Othering and territorial claims in the Palestinian-Israeli context

The social construction of belonging generates boundaries of groupings, life-worlds and (social) spaces by excluding ‘the other’ in order to claim ‘the own’. ‘Othering’ takes place in everyday life by performing the ‘we-group’ as the powerful one and by appropriation of space as the territory the group belongs to.

In the Israeli-Palestinian context, appropriation of space and ‘othering’ is part of the discourses and practices of everyday life in a complex, entangled and condensed form. Here, different groupings which form established-outsider figurations, are trapped and mobilized at the same time.

In our paper we will show how belonging and the hierarchies between groupings on the one hand and claims for territory on the other are interrelated in everyday interactions and social relations. We will present a comparative analysis of three ethnographic case studies on Haifa, Jaffa and the Old City of Jerusalem which was carried out in the context of a trilateral Israeli-Palestinian-German research project funded by the German Research Foundation.

For the urban context we will demonstrate the processes of ‘othering’ and spatial appropriation on different levels: on the level of historical, hegemonic discourses (narratives and nation-building), on a socio-economic level (gentrification processes), on the level of state-institutional regulations, and on the level of demographic transformations in terms of spatial mobility and migration.

The results show that on each of these levels, appropriation of space (occupying, owning, developing space) generates specific dynamics of exclusion and power relations within established-outsider figurations. We argue that ‘othering’ and appropriation of space are the reification of territorial claims and ideological hierarchies in the everyday life in conflict zones in general and in the Israeli-Palestinian context in particular.