Contested space: Control and resistance in Rema Hammami’s East Jerusalem

Abstract

Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian neighbourhood of East Jerusalem, is considered by Israel as part of their state, and by Palestinians as under occupation. This contested locality is where Rema Hammami, a Palestinian anthropologist and writer, has lived for over 20 years, witnessing escalating Israeli control of the territory. Through an examination of Hammami’s autobiographical essay, “Home and Exile in East Jerusalem” (2013), this article explores the effects of Israel’s colonization of land on Hammami and her community as they struggle to protect their environment. It draws on a paradigm expressed by many critics (including Hammami) of Israeli tactics as a complex system of spatial control. It also assesses various assertions that the spatial politics of Palestine/Israel challenge temporality; in particular, the distinction between — and passage from — colonial to postcolonial. Overall, the article reiterates the relevance of spatial thinking for analysing the conflict and its contested localities, and demonstrates that such thinking is a productive way of reflecting on Palestinian life-writing.

Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1994: 6)

Applied to Jerusalem, Edward Said’s well-known description of our compulsion to fight for space, and what drives and defines it, is particularly pertinent. In a city historically overburdened by people asserting their claim to it, this struggle over space is underpinned by imaginings, not just of the past as a means to justify the present, but also an (often exclusionary) imagining of what the present is, and what the future should be. As the historian F. E. Peters observes, “[t]his city, perhaps above all others, has multiple histories, discordant accounts of what it was and what it is and what it will be” (2008: 14). Emblematic of this discord today is the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem and the vision that drives it: an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state of Israel, which simultaneously elides the city’s Arab heritage and deprives its Palestinian inhabitants. Discussing the struggle over land in a specific context, Said — who was born in Jerusalem — laments Israel’s plans for the city as “an assault not only on geography, but also on culture, history, and religion” (1996: 7), thus indicating the far-reaching consequences of the principle of exclusion.

Unsurprisingly, a fierce counter-narrative to Israel’s claims to the whole city is prevalent in Palestinian life-writing that deals with Jerusalem, whether by current residents or those exiled from the city. The relative availability and breadth of both Arabic- and English-authored autobiographical texts addressing Jerusalem from a Palestinian perspective is understandable given that Palestinian life-writing is now a well-established field and that Jerusalem remains central to the Israel–Palestine conflict. ¹ Celebrating both the quantity and quality of autobiographical works, Salma Khadra Jayyusi asserts in her influential anthology of Palestinian literature that Palestinian writers can never entirely divorce their writing from political realities and that “[p]ersonal account literature by Palestinian writers is perhaps the greatest witness to the age of catastrophe” (1992: 66). The prevalence of Palestinian life-writing that pays attention to catastrophe is also noted by Bart Moore-Gilbert, who in his assessment of postcolonial life-writing remarks that since the Nakba (“Catastrophe”) of 1948 and especially since the Six-Day War of 1967 (when Israel illegally annexed East Jerusalem and took control of the West Bank and Gaza), “the sub-genre has flourished in direct proportion to Israel’s ever-tightening stranglehold on Palestinian lives and resources. One might even argue that it has become the major branch of contemporary Palestinian literature” (2009: 115). There is no doubt that many Palestinian writers seek to reflect on, and speak out against, the occupation of their shrinking localities and the degradation of their resources. In light of the historic and ongoing difficulties that Palestinians face throughout the occupied territories, paying attention to these narratives is arguably a vital task. ²

A Palestinian anthropologist and writer, Rema Hammami is a long-time resident of the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Through a close examination of her autobiographical essay, “Home and Exile in East Jerusalem” (2013), I will explore Palestinian life in the locality, concentrating on the battle to remain in the city and the struggle to travel through it. I shall also draw on Hammami’s anthropological output, which focuses on the impact of Israeli occupation on Palestinians, with a particular emphasis on gender and economic issues, civil society, and everyday resistance. Whether writing in personal terms or reflecting more broadly on Palestinian society, her work persistently poses an urgent question: as the Palestinians experience the dramatic shrinkage of their space, what is left for them and how do they operate within it? Before addressing Hammami’s work, I will discuss the specific spatial and temporal challenges that the conflict produces, especially as these pertain to the issues of colonialism and postcolonialism. These ideas about the relationship (and disconnect) between space and time within the environment(s) of Palestine/Israel help us to think incisively about the occupation, which Hammami’s work further challenges us to do.

