Terror at the beach: Arab bodies and the somatic violence of white cartographic anxiety in Australia and Palestine/Israel

Abstract

Nearly six months after the horrific episodes of racist violence at Cronulla beach in Australia, Israeli artillery fire killed seven Palestinians on a northern Gaza beach. This article examines how, in both sites, the beach is constructed as the legitimate preserve of an aggressive majority that maintains its fragile sense of cartographic hegemony through an excessively violent mapping of the racialised Arab Other's body. The trans-national mapping of the somatic violence of whiteness will be analysed through a reading of Arab embodiment in the Australian and Israeli contexts of racial oppression and territorial aggression.