Space and Mobility in Palestine

Julie Peteet

Description

Professor Julie Peteet believes that the concept of mobility is key to understanding how place and space act as forms of power, identity, and meaning among Palestinians in Israel today. In Space and Mobility in Palestine, she investigates how Israeli policies of closure and separation influence Palestinian concerns about constructing identity, the ability to give meaning to place, and how Palestinians comprehend, experience, narrate, and respond to Israeli settler-colonialism. Peteet's work sheds new light on everyday life in the Occupied Territories and helps explain why regional peace may be difficult to achieve in the foreseeable future.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Space and Mobility in the Time of Closure
1. "Permission to Breathe": Closure and the Wall
2. Mobility: Legibility, Permits and Roads
3. Geography of Anticipation and Risk: Checkpoints, Filters and Funnels
4. Waiting and "Stealing Time": Closure's Temporality
5. Anti-Colonial Resistance in the Time of Closure
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Middle Eastern Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Anthropology
• Social
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 15 janvier 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253025111
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

SPACE AND MOBILITY IN PALESTINE
PUBLIC CULTURES OF THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA
Paul A. Silverstein, Susan Slyomovics, and Ted Swedenburg, editors
SPACE AND MOBILITY IN PALESTINE
Julie Peteet
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by Julie Peteet
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Peteet, Julie Marie, author.
Title: Space and mobility in Palestine / Julie Peteet.
Other titles: Public cultures of the Middle East and North Africa.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2017. | Series: Public cultures of the Middle East and North Africa | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016024513 (print) | LCCN 2016040105 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253024800 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253024930 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253025111 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Palestinian Arabs-Social conditions. | Israel-Boundaries. | Israeli West Bank Barrier. | Space-Social aspects.
Classification: LCC DS113.6 .P48 2017 (print) | LCC DS113.6 (ebook) | DDC 305.892/74-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016024513
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Space and Mobility in the Time of Closure
1 Permission to Breathe : Closure and the Wall
2 Mobility: Legibility, Permits, and Roads
3 Geography of Anticipation and Risk: Checkpoints, Filters, and Funnels
4 Waiting and Stealing Time : Closure s Temporality
5 Anti-Colonial Resistance in the Time of Closure
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
T HE IDEA AND PASSION for this book project was launched at a conference at Bir Zeit University in 2004. A special thanks to Sari Hanafi for organizing the conference and inviting me to participate. Lena Dallasheh is to be commended for her wonderfully informative and intense tours of the wall, which were, in significant part, the inspiration for this book.
This book could not have been written without interlocutors from many walks of life in Palestine. As always, they provide the bedrock upon which ethnographies are written. There are too many to name individually, and many prefer not to have their names made public. Warm welcomes and the willingness to share their stories have been consistent features of my experience as an anthropologist among the Palestinians. My heartfelt thanks to people in Bil in, Iskaka, Zawiya, and Jenin for their generous welcome and for the inspiration to bring this book to completion. The gracious hospitality I received from Palestinians in the West Bank is another chapter in many years of ethnographic work among Palestinian communities in Lebanon and the West Bank.
In Palestine, friends and colleagues provided support, friendship, insight, and much-needed background information. I was lucky to have the close friendship and never-flagging support of Wassim Abdullah and Um Ghassan, who always had an open door, a great meal, and wonderful stories. Sadly, she passed away before the publication of this book. Both SHAML directors, Sari Hanafi and Awad Mansour, welcomed me and provided an affiliation and office space. I am honored and thankful to have had input as well as inspiration from Sanabel Harwani, Caroline Abu-Saba, Awad Mansour, Fadwa al-Labidi, Maha Samman, Sonia Nimr, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Penny Johnson, Salim Tamari, Issam Nassar, Rema Hammami, and Lisa Taraki. Anne Meneley, Ted Swedenburg, Shira Robinson, and Chris Toesing provided companiomship during part of my fieldwork. As the director of Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) during my PARC fellowship, Hadeel al-Qazzaz was a valued colleague, and a fount of knowledge on Palestine. A special thanks is extended to Kathy Bergen, former American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) director of the Ramallah Friend s Meeting House, for her wonderful hospitality and for sharing her knowledge of the area. To Jean Zara, clerk of the Ramallah Friend s Meeting, and the staff at the Ramallah AFSC I extend my gratitude for their time and for helping me to understand what daily life is like under occupation. Sonia and Louay were invaluable friends and a source of many stories and much help in traveling in the West Bank.
