The wall of violence: Understanding the structural violence of the West Bank wall and the politics of terminology

Abstract

ABSTRACT The West Bank wall is a contemporary manifestation of the protracted violence in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Yet, the Israeli state-promoted discourse has detached the wall’s construction from the conceptualization of violence. It has achieved this by relying on the employment of the traditional conceptualization of the violence, governed by the regimes of instantaneity, visibility and physicality. Embracing Johan Galtung’s concept of structural violence, the paper problematizes the restricted understanding of the notion. It draws attention to the politics of conceptualizing violence and explores various nexuses between the modalities of violence and the production and governance of conflict ‘realities’, as well as the regimes of legitimacy, accountability and responsibility. The paper argues that the discursive inequalities in the representation of violence in the conflict are not independent from the material power of the Israeli occupation regime; they constitute an extension of Israel’s dominant status, and as such should be analysed as an intentional strategy that enables and legitimizes the occupation.