Abstract
This article reflects on the spatial arrangements that memorialize power on the bodies of the colonized in occupied Palestine. These are the reflections of someone whose research is focused on the Canadian context. I attempt here to have a conversation with those scholars who are more conversant with the Israeli/Palestinian context than I, reading them through the prism of my own extremely brief experience of occupied Palestine, and through my research on violence against Aboriginal peoples in Canada. I focus on the physical encounter between colonizer and colonized, on the way that spaces express power arrangements that operate on the bodies of the colonized, turning them into small animals scrambling over rocks, or rats prodded and poked to make their way through a maze. The same spatial arrangements confirm colonizers as rightful owners of the land, convincing them who they are. The wall, the shouting at checkpoints, the power to arbitrarily stop and search, these must assist the 18 year old soldier wielding a gun to banish the ghosts on the landscape, the Arab faces, the outlines of buildings, the old Arabic names – anything that suggests that in truth, the land is Arab land.
Highlights
This article reflects on the spatial arrangements that memorialize power on the bodies of the colonized in occupied Palestine
I attempt here to have a conversation with those scholars who are more conversant with the Israeli/Palestinian context than I, reading them through the prism of my own extremely brief experience of occupied Palestine, and through my research on violence against Aboriginal peoples in Canada
Ahmed Ayyesh, a 27 year old writes: “What is an even more revolting provocation is the rose they put at the side of the fortified checkpoint
Summary
Space is one way to think about the violence of settler states towards the Indigenous populations they have dispossessed. I attempt here to have a conversation with those scholars who are more conversant with the Israeli/Palestinian context than I, reading them through the prism of my own extremely brief experience of occupied Palestine, and through my research on violence against Aboriginal peoples in Canada In her brilliant article on the spatiality of Apartheid, South African scholar Lindsay Bremner argues that it wasn‟t a wall or even the Bantustans that most distinguished apartheid: Instead it was the countless instruments of control and humiliation (racially discriminatory laws, administration boards, commissions of inquiry, town planning schemes, health regulations, pass books, spot fines, location permits, police raids, removal vans, bulldozers) and sites of regulation and surveillance (registration offices, health clinics, post offices, recruitment bureaus, hostels, servants rooms, police spaces, courtrooms, park benches, beer halls) that delineated South African society during the Apartheid years and produced its characteristic landscapes.[3] Daily “acts and rituals were transformed into acts of segregation and humiliation that accumulated into an omnipresent violence of everyday life. It is this porousness that most strikes the first time visitor about the wall separating Palestinians and Israelis, a porousness that suggests both where and how the bodies of the occupied are imprinted with the power of the occupiers
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