Material Footprints: The Struggle for Borders by Bedouin‐Palestinians in Israel

Abstract

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.

The stateless (ad)vantage? Resistance, land and rootedness in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights

“…We argue that their intimate experience of the landscape informs and legitimises their political claims vis-à-vis the Israeli state and lends support to literatures that evidence the role of indigenous groups in unsettling, and therefore shaping, settler colonial geographies (e.g. Joronen, 2017;Plonski, 2018).…”

Beyond ‘causes of causes’: Health, stigma and the settler colonial urban territory in the Negev/Naqab

“…These were transferred from other parts of the Negev/Naqab into a restricted zone in its north. In the newly created land registration and planning system in Israel, these Bedouin localities were not taken into account (Plonski, 2018;Yiftachel, 2009). The property registration system according to which the Bedouin population operates was not recognised by Israeli law and hence the Bedouin localities ' .which bear the literal designation of nonrecognition, provide a near-transparent instance of the perilous effects of the state's refusal to recognise the legal and historically based rights of the Bedouin to their land' (Bhandar, 2018: 115).…”

“…5 Settler societies may be 'external' or 'internal'; the former relates to the organised movement of people across borders, often into other continents, as in the period of European colonialism. The latter refers to the planned ethnicisation of 'internal frontiers' in which the state manipulates the local geography to further the interests of a dominant group (Falah, 2003;Plonski, 2018;Yiftachel, 2006). Both processes produce uneven patterns of ethnic, race and class segregation, as exemplified in the case of the Negev/Naqab region in Israel.…”

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, ).…”

“…Smiles (, p. 141) similarly foregrounds “the stark totality of quotidian settler violence towards indigenous bodies,” yet emphasizes that this violence need not always be overt. De Leeuw () stresses that geography's prevailing focus in the study of colonialism on natural resources and territory problematically overlooks the ways in which settler colonial violence takes place through geographies of homes, families, and bodies, calling for greater attention to these intimate domestic spaces (also see Farrales, ; Holmes, Hunt, & Piedalue, ; Plonski, ). Griffiths and Repo () challenge a purely thanatopolitical framework for understanding settler colonial biopolitics, situating checkpoints in the West Bank as regulatory sites that (re)produce sexual divisions of labor.…”