Occupied Golan Heights Research Articles

Politics, geography and recognition in the emerging multipolar world order

ABSTRACT This article examines international politics of recognition in the increasingly multipolar global environment, with a specific focus on recognition events in Kosovo, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Crimea, the Occupied Golan Heights, Jerusalem, Western Sahara, Luhansk and Donetsk. It reveals that the recent surge in recognition is propelled by geopolitical and geographical motivations, which undermine the normative significance of territorial integrity, non-recognition and self-determination in recognition politics. The article proposes a thesis that situates recognition within the context of geopolitics, spatial management and power dynamics that expand our understanding of the broader impacts of recognition beyond the traditional emphasis on statehood emergence and prevention. Recognition has become entangled in geopolitical contestations between influential global players seeking to normatively legitimise and normalise conquest, occupation and colonisation. In this context, geopolitical considerations have overridden the normative and legal weight of the well-institutionalised norms of territorial recognition. This underscores the gap between recognition norms and practices and demonstrates the explanatory power of geopolitics.

Explaining societal change through bricolage: Transformations in regimes of water governance

This paper is motivated by the pressing need to understand how water use and irrigated agriculture can be transformed in the interests of both social and environmental sustainability. How can such change come about? In particular, given the generally mixed results of simplified, state-initiated projects of social engineering, what is the potential for transformations in societal regimes of governance to be anchored in the everyday practices of farmers? In this paper, we address these enduring questions in novel ways. We argue that the concept of bricolage, commonly applied to analysing community management of resources, can be developed and deployed to explain broad societal processes of change. To illustrate this, we draw on case studies of irrigated agriculture in Saharan areas of Algeria and in the occupied Golan Heights in Syria. Our case analysis offers insights into how processes of institutional, technological and ideational bricolage entwine, how the state becomes implicated in them and how multiple instances of bricolage accumulate over time to produce meaningful systemic change. In concluding, however, we reflect on the greater propensity of contemporary bricolage to rebalance power relations than to open the way to more ecological farming practices.

Walking the line: lines, embodiment and movement on the Jordan Trail

This article explores the relationship between movement and cultural politics through a long-distance walking trail – the Jordan Trail. The Jordan Trail is a 650-km trail running the length of Jordan from its northern border with the occupied Golan Heights to the Red Sea. While cultural geography has increasingly engaged with walking, the actual line that is walked along has been neglected. Lines can be violent and destructive. This is exemplified by the drawing of the borders of the Jordanian state, under the British Mandate period following the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire. Lines can impose power on a place, therefore, when defined by a state. In Jordan, these state-drawn lines have created divisions where none have previously existed and have severed movement, particularly Bedouin movement. The Jordan Trail, however, has the possibility to rethink and recapture movement, particularly movement erased by the state. This is where I suggest cultural geographical approaches to lines are important in paying attention to the more experiential and ongoing nature of place. The lines of the Jordan Trail can be created by the movement of a body over the ground, they can be invisible to the human eye and instead told through stories, or they can be the recording of Global Positioning Services (GPS) coordinates. This article is based on 12 months of ethnographic research walking on the Jordan Trail and volunteering for the Jordan Trail Association and as such argues for more embedded explorations of movement and cultural politics in Jordan. I argue that a relationship between movement and cultural politics at the embodied and everyday scale can be explored by attending to the line of a walking trail. The Jordan Trail can highlight the violence of state creation and particularly the imposition of state drawn lines in Jordan and the movements they have cut off and the Trail can also capture embodied accounts of movement and place in which Bedouin and everyday accounts matter.

U.S. Recognition of Golan Heights Annexation: Testament to Our Times

On 25 March 2019, U.S. president Donald Trump signed a proclamation recognizing the occupied Golan Heights as part of Israel. The Golan Heights proclamation, which endorses Israel's annexation of the territory captured from Syria in the 1967 war, was issued two weeks before the Israeli general election in a photo-op with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. Undermining internationally agreed-upon norms prohibiting states from recognizing the annexation of territory by force, the proclamation could have detrimental consequences for the international legal order, providing a precedent for other states to take steps to annex territory they claim is necessary for their defense.

