2024 Theses Doctoral

Minefield, Railway, Temple: The Violent Making of Space and Time in Israel/Palestine

Elmakias, Zohar

Israel’s spatial imaginary, as an unsettled project, is in constant negotiation, revision, and transmutation. At the heart of this dissertation is an ethnographic endeavor driven by a reading of the past, present, and future of political and religious struggles in Israel/Palestine through an analysis of actors, practices, and material palimpsests of three sites: a French Mandate building and former Syrian military base in the Golan Heights, turned into a boutique hotel by a security entrepreneur; the longed-for and imagined Third Temple in Jerusalem—today’s Temple Mount—a once marginal messianic scheme currently in revival; and the Jaffa Ottoman train station, reopened as a high-end shopping center and later as a light rail station. Through these sites, this dissertation asks how Israel understands itself vis-à-vis its narrative of a biblical past, its present ‘indigenous’ presence, and its vision or imaginaries of the future.