Beyond a Technology of Security and Segregation: An Ethnographic Study on the Impact of the Israeli-Palestinians Wall on the Christian Communities of Bethlehem and Beit Jala.

This work focuses on analyzing the impact of the security barrier or Wall built between Israel and the West Bank on the Palestinian Christian population of the municipalities of Bethlehem and Beit Jala. Consequently to the disorders and violence arisen during the Second Intifada, the Israeli Government began the planning and construction of a 712 kilometers-long barrier. Although scholars, activists, and the mainstream public opinion interested in the Israeli-Palestinian issue often address the Wall in terms of a technology of occupation or as an antiterrorist technology, in this research I wish to unveil a more complex dimension to the Wall’s presence. Thus, in this work I adopt and adapt a theoretical framework of Latour’s concept of assemblages in as much as it allows to challenge the notion that agency belongs solely to human actors while it embraces the idea that things also exert power. Furthermore, through the concept of assemblages, we are able to develop a cooperation between the phenomenological and the materialist approaches. Through this framework, the Wall is not just a tool in the hands of the Israeli government and army, but it exercises an agency of its own, which intertwines with the agency of the materials and the people who live in its proximities and interact with it. Against this backdrop, we unpack the label “Wall” into its one-word definitions given by the interviewees and separately analyze the different actants that are involved in said definitions and thus exercise agency within the assemblage called Wall. In particular we address its agency in appropriating of land, in exercising control and surveillance, in causing separation, in stirring acts of sumud or steadfastness from the Christian population, in stimulating the development of a new Christian shrine between its cement slabs.