Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the case of Palestinian citizens of Israel, an indigenous group living at the margins of Israeli space, as a means to spotlight the sub-national political settlements that form/are formed by relations between borderland communities and the state in which they are embedded.

Paper long abstract:

As a starting point, this paper shifts attention from borderlands that straddle national lines of sovereignty, to borderlands that map onto contested frontiers, within states. Building from the case of Palestinian citizens of Israel, an othered indigenous minority that lives at the edges of Israeli-Jewish space and society, it is concerned with the kinds of sub-national political settlements formed within 'internal borderlands', and between their leaders/elites and the state in which they are embedded. The case study spotlights two regions in Israel where its Palestinian citizens are concentrated and have anchored their political struggles: the Central Galilee in the north, where Palestinian citizens have produced an enclave of Palestinian politics, culture, language and institutions, in direct contravention to the state's logics of erasure and replacement; and the Naqab desert region in the south, where the state's Bedouin-Palestinian citizens have produced their own methods of spatial resiliency and resistance, vis a vis a spectrum of transfer policies. In both cases, we find examples of the borderland logics that produce difference, agency and distance, struggles, contestation and elite bargains that maintain them against erasure, and brokers that translate and navigate between these communities and the state. We also find the state working to integrate and discipline these spaces, whereas once it sought only to circumvent or exclude them. The paper will investigate how these ambiguous logics and practices maintain Palestinian-citizen borderlands in Israel, and how they extend (and possibly challenge) current thinking on political settlements and borderland dynamics.