Staging Israel/Palestine: The geopolitical imaginaries of international tourism

Abstract

This article argues that the curation of particular geopolitical imaginaries of Israel/Palestine for international tourists can legitimize and naturalize the violence of the Israeli state project. Juxtaposing the cases of Tel Aviv-Jaffa and the West Bank, I analyze the discourses and embodied practices that produce imaginative geographies through processes of spatial distancing and temporal fixing. The dominant imaginary in Tel Aviv-Jaffa incorporates Israel into a westernized geography of Europe, while the dominant imaginary of the West Bank emphasizes its location in an Orientalized Middle East. The cultivation of these tourist landscapes as entirely disparate places works to obscure how both are constitutive of a single Israeli regime, contributing to the public secret that separates the occupation of the West Bank from Israel as a democratic state. By examining how seemingly apolitical tourist practices are entangled with geopolitical violence, this article reveals the complicity of international tourism in sustaining Israeli settler colonial dispossession and military occupation.