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At Israel's new border crossings with the West Bank, modernization has become the buzz-word: not only referring to modernized mechanical means-a Wall, newly designed crossings, and micro-mechanics such as turnstiles, signs, and fences-but also to new and sophisticated scientific technologies, such as sensor machines and scanners, and to modernized means of identification, such as advanced computer systems and biometric cards. This paper considers the transformation of the Israel-West Bank border to be a result of four major processes: reterritorialization, bureaucratization, neoliberalization, and de-humanization. I utilize in-depth interviews with top military and state officials and with human rights activists as well as a series of participatory observations to explore the on-the-ground implications of the borders' transformation.

Law, with a capital "L" at least, is not particularly fond of hiding itself. In order to be effective, law must be asserted in the world; it must be acknowledged; and, most importantly, it must be visually seen. Why, then, would law hide itself in space? And, perhaps more importantly, how would it do so? And why would such hidden places of law be of importance to us? This paper explores the dual project of seeing and concealing within the context of legal geography. It examines how law sees the physical landscape and how it is seen from a spatial perspective. It also asks who does the legal seeing, who and what are being seen by law, and then who and what are rendered invisible in these geolegal sites. In addition, it considers how law's particular way of seeing landscape translates into the making of this space. Finally, and interrelated to all the above, it shows how both the visibility and, perhaps more importantly, the invisibility of law in space are strongly aligned with arrangements of power. The article presents two examples of visible invisibles: tree landscapes in Israel/Palestine and the properties of seeing the natural landscape through human and nonhuman inspection, and through aerial photos in particular; and border crossings and the properties of seeing in motion through the physical design of the border, and through sensor machines in particular. "To care about one sees in the world leads to mobilizing one's creative powers." Richard Sennett 1990, xiv 1 I. Prologue: Visualizing Law Law, with a capital "L" at least, 2 is not particularly fond of hiding itself. In order to be effective, law must be asserted in the world; it must be acknowledged; and, most importantly, it must be visually seen. Why, then, would law hide itself in space? How would it do so? And why are such hidden places of law important to us? This paper explores the dual project of seeing and concealing within the context of legal geography. It examines how law sees and how it is seen from a spatial perspective. It also asks who does the legal seeing, who and what are being seen by law, and then who and what are rendered invisible in these geolegal sites. In addition, it considers how law's particular way of seeing translates into the making of this space. Finally, and interrelated to all the above, it shows how both the visibility and, perhaps more importantly, the invisibility of law in space are strongly aligned with arrangements of power. That the modern project is dominated by vision, or "ocularcentric," 3 has been explained in many ways, physiological as well as cultural and historical. Scientists have 1 Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye (Alfred Knopf, 1990). 2 The examples of law's visual projects provided herein are mostly about state law. This does not mean that it is only state vision that matters in legal geographies. On an exploration of the project of seeing within a non-state oriented setting, see Irus Braverman, "

Drawing on ethnographic encounters and investigative analysis, this article relays how Gaza’s spatial confinement generally, and the Israeli incursion of summer 2014 in particular, has lent itself to a radicalized discursive interplay between the animalization of humans and the humanization of animals who live in Gaza. I show how human animals—Israelis and Palestinians, children and terrorists—as well as nonhuman animals—snakes, zoo animals, dogs, mice, lions, insects, zebras, donkeys, chickens, and beasts—perform detailed daily rituals of humanization, dehumanization, and animalization. By defining the degrees of their relative humanity and animality, these rituals render life and death more or less worthy. I coin the term zoometrics to refer to the detailed calculations of biopolitical worthiness that occur within and along the animal-human divide. Such zoometric accounts highlight the slippages between bestialized and humanized bodies, exacerbated by these bodies’ shared conditions of extreme captivity in Gaza.