Freedom Is a Place: The Struggle for Sovereignty in Palestine

By Ron J. Smith

Freedom Is a Place gives readers a snapshot of everyday life in the 1967 oPt (occupied Palestinian territories). A project of subaltern geopolitics, it helps both new and seasoned scholars of the region better understand occupation: its purpose, varied manifestations, and on-the-ground functions. This personal study brings to light how large-scale geopolitics play havoc with the lives of ordinary people and how people resist and endure.

Using data collected over a decade of fieldwork, Ron J. Smith situates the everyday realities of the occupation within the larger project of Zionism. He explores the attempts to codify a temporary condition like occupation into permanency. Smith insists that occupation be understood as a changing process, not a singular event, and to explain its longevity, he argues that we must uncover the particular geographical and political dynamism at hand.

Through careful use of interviews and participant observation, Smith reveals how the varied practices of occupation transform daily life into a prison. He also helps bring to light everyday narratives illustrating how people mobilize claims to freedom and sovereignty to maintain life under occupation. Freedom Is a Place uncovers how lessons from Israel’s seventy-plus-years occupation are used by other states to oppress restive populations. At the same time, Smith identifies how these lessons also can be mobilized to create new spaces and strategies toward achieving liberation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9780820357584

Ron J. Smith

RON J. SMITH is an associate professor of international relations at Bucknell University.

Book preview

Freedom Is a Place

GEOGRAPHIES OF JUSTICE AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

SERIES EDITORS

Mathew Coleman, Ohio State University

Sapana Doshi, University of Arizona

FOUNDING EDITOR

Nik Heynen, University of Georgia

ADVISORY BOARD

Deborah Cowen, University of Toronto

Zeynep Gambetti, Boğaziçi University

Geoff Mann, Simon Fraser University

James McCarthy, Clark University

Beverley Mullings, Queen’s University

Harvey Neo, National University of Singapore

Geraldine Pratt, University of British Columbia

Ananya Roy, University of California, Los Angeles

Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, CUNY Graduate Center

Jamie Winders, Syracuse University

Melissa W. Wright, Pennsylvania State University

Brenda S. A. Yeoh, National University of Singapore

Freedom Is a Place

THE STRUGGLE FOR SOVEREIGNTY IN PALESTINE

RON J. SMITH

THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS

Athens

© 2020 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Smith, Ron J., author.

Title: Freedom is a place : the struggle for sovereignty in Palestine / Ron J. Smith.

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, 2020. | Series: Geographies of justice and social transformation | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019058781 (print) | LCCN 2019058782 (ebook) | ISBN 9780820357577 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780820357560 (paperback) | ISBN 9780820357584 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Israel–Arab War, 1967—Occupied territories. | Israel—Politics and government. | West Bank—Politics and government. | Gaza Strip—Politics and government. | Israel—Ethnic relations.

Classification: LCC DS127.6.O3 S65 2020 (print) | LCC DS127.6.O3 (ebook) | ddc 956.94/2053—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058781

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058782

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 Historical Geographies of Dispossession in Palestine

CHAPTER 2 Geographical Modes of Occupation

CHAPTER 3 Sovereignty and Safety

CHAPTER 4 Turning Back the Clock

CHAPTER 5 A Political Economy of Land and Labor in Palestine

CHAPTER 6 Freedom Has No Meaning Here

CONCLUSION Resistances, Concessions, and Solidarity

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Interviewees

Bibliography

Index

FIGURES

FIGURE 1.     Observation tower on the Apartheid Wall outside Aida Camp, Bethlehem

FIGURE 2.     Primary sites of study

FIGURE 3.     PASSIA map of the wall encircling Qalqiliyah

FIGURE 4.     Detail of map of West Bank, Nablus area

FIGURE 5.     Detail of map of West Bank, East Jerusalem area

FIGURE 6.     Sketch map illustrating Palestine

FIGURE 7.     Map of Oslo II area designations

FIGURE 8.     A billboard outside a settlement advertising real estate

FIGURE 9.     Azzun Atme checkpoint

FIGURE 10.   Huwwara checkpoint, separating Nablus from the southern cities of the West Bank

