Israel’s Biospatial Politics

Territory, Demography, and Effective Control

Bibliographic Data

ID18982003
AuthorsYinon Cohen, Neve Gordon (0000-0002-9502-3998)
Year2018
Volume30
Issue2
Pages199-220
Publication date2018-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePublic Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0899-2363 • E-ISSN: 1527-8018
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/08992363-4310888
OpenAlexW2796570705
LanguageEN
Citations received30
References cited22

Using Israel’s land-grabbing practices alongside its demographic classifications as a conceptual lens, this article advances two claims: one about biospatial strategies, including the construction of space as a racialized category, and the other historical. The article shows that the particular biospatial scaffolding underlying Israel’s colonial project has deployed similar strategies of dispossession and settling across the entire territory located between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea. Simultaneously, it draws a connection between these strategies and statistical classifications and techniques of enumeration to delineate Israel’s efforts to racialize the appropriated space. Historically, the article identifies a boomerang trajectory, beginning with the massive confiscation and Judaization of Palestinian land in the wake of the 1948 war, then extending and duplicating many of the practices originally developed inside Israel to the West Bank in 1967, and finally turning back inward to solidify the racialization of land within Israel

Archaeology · Colonialism · Geography · Political science · Politics · Racialization · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Middle East Politics and Society · Turkey's Politics and Society

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