Gazzawi as bare life? An auto-ethnography of borders, siege, and statelessness

ABSTRACT

Borders of nation-states have become the natural barriers that constrain and organise the movements of people. These borders have entry and exit points such as airports, seaports and border crossings. Besides being an essential element in defining the national identity of the majority of people who live inside their geography, t borders can be used as a political tool to control the movement of people. They are also used as means to restrain their political engagement. In the age of mobility control, inequality in general, as well as the refugee crisis and the Arab Uprisings in particular, the Palestinians of Gaza have been excluded from the external world. They have been isolated in the Gaza Strip through different mechanisms related to borders and visas. This article is an autobiography of occupation, travels, airports and border crossings. It describes life under occupation, visa and border violence in the Rafah borders and the Israeli Erez checkpoint, Allenby, and then experiences in European and Middle Eastern airports and borders. The article explores the ‘State of Exception’ of living under occupation as a Palestinian. I examine operations of systematic profiling of the Palestinians in Arab countries’ borders.

KEYWORDS:

• Borders
• nation-state
• violence
• Palestine
• Gaza
• bare life
• auto-ethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Abdalhadi Alijla is a Palestinian-Swedish political and social scientist. He is a Co-leader of Global Migration and Human Rights Working Group at Global Young Academy, research fellow at Post Conflict Research Centre, Sarajevo, Institute for Middle East Studies, Canada (IMESC) and Research Associate at Varieties of Democracy Institute(V-Dem). He is the 2020 Post-doc researcher of Max Weber Stiftung at Orient Institute-Beirut.

Notes

1 UNESCO: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialised agency of the United Nations.

2 UNRWA: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.