Palestinian space: Where and when?

The ongoing nature of the Israel–Palestine conflict and the absence of an independent Palestinian state complicate the categorization and definition of Palestinian space, especially given the evolving (and thus temporal) nature of Israel’s manipulation of the contested territory, through open-ended projects such as settlement-building and the construction of the Separation Wall. Rashid Khalidi encapsulates this dilemma, asking, “What are the limits of Palestine? Where does it end and where does Israel begin, and are those limits spatial, or temporal, or both?” (1997: 9). These questions indicate the lack of resolution over where Palestinians belong, and the unresolvable overlap of Palestine and Israel. Khalidi continues by reflecting on the simultaneous experiences this overlap generates, and the space/time contradictions and tensions they reveal:

In a sense, each party to this conflict, and every other claimant, operates in a different dimension from the other, looking back to a different era of the past, and living in a different present, albeit in the very same place. (1997: 17)

There is a reminder here of Said’s definition of the struggle over geography as one always partly driven by imaginings and ideas. Each claimant’s subjectivity determines both what they see and their frame of reference. Khalidi persuasively suggests that in this particular struggle, territory is dismantling chronology by generating multiple constructions of time. Joseph Massad makes this dismantlement more explicit, arguing that the spatial complexities deny the traditional diachronic process of colonialism, whereby a colonized territory transforms itself into a postcolonial one. For Massad, this is not a process that can take place in Palestine/Israel precisely because of the different statuses of those inhabiting the same space:

What is, then, this space and time called Israel? […] Can one determine the coloniality of Palestine/Israel without noting its postcoloniality for Ashkenazic Jews? Can one determine the postcoloniality of Palestine/Israel without noting its coloniality for Palestinians? Can one determine both or either without noting the simultaneous colonizer/colonized status of Mizrahic Jews? How can all these people inhabit a colonial/postcolonial space in a world that declares itself living in a postcolonial time? (2000: 312-3)

Massad draws attention to the various communities developing in different ways within the same space, and the relational, shifting identities that they have, thus challenging neat categorization of either the temporal or spatial aspects of Palestine/Israel.

The ongoing nature of this conflict means that these issues are still being raised, as demonstrated in 2014 by the introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing by Patrick Williams and Anna Ball, which they call “Where is Palestine?”. Borrowing the question from the title of Shannee Marks’s 1984 work on the status of Arabs in Israel, the authors note that the question (which Marks did not have an answer for) is arguably less easy to solve now, 30 years later. It is even tempting, they argue, to answer “Nowhere”: Palestine is “nowhere geographically, nowhere politically, nowhere theoretically, nowhere postcolonially” (2014: 127). ³ A contested city like Jerusalem — with its eastern half illegally annexed by Israel since 1967, its underprivileged Arab inhabitants, its settlements, its Separation Wall both around and within it — only further complicates these space–time concerns. A final related example of these concerns is the title of the anthology that Hammami’s essay is published in — Seeking Palestine. In the introduction, Penny Johnson notes “the complicated present tense of a truncated and transitory Palestine” (2013: ix), reinforcing the notion that it is still a place being awaited and sought, even as it is materially experienced.

