Making Space on the Run: Exercising the Right to Move in

Una McGahern

Department of Politics, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

School of Geography, Politics & Sociology, 40-42 Great North Road, Newcastle NE1 7RU, [email protected]

Senior Lecturer in Politics at Newcastle University.

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Making Space on the Run: Exercising the Right to Move in Jerusalem

This paper explores the politics of running in the fragmented city of Jerusalem. Through a series of ‘run-alongs’ – an innovative method of talking while running – with members of the city’s first Palestinian running group, it reveals the mobile, multi- sited and multi-modal practices they use to transgress borders and reclaim spaces for themselves to live within it. Situating an analysis of their running practices within a discussion of the right to the city, it draws attention to social running as a form of collective action and an ongoing exercise of their right to move in the city.

Keywords: mobility; running; borders; right to the city; in Jerusalem

Introduction Following the launch in 2013 of the first Palestine Marathon in the West Bank city of

Bethlehem, a Right to Movement (RTM) running community was established with the dual aim of drawing attention to the restrictions of movement experienced by Palestinians living across the occupied (OPTs) (Stacher 2018) and of encouraging

Palestinian men and women to exercise their right to move in their home cities

(righttomovement.org). Today, this grassroots social movement has branches in ten cities across -Palestine (in Bethlehem, Gaza, Haifa, , Jaffa, Jericho, Jerusalem, Nablus,

Nazareth and Ramallah), with hundreds of Palestinians exercising their right to move together on the run several times each week.

Given their framing of running as a right to move in their home cities, an analysis of their running practices through the conceptual framework of the “right to the city” is fitting.

Increasingly recognised as a basic human right (Wari 2011), the right to the city is understood to be more than the individual right to access urban resources (Harvey 2008). It represents, inter alia, a collective right to urban life (Lefebvre 1996); “a demand for the democratisation of control over the collective means of producing urban space” (Brenner 2017); a struggle to

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“make yourself the centre of your own life, the centre of your own developmental process”

(Merriman 2017); as well as an ongoing and open-ended “right-in-the-making” (Mitchell

2017) that is productive of new and alternative ways of moving and living in the city.

Yet, prevailing analyses of the right to the city remain narrowly focused on direct forms of struggle that are rooted in place and result in visible transformations of the urban landscape, underemphasising the indirect, mobile and multi-sited ways in which marginalised and vulnerable groups subtly, cautiously and tentatively exercise their right to the city over time. Advancing a methodological critique of the right to the city concept, this paper draws on insights from the fields of mobilities, urban studies and contentious politics in order to argue that social running in Jerusalem provides a useful lens through which to reframe the right to the city as an ongoing political claim and exercise that is manifested through indirect, open-ended, and sustained practices of ordinary, yet contentious and transgressive movements that bring about subtle transformations of everyday life in the city.

In the ‘contested’ (Rosen & Shlay 2014), ‘fragmented’ (Pullan 2013), ‘segregated’

(Shtern 2016) and ‘colonial’ (Nolte & Yacobi 2015) city of Jerusalem, patterns of

(im)mobility as well as access to public spaces, services and opportunities are not only ethnically-differentiated but gendered and classed (Fenster 2005; Handel 2014; Kotef 2015;

Peteet 2015; Berda 2017; McGahern 2017). Yet, this order is also unstable and fluid, subject to competing logics of ethnoterritorial expansionism and resistance (Yiftachel & Yacobi

2003: 690) as minority groups (must) find new and alternative ways to move in the city in order to satisfy their basic social and material needs. A growing body of work has begun to examine these alternative and resilient minority mobility practices (Greenberg-Raanan &

Shoval 2014; Baumann 2016; Rokem & Vaughan 2017; Shtern & Yacobi 2018).

Explorations of Palestinian leisure mobilities in the city remain, however, few and far

3 between (Meneley 2019) and, at the point of writing, there are no studies of Palestinian recreational running at all.

This paper addresses this gap by providing an in-depth study of the city’s first running group organised by, and for, Palestinians. The analysis which follows builds on a ‘run-along’ method of ethnographic research which has been uniquely adapted here to the running subject and to the study of urban recreational running. This method speaks to emerging scholarship which engages with running as a distinct and valuable mode of ethnographic enquiry of the politics of everyday life in Israel-Palestine (Mannes-Abbott 2012; Dumper 2014). Its broader aim, however, is to contribute to wider explorations of recreational running as a political claim, strategy and activity whereby key political rights – namely, the right to move and the right to recreation – are not only practiced but exercised together on a regular and incremental basis.

