Seam settlers: Ghazi-Walid Falah, Samer Al-Nawaiseh, ‘The Geopolitics of Israel’s “Seam Zone” in the West Bank of Palestine’, The Arab World Geographer, 27, 1, 2024, pp. 1-20 | settler colonial studies blog

Seam settlers: Ghazi-Walid Falah, Samer Al-Nawaiseh, ‘The Geopolitics of Israel’s “Seam Zone” in the West Bank of Palestine’, The Arab World Geographer, 27, 1, 2024, pp. 1-20

20May24

Abstract: This paper discusses how Israel has intensified its settlement activities in areas immediately east of the 1949 Armistice Line/Green Line, seeking to carve out 13% of West Bank territory and add this to its pre-June 1967 sovereign space. In doing so, state planners have engineered the Separation Wall (SW), an 8-meter-high barrier in part and twice as long as the Green Line. This Wall is designed to ‘border and order’ territories that Israel desires to annex, declaring it as a Seam Zone (SZ), since it lies between the Separation Wall and the Green Line. Concomitant with these colonial activities, Israel has imposed a strict system of military control on Palestinian communities. While some such communities were conditionally left inside the SZ and are living in their localities upon presenting proof of permanent residency, many others were arbitrarily separated by the SW from their best fertile land and water resources. This unilateral step in settlement implementation aims to further Israel’s geopolitical strategy of creating ‘facts on the ground.’ The now imminent declaration of the SZ as Israeli sovereign space was backed up by Trump’s Deal of the Century (DoC) announced in January 2020. In 2024 the SZ remains an open question.

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