Disrupting movements, synchronising schedules

Abstract

In East Jerusalem two seemingly antithetical temporal regimes are at work. On the one hand, access to the city is disrupted by time that expands and contracts arbitrarily. This impedes movement, makes even the immediate future difficult to predict, and disconnects many Palestinian residents, particularly those on the outskirts of the city beyond the Separation Wall, from Jerusalem in both the short and the long term. Read as a deliberate 'deregulation', temporality thus feeds into Israel's demographic aims of excluding Palestinians from the city. On the other hand, increased speed, timeliness and synchronisation are used to formalise and normalise Palestinian mobilities, as I show using the case of the Ramallah-Jerusalem Bus Company. This furthers the fiftyyear project of Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem by linking and incorporating Palestinian movements into the circulations of the Israeli city. The de/regulation of urban rhythms enabled by this infrastructure of control serves to advance Israeli policy aims in the city by modulating degrees of connection to the city. The article reads this dual regime as reflecting the ambivalent status of Jerusalem's Palestinian residents, who nonetheless seek to resist and mitigate the effects of both exclusionary and incorporative temporality.

Time as infrastructure

“…In highlighting two modalities of temporal control, Hanna Baumann's paper in this Feature examines the consequences of Jerusalem's mobility regime for Palestinian residents: on the one hand, it is argued that the Eastern Jerusalem checkpoint system interrupts mobility and increases both social distance and uncertainty in Palestinian everyday life at the same time as it is used to construct Palestinians as 'irrational subjects'. On the other hand, the paper shows how the synchronization of Palestinian and Israeli public transport incorporates the former system into the latter, thereby 'linking and incorporating Palestinian movements into the everyday rhythms of the Israeli city' (Baumann 2019). Although contradictory, both forms of temporal practices constitute forms of control that according to Baumann actively advance Israeli policy aims.…”

“…Considering time through this analytic promises to elucidate the ways in which political, social, and economic conditions shape and exert authority over the everyday urban, and the material and social effects of such dominations. The papers assembled here unite scholars from different disciplines, probing this infrastructural lens to understand the structuring effects of urban temporalities in relation to various topics, including urban mobility and transnational migration (Baumann 2019;Coman, Grubbauer, and Kö nig 2019), the politics of financializing urban infrastructure (Bond 2019; Grafe and Hilbrandt 2019), urban energy transitions (Elsner, Monstadt, and Raven 2019) and climate risk (Koslov 2019). In sum, these contributions advance three aims: to strengthen and enrich the analytical notion of infrastructure; to facilitate new knowledge about the construction of present, past and future temporalities; and to unveil potential starting points for social interventions that aim to develop alternative future conditions.…”

Present checkpoint futures: the relaunch of checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem in the occupied Palestinian territories

“…The intricate ways in which the Israeli military regime in the Palestinian Territories is normalized has been analysed thoroughly in academia. Examples are the in-depth analyses of the use of language and maps (Bier 2017;Bowman 2007;Jones, Leuenberger, and Wills 2016;Leuenberger 2016), pink washing (Hartal 2020;Puar 2007Puar , 2013Ritchie 2015), wine washing (Handel, Rand, and Allegra 2015;Monterescu and Handel 2019), the administrative and political performances that strengthen and legitimize the Israeli military rule (Joronen 2017;Yiftachel 1998), the role played by infrastructure and the selective increase of mobility (Baumann 2019;Pullan et al 2007;Salamanca 2015), the role played by thanatopower in the Israeli colonial occupation (Ghanim 2008), the material-architectural history of Palestinian refugee camps (Abourahme 2011(Abourahme , 2015Hanafi and Long 2010), the functioning and impact of checkpoints (Bishara 2015;Braverman 2011Braverman , 2012Grassiani 2015;Griffiths and Repo 2018;Hammami 2004Hammami , 2010Hammami , 2015Hammami , 2019Kaufman 2008;Keshet 2006;Kotef 2011;Kotef and Amir 2007;Mansbach 2009Mansbach , 2012Mansbach , 2016Parizot 2009;Peteet 2017;…”