Unspectacular spaces of slow wounding in Palestine

Abstract

Visible lines on a map can sometimes foreclose obvious conclusions. The Bantustans of Palestinian cities and villages surrounded by the chains of growing settlements; the Separation Wall coiling within the West Bank; restricted areas, fences, settler-only roads -all made visible with lines that point towards the key Israeli endeavour to colonise Palestinian land without its inhabitants (see Gordon, 2008;Said, 1980;Zureik, 2016). Within the Bethlehem governorate, the area under focus in this particular study, E1 and E2 plans for settlement expansion have defined the directions taken in the north and south, the Gush Etzion settlement block in the West containing more than 75,000 settlers, all settling illegally (according to Fourth Geneva convention) West Bank and Palestinian lands. Here in particular the lines of existing and emerging conditions make visible, even mappable, the spatial patterns of occupation -the way it consistently proceeds to colonise the West Bank through settlements, barriers, walls, fences, checkpoints, and separated roads that consequently strangulate Palestinians' communities and villages in what Palestinians often refer to as the "human warehouses" (

Dromoelimination: Accelerating settler colonialism in Palestine

“…Finally, it is important to keep in mind that we are not arguing these novel modes of surveillance are able to completely dwarf Palestinian ways of acting against and upon the accelerating modes of dromoelimination. For instance, in Susiya, as is the case in similar sites throughout the West Bank (see Joronen, 2021), such eliminatory speed has been countered with speedy construction – of building as fast as possible to create, as one resident explained, ‘an already existing structure that would prevent the ICA issuing a stop-work order’ and hence force them to impose ‘a demolition order that could be delayed’ while ‘providing people with minimal help, ensuring the basics’ (Interviewee, 2018). These counter-temporalisations, as we discuss in detail in the next section, help in further underlining the operational complexity of dromoelimination, particularly its ability to align politics around the question of speed.…”

“…In the aftermath of the Oslo Accords in 1993/1995, these everyday eliminatory methods became concentrated on around 60% of the West Bank's territory marked as 'Area C', where Israel was temporarily given control over security and administrative matters, and which includes most of the Israeli settlements, Palestinian farming lands and villages 'unrecognized' by the Israeli regime (OCHA, 2015b). During the decades that followed, overlaps between various state mechanisms of control in Area C have laid ground for the ongoing dispossession of Palestinian inhabitants, and the appropriation, fragmentation and strangulation of their spaces, through what in the prevalent literature has been described in terms of 'creeping apartheid/closure' (Peteet, 2017;Yiftachel, 2009), 'slow violence/wounding' (Joronen, 2017(Joronen, , 2021 and 'silent transfer' (Badil, 2013).…”

“…In the existing literature within geography and cognate disciplines debates on acceleration and speed have been spread around vast range of topics, including the planetary-wide logistical networks (Cowen, 2010), time-space compression (Harvey, 1989), technological speed of globalisation (Joronen, 2008), colonization (Luke and Tuathail, 2000), capitalist logics and fascist politics of acceleration (Noys, 2014), and the more specific questions of speed related to, for instance, deceleration, futurism, algorithms, urban planning, warfare and revolutionary acceleration (e.g., Armitage, 1999;Deleuze and Guattari, 1987;Grindsted, 2015;Leach, 1999;Virilio, 2006). Within the literature focusing explicitly on Palestine/Israel, the notion of speed has most often been approached in terms of slow violence and purposely inefficient legal and administrative processes that have effectively stolen Palestinians' time by keeping them waiting under highly restrictive and vulnerable conditions (e.g., Berda, 2017;Joronen, 2017Joronen, , 2021Peteet, 2017). Acceleration, in turn, has been less often taken under explicit focus, though it has been mentioned in relation to infrastructural/architectonic ways of speeding up separatory politics (Jabary-Salamanca, 2016;Weizman, 2007), and indicated by works focusing on more abrupt events of spectacular violence (Azoulay and Ophir, 2009).…”

Pax McDonaldica before the storm: From geopolitical fault‐line to urbicide in Mariupol, Ukraine

“…However, in suggesting that a McDonaldised city is a peaceful city, Boichenko also implicitly acknowledged that there was significant potential for conflict behind the McPotëmkin façade. After all, Mariupol had fallen under temporary DPR control just seven years earlier, not without the approval of many of its residents, a culmination of the ‘slow wounding’ (Joronen, 2021) inflicted by the region's pre‐2014 pro‐Russian elite (including former president Viktor Yanukovych) on the city's identity as a Ukrainian city. The DPR, for its part, sought – and still seeks – the region's incorporation into the Russian Federation, very much against the background of Putin's theory of Ukrainian non‐nationhood, and of widespread Soviet nostalgia.…”

Care for Transactions

“…We do not think that interest in Latin American and Caribbean geographies should be constrained to scholars with an interest in the regions. Our recent turn towards geographies in the world is a start, but much more work is needed to engage with Latin American and other non‐Anglophone geographies (see Esson et al, 2021; Jones, 2022; Joronen, 2021; Nayak, 2017). As we explore possible strategies for opening greater dialogue, we therefore invite the TIBG community to care for the work involved in translating and working across different languages and canonical literatures.…”