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Closure’s Temporality

Article  in  South Atlantic Quarterly · January 2018

DOI: 10.1215/00382876-4282037

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 Julie Peteet 1
2
3
Closure’s Temporality:
4
The Cultural Politics of Time and Waiting 5
6
7
8
9
10
Could one restate Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” 11
(Cogito ergo sum) as “I move, therefore I am” 12
(Moveo ergo sum), and “I am how I move”? 13
—Sigurd Bergmann, “The Beauty of Speed or the 14
Discovery of Slowness—Why Do We Need to 15
Rethink Mobility?”
16
17
​Scene 1: On a visit to Hebron, I encountered an 18
iconic scene, one Palestinians witness or experi- 19
ence frequently. Two youth, not more than seven- 20
teen or eighteen years of age, were squatting, backs 21
against the cement wall in the blistering sun, wait- 22
ing while three well-armed young soldiers manned 23
the small but tightly controlled pedestrian check- 24
point. The contrast was striking. Of similar age, 25
the Palestinian youth were at the mercy of sol- 26
diers who bantered with each other and interacted 27
in a friendly manner with the few foreigners pass- 28
ing the checkpoint. Seemingly bored, the soldiers 29
wanted to chat while the young men waited. 30
When I passed by the same checkpoint several 31
hours later, the two fellows were still there, their 32
bodies in the same position. 33
Scene 2: I passed through Qalandia check- 34
point early one evening. To the side of the pedes- 35
trian lane, I espied a group of about fifteen Pales- 36
tinian males, young and old, kneeling on flattened 37
38
The South Atlantic Quarterly 117:1, January 2018 39
doi 10.1215/00382876-4282037  © 2018 Duke University Press

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 44  The South Atlantic Quarterly • January 2018

1 cardboard boxes, praying amid the tangled coils of barbed wire and debris.
2 Scene 1 vividly illustrates the mundane power of the occupying state to
3 inscribe a punishing temporal and mobility regime. Watching scene 2, it
4 struck me that the men were publicly imposing their sacred temporal
5 rhythms, rituals, and sounds on an encounter-space that ordinarily appro-
6 priated their mobility and time and deprived them of dignity. For a brief
7 moment, they stepped out of the occupiers’ time and fashioned their own
8 temporal space and bodily rhythms, however ephemeral. This was a
9 refusal to acquiesce, a small gesture of taking ownership of both time and
10 space, as well as one’s bodily movements. These ethnographic encounters
11 illustrate the power to impose waiting and appropriate time and, con-
12 versely, the refusal to acquiesce and instead move according to one’s own
13 temporal rhythm and sense of time in precisely the space where control
14 over Palestinians’ time is most visible and embodied: the checkpoint.
15 When controls over mobility are differentiated in a population situated
16 within a defined territory, different temporal orders and subjectivities are
17 put into relief.
18 Waiting is not a passive state (see Crapanzano 1985; Hage 2009) but is
19 rather an embodied state of active stasis, punctuated by movement; both
20 occur in spatiotemporal zones characterized by particular configurations of
21 power. For Palestinians, imposed waiting, a purposeful and willful depriva-
22 tion of mobility and temporal autonomy at its most basic level, that of the
23 body, has become a commonplace, routinized, and shared feature of daily
24 life under Israeli occupation and the policy of closure. Time, like mobility, is
25 a heavily marked category, objectified and subject to calculation and control,
26 on one hand, and uncertainty and loss of control, on the other. Most signifi-
27 cantly, the calculated strategy of control, the uncertainty and arbitrariness of
28 waiting, engenders not only anxiety, subordination (Peteet 2017), and ulti-
29 mately immiseration but also subversion and resistance.1
30 This article forefronts time as a lens through which to understand the
31 lives of Palestinians under a colonial-settler occupation and closure where
32 time and mobility are weaponized. In the prevailing “economy of suspended
33 rights,” where control over the body’s movements is severely curtailed, Pales-
34 tinian humanity and agency are affirmed through the will to persist and
35 move.2 The question that begs further research is: What sort of temporal
36 order do Palestinians envision, or are they even able to conceptualize a future
37 when the present is so profoundly restricted? This article has been written in
38 a colonial present with no end in sight.
39

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 Peteet • Closure’s Temporality  45

In the Time of Closure 1

2
In March 1993, Israel imposed a closure on the occupied Palestinian territo-
3
ries (OPT), restricting the movement of Palestinian goods, labor, and people
4
into Jerusalem, within and between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and
5
between them and Israel. Closure accompanied the 1993 and 1995 Oslo
6
accords that gave Israel substantial control over Palestinian mobility. Area C,
7
under full Israeli control, resembles a sea encircling a scattering of islands. In
8
this archipelago, how to reach another island when the sea is forbidden ter-
9
rain is the question. To move from one area to another, Palestinians are com-
10
pelled to avoid area C and the roads running through it. Marooning Palestin-
11
ians facilitates the crafting of exclusivist Jewish spaces.
12
Closure has resulted in geopolitical fragmentation, economic devasta-
13
tion, social fracturing, and a pervasive sense of isolation. Closure separates
14
Israelis and Palestinians, denying a mutuality of time and space. It crafts
15
spatiotemporal zones where predictability is a scarce resource. A set of physi-
16
cal and administrative devices structure Palestinian time, mobility, and
17
access to space: the wall, the permit system, identity cards, a segregated road
18
network, and numerous checkpoints.3 An immobilization regime drastically
19
limits the scope and speed of Palestinian mobility. An occupying, expan-
20
sionist, and colonial state, I contend, deploys temporal measures to further
21
its territorial scope. With space cleared of Palestinians through immobiliz-
22
ing practices, it becomes available for settlement by Jewish Israelis. Immis-
23
eration is envisioned as a means to winnow the Palestinian population and
24
thus relieve the demographic pressure on Israel. In approaching time in Pal-
25
estine, attention to the future should be heightened: How does the colonial
26
state envision the spatiality of the indigenous population, and how do Pales-
27
tinians understand the present and imagine the future?
28
Waiting occurs at the intersection of hierarchy, space, time, and mobil-
29
ity and shapes the contours of subjectivity. If time is an artifact of power,
30
control over temporal rhythms and mobility map and display hierarchy and
31
subordination. Polyrhythms, as well as multiple spatialities and sovereign-
32
ties, order daily life. With the Palestinian body in prolonged stasis, waiting
33
publicly performs and displays for both Palestinians and Israelis state domi-
34
nation over time, space, and the body.
35
This ethnographically grounded exploration is in conversation with
36
anthropology’s engagement with time.4 The recent temporal turn is related to
37
the “rapprochement between the anthropology of history and the anthropology
38
39

