Colonial management as a social field: The Palestinian remaking of Israel’s system of spatial control

Abstract

This article delves into the everyday dynamics of colonial rule to outline a novel way of understanding colonized–colonizer interactions. It conceives colonial management as a social field in which both the colonized and colonizers negotiate and exchange resources, despite their decidedly unequal positions within a racial hierarchy. Drawing their example from the West Bank, the authors argue that a Palestinian economic elite has proactively participated in the co-production of the colonial management of spatial mobility, a central component of Israeli colonial rule. The study employs interviews and document analysis to investigate how the nexus between Palestine’s commercial-logistical needs and Israel’s security complex induced large-scale Palestinian producers to exert agency and reorder commercial mobility. The authors describe and explain the evolution of a ‘Door-to-Door’ logistical arrangement, in which large-scale Palestinian traders participate in extending Israeli’s system of spatial control in exchange for facilitating logistical mobility. This horizontal social encounter that entails pay-offs is conditioned, but not fully determined, by vertical relations of domination and subordination.

Introduction

In January 2018, Israeli military officers arrived at a Palestinian factory in the West Bank and took the plant’s measurements. This was not a typical scene in which the Israeli military occupation forces raid a Palestinian self-rule area ¹ and prepare for a site’s punitive demolition. On the contrary, it was a coordinated visit aimed at installing Israeli security technologies in a large-scale Palestinian factory that exports 90% of its production to Israel. However, the Israeli classification of the Palestinians as a ‘dangerous population’ (Berda, 2017) dictated the security demands of the military officers: they inspected entrances and exits to the factory, ordered the erection of fences around the plant and requested detailed data on the factory’s staff. Moreover, they ordered a closed ‘loading yard’ to be isolated as the exclusive departure dock for the shipment of products to Israel. The loading yard would be overlaid by Israeli surveillance cameras, connected directly to the closest Israeli ‘border’ gate separating the West Bank from Israel. This visit preceded the launch of a ‘Door-to-Door’ logistical arrangement that substantially facilitated the transfer of Palestinian exports to Israel. Contrary to the impression that Israeli hyper-security measures are imposed one-sidedly on Palestinians, the Door-to-Door arrangement was in fact a demand made by Palestinian producers who proactively negotiated commercial mobility. The expansion of Israeli control over their factories and logistical routes within the West Bank was a trade-off that substantially lowered the costs of their commercial freight.

The evolution of this Door-to-Door logistical arrangement brings forth a curious paradox in the relationship between colonized and colonizers: How did the colonized Palestinians manage to reconstruct Israeli colonial rule by advancing new mobility regulations? Palestinian mobility has been largely perceived as being monolithically controlled by Israeli colonial institutions; an element of colonial management that enables the creeping annexation of the West Bank (Azoulay and Ophir, 2013) while subjecting the Palestinian population to segregation and strict mobility constraints (Peteet, 2017). During Palestine’s Second Intifada (2000–2004), Israel’s colonial administration intensified its system of spatial control and erected the West Bank–Israel segregation wall. The wall served as a central tool for sorting and surveilling the daily crossings of Palestinians to Israel. ‘Managed mobility’ (Stoler, 2016) within and across the West Bank was subject to harsh security considerations, as defined by the colonial administration. ² As a result, terrestrial Palestinian freight traveling through the segregation wall was highly affected and delayed three to four hours at the securitized crossing gates, causing severe financial losses (UNCTAD, 2014).

In this article we show that the nexus between Palestine’s daily economic needs and the Israeli system of spatial control induced large-scale Palestinian producers to co-author colonial mobility regulations. Previous scholarship on Palestinian mobility (Bornstein, 2002; Parizot, 2012), and political economy under the Israeli occupation (Hever, 2010; Roy, 2012; Taghdisi-Rad, 2014) is implicitly anchored in broader discussions of colonial rule, in which the actions of the colonized are seen as being limited to either collaboration or resistance. While scholars (including those just cited) have not entirely dismissed the agency exerted by the colonized, they nonetheless conceptualized them as ‘responding’ to a dis/enabling structure. This prism overlooks the everyday colonizer–colonized interactions that also entail those compromises and trade-offs in which the colonized can proactively emerge as co-authors offering exchangeable resources to the colonizers; a complex social encounter that has largely been unobserved.