FIGURE 11.   West Bank settler road with fence, blocking Palestinian access

FIGURE 12.   Kasab, holding his travel permit

FIGURE 13.   Village of Azzun, Qalqiliyah district, West Bank

FIGURE 14.   Qalqiliyah as seen from the outside

FIGURE 15.   Image from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs

FIGURE 16.   Detail of West Bank closure map

FIGURE 17.   Historical map indicating progressive decrease in Qalqiliyah land area through Israeli expansion

FIGURE 18.   Google Earth satellite image of Qalqiliyah region

FIGURE 19.   Hammam in front of his home

FIGURE 20.   Shuttered shop in center of Azzun Atme village

FIGURE 21.   Sketch map made by village council member in Azzun Atme

FIGURE 22.   Sketch map created by Ras al-Tira resident

FIGURE 23.   Map of Old City of al-Khalil

FIGURE 24.   Cross section diagram of street in the Old City of al-Khalil

FIGURE 25.   Street-level view of Shuhada Street, looking up

FIGURE 26.   Shop owner in the Old City of al-Khalil

FIGURE 27.   Map of the Nablus area

FIGURE 28.   Convoy of Egyptian aid vehicles stopped at the Rafah Terminal

FIGURE 29.   Map of Israeli prisons from the Israeli Prison Service

FIGURE 30.   Map of water basins of the Mountain Aquifer under the West Bank

FIGURE 31.   Water well pumping station at Ras al-Tira

FIGURE 32.   View from Azzun Atme primary school

FIGURE 33a. Map of electricity provision and shortfalls

FIGURE 33b. Infographic depicting shortfall of electricity for distribution in the Gaza Strip

FIGURE 34.   Palestinian workers detained

FIGURE 35.   Satellite image of lands gone fallow since the establishment of no-go zones

FIGURE 36.   Automated gun tower on the northern border of Gaza

FIGURE 37.   Gazan farmer explains his lack of access to land

FIGURE 38.   Headquarters of PA fishing authority

FIGURE 39.   Azzam, a fisherman, at the Gaza City fish market

FIGURE 40.   Rubble gatherers in northern Gaza

FIGURE 41.   Gasoline smuggled through Gazan tunnels

FIGURE 42.   Tunnel worker sitting at entrance to Rafah smuggling tunnel

FIGURE 43.   Sunset in southern Rafah

FIGURE 44.   The Apartheid Wall in Qalqiliyah

FIGURE 45.   Mosque in Jaffa

FIGURE 46.   Nizar, head of the fishermen’s union

FIGURE 47.   Sketch maps—Balata RC

FIGURE 48.   Sketch maps—specificity and place

FIGURE 49.   Sketch map of Gaza fishing closures

FIGURE 50.   Rubble gatherers in northern Gaza

Freedom Is a Place

INTRODUCTION

I entered Palestine for the first time in the summer of 2006. I had finally received a meager legal settlement from my lawsuit against the Oakland, California, police department, and I used some of this modest sum to pay for my first trip to the West Bank, wherein I was a summer student at Bir Zeit University. One evening I sat on the curb at a junction outside the town, on the road between the university and the town proper. From here, if you followed the side road between the falafel shop and the gym, you would encounter a burned-out hulk of an Israeli Egged bus, and further still sat the concrete apartment building that was the temporary home to our small group of students.

The main road was the arterial connector for the whole of the Northern West Bank, but it was also the path that took our small group of summer students from our apartments to campus. It is hard to imagine this small street connected the cities of Jenin, Nablus, Tubas, Salfit, and Qalqiliyah and the rest to Ramallah, but in the evenings it was fairly calm and quiet, largely due to checkpoint closures and curfews throughout the West Bank. I sat next to a young Palestinian from Bir Zeit town who was recounting his story of detention and imprisonment at the hands of Israeli authorities. He was arrested in November, during the olive harvest.

November is a time when families return to their lands outside the towns to lay down tarps and slap tree branches with sticks to get the ripe olives to fall. The olives are then collected, some to be pickled, others to be ground to make oils and soaps. Bir Zeit, meaning Well of Oil, was named after the old dwellings’ wells that were filled with olive oil in the winter and used until the following harvest season.

