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Abstract:
This article was written during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in East Jerusalem between March and June 2020. It discusses how the Palestinians approached the pandemic within the context of occupation, and how they used their power to reproduce what Henri Lefebvre called heterotopic spaces. People articulated these spaces accumulatively as they sought meaning in their daily lives, while managing the pandemic and benefitting from their previous experiences during their struggle against Israeli occupation. Thus, the aim is to shed light on the evolving role of civil society to support local action in dealing with a pandemic and to understand COVID-19 from peoples’ perspective rather than from a top-bottom lens in occupied cities. The methodology is multilayered: We use theoretical concepts of heterotopic spaces and analyze them through the social/societal, the temporal/historical, and the spatial/geographical forms of knowledge borrowed from Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, and Edward Soja. It also builds on participant observation, official and media sources, and semi-structured interviews conducted with heads of committees of the Jerusalem Cluster community initiative. Accordingly, the study illustrates how the voices of the people become more significant in taking a leading role in a pandemic crisis in an occupied city.
Notes
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11 Wilkinson, “Local response in health emergencies: Key considerations for addressing the COVID-19 pandemic in informal urban Settlements.”
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16 Edward Soja (Citation2010) Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press).
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19 Al-Haq, JLAC and MAP, “COVID-19 and the Systematic Neglect of Palestinians in East Jerusalem.”
20 Ibid.
21 Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (2020) Following Adalah’s Supreme Court Petition, Israel to Open Coronavirus Testing Centers in East Jerusalem Neighborhoods beyond the Separation Wall, April 14, Available at: https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/9979, accessed July 15, 2020.
22 Soja, “Seeking Spatial Justice,” p. 78.
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26 Al-Haq, JLAC and MAP, “COVID-19 and the Systematic Neglect of Palestinians in East Jerusalem.”
27 Ibid.
28 Authors’ Interview with Head-1, East Jerusalem, 2 June 2020.
29 Rawan Asali-Nuseibeh (Citation2015) Political Conflict and Exclusion in Jerusalem: The Provision of Education and Social Services (New York: Routledge).
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31 Ibid, p.10.
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38 Ren Xuefei (2020) Pandemic and Lockdown: A Territorial Approach to COVID-19 in China, Italy and the United States, Eurasian Geography and Economics, 61(4–5), pp. 423–434. Haokip Thongkholal (Citation2020) From ‘Chinky’ to ‘Coronavirus’: Racism against Northeast Indians during the Covid-19 Pandemic, Asian Ethnicity, 22(2), pp. 353–373.
39 Thongkholal, “From ‘Chinky’ to ‘Coronavirus’: Racism against Northeast Indians during the Covid-19 pandemic.”
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41 Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution p. xvii.
42 Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writing 1972–1977.
43 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, pp. 163–164, 294 and 366.
44 Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice.
45 Ibid, p. 70.
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47 Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, p. xvii.
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