"Please, Keep This Terminal Clean." Architecture of New Israeli Checkpoints along the Green Line and Politics of Sight

Abstract

The paper investigates changes that occurred at the checkpoints along the Green Line separating the West Bank and Israel proper in last ten years. It interrogates the interplay of architectural features, division of labor and subjectivity at the newly privatized major crossings.

The analysis proceeds in several steps. The paper firstly discusses the transformations of the Israeli occupation over the last decades.

Drawing on Neve Gordon's work, it argues that one can trace a shift from biopolitics (when were Israeli authorities invested in Palestinians' wellbeing) to sovereignty (characterized by disregard for Palestinians' lives). Such a setting, the paper argues, delegated extensive powers over the subjugated population to individual soldiers.

However, this gradually proved to have negative psychological impact on young soldiers and led to large-scale human rights violations that threatened to tarnish Israel's image. A solution was found in partial privatization of checkpoints and replacing state agents with private employees.

Simultaneously, checkpoints underwent major material and managerial changes. The paper demonstrates that new checkpoints' physical constellation, along with employees' firm assignment to particular and narrowly defined tasks, bring about a setting which obscure checkpoint's controversial nature on the part of the personnel.

The paper thus echoes Timothy Pachirat's remarks that spatial arrangements and division of labor can play a crucial role in the maintaining of oppressive and violence-laden power relations by concealing the effects of these relations' constitutive practices even from those who directly participate in them.