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This article explores the growing connections between the Persian Gulf states and the heavily militarised Israeli innovation ecosystem. The Gulf actors now play an increasing role in support of Israel as a globally expanding 'Start‐up Nation', and are involved in transforming Palestinian land into a regional frontier of technology in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israeli‐Gulf cooperation and its impact on Palestinians, however, has not been thoroughly researched. Drawing from fieldwork among Palestinian and Israeli innovation elites, we map these growing connections between Gulf state actors and Israel and analyse how the occupied Palestinian territories are further enmeshed in complex networks of financial capitalist and settler colonial security interests. Theoretically, the paper advances the critique of the contemporary settler colonial frontier, venturing beyond its usual Eurocentric and binary geographies. We conclude that 'innovation' is both (a) the terrain of expanding structures of Israeli colonisation and (b) the site of productive ambivalences and novel forms of resistance in an evolving regional and global reality. This article explores the growing connections between the Persian Gulf states and the heavily militarised Israeli innovation ecosystem. The Gulf actors now play an increasing role in support of Israel as a globally expanding 'Start‐up Nation', and are involved in transforming Palestinian land into regional frontiers of technology in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Drawing from fieldwork among Palestinian and Israeli innovation elites, we map these growing connections between Gulf state actors and Israel and analyse how the occupied Palestinian territories are further enmeshed in complex networks of financial capitalist and settler colonial security interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article is about an ownership dispute between two Palestinian families in the West Bank. The dispute moves between Palestinian and Israeli forums while drawing upon the legal patchwork of Ottoman, British, and Jordanian land laws, and Israeli military amendments. The multilayered legal terrain coupled with the jurisdictional tension allowed some legal maneuvering. The article explores how the families maneuvered the legal landscape, but it complicates the use of forum shopping in the Palestinian context by adding how settler-colonial domination and political economy play into this phenomenon. Settler colonialism has served to intensify the Palestinian land market through a curated land scarcity, all while managing the distribution of relative "security" and risk of land title. This has affected land value, land availability, and land use. When the settler legal system is known to render Palestinian ownership insecure, why would some Palestinians still choose Israeli registration as a forum in which to register their lands, considering these risks? The article argues that land ownership is a process through which layers of unevenness are inscribed and reproduced. In focusing on the process, the article adds to sociolegal scholarship to explore the role knowledge and capital play in forum shopping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1980s, Palestinian agronomists, activists, and farmers turned land reclamation into an anti-colonial project in the West Bank. Drawing on technical studies, interviews, and fieldwork, this article argues that anti-colonial reclamation is a composite of modernist engineering, peasant tradition, and international Leftist thought. Palestinian experts and voluntary work activists used reclamation to confront colonization and build a political collective to sustain territorial struggle. Today, this legacy shapes plans for landscape transformation and efforts to revitalize village agriculture. Reclamation highlights the importance of agricultural interventions in Palestinian anti-colonialism and reveals connections between seemingly disparate agrarian and Indigenous struggles against dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the increased application of settler colonial theory to analyse settler colonial contexts, critical scholars have highlighted its inadequacies – primarily, that it has marginalised Indigenous knowledge and agency. Palestinian scholars have questioned the paradigm's ability to fully capture the particularities of the Israel–Palestine -context. This paper seeks to contribute to these critiques by exploring Palestinian youth's interpretations of settler colonialism in the West Bank. It draws on qualitative research that explored Palestinian youth's views on and experiences of human rights. This article suggests that Indigenous analyses of settler colonialism seem more relevant to Palestinian youth than the settler colonial analytic. These, along with consideration of the interplay between neoliberalism and -colonisation, may better assist them to understand and articulate settler -colonialism and strategise against it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about a particular kind of settler-colonial phenomenology. It is based on almost two years of anthropological fieldwork in the West Bank, during which the author lived in an illegal Jewish outpost settlement in the Judean Desert frontier. Despite being considered the most extreme settlers, and despite being at the forefront of the