Summary
The border between Israel and the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, which the editors of the 2012 Settler Colonial Studies special issue use as their example of how occupation studies fragment the Palestinian polity: a line rarely crossed in scholarly accounts, in either direction (Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.3).
Details
- The editors call it “the border between Israel and the Palestinian reserves” and “a powerful symbolic and material signifier that enforces, and takes for granted, the fragmentation of the Palestinian polity. With few exceptions, it is a line that is rarely crossed in scholarly accounts of Palestine – in either direction.” Different Palestinian populations are thereby “represented as isolated, analytically separate, pieces of an impossible puzzle” (Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.3).
- The focus on the 1967 occupation that the line organises “absolves previous generations of Zionists and Israel itself of settler colonialism”, in the editors’ argument (PDF p.3).
- Pappe gives its length as 315 km, against the 670-km serpentine route of the separation wall, more than twice as long (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.289).
Related pages
Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, Settler Colonialism, West Bank, Separation wall