To highlight the everyday dynamics of colonial rule, we suggest understanding the management of Palestinian mobility in the West Bank as a social field dominated by, but not limited to, the Israeli institutions and agents. In the post-2005 period, management of Palestinian mobility has been settled as a social field in which colonial actors compete for a specific type of capital: capacities to control the Palestinian population. The expansion of surveillance and controlling technologies over the Palestinian population and territories, as the field’s capital, is a precondition to participate in the regulation of Palestinian mobility. The Palestinian producers’ possession of vital spaces that were hitherto beyond the radius of Israeli control enabled them to exchange the extension of Israeli surveillance for the facilitation of commercial-logistical mobility. Nevertheless, as we will show, this case also suggests that the possibilities of the colonized to participate in the colonial management of mobility and to promote changes are stratified along social and economic lines. Only large-scale Palestinian producers with substantial trade volumes were able to solve their logistical plight by reordering colonial mobility regulations. In March 2018, the large-scale producers achieved a better logistics arrangement (OQ, 2019) when their factories and terrestrial logistical routes were reclassified as ‘trusted’ and ‘low-risk’, cutting crossing time from three to four hours to seven to ten minutes (OQ, 2019).

In the first section of this article we conceptualize the colonial management of mobility as a social field to highlight the subtle everyday dynamics of the colonial management of Palestinian mobility after 2005. The second section explores how Palestinian exporters experienced, negotiated and participated in transforming the impeding logistical regulations. The case study is based on semi-structured interviews conducted between August 2019 and February 2020 with Palestinian merchants and policymakers in international, Palestinian and Israeli governmental and non-governmental organizations. Finally, we discuss the social and political implications of these Door-to-Door practices. Substantively, the arrangement redistributed the social hierarchies embedded within the colonial space by empowering/disempowering different economic actors while enabling a new type of infrastructure used to expand Israeli control of the Palestinian territories. Theoretically, we provide a path that reveals and analyzes colonized participation in the production of colonial rule within a structure of racial hierarchy.

Colonial management as a social field

The ‘rule of difference’ (Chatterjee, 1993) is a principle that combines the colonizer and colonized within a hierarchal structure based on unequal positions of dominance and subordination (Osterhammel, 1997). The colonial structure is not static, and frictions between the colonizer and colonized have given rise to diverse literature on how colonial rule is continuously reshaped and transformed by the colonized ‘responses’ (Memmi, 2013; Scott, 1995). However, colonized practices have been conceptualized as ranging from collaboration (Morrissey, 2015) to resistance (Scott, 2009). In different contexts, collaboration was part of direct (dyadic colonialism) or indirect (triadic structure) colonial rule (Mamdani, 1999). Both cases could either reproduce the colonizer’s domination or mitigate the ‘rule of difference’ by advancing part of the native demands (Chae, 2013), whereas resistance either resulted in the radicalization of colonial domination or served as a step toward dismantling colonial rule (Scott, 2009). Despite the obvious differences, the available accounts of collaboration or resistance share a premise that both colonizer and colonized are mutually constructed through their practices. Yet this interaction is almost exclusively approached through a vertical structure–agency paradigm in which the colonizers are the primary authors of colonial rule and the colonized are respondents. Even relational accounts proposed by postcolonial studies that attempt to recover the agency of the colonized (Go, 2013) remain preoccupied by forms of knowledge, identities and culture. As a result, literature on colonized–colonizer encounters overlooks feverish negotiations, compromises, and trade-offs on the material level that have enabled the colonized to emerge as proactive agents despite structural inequality. In this study we do not wish to dismiss the determinacy of the vertical hierarchy or refuse the unequal distribution of power concomitant to settler-colonial structures such as that of Israel’s occupation (Salamanca et al., 2012). Instead, we lay the groundwork to analyze the everyday dynamics of colonial rule by juxtaposing the vertical colonized–colonizer encounter with the horizontal frictions that have been largely unmonitored.

Rather than being mutually exclusive, this horizontal interaction is nested within the total vertical hierarchy characterized by an unequal distribution of power. On the vertical level, the colonized operate within a dis/enabling colonial structure (Chae, 2013) that limits ‘the nature of the terrain available for the colonized to produce their responses’ (Scott, 1995: 197). Conversely, horizontal interactions take place in specific realms of social practices where different groups of colonized and colonizer actors (individuals, classes, organizations and apparatuses) struggle and compete over the inner workings and outcomes of colonial management. Our empirical fieldwork in the occupied West Bank indicates that the colonized also struggle to retake positions and use exchangeable assets and resources to reorient the practicalities of colonial rule. The theory of social fields (Bourdieu et al., 1994) is useful to understand this horizontal type of everyday colonial–colonized relations that remain unobservable when only analyzing the vertical domination.

