Confinement Under an Open Sky: Following the Speed Trap from Guernica to Gaza and Beyond

Abstract

This article explores the global significance of Palestine through a focus on the politics of confinement. Using the work of Paul Virilio and others, I examine the processes of colonization, incarceration, and acceleration that have combined to produce the confining realities of contemporary Palestine. The rhetoric of ‘disengagement’ associated with the dismantling of Israeli settlement colonies in Gaza represents the discursive face of a process through which the Israeli state has cemented its domination of Palestine while rebranding itself as a world leader in the technologies of permanent warfare. Palestine, in this sense, is diagnostic of a larger global system of dromocracy (the rule of speed) that articulates in complex ways with neoliberal capitalism. Within such a system, everyone is subject to the tyranny of speed and to the psychological and moral disorientation it produces.