Paper short abstract:

Human mobility has been formative in the arrangement of space, infrastructure, and governance of occupied Palestine. This paper explores the movement of borders, populations, and ideas into and around the West Bank using Palestinian and Israeli human infrastructures.

Paper long abstract:

Human mobility has been formative in the arrangement of space, infrastructure, and governance of the West Bank. Like road and internet infrastructures, the locations and flows of settlers and Palestinians throughout the region have had the effect of moving borders, populations, and ideas into and around the West Bank despite the numerous restrictions to mobility. In this paper I propose considering Israeli settlers and Palestinian refugees themselves as human infrastructures, facilitating the flow of people, goods, and ideas into the region, informed by each group’s relation to territory, identity, and ideology.

Human infrastructures have been defined, broadly, as groups of individuals united by a common goal whose “selves, situations, and bodies bear the responsibility for articulating different locations, resources, and stories into viable opportunities for everyday survival” (Simone 2009: 124). The ‘common goal’ is a significant feature of human infrastructures, with those who are thus united often referred to as a “critical mass” in the scholarship of human geographers (Lugo 2013; Nello-Deakin and Nikolaeva 2020). It is this notion of a critical mass that is especially useful in thinking of settlers and refugees as human infrastructures rather than merely as kin groups, migrant networks, or ethno-national communities. An infrastructural approach complicates conceptions about immobility, invisibility, and the nature of occupation as well as emphasising the role of human agency in the navigation of mobility in a region where it is strictly controlled.