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 46  The South Atlantic Quarterly • January 2018

1 of capitalism” (Bear 2016: 487). Just as ethnographies of the temporal have

2 challenged singular, linear capitalist chronopolitics (488), studies of the tem-
3 poral order instantiated by settler-colonial formations can further under-
4 standings of the work of time in producing hierarchy and subjugation. The
5 situation in Palestine departs in some significant ways from other cases in
6 the anthropology of time. For example, Henry J. Rutz (1992: 7) contends that
7 a politics of time is “concerned with the appropriation of the time of others,
8 the institutionalization of a dominant time, and the legitimation of power.”
9 Israel departs from this model in one significant way: it seeks not to institu-
10 tionalize Israeli time, just as bringing the colonized into the orbit of Zionism
11 as an ideology has not been on its agenda. Immobilizing the Palestinian in a
12 web of physical and bureaucratic restrictions that are arbitrary, inconsistent,
13 capriciously applied, and not legally legible or coherent imposes chaos and
14 disorder rather than the rationality of modern technologies of time. The Pal-
15 estinian seems to operate out-of-time, neither precapitalist or modern capital-
16 ist time nor hyperspeedy, fragmented neoliberal time, but in a gray zone of
17 indeterminacy.
18 Not surprisingly, colonial rule often remaps space and reassigns tem-
19 poralities to adhere to their imaginaries about the native as well as to tether
20 native time to colonial time. Colonial regimes often imagined the native as
21 occupying an alternate time zone, distinct from “modern” time (see Fabian
22 1983) and worked to effect that distinction. Accordingly, Palestinians and
23 Israelis do occupy distinctly hierarchical but relational spatiotemporal
24 zones. New temporal orders are often associated with demands for a regu-
25 lated and disciplined labor force. For example, during the 1970s and 1980s,
26 when Israel used large pools of Palestinian labor, their time and mobility
27 was appended to the demands of Israeli capital. In this, Israel joined other
28 colonial enterprises where native time was appended to the colonizer’s time
29 (see Merry 2000; Cooper 2005), resulting in polyrhythmia. Yet being
30 appended to colonial time varies with the particulars of colonial labor
31 needs, different types of resource extraction, and security regimes. In Pal-
32 estine, settler colonialism’s temporal order operates less according to the
33 demands for labor and more for clearing space for state expansion and
34 exclusivist settlement.
35 That ethnography “has challenged the existence of a single chronopoli-
36 tics of speed or time scarcity” (Bear 2016: 488) is exemplified in Palestine,
37 where highly disparate temporalities exist side-by-side; these differential yet
38 relational temporalities render them a singular field of analysis. Distinct
39

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 Peteet • Closure’s Temporality  47

temporalities intersect with space and mobility to give rise to timescapes, 1

these “mutual interdependencies of time and space” (496). 2
I hone in on waiting as a primary embodied aspect of the rhythms of 3
closure that surface at the intersection of time, movement (see Lefebvre 4
2004), and space. With Palestinians literally stranded in enclaves shaped by 5
the wall and checkpoints, their ability to craft space through mobility is seri- 6
ously undermined, while Israelis’ unencumbered, high-speed mobility facil- 7
itates spatial expansion.5 In Palestine, time and mobility’s scope and speed 8
are unambiguously differentially allocated. In short, there are distinct tem- 9
poralities. Not merely opposed, they are relational—one creates the condi- 10
tions of existence for the other. One need only observe or pass through an 11
Israeli checkpoint to know that the “distribution of waiting time coincides 12
with the distribution of power” (Schwartz 1974: 841). Thus the temporal is 13
part of the mechanics of crafting exclusivist space. 14
At a fundamental level, the time/space/mobility nexus is a crucial 15
component of self-determination in the aggregate and individual sense. The 16
capacity to move through space and to control the tempo is indexical for 17
human rights as well. Closure’s punishing temporality and the pressure to 18
emigrate are a means to short-circuit self-determination. Through a focus 19
on waiting, this article fleshes out the mutual constitutiveness of space, 20
time, and mobility and the effects of closure’s temporality on subjectivities. 21
The imposition of waiting and control of Palestinian time fashions a particu- 22
lar kind of body and subjectivity. If time, like space, is in significant measure 23
produced through action and mobility, what role does the appropriation of 24
time play in this Zionist settler-colonial project? What sorts of subjectivities 25
does waiting produce? 26
In the Israeli imaginary, Palestinians are seen largely through the lens 27
of security. The individual Palestinian represents an aggregate population, 28
and thus the boundaries of the corporeal body are expansive. As a potential 29
carrier of danger and mayhem, the Palestinian body is a mobile signifier, 30
managed, surveyed, and punished for transgressions. Israeli political and 31
social discourse has produced two types of Palestinian bodies: the explosive 32
body of the male terrorist, the “major inhabitant of the discourse of national 33
security” and the female giving birth at the checkpoint, emblematic of an 34
oppositional Israeli discourse (Kotef and Amir 2007: 978). In both images, 35
the Palestinian is reduced to either a suffering or an explosive body; one 36
embodied aspect of identity overrides all others, an instance of Judith Butler’s 37
“excessive corporeality” (984). With the Palestinian body perceived as having 38
39

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 48  The South Atlantic Quarterly • January 2018

