Spaces of waiting: Politics of precarious recognition in the occupied West Bank

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to explicate a peculiar logic of government Israeli state apparatuses use to control the Palestinian population and colonize the West Bank; namely, the one of slowness, delay and waiting. To understand the operational logic of such governing, I suggest the conditions of recognizing Palestinian rights, their theatric performance by the Israeli state apparatuses, and the maintaining of precarity among Palestinians are the critical aspects to expand. By looking at the West Bank sites close to expanding Israeli settlements, I show how this mode of governing operates by recognizing the Palestinian right to claim justice, security and governance without actualization of these rights, therefore directing Palestinian resistance and sense of injustice to support the theatric functions of settler colonial state. Hence, theaters of recognition are created, the ones that ceremoniously keep administrative, legal and security processes functional, but through the slow processing, stalling and endless piling up of decisions, regulations, requirements and security exceptions do not alleviate the induced precarities.

Inside Checkpoint 300: Checkpoint Regimes as Spatial Political Technologies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

“…The “wilful inefficiency” we observed inside Checkpoint 300 is explained by Julie Peteet as one of the key characteristics of the Israeli checkpoints, creating a “population in a perpetual state of anxious anticipation” (2017:119). Mikko Joronen () even suggested that making Palestinians wait is an important form of government that upholds the status quo of the occupation of the Palestinian Territories. Such arbitrariness and inefficiency are not eliminated by the presence of the machines at Checkpoint 300, but rather produced by and reproduced also via their operations.…”

Negotiating Colonial Violence: Spaces of Precarisation in Palestine

“…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. Apart from Mitch Rose's (:215) elaboration of the way in which ontological vulnerability has been mobilised as a form of “negative governance”, where the precariousness of life itself is “let to rule” through the “strategic decision not to govern” (see also Joronen ; Ramadan and Fregonese ), the ways in which ontological precariousness constitutes and relates to a practice of governing have not been taken into explicit consideration.…”

“…The rest of the post‐67 village is considered as “Area C” under the direct security and administrative control of Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) (see Figure ). Since the mid 1990s, however, Israel has used its control of Area C to further catalyse settlement expansion, by simultaneously hampering Palestinian development with restrictions and a purposely slow and obstructive permit regime (Berda ; Joronen ). Less than 1% of the whole of “Area C” is allocated for Palestinian development (OCHA ), while the situation is even more alarming in those parts of “Area C”, such as Al‐Walaja (of which the villagers used an expression “Area C minus”) that stand in the way of the Israeli expansion plans.…”

“…Here time, waiting and prolonging become crucial elements of governing. The limbo does not merely ensure the precarious situation, with all the fears and anxieties, prevails among the colonised, but constitutes an entire system of “effective inefficiency”, where the slowness and tardiness in administrative processes is used to induce further precarities (see Berda ; Joronen ). As a field researcher of a Bethlehem‐based NGO described, many Palestinians in the region do apply for building permits before construction, but face the precarities of slow‐motion governing: “houses can be there for six years before Israeli officials start to claim undue payments, with high rates of interest”—a situation that is economically unbearable for many.…”

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

“…Scholarly interest in precarity has grown especially since Judith Butler's (2006; (Joronen 2016); the limits to and possibilities of resistance to the occupation (e.g. Falah 2004;Griffiths 2017;Hammami 2016); and the manifold 'slow-motion' bureaucratic means by which the Israeli Civil Administration maintains Palestinians' precarity (Berda 2017;Joronen 2017). In the context of families and the occupation of Palestine, scholars have further documented how Israeli officials construct the Palestinian family as nuclear so as to make surveillance more effective (Zureik 2001, 219), and the ways that family members of each household are frequently photographed and mapped by the Israeli Army (Huss 2017).…”