Negotiating colonial violence: spaces of precarisation in Palestine

Negotiating Colonial Violence: Spaces of Precarisation in Palestine Mikko Joronen Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG), Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere University,Tampere, Finland; mikko.joronen@tuni.fi Abstract: This paper examines the ways in which colonial violence is transformed and spatialised into negotiated precarities at the occupied Palestine. The notion of “negotiated precarity”is developed herein, to refer to two aspects in particular. First, to spatial compartmentalisation, which shows how the settler colonial power operates by creating precarious administrative zones, where the life of the colonised becomes prone to several flexible, negotiated uses of power. Second, negotiated precarity is used to refer to the conduct of the colonised that counters, transforms, redirects, cancels or hampers the colonial spatialisations of power. By focusing on the “negotiated precarities”in a singular West Bank village, I exemplify how the colonial governing is entwined with spatial compartments that enable several informal, indirect and ad hoc techniques of colonial violence, but also how the colonial governing is constantly mobilised, negotiated, countered and redirected in/through the everyday Palestinian spaces. Keywords: Palestine, West Bank, compartmentalisation, zoning, precarity, settler colonialism, government, political action It is conflict about the history, and the geography of the land ... when they change the geography, they change the history. (Interviewee, Al-Walaja, West Bank) Introduction As Frantz Fanon (1963:29) wrote in The Wretched of the Earth,“the colonial world is a world divided into compartments”. During the last 50 years of Israeli occupation, administrative zonings, enclavisations, borderings, quarters, compartments, lines, pockets, segregations and other divides have played a crucial role in producing the complex and historically layered spaces of governing the occupied Palestinian territories, particularly the West Bank and East Jerusalem (Falah 2003; Zureik 2016). 1 Although these spatial divisions have often, and justly, been discussed in terms of racial separation, apartheid or broader organisation and exploitation of life in the colonies (e.g. Kipfer 2006; Legg 2007; Pappe 2015; Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2014; Veracini 2010; Yiftachel 2009), in this paper I approach these compartmentalisations, not only as a technique for spatialising settler colonial violence, but also as they are negotiated as part of the everyday Palestinian spaces. Compartmentalisation, I show, operates by creating precarious Antipode Vol. 51 No. 3 2019 ISSN 0066-4812, pp. 838–857 doi: 10.1111/anti.12518 ª2019 The Author. Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. A Radical Journal of Geography administrative zones, where the life of the colonised is prone to a variety of spatially negotiated colonial precarities. I examine these zonings and precarities by focusing on the variety of modes though which they are mobilised, negotiated, redirected and implemented as part of the everyday Palestinian life. I will do so by focusing on the West Bank village of Al-Walaja, which I show to provide an exemplary site for examining not only the variety of techniques Israel uses to spatialise its settler colonial project, but the ways in which these precarities become implemented, negotiated and redirected in practice. A more profound picture of the occupation is thus revealed, one that shows how colonial violence induces vulnerabilities (precarisation) upon the occupied population and the spaces they dwell in, but also how the establishment of precarious zones (compartmentalisation) enables several formal and informal, direct and indirect practices that link administrative violence back to the military violence of killing, harming, destructing, disabling and maiming. My main claim is that a focus on what I refer to as the “negotiated precarities”affords a stance that properly acknowledges not only how the use of power and distribution of precarities are negotiated in the spatialisation of colonial power, but also the ways in which the practices of governing appear and become redirected, ignored, erased, transformed, etc. as part of the everyday spaces of the colonised. I start the paper by discussing the main processes at play in “negotiated precarities”: the flexible precarisation part of compartmentalising colonial power and the negotiation of precarities in everyday Palestinian spaces. I focus in particular on how precarity operates as a political and ontological condition of governing and counter-conduct, and how these different sides of precarity are played out in spatial terms. In the second section I look at the historical ways in which colonial precarities have been spatialised in the village of Al-Walaja. In the third section I show how this compartmentalisation has enabled the state