Between mobile corridors and immobilizing borders: race, fixity and friction in Palestine/Israel

Abstract

This article wrestles with the question of ‘national’ borders in racial capitalism. We do so through an examination of border and capitalist corridors. We focus particularly on the Israeli border, branded and then sold to the rest of the world by the epistemic community of border-makers and interlocutors. In tracking the Israeli border and showing the implication of the experts and their markets, we ask how the border reflects and is refracted through a global order organized by the twin dictates of racism and capitalism. We are especially interested in how racialized processes of bordering, ostensibly governed by national exigencies, are transplanted on to other contexts. Two points emerge from this: in the first instance, we ask who and what enables this movement of the border. And in the second, we interrogate which logics and practices are transplanted with the border, as it is reproduced and seemingly fixed in a new place. We examine the violent ontologies that give shape and reputation to Israel's high-tech border industry, which has become a model for the ever-growing global homeland security industry. We ask: has Israel's border become an exportable commodity and who are the actors who have enabled this ‘achievement’? Related to this, what sort of occlusions and structural violence does the fetishization of the Israeli border rely on?

The geographies of colonial infrastructures: Mobility, im/materiality, and politics on walking trails in the Middle East

“…These ‘small sections’ are those that pass close to the West Bank and this narrative reinforces settler‐colonial imaginations of Palestine as ‘other’ and a security threat. This echoes Manchanda and Plonski's writing on the Palestine–Israel border as creating narratives about space that are not just material but imaginary: ‘The border takes hold in the imperial imagination, becoming a metonym for safety and stability’ (2022, p. 197).…”

“…A rich literature draws our attention to the mobilities and temporalities of colonialism (Carby, 2019; Cowen, 2020; Khalili, 2020; Lowe, 2015; Sheller, 2018). This literature is complemented by increasingly nuanced work on infrastructure in geography and related disciplines (Arefin, 2019; Brady, 2021; Curley, 2021; Gergan & McCreary, 2022; Hope, 2022; Manchanda & Plonski, 2022; Millington, 2018; Simone, 2004, 2021; Solomon, 2021). A focus on walking trails as infrastructure provides a means to bring together literatures on infrastructures, colonialism, and mobilities in nuanced ways.…”

“…Through infrastructure, temporalities and mobilities become embodied and im/materialised in ways important to understanding the geographies of colonialism. The past 10 years have seen an ‘infrastructure turn’ with an intensification of research on infrastructure across geography and related fields (Arefin, 2019; Brady, 2021; Curley, 2021; Gergan & McCreary, 2022; Hope, 2022; Manchanda & Plonski, 2022; Millington, 2018; Simone, 2004, 2021; Solomon, 2021). Included within this work are explorations of alternative forms of citizenship and politics created and contested by infrastructure (Alderman & Goodwin, 2022; Brady, 2021; Hope, 2022; Lemanski, 2020) and the relationship between infrastructure and nationalist politics.…”

“…Sanitary infrastructures in Cairo are evidence for Mohammed Arefin of how ‘material relations … contain the accretions of long‐standing struggles over colonialism’ (2019, p. 1057). Infrastructure as ‘both a metaphorical and a material manifestation’ is central to Nivi Manchanda and Sharri Plonski's exploration of the ‘racial, colonial, and capitalist violences’ (2022, p. 184) in bordering practices in Palestine/Israel. In her work on shipping and capitalism in the Arab Peninsula, Laleh Khalili (2020) demonstrates how attention to material (e.g., ports) and immaterial (e.g., shipping routes) infrastructures is evidence of how colonial histories shape geopolitical relationships in the present.…”

“…A focus on walking trails in the MENA region further provides an account of what it means to centre methods and sites in geography in which the discursive and representative is in constant relation with the experiential and embodied. To fully understand the production of (post)colonial and settler-colonial space, increasing attention is currently drawn to material and imagination processes (Manchanda & Plonski, 2022;Nassar, 2018Nassar, , 2021). Yet despite similar calls in mobility scholarship and political geographies of infrastructure to attend to imagination and materiality in the production of mobility and infrastructures (see Barry, 2019;Cresswell, 2010;Merriman, 2016), there remains little work that fully explores these entanglements.…”