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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the disappearance of Palestinian neighbourhoods as shared urban spaces, showing how the erosion of everyday public life produces polarised childhoods and reorganises fear, care, and belonging under conditions of violence and state abandonment.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the disappearance of the neighbourhood as a shared social space among Palestinian citizens of Israel and its implications for childhood, parenting, and everyday life under Neolibera conditions. Based on ethnographic research conducted in the Triangle region between 2019 and 2020, the study traces how neighbourhoods once central to socialisation, informal care, and collective responsibility have become sites of fear, withdrawal, and exposure to arbitrary violence.

I argue that the erosion of the neighbourhood is key spatial process through which polarisation is produced and lived. As public space collapses, families retreat into domestic interiors, children’s lives become increasingly privatised and mediated, and responsibility for safety is displaced from collective infrastructures onto individual households. Drawing on structural violence (Galtung) and necropolitics (Mbembe), I develop the notion of mediated necropolitics to describe a mode of governance in which state abandonment, neoliberal restructuring, and selective policing render community violence statistically predictable while appearing internally generated. Within this configuration, Palestinian neighbourhoods increasingly function as “death reserves”: urban spaces of permanent exposure where life is organised around the anticipation of possible death rather than direct sovereign killing.

By foregrounding the neighbourhood as a vanishing “third place” between home and state, the paper contributes to debates on polarised urban spaces by showing how epistemologies, imaginaries, and everyday practices are reshaped through the fragmentation of public space. It reframes polarisation as a spatial and moral process, highlighting how urban collapse reorganises belonging, care, and survival in ways that demand renewed anthropological attention.