Marriage under occupation: Israel’s spousal visa restrictions in the West Bank

Abstract

In the West Bank, hundreds of non-Palestinian women who are married to Palestinian men have recently been issued shortened visas with tightened restrictions. This means they are often prevented from working, their mobilities are severely reduced and they are placed in extremely precarious bureaucratic and procedural positions. The research in this article draws from fieldwork interviews with women affected by such restrictions to show how politically induced precarities produce gendered effects towards specific ends of the occupation of Palestine. We thus frame a discussion of the women's experiences of visa regulations through precarity before giving an account of the profound effects on women's roles in family and political life. We then broaden the focus to consider Israel's occupation of Palestine and the demographic implications of the gendered effects of visa precarity. In doing so we make the argument that Israel's spousal visa regulations contribute to the (re)production of uneven gender relations and the demographic objective of emptying out the West Bank.

Women’s Lives Beyond the Checkpoint in Palestine

“…But it is also clear that the men’s enforced absence and tired presence exacerbates the gendered division of labour. It thus serves to remember that Palestinian women, in common with other colonised women (Griffiths 2018; Spivak 1988), face two main formations of patriarchy: “not only its ‘own’ immediate patriarchy but also to that of the occupier” and that “Israel has a long history of exploiting, violating and exacerbating already uneven gender relations within the Occupied Territories” (Griffiths and Joronen 2019:165).…”

The affective politics of precarity: Home demolitions in occupied Palestine

“…As the discussion so far begins to show, the notion of ‘affectual demolition’ not only reveals our fundamental vulnerability to moods, but also brings forth the political promotion and use of such vulnerability as a tool of governing. ‘Affectual demolition’ thus signifies our capacity to be affected by modes of distributing what Judith Butler describes as the ‘political notion of precarity’ (Butler, 2006; see also Griffiths and Joronen, 2019; Joronen, 2016; Lorey, 2015). Following Butler’s formulation, it is not our claim that precarity constitutes an ‘affective condition’ that names a ‘disposition that discloses a ‘predictably unpredictable’ future without guarantees’ (Anderson, 2014: 125, 129); it is rather that the threat of demolition is used to allocate precarity and all manner of anxieties and fears follow (as in the case of Faris, above).…”

Negotiating Colonial Violence: Spaces of Precarisation in Palestine

“…Judith Butler's discussion of precarity as differentiated between the ontological and the political condition—between life's intrinsic frailty, finitude, and proneness to harm (its precariousness ) and the political frames and social conditions through which precarities become distributed—has been of influence for recent geographical work on Palestine and beyond (e.g. Griffiths and Joronen ; Harker ; Joronen ; Kearns ). These debates examine and draw attention to the manifold political ways through which precarity has been used as a tool for governing, from neoliberal to settler colonial (Waite ), leaving the role of the ontological precariousness in governing relatively untouched.…”