1 hidden and violent motives that can be contained by hypervigilance, surveil-

2 lance, and biosocial profiling, the soldiers’ task is to discern the hidden agenda
3 and disable it. Rather than simply discipline it, the body is disabled while
4 simultaneously subjected to a state of ambiguity and temporal suspension.
5 Palestinians understand these techniques as schemata to engender a self-­
6 disciplining body and a quiescent subject. This regime of spatial interdiction
7 and deceleration of movement does not correspond with Marcel Mauss’s
8 notion of habitus as what goes without saying or Pierre Bourdieu’s largely
9 unconscious disposition. Indeed, these dispositions—the body seemingly on
10 task as it proceeds through the requisite motions of deference at check-
11 points—rarely operate as unmediated habitus. They are constantly com-
12 mented on and stridently critiqued, resisted, and subverted, and perceived
13 underlying premises and goals are articulated. Palestinians seemingly acqui-
14 esce and follow the rules because they need to move, yet they analyze con-
15 stantly minute changes in checkpoints and thus objectify rather than normal-
16 ize the process. Indeed, they have a firm and consciously articulated conviction
17 as to the purpose of these rules governing mobility: “They want to drive us
18 crazy,” Ziad complained. An employee in a shop, he was late for work one day
19 due to delays at checkpoints. He proceeded to analyze the situation as if
20 explaining a mathematical equation:
21
If you can’t plan from one day to the next and there is never any explanation
22
for why you are denied a permit or turned back at checkpoint, you will get so
23
frustrated—daily life just becomes unmanageable. It takes so much time to
24
do anything; every task becomes an ordeal and you are never certain what
25
will happen. You add it all up and you figure they want you to go crazy with
26
frustration. Then we will start to think about leaving.
27
28 Confining a surplus population generates effects well beyond the dis-
29 ciplinary. The regime of control operates most visibly at the edges. As the
30 Palestinian body nears Israeli space, Michel Foucault’s (1979: 138) descrip-
31 tion of the mechanics of power and disciplined bodies is apt: “. . . so that they
32 may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency
33 that one determines. Thus discipline produces subjected and practised bod-
34 ies, ‘docile’ bodies.” Yet closure is simultaneously disciplinary and antidisci-
35 plinary, ordered yet chaotic, predictable yet unpredictable, and, most signifi-
36 cantly, it produces a critical disposition, alert to mutations in the regime of
37 control. Disciplining the body operates hand-in-hand with disabling it
38 through long waits filled with uncertainty.
39

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 Peteet • Closure’s Temporality  49

Mobility and Time 1

2
What is the message of the checkpoint? Leave! Life is not going to be easy.
—Nabil, a thirty-year-old development worker and father of three 3
4
Recently, mobility has become an indicator of human rights and modernity 5
(Cresswell 2006: 10; Sheller 2008). Mobility is socially produced and in turn 6
productive and reproductive of particular social orders, spaces, and subjec- 7
tivities. If mobility is undifferentiated by power, that is, as a right that can be 8
accorded, modulated, or withheld, then the concept risks losing analytical 9
specificity. While some move with unencumbered speed and range, others 10
are constrained and closely monitored.6 Most significantly, human mobility 11
remains tethered to the demands of capital, labor, securitization practices, 12
and state boundaries and identity documents. 13
Since September 11, 2001, states have magnified their hold on mobil- 14
ity, fueled by new technologies for border security and surveillance. If “con- 15
trol societies function with a third generation of machines, with information 16
technologies and computers” (Deleuze 1995: 180), then biometrics may con- 17
stitute the highest stage yet of this machinery. Thus Palestine-Israel, with 18
the latest high-tech surveillance equipment, biometrically encoded identity 19
cards, the permit system, and checkpoints, as well as a low-tech cement wall, 20
provides an illustrative setting to explore (im)mobility and its embedding in 21
regimes of surveillance, risk assessment, and security technologies and the 22
way that together they fashion particular forms of space. 23
Israel adds a somewhat new twist to the regulation and constraint of 24
indigenous mobility.7 In Palestine, obstacles to mobility penetrate deep into 25
quotidian life (Peteet 2017; Hammoudeh, Hamayel, and Welchman 2016). 26
Controls over mobility usually begin at the borders between sovereign states, 27
at which point documents such as passports, identity cards, and visas come 28
forcefully into play.8 For this stateless, occupied population, mobility is con- 29
strained by the absence of citizenship in the state exercising sovereignty and 30
its grip on the issuance of documents that determine the legitimacy and 31
scope of mobility. On the personnel side, gun-toting colonists, private secu- 32
rity operatives, the border police, and military officers operate along with the 33
occupation’s Civil Administration staff to govern Palestinian mobility. In 34
their eyes, Palestinians are transgressive interlopers; immobilization ren- 35
ders them distant and yet observable. 36
With the Israeli-generated identity card, a Palestinian’s classification is 37
quickly knowable. Where the state strictly determines the legitimacy of move- 38
ment on the basis of citizenship, itself differentially allocated, documents 39

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 50  The South Atlantic Quarterly • January 2018

1 become critical artifacts. Identity documents encode and produce legal dis-
2 tinction and inflect subjectivity by constituting categories of difference. A
3 hierarchical rainbow of color-coded identity card holders or plastic sleeves is
4 instantly read to ascertain place of residence and determine the range of
5 mobility. West Bank residents carry identity cards encased in green plastic
6 sleeves, while those of the relatively more privileged East Jerusalem resi-
7 dents are encased in blue; orange is for Gazans. The green sleeve automati-
8 cally signals a prohibition on movement beyond the West Bank. Date and
9 place of birth, which determine where one can or cannot reside “legally,” are
10 denoted, as are religion, parents’ names, and residency. While Ziad and I
11 waited patiently to cross a checkpoint, he remarked: “All these different iden-
12 tity cards separate us from each other. Each begins to see the other as differ-
13 ent and resents the small privileges. Palestinians with Jerusalem identity
14 cards begin to think they are better than us in the West Bank because they
15 get a few benefits from the Israelis. This creates divisions among us.” Atomi-
16 zation of sentiment and affiliation are stretched by such measures.
17 At checkpoints, Palestinians follow a sequence of procedures in which
18 their control over the timing and rhythm of movement is suspended. The
19 checkpoint marks the intersections of distinct temporal and spatial orders; it
20 is a mediating structure and experience. Ad hoc decisions and a good
21 amount of arbitrariness govern the reading of documents and the scope of
22 mobility allowed.
23 With its long waits, inexplicable denials, and lack of clarity as to regula-
24 tions the permit system constitutes, a paper wall of bureaucracy governs and
25 regulates mobility as well as compels compliance and sometimes collabora-
26 tion. A mysterious and time-consuming process, the criteria for obtaining
27 permits are unstated and seemingly arbitrary. Indeed, it is opacity that is
28 consistent. After being denied a permit to enter Jerusalem, Leila, a twenty-
29 five-year-old employee of a local NGO, explained: “Permits are another way
30 to strangle us, to rule us and make life so awful we will leave permanently.”
31 The interminable waits and arbitrary denials can have grave consequences
32 for daily social life, particularly employment and access to health care. The
33 permit system also exemplifies relational mobilities. For example, a permit’s
34 validity is suspended during Jewish-Israeli holidays, when the West Bank
35 becomes a closed zone.
36 While all states seek to “monopolize the legitimate means of move-
37 ment” (Torpey 1998: 241), what distinguishes the case at hand is the
38 monopolization of a noncitizen populations’ movement within a territory
39 not officially incorporated into the state. Israel has imposed what Anne

