Moral othering at the checkpoint: The case of Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians

Abstract

In many ways the Palestinian civilian is the ultimate or significant ‘other' for the Israeli soldier serving in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). (S)he is the one who will be stopped, checked, controlled and at times arrested. (S)he is the one who negotiates, pleads, begs and sometimes curses the soldier. This other represents, amongst other things, disorder for the soldiers. (S)he becomes the ‘face’ of the hardship, the frustration, anger, doubt and boredom the soldiers associate with their work within a military occupation. To regain a sense of order, control and normalcy soldiers construct the military checkpoint as a ‘moral geography’ where the Palestinian is actively ‘othered’. In this paper I will explore how moral boundaries are drawn along these physical borders in a landscape of conflict, while not losing sight of the symbolic meaning of this border. I will do this by exploring the way Palestinians are made into a moral other by Israeli soldiers, in an effort to create a certain sense of order, at the checkpoint. I will first discuss the checkpoint as a site of ‘moral geography’ that enhances and legitimizes these processes of othering that I will explore next. Finally, I will discuss the way Palestinians are made into a moral other, while tracing this back to a moral discourse that is geared to establish a ‘normalized’ self.

Doing Research in Conflict Areas: Some Methodological Lessons From Palestine

“…Life in Palestine has been unpredictably and continuously refashioned since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that commenced in 1967 [Weizman, 2007;Azouly & Ophir, 2013;Grassiani, 2015]. It has been troubled with the spatial and administrative complexity, fragmentation, and control of the Palestinian territory, which reflects not only an ordered process, but increasingly, a structured chaos [Weizman, 2007;Abu-Zahra & Kay, 2013].…”

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;…”

Confessions and Tweets: Social Media and Everyday Experience in the Israel Defense Forces

“…Grassiani (2013) has noted how IDF combat soldiers in the West Bank seem to exhibit a “numbing” effect as they conduct their duties among Palestinian civilian populations at military checkpoints across the West Bank. At these checkpoints she argues, “the cold, the heat, the dust, the boredom and the hardship of the work” (Grassiani, 2015, p. 379) blur the regular soldier’s moral decision-making abilities. While this argument may be accurate, it lacks empirical context.…”

“…Much of this current scholarship asks how social media use in the IDF aids or hinders the official, strategic, political, or doctrinal contexts of military conflict. Yet, as anthropologists of the IDF’s policing actions in the West Bank have demonstrated (Ben Ari & Sion, 2005; Feige & Ben Ari, 1991; Grassiani, 2015), so much of the military’s activities in areas of conflict are grounded in the everyday experiences of soldiers on the ground. Scholars of armed forces and society have little empirical data regarding the unofficial (and often subversive) uses that IDF soldiers themselves make of social networking sites and the meanings they ascribe to them.…”