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Paper short abstract

In the West Bank, Palestinian and Israeli mobilities are often framed as binary. In this paper I challenge this binary by examining how Palestinians use social media to collectively navigate checkpoints, closures, and risk, reframing mobility as a tactical, everyday practice.

Paper long abstract

In the occupied Palestinian West Bank, everyday mobility is made dangerous, difficult, and perilous by occupation policies, geographies, and violence that disrupt and distort the spatial landscape for Palestinians. Indeed, the region is often characterised as one of immobilisation and staticity for Palestinians, binarily opposed to the dynamic mobility of their Israeli settler counterparts. Ethnographic research, however, evidences not only the inaccuracy of this binary but the importance of disrupting it, in order to evidence and emphasise uniquely Palestinian and creative forms of mobility in the face of restriction.

Disrupting binaries that frame Palestinians solely as subjectified victims of occupation, I reflect on how Palestinians strategize their mobility using the tools they have available. In the absence of physical maps and mapping software, social media emerges as a unique virtual space in which Palestinians trade information and live-map the numerous ways in which Israeli occupation and settlement restricts their mobility. In so doing I build on Vigh’s (2009) work on navigation, connecting it with the growing scholarship on migrant uses of smartphones and social media to trade information about safe movement, and apply it to an everyday and non-migratory context. Anthropologists of mobility have been somewhat reluctant to engage with the concept of navigation, yet as a key aspect of mobility (and indeed immobility), in contexts of conflict and violence it emerges as a key metric by which mobility is achieved.