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 Peteet • Closure’s Temporality  51

Meneley (2008: 20) dubs “occupation time.” Palestinians and Israelis refer- 1
ence the same technologies of time (clocks, calendars, the modern work 2
schedule, etc.) yet inhabit distinctly disparate relational timescapes. In 3
short, in Palestine/Israel, there is a plurality of timescapes or coeval times 4
(Fabian 1983). Palestinian time and mobility are surveilled, slowed down, 5
and subject to control. “Occupation time” obstructs Palestinians’ participa- 6
tion in modern industrial time and yet also “interferes with the seasonal 7
rhythms of old”—“it is its own temporal category” (Meneley 2008: 21). In 8
occupation time, speed, a quintessential signifier of modernity, is deceler- 9
ated through prolonged waiting. 10
Eventually and inevitably, time and space intersect,9 an intersection 11
succinctly captured by Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh (2008: 173) during 12
a walk in the West Bank: “When we climbed up again the whole scene of 13
the new construction lay bare before our eyes. There was so much upheaval, 14
it was as though the entire earth was being reshuffled. . . . It was as though 15
the tectonic movements that had occurred over thousands of years were 16
now happening in a matter of months, entirely redrawing the map.” Israeli 17
time and space move on a “tectonic scale,” undoing thousands of years of 18
time. Palestinian time is a visible and embodied mark of distinction where 19
the biological and the social connect in “a medium of hierarchic power and 20
governance” (Munn 1992: 109).10 Johannes Fabian’s (1983: 29) “physical 21
time” can become “political physics” or mobility physics, whereby the occu- 22
pation deems it “impossible for two bodies to occupy the same space at the 23
same time.” Furthermore, mobility physics illustrates the time-space inter- 24
section and how obstacles to mobility produce space diluted of natives. Ulti- 25
mately, the control of mobility is bound up with a territorial expansion 26
achievable through the production of differentiated forms of space and the 27
mobility that produces them. 28
In Paul Virilio’s concept of dromocracy, those who command speed 29
rule (Collins 2008: 9–10). If speed is a hallmark of modernity, Palestinians 30
wait, endlessly suspended in a web of obstacles that often has them moving 31
at a tempo from another century. To travel is to be caught in a slow moving 32
vortex of filtering by the permit system and the checkpoints and to move 33
among spaces with varying forms of sovereignty and power. Palestinians 34
strive to proceed with their everyday lives but in radically altered ways. Mov- 35
ing from one place to another has become an art of negotiations, constant 36
resequencing, subterfuge, patience, and cunning, an obstacle course to be 37
mastered anew every day. Trust in the predictability of everyday life has been 38
replaced by anticipation and anxiety. 39

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 52  The South Atlantic Quarterly • January 2018

1 Waiting and “Stealing Time”

2
Always waiting. For this is what the Palestinian does: we wait. For an answer to be
3 given, for a question to be asked; for a marriage proposal to be made, for a divorce
4 to be finalized; for a border to open, for a permit to be issued; for a war to end; for a
5 war to begin; for a child to be born; for one to die a martyr; for retirement or a new
6 job; for exile to a better place and for return to the only place that knows us; for our
7 prisoners to come home; for our homes to no longer be prisons; for our children to
8 be free; for freedom from a time when we no longer have to wait.
9 —Leila El-Haddad, “The Quintessential Palestinian Experience”
10 Palestinians are observers of their own quotidian immobility. Waiting com-
11 pels an indeterminate, protracted state of paralysis and heightened anticipa-
12 tion. It establishes and performs a relationship among those who wait, those
13 who force them to wait, and those who move with ease. Waiting is a central
14 feature in this social order of visual, tangible, and embodied relations of
15 hierarchy, value, domination, and subordination. As Zygmunt Bauman
16 (2004: 104) reminds us: “Nowadays, all waiting, any procrastination, all
17 delays turn into a stigma of inferiority.”
18 While waiting “seems to be the neglected Achilles heel of modernity”
19 (Bissell 2007: 277) and only marginally present in the literature on (im)mobil-
20 ities,11 in Palestine it is magnified. However, waiting in Palestine is hardly
21 equivalent to the mundane waiting that accompanies ordinary life, whether in
22 line at the post office, the grocery store, or the bus stop or as part of the fabric
23 of neoliberal state-citizen relations (Auyero 2012). Both Israelis (see Ochs
24 2011) and Palestinians wait—for the next explosion, for the next round of
25 fighting, for the next peace initiative they both know amounts to nothing.
26 This reminds us of Vincent Crapanzano’s (1985: 42) depiction of white South
27 Africans during apartheid as they “wait for something, anything, to happen.
28 They are caught in the peculiar, the paralytic, time of waiting.” Capricious,
29 unpredictable waiting undermines any semblance of a single, standardized
30 temporal structure. Indeed, temporal rhythms are yoked to citizenship. Israeli
31 citizenship has a timescape; citizens enjoy temporal affluence as they move
32 with few obstacles compared to the Palestinians’ temporal poverty.
33 Waiting itself is hardly a passive act devoid of agency. Rather, it may
34 be an “active passivity” (Hage 2009: 2). Waiting is an act of refusal, an
35 embodied rejection of the Zionist idea that Palestinians can go elsewhere.
36 Ghassan Hage writes that in “relation to waiting” agency is “a hotbed of
37 ambivalence” (2). The question arises: With their actions to keep moving,
38 are they defying state logic? Is a temporal order of their own making dis-
39 cernable? The act of waiting is not simply symptomatic of submission or

