Barriers, Walls, and Urban Ethnocracy in Jerusalem

Abstract

Some 1,200 kilometers of security fence/separation wall have already been built, consisting of 60-to-100-meter-wide complexes of trenches, barbed wire, tracking roads, and electronic fences in rural areas, and 8 meter high concrete walls in and around Palestinian towns and cities. Over 200,000 dunums (1 dunum = 1000 square meters) of Palestinian land are to be affected, i.e. expropriated, cleared, or declared “out of bounds” to West Bank Palestinians. The construction of this barrier, coupled with recent minor Israeli territorial withdrawals of late, constitute the State of Israel’s latest attempts to manage the growing contradictions of its “ethnocratic” regime.

We are indebted to the Israel Science Foundation for its financial support of our project: “The Emergence of a New Land Regime: the Transformation of Israel’s Urban Legal Geography.”