Resistance in Circulation

Abstract: This thesis traces the ways in which apartheid as a signifier had been mobilized by Zionist and anti-Zionist conversations in the 1950s-1970s, transforming the postcolonial organization of urban space. I initiate my historiographic narrative by viewing how apartheid was circulated as a trope during Israel’s early state-building years, shaping the ways in which Zionist spatial control could be discussed. I then move from mobilizations of apartheid as a trope to its use as a mode of analysis, presenting the case of how Palestinian discourses at the UN in the mid-60s had leveraged apartheid both as an analogical trope and as a human rights based analysis geared at international condemnations of Israel. Within this framework, I argue that early Palestinian analyses of Zionism as a style of apartheid were paradoxically limited in their capacities to render extreme segregation in Israel-Palestine legible. Finally, I posit that in the civil rights era, the relation between apartheid and events in Israel-Palestine was re-articulated by urban communities that were themselves struggling against extreme sociospatial control. This leads to a discussion of how the parallel movements of Black Consciousness and the Palestinian resistance had exchanged ideas while formulating divergent approaches to the contested ideologies of integrationism and separatism. In conclusion, my thesis advances knowledge-power-space as a helpful medium through which to read historical and ongoing Zionist and anti-Zionist mobilizations of apartheid as a trope and mode of reference