of Israel to flexibly control, strangulate and disable the sites of everyday Palestinian life. In order to further scrutinise how such flexible governing functions, I show how a cavalcade of formal and informal governing practices bring the colonial violence to the fore through a precarisation that is negotiated and manifested as part of the everyday life of Palestinian bodies and their sites of dwelling. Studying Colonial Violence in Spaces of Everyday Spatialising colonial violence through administrative, legal and governmental processes is, of course, not a new phenomenon. As Achille Mbembe (2003:26) recalls, colonial powers have for a long time (re)shaped power relations in colonies by establishing administrative zones, enclaves and borders, often accompanied by new social hierarchies and land ownership arrangements (see Legg 2007; Shafir 1989). The ongoing legalisation of land appropriations (Joronen 2017b), the use of permit regimes (Berda 2017), and the demolition of homes often related to colonial planning and rezoning (Chiodelli 2012, 2017) are all, as I will show below in detail, clearly indicative of how Israel uses administrative processes for spatialising settler colonial violence, particularly in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. While there is a broader agreement within the existing literature on the Negotiating Colonial Violence 839 ª2019 The Author. Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd. prevalence of Israel’s use of settler colonial means of governing (Pullan and Yacobi 2017; Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2014, 2015; Veracini 2006, 2010; Zureik 2016), critics have claimed all too often Palestinian spaces have been framed through, and so sidelined with those of the Israeli occupation (Allen 2008; Harker 2009; Joronen 2017a; Kotef and Amir 2011; Stamatopoulou-Robbins 2008). As it has also been argued within the literature critical of governingand governmentality-centred approaches (Death 2010; MacKinnon 2000), focus on the control, government, and conducting of others tends to ignore the “real-world messiness”, therefore setting aside “the practice, implementation, agency, experience and resistance” of the ones governed (Rosol 2014:75). Mbembe (2003:28–29), for instance, acknowledges Palestine as one of the “most accomplished sites”of “late colonial power”, claiming it offers a principal set, where the multiple forms of power— from the disciplinary to bioand necro-political (see Joronen 2016a; Zureik 2016) —are used to extend Israel’s“absolute domination over the inhabitants of the occupied territories”(emphasis added). And yet, the focus on domination and control, and the colonial spaces they induce (Gordon 2008; Weizman 2007), can never capture the everyday spaces of Palestinian life, always irreducible to the aims and functions of the (settler) colonial state (e.g. Amir and Kotef 2015; Griffiths 2017; Harker 2009; Joronen 2017a). In this article I suggest one way for properly acknowledging the above-mentioned approaches—the ones focusing on the colonial spaces induced through the Israeli governing practices (e.g. Gordon 2008; Weizman 2007), and the others focusing on Palestinian spaces of everyday (e.g. Harker 2009; Joronen 2017a)—is through the notion of precarity. Focus on precarity, particularly on its “spatialisation”, I argue, helps in showing how Israeli settler colonialism operates through the spatial zones and compartments that use precarisation as a tool for governing, while also revealing how governing becomes implemented through the spaces of everyday encounter, or what I refer to as the “negotiated precarities”redirecting, ignoring, erasing and transforming the colonial conduct. My argument here is twofold. First, although the precarisation of the colonised can be used as a settler colonial tactic of governing, precariousness is also something, as Judith Butler (2010:25–26) writes, that characterises “life itself”,and thus, I argue, all efforts to govern. The notion of precariousness hence significantly broadens the scope of precarity from current approaches that either consider it as an “affectual”condition (Anderson 2014:126–127) or as a “political” form of governing (Lorey 2015) to cover the ontological fragility intrinsic for all living and acting, including the practices of governing. This signifies not only the fact that governing remains always vulnerable to resistance, but also the uncertainty, unpredictability and incompleteness of governing, which we can see in negotiations taking place in spatialising the use of colonial power. Second, even though precarisation has the power to turn the spaces and lives of the colonised even close to unliveable, it can also operate as a source of action. Induced precarities do not merely passivise those set under the precarious conditions, but engender new forms of action and social practice, ranging from the solidarity within the communities under the threat of settler colonial eviction to the counter-conducts and counter-visibilities against the settler colonial ways of precarisation and 840 Antipode ª2019 The Author. Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd. elimination (see Athanasiou 2016; Hammami 2016; Joronen 2017a; Joronen and Griffiths 2018a). Together, these two tensions—the one between the political distribution of precarities and ontological precariousness, and the other between precarity as a source of governing and counter-conduct—also help in understanding how the corresponding spatialities between the compartmentalisation (as a tactic of spatialising colonial violence) and the negotiated precarities operate in a way that takes into account the irreducibility of Palestinian spaces to the precarities imposed by Israeli settler colonialism. Judith Butler’s discussion of precarity as differentiated between the ontological and the political condition—between life’s intrinsic frailty, finitude, and proneness to harm (its precariousness) and the political frames and social conditions through which precarities become distributed—has been of influence for recent geographical work on Palestine and beyond (e.g. Griffiths and Joronen 2018; Harker 2012; Joronen 2016b; Kearns 2013). These debates examine and draw attention to the manifold political ways through which precarity has been used as a tool for governing, from neoliberal to settler colonial (Waite 2009), leaving the role of the ontological precariousness in governing relatively untouched. Apart from Mitch Rose’s (2014:215) elaboration of the way in which ontological vulnerability has been mobilised as a form of “negative governance”, where the precariousness of life itself is “let to rule”through the “strategic decision not to govern”(see also Joronen 2017b; Ramadan and Fregonese 2017), the ways in which ontological precariousness constitutes and relates to a practice of governing have not been taken into explicit consideration. To properly consider the role of precariousness in governing, I argue, first, that while we need to acknowledge that the governed may be placed in vulnerable living conditions, governmental processes themselves also bear ontological vulnerabilities that make governing a conduct always prone to failure, reconfiguration, transformation, resistance and other unpredictable outcomes. I hence understand governing practice as an aim to govern—as a governmentalising drive in which vulnerability, complicity, incompleteness, and metamorphosis may become visible through analysis of its implementation and negotiation in everyday spaces. Nonetheless, even though precariousness may constitute an ontological condition of living, it always remains irreducible to any of the particular political, social and spatial ontologies—it constitutes, as Butler (2015:129) aptly writes, our “joint non-foundation”. Precariousness is thus what haunts all political, social and spatial manifestations as a reminder of their intrinsic finitude, thereby offering, not an ontological foundation of life, but a condition that makes life (and its governing) fragile, vulnerable and finite. It is such a “hauntology”of precariousness that thus makes colonial governing vulnerable, incomplete and prone to resistance and negotiations. Second, the irreducibility of precariousness to any political means also allows it to operate as a source for both, governing (precarisation) and the counter-conduct (mobilisation of the precarised). This, I argue, highlights the importance of comprehending precarity as beyond the passivising/activating and the governing/ governed divides (see also Athanasiou 2016; Butler 2016). As shown by several scholars, even remarkable vulnerabilities can create new forms of solidarity Negotiating Colonial Violence 841 ª2019 The Author. Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd. (Hammami 2016), steadfastness (Lentin 2016), resistance (Joronen 2017a), resilient family practices (Harker 2012), affectual capacities (Joronen and Griffiths 2019a) and hope (Griffiths 2017; Joronen and Griffiths 2019b) among the colonised, particularly when shared. Vulnerability can be hence used to perpetuate subjugating governing but also activating resistance; it ensures the governed and the governing alike remain vulnerable, but can also be used as a resource for affirming new action, counter-conduct and new ways of coping with settler colonial violence. Focus on the means of governing, no matter how persuasive they are, is not enough; attention must be paid to the processes of distribution in the actual “messiness”of governing practice and how precarities are negotiated, resisted and transformed in and through everyday encounters. Accordingly, one should recognise the incompleteness and incapacity of governing, but also the hope, counter-acting, pertinacity, obduracy, disobedience, solidarity, resistance and the other manifold, often small-scale ways of erasing, diminishing, redirecting, cancelling, ignoring and inoperationalising the precarities induced