Urbanization and Bottom-up Politics in Palestine: The Case of Yatta

Abstract

The West Bank (occupied Palestinian Territories) is a fragmented network of urban clusters while the rural area is slowly chipped away by Israeli settlers and military apparatus. Palestinians’ bodies are squeezed between checkpoints, razor wire, apartheid walls, military watchtowers, barracks but also between state bureaucracy, incorporation of labourers and cultural dispossession. The occupation through multiple devices produces dispossession and the national struggle explodes with violent and unforeseen forms against Israeli settlers and soldiers. The present paper is a reflection based on one year of fieldwork in Yatta’s urban cluster and its rural area in the southern West Bank. By analysing Israeli’s occupation law, the present work aims at explaining how the Palestinian urbanization process is forced under colonial rule with interlinked consequences on cultural and material dispossession, and youth liminal identities. Within the frame of this set of socio-spatial fragmented relations, the distrust of political parties is growing, and political forms are re-territorialized in local struggle. The research inquires why radical subjectivity is emerging in the Yatta social-spatial context produced by occupation law. How, despite the devices of Israeli occupation, aiming at drawing docile bodies and geography, the bottom-up political phenomenon emerging from Yatta’s urban context explodes in sudden violence.