Confined! Voices and Images from the Carceral Geography in Palestine

Colonization and settlement of the Palestinian West Bank by the State of Israel has converted vast portions of the West Bank landscape into the status of “Israel Lands” — lands under the control of the Jewish State and Jewish Israeli settlers. As more and more of the land surface in the West Bank succumbs to the land hunger of Israeli colonization and settlement, an ever-expanding share of the Palestinian landscape is rendered off-limits to Palestinians. In the shrunken spaces on the landscape remaining for Palestinians, the State of Israel has established a tightly restricted system of control over Palestinian mobility in which freedom of movement is severely curtailed. The argument in this article is that the landscape, with its expanse of impassible spaces and tight controls over mobility constitutes a prison-like regime of confinement on the land. Policed by the Israeli military and reinforced by a host of physical barriers to free movement built into the landscape, this confinement system also imposes strict controls on Palestinian mobility from the violence and vigilantism of Israeli settlers. This article reveals how Palestinians experience this confinement regime on the ground level in two case studies, the agricultural village of Iraq Burin and the city of Al-Khalil (Hebron), and emphasizes how photography can be mobilized as a method alongside ethnography to tell this story.