Ethnic cleansing and the formation of settler colonial geographies

Abstract

The Daily Show was well-known for its left leaning political satire. Although the program focused on the United States, from time to time Stewart broadened the coverage and examined political events in other countries. Over the years, the policies adopted by the Israeli government had been among his satirical targets. A section dealing with Israel's 2014 military campaign in Gaza caught our eyes, since in the map suspended behind Stewart Israel's borders were not drawn according to the internationally recognized 1949 armistice agreements (Figure 1). The map is accurate in the sense that Israel's borders do not encompass the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip, but its depiction of the Golan Heights as an integral part of Israel is flawed. The fact that Stewart's team chose this map is, however, hardly coincidental, since many existing maps have erased the line separating the Golan from Israel. Figure 1 about here Reflecting on the difference between the West Bank and the Golan Heights, two areas that Israel occupied in the June 1967 War, Meir Shalev, one of Israel's most popular authors, remarked that 'The holy sites of the West Bank represent today the pinnacles of lunacy, evilness and stupidity… The Golan, on the other hand, is the only normal territory we have left. It has no holy tombs, sites of religious frenzy or a large downtrodden and rebellious population' (Shalev 1994, emphasis added). Normal for

Political geographical perspectives on settler colonialism

“…These discussions have begun to interrogate how Foucault's conception of biopolitics is responsible for “whitewashing” the coloniality and raciality of modern violence and power (Howell & Richter‐Montpetit, ). Geographical work on biopolitics remains focused on overt physical forms of violence, confinement, bordering and erasure (Plonski, ; Schofield, ; Smith & Isleem, ) as well as the political technologies they rely on like security and surveillance practices (Bastos, ; Machold, ; Shalhoub‐Kevorkian, ; Zureik, Lyon, & Abu‐Laban, ), risk and supply chain management (Pasternak & Dafnos, ) and juridical innovations (Gordon & Ram, ; Hunt, ; Pasternak, , ; Tawil‐Souri, ). Here studies focus centrally on theorizing the connections between race, white supremacy, and settler colonialism (Bonds & Inwood, ; Clarno, ; Eastwood, ; Inwood & Bonds, ; Mott, , ; Tatour, ).…”

The politics of karameh: Palestinian burial rites under the gun

“…There are a few fundamental norms established within settler colonial theory; principally, that the settler colonial state’s “dominant feature is not exploitation but replacement” (Wolfe, 1999: 164) predicated on the “elimination of the native” (Wolfe, 2006). How settler colonialism manifests is contested among scholars, with some positing that divergent circumstances of foundational violence shape the settler state’s manifestations of power (Elkins and Pedersen, 2005), and others locating continued native presence as the key driver in the formation of the settler colonial structure (Gordon and Ram, 2016). Despite this, there is a consensus that the settler colonial state is structured around the exclusion of the native population – often by genocidal means – which Wolfe terms the “logic of elimination” (2006: 387), in which any traces of the native population must be destroyed and replaced.…”

Experiences of Urban Militarism: Spatial Stigma, Ruins and Everyday Life

“…Wacquant's sociology of urban marginality draws on case studies from the global North and is mostly interested in neoliberal securitization rather than colonial sociospatial formations. Yet, once it is put alongside recent works that examine the settler‐colonial dimension of Israeli‐Palestinian societies and geographies (Rouhana and Sabbagh‐Khouri, ; Gordon and Ram, ), the sociology of urban marginality can effectively travel to urban Israel, helping understand the everyday dilemmas that Palestinians living there face as they grapple with criminalization, punitive control and containment through ‘ethnocratic’ planning. More generally, it can help address how the spatial distribution of security practices (for example, the interplay of military and humanitarian urbanism in West Bank refugee camps versus the policing and planning patterns in Lydda) might impact the spatial meanings that circulate among differently situated Palestinians.…”