The young man explained that the soldiers, riding in a caravan of armored jeeps, would enter the village during the harvest and impose random curfews. Anyone caught in the fields would have to stay until the soldiers left town, which could be some time. Townsfolk would have to spend the night in the fields or stay in their homes, neglecting the harvest. This young man had had enough and decided he would do his part to make these curfews more complicated for the Israeli soldiers to enforce. He lay in wait on the church grounds until the jeeps entered. When they did, he and two friends tossed Molotov cocktails at the jeeps, hoping for a Hollywood-style explosion. Instead, they hit the first jeep in the convoy, causing the soldiers to hop off and run toward the boys in the churchyard. My companion was immediately captured, taken to a military base, then restrained in a process of detention, imprisonment, and finally release.

I listened to his retelling of the experience, still fresh in his mind following his release just a week before. He asked me what I thought, and I said, in an ironic, parental tone, And what did you learn? He looked at me as though he expected the Western interloper to whitesplain why what he did was uncivilized or to justify the Israeli violence. Instead I proclaimed, The next time you throw a Molotov cocktail at a jeep, you run like a motherfucker!, laughing at the absurdity. He laughed too.

Our conversation was emblematic of my initial foray into Palestinian society as an outsider. I was determined to express my solidarity with Palestinians, to prove I was not simply a tourist or consumer of misery, to develop a rapport based on witness and action. I was there to begin a study, for certain, but I wanted that research to be important for Palestinians, something that I could share with them, and that would do more than simply advance my academic career. This approach jibes with the work of a few committed academics, specifically anthropologists working through participatory action research and, more recently, geographers performing subaltern geopolitics.

There are any number of books available on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. All of them represent a particular agenda, especially those that claim to provide a balanced approach to the conflict. The book in your hands makes no such claim, instead giving the reader a snapshot of everyday life in the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt), and then using those insights to develop a deeper understanding of what occupation is, what its purpose is, and how it works. I make no claim of objectivity but provide the reader with an honest recounting of my experiences with Palestinians who deigned to take the time to speak with me and, sometimes, host me in their homes.

It was during the Molotov cocktail conversation that my research goals started to become clear. I had come to Palestine in the first summer after beginning a doctorate program in history at the University of Washington. I knew that I wanted to study Palestine, reaching this conclusion after working as a shoe-string-budget independent journalist all over Latin America. I knew I wanted to learn Arabic, and I had planned to make my dissertation on the links between the modern Palestinian communist parties, like the PFLP, DFLP, and PPP, and the earlier collaborative Palestine Communist Party, made up of both Jews and Palestinians, prior to the establishment of the state of Israel. These groups were fascinating in part because they represented organizations that were explicitly inclusive of both Palestinians and immigrant Jews and were overtly opposed to the establishment of the state of Israel.

My partner in the conversation that evening helped me to dispel notions of my preconceived study and to begin to delve into what would eventually become my dissertation research—in an entirely new field. He asked, Why would you study communists in Palestine today? There are no unions, because there are no jobs. What is the use of communists today? If you want to know Palestine, study the prisons, that’s where we all end up. While his analysis of the role of communists within Palestine was somewhat simplified, he had a point. At the time, almost 50 percent of Palestinian men between the ages of seventeen and seventy had served time in Israeli prisons (Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics 2007). As I was having little luck finding communist organizers with the institutional memory and the will to talk with an outsider, I took his reproach seriously and started to focus on the incarceration of Palestinians as the subject of my research. This process is at the heart of subaltern geopolitics—that researchers take seriously the claims of participants, not only in answers to preconceived questions but in the design of the research project itself.

As I delved deeper into the questions of incarceration, I made contact with a number of Palestinian NGOs that dealt with issues of legal representation, human rights, and prisoners’ rights and was welcomed by Ad Dameer, an NGO focused largely on administrative detention and the rights of the prisoner. Most of the staff were practicing attorneys, attempting to represent clients trapped in the Kafkaesque farce of the Israeli military detention complex. The more I studied prisons and prisoners, the more it became clear that imprisonment and detention for Palestinians was a matter of degree, as those living in the West Bank could never be described as free. Once they entered the prison system, they were marked for life, with their actions circumscribed, like prisoners. I also found support from the Torture Rehabilitation Committee, which graciously connected me with the families of prisoners and victims of torture.

This study is based on a number of simple questions that go unanswered in conventional narratives of the occupation: How has the occupation lasted so long? What does occupation do to people’s lives? How do people cope with the vagaries of occupation? What is occupation? While these questions are indeed simple, they are immensely important, in terms of both making sense of the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and understanding how large-scale geopolitics plays havoc with ordinary people’s lives. While others have made clear connections between various forms of settler-colonialism, this book explores the impacts of the project of occupation, part of the larger mission of Zionism and dispossession, told by participants who have agreed to take part in this study.

