Defying Exception: Gaza after the “Unity Uprising”

Abstract

Over the past three decades, a series of regimes invoked by Israel have gradually constructed the Gaza Strip into a site of exception to commonly recognized rules and conventions, legitimizing and perpetuating the territory’s separation and confinement. The organizing principle behind Gaza’s state of exception is the separation, isolation, and confinement of a surplus Palestinian population into designated spatial zones, a fact that has been either ignored, absented, or obfuscated in Western normative discourse, which follows the Israeli narrative in exceptionalizing Gaza’s difference. With the recent wave of widespread popular Palestinian mobilization, however, the dominant narrative about Gaza has started to shift. The ongoing mobilization has reaffirmed the shared struggle of Palestinians across differentiated geographies of Israeli rule against a broader policy of territorial dismemberment and fragmentation.