Geopolitics of Palestine

Palestine is a site of longstanding settler-colonial violence and conflict. Settler colonization by Israel began in 1948, and continues to this day. The types of violence enacted during this period have varied, from forms of disciplinary power and biopolitical control to periods of intensified military violence where Israeli sovereign power asserts itself (Gordon 2008).

Scholarship on territory and borders has traced the shifting production of different territories and boundaries that constitute Palestine and Israel (e.g., Falah 2003; Newman 2002). Some of this work has also produced a series of statements about state formation that seek to address politicians, negotiators, and diplomats, very much in the mold of classical geopolitics (Falah 1996). More recent work on territory has been attentive to the ways in which the everyday practices (particularly those of the Israeli occupation) have produced Palestinian territories. Such work includes studies of land seizure and displacement (e.g., Falah 2003), the destruction of Palestinian cities and built environment (e.g., Falah 1996; Graham 2004), the construction of Israeli settlement colonies in the occupied territories (e.g., Weizman 2007), and the role surveillance and mobility plays in striating these territories (e.g., Zureik 2001; Weizman 2007; Harker 2009). Similar studies have been conducted in Palestinian spaces beyond the occupied territories (e.g., Ramadan 2009). This work on territories and borders has helped to explain the ways in which Palestinian spaces (national, municipal) are produced, and the constitutive role played in these productions by different Israeli actors and, depending on the context, other Arab actors too.

Geopolitical work on Palestinian territories has also been instrumental in unpacking the contorted topologies of power/knowledge embodied in such spatial formations. This second thematic includes studies that have explored the discur­sive construction of both Palestine (e.g., Gregory 2004; Gordon 2008) and Palestinians (Ramadan 2009; Bhungalia 2010), and how these interconnected discursive constructions are entangled with a range of material practices that have devastating consequences for the spaces and bodies that they enroll and act upon (e.g., the destruction of Palestinian built environment). Such studies expand the category of “political” actors beyond statesman and militants to include architects, planners, and economists (Weizman 2007). Bhungalia (2010) also shows how the geopolitical scriptings employed by the Israeli military and politi­cians exclude Palestinian “terrorists” and “civilians” from the realm of politics (and political actors).

By recentering the analytic gaze from up on high to within embodied individuals, this group of studies has produced more variegated understandings of spatialized power in the occupied territories. However, politics and violence, whether military, bureaucratic, or state based, remain the common basis for geopolitical studies of Palestine. This is hardly surprising, given the intense vulnerabilities many Palestinians experience while living in (and moving between) the occupied terri­tories, the state of Israel and the manifold spaces of Palestinian exile. It would be negligent and naive to ignore such relations, and the analyses mentioned help to unpack such violence. However, an unintended consequence of this relatively consistent analytical focus is that Palestine becomes envisioned and “known” as a place of politics, conflict, and violence. While many individual studies do move beyond these foci, the reiteration of particular tropes at collective level creates a stereotype.

This is an epistemological critique, but it also has ontological implications. As critical geopolitics has clearly shown, particular representations of space actively participate in sociomaterial “fabrications” that have devastating consequences (Gregory 2004). In the context of Palestine, epistemologies of politics and violence participate in the re-creation of spaces where Palestinians often have little agency (Bhungalia 2010). Weizman’s (2007) study of Israel’s occupation provides the clearest example of this problem. While the Israeli occupation is the explicit focus of his work, the spaces in which Weizman’s analysis moves are nevertheless Palestinian (too). However, the occupied are a derivative, of both the occupation and of Weizman’s analysis. Put differently, in exploring how Israel creates a land hollowed out of its Palestinian inhabitants, Weizman does much the same thing himself. His analysis of the ontology of occupation bleeds into and comes to define an epistemology of Palestinian life.

Weizman’s work demonstrates how an ontological axiom of uneven power relations between Palestinians and their various “others” (Israeli, Lebanese, Jorda­nian, etc.), and the multiple vulnerabilities Palestinians experience as a consequence, is translated into an epistemological axiom that dictates Palestinians can only be apprehended through politics and violence (and frequently as largely passive victims to such processes). This tacit consensus, which subsists in geography because of the sheer number of geopolitical studies of Palestine, can unintentionally reinforce inequitable power relations at a discursive level and create one-dimensional repre­sentations of Palestine and Palestinians. This is problematic not only because it leads to the production of stereotypes (Palestinian children as victim of occupation, or on the other side of the same coin, as hero of resistance) but also because it obscures a whole series of other social performances and time-spaces.

This problem extends beyond the context of Palestine too. Despite the many intricate differences in various critical geopolitical approaches, their analyses of the geographical basis of politics across a series of spatial and temporal extents are largely characterized by a focus on violence. This often leads to accounts of death, destruction, and demise and sculpts representations of place that offer little sense of forms of endurance and lives lived beyond the purview of state violence. There is nothing wrong with this at the level of individual studies. It is important to under­stand how such violence happens. But collectively, as a body of knowledge, this is problematic. Through the repetition of tropes of violence and politics, geopolitical scholarship collectively produces - albeit unintentionally and unknowingly - ste­reotypical representations of place. These stereotypes cast certain places as violent (often feeding into orientalist discourses when those places are in Southern con­texts). Consequently, geopolitical studies are one of many forms of Western schol­arship in which “different places come to stand in, stereotypically, for certain kinds of events or processes” (Robinson 2003: 279).

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