We propose to disaggregate colonial rule into distinct spheres of management such as managing the mobility of the colonized, territorial planning, industrial policies and so forth. Colonial management becomes a semi-autonomous social field (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992), when the field’s dominant actors (the colonial administrators) develop an implicit consensus on what colonial actors and groups are striving for: a specific type of capital around which the field’s actors compete in cementing colonial management. For instance, when Steinmetz conceptualized the German colonies as distinct social fields, semi-autonomous from the German empire, he recognized the emergence of a particular form of symbolic capital, namely ‘ethnographic capital’: the exhibition of an ‘alleged talent for judging the culture and character of the colonized’ (Steinmetz, 2008: 589). According to him, the acquisition and accumulation of ethnographic capital created competition and struggle between colonialist agents over the production of native policy. Steinmetz focused on proving the semi-autonomy of the colonial state from the mother empire. Therefore, although he recognized the practices and responses of the colonized in shaping the social competition between the colonialist agents (Steinmetz, 2008), he did not extend his discussion of the colonial social field to include the colonized.

Specific realms of colonial management are, as social fields, designated with everyday social encounters between both the colonized and the colonizers because the colonial administrators rely on the colonized to comply in order to operationalize the colonial management. Within this nexus, when the colonized possess resources recognized as bargainable by the colonial administration they can emerge as proactive actors endowed with maneuvering power in the field. The social field as a relational space defined by struggles over capital (Bourdieu et al., 1994) is thus a useful method to reveal daily colonizer and colonized interactions as a social competition based on pay-offs. It is crucial to understand this type of social encounter found in specific realms of colonial management as nested within the overarching racial hierarchy which Bourdieu would call the field of power (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Hence, the semi-autonomous realm of colonial management is better understood as an overlap between two principles: an external principle of hierarchization that applies to the realm of management the unequal distribution of power prevailing in the colonial structure, and an ‘internal or autonomous principle that hierarchizes in accordance with the values specific to the field’ of management (Mounier, 2001: 71). Moreover, the social field enables us to rethink the colonized not as a unified category within a social class of Palestinian producers, but as unequal actors whose ability to challenge and co-construct colonial rule is socially stratified according to the volume of economic and symbolic capital possessed (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). To exemplify the proactive role of the colonized in co-authoring colonial rule we turn to the management of Palestinian mobility in the occupied West Bank.

The colonial management of Palestinian mobility

Since 1967 the Israeli occupation of the West Bank has resulted in a colonial rule that rests on three principles. Demographically, Israel manages Palestinians as non-citizen subjects and governs them through a variety of exclusionary policies aimed at legally separating them from Israeli citizens (Gordon, 2008). Economically, colonial rule has rendered the West Bank a de-developed economy that is dependent upon the much more advanced Israeli economy, especially in trade (Roy, 2012; Taghdisi-Rad, 2014). Territorially, successive colonial regulations have tried to limit Palestinian residency to highly populated spaces, enabling the expansion of Israeli civilian settlements (Hanafi, 2013). The configuration of these three principles have shifted through the years (Gordon, 2008), but has been managed by a colonial administration that comprises multiple actors from the Israeli military and governmental institutions as well as public and private organizations and executive Israeli institutions (Berda, 2017). The Israeli Military Administration (1967–1981) preceded the Civil Administration (1981–) that still consolidates the patchwork of interests and practices into institutionalized decrees that shape contemporary colonial rule in the West Bank.

Management of Palestinian mobility through spatial policies controls the Palestinian population and territories and shapes the scope and extent of the West Bank–Israeli economic relations ³ (Azoulay and Ophir, 2013). Especially in bilateral trade, the stratum of Palestinian producers who have emerged as subcontractors for the Israeli private sectors (Samara, 2000) are particularly vulnerable to mobility regulations. In contrast to the relatively fluid mobility in the first two decades of colonial rule (1967–1991), the Oslo Accords ushered in a realm of colonial management around Palestinian mobility with its own microcosm of internal institutional logics. During the Oslo peace negotiations (1993–1999), Israeli military forces withdrew from highly populated Palestinian areas that became self-ruled by a newborn Palestinian Authority (PA). The Palestinian self-rule territories (known as Areas A and B), out of which most commercial Palestinian freight originates, are non-continuous enclaves surrounded by contiguous Israeli spaces (known as Area C). The semblance of a two-state paradigm during the Oslo period did not end the function of the Civil Administration, but introduced a double-headed bureaucracy in which the dominant colonial administration liaised with the PA in its administrative responsibilities for the self-rule areas (Berda, 2017). However, the territory’s administrative division was accompanied by the colonial introduction of a permit regime which gradually subjugated Palestinian civilian and commercial mobility across the self-rule enclaves to Israeli security considerations. These developments surfaced the everyday frictions between colonial administration and Palestinian merchants, producers and commercial subcontractors.

