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More food for settler colonial thought: Mehroosh Tak, Sardar Babur Hussain, Haris Zargar, Lauren Jessica Blake, ‘Settler colonialism de-develops food systems in protracted crises’, Nature Food, 6, 2025, pp. 751-756 »

Urban resistance against settler colonialism: Giorgia Ciccocioppo, ‘Permanent Battlespaces: Military Landscapes as a Lens of Israeli Settler Colonialism in Hebron, West Bank’, Crime, Law and AI, 06/08/25

19Aug25

Excerpt: Architecture in Hebron, West Bank, presents such a complex array of colonial strategies that the following analysis covers only partially. Since the establishment of Israeli settlements, military presence has gradually intensified to protect the latter from the alleged threat that Palestinian communities represent. Palestinian individuals are therefore subjected to a violent military regime that impacts their bodies, through physical persecution by the IDF and algorithmic profiling; their communal spaces, destroyed through targeted demolition or fragmented by checkpoints and settler-exclusive infrastructure; and their homes, through intensive surveillance and military raids. Life as a Palestinian resident in Hebron is deprived of collectivity, civic participation, and social life. The attempt to neglect Palestinians is materialized in the establishment of two differential temporal regimes. However, despite the clear-cut separation into enclaves and archipelagos, Israelis and Palestinians still inhabit the same spaces. The lives of both communities are still inevitably and violently intertwined. Despite the State of Israel’s justifications of such conditions based on a felt security threat posed by Islamist terrorism, a deeper look into how daily life unfolds in Palestinian communities in Hebron reveals a further settler colonial agenda. Building on the theoretical framework of security and military landscapes (Minghi, 1986; Pearson, 2012), and urban warfare (Coward, 2009), this paper aims to examine the goals and impact of military penetration into urbanity through the qualitative method of case study. Subsequent to the presentation of the literature’s framework applied to the case of Hebron, the following sections will disentangle the question of the blurred lines between military and civilian, war and peace, security and oppression: specifically, the differential mobility questions established by military checkpoints are highlighted, to further move into a reflection over the use of high-tech biometric surveillance systems as a disciplinary tool.  The work concludes with a critical reflection on the role of architecture in perpetrating violence and in finalizing a settler colonial project.


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