colonization of the West Bank, many of the "outpost people" are no longer motivated from the nationalist-messianic ideas that pushed forward the first generation of West Bank settlers. It is by disclosing the phenomenology of the flow that one is able to understand what drives the settler-colonial practices of this new generation of postideological settlers. More than a worldview, the flow is an existential force that animates these people's settler-colonial way of being in the world. In disclosing the flow, this article also offers an understanding of a particular settler-colonial habitus, one that invites a different way to think about habitus as conceptualized by Pierre Bourdieu, and a somewhat different understanding of settler colonialism from the one ingrained in the field by Patrick Wolfe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Marshall examines the case of Maqam Yusuf (the Shrine of Joseph, commonly referred to as Joseph's Tomb in English), a contested religious site near the northern West Bank city of Nablus. Often called a "microcosm" of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the shrine has long been viewed as a site of religious intolerance, marked by regular violent confrontations between Palestinian youths and Israeli soldiers. Such a view obscures deeply rooted traditions of multireligious shrine visitation and veneration practiced by Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Samaritans at Maqam Yusuf and other sites throughout Palestine, traditions that themselves predate the arrival of Abrahamic monotheism. This article presents an alternative perspective, namely, that conflict over the shrine is not one of inherent religious rivalry but is rather a conflict of settler-colonial acquisition and resistance. Going further, this paper considers the violence of erasure, and the politics of forgetting as a form of resistance. Drawing on multigenerational oral histories, Marshall charts the shifting meanings of Maqam Yusuf against the changing geopolitical dynamics of the Israeli occupation, highlighting the silences and gaps in generational memory that surround the site. In particular, the article demonstrates how Maqam Yusuf transformed from a site where women practiced and fashioned their social and religious selves, to a site where young men perform a resistant masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Israeli plans to partially annex West Bank territory have mainly been perceived as frustrating the two‐state solution, and as putting Palestine/Israel on a path leading to the one‐state alternative. This paper analyses partial annexation plans without assuming that the future of Palestine/Israel would necessarily abide by either statist resolution. It argues that by ostensibly distancing Israel's hold of the West Bank from an identifiable configuration of a belligerent occupation, partial annexation is offered to Jewish Israelis as a path for detaching the futurity of the two nations, and as a trajectory for normalising the Israeli state, without having to make what much of this public would see as painful concessions. It further explores settlers' objections to such plans, claiming that even a partial incorporation of West Bank territory into formal Israel is expected to erode the exclusivity of Jewish domination which Israel has been upholding in its settler‐colonial frontier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, Palestine has been the subject and recipient of significant humanitarian and development aid. This article critiques the humanitarian and developmental assistance provided by major donors in Palestine, with a particular focus on the E-1 area in the central West Bank, highlighting its depoliticisation and the misdiagnosis of the context of Palestine as a post-conflict situation, and showing how aid has had an adverse effect on Palestinians. This article, drawing on the Do No Harm approach, argues that aid has not only been ineffective in achieving its stated goals, but has also harmed Palestinians by entrenching the occupation and advancing settler colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a study of the causes and consequences of making Palestinian land into an ethical investment. It builds on fieldwork in villages north of Ramallah where a Palestinian real estate company purchased devalued agricultural lands and offered them to Palestinian buyers as an ethical investment. It argues that through private titling, planning, and infrastructure, this company secured land for potential investors and produced an imaginary of rural areas as empty and unowned. It created enclaves that protect the rights of new owners but undermine the possibilities for collective land defence, and it pioneered a model of development that will transform the use and control of village land across the West Bank. Rather than an example of a company that uses human rights to cover up illegality, this case illuminates the limits of human rights for critiquing capital and settler colonialism and for understanding the forces that are reshaping rural Palestine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Promoting the employment of indigenous peoples has been a key strategy of economic development in settler colonial states. Israel's framing of occupied Palestinian labour in its economy has mirrored this approach, with an implicit claim that it contributes prosperity to the Palestinians. What this false