The militant Palestinian attacks against Israel during the 1990s and the breakout of the Second Palestinian Intifada (2000–2004) accelerated self-rule territorial segregation for being dangerous spaces. This further shaped the management of Palestinian mobility across the West Bank as a semi-autonomous social field settled to ensure Israeli security through tightening control over Palestinians. According to Bourdieu (2000), a settled social field is one where colonialist agents not only agree on the type of capital (capacities for control), but also on how is it is measured. In the field of managing Palestinian mobility, control was accumulated and measured by one or more of the following technologies: First, by the infrastructure of incarceration technologies. This segregation system entailed checkpoints, iron gates, settler-only roads, closed zones, electric fences, etc. Most importantly, Israel erected a segregation wall between the whole of the West Bank and Israel. Incarceration converted the dispersed Palestinian self-rule areas into enclosed territories (Handel, 2014), significantly affecting commercial mobility within and across the West Bank (Peteet, 2017). Second, by the expansion of Israeli surveillance technologies over Palestinian spaces: a colonial practice that gradually converted West Bank spaces into an Israeli surveillance hub (Zureik, 2011). Third, in addition to those territorial-based mechanisms of control, a massive population management system controls Palestinians through a permit regime (Berda, 2017) that subjugates their mobility to Israeli security, political and economic interests.

From 2005 the mobility regulations were institutionalized as a mechanism of control, paving the way for two seemingly inconsistent interests to converge: on the one hand, the geopolitical agenda of the colonial administration that results in further mobility restrictions, and on the other hand, the geo-economic interests of Palestinian producers keen to facilitate commercial mobility. This convergence was enabled precisely because indirect taxes on Palestinian exports were calculated and paid for upon the crossing between the West Bank and Israel (Elmusa and El-Jaafari, 1995). Based on the Oslo Accord’s Protocol on Economic Relations, the Israeli government (the importer) is responsible for monitoring incoming commercial freight and calculating accrued taxes to be collected from the PA (the exporter). Israel embedded this responsibility into the system of spatial control so the commercial West Bank wall gates operated both as security inspection gates and as taxing stations. Palestinian producers, as much as they are central to certain Israeli industries, are compelled to obey Israeli taxation procedures to preserve and legitimize their profitable relations with the Israeli market. However, taxation mechanisms are not external to the Israeli system of spatial control. On the contrary, the crossing gates served as a necessary station for both taxation and security inspection processes. Therefore, large-scale producers found themselves compelled to stream only through the crossing gates and to follow the microcosms of the Israeli mobility regulations to formalize their trade through the taxation process.

As restrictions on Palestinian mobility expanded in the aftermath of the Second Intifada, West Bank trade dependency on Israel ⁴ increased for two reasons. First, despite the fact that the system of spatial control raised the average cost of commercial shipment from the West Bank to Israel to USD 500–600 per truck, it still lies far below the costs of exporting to a third country (Paltrade and PSC, 2013). Second, international donors as well as the Israeli and Palestinian private sectors encouraged further Palestinian–Israeli trade relationships (Haddad, 2016). As a result, the total volume of West Bank commodity exports to Israel rose from USD 286 million in 1996 (91% of total exports) to USD 956 million in 2018 (85% of total exports) (PCBS, 2020).

The majority of scholarship on how the Israeli system of spatial control has reconstructed the Palestinian economy is premised on the assumption that Israeli colonial rule is exclusively shaped by Israeli agents that monolithically dominate the colonial administration. Studies on the Palestinian political economy under occupation (Hever, 2010; Khalidi, 2016; Roy, 2012) assumed that Palestinian trade (Samour, 2016), labor migration (Bornstein, 2002), logistics mobility (Alimahomed-Wilson and Potiker, 2017) and other aspects of the Palestinian economy (Gordon, 2008) are totally subject to, and affected by, the impediments of the Israeli system of spatial control, especially in the aftermath of the Palestinian Second Intifada (2000–2004). A few studies challenged the notion of exclusive Israeli control over mobility by exemplifying different ways Palestinian economic actors ‘bypass’ Israeli mobility restrictions, such as the smuggling practices in Parizot’s investigation of labor networks (2012), or Garb’s study of commercial freight (2015). However, such illuminative literature focused on how Palestinian practices are innovating alternatives to, rather than attempts at proactively co-authoring, the colonial regulations concerning segregation and closures. Therefore, such literature has overlooked the relational effects of actions of both colonized and colonizers due to high economic integration between the West Bank and Israel. To exemplify the daily encounters between Palestinian merchants and the Israeli system of spatial control, we can trace the Palestinian producers’ logistical journey across the West Bank.

