Disrupting movements, synchronising schedules

Abstract

In East Jerusalem two seemingly antithetical temporal regimes are at work. On the one hand, access to the city is disrupted by time that expands and contracts arbitrarily. This impedes movement, makes even the immediate future difficult to predict, and disconnects many Palestinian residents, particularly those on the outskirts of the city beyond the Separation Wall, from Jerusalem in both the short and the long term. Read as a deliberate ‘deregulation’, temporality thus feeds into Israel’s demographic aims of excluding Palestinians from the city. On the other hand, increased speed, timeliness and synchronisation are used to formalise and normalise Palestinian mobilities, as I show using the case of the Ramallah-Jerusalem Bus Company. This furthers the fifty-year project of Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem by linking and incorporating Palestinian movements into the circulations of the Israeli city. The de/regulation of urban rhythms enabled by this infrastructure of control serves to advance Israeli policy aims in the city by modulating degrees of connection to the city. The article reads this dual regime as reflecting the ambivalent status of Jerusalem’s Palestinian residents, who nonetheless seek to resist and mitigate the effects of both exclusionary and incorporative temporality.