For “a no-state yet to come”: Palestinian urban place-making in Kufr Aqab, Jerusalem

Abstract

This article explores Palestinians’ place-making in Jerusalem under the constant threat of displacement and dispossession. I center my focus on Kufr Aqab, a neighborhood that was cut off from Jerusalem by the construction of Wall in 2003 while remaining inside the borders of the city’s municipality. After 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the borders of Jerusalem’s municipality expanded and Kufr Aqab village was annexed as a neighborhood inside Jerusalem’s newly formed borders. Since its occupation, a matrix of displacement and dispossession consisting of policies and practices was put in place to oversee the domination of the Palestinians in the city. In my research, I explore the possibilities of reconceptualizing Palestinian urban spaces and place-making in Kufr Aqab between the gap in settler-colonial governance and the Palestinian future of no-state. I show how the urban space emulates a camp-like space that I describe as an “affective infrastructure” of a camp. Being on the Israeli settler-colonial frontier, I argue that Kufr Aqab dwellers are kept suspended in time in a liminal zone between the ghost of displaceability from the Israeli state and in a deep suspension of no-state. I conclude by suggesting that the case of Kufr Aqab speaks to the space-making, displacement, and statelessness of the present as well as futurity of the West Bank (and East Jerusalem), where the future of the Palestinian state is far from being seen in the horizon and debilitated sovereignty is exercised on a limited scale in fragmented territories of governance.