Given the particular spatial and temporal aspects of this territorial conflict, it is unsurprising that much analysis of Israel’s occupation emphasizes the need for a spatial framework; as Hammami states, “land — its physical control and sovereign identity — stands at the core of this conflict” (2001: 15). Helga Tawil-Souri concurs, noting, “[t]he conflict has always had a geographic dimension, wherein spatiality has become the product of politics and the material theater of war” (2010: 32). This means:

[T]he Palestinian landscape is used as a playground and laboratory by the Israeli state/military to exert power, create new modes of organization, parcel out and govern territories and people in ways heretofore undreamed of. Israeli policies of territorial segmentation […] combined with the erection of settlements, by-pass roads, walls/fences, checkpoints, and closures demonstrate how directly and explicitly domination and control are inscribed into the way space is organized. (2010: 32)

Focusing on many of the same examples of control, Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman assert that Israel’s maximization of space — at the expense of Palestinian space — constitutes “the vernacular of occupation” (2003: 23). Sari Hanafi takes this further, developing a neologism that refers exclusively to the battle for space. The Israeli occupation, he claims, perpetrates “spacio-cide”, as opposed to direct genocide: “In every conflict, belligerents define their enemy and shape their mode of action accordingly. In the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, the Israeli target is the place” (2009: 109). Whilst the Palestinians might not be direct targets, the objective of taking land has as its (deliberate) corollary the eradication of a viable Palestinian state and the dispersion of its people. Hanafi’s work accommodates this logic of direct and indirect action, stating that spacio-cide entails a “deliberate exterminatory logic employed against space livability” (2009: 111). Hammami echoes this when she claims that “the system of spatial control is not simply about controlling and containing resistance but is primarily a mechanism of disinheritance”, as it has been since 1948 and the mass expulsions of Palestinians from within the newly-established State of Israel, and, with renewed vigour, since 1967 with the occupation of the rest of historic Palestine (2010: 33). ⁴ Hammami pays attention — and contributes — to these comprehensive theories about spatial control, but also narrates a located experience of resisting spacio-cide, demonstrating in detail the effect that such control has on herself and her environment, and reminding us that it is an ongoing, evolving process.

Residence in East Jerusalem: Remaining on the territory

Hammami describes her life as “a typical diaspora story”, and her catalogue of lost homes and upheavals is in many ways emblematic of the Palestinian diaspora experience. Born in Saudi Arabia to a Palestinian father and an English mother, Hammami’s early family life was typically dictated by external events. Hammami and her sister were sent to board at Schmidt, a school run by German nuns in East Jerusalem. Two years later, the Six-Day War of 1967 occurred, during which Israel breached the 1949 Armistice Line, and subsequently took over and annexed East Jerusalem. The young Hammami sisters were trapped at the frontline where their school was located, and initially feared dead. The family relocated to England, after which Hammami lived in the US and Belgium, before returning to Jerusalem in the late 1980s, just as the First Intifada, a major Palestinian rebellion against Israeli occupation, erupted. ⁵

In “Home and Exile in East Jerusalem”, Hammami begins by describing her return to the city as a struggling graduate student, living with other students and solidarity workers. Initially, Jerusalem functions as a form of escape, a place where Hammami can experience a semblance of normality in contrast to her studies, which take her into occupied Gaza, a far more volatile environment due to the intense violence of the Intifada, Israel’s punitive measures, and the increased Islamization of the area:

Recklessly, I had chosen Gaza as the place to do my fieldwork in anthropology, a year after it had exploded in the first uprising’s fog of tear gas and black tire smoke. The only way I could make it through a week of Gaza’s heavy mix of Intifada violence and social repression was by knowing that on my horizon were a few days in the little apartment on the Nablus Road where I could grab some oxygen, a few sips of Gold Star beer, and remember what it was like to have bare arms. Sheikh Jarrah was a haven, but a rather odd one. (2013: 111) ⁶

The oddness of life in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah, characterized by a lack of progress and the lost souls that Hammami has for neighbours, becomes increasingly pronounced as the narrative unfolds, eventually becoming something far more menacing altogether. Her perception of the locality shifts from a strange sanctuary to a claustrophobic and constantly threatened space, eventually cut off from both Gaza and the West Bank. She charts her experiences in the city, from the 1980s to the present day, focusing in particular on the changes to her neighbourhood effected by overarching Israeli control. ⁷

Hammami narrates a steady succession of Israeli incursions into Palestinian space, and consequent attempts to resist them. This resistance entails learning to cope with “the inexorable spread of our unwanted West Jerusalem neighbor-occupiers”, as well as the sharply contrasting paralysis enforced on Palestinian East Jerusalem, a twin-system designed to enable Israeli growth and control (112). Evidence of this enforced standstill is part of Sheikh Jarrah’s landscape, an eerie reminder of how progress has been deliberately stalled:

[T]he neighborhood was sleepy. Or, more exactly, it was in a paralysis that began when Israel stopped the clock in 1967. New buildings were totally absent. Looking around, you could make out an odd assortment of weathered concrete skeletons protruding from buildings: unfinished projects that had waited despondently for twenty years for an elusive Israeli building permit. (112–3)

This stopping of the clock is made even clearer when Hammami describes her neighbours, who are presented as lonely imitations of the unfinished building projects:

Most of the residents of the quarter were also surviving remnants of a more genteel past. My immediate neighbors were assorted versions of Palestinian Miss Havishams: spinsters and widows from Jerusalem’s “good” families who had been left behind when other family members passed away or moved on to more promising futures. (113)

By describing this freezing of time, with both buildings and people paused in mid-development, and tethered to a lost past, Hammami demonstrates the extent to which ordinary opportunities and freedoms are denied to the Palestinian residents because of Israel’s control of civic life, rendering — for example — infrastructure unreliable and building permits elusive. Her implication that time only continues if one leaves East Jerusalem serves as a poignant reminder of how we need progress in order to measure time and offer hope of a “promising” future, as opposed to a perpetually insecure present. The literary allusion to Miss Havisham, a traumatized woman defined (and destroyed) by her inability to escape the past, serves to enforce the point, hinting at the emotional impact of living in such an unstable environment still very much defined by previous cataclysmic events. In her study of autobiography, trauma, and testimony, Leigh Gilmore draws attention to the enduring quality of trauma and the difficulty in moving beyond it. She observes that “the extent to which trauma can be understood as repetition raises an important question: where does harm done in the past end?” (2001: 27). For the Palestinian Miss Havishams, harm done in the past has not ended, most crucially because the initial loss of the homeland in 1948 and Israel’s stopping of the clock in 1967 have not been undone or ameliorated. Therefore, an enduring and repeated sense of trauma reigns throughout the neighbourhood, exacerbated by the ongoing occupation which serves as a reminder of Israel’s supremacy and the Palestinians’ ongoing struggle for justice.

Despite this combination of enforced stasis and unresolved grievances, Hammami uses a clear chronology to structure her piece, with each section indicating the year being written about. This effectively elucidates the dynamics of the struggle, as Hammami contrasts the sense of standstill within the Palestinian community with the unstoppable succession of events that do mark the passing of time; namely, the myriad and intensifying threats to the neighbourhood. Consequently, we realize that any major change that takes place in Sheikh Jarrah is never a result of meaningful Palestinian action (more or less entirely prohibited) but instead due to Israeli action. Palestinian activity, if it is ever condoned, happens elsewhere in the occupied territories. Therefore, once the First Intifada ends and the Oslo Accords are signed in the early 1990s, Hammami struggles to synthesize the enforced stasis of Palestinian life in Sheikh Jarrah with “the dizzying changes that constituted ‘state-building’” in Gaza and the West Bank (where she now works at Birzeit University), and the concomitant rise in Israeli settlement-building (120–1). The temporary checkpoint on her way into the city now seems permanent — a deliberate military policy that Weizman neatly describes in Hollow Land, an instructive account of Israeli occupation and its evolving tactics at the macro level, as “permanent temporariness” (2007:103). An abandoned Palestinian home becomes a base for Mossad agents, who deny entry to its elderly owner when he is finally able to visit Jerusalem after a long enforced absence. Hammami returns from holiday in 1996 to see an Israeli flag waving from the roof of a nearby house — the first settler takeover of a Palestinian family home. The following year, she assists a desperate neighbour when settlers attempt to take over his house. In 1999, another neighbour has a Molotov cocktail thrown into her house, setting fire to the property, and almost killing its inhabitants. ⁸

For Hammami, these constant afflictions lend an uncertainty and unpredictability to daily life. Thus, the occupation is narrated not simply as a military operation, limited to identifiable practices, but instead as a more insidious and erratic system of dispossession. This system is again summarized well by Weizman, who has repeatedly asserted the intentional complexity of Israeli tactics:

Palestinian life, property and political rights are constantly violated not only by the frequent actions of the Israeli military, but by a process in which their environment is unpredictably and continuously refashioned, tightening around them like a noose. (2007: 5)

Integral to this process of compromising the Palestinian environment are settler organizations, architects, and urban planners, making it harder for Palestinians to define the enemy, given that it is not exclusively the state and its military (Weizman frequently refers to a civilian occupation). By drawing attention to “the institution of military orders and discriminatory laws affecting every detail of Palestinian life as well as Kafkaesque planning and administrative procedures”, Jeff Halper reiterates this analysis (2005: 56). Halper’s reference to Franz Kafka indicates another ongoing feature of life under occupation: its absurdity. As is often the case in Kafka’s fiction, this absurdity is experienced as a form of terror and encirclement. Hammami emphasizes this through her observations of the language, rhetoric, and visual keys of the occupation. She notes that a nearby Palestinian family house is designated “enemy property”, and thus confiscated and converted into a base for Israeli security agents (118). She passes a nearby West Bank hilltop being flattened in the name of “natural growth” — another settlement in the making (120). A Palestinian family who have been assigned West Bank identity cards are named “absentees” in the attempt to seize their Jerusalem home, leading to a court case that only collapses when other family members come forward with US citizenship (125). A row of parking spaces for disabled people mysteriously appears on Hammami’s road — which, it transpires, is for the exclusive use of the (able-bodied) settlers residing in the first Palestinian house that was taken over, now expanded, and with armed security guards manning the roof (128).

This use of language and force, with one reinforcing the other, reveals the lengths to which the occupying forces will go in order to assert Jerusalem as an Israeli-Jewish city, unwilling to accommodate the rights of its Palestinian residents (who nonetheless pay municipal taxes whilst receiving very little in return). ⁹ The uncertainty of life in East Jerusalem, encapsulated by this manipulation of language and disconnection between signifier and signified — between words and what they actually refer to — is thus ultimately a means to disrupt and disavow notions of the city as a multi-faith, multi-ethnic environment. The assertion of Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel is a further example of occupation rhetoric. Ian S. Lustick points out that “Jerusalem” is a misleading catch-all Western/Christian term, implying a unified space that belies the complex reality of the area and ignores the Arabic term for the city, Al-Quds, and the Arab heritage and way of life to which it refers (2008: 298). By staying in East Jerusalem — and narrating that experience — Hammami stands firmly against Israel’s rhetoric of a unified Israeli city. Withstanding (further) marginalization also works to entrench her connection to East Jerusalem and her neighbourhood; resistance is the consequence of control.

(Im)mobility in East Jerusalem: Travelling the territory

Alongside this battle to remain in Jerusalem is the challenge of travelling through it. For Hammami, this struggle to achieve freedom of movement requires a shift in Palestinian responses to occupation and a redefinition of the widely endorsed concept of sumud — steadfastness: “In the 1970s, sumud meant refusing to leave the land despite the hardships of occupation; now, it connotes something more proactive” (2004: n.p.). Resistance, therefore, is not just about standing firm; it is about striving for normality by making the necessary journeys around the Separation Wall and through checkpoints. As Hammami notes, “movement, itself, has become central in the struggle between Palestinian survival and Israeli domination” (2010: 34). We might infer from Hammami’s remarks that this redefinition of sumud aims to better connect movement through space with movement through time; in other words, to counter the standstill that has for so long held her neighbourhood back by making the journeys that imply that some form of progress is taking place.

The vast apparatus created to impede and regulate movement is ultimately part of the practice of spacio-cide and its accompanying principle of disinheritance. As a resident of East Jerusalem working in the West Bank, Hammami is all too familiar with Israeli strategies for controlling Palestinian movement, and her account of the changes made to Nablus Road (on which she still lives) is particularly revealing. She describes how the road was once a busy thoroughfare for Palestinians travelling in and out of the West Bank until the early 1990s, when Israel finally breached the no man’s land that ran alongside the neighbourhood’s western edge and extended Highway 1 through it (a development that granted direct access from Tel Aviv to Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank). As a consequence, Nablus Road becomes one-way, ending its use as the route into Jerusalem and forcing Palestinians to use Highway 1, “the new master of all roads” (2013: 120).

The difficulties of life in East Jerusalem emphasize not just the vitality and dominance of the settlements and West Jerusalem, but also the necessity of remaining connected to the West Bank. Hammami notes that as with many other Palestinian Jerusalemites who have witnessed the departure of friends and the forced transfer of cultural and political institutions out of Jerusalem and into the West Bank, “the main ingredients of my life were on the other side” (130). Remaining connected to this other side, however, becomes all but impossible during periods of intensified violence. During the Second Intifada, journeys to work become insurmountable — where once there was only one checkpoint, there is now “a dense thicket”, and thus daily life is rendered “a pitiless odyssey through the brutish maze they had made of the landscape” (130; 131). Her friends, “once close by, had at some imperceptible point begun to inhabit another country just a few miles down this miserable road” (131). East Jerusalem begins to seem exiled from Palestine and Hammami’s narrative demonstrates that what is taking place is not just the disruption of her own physical experience of the territory, but also the fracturing of the body politic of a still-sought Palestinian state. Under such circumstances, with Sheikh Jarrah progressively more isolated from other Palestinian localities, the emotional toll of such journeys is sometimes unbearably high:

Against this annihilation of our familiar links between time, place and matter, like everyone else, I doggedly made the journey, believing I could defy the physics of despair. Until one day when, at the first checkpoint, I finally broke down. I couldn’t do it anymore. I just couldn’t go on. My hands slowly steered the car to the side of the road and I sat as if in shock, trying to comprehend what had just happened. Khalas, I would go home. No more fighting this hopeless battle. (131)

This moment of temporary collapse poignantly demonstrates the impact of a fractured, colonized environment on emotional wellbeing, as the various sites of daily life are carved up into disconnected localities. Despite the despair, the journeys continue: further demonstration of the resistance to occupation tactics.

The greatest challenge to these journeys now is Qalandiya checkpoint, situated on the main route between East Jerusalem and the West Bank, a highly-developed apparatus of watchtowers, turnstiles, x-ray machines, biometric scanners, and loudspeakers. Crossing the checkpoint is a deliberately drawn-out process defined above all by uncertainty and insensitivity, not just to Palestinians themselves, but to their time. As the Israeli human rights agency B’Tselem (2014) points out, given that most of the people who cross the checkpoint are doing so in order to reach work, school, or medical treatment, the regular delays at Qalandiya have serious consequences. The sense of standstill this generates is perfectly illustrated by the opening of Hammami’s essay “Qalandiya: Jerusalem’s Tora Bora and the Frontiers of Global Inequality” (2010). She arrives at Qalandiya during rush hour, battling the heat and strong wind. This initial energy and movement is soon stalled when she approaches an old man and asks him how long he has been waiting. His reply: “‘From the time I was born’” (2010: 29), hinting at the broader quandary of statelessness in which Palestinians continue to find themselves and the extent to which waiting is intrinsic to Palestinian experience, both in terms of daily life and long-term aspirations.

Hammami observes that at checkpoints “Palestinian time is ‘cheap’ and infinite, while Israeli time is a valuable, finite resource” (2001: 14), a dramatic expression of inequality. The language here indicates that Israelis regard their own time as precious and requiring protection, whereas Palestinian time is dismissed as something endless and thus valueless. Furthermore, the description of time as a resource echoes the Palestinian struggle to access natural resources such as water, which is predominantly drawn from within the West Bank yet exclusively controlled by Israel. ¹⁰ In a 2014 article about Palestinian women’s life-writing, Moore-Gilbert makes the pertinent point that whilst the theft of Palestinian land and the displacement of its inhabitants will dominate debate and analysis, it is important to also recognize “that the theft of Palestinian time (and, indeed, history) is an equally deleterious consequence of the experience of colonial dispossession” (2014: 199). Hammami’s descriptions of Palestinian time are indicative of this theft — as is the title of one of her articles about the checkpoint: “Waiting for Godot at Qalandya”. The experience of waiting at Qalandiya extinguishes any feeling of progress, reproducing Hammami’s depiction of the paralysed Palestinian community of Sheikh Jarrah in another context. Thus, both at the peripheries of East Jerusalem and at the heart of it, the occupation works to manipulate Palestinian space and time, slicing through both.

It is her case study of Qalandiya in particular that offers an incisive commentary on the spatial and temporal challenges that the conflict produces. By drawing attention to how different experiences of time are incorporated into the very same space, Hammami corroborates Khalidi’s observation that each party to the conflict is operating in a different dimension, as well as Massad’s point that we cannot singularly categorize this environment as colonial or postcolonial — or even in the process of moving from one to the other — but must pay attention to the different experiences and statuses generated within the same space. Furthermore, through her observations of the checkpoint, Hammami encourages us to think about Palestine in relation to other sites of segregation and spatial control. By reflecting on these networks of control, she impels us to spatialize the occupation’s techniques, rather than place them exclusively within a linear narrative of colonial history:

[T]his process taking place in Palestine, though exceptional as a late colonial project (whose motivations are thus primarily territorial) shares some strong commonalities with processes of inequality taking place in the wider world. For instance incarcerating Palestinians in walled ghettos made from fragments of their own geography is what Mike Davis has elsewhere called, “the warehousing of surplus humanity”, which has become a global feature of neo-liberalism at the end of the 20th Century. Thus rather than assuming the exceptional nature of what Qalandiya represents in terms of a powerful late colonial project’s ability to reverse or remake a national liberation project — we might better understand how it is linked to a global convergence of new and distinct forms of inequality (and their acceptability) as well as a global convergence in terms of how to control them — through policing and the politics of securitization. In this scenario, Israel is both an avant-garde among those powerful global processes, while its current project is simultaneously enabled by their existence. (Hammami, 2010: 33)

These “global processes” and their neoliberal rhetoric are part of today’s world, justified by a now dominant capitalist-driven globalization whose elite and ruling classes thrive on the dogma of securitization, perpetuating the fear of terrorism, and the binaries that this creates between cultures and localities. As such, Israel’s security measures, instead of being condemned for violating human rights, are branded “expertise”, and reproduced and normalized worldwide — in American schools and airports, along the US–Mexico border, in Kashmir and China, at nuclear reactor sites. It is this interconnectedness in terms of sites of inequality that Hammami rightly sees as crucial in perpetuating the occupation. Hanafi echoes this by asserting that alongside the military and the settler movement, urban planners, and capitalist real estate executives contribute heavily to the destruction of Palestinian space and its reconstruction as Israeli (2009: 112). In pursuing the idea of a civilian occupation, Segal and Weizman suggest that the aggressive strategy of settlement building is not something unique to Israel but in fact “a worst-case scenario of capitalist globalization and its spatial fallout” (2003: 26). The hilltops of the West Bank: this is where the new politics of seclusion, segregation, and securitization ultimately take us. In his assessment of the uprisings that swept across the Arab world in late 2010 onwards — referred to as “a Palestinian intifada going global” — Hamid Dabashi asserts that we are now witnessing collective resistance against both domestic tyranny and globalized disempowerment that moves beyond “the entrapment of postcolonial ideologies”, which he sees as harmfully yoked to an inherited colonial geography (2012: 2–3). Dabashi’s titular statement that we are experiencing “the end of Postcolonialism” is deliberately provocative (and his optimistic assessment of the Arab uprisings now seems particularly hasty) but whether one agrees with him or not, he makes a valid point that globalized structures of disempowerment connect different and disparate spaces that have not been connected before, and where the disempowered are aware of the various forces that are disempowering them. There is much here that resonates with Hammami’s knowing evaluation of Qalandiya, and her awareness of, and resistance against, those responsible for keeping her and her fellow Palestinians waiting there — as well as waiting more generally for an end to the conflict.

As indicated, the work of Hanafi, Segal, and Weizman, as well as many others, corroborate Hammami’s assertion that the occupation pursues a doctrine of spatial manipulation and stolen time, bolstered by global systems. What makes Hammami’s work more salient, though, is its attentiveness to what oppression engenders — namely the creativity of Palestinians in response to their situation, allowing Hammami to apply these overarching notions of spatial control to an analysis of what these notions mean for a particular environment, her neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Concentrating on this helps to illuminate ways in which the structures of violence can be undone, or at least survived. Hammami criticizes some analysts of the conflict, including Weizman, for what she perceives as a failure to properly acknowledge Palestinian agency (2010: 37–8). After all, much of Israel’s control is a response to Palestinian resistance; to elide this symbiosis is to eliminate important lines of enquiry. Crucial as it is to reflect on the frameworks that perpetuate Israeli occupation, it is also essential to think about the responses to them. This is what Hammami does, both through her personal reflections, and the broader picture she paints of the lives and circumstances of her fellow Palestinians. Hammami’s work personally attests to the experience of being the target, providing eye-opening narratives of what it means to be on the receiving end of what Weizman identifies as the architecture of occupation, and what Halper refers to as Israel’s comprehensive “matrix of control” (2005: 64).

Conclusion

In 1996, Said emphasized the centrality of Jerusalem to the conflict, warning that peace was not at hand unless the seemingly inexorable changes to the city could be halted. Expressing mournfulness about the city’s future, Said writes that, “[p]erhaps Jerusalem, with its thousands of new residents, its dislodged Arabs, and its illegally acquired spaces, is already lost” (1996: 21). Nearly 20 years later, Hammami demonstrates that whilst the same challenges remain — thousands of new Israeli residents, Palestinians forced out, spaces illegally acquired — there is still a settled Palestinian population that continues to endure, even whilst these challenges intensify. Her narrative reveals that resistance to losing Jerusalem is part of her community’s identity. She — and her neighbours — are constantly countering Israeli claims to the entire space of the city and dissecting the Kafkaesque nature of life in East Jerusalem, where innovations such as parking spaces for disabled people are always something to be wary of. She reveals a layered, evolving, and unpredictable territorial battle, and the very form of her essay, “Home and Exile in East Jerusalem”, conveys the disrupted chronology of Palestinian life.

Hammami concludes her essay with an observation about a new presence in Sheikh Jarrah. The Middle East Quartet, an international body established to mediate in the conflict, has set up its offices on Nablus Road, occupying a plot of land that spent decades as rubble, due to the failure of its Palestinian owner to obtain a building permit. Hammami points out that Tony Blair, the Quartet’s special envoy, never met with any of the Palestinian families who have lost their homes, nor issued a statement about their situation. The irony of a peace process mediated by neoliberal facilitators, promoting a distrusted agenda of economic growth and state-building in the West Bank and Gaza, is certainly not lost on Hammami. Her narration of life along this stretch of road encapsulates the conflict and its spatial dimensions: the loss of family homes; building permits granted only to non-Palestinians; the tacit acceptance — and thus viability — of the occupation through its neoliberal allies; and the Palestinians existing in, and moving between, the spaces that remain.