Settler-Colonial Assemblages and the Making of the Israeli Frontier: Palestinian experiences of (in)security, surveillance and carceral geographies

Abstract

This dissertation examines the operations of contemporary Israeli security machinery as it unfolds in the course of expanding the Israeli colonial frontier over Palestinian rural areas of the occupied West Bank. Since the early 1990s and up to the present, Israeli security measures and monitoring technologies multiplied and have come to operate across various public, hybrid and civilian actors and institutions that orchestrate control over Palestinian bodies as a mean to dispossess them and expand the Israeli frontier over their lands through the erection of settlements. In order to study how the Israeli frontier is made today, this dissertation follows Palestinian villagers’ everyday experiences of (in)security and control as they play out through a multitude of formal and informal colonial actors, institutions and technologies — in other words, through a settler-colonial assemblage. Informed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ontology of ‘assemblage thinking’, and drawing on their theorizations regarding power, politics and contemporary war-making, this dissertation pays attention to various domains in which the Israeli assemblage operates today in relation to Palestinian bodies and landscapes. More specifically, the dissertation identifies dominant features of Israeli power as they play out across imaginative and spatiotemporal domains of the Israeli assemblage, highlighting relations between political and security discourses, securitization practices, and the movement and intensity of control and violence. By investigating the operations of Israeli power in rural areas of the West Bank, this dissertation offers novel conceptual insights regarding political processes and logics that inform contemporary Israeli regimes of control and colonization in the occupied Palestinian territory more broadly.