promise hides is how employment and the economic incorporation of indigenous people can become a source of ongoing dispossession in and of itself: a kind of dispossession that is driven by workers' economic inclusion rather than being remedied through it. Based on ethnographic research among Palestinians from the occupied West Bank who work in Israel, this article explores the multiple dispossessions that result from such labour. The article explains how a neoliberal settler economy utilizes a meritocratic regime of indigenous employment to execute a colonial logic of domination. As access to jobs in the settler economy is made conditional on workers' political docility and their continued absence from communal life, the labour regime aims to turn Palestinian livelihood and Palestinian nationhood into mutually exclusive aspirations: it strives to undermine the Palestinians' capacity for social reproduction and anticolonial resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ongoing occupation in Palestine involves structural colonial oppression over the native population, depriving Palestinians of fundamental human rights. The set of political, social, economic, and environmental factors that result from the occupation has a lasting direct and indirect effect on the well-being of the children exposed to systematic violence. In this study, we explored the effect of systematic violence and military oppression in a group of 22 school-aged youths (M = 12.2; SD = 2.69, 45.5% girls) living in the West Bank. We identified factors associated with children's maladjustment to potentially traumatic environments and survival skills following a socio-ecological lens. Data were collected through biographical participative interviews. The TCA identified six themes: the pervasiveness of the Israeli violence; the unexpected costs of the pandemic; victims and perpetrators of intra-community violence; everyday acts of happiness (or normalcy); support from families, peers, and community; subverting negative situations, and fighting back. Children emerged as continuously engaged in adjustment and readjustment to inhuman living conditions, making normal what is abnormal in their development. The study draws attention to the political antecedent and determinants of the Palestinian children's actions and reactions to violence, highlighting the impossibility of exploring children's growth while avoiding political and human rights implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the factors influencing the Israeli government's treatment of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip between 2009 and 2019. The essay argues that the Israeli approach towards the Palestinians can be examined in the broader context of settler colonialism and is not exclusively shaped on a security basis. Semi-structured interviews, documents, and other secondary data sources were employed to determine factors defining Israel's approach in confronting Palestinians. Multiple internal and external factors have shaped the Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Internal elements include power structure, ideology, public opinion, and the colonized people's response. The external factors include the regional (dis-)order and the US-Israel alliance. This analysis finds that most of these factors have fuelled a violent Israeli treatment towards Palestinians. The Palestinian resistance was found to compel Israel to lessen its violent treatment on various occasions. These results indicate that the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is not exclusively shaped on a security basis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the eliminatory speed of Israeli settler colonialism, particularly the ways in which settler organizations aim to accelerate the pace of elimination at the colonial frontiers in Palestine. We show, by focusing on the settler NGO Regavim, how such settler entrepreneurs constantly develop new techniques that challenge the slow and creeping eliminatory pace of state's administrative, legal and security bodies with an intensifying eliminatory speed we call 'dromoelimination'. By closely elaborating the ongoing events in the West Bank village of Susiya, we argue that dromoelimination operates, firstly, through accelerative state-settler dynamics that traverses beyond the eliminatory functions of the state while at the same time fundamentally reconfiguring them; and secondly, by turning Palestinian life and struggle against dispossession, forced displacement and destruction increasingly vulnerable to intensified temporalities of 'depleting time'. Settler colonialism, we contend, becomes comprehensible in a more tangible, complex and spatially nuanced terms when looked through the speed and pace of its movement: that is, through intensified and accelerated eliminatory rhythms – of dromoelimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In settler colonial settings, agriculture is a means of reclaiming territorial sovereignty and indigenous identity. Turning attention to the Jewish settlers in the West Bank and their multiple uses and abuses of organic farming, this article explores epistemic and political spatial operations on the colonial frontier. Applying a relational conceptualization of three spatial modalities—soil, territory, and land—we explore the ways in which these modalities serve as political apparatuses: Soil designates the romantic perception of cultivable space, territory is concerned with borders and political sovereignty, and land is seen as a space of economic value and as a means of production. While agriculture is a well-known instrument of expansion and dispossession, organic farming contributes to the colonial operation by binding together affective attachment to the place, and new economic singularity in relation to environmental and ethical claims. We argue that organic farming practices converge claims for local authenticity, spatial appropriation, and high economic values that are embedded in what we term the colonial quality turn. Ultimately, organic farming in the West Bank normalizes the inherent violence of the colonial project and strengthens the settlers' claim for political privilege. