Protesting at the Crossroads: The Use of Non-Iconic Sites of Protest by Palestinians in Israel

This paper examines the use of a "non-iconic" (Wallach 2013) site of protest by Palestinians in Israel. It begins with a vignette, based on ethnographic observation, of a single “day of rage” at a crossroads on Highway 65 near the village of Arara (in the Wadi Ara region of Israel’s Haifa District) which was organised in August 2013 in order to protest the Prawer-Begin Plan, a 2011 government initiative which set out to forcibly displace and resettle 70 thousand Bedouin and demolish 35 “unrecognised” villages in the Negev (Adalah 2012). The paper seeks, in the first instance, to explain the emergence of these crossroads as an important site of Palestinian protest within the context of uneven geographies of power, dispossession and enclosure. Its main aim, however, is to depart from prevailing analytical approaches which focus primarily on the forces of (Jewish) expansionism and control (Yiftachel 1996, 2006) in order to isolate the creative use of space which protest at the crossroads reveals. In order to do this, this paper incorporates the work of Timothy Mitchell on practices of enframing indigenous populations (Mitchell 1988) with insights on frames of protest within the literature on social movements (McAdam et al 1996; Della Porta & Diani 2009; Tilly & Tarrow 2012) in order to argue that in order to be seen and heard, Palestinian protesters have creatively instrumentalised the same material infrastructures of roads and road networks which marginalise them. Nonetheless, attempts to speak to, and interrupt, power at the crossroads are undermined by the increasingly routine nature of these protests as well as by ongoing asymmetries of territorial and coercive power which surround them. Through a micro-political analysis of a single protest event, this paper seeks to contribute to the literature on the visual dynamics of contention in deeply-divided and marginalised contexts.