Post-occupation Gaza: Israel’s war on Palestinian futures

This article is published as part of the Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography special issue “Palestinian Futures Anticipation, Imagination, Embodiments”, edited by Mikko Joronen, Helga Tawil-Souri, Merav Amir & Mark Griffiths. ABSTRACT The 2005 Israeli Disengagement from the Gaza Strip has left this region in a political and legal limbo. No longer strictly and fully complying with the definition of an occupied territory, the Strip, which has been under siege from 2007, cannot similarly be considered as fully independent. This paper argues that the Israeli control of Gaza is predicated on relegating this control to the past. Accordingly, it offers ‘post-occupation’ as a conceptual framework for deciphering Israel’s modalities of power over the Strip, claiming that rather than signifying a clear break from a now defunct occupation, post-occupation demarcates the persistence of Israeli domination. By rendering Gaza to the status of a post-occupation Israel can infer that Gaza’s future has already arrived, and relinquish its responsibilities towards the Strip and its residents through a fabrication of Palestinian political agency, while holding the Palestinian futures captive. The post-occupation condition therefore confounds normative narrations of time, while disrupting the distinction between past, present and future. This examination of the Disengagement and the siege as operating in tandem reveals that Israel substituted a burdensome and costly occupation with a more parsimonious spatial containment of Gaza, which allowed it to retain its grasp of Palestinian futurity.