Paper short abstract:

Following fieldwork with left-wing Jewish women living in Palestine, this talk will display their strategies to avoid border agents. I claim these women live "out of sovereignty" and embody an alternative political imagination that undermines that of the nation-state.

Paper long abstract:

Very few Israeli left-wing Jews live in Palestine. However, research that has been done on some of these cases, and especially on women living in Palestine, describes the phenomenon in terms of crossing and blurring national, ethnic, political, sexual, and gender boundaries. Following field-work with Israeli left-wing Jewish women living in Palestine, this paper points to a crossing of edges from a different angle: crossing the lines of fear. The narratives informing this paper reveal that life in Palestinian localities in the West Bank and the need to pass through the checkpoints often confronted the interlocutors with feelings of fear of the army and other state apparatus, fear of the settlers, and the public opinion in Israel, but also fear of the Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority.

In my talk I will claim the West Bank, with its subdivisions of different degrees of sovereignty, is a borderland. I will demonstrate the challenges the women living in the borderland encounter and the various strategies they employ to avoid border agents. I claim these women are living "out of sovereignty" and therefore embody an alternative political imagination that undermines that of the nation-state.