by settler colonial governing. The focus on the negotiation, distribution and alleviation of precarities means, above all, attending to how precarities become spatialised and distributed in space. As Christopher Harker (2012) has shown, examining precarity through different spatio-temporal contexts helps in revealing more nuanced and spatially differentiated politics, which unsettles the spatially robust divides often associated with discussions of war, colonialism and nationalism. For Harker, this specific focus has enabled compelling accounts of how Palestinian family practices help in alleviating exposure to colonial precarities in spatially differentiated and localised ways. In the analysis that follows, I draw on and further Harker’s insight to show how the spatial differentiation of precarities emerge through the two connected processes: the “compartmentalisation”of precarities into administrative zones; and the negotiation of precarities as part of the spaces of implementation, of which I mean not only those negotiations Palestinians do in their daily lives but the ones related to the space-sensitive use of power. To this end, I suggest starting from the everyday struggles and violence faced by the colonised can provide an ethically motivated methodological stance that makes the everyday realities of the colonised its prime concern. As claimed by several authors, it is an ethical standpoint to look at Palestinian lives beyond the “victimhood”, which at worst reduces them into mere targets of governing without a voice of their own (e.g. Kotef and Amir 2011; Marshall 2014). The erasure of Palestinian agency, voice and capacity to resist is particularly problematic as Palestinians themselves refuse to succumb, both in practice (Joronen 2017a) and at the level of identification (Lentin 2016), into mere targets of colonial power. And yet, as I will further show in the final section, focus on negotiated precarities also shows the controversial and countering nature of governing, as practices of resistance and counter-conduct can also be re-mobilised to serve the purpose of governing. Not only are governmental efforts thus prone to resisting and counter-conduct, but the resistance and counter-conduct themselves can also be tactically promoted to strengthen and normalise colonial conduct. This dynamic, I argue, further underlines the need to focus on the spatialisation of precarity, particularly on how 842 Antipode ª2019 The Author. Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd. the practice of governing appears and becomes negotiated as part of the everyday life of colonised people. As the discussion above shows, amplifying the voice of (rather than giving a voice to) colonised people is an ethical and methodological task that engages with the “actual messiness”and the (often informal) complexity of governing and colonial violence. The accounts I use here to explore the negotiated precarities are drawn from the two fieldwork periods conducted in the West Bank village of Al-Walaja and its surroundings in 2016 and 2017, during which I interviewed residents including farmers, officials, council members, activists, NGO workers, pensioners and families dealing with and/or threatened by different forms of colonial violence. Some of the talks were conducted in a more formal interview set-up (16 interviews), others more informally by participating in the olive harvest, council meetings and other social get-togethers, or as walking interviews around the village and its surroundings. The interview materials were supported by daily observations, notes and ethnographic vignettes put together into fieldwork diaries, but also by other official and unofficial materials collected from different archival sources (i.e. home demolition orders, statistics, Al-Walaja Facebook pages). Through these materials, I show, we can paint a subtler picture on the spatialisation of precarities—on how the establishment of precarious zones makes colonial tactics part of everyday Palestinian life (compartmentalisation), and how informal practices and everyday spaces of encounter are crucial for the precarisation and their implementation as negotiated precarities. Compartmentalisation of Al-Walaja: Short History of Governmental Zonings As Ghazi-Walid Falah (2003) has shown, targeting of the Arab-Palestinian population in the occupied territories and Israel proper through “zoning”,“enclavization/exclavization”and “spatial segregation”policies has a long history that can be dated to before the 1967 occupation of the Palestinian Territories (on the role of the British Mandate regulations, see Abdo 2011; Gordon 2008). While Falah’s focus on zoning reveals the colonial processes that effect the overall “shrinking” of Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the creation of zones, I argue, also allows Israel to flexibly implement colonial processes through several informal and indirect site-specific practices. This is particularly the case in AlWalaja (and its surroundings, Al-Makhrour, Battir, Cremisan Valley), one of the “border”sites next to the 1949 armistice line (the “green line”) in the eastern part of the Bethlehem district. Al-Walaja’s vicinity to Jerusalem has made it subject to several colonial spatialisations, including the Jerusalem Masterplan, construction of the Separation Wall, settlement expansion, national park establishment, and the cavalcade of Israeli “Area C”policies. It is precisely these processes, originating in different historical moments, that have created a presence of several administrative compartments which the state of Israel uses to flexibly implement settler colonial appropriations, eliminations and evictions. After the 1948 war, approximately 66% of Al-Walaja’s original land area, including the build-up part of the village, was handed to the newly established state of Negotiating Colonial Violence 843 ª2019 The Author. Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd. Israel in the armistice agreement signed with Jordan in April 1949 (Khalidi 1997:322–323). Many Al-Walajees fled the 1948 battles to the caves in the eastern agricultural part of village—one of the older interviewees even bravely stating he was “born in a cave”—to wait for a chance to return to their homes. After Israel destroyed most of the original village in 1954 to prevent Al-Walajees, contra UN resolution 194 (the “right to return’), from returning to their homes behind the Green Line, villagers slowly started to realise their stalled situation. As one of the villagers, born in the aftermath of the Nakba (the 1948 “catastrophe”), aptly put it: “I was born as a refugee in my own village”. The temporary shanties, shacks, cottages, and premises built in caves were gradually replaced with more permanent houses, the eastern part of the village eventually forming what today is known as the West Bank village of Al-Walaja (see Figure 1). After Israel occupied the West Bank and other Palestinian territories after the Six-Day War in 1967, Al-Walaja faced another kind of divide: the one of administrative zoning. More than a half of the remaining eastern part of the village (13% of the original land area) was unilaterally annexed within the borders of Jerusalem, which Israel today considers, again unilaterally and against the international law or the view of an international community (excluding the Trump administration), as its “united capital”(B’tselem 2014; UNRWA 2011). After the occupation, two Figure 1: Compartmentalisation of Al-Walaja (map by Issa Zboun, Head of Geo-Informatics [GIS & Remote Sensing] Department, Applied Research Institute–Jerusalem [ARIJ], Bethlehem, Palestine; modified by author; reproduced here with permission) [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]. 844 Antipode ª2019 The Author. Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd. additional parcels of land were confiscated from the eastern part of the village for the construction of Israeli-Jewish settlements—Gilo (1971) and Har Gilo (1972)— both of which have had a steady population growth since their establishment (ARIJ 2010:17; ECF 2016; JPS 2016). The rest of the village was occupied and held under military rule (see Figure 1). The re-zoning of the Jerusalem district, which also impinged on several other West Bank communities around East Jerusalem (see Chiodelli 2017; Jabareen 2010; Yiftachel 2009), had a significant impact on Al-Walaja, particularly after Israel formalised Jerusalem as its united capital in 1980. Although much has been written about the colonial aims and “creeping urban apartheid”of the Israeli planning system (Yiftachel 2009), and the complex entanglement of racist goals to rational-comprehensive and neoliberal planning in East Jerusalem (Abdo 2011; Braier 2013; Wari 2011), Al-Walaja offers one of the sites for looking at the devastating consequences these plans, particularly the “Jerusalem 2000 plan”, 2 have had for the surrounding West Bank communities. Despite being forcefully annexed to Jerusalem, residents of the Jerusalem part of Al-Walaja (the Ain Jawaizeh neighbourhood) have not been offered Israeli citizenship or Jerusalem IDs (a residency permit with limited rights issued to Palestinians in East Jerusalem; see Tawil-Souri 2012). Although several legal efforts to recognise and improve the status of Al-Walajees residing in Ain Jawaizeh have been made in Israeli courts, most of the residents are still considered to dwell in their homes illegally, and have thus been targeted with home demolition orders, harassments and administrative fines. As the head of the village council estimated in 2017, since the mid 1980s Israel has issued altogether 150 home demolition orders in Al-Walaja, while close to 60 demolitions have already been implemented, some of the premises being destroyed only recently (see also Al-Walaja Withstand 2018; BADIL 2013; UNRWA 2013). Home demolitions, however, are not only restricted to land annexed to the Jerusalem district. After