This study is based on a number of assertions: That the maintenance of the Israeli occupation of Palestine is extraordinary in its longevity. That occupation is a process, not an event—constantly being developed and revised to further a project of dispossession. That this longevity is a direct result of the dynamic nature of the occupation process. That these dynamic processes vary greatly in scale: from policies that are handed down by military generals that affect all Palestinians to military orders that affect towns, neighborhoods, and even individual homes.

Occupation is a totalizing project. It affects all aspects of the lives of its subjects, from traveling to securing a meal, gaining an education, building a family. No part of Palestinians’ lives is untouched by the occupation, which also means resistance takes place in every aspect of their lives. The occupation functions through small-scale differentiation in its practice. One town is treated much differently from another. My experiences in a refugee camp in the Northern West Bank illustrate some of these idiosyncrasies.

Pedestrians and cars share the dusty, narrow streets of Balata Refugee Camp, the wind kicks up trash, and those traveling on foot are observed by the faces of martyrs photoshopped holding heavy weapons glaring from posters placed on walls, lampposts, and billboards. From time to time the shriek and whoosh of an F-16 can be heard above the din of vendors, groups of children, and cars. Graffiti on the walls commemorates various political parties, activists, and militia groups and the impending revolt against the occupation. Balata is clearly a home for the displaced, in stark contrast with the wider streets and historicism of Nablus, its host city. Nablus is replete with Roman aqueducts and an extraordinary old city, part of which is considered a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Balata has been home to some of the fiercest resistance to the Israeli occupation and their counterparts in the Palestinian Authority, with youth actively battling Israeli soldiers and inflicting casualties on raiding parties. The densely packed apartments in Balata and the sense of anticipation of freedom are central to understanding the continued resistance Palestinians wage against occupation. The lack of barrier walls and guards visible in the camp does not ameliorate the feeling that when you are in Balata, you are in a prison, with its inmates anticipating nothing more than their release.

What is striking, given the massive security apparatus constructed by the Israeli military to maintain control of Palestinians, is that entry and exit from Balata Camp are unencumbered by checkpoints or walls. This is in stark contrast to other Palestinian towns like Qalqiliyah, for example, surrounded by a nine-meter wall interspersed with forbidding gun towers, or the rural villages of the Jordan Valley, declared a closed military zone for Palestinians. It would be completely incorrect to claim that Balata is free of the violence of occupation; rather the form of occupation in Balata, as one of two refugee camps in the Nablus municipality, is distinct from other forms. This book examines these differences through the experiences of Palestinians and posits that the occupation is defined by these differences in service to the overall goal of dispossession.

How Does Theory Help?

This book is intended to be of interest to academics as well as individuals outside of academia. This is a complex undertaking because, on the one hand, it needs to demonstrate a type of rigor acceptable within the academic realm, connect with literature already written by academics, and move the academic understanding of the topic in a novel way. At the same time, it needs to explain the processes and events in a way that is approachable, not muddied by jargon, through detailing events, actions, and stories observed by the author.

Beginning students of geography, political science, international relations, anthropology, and related disciplines often struggle with the mere mention of the term theory. Theory is often written and discussed in the abstract, with no grounding in real, contemporary situations. While many would argue that theories are important in and of themselves, I believe that they become useful when applied.

In my research in Latin America and the Middle East as well as my observations of U.S. politics, I have found that if we pay close enough attention, patterns start to become clear in dramatically different places, separated by thousands of miles and tens of years. Theory helps observers to understand these patterns and make sense of new scenarios that seem completely alien at first glance. There is no universal theory: no theory explains all of human behavior or can predict events like revolutions and uprisings. Even so, theoretical approaches grounded in material observation can provide meaningful insight to political events.

In consideration of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, I have found a number of theoretical approaches useful in developing an analysis. I group these approaches into a small number of categories: feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and Marxist theory. I approach these theories as a geographer, understanding the relationship of the terrain to the theoretical assumptions.

