INTRODUCCIÓN AL TEMA CLASIFICACIÓN DE COSTOS

This research is inspired by my own relation to the landscape and the history I share with the people I encountered in the field, as well as by my positionality in the field, which has mainly informed my methodology. In other words, access to particular sites and

conversations with different people were made more or less possible due to my ethno- national positioning. That is, I had more access to Palestinian or Israeli leftist political spaces than I did to the Israeli military sites or personnel. In a context like Israel-Palestine, where ethnic, national, and religious identities are heavily regulated through the state’s formal and informal practices (Nasser 2013) and through hegemonic discourses of secured identity borders, it becomes even more crucial to pause and recount my positionality. As an anthropologist, my positionality is neutral neither in the eyes of the Israeli state, in those of Israelis, nor of Palestinians.

I was born in Nazareth to a Palestinian-Arab family with Israeli citizenship. Nazareth is the biggest Palestinian-Arab city in the Israeli state20_{. I lived in Nazareth for} eighteen years of my life before moving to live in Jerusalem in 2000. There I pursued my undergraduate education at the Hebrew University and lived in that city for four years. During my stay in Jerusalem, I became tremendously aware of the effects of the Israeli military occupation on people’s lives in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, specifically in East Jerusalem, which was occupied by the Israeli Army in 1967. The Hebrew

University was located in East Jerusalem, surrounded by Palestinian neighbourhoods, overlooking, to the east, Jericho and the Dead Sea, and to the west, the Old City of Jerusalem.

20 _{East Jerusalem is bigger in space and larger in the number of Palestinian Arab dwellers. However, it was}

occupied in 1967 and it holds a different political position in the Israeli state. For example, most of the Palestinians living in East Jerusalem are not citizens of the Israeli state: they are only residents, which

By the end of 2002, the Israeli government initiated the construction of the

separation Wall deep inside the Occupied Palestinian Territories; Jerusalem saw the Wall in its earliest years of construction, other people in territories in the West Bank witnessed the Wall’s construction a few months later. The Wall solidified, to a large extent, much of the already existing separation between Israeli citizens and their spaces and Palestinians and the spaces they inhabit. I saw the slow process of solidification of this separation taking place in front of my eyes. The confusion caused by this radical transformation in the space led many Palestinians and a few Israelis to organize against the Wall.21 _{I, too, was} affected by the obfuscation of the space and of the city I had grown to love. I sought out an organization that gave educational tours around the Wall in Jerusalem to gain insight into the politics of this divide. During 2003 and 2004 I joined Israeli political tours to the Wall, where I was first exposed to the discourse of Israeli militarism and security logic,

juxtaposed with testimonies of Palestinians with whose daily lives the Wall interfered. The Israeli Ministry of Defence claimed22 _{that the Wall was constructed to stop suicide}

bombers from carrying explosives into Israeli cities; the Palestinians we talked to during these tours explained how the Wall had blocked their movement, damaged their economy, and confiscated their lands (see also Lee (2013)).

21 _{One of the first Palestinian organizations established in the West Bank was Stop The Wall. Israeli Coalition}

Against House Demolitions (ICHAD) was another organization already working on the humanitarian cases of Palestinian homes’ demolitions, and in 2003 was involved in education tours about the Wall and its

violation of human rights.

Since 1948, a cease-fire line, also known as the Green Line (Shlay and Rosen 2010:359), has divided Jerusalem into two sides: the Palestinian side—Jordanian- administered—and the side of the newly formed Israeli state. In 1967, with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the same borderline was physically removed and politically burdened with new symbolism. With the removal of that line, Israel replaced the border with intensified military presence in all Palestinian

neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem. Jerusalem was annexed into the Israeli state borders while maintaining military troops patrolling people’s lives, regulating Palestinian institutions and restricting urban development in Palestinian-inhabited areas of the city (Klein 2008:55–56, 59; Shlay and Rosen 2010). The Wall was the most recent structure that continues to deprive Palestinians from accessing Jerusalem or from building any material attachment to it. I left Jerusalem in 2004; for its Palestinian dwellers, a torn, fragmented, and suffocating city. Palestinian residents of Jerusalem were deprived of any geographical continuity with other surrounding Palestinian cities in the West Bank like Ramallah and Bethlehem (Thawaba 2011).

During my four years of education in Jerusalem I made a few Jewish friends based on frequent interactions in the university campus residence housing or in classes. These friendships were not based on shared political views, but more so on ordinary friendly encounters. All of the Jewish Israeli friends I made during the first years of undergraduate education held liberal or left-wing political views on most economic and social issues; but their political views on Palestine and the occupation were moulded through the Israeli security discourse. Such discourses are based on the argument that Israeli security is

always prioritized over Palestinians’ human rights, and often lead to a justification of brutal military treatment of the Palestinians (Hajjar 2005; Hajjar 2011:27). My Jewish Israeli friends also strongly believed that Israel must maintain a majority Jewish ownership of the land, which also implied articulating opinions against the return of Palestinian refugees from 1948 to live inside what is now the state of Israel; or against family reunification between Palestinians from the West Bank and Palestinian Israeli citizens (Boullata 2007:36–37; Barak-Erez 2008).

I often found myself engaged in arguments about the Israeli military occupation or the situation with Palestinian citizens of Israel with my Jewish Israeli friends. These arguments would regularly end with no recognition of the Palestinian right to national self- determination, and with me realizing that my friends lacked sufficient historical knowledge to hold detailed, engaging conversations about the recent history of this land or its people. Yelling at each other was another form of communicating and engaging in conversation about the politics of this shared space and land. The conversations would always explode with worst-case scenarios to which my Jewish friends would arrive—which often

envisioned the future expulsion of the Israeli Jews from this land. This fear of being denied existence on the land, I would always argue back, this feared imagined future is a lived reality for most Palestinians today. Conversations like these would often end at that impasse.

The escape to imagined past or future scenarios made me think about the discourses and mechanisms of absenting the present, the current urgent scenario, and strategies of

fieldwork was not only going to be located in what is apparent, but also in what is hidden. In other words, my research was not only going to explore what is seen clearly or is visible on the landscape or evident in national discourses but also what is invisible. It would also be an inquiry into what is made to be unseen.

During my empirical exploration, I realized that underlying this ethnographic account is a personal and subjective chronicle of my life and the lives of people who were “othered” to me through different historical, political and social processes. Beneath the surface of the physical field, this ethnographic work is also an account of what is narrated and what is not narrated. It is also heavily informed by my personal experience; hence, the ethnographic field is located inside me as much as it is outside of me—in the landscapes I inhabited in the past or during the research period. Having said that, in the following I break down my research locations into three fields: the land and landscape, liminal spaces, and national and social proximities and positionings.