‘We Refuse To Be Enemies’: Political Geographies of Violence and Resistance in Palestine

Abstract

The political and economic geography of occupied Palestinian territory presents significant constraints to the livelihoods of Palestinian families. And yet the story of many Palestinian families is one not of resignation but of steadfastness and resistance. This article explores this as an important example of civil resistance. It begins by building a theoretical case for giving greater attention to the constitutive role of marginalised people in the production of concepts and practices of civil resistance claiming that this helps us identify overlooked and seemingly everyday practices of colonised groups. Next it explores the case of one Palestinian family farm in the west Bethlehem village of Nahhalin as an example of alternative imagined geographies and communities that present a refusal to Israeli colonial occupation. It argues that this refusal is an expression of civil resistance that constitutes a counter-map that rejects Israel’s settler-colonial map of their farmland by refusing to leave, and that rejects the violence of the state and its claims to sovereignty by ‘refusing to be enemies’.

Keywords:

• Palestine
• political geography
• military occupation
• resistance
• settler colonialism
• transnational solidarity
• violence

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the editors of this special issue and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The research for this article was made possible by the financial support of Nonviolence International’s Randall Research Scholarship and the American University Provost’s Office Doctoral Student Research Award.

Notes

1 References to counter-mapping and worlding practices in this article are informed by Edward Said’s notion of contrapuntality and its aims to make visible the erasures and silences accompanying colonial histories. As Wainwright (2005) describes it, Said refused the claim that we could take hold of the world without reading contrapuntally, that is, ‘without applying a critical and syncopated scrutiny to the practices and texts that produce the world for us as something to behold. In this way, geography never entails merely describing the world: it is instead a political, hermeneutic practice of reading and writing worlds’ (1042).

2 The destabilising effects of postcolonial inquiry — such as Chakrabarty’s and Edward Said’s — underscores these ontological implications. Indeed, an important argument for Said in Orientalism (1978) was that categories such as the Orient or the West have no ontological stability but are the result of human efforts to read and write ‘worlds’.

3 Classic works in the field of political economy in Palestine include Sayigh (1979), Zureik (1983), Abed (1989), and Roy (1995). For more recent analyses see Farsakh (2016), Khalidi and Samour (2011), Turner and Shweiki (2014), Tabar and Salamanca (2015).

4 This ‘friends of’ model of transnational solidarity can be seen with other Palestinian and Israeli initiatives, expressing relationships of solidarity while attempting to signal the leadership of Palestinians by claiming a subsidiary position. Examples include Friends of the Sabeel Ecumenical Palestinian Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem and Friends of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, each with chapters in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia.