Enforcing Israel/Palestine’s border spaces

Why boundaries matter

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 purportedly marked the beginning of a new era of open geographical spaces and unparalleled physical and electronic mobility, replacing a world divided along ideological and political lines. By the 1990s, globalization, deterritorialization and the opening of borders ostensibly superseded nationalism, regionalism and territorially based cultural identities. At the time, bordered spaces seemingly gave way to a borderless and interconnected world. Economic trade agreements between member states of the European Union (EU) and other such trading blocs enhanced transnational economic connectivity. Development of cross-border regions in Europe, Asia and the Americas made it seem like we had entered a post-bordered world in which the nation-state and its boundaries no longer dictate the terms of our global interconnectedness. While the dreams of a borderless world increasingly clashed with the rise of nationalism and the closure of borders across Europe and the US that commenced with Elungary’s building a wall in 2015 to allegedly stop immigration from Serbia and Croatia, such dreams of an open borderless world -however temporary they might have been - were always nothing but a fata morgana in the deserts of the Negev and the Sahara. Not only has the post-1989 period led to a worldwide proliferation of borders, boundaries and physical and virtual frontiers, that divide people, cultures and territories, but also in conflict-ridden areas, such as in the Middle East, establishing firm boundaries so as to delineate territory and attempt to differentiate between what are taken to be ethnically and culturally diverse social groups remains a desired form of social organization (Brawer, 2002).

The unexpected hardening of borders in a supposedly borderless post-Cold War World, has led geographers and Border Studies scholars to increasingly use borders as a lens through which to understand notions of territoriality, spatiality of power and political identities. Given the ever more complex spatiality of borders in the 21st century, Border Studies scholars have focused on how spatiality and borders are socially produced, not only within border areas, but also through social practices, legislations and discourses that permeate societies. Accordingly, bordering mechanisms and their impact reside within a complex

Enforcing Israel/Palestine’.s border spaces 89 network of institutional practices and narrative frameworks across different spaces, in which people perform notions of territoriality, cultural identities and power relations (Brunet-Jailly, 2011; Newman and Paasi, 1998; Paasi and Prokkola, 2008). National boundaries therefore do not only ideally define a nation’s sovereign control over people and land and differentiate states from each other, but they are also lines on maps, demarcations engraved in territories, as well as political, social, cultural and discursive constructs. Moreover, the meanings of borders are not fixed, but they are fluid as they respond to the changing historical and social and cultural contexts that shape cross-border relations and affirm or deemphasize the importance of borders.

Yet few studies have focused on the making of borders as a complex process of paper trails, surveying, map-making, politics, people and topographical challenges. Indeed, despite their geopolitical importance in the region, studies of borders in the Middle East have been scarce (Meier, 2013). The social, technical and bureaucratic construction of Israel’s boundaries provides an evocative case for gaining insight into attempts to make boundaries. Israeli surveyors have reported on the trial and tribulations of surveying activities (Srebro and Shoshani, n.d.; Srebro et al., 2009); geographers have analyzed Israel’s borders as mutable public spaces that can make and remake political identities and are impacted by facts on the ground (Bar-Gal, 1993; Falah and Newman, 1995; Hatuka, 2012; Newman, 2002; Wallach, 2011); historians have traced how borders are constitutive of state- and nation-building, delimiting territorial governance and also serving as agents of socialization into a sense of national belonging and identity (Anderson, 1983; Hobsbawn, 1992); and border experts have dealt with the process of delineating Israel’s borders and its social, political and economic impacts (Brawer, 1978, 1983, 2002; Biger, 2002, 2008; Kaufman, 2002, 2009). The focus here, however, is on how borders are not only technically produced, but their delineation is a social accomplishment, as their lines are constituted by an array of objects, papers, maps and data that are physical and tangible as well as abstract and conceptual. This amalgam of the abstract and the tangible constitutes what Bruno Latour (Kuklick, 1986) calls an “immutable mobile” that is transportable and used to convince others of the location of the border. At the same time, its rhetorical persuasiveness depends on interactional contingencies, diplomacy and negotiation, both during its making and also when used to convince others of its reality.