edited volume by Stéphanie Latte Abdallah and Cédric Parizot claims to provide a new dimension 2 by distancing itself from the conflict and its overt effects per se by providing a more nuanced, in-depth approach toward the two affected societies. Israelis and Palestinians in the Shadows of the Wall begins from the point of view of social settings, and juxtaposes the perspectives against institutional ones to offer an alternative view on the functioning of the “occupation.” It analyzes Israel’s control over Palestinian territories beyond the conflict paradigm and looks at its productive capacity.
The book is divided into four parts dealing with the geographies, economy, marginalization, and political aspects of the Israeli control and the process of separation. The first part deals with the constant transformations brought about in the geographical milieu of the Palestinians by devices which control mobility and impose confinements, such as the security checkpoints (Outsourcing the Checkpoints) and the prison system (Denial of Borders). Progressively dominant neoliberal thinking is traced as the new driving force behind the functioning of such confining infrastructure. In the first chapter, Shira Havkin contends that privatization of the security checkpoints highlights the changing modalities of the Israeli control over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, combining its “rationalities with the dynamics of neoliberal globalization” (p. 37). In her chapter on the prison system, Latte Abdallah challenges the dominant understanding regarding the effects of the prisons, namely, the consciousness of the new Palestinian generation is being modeled by the prison system “according to Israeli national interests” (p. 55).
Other chapters in this section deal with the juridical dimension of Israel’s control. Emilio Dabed (Constitutionalism in Colonial Context) argues that in the absence of sovereignty, Palestinian constitution drafting has been severely affected by the asymmetrical power equation between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel. The fourth chapter (Geographies of Occupation) challenges the conventional narratives of this conflict and argues that these present a myopic and misconstrued perception of space used by the Palestinians under Israeli occupation.
The economic aspects of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict have been analyzed in part two. Chapters on legal freight traffic and illegal trafficking between Israel and the West Bank as well as Gaza’s tunnel economy along the border with Egypt highlight the complexities of power relations along Israeli–Palestinian “borders” and challenge the notions of a modern nation state. For example, Basel Natsheh and Cédric Parizot (Separation and Goods Trafficking between Israel and the West Bank) argue that the PA’s policy of controlling flow of goods and people remains deterritorialized due to its inability to project control over its territory, while Israel maintains firm control. This imbalance shows that “Israeli policy has produced a territorial regime that cannot be understood using the categories of analysis proper to the political imagination of the modern State” (p. 126).
Decentralizing the focus and looking at the margins of the Palestinian and Israeli society, part three analyzes how the separation has been experienced by groups such as the Israeli Palestinians (Identity, Solidarity, and Socioeconomic Networks across the Separation Lines) and LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer) activists on both sides (From a “Gay Paradise” to a Pioneer Frontier). Among the marginalized groups, Valérie Pouzol argues, the LGTBQ activists on the Palestinian side are among the most influential popular resistance movements and are drawing new political boundaries where marginal sexualities are no longer associated with political deviance.
The last part of the book continues the assessment of changes in and effects of “border”–crossings taking place within specific political groups or actions. Marc Hecker (Activists without Borders?) looks at the organized “pro-Palestinian” and “pro-Israeli” tours from France, while Esmail Nashif (Some Observations on Martyrdom Operations in Palestine) attempts to explain the actions of Palestinian suicide bombers as a “strategy … of [re]producing a [de]colonized social order in Palestine” (p. 244). While being radically different from one another, the crossings dealt in this part of the book nonetheless contribute toward generating alternative understandings of and means of dealing with the Israeli–Palestinian spaces.
For scholars interested in the alternative voices of separation, especially that of marginalized sections of Israeli and Palestinian societies, this book is a timely resource. Going beyond the much-analyzed, much-dissected political and security representations and manifestations of the Israeli–Palestinian divide, both physical and virtual, this book makes the unique and interesting assertion that the West Bank Wall has actually increased the “interconnectedness of Israeli and Palestinian lives and their spaces” (p. i). The book makes a significant contribution toward understanding how mundane actors adapt and reappropriate Israeli control over production and in turn force the controlling mechanism to change. It is a welcome and nuanced addition to scholarship on the sociology and political economy of “the wall” and would be highly beneficial to students of the subject.
Footnotes
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2.
Originally published in French, this book focused on the limitations in, and enrichment of, existing research point in French scholarship. However, it does provide value in its translated version as well.