H a g a r K o t e f a n d M e r a v A m i r (En)Gendering Checkpoints: Checkpoint Watch and the Repercussions of Intervention T his article is the outcome of three years of experience, between the two of us, of weekly shifts, standing with Checkpoint Watch (CPW) at the checkpoints that are spread throughout the Palestinian Occupied Territories. It is the product of these three years of observations, dilemmas, internal conflicts, and contradictory impulses. All of the critiques that this article suggests are thus ones that we as members of CPW often struggled with ourselves. They are by no means an attempt to undermine CPW and the important work it does. To the contrary, we both think CPW is one of the most significant and effective organizations operating today against the Israeli occupation. This article is dedicated to this organization and, in particular, to the remarkable and rare women with whom we have the privilege to stand, week after week, protesting against the occupation.
Research on the Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank has emphasized not only that these checkpoints have dire implications for the Palestinians living there, at the personal, familial, and communal levels, and devastating effects on the Palestinian economy, but also that they have far-reaching consequences for the ability of the Palestinians to establish an independent political entity. At the same time, analysis of the Israeli forms of domination over the Palestinians has also stressed the role of a Palestinian governing authority in sustaining the Israeli rule, since the former relieves the latter of its responsibility to care for the occupied Palestinian population. This paper aims to address this apparent contradiction claiming that a comprehensive analysis of Israeli forms of domination requires a spatial examination of the operation of sovereignty with an assessment of governmentalizing arrays. This combined analysis suggests that a Palestinian sovereignty, but one which is emptied of its actual ruling power, is construed at the checkpoints as an epiphenomenon of Israeli apparatuses of control.
Drawing on a perspective which takes into account the convergences of sovereign and biopolitical ruling apparatuses, the aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive view of the Separation Wall constructed by Israel in East Jerusalem, and, through it, of Israeli control of Palestinian East Jerusalem. Neither a comprehensive border, nor a mere barrier, the Separation Wall which is being constructed in Jerusalem operates to reinstates sovereign power in arrays of governmentality for the purpose of drawing on the ability of sovereignty to appropriate legitimacy for the territorialisation of governmentality. This article claims that these territorialised arrays of governmentality give rise to processes of racialisation, by maintaining a grip on the communities of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and sustaining them in an intermediate position, standing in the way of their full integration into the Israeli population while severing their existing connections with the Palestinians in the West Bank.The material presence of the Separation Wall constructed by Israel leaves little room for doubt. Confronted with its enormity, with its bulk concrete blocks, erected nine metres tall, topped with barbed wire, in its wall sections, and a high-tech multilayer fence, stretching up to fifty metres in width, with its track-trails and patrol roads, in the sections where it appears as a fence, one can hardly ignore that it was constructed as an exercise of state power to determine territorial facts on the ground. The magnitude of the wall is not only reflected in its immediate physical presence, but also in its being the biggest, most complex and most costly single project the Israeli government has ever undertaken. Indeed, the Separation Wall has attracted
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