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 Peteet • Closure’s Temporality  53

passivity. Ethnographic observation provides an indication of the agency 1

apparent in the ostensibly passive act of waiting. Palestinians are architects 2
of their own lives, asserting a resistant or subversive agency within the con- 3
straints imposed by occupation. For example, prayers they perform at 4
checkpoints are an appropriation of both time and space. Or when they 5
drive on often-circuitous, unpaved old roads or tracks, they defy the colonial 6
spatiotemporal order. When they borrow a friend’s Jerusalem identity card 7
to pass through a checkpoint, they defy mechanisms of surveillance and 8
legibility that govern mobility. 9
In Palestine, subordination is produced and reproduced, performed 10
and observed, through waiting that is also a form of punishment. Waiting is 11
part of everyday encounters with the occupying state and is enmeshed in 12
state institutions, practices, and personnel governing Palestinian mobility. 13
Compliance is enforced by the visible presence of the means of violence in 14
the armed colonists and soldiers. Occupation personnel are explicit about 15
the productive aspect of waiting. Soldiers report that they teach Palestinians 16
lessons in deference and about who is in charge at checkpoints (Grassiani 17
2013). Barry Schwartz (1975: 38) could have been writing about these check- 18
points when he said: “Punitive sanctioning through waiting is met in its 19
most extreme form when a person is not only kept waiting but is also kept 20
ignorant as to how long he must wait.” 21
Checkpoints are encounter spaces characterized by unpredictability 22
and petty cruelties. As Jumana, a young chemistry student, relates: “Once I 23
waited at the ‘Container’ [checkpoint] for eight hours—there was a soldier— 24
eighteen to nineteen years old. He had unzipped his pants—you could see 25
his genitals. He had his arms up in the air and he was shouting. This crazy 26
guy held us up for eight hours—women, children, and pregnant women, 27
people who needed to go to work or to [go] home.” In waiting for a permit, to 28
arrive home, for a doctor’s appointment or to visit family, the immediate 29
future is contingent less on the accoutrements associated with modern time 30
such as schedules, clocks, watches, and agendas and more on the checkpoint 31
to open, for the line to move, or for soldiers to arrive and swing open the 32
gates. Checkpoints set in motion a ritualized sequence of actions and 33
encounters, but unlike rites, they can be quite arbitrary. The contradiction, 34
however, is resolved by the intent and outcome: immiseration, restrained 35
and filtered mobility, and a constant state of ambiguity. Waits can entail 36
hours or minutes as documents are slipped into pockets of soldiers who then 37
disappear into the guard post; sometimes they return quickly, sometimes 38
hours later. Sometimes they simply carry documents around while their 39

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 54  The South Atlantic Quarterly • January 2018

1 owners wait. Oddly enough, they often do not check the cars themselves or
2 do so perfunctorily.12 Given the lax security, capricious waiting seems to be
3 the intent.
4 The temporal is also a discursive device; “temporary” evokes an inde-
5 terminate, protracted state. In international law, occupation itself is an
6 “interim measure” in the period between “armed conflict” and “a peace set-
7 tlement” (Dugard 2007). When the occupation began, it was declared “tem-
8 porary,” but the building of colonies soon belied that claim. Imposed as a
9 temporary measure in March 1993—“until further notice”—closure has yet
10 to be lifted. Cast as a temporary security device, the wall’s $3 billion price tag
11 vitiates any notion of its “temporariness,” as does its concreteness conveying
12 a permanency hiding in plain sight.
13 In a world where time is wielded as a weapon, how is waiting experi-
14 enced, conceptualized, and negotiated? Muna, an eighty-year-old retired
15 schoolteacher and widow, spent hours trying to reach Nablus to visit friends.
16 Her lamentations, “We are masters of waiting” and “Our struggle will be a
17 long one,” convey an expansive and contradictory view of time. Palestinians
18 watch with heavy hearts as each day brings new indignities. Nevertheless,
19 they know that the situation can be sustained for only so long; they, too, wait
20 for the proverbial tipping point when violence will erupt.
21 Waiting is an embodied state of simultaneously constrained move-
22 ment and stasis. When faced with inexorable waits, the body decelerates,
23 often to a standstill; a heightened state of alert and agitation sets in. Pales-
24 tinians wait under the hot sun or in the freezing rain. With cell phones,
25 they relay information about estimated times of arrival and warn of delay.
26 They wait for the line to slowly inch forward, for the rattling sound of a
27 turnstile moving into action, or the grunts of a soldier’s order to “Go!” They
28 fidget, shift from one foot to the other, turn to one another and exchange
29 laments and information about alternatives routes, bemoan the situation,
30 mutter and curse quietly, angrily leave, but most often they are just still.
31 Their bodies sweat in summer and shiver in winter, they hold their bowels,
32 wait to eat and drink, and their legs and backs ache. Eventually, they slouch
33 against the wall or sit on the rough and often dirty pavement. Mothers hush
34 crying babies, and young children squirm. Arriving late to work, Ziad sighs
35 after several long delays at checkpoints: “We are patient, but we can only tol-
36 erate so much. At some point, it will explode.” Needless to say, just beneath
37 the surface of compliance, a seething frustration and bitterness saturates
38 the atmosphere at checkpoints, communicated in the angry muttering of
39 those in crowds moving at a snail’s pace. This is not ordinary waiting; it is

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 Peteet • Closure’s Temporality  55

state-enforced waiting whose sheer punishing physicality engenders an 1

acute sense of time. 2
This objectified sense of time is also magnified by the randomness it 3
inflicts on daily rhythms and agendas. “They are stealing our time. Every- 4
thing takes so long!” Muna lamented. She had just been granted a twelve- 5
hour permit to travel ten kilometers to Jerusalem. An otherwise mundane 6
event, a book reading, had become a major production. She had to be back in 7
Ramallah by 9:00 p.m. or risk being caught illegally in Jerusalem. It took five 8
days from her application to the actual issuance of the permit. “Stealing time” 9
captures the materiality of closure: a concrete, objectified sense of time, the 10
actual minutes, hours, and days that accumulate while waiting. Stories of 11
waiting have common threads: physical discomfort, violations of bodily integ- 12
rity, fear, trepidation, and, most markedly, ambiguity and humiliation. Pales- 13
tinians are both audience and performer in this public enactment of domina- 14
tion and subjugation. Their time is a tangible material thing that can be 15
granted or denied or, as Palestinians see it, stolen. The appropriation of time 16
works to hinder access to space and to diminish social relations. 17
Obtaining a permit requires advance preparation: a trip to the Palestin- 18
ian liaison that coordinates with the Israeli office that confers them. A wait of 19
days or weeks then ensues followed by another trip or perhaps several, to pick 20
up a permit for a delimited period. Like all who seek a permit, Muna must 21
request permission and then wait for approval. A few days before a hoped-for 22
visit to family in Jerusalem, her conversation was replete with references to 23
the uncertainty of the coming days and constant use of the conditional: “if I 24
can go.” Having time yoked to a dominant other infantilizes and humiliates. 25
Protracted waiting affirms that Palestinian time is without value and that the 26
space within which Palestinians desire to move is not theirs. They live in a 27
state of prolonged time-out, a common form of discipline for children. 28
Palestinians have become a nation of waiters. Waiting to be scruti- 29
nized and validated and then granted or denied permission to move. Semi- 30
paralysis can set in as some Palestinians hunker down in their enclaves, 31
avoiding movement if they can, unwilling to risk the indignities and the 32
uncertain waits. But it can have a cost. Um Faud, an eighty-two-year-old 33
widow living in Ramallah, complained of being unable to visit Tubas due to 34
the now long journey without access to toilets and prolonged sitting in the 35
car. Her son chimed in, “Making people suffer like that is part of their 36
humiliation, and it is a way to get our land.” Um Faud added: “We own a lot 37
of land around Tubas—it hasn’t been confiscated yet. If we can’t visit there 38
and tend to it, they will take it.” 39

