Facts on the Ground: Domicide and the Production of Space in Palestine

Abstract

This thesis explores the use and effects of domicide: the deliberate and permanent separation of occupants from their home which causes suffering (Porteous and Smith 2001: 12). Specifically it charts domicidal acts as a long-running feature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel’s varied use of domicide, both historic and contemporary, reveals underlying biopolitical, expansionist, disciplinary and memoricidal aims. These dovetail into one goal: maintaining the ‘Jewish State’. However as with any effort to ‘produce space’ domicide generates contestations over spatial meaning. How these struggles, and domicide’s unanticipated effects, manifest within forms of cultural production and social practice occupies the subsequent focus of this thesis. The significance house-keys have acquired within Palestinian inter-familial and communal customs, as well as within cultural (re)production, provides insight into the suffering of domicide victims. Attachment to the house-key is viewed as emblematic of that felt towards the lost home – even a continuation of that connection by other means. A series of analyses explores the re-configuration of the key’s symbolic value as it permeates different arenas of cultural production and activity, embodying both loss and resistance toward the goals of domicide. Attention shifts to Beit Arabiya, Anata, a post-domicide landscape serving as venue for the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions’ (ICAHD) 2013 rebuilding camp. An ethnographic study critically examines the community’s appropriation of this site in their efforts to re-frame meaning into a direct challenge to domicide’s aims. It is proposed that by revealing the inherent struggle(s) over spatial meaning caused by domicide, deterministic understandings of spatial production are demonstrably flawed. Nevertheless, while unable to effectively silence alternative narratives, domicide still inflicts profound suffering – evidenced by this wide-ranging analysis of its practice.