Reconsidering the laboratory thesis: Palestine/Israel and the geopolitics of representation

Abstract

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the notion of Palestine/Israel as a 'laboratory' for the production and export of advanced weapons, security knowhow and technology. Critics of Israeli wars and the ongoing colonization of Palestine use the laboratory metaphor to make sense of Israeli state policies and practices used in controlling Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and fighting wars but also to address how Israeli instruments of violence come to travel elsewhere. This article brings these discussions into sharper focus by examining how the concept of the laboratory is employed in making sense of Israel's perceived centrality in global patterns violence and militarism, here termed the laboratory thesis. I argue that although the thesis develops powerful insights, it has analytical limitations. I further call into question its polemical force, suggesting that critical references to Palestine/Israel as a laboratory reinforce misleading ideological tropes at the core of Israel's settler colonial project. I take these concerns as an opportunity to reassemble the policing/security laboratory as a critical concept, in relation to Palestine/Israel, the global war on terror and beyond.

Political geographical perspectives on settler colonialism

“…These discussions have begun to interrogate how Foucault's conception of biopolitics is responsible for “whitewashing” the coloniality and raciality of modern violence and power (Howell & Richter‐Montpetit, ). Geographical work on biopolitics remains focused on overt physical forms of violence, confinement, bordering and erasure (Plonski, ; Schofield, ; Smith & Isleem, ) as well as the political technologies they rely on like security and surveillance practices (Bastos, ; Machold, ; Shalhoub‐Kevorkian, ; Zureik, Lyon, & Abu‐Laban, ), risk and supply chain management (Pasternak & Dafnos, ) and juridical innovations (Gordon & Ram, ; Hunt, ; Pasternak, , ; Tawil‐Souri, ). Here studies focus centrally on theorizing the connections between race, white supremacy, and settler colonialism (Bonds & Inwood, ; Clarno, ; Eastwood, ; Inwood & Bonds, ; Mott, , ; Tatour, ).…”

“…Engagements with settler colonial theory in planning debates, for instance, not only locate the roles of discipline and practice of planning in dispossessing indigenous peoples; they also seek to reclaim indigenous histories and open up space for addressing how indigenous peoples seek to remake place and build alternative futures (Jackson, Porter, & Johnson, ; Rutland, ). Geographers' close attention to the actual workings of settler colonial biopolitics, moreover, usefully draws attention to the limits and fragilities of settler colonial formations (e.g., Bhungalia, , p. 329; Smiles, , p. 141) and challenges their supposedly “high‐tech” or even novel character (Machold, ; Tawil‐Souri, ).…”

“…And the tendency to refer to Israel as a settler polity, but not other settler states, reifies the (misleading) assumption of Israeli exceptionalism: a belief that the Israeli state and society “still constitute an active immigrant settler sociopolitical entity (perhaps the last of its kind in the world), lacking a finalized and consensual geopolitical and social identity, boundaries, and location” (Kimmerling, , p. 3), whereas other settler colonies are case studies with “known closure” (Pappé, , p. 312). In skirting the settler colonial designation, and, more significantly, the framework and theory, political geographers run the risk of rendering ongoing anti‐colonial struggles invisible, denying the possibility of decolonization, and smoothing over ruptures within the settler project itself (Hughes, forthcoming; Machold, ; Rouhana & Sabbagh‐Khoury, ). While he conflates settler and ethnocratic societies, Yiftachel () hits the nail on the head in stressing that neither “can [ever] be treated as static political communities, but rather as arenas of constant struggles over the very geography of the polity in question ” (p. 222, emphasis added).…”

“…One such narrative is the “laboratory thesis,” taken up by critics and supporters of Israel alike, which posits that Israel's military industrial complex uses the occupation to refine and develop technologies for the international market. In his critique of the laboratory thesis, Machold (, p. 89) argues that uncritical reliance on the concept reinforces the misleading ideological tropes at the core of Israel's settler colonial project, such as the suggestion that Israel's position as a global security leader stems from the self‐declared exceptionality and universality of Israeli violence, that Israel triumphs against the odds, and that Israel's development is part of an inevitable progressive history (see also Tawil‐Souri, ). In other words, in explicitly theorizing Israel as engaged in an ongoing project of settler colonization, Machold avoids “accept[ing] the permanence of settler colonialism as an unmovable reality” (Simpson, , p. 8), and instead attunes to the ongoing (and not always successful) work and (re)production of Israeli territorial control over Palestine.…”

“…Despite this longstanding present absence, which endures in contemporary political geography, recent works by political geographers are engaging with the field of settler colonialism much more directly (Gentry et al, , Hawari, Plonski, & Weizman, , Hughes, , forthcoming; Machold, ; Naylor, Daigle, Zaragocin, Ramírez, & Gilmartin, ; De Leeuw & Hunt, ), focusing particularly on biopolitics, planning, urban geopolitics, and gendered and racialized foundations of settler colonialism (Farrales, ; Naylor et al, ). Indeed, Coleman and Agnew () argue that the settler colonial framework is of rising importance to the field of political geography.…”