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 56  The South Atlantic Quarterly • January 2018

1 Time/Space Intersection and Relationality

2
Palestinian mobilities are relational, contingent, and hierarchized—one
3
constrained, managed, and decelerated, the other accelerated and spatially
4
expansive. Relationality refers to a situation where the freedom of movement
5
of some “often depends on the denial of others’ mobility” (Sheller 2008: 28).
6
Slow Palestinian mobility can be juxtaposed to hyperspeedy, smooth, and
7
unobstructed Israeli movement along the well-paved, lightly traveled bypass
8
roads. At checkpoints, Palestinian cars can face lengthy delays, while Israeli
9
cars whiz by. Thus Israeli mobility cannot be extracted from its tight sedi-
10
mentation in Palestinian immobility.
11
Framing mobilities relationally facilitates the linkage of mobility to the
12
production of space. A segregated road system decelerates and regulates Pal-
13
estinian mobility while enabling the smooth connectivity of colonists with
14
Israel. The maze of bypass roads fracture the Palestinian landscape while
15
stitching together colonies and Israel, thus carving out ethnicized space.
16
This spatial contiguity and the speed of connection ensures colonialists’ par-
17
ticipation in state and society and facilitates the production of Israeli-Jewish
18
space. In this sharply asymmetrical relationality, time is aptly grasped as
19
arrhythmic and productive of space.
20
On a crowded and slow moving bus edging along the wall, an elderly
21
man started loudly badgering the driver as to why the bus was moving so
22
slowly. Shooting him a playful glance in his rearview mirror, the driver
23
shouted sarcastically: “Fly! Take an airplane if you don’t like it.” The busload
24
of passengers burst into laughter, finding humor in the dark reality of time
25
slowed. Now and then, when the road hit an incline, we could see over the
26
wall where Israeli cars zipped by. Here time is decidedly relational and poly-
27
rhythmic. While “people can live within and think in multiple temporal
28
frameworks” (Deeb 2009: 243), Palestinians’ lives are tethered coercively to
29
“occupation time” and the rhythms of the Jewish/Israeli calendar. Curfews,
30
not uncommon since 1967, are a good example of the relational intersection
31
of time, space, and arrhythmia. Arrhythmia can be a “pathological situation”
32
(Lefebvre 2004: 77) where desynchronization is “morbid and then fatal”
33
(78). Curfews impose prolonged waiting on Palestinian communities where
34
mobility is strictly forbidden except for a few hours a day. Usually declared
35
during Jewish holidays or after an incident of violence toward colonists or
36
the military, curfews often completely seal off the OPT. Mass lockdown
37
ensures that Israelis move with ease, while Palestinians are more or less sta-
38
tionary. Nasreen, who resides “illegally” in Jerusalem with her husband,
39

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 Peteet • Closure’s Temporality  57

who has a Jerusalem identity card, complained angrily: “Every Jewish holi- 1
day my husband and I are apart. I have to sleep at my parents in Ramallah 2
because of the complete sealing off of Jerusalem.” Aside from occasionally 3
easing the restrictions on entry to Jerusalem for the elderly and women, 4
mobility during their own sacred time is accorded little recognition. Randa, 5
a young employee of a nongovernmental organization (NGO), was fuming 6
on the eve of the end of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting: 7
8
You know, the evening before this Muslim feast day—everyone is trying to go
9
home to their families. So I arrive at Qalandia [checkpoint], and it is closed. A
10
big group of us waited for four hours in the cold. There were many elderly peo-
11
ple and women with small children. Everyone was so angry. I couldn’t stand
12
it! I was so hungry and getting thirsty. . . . We waited for hours from 4:00 until
13
8:00. I needed to go home. I needed to go home and prepare for the feast. I
14
could barely stand up I was so drained, but I kept thinking, I need to go home
15
and cook and clean and be with my family.
16
17
Subjectivity 18
19
Scene 1: After being denied a permit to go to Jerusalem to participate in a pro-
20
fessional event, Selma, an employee in an NGO, was visibly irritated. Pacing
21
the floor and wringing her hands, she burst out: “I don’t want to be excited
22
about anything that involves the future because you don’t know if it will really
23
happen. Our whole life is like this—not knowing if something will really hap-
24
pen.” The potentialities that inhere in the future are suspended as hopeless-
25
ness sets in and a self-disciplining suppression of desire is cultivated.
26
Scene 2: As the workday draws to a close, Selma tells everyone in the
27
office to take home their laptops because, as she explains, “None of us really
28
knows if we will arrive here tomorrow.”
29
Scene 3: Young men with lithe, athletic bodies seem to fly through the
30
air, up and down the wall they move, vaulting over obstacles and across roof-
31
tops. Those watching are captivated by their lightning-quick movements,
32
unable to look away from their daring and artistic performances of parkour, a
33
form of free running. In a video of the Jerusalem Parkour Crew, a young man
34
says: “We do parkour here near the wall because we wish to fly over the wall
35
to meet the family, the friends that they can’t come here. . . . If a settler follows
36
me, I can use parkour and save myself” (AJ+ 2015). Another young man
37
explains: “We do this sport in Jerusalem to say we are here. We are Palestin-
38
ians who are alive and doing well” (Grima and Ottomanelli 2013).
39

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 58  The South Atlantic Quarterly • January 2018