Upon completing large parts of the segregation wall (2002–2007), four commercial gates were gradually designated as the only corridors for Palestinian commercial exports to Israel, namely: Jalameh, Al-Taybeh, Betunia and Tarqumya ⁵ (USAID, 2015). The gates’ bureaucratic operation, as security inspection stations as well as the only taxation points, required various Israel military organizations (Civil Administration, police, border guards, district coordination officers) and authorities (Israel taxation authority, various ministries) to cooperate. From 2005, a ‘Back-to-Back’ procedure was imposed as the only mechanism for transferring Palestinian freight: goods originating from Palestinian spaces were loaded onto Palestinian trucks. Inside the crossing compound, they were reloaded onto Israeli trucks after being exposed to both a prolonged Israeli security inspection and tax registration procedures (Alimahomed-Wilson and Potiker, 2017). According to Moshe Bracha, head of the Civil Administration’s economic department in 2012–2015, the Back-to-Back policy was justifiable because Palestinian commercial products originated from dangerous and unsecured areas in the West Bank. By looking closely at the complexity and intertwining of both the Palestinians’ economic lives and the Israeli system of spatial control, we can trace how the relational position of the colonized enables them to participate in refining the management of Palestinian mobility by transcending the Back-to-Back mechanism.

Methodology

Our fieldwork focused on Palestinian shipments through the Tarqumya and Al-Taybeh crossings, at which the affected producers spearheaded attempts to transform the Back-to-Back procedures. At those two crossings, large-scale Palestinian producers acquired participating status within the social field’s mobility management and co-produced new mobility arrangements. Tarqumya, the most dominant crossing, is located west of Hebron and produced 32% of West Bank exports to Israel between 2010 and 2018. Al-Taybeh, the second largest crossing, lies west of Nablus city, with an average share of 14% of the total West Bank exports during the same period (PCBS, 2020; USAID, 2015). Our study was based on 22 in-depth interviews conducted between September 2019 and March 2020 that included 12 large-scale producers in Hebron and Nablus, all of whom export more than two trucks to Israel daily and circulate trade amounting to NIS 1–40 million annually. Four small-scale producers from Nablus with an annual trade volume of under NIS 100,000 were also interviewed. All 16 interviewed Palestinian producers were either owners or CEOs of Palestinian factories and were questioned on the direct and indirect negotiations with the colonial administration to mitigate the logistics restrictions. Moreover, we interviewed the former head of the economic department in the Civil Administration; representatives from the Office of the Quartet and USAID – two international organizations involved in promoting Palestinian–Israeli economic relations. Finally, we interviewed the directors of Hebron and Tulqarem Chambers of Commerce as well as a representative of the Israeli private sector who occupies a senior position in the Manufacturers’ Association of Israel, as witnesses of incessant Palestinian efforts to negotiate mobility restriction and advance change. Our analysis also includes secondary material comprised of published (the Quartet ⁶ reports) and unpublished documents (USAID reports) received from our interviewee in USAID. These documents were crucial in complementing our fieldwork with statistics, company names and the chronology of Palestinian producers and Israeli colonial administration negotiation.

The evolution of the Door-to-Door arrangement

Our fieldwork highlighted five main obstacles created in the Back-to-Back process that led Palestinian traders to negotiate change. First, Palestinian producers suffered doubled shipment costs because cargo was transported to Israel using Palestinian and Israeli trucks that meet back-to-back at the crossing. Second, the waiting time per shipment at the crossings ranged from three to four hours due to security inspections. The delay limited the number of Palestinian shipments that could be processed and it became unfeasible to raise the productivity of the production lines. Third, Israel compelled the Palestinian exporters to use wooden pallets to pack their cargo while shipping on both trucks, limiting the size of goods that could be shipped per truck. Fourth, inspection procedures caused damage while unloading the pallets and checking their contents. Fifth, crossing protocols were unstable and uncertain so that Palestinian exporters often did not have advance warning about any Israeli changes in procedures and requirements. Altogether, these setbacks prompted Palestinian producers’ counter-initiatives toward the colonial administration. The general director of Hebron Chamber of Commerce explained that the Back-to-Back policy became ‘unfeasible’ and that ‘it became necessary that Palestinian producers look for alternatives’. The experience of the Back-to-Back commercial mobility system placed the Palestinian producers at a crossroads: either lose their lucrative non-substitutable relationships with the Israeli market or preserve their subcontracting businesses by mitigating the mobility procedures produced by the colonial administration.

