"Landscapes of Exclusion: The Spatial Construction of Identity and the Politics of Difference in Contemporary Jerusalem" by Thomas Philip Abowd

Thomas Philip Abowd

Deposited 2003

Abstract
This dissertation explores the spatial construction of identity and the politics of difference in contemporary Jerusalem. I trace ethnographically what few studies have, heretofore, examined: namely, the multiple ways in which space, identity, and alterity are experienced, produced, and contested by those who reside and toil in this divided urban center. Throughout, I detail many of the complexities of an ethno-racial order that has beset, shaped, and defined relations between Palestinians and Israelis over the last several decades.

Deploying a range of methodological approaches (particularly participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and life-histories), I examine how the past is produced in a city vigorously characterized by a set of myths and mythic representations. I explore how particular urban spaces and places have come to take on national meanings and what those meanings have meant for the contest over a city both Palestinians and Israelis consider as their capital. My work looks at the politics of Israeli-state segregationist schemes and the emerging racialization of urban space in Jerusalem from a number of perspectives. The dissertation seeks to examine how particular communities in the city are affected in diverse ways by what I argue is a distinctly colonial form of racism and administration.

Israeli colonial authority is detailed as it is expressed institutionally in land law, the politics of zoning, city planning, and housing policy. But beyond these realms of racist expression, this work also attends to everyday, quotidian, non-institutional forms of discrimination and violence that sustain and reproduce Israeli rule in Jerusalem. I examine these multiple forms of discriminatory power and as well as the innumerable sorts of resistances to such practices of control and domination that both Palestinians and Israelis have engaged in.