The scales of occupation: ‘Operation Cast Lead’ and the targeting of the Gaza Strip

Abstract

This article analyses the role of scalar politics in the 22-day Israeli assault on the occupied Gaza Strip that happened in the winter of 2008–9, and argues that practices of organizing and representing different kinds of scale have helped normalize occupation violence. Israeli regulatory mechanisms and a variety of scalar narratives of the occupied Palestinian territory constructed geographical, material and sensorial aspects of space and scale in a way that allowed the Israeli ‘Operation Cast Lead’ to stand out as anomalous, when it was in fact part of an ongoing, systematic military occupation. The ways that space and scale have been constructed throughout the occupied Palestinian territory in many ways echo modes of fragmentation and social segregation that enable forms of violence seen in enclaved cities around the globe. The Palestinian case calls for additional attention to the imbrication of different kinds of scale – density, distance, time and destruction – as they are shaped militarily and discursively.