Israel/Palestine: Holy Land – Profane Spaces

Seizing land in Israel/Palestine, colonizing it, shaping its boundaries, and reconstructing it as a governed space have played a major role in the struggles between Jews and Palestinians. Space has been a medium of domination and resistance, a scene of dispossession, construction and destruction, and its governmentalization has become a powerful state apparatus. Using concepts drawn from political theory, human geography, and postcolonial studies we shall examine and contrast the mental geographies and actual government of land and space(s) in Israel/Palestine and use space as a privileged perspective for understanding the history and structure of the Land’s political predicament.