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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Mori Ram
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In this chapter we explore Jerusalem as an urban regime that we define as the neo-apartheid city. We build this notion around ongoing efforts to examine the critical conceptual capacities of the term ‘apartheid’ and its relevance to the dynamic shaping cities today in general (Abu-Lughod 1981; Clarno 2017; Massey and Denton 1993) and in Palestine/Israel in particular (Yacobi 2015; Yiftachel and Yacobi 2005). We suggest that the current urban dynamics of the city of Jerusalem represent a paradigm shift in the way we understand apartheid in general, and its localised urban manifestations more specifically. Our main argument is that apartheid today can be productively understood through an analysis of lived urban realities and day-to-day colonial encounters in the city. We develop this argument through an examination that takes into account two critical components of Israel’s apartheid regime. First, that to understand the character, scope, and operation of this regime – as a lived reality – we need to examine its spatial attributes. As a political project, apartheid regimes operate to produce a cohesive territory under one sovereign rule which is able to create a hierarchy between different groupings sharing the same territory. While such a claim can be contested in the context of national territorial conflict and the two-state solution argument, it gains significant traction when moving to an urban scale, for instance in Jerusalem. Our second critical component assumes that to better explore the facets of apartheid today (or a neo-apartheid modality, as we suggest), we must acknowledge its multi-scalar and ‘messy’ manifestations. More specifically, we propose that one must move beyond the level of the state to that of the city in order to explore the relational formation of the neo-apartheid city as a novel regime, which highlights new apparatuses of territorial management and colonisation. Thus and as Griffiths and Joronen suggest in the introduction to this volume, we examine apartheid in Palestine/Israel from a relational perspective that explore its multiple manifestations.
Author(s): Ram M, Yacobi H
Editor(s): Mark Griffiths and Miko Joronen
Publication type: Book Chapter
Publication status: Published
Book Title: Encountering Palestine Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence
Year: 2023
Pages: 149-176
Print publication date: 29/12/2023
Acceptance date: 14/12/2021
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Place Published: Lincoln, Nebraska.
URL: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496232588/
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9781496232588
