Photo Feature Landscapes of Occupation in Palestine

This paper is for a special issue of the ARAB WORLD GEOGRAPHER on ethnographic research in the Arab and Muslim World and details the author's experience in the Palestinian village of Jayyous.

Middle East Report, 1995

Journal of Urban and Regional Analysis, 2011

Immediately after the 1967 war and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza the national religious youngsters (Gush Emmunim settlers) reached out to settle the new frontier of the biblical places. By thus, they have developed a Messianic myth. The interpretation of Gush-Emmunim settlers' experience of landscapes reveals a complex and contradictory structure of sense of space. Settlers' mythical sense of space may be understood in two strata-imagined and material. The imagined stratum is conceived mainly in transcendental romantic terms while the material is reified according to classic conceptions. Two main contradictions are outstanding: first, between the romantic representation of Jewish landscapes and the classic representation of Palestinian landscapes in the imagined stratum; second, between the romantic representation of the Jewish home space in the imagined stratum and the classical representation of the suburban Jewish home landscape in the material stratum. The first contradiction is inherent in frontier societies as a means to pseudo-rationalize the colonisation of the land, although in general there may be a mixture of romantic and classic attitudes towards the natives. The settlers pioneering myth is highly subsidised by the government and aggressively backed by military force. This enables them to tolerate the surrounding fear, antagonism and hatred. Thus, the landscape they build represents power and domination with no regard to local nature and to the Palestinian landscapes that are perceived by the settlers as part of it.

Radical History Review, 2010

The Arab World Geographer, 2024

Colonization and settlement of the Palestinian West Bank by the State of Israel has converted vast portions of the West Bank landscape into the status of “Israel Lands” -- lands under the control of the Jewish State and Jewish Israeli settlers. As more and more of the land surface in the West Bank succumbs to the land hunger of Israeli colonization and settlement, an ever-expanding share of the Palestinian landscape is rendered off-limits to Palestinians. In the shrunken spaces on the landscape remaining for Palestinians, the State of Israel has established a tightly restricted system of control over Palestinian mobility in which freedom of movement is severely curtailed. The argument in this article is that the landscape, with its expanse of impassible spaces and tight controls over mobility constitutes a prison-like regime of confinement on the land. Policed by the Israeli military and reinforced by a host of physical barriers to free movement built into the landscape, this confinement system also imposes strict controls on Palestinian mobility from the violence and vigilantism of Israeli settlers. This article reveals how Palestinians experience this confinement regime on the ground level in two cases studies, the agricultural village of Iraq Burin and the city of Al-Khalil (Hebron), and emphasizes how photography can be mobilized as a method alongside ethnography to tell this story.

Journal of Palestine Studies, 1991

The American Historical Review, 2006