A Political Ontology of Land: Rooting Syrian Identity in the Occupied Golan Heights

AbstractQuestions of identity, belonging and place are heightened in societies under protracted military occupation. Bridging scholarship on territorial justice and settler colonialism, this paper examines the impacts of, and responses to, the misrecognition of Arab residents enacted by the Israeli state in the occupied Golan Heights. The injustice of misrecognition entails the imposition on the indigenous population of a Zionist ethnogeography consolidated through Jewish settlements, forced citizenship and discriminatory land and water policies. Focusing on the distinctive agricultural practices by which a Jawlani (Syrian Golani) identity is forged, we highlight the role of sumud (“steadfastness”) as a strategy of non‐violent resistance. Sumud here rests on the mobilisation of communal norms of land and water management, evident in the creation of counter‐infrastructures and water collectives supporting apple orchards. In the face of settler colonial misrecognition, Jawlani rootedness expresses a distinctive ontology on land with a conjoined right of resourcehood.

Between Two Cells

Between Two Cells Yasser Khanjer (bio) Translated from the Arabic (Syria) by Marilyn Hacker For Mazen Darwish, and all the prisoners of the Syrian regime I hear your voice light up the next celland the question occurs to meWhere does the guard change his clotheswhen he goes from your cell to mine?How does he shift the letters on his lipswithout one of the two "enemy" languages breaking—a language in despair since its creation,gloomy since infancy, lameobliquedeceitfulthat manages, once it's beautified itselfto trap its neighbor, enthralledin undoing the good-luck charms of its childhood—a language with malleable meaningsengrossed by the charms of exegesis,barefoot, like a dancer bent backward,her anklets linking the text's footto the sultan's desire.How does he change the letters on his lips,a guard who pronounces words badlywhen he goes from my cell to yours? * Are you smoking?Reach your hand out between the bars [End Page 12] I'll light your cigarette for you,the last one in the packInhale its smoke in secretso the guard doesn't take it away.The light here is dim,no star knows this wounded horizon.Draw up a little sunlight from your heart,it will gouge out the eye of darkness * The guard's face here, root of a chronic deathand mirror of a massacre there.The guard's face there, bloody with defeatshe only describes in secret.Since he hasn't learned the role of victimhe dresses in his wolf costumeto hunt down a letter in a poem and riddle it with wounds.The guard's face there,memory of a surrender heavy with stories * To the guards here and there, a weakness like dry grassif each one wasn't leaning on a riflethat stands guard over the dunes of his fear,a confession throbbing in a song.And if they exchange a few insultsthe aim is clear,they are only juggling masks.They are a pair of twins,they have one umbilical cord,there where their shadow fell on the eartha slaughter follows a slaughter. * [End Page 13] hear your voice, the brushing of pine needlesas it climbs the steps of prayerthen exhales the perfectly baked bread of freedomtoward a heart open to the winds To the prisoners here and those therea single heartthat gets drunk on a breath of freedom * I have comrades in prisonwho turn each night, penitent, toward pillows of hopeHunger devours themThirst withers themyet they persist in adorning the hip of our shattered agewith a flock of freed birds [End Page 14] Yasser Khanjer Yasser Khanjer was born in 1977 in the occupied Golan Heights. He spent seven years of his twenties in prison for resisting the Israeli occupation. His first collection of poems, Freedom Bird, was published in Beirut during his imprisonment; two others followed, and a fourth book It Is Not Midway, is forthcoming from Al-Mutawassit Publications in Milan. A bilingual Arabic/English collection, Wounds of the Cloud, was published in al-Quds/Jerusalem this year. Marilyn Hacker Marilyn Hacker is the author of thirteen books of poems, including A Stranger's Mirror (Norton) and Names (Norton), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (Michigan). Her translations from the French include Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen (Farrar Strauss and Giroux), which received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and Emmanuel Moses's Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin). For her own work, she received the PEN Voelcker Award for poetry. She lives in Paris. Copyright © 2018 University of Nebraska Press

