Discreet and Hegemonic Borderscapes of Galilee: Lebanese Residents of Israel and the Israel–Lebanon Border

Abstract

ABSTRACTFollowing the processual shift in border studies, recent concepts such as “borderities” and “borderscapes” allow for original analyses that give voice to multiple agents alongside that of the nation-state in bordering processes, elucidate the links between border representation and border experience, and establish borders as both “markers of belonging and places of becoming”. This article will explore the potentials of these concepts when applied, not to the highly mediatised Separation Fence in the West Bank, but to a less studied border that reveals parallel evolutions in Israeli borderities and contemporary Middle Eastern borderscapes: the Israel-Lebanon border. It will focus on a marginal and little known phenomenon, that of the migration of Southern Lebanese to Israel. The creation of the State of Israel at the expense of Pan-Arab and Palestinian national aspirations has laid the foundations for a diversified relation to this border amongst inhabitants of the Galilee today depending notably on their belonging to the indigenous Arab population, or the more recently settled Jewish population. Through an analysis of two groups of Lebanese migrants, who, although originating from the same villages in Lebanon, settled respectively on opposite sides of the Arab/Jewish divide in Galilee, we will see how different patterns of border crossings produce different levels of interiorisation of the Israel-Lebanon border and different uses of categories of identity and meaning defined by it. Reterritorialised in either of Galilee’s superimposed geographies, Southern Lebanese migrants reveal two alternative Galilean borderscapes, one normative and hegemonic, partaking in the “national order of things”, the other discreet and alternative.