Pushing through the skin to break the bones: Israel's performance of extraterritorial expansion into West Bank, Palestine

ABSTRACT

This paper argues the built structure of Israeli military occupation in the West Bank is only part of the mechanism that serves to define territorial boundaries and restrict Palestinian movement. A more pervasive and debilitating process of boundary formation occurs through affect-laden performances that typically take place in border areas or sites of surveillance, where state actors and technologies police Palestinians. These performances serve to produce fear and shame: two affects that circulate and act as structuring agents preventing Palestinian movement and resistance. Thus, Israel extends its borders through socio-spatial-technical practices, deep into Palestinian spaces. The underlying evidence for this study originated out of critical performance ethnography and a drama workshop conducted with Palestinians, theorised in part through Sara Ahmed's notion of an ‘affective economy’ of emotions. Overall, this study re-orients the predominant view of occupied space in the West Bank as an oppressive architectural blockade, to that of an affective regime constituted by a set of relations that require repeatable performances to produce the effect of territory. This re-framing opens possibilities for re-thinking resistance to the occupation by suggesting Palestinians may disrupt or alter the circulation of affect in order to reclaim their space and curtail Israeli extraterritorial ambitions.

KEYWORDS:

• Palestinian
• embodied knowledge
• arts-based research
• Israeli occupation
• affect theory

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Al-Harah Theatre and the Palestinian workshop participants that contributed to this project, as well as the guest editors and anonymous reviewers for providing valuable critique of earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The names of all Palestinian interlocutors have been changed in order to protect their identity.

2 I was required to show a letter from my Rabbi stating that I am Jewish. Because my partner is not Jewish and we were not married at the time, he was told he would not be granted an extension, so I chose not to extend my visa either.

3 This is the term used by the United Nations since 1999. International Organization for Standardization. 10 Jan. 1999

4 UN Security Council Resolution 2334 calls Israeli settlement in the West Bank a ‘flagrant violation under international law’ (23 Dec. 2016: 2).

5 Settlers and settlements in annexed East Jerusalem are not included in these totals. The outposts are not government sanctioned, but settlers typically secure government assistance to build them (B’tselem 2011).

6 Institutional Review Board, Northwestern University, Approval No. STU00051633.

7 The original conceptualisation of the trajectory from mimesis, to poesis, to kinesis may be found in Conquergood 1998.

8 Beyond the tragedy of losing family members, Israelis typically imprison men who for the most part provide the family's primary income. Therefore, these disappearances threaten the entire family's survival.

9 For scholarship on this practice see (Giacaman and Johnson 2013; Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2009); For documentary testimonial see (Weir 2007); For human rights reportage see (Human Rights Watch 2019; International Solidarity Movement 2018).

10 I owe this insight to Allen Feldman's discussion of the performance of torture, within the context of Northern Ireland, and the way in which the state produces its power as a materiality on the surface of the prisoner's body (Feldman 1991: 115).

11 Dozens of Israeli soldiers alleged that Rabin ordered them to break the bones of Palestinians. However, Rabin denied that he gave such an order and the Israeli Parliament refused to investigate these allegations (NY Times 1990: A8).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Northwestern University under a Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts (CIRA) grant and a Crown Mideast Travel Grant from the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.

Notes on contributors

Hilary Cooperman

Hilary Cooperman is Assistant Professor in the department of theatre and dance at Rollins College in Florida. She earned her doctorate in performance studies from Northwestern University and her master's degree in Middle East Studies from Ben Gurion University in Israel. She is both a scholar and theatre artist. She teaches courses in peacebuilding through theatre and Middle East performance and culture. She is currently working on a monograph, entitled Beyond Words: The Performativity of Occupied Space that looks at Palestinians’ embodied knowledge regarding Israeli occupation.