Checkpoint 300: Precarious checkpoint geographies and rights/rites of passage in the occupied Palestinian Territories

Women and checkpoints in Palestine

“…Our objective has been to complement existing work that discusses women and checkpoints (e.g. Hammami, 2015Hammami, , 2019Peteet, 2017;Richter-Devroe, 2011;Rijke and Minca, 2018;Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015) by bringing women to the centre of a discussion of permits, checkpoints and their gendered effects on (im)mobility, embodied experience and relations of care. The study, we hope, adds evidence and texture to existing accounts while also building new knowledge of how the checkpoint brings the politics of gender and occupation to the fore, and how security infrastructure connects to the politics of care in the context of military occupation.…”

Disrupting movements, synchronising schedules

“…As we have seen, commuters saw the constant redefinition of the rules of Palestinian movement as a fundamental aspect of moving into and around Jerusalem, and felt at the mercy of a system that was not accountable to them. Indeed, numerous authors have noted that arbitrariness is a tool with which the Israeli occupation controls Palestinian lives, both in the legal-administrative and in the spatial realms (Handel 2009, 214;Azoulay and Ophir 2013, 90;Kotef 2015;Berda 2017;Rijke and Minca 2018). The uncertainty governing Palestinian time might thus also be viewed as part of what has been referred to as 'strategic confusion' (Pullan 2013b).…”

Women’s Lives Beyond the Checkpoint in Palestine

“…Where women are brought into research, insightful analyses reveal checkpoints as spaces of women’s discrimination (Braverman 2011), survival (Hammami 2015, 2019), coping (Rijke and Minca 2018) and/or resistance (Richter‐Devroe 2011). From this we learn how the crowds, violence and security checks that constitute the space of the checkpoint can, for instance, deter women from crossing—“especially traditional Muslim women … [who] refrain from direct physical contact with male strangers” (Braverman 2011:278)—but also present a setting where women exert political agency, “negotiat[ing] the everyday ontologies of collective suffering” to make crossing more bearable for themselves and fellow commuters (Hammami 2015:7).…”

“…The research presented here is focused on proximity to border infrastructure and complements this existing work by retaining focus on women and checkpoints and extending analysis to the less visible spaces of the home and community. The discussion is based on fieldwork in Al‐Walaja, a village in the Bethlehem Governorate that is close to the Separation Wall (see Joronen 2019) and Checkpoint 300, one of the largest in the West Bank (see Griffiths and Repo 2018; Rijke and Minca 2018, 2019). In a 12‐month period between 2018 and 2019 we were fortunate to work with the Women’s Group in the village who facilitated research activities concentrated on the ways that Checkpoint 300 affects their daily lives, even though none of them passed through with any frequency.…”