Author: Aneta Brockhill

Affiliation: University of Exeter, UK

Organization/Publisher: Mediterranean Politics

Date/Place: 2020/UK

Type of Literature: Research Paper

Number of Pages: 26

Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13629395.2020.1741276

Keywords: West Bank Wall, Palestine, Israel, Violence, Security

Brief:

The West Bank wall has been a manifestation of violence in the Israel-Palestine conflict. But the Israeli State has changed the discourse in its favor so that the Israeli and international public see the whole wall-building phenomena as a security measure. This article uses the conceptual lens of structural violence to challenge the depictions of violence in the conflict. It employs the West Bank Wall case study to analyze it as an act of structural violence, built within the wider apparatuses of the Israeli regime’s social, political, and economic structures. The paper contributes to the existing scholarship that challenges the restricted understandings of violence in the Israel-Palestinian conflict by looking beyond the direct acts of violence and shifting its focus to Israeli mechanisms of violence and the structural dimension of Israeli military rule. Apart from the structural violence, the paper analyses the exploitative and oppressive mechanisms of the wall and the implications of these apparatuses on Palestinian socio-economic livability. It also explores the political nature of the employment of violence’s narrow conceptualization. The paper also considers the relationship between the phenomenon’s conceptual and terminological restrictions, and governance of the conflict’s realities and key political questions about legitimacy, accountability, and responsibility. 

By: Saima Rashid, CIGA Research Assistant