This article delves into the everyday dynamics of colonial rule to outline a novel way of understanding colonized–colonizer interactions. It conceives colonial management as a social field in which both the colonized and colonizers negotiate and exchange resources, despite their decidedly unequal positions within a racial hierarchy. Drawing their example from the West Bank, the authors argue that a Palestinian economic elite has proactively participated in the co-production of the colonial management of spatial mobility, a central component of Israeli colonial rule. The study employs interviews and document analysis to investigate how the nexus between Palestine’s commercial-logistical needs and Israel’s security complex induced large-scale Palestinian producers to exert agency and reorder commercial mobility. The authors describe and explain the evolution of a ‘Door-to-Door’ logistical arrangement, in which large-scale Palestinian traders participate in extending Israeli’s system of spatial control in exchange for facilitating logistical mobility. This horizontal social encounter that entails pay-offs is conditioned, but not fully determined, by vertical relations of domination and subordination.

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The function of the West Bank–Israeli separation barrier, designed to segregate Palestinians away from Israeli territory, was subverted by the COVID-19 crisis. For the first time, the barrier locked West Bank Palestinians inside Israel. For a two-month period, construction workers from the West Bank were sequestered at work sites in Israel to reduce movement of people between the territories while also minimizing economic losses. This turn of events illustrates the ad hoc economic interests underlying Israeli security policy toward the West Bank.