Feminist theory provides an important basis for ethnographic study. It also helps to provide a way to deal with the incessant claims of bias made against ethnographic research. A feminist approach considers the notion that all research reflects the positions and biases of the researchers themselves: all research is then biased, and therefore it is the obligation of the researcher not to eliminate bias but to be forthright about the positionality of the researcher reflected in the research. Positionality is, simply put, the rank of the researcher within relevant matrices of power and privilege. Positionality is based on an intersectional reading of power and privilege within society (Crenshaw 1989; Davis 1981). Intersectionality refers to a notion that privilege is not a binary but rather acknowledges that power and privilege are expressed unevenly across individuals. It examines the importance of race, class, and gender, but also considers notions like geography, belonging, citizenship, and others (Valentine 2007; Hopkins 2019).

Intersectional approaches to understanding power and privilege are based on the knowledge that these uneven systemic biases are usually invisible to their beneficiaries. Members of an in-group assume that the way they are treated is normal within a society and therefore often have difficulty imagining that all members of a society don’t experience its benefits the same way (McIntosh 1988). An intersectional approach to society is fundamental to understanding power, in no cases more apparent than in politics and academia.

The reason that an intersectional approach to society is so important is that if we understand that all research is biased, then we know that research that claims to be objective usually supports the status quo. It appears that way because it matches the assumptions that readers have about a topic due to its repetition and reproduction of claims made by society at large. Objective research is comfortable for the consumer because it makes familiar claims. For example, studies of the Middle East that present data through a simplistic narrative of terrorism and counterterrorism, as in much of the literature in mainstream political science, is comfortable for the reader because it reproduces a familiar narrative. That narrative explains that the region is inherently unstable and full of violent actors, that constant interventions by the West are necessary to maintain structure, order, and stability. Many of these claims are reproducing arguments that are hundreds of years old, made to justify European and then North American imperial policy by claiming that Middle Eastern peoples suffer from inherent savagery (Said 1978, 1989; Sharp 2009).

The problem with these types of narratives is that they are fundamentally untrue and mischaracterize communities, individuals, and societies by repeating problematic stereotypes. They are often popular because they represent a global system that is blameless: no one is responsible for poverty and violence because these are simply the natural order of humanity. Beyond merely presenting inaccurate descriptions of societies, these narratives are dangerous. Stereotypes of non-Western cultures dehumanize entire populations, which then makes violence against these communities easier to justify. This dehumanization also has a multi-century history and has contributed to multiple genocides, from the elimination of as many as 98 percent of indigenous people in the Americas to the Armenian Genocide and the Nazi Holocaust. It is for this reason that in the late 1960s famed intellectual Noam Chomsky issued a call to arms for academics titled The Responsibility of Intellectuals (Chomsky 1967). Horrified by academics spreading untruths about the U.S. war in Vietnam, Chomsky explained that it was vital for intellectuals, due to the respect that is accorded to them, to criticize and reject the assumptions of the status quo of society’s elite.

Intersectional frameworks are not the only way to ensure critical research, but they help researchers to reveal their own biases and to open themselves up to critique based on their position. The purpose of intersectional research is not to convince readers of the point of view of the researcher, but rather to be transparent in informing readers of that point of view so that readers can make informed decisions about their consideration of the presented information.

An intersectional approach is particularly important when studying conflict, especially one as protracted and seemingly complex as the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Foreigners covering Palestine are often victims of the pitfalls of a Western education and the ongoing effects of the overwhelming media representations that make the victims the aggressors. Being honest and straightforward about my background as an author will not eliminate bias but will make clear the subjective nature of social science research and give the reader the opportunity to put the material in the context of the perceived agenda of the author.

As a Jewish American, raised in an Israeli Zionist family, I have been taught to consider Palestinians my enemies. The Palestinian/Israeli conflict is far from a distant concern to me: it has been internalized through my education, both formal and informal. I was raised in the United States, son of an Israeli immigrant mother and father from Alabama, in a household that regarded being Israeli as a fundamental part of our identities as American Jews and Israeli Americans. During my childhood, I visited family in Israel several times, including my aunt’s family, who live in the French Hill settlement in East Jerusalem. I had my bar mitzvah there with my cousin. When I was sixteen I went on a youth trip to Israel, designed to cement our identities as Zionist American Jews, but it had the opposite effect. The year was 1991, during the First Intifada, or uprising. The group leader had decided to take us to the Kibbutz, where we were to volunteer, via the Arava, a settler highway that spans the eastern side of the West Bank. This required that we pass through Jericho, a hot spot of Palestinian resistance during the First Intifada.

