(Un)Settling the West Bank of Israel/Palestine: the anthropology of citizenship in "no man's land"

Abstract

This paper answers Yael Navaro-Yashin's (2003) call for ethnographic research of "no man's land(s)", and to the ethnographic challenge she poses in her call for anthropologists to "sense the political" in such territories. The paper is based on my fieldwork in an Israeli college in the "West Bank" of Israel/Palestine and deals with the ambiguous political status of this geo-political territory. The paper analyses the "West Bank" of Israel/Palestine as a (political) "no man's land" and attempts to "sense the political" there, with special emphasis on the changing status of Israeli citizenship in the "West Bank". In the end, the paper also suggests that anthropologists should pay more attention to the possibility that citizenship in a "normal" (nation-)state becomes the new locus where people today negotiate ideas about the political.