Fluid Sovereignty: State–Nature Relations in the Hasbani Basin, Southern Lebanon

The concept of fluid sovereignty denotes configurations of state authority in which flows of living and nonliving things, within and across borders, render insecure claims of unconditional territorial control. Loss of monopoly control of the means of violence within a territory conventionally signals weak political sovereignty. Bordering Israel (including the occupied Golan Heights) and Syria, the Hasbani Basin in southern Lebanon seems to exemplify such sovereign failings: Over decades, rival security providers have provoked political instability and conflict in the region. Fluid sovereignty, however, brings to the fore state–nature relations neglected in scholarship on “fragile” or “failing” states. Informed by geographical work on hybrid sovereignties and vital materialism, we show how sovereign claims over the Hasbani Basin extend to (sub)terranean water sources and rainfall-dependent agricultural lands, both of which are deeply securitized. Incomplete centralization and territorialization by Lebanon of the Hasbani Basin evinces fractured state nature—the inability of the state to realize volumetric control of, and authority over, basin waters. This state nature is coproduced by the fluid materiality of the waters themselves, whose hydroclimatic circulation and contingencies are at odds with territorial designs for volumetric control. For rural communities in the Hasbani Basin economically dependent on access to agricultural water, field research reveals a practical experience of fluid sovereignty, both in adapting to water variability and also in navigating use of agricultural borderlands subject to conflict-related dangers. Recent conflict spillovers from the Syrian war have reinforced, for the majority Druze population, the low legitimacy of Lebanese state nature.

The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication

The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication

The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication

The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication

The Anti-Assad Campaign in the Occupied Golan Heights, 2011-2012: Reimagining Syrian Nationalism in a Contested Borderland

Since 1967, both Israel and Syria have laid claim to the Golan Heights, 1,250 square kilometers of territory that lies along the eastern edge of the internationally recognized border between the two countries. Over four decades, the Arab residents of this contested borderland have provided an unusual field for contestation between the two states. Both Israel and Syria, in collaboration with local allies, have enacted a series of programs designed to inculcate national consciousness within the population. This contestation has subsumed many aspects of daily life in the community, instrumentalizing a variety of practices and discourses to spread Israeli or Syrian nationalism. In 2011 and 2012, a small group of local activists organized a campaign to express opposition to the rule of Syrian President Bashār al-Assad. In addition to advertising an anti-regime agenda, this campaign constituted an unprecedented attempt to cultivate an alternative form of Syrian national consciousness in the Golan Heights, defined in opposition to the state-sponsored patriotism of both Israel and Syria.

Down to the River: Identity, Citizenship, Security, Borders and Water in the Occupied Golan Heights

Currently there is no coherent or sustainable water cooperation among the five states—Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestinian territories and Syria—that share the Jordan River. Why do people not cooperate on sustainable river basin management, even if it seems the most rational course from the perspective of economic benefits? I hypothesize that the political uses of citizenship, identity and security at the local level hamper cooperation at the basin level and ignore cognitive dimensions of violence and conflict. In this article, I have chosen the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as a case study to illustrate hydropolitics in praxis, because the political future of this particular area in many respects affects the sustainable future of the Jordan River Basin and the entire Levant.

Non-Violent Resistance: A Strategy for the Occupied Territories

Non-violence is not an innovation in the struggle of the Palestinian people. Palestinians have used non-violent methods since the beginning of the 1930s side by side with the armed struggle in their attempts to achieve their goals against Zionism. The six-month strike of 1936 and the Arab boycott of Israel are two prominent examples of the use of non-violence in the service of the Palestinian cause. In the occupied territories today, the resistance against the occupation does not generally reflect violent methods. School and commercial strikes, petitions, protest telegrams, advertisements and condemnations in the daily papers, and the attempts to boycott Israeli goods are, in fact, manifestations of non-violent struggle. Syrian citizens in the occupied Golan Heights are also conducting a powerful, concentrated and successful campaign of non-violent resistance to the attempts of Israel to impose Israeli law on the Golan Heights.* This campaign appears to be well organized, and intelligent in its methods, ideas, and the execution of classic non-violence tactics.

Appendix: Testimonies from the Occupied Golan Heights

Appendix: Testimonies from the Occupied Golan Heights

Appendix: Testimonies from the Occupied Golan Heights

Appendix: Testimonies from the Occupied Golan Heights