H a g a r K o t e f a n d M e r a v A m i r (En)Gendering Checkpoints: Checkpoint Watch and the Repercussions of Intervention T his article is the outcome of three years of experience, between the two of us, of weekly shifts, standing with Checkpoint Watch (CPW) at the checkpoints that are spread throughout the Palestinian Occupied Territories. It is the product of these three years of observations, dilemmas, internal conflicts, and contradictory impulses. All of the critiques that this article suggests are thus ones that we as members of CPW often struggled with ourselves. They are by no means an attempt to undermine CPW and the important work it does. To the contrary, we both think CPW is one of the most significant and effective organizations operating today against the Israeli occupation. This article is dedicated to this organization and, in particular, to the remarkable and rare women with whom we have the privilege to stand, week after week, protesting against the occupation.

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Drawing on feminist and queer critiques that see violence as constitutive of identities, this essay points to subject-positions whose construction is necessarily conditioned by exercising violence. Focusing on settler colonialism, I reverse the optics of the first set of critiques: rather than seeing the self as taking form through the injuries she suffers, I try to understand selves that are structurally constituted by causing injury to others. This analysis refuses the assumption that violence is in conflict with (liberal) identity, and that, therefore, the endurance of violence of liberal states/societies is dependent upon mechanisms of active blindness (or denial, deferral, and other forms of dissociation). I argue that this assumption, which is shared by many critiques of violence, fails to perceive that people can desire the violent arrangements supporting their communities. They therefore fail to address political settings wherein violence is an affirmative element of political identities.

On 26 December 2003 an Israeli activist was shot by the Israeli Army while he was participating in a demonstration organized by Anarchists Against the Wall (AAtW) in the West Bank. This was the first time Israeli Soldiers have deliberately shot live bullets at a Jewish-Israeli activist. This paper is an attempt to understand the set of conditions, the enveloping frameworks, and the new discourses that have made this event, and similar shootings that soon followed, possible. Situating the actions of AAtW within a much wider context of securitization-of identities, movements, and bodies-we examine strategies of resistance which are deployed in highly securitized public spaces. We claim that an unexpected matrix of identity in which abnormality is configured as security threat render the bodies of activists especially precarious. The paper thus provides an account of the new rationales of security technologies and tactics which increasingly govern public spaces.