Contrary to previous scholarship (Alimahomed-Wilson and Potiker, 2017) and reports (UNCTAD, 2014; World Bank, 2017) that assumed a homogeneous Palestinian experience of the Back-to-Back plight, our fieldwork revealed that trade volume played a significant role in shaping Palestinian responses. While large-scale producers attempted to negotiate with Israeli military officers, Palestinian officials and Israeli acquaintances in the private sector, small-scale and seasonal merchants innovated smuggling and alternatives routes (Habbas, 2021). Large-scale Palestinian producer interlocutors, who refrain from smuggling, stressed the need to adhere to both taxation regulations and Israeli security demands to preserve the legality of their trade relations with the Israeli market. Because of its dual functionality as both a security inspection point as well as the only taxation station to formalize trade, the crossing mechanism was a convergence point for the seemingly inconsistent interests of large-scale Palestinian producers and the colonial administration. Because the large-scale producers emerged as subcontractors of low-cost products essential for the Israeli market, their scale of trade granted them some maneuvering power within the field of the management of Palestinian mobility, and Israeli colonial institutions were inclined to incorporate their interests into their bureaucratic practices. According to Bracha, almost all Palestinian businesspeople, producers and exporters approached the Israeli occupation institutions to advance their individual interests. However, only large-scale traders with significant trade circulation received the attention of the Israeli apparatus. ⁷

Large-scale producers learned that neither the PA (the formal political representative of the Palestinian population) nor the Chambers of Commerce (the Palestinian private sector representative) were capable of resolving mobility impediments. ⁸ Between 2010 and 2018, a relatively calm period in terms of security, two separate Palestinian initiatives were advanced to attenuate Israeli border-crossing regulations and foster large-scale exports to Israel. First, frustrated by the long queues and the waiting times of the Back-to-Back system, various exporters convinced Israeli military personnel to innovate a ‘priority’ procedure. As one large-scale exporter explained:

The best VIP service that we were allowed to have is that out of the four trucks they permitted us to enter only one truck in the early hours using Back-to-Back. Even this exceptional truck that was allowed to bypass long queues in the morning, it took them between one and a half to two hours to check it. ⁹

The second agreement was a ‘yard allotment’ mechanism. Palestinian exporters obtained a specific yard inside the crossing compound as a ‘personal’ space to store goods after they went through the Back-to-Back procedures, thus reducing supply chain costs. Both modest arrangements remained oral, unofficial and undeclared. ¹⁰ Although these sporadic innovations alleviated some of the supply chain obstacles, none of them transcended the core of the Back-to-Back system: the classification of the Palestinian factory and the long logistics routes in the Palestinian territories as ‘dangerous’ spaces that lay outside the Israeli surveillance system.

When Palestinian traders negotiated with the colonial administration, they had difficulty converting oral arrangements and modifications into formal practices, so critical for their daily economic needs. According to Bracha, Civil Administration departments were not comfortable institutionalizing Palestinian-driven modifications, especially because border-crossing mechanisms are an Israeli ‘security’ affair; ‘we all need international bodies or international governments to mediate the modifications’. ¹¹ Likewise, a Palestinian chamber of commerce director underlined the fact that ‘if the Palestinians demanded changes for a hundred years’, the Israelis would not adhere to their requests. ¹² With the Israelis and Palestinians holding unequal positions in any negotiations on mobility, the international community played a crucial rule in bridging Palestinian economic demands with Israeli territorial and security demands (Haddad, 2016).

Both USAID and the Office of Quartet articulated the logistical plight as a technical problem that could be addressed through a depoliticized solution and devoted notable budgets to enhance Palestinian–Israeli economic integration. For instance, in 2005 USAID launched the Palestinian Integrated Trade Arrangement, a seven-year project with a USD 56 million budget to assist Israel in easing the movement of Palestinian goods in and out of Israel (USAID, 2012). As part of the project, USAID launched the Known Trader Program at Tarqumya crossing that piloted a ‘secured supply chain’ by offering a separate ‘fast lane’ for trusted trader shipments (USAID, 2012: 24). For this purpose, USAID chose 20 Palestinian production factories whose owners previously had sporadic and oral negotiations over mobility with the Civil Administration. The primary criteria for the choice of ‘trusted’ participants was an index of trade volumes, customs compliance with taxation authorities on both sides and the ability to secure the supply chain (USAID, 2015). In return for their voluntary compliance with the surveillance system, the ‘trusted’ Palestinian producers ‘were allowed not to wait in a queue in the gates’; once they arrive, they can start the Back-to-Back process. ¹³ The ‘fast lane’ resulted in a substantial increase in exports and a notable reduction in logistical costs. The Known Trader Program was applied as a short-term pilot that did not totally surpass the Back-to-Back mechanism. However, once the struggle between the multiple actors within the social field of mobility management was legitimized by the mediation of international parties, Palestinian producers were able to participate and co-construct commercial mobility confinements. Because the producers were acutely aware of their unequal position within the social field, they had to comply with Israeli security and colonial geopolitics in return for logistical flexibility.

