Knowledge production in, for and by a settler-colonial state hinges on both productive and repressive practices that work together to render its history and present, 'normal'. The settler state aims to maintain hegemony over its agents, subjects, supporters and challengers by controlling, how, where, to and through whom it tells its story. This makes the production and dissemination of knowledge production an important battleground for anti-colonial counter-hegemonic struggles. The State of Israel, in its ongoing search for patrons and partners in its colonising project in the Middle East, is especially focused on how to produce and appropriate 'knowledge', and the arenas in which it is developed and shared, to this purpose. In so doing, it works to reshape critique of its political, social and economic relationsin which the dispossession of the native is a ceaseless featureand redefine the moral parameters that inform its legitimacy and entrench its irrefutability. Inspired by existing literature on and examples of anti-colonial struggles and practices of decolonisation, this paper investigates and challenges the myriad modalities through which Israel produces and normalises the colonial narrative. By critiquing existing representations and framings of the Israeli stateand the spaces and structures in which these take holdour article contributes to the range of scholarship and communities of scholars working to radically recalibrate knowledge of 'Israel' and 'Palestine'. As part of this work, the article deliberately and purposefully centres indigenous anti-colonial frameworks that reconnect intellectual analysis of settler colonial relations, with political engagements in the practice/praxis of liberation and decolonisation. Keywords Israel Studies; Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies; hegemony and counter hegemony; critical pedagogy; anti-colonial/decolonising praxis passions it evokes often present obstacles to balanced analysis and evenhanded discussion. In the six decades since its founding, the State of Israel has spawned a vibrant culture and a multiethnic democracy. It has also faced ongoing challenges and has had to grapple with complex geopolitical issues. An appreciation of the complexities that are Israel requires knowledge, probing analysis and dialogue across different disciplines and viewpoints. Through a commitment to academic rigor and interdisciplinary approaches, the Nazarian Center fosters a broad understanding of Israel and its place in the region and the world." The Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, UCLA 'About US' 2 The two quotes above expose the multiple terrains upon which Israel is currently battling for legitimacy. In the first of these, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's Prime Minister, stands on the UN stage, selling the image of Israel as the stable bastion of 'civilisation' in the Middle East to a global audience; a part of the world that Western/US audiences have positioned as the 'heart of darkness' in their global imaginary. In the second, UCLA's Israel Studies ...

In the following article, borders become an epistemology for reading the social and political history of settler geographies, and their particular manifestation in the southern Naqab region of Israel. It takes as its starting point the idea that borders are activated in an assemblage of encounters; and that they act as markers, not only of the power of the settler state to rupture and control indigenous life and mobility, but of the multiple resistances that divert, disrupt and unsettle settler movements and spaces. Based on more than three years of fieldwork with the Unrecognised Bedouin‐Palestinian communities of the Naqab, the article investigates the significance of borders in spaces the state has conceived and structured as empty and dead. In exploring the multiple modes of resistance and resilience that constitute Bedouin struggles for recognition in Israel, it finds relevance in the lines they carve out, and the living spaces that persist and evolve in their shadows.

No abstract

This article wrestles with the question of ‘national’ borders in racial capitalism. We do so through an examination of border and capitalist corridors. We focus particularly on the Israeli border, branded and then sold to the rest of the world by the epistemic community of border-makers and interlocutors. In tracking the Israeli border and showing the implication of the experts and their markets, we ask how the border reflects and is refracted through a global order organized by the twin dictates of racism and capitalism. We are especially interested in how racialized processes of bordering, ostensibly governed by national exigencies, are transplanted on to other contexts. Two points emerge from this: in the first instance, we ask who and what enables this movement of the border. And in the second, we interrogate which logics and practices are transplanted with the border, as it is reproduced and seemingly fixed in a new place. We examine the violent ontologies that give shape and reputation to Israel's high-tech border industry, which has become a model for the ever-growing global homeland security industry. We ask: has Israel's border become an exportable commodity and who are the actors who have enabled this ‘achievement’? Related to this, what sort of occlusions and structural violence does the fetishization of the Israeli border rely on?

No abstract