Suchergebnisse

Barred entry to Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, Western photojournalists and TV crews found themselves confined to the Israeli side of the border during the assault, peering along the barrels of IDF artillery. The following essay reflects on what was said and heard among them on a sunny day in January 2009, how they and local Israeli spectators related to the violence, and how these two perspectives were tacitly elided in photographs of the war.

When Club Med arrived in Israel in 1961, it found on the country's northern coast a golden beach with picturesque ruins and no people——the kind of place where a weary European could ""feel so far away, yet be so near."" Palestinians who once lived in the coastal village of al-Zib feel the same way. Driven from their homes in 1948, some returned to the vicinity of their destroyed village after the war, to resettle on the margins of Israel's conscience and the globalized fantasies of leisure that have since been enacted on the ruins of their homes.

Since 2002, the ""Separation Fence"" has emerged as Israel's most defini-tive effort at reshaping the West Bank to date. Surveying the project's genealogy, ideological underpinnings, and diplomatic context, the article maps its concomitant implications: the bantustanization of the West Bank and any Palestinian state on some 50 percent of the territory; the fragmentation of Palestinian society and economy; the expansion and consolidation of Israeli settlement; and the physical and ""virtual"" transfer that looms as its conclusion. The author argues inter alia that the project has thus rendered irrelevant the current international ""me-diations"" in the conflict and terminally threatens also the idea of a two-state solution to the conflict.

During Oslo, a Palestinian industrial estates scheme sponsored by international donors was marketed as a template for the occupied territories' integration into global markets. This article traces the project's significance as an encounter between donor agendas, development discourses, and the nexus of Israeli security prerogatives and Palestinian clientele politics that shaped Oslo's political economy. It argues that in addition to dubious economics, the scheme provided rent-seeking opportunities to Israeli middlemen arbitrating between Israeli security apparatuses and Palestinian economic elites, both rehearsing a wider tendency of development projects to obscure issues of power and control, and ultimately itself reinvesting a local, colonial genealogy of development as control.