Palestinian remaking of colonial routes

In March 2018, the Door-to-Door pilot was launched at Tarqumya crossing as a qualitative leap in the prolonged negotiations. The arrangement reconfigured the system of spatial control through extending Israeli surveillance and reclassifying logistics routes as ‘secured’ and ‘low-risk’. First, instead of using Palestinian and Israeli trucks that met back-to-back at the crossing, Door-to-Door permitted exporters to use only one Israeli truck that delivered products from the door of the Palestinian factory to the door of the Israeli client. Second, instead of the security inspection at Tarqumya crossing point, cargo was inspected at the departure point (the Palestinian factory) and conducted by Palestinian workers under the remote supervision of Israeli officers. Third, Door-to-Door permitted Palestinian trucks to bypass the long queues and cross into Israel through designated fast lanes. One Palestinian producer summarized the three innovations sarcastically:

It is I am inside Israel now. It takes me only 10 minutes to cross the gate. As if the driver stopped to drink coffee on the road. That’s it. It is not a gate anymore. ¹⁴

The producer’s statement that the Palestinian factory was now located ‘inside Israel’ is not only a metaphor. Although the production facility remained in the heart of a self-ruled Palestinian territory, it was incorporated into the Israeli surveillance system and spatialized security procedures. Our visits to the production sites revealed the extent of Israeli demands and the way it turned the factory into a securitized Israeli space. First, each Palestinian factory had to allocate a special closed yard within its facility as a loading dock for the cargo. Various Israeli military officers visited the factory site and approved the applicability of the chosen yard to the Israeli security measurements. Second, cement and wire fences supported by an alarm system surrounded the yard that was covered with an Internet Protocol Camera feeding data directly to an Israeli military office at the proximate commercial gate. Third, only qualified Palestinian employees were authorized to load the Palestinian cargo onto Israeli trucks. These certified Palestinian employees underwent a three-day security course supervised by the Civil Administration. They were trained to watch the loading dock 24/7 and to report daily to their Israeli military supervisors. Fourth, it was not only the factory site that turned into a hub for Israeli surveillance, but also the entire logistical route through the West Bank. Every freight truck had to install a GPS tracking system that allowed Israeli military agents to surveil the shipment on the road through the West Bank. Fifth, a relative of each factory owner had to accompany the truck from the Palestinian factory until it approached the Israeli crossing point. This person, keen on protecting the family business, had an incentive to verify that the trucks did not stop for unjustified reasons and that they arrived at the crossing point within the time limits set by Israeli officers.

The successful Palestinian attempts to co-author commercial mobility regulation and enjoy substantial facilitations demanded high costs. Reconfiguring Israeli control of Palestinian space roped Palestinian factories and families into the network of surveillance and spatial control. However, we do not classify the producers’ acceptance to convert their spaces into an Israeli surveillance hub as collaboration with the colonizers, nor as a total surrender to the colonial regime. Palestinian producers recognize colonial rule as the main obstacle and define their arrangements as a type of ‘resisting’ and ‘challenging’ mobility constraints. However, this challenge resulted in a Palestinian co-authoring of colonial regulations; a social encounter that rests on pay-offs and capital converting within the social field of mobility management. Through their relentless daily demand and negotiation for fluid logistical routes, ¹⁵ Palestinian producers learned that security-through-control is a precondition to participate in the production of mobility. The expansion of Israeli control over Palestinian factory spaces and production processes meant Palestinians became participants in the social field of colonial mobility management. This participation enabled them to play a proactive role in reordering commercial mobility. ¹⁶ As explained by one large-scale producer:

We suggested that we want the Israeli truck to enter from Israel and reach our own factories. If they want security guarantees, they are free to do it. So, they called it ‘Door-to-Door’. It was our idea. ¹⁷

However, while Palestinian traders co-initiated the arrangement ¹⁸ and generated additional profits on the level of each factory, the Door-to-Door did not mitigate what Roy (2012) calls the ‘de-development conditions of the Palestinian economy’. In fact, it exacerbated Palestinian dependency on Israel by encouraging more, and facilitating, subcontracting relations. Most importantly, the traders had little or no control over the way the new logistics were operationalized in accordance with Israeli securitized logic. These logistical measures were devised by various Israeli authorities such as the Civil Administration, the Israeli police and border guard apparatuses, General Secret Service and the Israeli Hebron district coordination office. Agents of this apparatus repeatedly visited the Palestinian factories and examined the preparations prior to approving the security eligibility of each factory. ¹⁹ Moreover, the Quartet subcontracted a ‘neutral’ international supply chain expert who visited each candidate factory and ‘took photos and watched everything’, but ‘cared more about the Israel security as a top priority’. ²⁰

