Between Dislocation and Domination: Palestinian Dual Marginality and Identity Construction in East Jerusalem 1993-2017

Abstract

This thesis adopts a bottom-up, qualitative approach to Palestinian identity construction in East Jerusalem and asks how the new politics and altered geography of the city since Oslo are recreating Palestinian subjectivities and redefining Palestinian struggle. I make the case that East Jerusalemites are doubly marginalised, first as Palestinians spatially and politically dislocated from the West Bank, then as residents of Israel, inside the politics and economy of the state but permanently excluded from the national project. Distanced from both state projects and from the discursive structures through which Palestinian identity was constructed after 1967, East Jerusalem residents are redefining from below what it means to be Palestinian in ways that are unfamiliar to Palestinians elsewhere in the occupied territories.

Drawing on the vocabulary and theoretical contours of discourse theory, I problematise the top-down optic favoured by mainstream academic approaches which essentialises identities and privileges an occupation/resistance binary. I suggest that a ground-level approach to everyday practices in East Jerusalem sheds light on the extent to which existing nationalist and resistance discourses have either lost or changed meaning for Palestinian residents and makes evident the complexities of domination which are not visible from an elevated perspective. I suggest that the view from the ground in East Jerusalem is significantly underexplored and that from this position, the assumptions underlying existing analytic approaches to Palestinian identity and struggle are called into question.