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Mobilizing Citizenship: Navigating Urban Infrastructure and Planning Advocacy Among Palestinian Citizens of Israel

Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This dissertation, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, explores how Palestinian citizens of Israel navigate urban infrastructural neglect and development in Israel’s Palestinian localities. These localities have developed largely informally because of long-standing state-led spatial planning policies premised on Jewish territorial and demographic control through expropriation and settlement, and conversely, on preventing the expansion and contiguity of Palestinian space. The resultant geography is one of under-resourced Arab towns and cities that are bursting at the seams, fragmented from one another by surrounding Jewish localities and the roads and highways connecting them. I take up mobility as a key analytic through which to understand how Palestinian citizens of Israel encounter and make sense of the materialities and gradations of citizenship under settler colonial apartheid. I argue that everyday experiences of (im)mobility generate political sensibilities that then inform strategies of political mobilization and claims-making around local urban planning and infrastructure issues. As this ethnographic study reveals, sitting in a traffic jam in Nazareth’s city centre, commuting to and from the adjacent Jewish city of Nazareth Illit, or responding to the looming threat of home demolitions in Wadi Ara and the Little Triangle, are critical sites for the formation and expression of situated knowledges about citizenship and infrastructure as entangled technologies of differentiation, dispossession, and settler colonial governance. In recent years, the Israeli state’s planning apparatus has shifted its approach from neglect to intervention in Arab communities, under the guise of “closing the gap” with Jewish ones. This shift has taken place alongside the adoption of legislation that further entrenches Jewish ethnonational interests. Although Palestinians with Israeli citizenship understand their legal status to be variously unequal, hollow, or incomplete, my ethnographic research shows how residents, activists, and planning advocates nonetheless mobilize citizenship rights and planning knowledge as tools of democratization and even political resistance. In doing so, I argue that strategic engagements with state institutions, discourses, and formal procedures and with informal, grassroots, and insurgent politics are not incommensurable, but rather are mutually enabling and ambiguously bounded.
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7139367023
Cites: 118
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Related to: 10