This paper examines digital bank systems that automate the repayment of debt, and how these systems impact the everyday social and political geographies of Palestinians living in the conurbation of Ramallah-Al Bireh.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines digital bank systems in Palestine, which automate the repayment of debt for many Palestinians with bank loans. The automatic repayment system deducts up to 50% of a borrower's salary each month. This process, in concert with a digital credit registry and historical and contemporary practices of Israeli colonialism, underpins the formal debt economy in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This debt economy, which only (re)emerged in 2008, has in turn transformed both informal credit-debt relations among kin and friendship networks, and everyday financial practices that are ostensibly not connected with debt. While stories of strained social relationships and altered consumption practices are common, they are not ubiquitous. Ethnography thus illustrates how new kinds of debt and debt repayment both capacitate and constrain practices of enduring (rather than resisting) Israeli colonialism and its foreclosure of liveable life. Thus, while the banking technologies enabling automatic repayment are highly mobile, the practices of endurance they feed into are defined by the specific geographies of Ramallah.