We Refuse to be Enemies: Political Geographies of Violence and Resistance in Palestine

The political and economic geography of occupied Palestinian territory presents significant constraints to the livelihoods of Palestinian families. And yet the story of many Palestinian families is one not of resignation but of steadfastness and resistance. This article explores this as an important example of civil resistance. It begins by building a theoretical case for giving greater attention to the constitutive role of marginalised people in the production of concepts and practices of civil resistance claiming that this helps us identify overlooked and seemingly everyday practices of colonised groups. Next it explores the case of one Palestinian family farm in the west Bethlehem village of Nahhalin as an example of alternative imagined geographies and communities that present a refusal to Israeli colonial occupation. It argues that this refusal is an expression of civil resistance that constitutes a counter-map that rejects Israel’s settler-colonial map of their farmland by refusing to leave, and that rejects the violence of the state and its claims to sovereignty by ‘refusing to be enemies’.