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines settler‐colonial visuality in West Bank Jewish‐Israeli settlements. It argues that settler visuality is attuned to a bourgeois ideal of domestic life, made possible by practices of unseeing. Reading Israeli encounters with the Wall and other artifacts of the occupation, I show that these visual encounters help settlers position themselves politically within Israel—and settlements, as Israel itself. Unseeing is a perceptual practice that makes and remakes space, one required to build the kind of settlements most Israeli settlers desire. This vision is oriented to the domestication of space, cohering with the demands of an extended military occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short intervention starts by discussing Giorgio Agamben's theoretical formulation of 'bare life,' popular in refugee studies. Thinking with the case study of Palestinian refugee camps, particularly in the West Bank, it argues that there are clear limitations to the discourse of biopolitics and bare life. I argue that 'bare life' neither accounts for the multilayered relations of power, particularly colonialism, slavery, and indigenous genocide, that systemically make certain populations more susceptible to its power than others. Nor does it account for the modes of sociality of those who are systemically relegated to its sphere. I conclude by working through some of the theoretical formulations around body politics from the field of Black studies, particularly Alexander Weheliye's 2014 concept of the flesh, in order to explore new directions they may point us towards in refugee studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our special issue provides a first-of-its kind attempt to examine environmental injustices in the occupied West Bank through interdisciplinary perspectives, pointing to the broader settler colonial and neoliberal contexts within which they occur and to their more-than-human implications. Specifically, we seek to understand what environmental justice—a movement originating from, and rooted in, the United States—means in the context of Palestine/Israel. Moving beyond the settler-native dialectic, we draw attention to the more-than-human flows that occur in the region—which include water, air, waste, cement, trees, donkeys, watermelons, and insects—to consider the dynamic, and often gradational, meanings of frontier, enclosure, and Indigeneity in the West Bank, challenging the all-too-binary assumptions at the core of settler colonialism. Against the backdrop of the settler colonial project of territorial dispossession and elimination, we illuminate the infrastructural connections and disruptions among lives and matter in the West Bank, interpreting these through the lens of environmental justice. We finally ask what forms of ecological decolonization might emerge from this landscape of accumulating waste, concrete, and ruin. Such alternative visions that move beyond the single axis of settler-native enable the emergence of more nuanced, and even hopeful, ecological imaginaries that focus on sumud, dignity, and recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I investigate three public transit-centered Palestinian political actions in the West Bank and argue that the activists' framing choices facilitate particular forms of global solidarity. The bus-centered political actions I examine are the Palestinian Freedom Rides of 2011, the Freedom Bus of 2014, and the bus sabotage of 2013. I demonstrate that the activists and participants in each of these cases dexterously move among a collection of terminological frames, invoking racial segregation, racism, and apartheid alongside occupation and colonialism. This rhetorical movement parallels the physical movement that the bus enables and represents. In turn, both forms of movement carry Palestinian political messages beyond the Israeli enclosures in order to connect with diverse solidarity audiences and educate them about Palestinian experiences of im/mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary turn to the settler-colonial framework has allowed an emerging and growing generation of activist-scholars working on Palestine-Israel to think about decolonisation as an alternative to the official conflict-management-focused peace process. This framing has allowed for the articulation of a range of rich and complex discussions concerning the making and unmaking of settler-indigenous relations in Palestine-Israel, as well as the possibility for decolonial cohabitation. This paper's contribution to this ongoing conversation is to theorise the ways in which the widespread adoption of the