the Oslo Peace Accords (1993/1995), which were to offer a roadmap to peace through the partial sovereignty of the newly established Palestinian Authority (PA), the remaining part of Al-Walaja was zoned into areas “C” and “B”. While “Area B”has a civilian administration run by the PA, it only comprises less than 3% of the original land area of the village (ARIJ 2010:16). The rest of the post-67 village is considered as “Area C”under the direct security and administrative control of Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) (see Figure 1). Since the mid 1990s, however, Israel has used its control of Area C to further catalyse settlement expansion, by simultaneously hampering Palestinian development with restrictions and a purposely slow and obstructive permit regime (Berda 2017; Joronen 2017b). Less than 1% of the whole of “Area C”is allocated for Palestinian development (OCHA 2014), while the situation is even more alarming in those parts of “Area C”, such as Al-Walaja (of which the villagers used an expression “Area C minus”) that stand in the way of the Israeli expansion plans. In the future transportation plan for metropolitan Jerusalem, for instance (a collaborative effort between Transportation Ministry, Finance Ministry, and Jerusalem Municipality), the connection between West Bank settlements and Jerusalem is considered as a natural part of metropolitan growth (JTM 2014). Negotiating Colonial Violence 845 ª2019 The Author. Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd. The most recent, still partly ongoing compartmentalisation is related to the construction of the Separation Wall, the 8-metre concrete wall/fence which separates the built-up areas of Al-Walaja from the surrounding agricultural lands in both the Area C and “Jerusalem”parts (Ain Jamaizeh) (see Figure 1). As the construction of the wall in Al-Walaja highlights, most of its planned route does not run along the Green Line but within the West Bank, the wall thus connecting settlements more tightly to Israel, while simultaneously sequestering land and destroying the livelihoods of Palestinian villages, neighbourhoods and communities (UNRWA 2013). In Al-Walaja (and its surroundings) the wall has already separated Palestinian farmers from their lands and obstructed olive harvesting and grazing in the “seam zone”between the Wall and the Green line; it has also imposed a significant threat of demolition upon homes located behind or in the planned route of the wall. One of the farmer families, for instance, explained how they now need to “buy feed for their goats”who, before the Wall, would graze in the areas now separated away. When complete, the wall will entirely surround Al-Walaja and strangulate it to a “Bantustan”with one entrance point only. As the discussion above shows, Al-Walaja has not only been cut into several governmental zones and compartments—Areas C and B, Jerusalem municipality, settlements, seam zones—but strangulated and shrunk into an isolated pocket targeted by different regulations, permits and administrative conducts related to home demolitions, land appropriations, restrictions and other ways of hampering everyday life and the practice of professions. Together the historically folded agreements, confiscations, zonings, strangulations and unilateral annexations have thus created a local mosaic of governmental compartments, which offers a spatial platform for flexibly spatialising colonial violence through the variety of administrative techniques, practices, plans and regulations, whose specificities I turn to in the following section. Negotiating Precarity As the head of the Al-Walaja village council summarised, compartmentalisation of the village has affected everyday life in profound ways. “Many people here were farmers”, he explained; “now, after the land was taken from them, people are going to other jobs”. As another interviewee continued, confiscation of areas with water springs in particular has significantly affected the livelihood of the village: Al-Walaja was one of the main villages in the area that provided fruits and vegetables for Jerusalem, and the whole region. Now, since we don’t have the water, we cannot farm anymore, the land is becoming drier and the farmers turning into workers. One of the few remaining water springs, Al-Haniye, that emerges from the caves in the western part of the village, is located in a section of a “seam zone”, which Israel designated a public park area in 2013 (B’tselem 2014). As the newly established information boards around the spring show, Israel is currently turning the area into a public park with cycling paths, hiking trails, picnic areas, play grounds, planted forest areas, artificial lakes, archaeological sites, and so forth. The Al-Haniye spring, which used to be a popular picnic site for the Al-Walajees, 846 Antipode ª2019 The Author. Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd. compartmentalisation facilitates more informal acts—from intimidating settler music, stolen olives and damaged trees to accidental fires, explosions and floating water—and indirect effects such as fearful and anxious waiting of home demolitions. These dynamics of precarity are cumulatively central to an understanding of how settler colonial violence is implemented, negotiated and transformed in AlWalaja. In order to deal with this complexity, I have shown how taking the narratives and practices of the colonised, particularly the ways in which Palestinians encounter the indirect, informal and overlapping ramifications of governmental processes in their daily lives, as a point of departure places research in the middle of the “actual messiness”of governing practice. I further suggested the notion of “negotiated precarity”as capable of covering the political uses of precarity as a flexible tool of governing, but also the ways in which precarities engender action, resistance and (social) ways of alleviating and transforming the colonial violence. The focus on “negotiated precarities”, I have further shown, affords a methodological and ethical stance ignoring the spatial imaginaries and practices of the settler colonial regime (e.g. Veracini 2010), further acknowledging the cracks, incompleteness and transformations in the practice of governing. Moreover, the notion of negotiation helps to acknowledge how counter-conduct, disobedience, pertinacity, hope, solidarity and other ways of erasing, diminishing, redirecting and cancelling the effects of power are all part of the “art of governing”(Legg 2018), often with unexpected ways, as the example of counter-planning in Al-Walaja exemplified. Yet, in all accounts the Al-Walajees were activated rather than merely passivised and victimised by their precarious situation, precarity thus standing between the activating and passivating, or subjugating and affirming condition. This signifies not only the uncertainty and unpredictability of how settler colonialism can be spatially practiced, but also how existing Palestinian spaces affect, transform, redirect and reorganise aims to spatialise precarity. Acknowledging such dynamics helps in recognising how the political violence is entwined around everyday vulnerabilities and negotiations of power that are often ignored in geopolitical narratives on Palestine/ Israel, but also in maintaining a sensitivity to politics and hope in sites, where one hardly expects to find any room left for their appearance (see Hage 2009; Joronen and Griffiths 2019b). To understand such manifoldness in distributing precarity, a more spatially grounded study of settler colonial power is needed, as is a clearer articulation of the ways in which ontological precariousness haunts all efforts to govern, act and resist. Precarity may be spatially and politically distributed as settler colonial conduct, but it is never reducible solely to manifestations of power and desires to dominate. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Mark Griffiths and the participants of the two talks I gave at Aberystwyth and Swansea Universities for their important feedback. I am also thankful for the editors of Antipode and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. I am grateful for the assistance in the field and feel indebted to the participants of the research, without whom the writing of this article would not have been possible. Negotiating Colonial Violence 853 ª2019 The Author. Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd. Endnotes 1 In Gaza the situation remains significantly different, particularly due to Israel’s blockage of the Gaza Strip after Hamas’electoral victory in 2006 (see Joronen 2016a). 2 According to Braier (2013), the “Jerusalem 2000”plan (also known as the “Jerusalem Master Plan 2020”) has offered a guideline for the Jerusalem municipality and district planning since the end of 2008 (for more details, see Jabareen 2010; Wari 2011). 3 Names have been changed to protect the anonymity, unless the interviewee wanted to appear with his/her own name. Interviewees are named only if they are quoted more than once. 4 “Land without a people for a people without a land”(Said 1979:9). The origin, meaning and the use of the proverb, however, are under dispute (e.g. Muir 2008), though the colonial terra nullus-motif has clearly been an essential part of the Zionist narratives of “empty land”(e.g. Yiftachel 2002:224–225), with “two millennia of neglect”now made into “agricultural and botanic miracles”(Long 2009:65). 5 Since the Oslo Agreements, East Jerusalemites have been increasingly targeted with deportations implemented through the “center of life”policy. The policy ties the renewal of residency rights (“Jerusalem ID”) to the arbitrary requirement that Palestinians need to meet in order to prove their centre of life is in Jerusalem, thus creating stateless persons that exist, not outside the law, but within Israel’s citizenship legislation (see Jefferies 2012; Tawil-Souri 2012). 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