Very few Israeli left-wing Jews live in Palestine. Research that has been done on some of these cases, and especially on women living in Palestine, describes the phenomenon in terms of crossing and blurring national, ethnic, political, sexual, and gender boundaries. Following field-work with Israeli left-wing Jewish women living in Palestine, this research points to a crossing of boundaries from a different theoretical angle: crossing the lines of fear.
The green line marks the borders of the West Bank occupied by Israel since the war of 1967. In my talk, I will demonstrate the way the green line and all the other apparatus of separation and control, induce fear amongst Israeli Jew dissidents, as well as amongst Palestinians.
The life in Palestine and the need to pass through the checkpoints often confronted my interlocutors with feelings of fear. I will claim that fear can inform us about the way the line functions. Fear reveals that the line is not one, it is scattered through the West Bank in different technologies and performances. I discuss the way in which fear has been seen in the literature as a political emotion, primarily as a means of mobilization and control. I add to the literature by proposing that fear is also a political emotion because it reveals these masked systems of control and can, therefore, invoke resistance and nurture counter-hegemonic political imagination.