Parts of this book have been presented at conferences in Beirut, Athens, Cyprus, Norway, New York, Cincinnati, and Palestine as well as at meetings of the American Anthropological Association and the American Ethnological Society. The feedback I received from participants at those meetings was invaluable in preparing the manuscript.
Over the past decade, funding for research has been generously provided by a research fellowship from PARC, a senior research fellowship from the American Center for Oriental Research in Jordan (ACOR), and by the University of Louisville. A Bunting fellowship at the School for Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe provided me with a wonderful opportunity, as well as a very peaceful and supportive site, to plow through pages of fieldnotes, dozens of recordings, and files of photos as I wrote a rough first draft of the manuscript, and to share ideas in an atmosphere of collegiality and intellectual exchange.
In Jordan, ACOR fellows Anne-Marie Pederson and Chris Tuttle and I became fast friends as well as colleagues, and they provided much-needed encouragement to carry on with this project. Over the years, Barbara Porter, director of ACOR has consistently offered a warm welcome and good company when I am in Jordan. ACOR head librarian Humi Ayubi was an invaluable source of references and assistance in locating sources. I have a profound appreciation of Nasreen al-Sheikh, for her friendship, hospitality in the best Arab tradition, and abiding interest in this project. Elena Corbett and Sally Bland provided intellectual friendship, moral support, and encouragement, and deep knowledge of the region and Palestine.
To Susan Slyomovics, Ted Swedenburg, and Paul Silverstein my most heartfelt gratitude for bringing this book to Indiana University Press. Without their unwavering support, this book would not have seen the light of day. IUP editor Dee Mortensen deserves the sincerest thanks for enthusiastically taking on this publication, as do Nancy Lightfoot, Paige Rasmussen, and Charlie Clark for taking this book through production. To Ginny Faber-thanks for your judicious editorial pen and attention to detail that made this a better and certainly more readable book.
My colleagues Shawn Parkhurst and Yvonne Jones were always ready to discuss areas of uncertainty and help me reach clarity. To Omar Attum, a biologist, goes a pointed thanks for alerting me to funnel-traps. A special thanks is extended to the students who have been research assistants over the past decade-Brett McGrath, Claire Gervasi, Anna Mallory, Amanda Yee, Irene Levy, and Anna Brashear-for all their help in assembling this book and their diligence in finding resources and tracking references. I can only hope they acquired new and useful skills in research and writing that will serve them well in their future careers.
SPACE AND MOBILITY IN PALESTINE
Introduction
Space and Mobility in the Time of Closure
P ERCHED ON A LARGE BOULDER , on the dry, hilly edge of the West Bank Palestinian village of Bil in, Ahmad and I are observing the weekly Friday protest unfolding in the surrounding olive groves. Prevented from entering Israel to work by its policy of closure, Ahmad has been working in his family s olive grove, and we are watching the olive trees being uprooted by weaponized bulldozers flanked by Israeli soldiers and police. They are carving out the route for Israel s separation wall and for the expansion of the colony on once well-cultivated, now confiscated, village lands, and Ahmad s family is one of those losing substantial tracts of land to this effort. We can see the occupation forces throwing tear-gas canisters at the unarmed villagers as they, and their Israeli and international supporters, protest peacefully. This sends the protestors running through the fields, and Ahmad turns to me and says glumly, This is the third stage in our dispossession. His words capture the spatiality, temporality, and topography of the nationalist settler-colonial project in Palestine, yet they are uttered amid a protest against this very progression of history, an attempt to disrupt the continuity of past, present, and future.
As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe (2006, 388) reminds us, Invasion is a structure not an event. Ahmad s life trajectory illustrates particular moments in a logical and sequential, rather than disconnected, set of displacing actions that have unfolded in the context of settler colonialism. Born under occupation, he has known no other way of life. Domination by and the expected show of deference to the Israeli settlers and military are routine, as is imprisonment for political activism. Ahmad was forme