This trip left me with two impressions: this was my first encounter with refugee camps, which were spread throughout the West Bank and adorned with signs stating the name and their affiliation with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). This came as something of a shock to me, as in my family there was no discussion of the dispossession of Palestinians or even acknowledgment that French Hill was a settlement. The misery of these camps was visible even from a bus speeding along a bypass road on the way to Jericho. Second, as we passed a refugee camp outside of Jericho, our bus was pelted with rocks, which shattered several windows. I could clearly see the handful of young boys, none possibly older than thirteen, who threw the stones and targeted our bus as it was adorned only with Hebrew and English and was flying Israeli flags.

I immediately identified with the young boys, trapped in a dusty refugee camp in the searing heat of the Jordan Valley in summer. I also was well aware of the consequences they faced: this was during Yitzhak Rabin’s tenure as defense minister of Israel; he instated the broken bones policy, which mandated that any Palestinians caught throwing stones would have their arms broken (Atway 1991). The tour guide demanded that the bus stop at the Shin Bet police offices in Jericho, and four armored jeeps sped off in the direction of the camp about thirty minutes after our arrival.

I had begun that trip with the hope of connecting personally with the culture and politics of Israel and with my family. I had hopes of perhaps joining the Israeli military, becoming a part of the pioneering Zionist spirit. What I saw instead was heavily armed soldiers violently pacifying a nonviolent and largely unarmed society. This began my disillusion with the Zionist mythology so prevalent in American Jewish society. My father, a late convert to Judaism, celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1994, and that was my last trip to the Middle East until I began preliminary research on this project. This project was motivated by a desire, on my part, to engage directly with a society whose demonization was so fundamental to American Zionist politics. As a teenager, I was enraged at how I had been misled, by my family, by my schooling, by the news media. I thus began a project of seeking not simply peace but knowledge that could lead to justice, the precursor for any real lasting peace.

My participants have similarly complex identities as laborers, political actors, family members, participants in religious communities, and residents of particular sites. These intersections are vital in the formulation of their experiences and responses to life under occupation. In this work, I have attempted to engage with these intersectionalities to create a more complex vision of the population and life under occupation (Valentine 2007).

As a college student at Evergreen State College in Washington State in the 1990s, I set about with another student to make a short documentary on the Israel/Palestinian conflict. We conducted an interview with a professor who had spent some time in the 1967 oPt and wanted her insight as we grappled with the moral and ethical contradictions of our Jewish and Liberal identities. At the end of the interview, the professor said to us, I just wanted to let you know, that was an extremely Judeo-centric interview. The student and I were rather taken aback by this claim and were upset by its implications. While we saw ourselves as deeply progressive, even radical, among the American Jewish community, we were being called out for unexamined privilege. Looking back on this incident, I now understand the criticism as a gift: it forced me to reconsider my position and my privilege, and the ways in which I reproduced inequality even as I saw myself challenging power. Aside from my experiences witnessing the First Intifada firsthand as a teenager, that video project was one of my most formative experiences.

This study uses a grounded, qualitative research methodology. Much of the data here were collected through fifty-six semistructured interviews with participants in field sites across four regions of the West Bank: Nablus, Qalqiliyah in the North, Jerusalem, and Gaza—largely in the northern half of the strip. I conducted interviews with open-ended questions and received permission from my participants in the form of written consent forms.

Situated within postcolonial traditions, this is a project of subaltern geopolitics, a formulation of critical geopolitics that concerns itself with the impacts of geopolitics on everyday life. It derives from some of the considerations of subaltern studies, most notably of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. In Can the Subaltern Speak?, she is concerned with the representation and misrepresentation of what she calls the subaltern, people outside of the centers of power including academia, and specifically colonized peoples, represented in academic and media texts. Spivak details the ways in which Western authors developed apologias for colonialism through speaking for the other. British imperialists long represented local customs as evidence of the barbarity of colonized Hindu culture; imperialism was then justified through its practices of tutelage and civilization (Spivak 1988). Certainly, there are parallels between the Israeli narrative promoting occupation and the British imperial narrative.

This study is subject to the same concerns that Spivak raises regarding the misarticulation of subaltern positionings. As a strategy, subaltern geopolitics engages with questions of power and privilege, demanding transparency on the part of researchers as we attempt to incorporate the words of the excluded into our analyses of the impacts of geopolitical processes on individuals and communities. Rather than create a monolithic narrative of the Palestinian experience, this study is designed to incorporate the insight of affected individuals and communities into an analysis of geopolitics.

