Transactions, space and Otherness: borders and boundaries in Palestine–Israel

ABSTRACT

In the context of conflict narratives, boundaries, borders and borderlanders serve as facilitators or inhibitors of peace. In Palestine–Israel, demarcation is enacted through the separation wall, the Green Line and the smart fence along the Gaza Strip. To the established boundaries, informal demarcations are added, running through the land and communities physically, in the case of Firing Zone 918, and ideologically through Othering and transactions in the zones of transition. This article considers Othering and the negotiation of space in the context of (un)official boundaries in the West Bank and deconstructs the intersection of culture, politics and place, as well as the boundary practices enacted by the state, community and the individual. First, the article distinguishes between the types of borders and boundaries in the West Bank, before considering the manner in which Otherness is practiced in the context of movement and the separation wall, as residents negotiate the transition through and around the barrier. From Othering in the transition zone, the study questions how far the experiences of Palestinians and Israelis correlate with the broader border/boundary discourse, the extent to which negative reciprocity is practiced at the checkpoints, and whether subliminal boundaries and (re)naming influences stability in the region.

KEYWORDS:

• Borders
• Otherness
• conflict
• politics
• culture
• Palestine–Israel

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Ken Chan for his cartographical assistance and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Luisa Gandolfo is based in the Department of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen. She has written on the role of resistance in Palestinian art, the utilization of artistic practices in social change in North Africa and is the author of Palestinians in Jordan: the politics of identity (2012).

Notes

1. Thor Heyerdahl quotation on the façade of the Kon-Tiki Museet, Oslo, Norway.

2. Translated, “Fighters of the Ghetto”, it is also the name of the kibbutz, Lohamei HaGeta'ot, founded in 1949 in the western Galilee by surviving fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943).

3. This is translated as “Judea and Samaria”.

4. The villages include Jinba, Al-Mirkez, Al-Halaweh, Halat a-Dab’a, Al-Fakheit, A-Tabban, Al-Majaz, A-Sfai Megheir Al-Abeid, Al-Mufaqara, A-Tuba, and Sarura.

5. The self-boundary is defined as the exercise of “control at the expense of expressiveness”; cf. Rycroft (1983).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the Carnegie Trust [grant number SO053 RGB4577] for the Universities of Scotland and a EURIAS-NIAS Junior Fellowship from September 2014 to June 2015.