1 As Palestinians by turns navigate, subvert, refuse, accommodate,

2 negotiate, and acquiesce to this mobility and temporal regime, what sorts of
3 subjectivities emerge? The ever-present potential of state violence, unpredict-
4 ability, chaos, and disorder clearly nuance the Palestinian subjectivity, giving
5 rise to feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and anger, and yet at the same
6 time they kindle creativity and ingenuity.
7 Daily life lurches forward in crisis mode, its sequencing enveloped in
8 uncertainty and contingency. Selma’s comment underscores the way the ordi-
9 nary routines of daily life are unpredictable. Recalling those stark statements
10 “‘I move, therefore I am’ (Moveo ergo sum) and ‘I am how I move’” (Berg-
11 mann 2008: 21) positions mobility center stage in human subjectivity, open-
12 ing a window to explore the geography of subjectivity in a setting of pro-
13 nounced disparities in mobility. Movement is essential to being human and to
14 having a sense of self—the “I.” Parkour is understood as a form of resistance
15 at the most elemental level: the body and its movement through space. “We
16 are here,” a simple statement of presence, is freighted with meaning in Pales-
17 tine, where the dominant Zionist narrative and imaginary of an empty land-
18 scape awaiting redemption butts up against the presence of Palestinians.
19 It is worth pointing out that the temporal rhythms of the prison are
20 mimicked in the mobility regime. Palestinian prisoner Walid Daka (2011)
21 provides an astute analysis of the “conscious molding” that unfolds in Israeli
22 prisons through fragmentation of prisoners’ time and their ability to connect
23 with other prisoners. The intent is to short-circuit a collective national iden-
24 tity and action in the prison by atomizing each prisoner. A key difference in
25 the appropriation of time between the prison and the space outside its walls is
26 the physical structure, internal order, and disciplinary regime of the former;
27 the latter, the West Bank, while not technically a prison, is commonly
28 described as an “open-air prison” or “prison without a roof” to encapsulate
29 spatial constriction and loss of temporal autonomy. The isolating effects of
30 the prison are replicated among the general population: spatial and temporal
31 separation, fragmentation and constriction, and hence atomization.
32 The creativity and resourcefulness that Palestinians exhibit—from
33 skirting around checkpoints to tunneling under them—indicate a subjectiv-
34 ity that is more than one derived from an imposed stasis or calibrated slow-
35 down. Alongside the anger and frustrations of dealing with a time-space frac-
36 turing and control, Palestinians tell humorous jokes about closure’s impact
37 on their mobility. For example, I was driving with a friend around the West
38 Bank, and when I asked how much longer it might be before we arrived at the
39

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 Peteet • Closure’s Temporality  59

next village, he replied sarcastically: “Haven’t you heard—Palestinian cars 1

don’t have a fourth gear. We rarely exceed the speed of third gear before we 2
are faced with another checkpoint.” When Palestinians state that they want to 3
lead “normal” lives, they imagine a future without constraints on mobility 4
and the appending of time to another’s desire, suggesting a subjectivity that 5
is always more than a result of oppressive conditions but rather one that 6
results from their productive aspects as well. Palestinian subjectivity can be 7
situated at this intersection of the repressive and the productive. 8
The temporal has acquired an immediacy in individual and collective 9
subjectivities. A word that comes up often when talking about permits and 10
checkpoints is humiliation (izlaal). Ayman, an ambulance driver with a West 11
Bank identity card, who occasionally requested a permit to visit relatives in 12
Jerusalem and pray at al-Aqsa Mosque lamented: “I am so humiliated by the 13
process of asking for a permit to go to Jerusalem.” My neighbor in Ramallah, 14
forty-five-year-old Sami, obtained a twelve-hour permit to pray at Jerusalem’s 15
Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Relating his experiences at the checkpoint, 16
he said: “I felt so humiliated. I hold up my permit to the Plexiglas window 17
and this eighteen-year-old bitch flicks her wrist at me to go as if I am a fly, as 18
if I am nothing. I waited so long for a permit that she barely glanced at.” 19
Permits and checkpoints infantilize and humiliate those who, in effect, 20
must ask for permission to move. Wandering around the Old City of Jerusa- 21
lem, I stopped at a sweetshop. A few minutes later, Sami walked in. He had 22
managed to obtain a half-day permit to enter the city to visit Christian holy 23
sites. As we ate, Sami animatedly described his afternoon. Suddenly he 24
glanced at this watch and gathered his things. It was a few minutes before 25
5:00 p.m.; he said that he had to run and buy his mother her favorite bread 26
from a shop in the neighborhood where she was born and raised but could no 27
longer visit without a permit. “My permit expires at 6:00, so I have to hurry to 28
get to Qalandia,” he explained sheepishly, like a child with a curfew. 29
While expressing frustration and anger, Palestinians also celebrate 30
their ingenuity in various ways. For example, they tunnel under walls and 31
make the wall and checkpoints the subject of films, art, and humor; with 32
graffiti and wall murals, they speak back to occupation (Peteet 2016b). Post- 33
cards circulated in the West Bank several years ago depicting the “Palestin- 34
ian Olympics” with young men pole-vaulting over the wall. Parkour, the 35
sport or art of choreographed-like performances of hurling the body through 36
space, has taken hold in Palestine. Athletic young men contort their agile 37
bodies into a fast-paced sequence of dare-devil movements, part acrobatics 38
39

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 60  The South Atlantic Quarterly • January 2018

1 and martial arts, part gymnastics, and dance-like performances often in

2 front of the wall or with it as a backdrop and sometimes in front of soldiers
3 watching glumly. Jumping over and around physical barriers, escaping
4 momentarily their claustrophobic world of confinement and slowed move-
5 ment, they reclaim space, time, and their own bodies within, however, the
6 spatial constraints of the occupation. They provide a defiant and aesthetically
7 engaging image of unconstrained mobility and speed that puts into relief
8 and questions borders. Parkour performances give embodied expression to
9 an imagined word of porous borders. A rule-defying means of expression in
10 a world of sieges, borders, walls, and checkpoints, parkour speaks back to
11 imposed boundaries. A peaceful and creative form of protest, it evokes an
12 imagined future of a spatial order without obstacles. With its high-speed
13 tempo, parkour is a fleeting and embodied attempt to overcome temporal
14 constraints as well.
15 In asserting agency, through being in motion, however limited in
16 scope, or with parkour or praying at Qalandia, or simply refusing to be
17 immobilized, Palestinians engage in a politics of refusal. Persistent attempts
18 at movement in a restricted spatial orbit can be understood as acts of tactical
19 resistance by a body replete with subversive possibilities, within an “econ-
20 omy of suspended rights.”
21 El-Haddad’s inventory of waiting positions it as a constituent compo-
22 nent of the national condition and Palestinian subjectivity. Palestinians
23 have waited to return home in the wake of mass displacement in 1948–49.
24 In their minds, this temporary state of affairs would have been remedied
25 when violence subsided; occupation was claimed to be temporary. In the
26 camps, refugees live the paradox of protracted temporariness—trying to
27 construct normal lives in what is by design a temporary abode. The right of
28 return, still central to Palestinian politics and national sentiment, suggests
29 a state of suspended time, a protracted period of waiting for a right that
30 remains out of reach. All wait for solutions, for justice, for recognition, and
31 for security. A sense of crisis suffuses most Palestinian lives as they live in
32 anxious anticipation of the next restriction, the next outbreak of violence,
33 and disaster.
34
35
Conclusion
36
37 Closure has fostered an acute consciousness of time as tangible, something
38 that can be given or taken away. Not surprisingly, in Palestine geospatial
39 fragmentation and constriction are replicated in arrhythmatic temporalities.