Subaltern geopolitics incorporates data not by showing the fractured bodies but by examining the quotidian, the mundane practices of dispossession. It does not do so out of an insensitivity to the extreme violence of dispossession but puts the bombings, the invasions, the assassinations into a larger context of daily violence, the violence of colonization (Fanon 1965). Subaltern geopolitics … needs to learn from postcolonialism, drawing on Spivak’s call for ‘learning from below’ (Kapoor 2008:56) (Sharp 2011b: 271).

In subaltern geopolitics, the intention is not to shy away from uneven relations between researcher and researched; rather it is driven by the notion that the effects of geopolitics can be understood only through the inclusion of the voice of the subaltern. This is a tricky proposition; authors run the risk of presenting themselves as either the voice of the subaltern or as transparent, detached mediators (Spivak 1988: 275–76). This study, like other subaltern geopolitical texts, attempts neither. This is a study made by a politically engaged researcher from the Global North, seeking to include the voice of the marginalized as a means of gauging the impacts of geopolitics on these specific subaltern communities. The purpose, then, is to develop a more complete, profound, and precise understanding of the displacement and dispossession effects of occupation on Palestinians.

Ironically, although the title of this book was originally From the River to the Sea, indicating a geography that includes all of historical Palestine, the data, experiences, and analysis here are derived almost entirely from my experience in the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territories, or oPt, territories that make up about 20 percent of historical Palestine. These territories are known as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and were conquered by Israel in 1967. They are considered the basis for the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state, a plan referred to as the Two-State Solution. Readers should be aware that the fact that my research focused on these two territories is not based in advocacy for a particular political solution, and, like many Palestinians, I reject the notion that the West Bank and Gaza are Palestine and the 1948 territories are Israel Proper. Instead, this book takes seriously the notion expressed by my participants that Palestine is a site of geographical aspiration and includes all territories that have been historically termed Palestine until a just and lasting agreement is achieved.

My theoretical framework in analyzing the Israeli occupation of Palestine also rests on some major ideas from classical Marxist theory. My intention here is to explain some of the relevance of Marxist theory to the Israeli occupation of Palestine by way of an extremely simplified introduction to some of Marx’s main points. I then consider other authors who write within the Marxist school to describe some of the complexities of political economy applied to the peculiar context of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Karl Marx is considered a cornerstone of what economists call heterodox economics and is central to analysis of the interrelationship of economics and politics, or political economy. Marx didn’t invent political economy; in fact his text Capital is subtitled A Critique of Political Economy, and he spends much time discrediting economists who promoted capitalism before him (Marx 1959a).

Marx was best known for his works critiquing Western European capitalism, Communist Manifesto and Capital. Although Marx focused primarily on inequality and exploitation of the masses in Capital, he was also concerned with the effects of Western capitalist development outside of Europe through the twin processes of imperialism and colonialism. In his analysis, capitalism is an economic system where value is determined by exchange: buying and selling of goods and services. These goods and services that can be traded are called commodities. Capitalists are individuals within capitalist societies who have collected significant wealth and are able to mobilize society through the production of commodities, thereby gaining more wealth and providing wages to workers throughout the process of creating commodities. While this arrangement works well for the owners, the relationship between owners of capitalist businesses and workers is called exploitation: the worker is in constant struggle not only with the owner of the business but with all other workers able to accomplish the same tasks on the job.

Capitalism, while hailed by Marx and others as an immensely powerful and effective means of organizing people, resources, and goods, suffers from a number of insurmountable contradictions. Because of the ways in which capitalist society is organized, owners and CEOs of corporations are caught in an unstoppable drive to collect more money, more commodities, and more power. The result of this drive is what Marx termed over-accumulation, where wealth continues to flow upward, causing stagnation of the economy as workers’ wages stall and collapse to a point where they are unable to drive the economy through their purchases.

As capitalism develops in a particular place, and this is why capitalism is of particular interest to geographers, it suffers from these contradictions, and the capitalist is left with no choice but to expand outside of the local site of initial development or risk collapse. Capitalists, and the societies in which they operate, are then compelled to expand their operations outside of the original factories and towns where