From March 2018 to September 2019, Door-to-Door expanded to 11 Palestinian factories in Hebron and another four in Nablus (Al-Taybeh crossing). In 2020 the project enrolled several other factories in Tulqarem and Jenin cities, with further efforts made by the Quartet Office and additional large-scale producers to target commercial crossings to Jordan through King Hussein Bridge. ²¹ Despite initial suspicions, Door-to-Door became a coveted arrangement, as reported by the director of the Hebron Chamber of Commerce: ‘each day between four and five new producers begged me [to recommend their names to the Quarter] to include them in the new round’. ²² Quartet reports cite Door-to-Door as reducing costs of over half a million dollars for five large-scale producers in 2018 (OQ, 2019). The beneficiaries stated that the reduction of time and uncertainty enabled them ‘to compete with Israeli competitors in the quality of delivery services’.

Significantly, the volume of Palestinian trade affected the producers’ participation in the program. Large-scale producers with relatively small trade volumes were reluctant to concede to the harsh Israeli security demands and some even withdrew from the program. ²³ It should also be emphasized that not only was Door-to-Door co-advanced by large-scale producers, it was also institutionalized as a privileged arrangement only possible for large-scale producers. When the Tulqarem Chamber of Commerce inquired in January 2020 about the procedures needed to expand Door-to-Door to their small city, the Israeli Civil Administration faxed them stating that only large-scale producers with an annual minimum of NIS 10 million circulated trade with Israel can be potential candidates.

Despite the Door-to-Door being presented as a ‘win-win’ situation by both the Palestinian chambers of commerce and Israeli authorities, there were ‘losers’, nonetheless. First, Dan Catarivas, ²⁴ the director of the foreign trade division for the Manufacturers’ Association of Israel, revealed a range of reactions by the Israeli private sector toward the substantial increase in Palestinian commercial mobility. In certain branches, such as plastics and furniture industries, Israeli companies were frustrated by the ‘border’ that vanished and led to increased competition from low-cost Palestinian producers. Second, while Back-to-Back had disastrous effects on the producers, Palestinian truck owners benefited from it as their shipping businesses prospered around the commercial crossings. Because Door-to-Door only demanded the use of a single Israeli truck, Palestinian truck owners became unemployed. Third, certain small-scale producers were harmed by Door-to-Door. In the furniture sector in Nablus, most manufacturers are small-scale actors to whom Israel turned a blind eye in their use of clandestine routes that passed through Jewish settlements. However, when the large-scale furniture producers joined Door-to-Door in September 2019, Israeli enforcement rose to protect the arrangement and shut down 11 Palestinian warehouses that used Jewish settlements as transit stations. The aggrieved small-scale producers accused large-scale furniture producers who joined Door-to-Door of deploying the Israeli authorities to fight illegal logistics routes to raise their own share in the Israeli market. ²⁵

Conclusion

The system of spatial control imposed by Israel after the Second Palestinian Intifada (2000–2004) obstructed the logistics routes connecting Palestinian factories in the West Bank with Israeli markets, greatly impeding commercial shipments by Palestinian producers. In a successful attempt to overcome this blow to their businesses, large Palestinian producers (assisted by third parties) negotiated with the colonial administration, effectively co-producing revisions of colonial spatiality. Our fieldwork followed this attempt by colonized economic actors to exercise agency and change institutional arrangements despite their domination by the Israel colonial apparatus. Building on Bourdieu’s field theory, we introduced the colonized producers as proactive players in the Israeli social field of Palestinian mobility management. The ability of the colonized to participate in co-authoring regulations concerning colonial management was limited to the social field’s boundaries (Hussin, 2016), and was dominated by Israeli colonial actors and their security concerns. Because Palestinian mobility management has been settled by the accumulation of Israeli control over Palestinian territory, population and economy, large-scale Palestinian producers offered the expansion of Israeli surveillance over territories deep inside the areas administrated by the PA in return for commercial efficiency.

Building on this example of the relational interactions between colonized and colonizers, our analysis offers a path to understand the inner workings of everyday colonial rule and its dynamics by recognizing the agency of colonized subjects beyond the mechanisms of collaboration and resistance. Despite inequality and domination as inherent features of colonial structures, an empirical examination of colonized practices within specific realms of colonial management reveals when and how the interests of colonizers and colonized can converge, diverge and compete, resulting in unexpected nuances in colonial rule. Our study of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank illustrates that settler-colonial settings and other regimes of military and political domination are spheres of complex social interactions in which the oppressed are actively participating.