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 Peteet • Closure’s Temporality  61

Hemmed in by temporal deceleration and spatial constriction, Palestinians 1

are suspended in a time/space formula in which they wait and anxiously 2
anticipate. Time has become another arrow in the quiver of modern colonial 3
management and conflict. Imposed asymmetrical temporal rhythms have 4
not become normative; indeed, they are saturated with consciousness, from 5
constant analysis to the fretful anticipation of moving forward to the frustra- 6
tion of deceleration. In the final analysis, closure operates through willful 7
temporal and spatial ambiguity and uncertainty. When the outcome of wait- 8
ing is not assured, the sense of its length and misery heightens. When con- 9
trol over time is appropriated and unpredictability ensues, trust in one’s own 10
ability to craft an immediate present or future is difficult to sustain. Waiting, 11
a suspension in time and space, resembles prolonged liminality, between 12
here and there, now and then, but without certainty as to outcome—will 13
“there” and “then” be realized? 14
In Palestine/Israel, time is baldly and visually relational: Palestinians 15
wait, Israelis move. Closure and the relentless march of colonists and their 16
speedy mobility is rapidly transforming the landscape and indigenous tem- 17
poral rhythms. For now, Palestinians watch and wait, stranded in enclaves. 18
They live in a state of alert, waiting for the next disaster to unfold—more 19
colonists and the violence they increasingly inflict, land confiscations, mili- 20
tary incursions, territorial fragmentation, and economic devastation. After 21
his olive grove was uprooted to make way for the wall, seventy-five-year-old 22
Abu Bilal stated with quiet dignity: “God will right this wrong. They will be 23
punished. Injustice can’t last forever.” The anticipation of justice and a 24
future, a time beyond occupation and closure, are apparent in his words of 25
hope. Perhaps, it is in the realm of hope where a postnational Palestinian 26
consciousness and imaginary is evident. 27
Mobility is pivotal to the production of space and place. If place is 28
dynamically produced and reproduced through the activities that unfold in it 29
and the social relationships formed in it, then Palestinians are losing the 30
ability to make space and place. Israel expands the territory of the state, 31
which, in effect, shrinks the territory vital to a contiguous Palestinian state. 32
Yet Palestinians continue to contour space. Denied access to local roadways 33
and forced to traverse the same route as others, whether a trail, path, or rut- 34
ted road, and to wait and navigate space together, is to participate in a shared, 35
collective relationship to time, place, and the emotional life of occupied, dis- 36
posable subjects. 37
Fragmented space, stretched time, and prolonged waiting are compo- 38
nents of a subjectivity binding Palestinians across multiple borders. Waiting 39

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 62  The South Atlantic Quarterly • January 2018

1 and the trepidation it generates are shared experiences whether in Lebanon,

2 Syria, Palestine, or Iraq. A sense of the future is constrained by the block-
3 ing of opportunities to travel, to find employment, to marry freely without
4 consideration for identity cards and residency, and to live where one chooses.
5 Self-determination unfolds on multiple levels. On the individual and the
6 aggregate level, it anticipates control over one’s body and its movements.
7 This requires gaining control of time, coming out of the chaotic gray zone of
8 others’ arbitrary and ambiguous control over mobility, operating according
9 to a time of one’s own making and reckoning.
10
11 Notes
12 Fieldwork for this research project was conducted in the occupied Palestinian territories
13 between 2004 and 2012. All names are pseudonyms. Statements by Palestinian interlocutors
14 have been translated by me.
15 1 An ethnography of waiting in Argentina illustrates a similar phenomenon of subordi-
nation (Auyero 2012: 19).
16
2 Michel Foucault (1979: 11) uses the concept of an “economy of suspended rights” to dis-
17 till the shift from physical pain to discipline. In Palestine, the actual deployment of
18 physical pain remains operative and always a potentiality, easily and quickly activated.
19 3 Restricting Palestinian mobility has a precedent. After 1948, Israel carried out a census
20 of the remaining Palestinians and gave them new identity cards. They were governed
21 by military rule until 1966 that included restrictions on their mobility (see Robinson
2013).
22
4 Two review articles map out anthropology’s engagement with the temporal: Munn
23 1992 and Bear 2016.
24 5 For an exploration of the enclaves and their relationship with refugee camps, see Peteet
25 2016a.
26 6 For literature on immobilities, see Adey 2006, Urry 2007, and Sheller 2008.
7 Colonial regimes also institute control over mobility in order to organize and regulate
27
the flow of labor, maintain designated spaces free of the colonized, and reduce their vis-
28 ibility, spatially concentrate them, and obstruct their political organizing.
29 8 Within states, citizens may enjoy internal mobility, although not always equally: for
30 example, in the United States, African Americans refer to “driving while black” (DWB),
31 and in Saudi Arabia, women cannot drive.
32 9 In the late 1980s, geographer David Harvey (1989: xii) wrote that social sciences usu-
ally “give time and history priority over space and geography.” Undoubtedly once true,
33
time and space are now tackled as they intersect. For a discussion of these entangle-
34 ments, see Lefebvre 2004.
35 10 For cogent critique of the productivist and neo-Marxists’ approaches to waiting, see
36 Bissell 2007.
37 11 For an illuminating, ethnographically grounded account of waiting in Palestine, see
Wick 2011.
38
12 This observation was confirmed by Machsom Watch activist Dorit Naaman (2006).
39

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