A Hole in the Wall; A Rose at a Checkpoint: The Spatiality of Colonial Encounters in Occupied Palestine

This article reflects on the spatial arrangements that memorialize power on the bodies of the colonized in occupied Palestine. These are the reflections of someone whose research is focused on the Canadian context. I attempt here to have a conversation with those scholars who are more conversant with the Israeli/Palestinian context than I, reading them through the prism of my own extremely brief experience of occupied Palestine, and through my research on violence against Aboriginal peoples in Canada. I focus on the physical encounter between colonizer and colonized, on the way that spaces express power arrangements that operate on the bodies of the colonized, turning them into small animals scrambling over rocks, or rats prodded and poked to make their way through a maze. The same spatial arrangements confirm colonizers as rightful owners of the land, convincing them who they are. The wall, the shouting at checkpoints, the power to arbitrarily stop and search, these must assist the 18 year old soldier wielding a gun to banish the ghosts on the landscape, the Arab faces, the outlines of buildings, the old Arabic names – anything that suggests that in truth, the land is Arab land.