settler-colonial framework by Israeli and international solidarity activists active in the nonviolent struggle against the West Bank Separation Wall has contributed to the evolution of a praxis of decolonial solidarity articulated through the strategic mobilisation of vulnerability vis-à-vis the violence, repression and dispossession of the settler-colonial state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A contentious issue in the Israel-Palestine conflict is the ongoing construction of settlements in the occupied West Bank along with its related policies, both of which have had impacts on the lives of resident Palestinians. These impacts have been documented by various UN and non-governmental agencies yet have been insufficiently studied in the academic literature. This article aims to review the literature on the social determinants of health for West Bank Palestinians and understand how settlement construction and policy influence these determinants. To accomplish these aims, the article first includes an analysis of how military infrastructure, resource allocation, land appropriation and house demolition related to the settlements influence the lives of West Bank Palestinians. The article then proceeds to review available literature on the social determinants of health in the West Bank, most notably: access to healthcare, exposure to political violence, economic conditions and water contamination, with the goal of understanding how settlement-related policies are related to these social determinants of health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I propose a framework for analyzing context-specific relationships between neoliberal restructuring and simultaneous efforts to reorganize racial and colonial domination. To do so, I explore the articulation between colonization and neoliberalization in the West Bank with a focus on the Bethlehem region. Drawing on qualitative interviews and ethnographic research, the article begins by examining the territorial fragmentation of the Bethlehem region into a series of isolated Palestinian enclosures. These neoliberal enclosures attempt to contain a colonized population that has become increasingly disposable with the restructuring of Israel’s economy. As sites of concentrated inequality and intense marginalization, however, they offer only a precarious form of containment. The article then turns to the Palestinian villages, which have become front lines of the struggle over colonization in the West Bank. In the hills west of Bethlehem, Palestinian villagers confront colonial violence by Israeli settlers and the state. They also confront a crisis of unemployment and rapid urbanization due to neoliberal restructuring. These dynamics have combined to create an indirect form of displacement and a market-based strategy of colonization. Overall, therefore, Palestinians in the West Bank today confront a unique form of neoliberal colonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to explicate a peculiar logic of government Israeli state apparatuses use to control the Palestinian population and colonize the West Bank; namely, the one of slowness, delay and waiting. To understand the operational logic of such governing, I suggest the conditions of recognizing Palestinian rights, their theatric performance by the Israeli state apparatuses, and the maintaining of precarity among Palestinians are the critical aspects to expand. By looking at the West Bank sites close to expanding Israeli settlements, I show how this mode of governing operates by recognizing the Palestinian right to claim justice, security and governance without actualization of these rights, therefore directing Palestinian resistance and sense of injustice to support the theatric functions of settler colonial state. Hence, theaters of recognition are created, the ones that ceremoniously keep administrative, legal and security processes functional, but through the slow processing, stalling and endless piling up of decisions, regulations, requirements and security exceptions do not alleviate the induced precarities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on practices of non-violent resistance as they are played out in the ongoing Palestinian struggle against the Israeli settler colonialism in the occupied West Bank. By looking at the resistance of expanding settlements, demolition and land confiscation orders, and livelihood destruction in two Palestinian sites, the paper shows how Israeli settler colonial apparatuses, and the variety of techniques and practices of erasure they mobilize, can be fruitfully studied through site-specific ways of Palestinian resistance. In order to do so, the paper turns to discuss a peculiar form of non-violent resistance grounded in what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘destituent power’. It shows how the acts of destituent resistance in the two sites under study function by playing with the apparatuses of control in creative but non-violent ways; namely, by using the potentialities of that form-of-life that the settler colonial apparatuses try to cancel, overrule, control, weaken, criminalize, and erase. The idea of ‘destituent play’ is hence elaborated, and special attention paid to its ability to slow down and hamper the repressive functions of the settler colonial apparatuses through the creative use of the potentialities of Palestinian everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]