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" The Land of the Checkpoints: "
Rijke, Alexandra
Minca, C.
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1112187
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TLpq2522370928
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| Main Entry
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Minca, C.
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Rijke, Alexandra
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| Title & Author
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The Land of the Checkpoints:\ Rijke, AlexandraMinca, C.
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| College
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Wageningen University and Research
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| Date
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2019
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| student score
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2019
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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373
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| Abstract
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When the Israeli state occupied the Palestinian Territories (West Bank and the Gaza Strip) in 1967, it gradually put restrictions on Palestinian movement in place. At first, Palestinians could easily circumvent these, but in the last 50 years these restrictions have become an intricate multi-layered ‘architecture of occupation’ that includes the Wall, no-go military areas, fences, numerous illegal Jewish settlements and their related bypass roads, and an elaborate checkpoint system. This architecture of occupation fragments the border between Israeli and Palestinian territories into a multitude of ever-changing borders and contributes to a series of geographical practices aimed at controlling the daily lives of Palestinians. As a consequence, many Palestinians and Jewish settlers cannot avoid passing through an Israeli checkpoint on their way to work, school, family or their place of worship. Although the checkpoints are key sites where the impact of the architecture of occupation is felt on a daily basis, the experiences of Palestinians and Jewish settlers at these sites have been the focus of a relatively limited number of research projects. In this thesis, I aim to address this gap by analysing how checkpoints in the Occupied Palestinian Territories function as spatial political technologies that produce arbitrary, selective and mutable geographies of mobility In Chapter 1, I elaborate upon the context in which this research took place, introduce the research questions and reflect upon the intended academic contributions of this PhD project. In Chapter 2, I introduce my theoretical framework, which is largely informed by Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Giorgio Agamben's sovereign exception. Inspired by the work of Foucault, I frame checkpoints as political technologies, made up of specific practices and techniques aimed at organising the bodies subjected to them. This means that I focus on the interplay of human and non-human interactions, and on the daily experiences of the commuters subjected to them. Furthermore, following the insightful work of Minca (2015a) and Katz, Martin and Minca (2018), I have added a spatial dimension by analysing checkpoints as spatial political technologies producing a set of selective, arbitrary and mutable geographies of mobility. The addition of Agamben's sovereign exception allows me to investigate randomness and arbitrariness not as an unintentional by-product of the checkpoints, but as inherent to their spatial regime and as an expression of the sovereign exception. As such, I analyse the workings of the sovereign exception and the coping mechanisms of Palestinian commuters as part of the same spatial regime of power. Chapter 3 discusses the fieldwork that I conducted to collect the necessary data. I spent seven months in total collecting data in the Bethlehem area, in 2016, 2017 and 2019. During these periods, I conducted in-depth interviews, go-along interviews and made extensive observations. I interviewed 36 Palestinians and Jewish settlers—most of them twice, some more often. In addition, I observed Checkpoint 300 up to eight hours each week, usually from 4:00 to 8:00 am during rush hour. This combination of methods allowed me to connect what my interviewees told me during the interviews to my observations of their checkpoint passages and the workings of the checkpoints in general. Furthermore, in Chapter 3, I reflect upon the ethical issues related to my safety and that of the interviewees while collecting data in a militarised context, as well as my position as a researcher. This chapter concludes with a discussion of some of the limitations of this study. Chapters 4 and 5 provide an analysis of Checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem. In Chapter 4, I discuss the specific design of Checkpoint 300 as a terminal checkpoint, with a focus on the roles played by some of its numerous machines: the turnstiles, metal detectors, x-ray machines, and fingerprint- and iris-scanning devices. While the Israeli army introduced these machines to 'decrease the tension' inside Checkpoint 300, I describe how the checkpoint is still a place filled with tension. Moreover, I discuss the ways in which Palestinian commuters engage with the machines, reinforcing but also twisting some of their expected functions. In Chapter 5, I also analyse Checkpoint 300, but with a focus on the use of biopolitical categories by the checkpoint managers and the Palestinian commuters, zooming in on 'gender', 'age' and 'ID card status'. In this chapter, I discuss how the checkpoint managers implement these categories. I indicate how these categories are tools that help create the conditions for the exercise of sovereign power—in which a checkpoint manager can decide 'on the spot' whether or not the rules and associated privileges of a certain category apply or are ignored. I, again, describe also how Palestinians adopt some of these categories and their associated privileges, while resisting others. In Chapter 6, I analyse The Tunnels and Al Walaja checkpoints. These are two car checkpoints in the Bethlehem area used by Palestinians with Jerusalem and Israeli ID cards and by Jewish settlers. These checkpoints bring together two opposed regimes of mobility: one aimed at providing smooth and fast checkpoint passages for Jewish settlers, the other aimed at stopping and checking Palestinians. These two aims can be simultaneously achieved because of the low-tech design of these checkpoints—there are almost no machines present. The soldiers employ several biopolitical categories when they decide which car to stop and which one to let pass unchallenged. In this chapter, I describe the use of two of these categories: 'Jewish versus Arab' and 'gender'. Similar to the use of these biopolitical categories in Checkpoint 300, these categories selectively limit Palestinian mobility, while Palestinian commuters incorporate part of the categories and their associated privileges, and redefine or resist others. This thesis concludes with Chapter 7. In this chapter I discuss the two main conclusions. Firstly, checkpoints are spatial political technologies that produce arbitrary, mutable and selective regimes of mobility. Secondly, checkpoints should be seen as the outcome of the endless interplay between its managers, biopolitical categories, material devices and procedures of control, on the one hand, and the commuters, on the other. I arrive at these conclusions by addressing the three main research questions of this project: 1) how biopolitical categories are implemented in governing mobile Palestinian bodies; 2) which roles the machines and spatial arrangement of the checkpoints play in the checkpoint passages of the commuters; and 3) how Palestinian commuters engage with, reproduce, but also redefine and/or resist the workings of the checkpoints. Moreover, in this chapter I discuss the academic implications of this thesis. I specifically address the ways in which this research can contribute to the existing debates concerning Israel/Palestine, checkpoints and walling in political geography, but also the impact it may have on the broader debates about walling, bordering practices and mobility in political geography, border studies, political science and critical international relations. I also discuss some of the limitations of this study and suggest possible ideas for future research. Finally, I conclude the thesis by returning to Checkpoint 300, which was relaunched as an even more ‘humane’ and ‘official border crossing’ in the period I was writing this thesis. I therefore end with a reflection on what this means with regards to the increased normalisation of the presence of checkpoints and the occupation of the Palestinian Territories in general.
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Arabic language
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Biopolitics
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Gender
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Geography
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Politics
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Rites of passage
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