The paper proceeds as follows: The first section outlines the paper’s mobility-based and social-needs driven conceptualisation of the right to the city. The next section outlines the contours of mobility and space in Jerusalem. The third section outlines insights from current scholarship on leisure practices in Jerusalem while the following section narrows in on the embodied effects of running. The paper then outlines the “run-along” method used here, before analysing the routes used, patterns observed, and meanings, values and feelings that were produced and shared on the run. The paper concludes with a discussion of the relevance of its findings for the study of the right to the city more generally.

Exercising the Right to Move in the City

“The right to the city might seem a fuzzy sort of human right, but it is very concrete. It means the right to live out the city as one’s own, to live for the city, to be happy there. The right to affordable housing, a decent school for the kids, accessible services, reliable public transport. The right to have your urban horizon as wide or as narrow as you want. This might mean an allegiance to the neighbourhood, to

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your street or building, but also to what lies beyond. The urban as a whole should be yours, yours to move in yours to explore, possess, feel you have a stake in – should you want it.” (Merrifield 2017) Increasingly recognised as a basic human right that must be preserved and guaranteed (Wari

2011: 469), the right to the city has nonetheless been criticised as a “fuzzy” concept (Attoh

2011: 678) that is excessively broad, abstract and lacking in a clear analytical framework that would make it applicable or responsive to different forms of urban exclusion as well as struggles for urban life that are experienced by different groups of people living in different cities around the world (Rosen & Shlay 2014; Jabareen 2014).

As Shahd Wari (2011: 469-70) observes, the concept includes a vast umbrella of rights, such as “equality of participation in using the city space and in formulating and producing it”, “the right to occupy and own land”, “the provision of public transportation, energy and basic infrastructure”, “freedom of movement within the urban space”,

“internationally recognised human rights to housing, social security, work, appropriate living standards, recreation, information, organisation and freedom of assembly, water and food”, as well as “health, education, culture, privacy and security, a safe and healthy environment”.

In order to provide it with greater analytical traction, Palestinian planner Yousef

Jabareen (2014) set out six main types of right which are constitutive of the right to the city.

These are: the right of appropriation, the right of participation, the right to centrality, the right to inhabit, the right to habitat, as well as the right to individualization in socialization. To this, I add the right to movement as a key corollary right of the right to the city and a basic measure of it, whereby the right to centrality, participation, individualisation in socialisation, space production, etc., are all understood to be fundamentally dependent upon a preceding right to movement.

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The analysis put forward here focuses on the right to movement in relation to one other right that is often neglected within broader discussions of the right to the city: the right to leisure. In order to support this move, I return to Henri Lefebvre’s seminal Writings on Cities in which he sets out his conceptualisation of the right to the city as based not only on the social needs of urban inhabitants, but on their efforts to satisfy them. The need for “security and opening”, “certainty and adventure”, “organization of work and play”, “isolation and encounter”, “exchange and investments”, for “independence (even solitude) and communication” (Lefebvre 1996: 147), are all understood by him to be not only relational and dynamic, but rooted in ordinary, open-ended and mobile practices that individuals and groups engage in as part of their everyday life.

Efforts to satisfy these basic needs can be observed in a myriad of ordinary mobilities, from the daily work commute, through shopping practices, to leisure and sporting practices.

Here, it is important to note that, as with the right to recreation, the pursuit of leisure and sporting activities is not considered to be a privileged add-on to Lefebvre’s conceptualisation of the right to the city, but a key component of it:

“The human being has the need to accumulate energies and to spend them, even waste them in play. (…) Through those specified needs lives and survives a fundamental desire of which play, sexuality, physical activities such as sport, creative activity, art and knowledge are particular expressions and moments, which can more or less overcome the fragmentary division of tasks.” (Lefebvre 1996: 147-8) Leisure practices have the capacity to reshape everyday lives in the city, but they are also shaped by them and the spaces in which they live. The ability of individuals and groups to take part in them is facilitated, or disrupted, by the uneven distribution of population groups within the city; the material affordances of places in which individuals and groups live and interact; the circuitry of roads and public transport systems connecting them; as well as the

6 legal and social ordering mechanisms that regulate behaviours and relationships in public and private spaces.

In conditions where there is an interruption or closure of opportunities to satisfy these basic needs and rights, an insurgent “state of necessity” (Jabareen 2015: 1) emerges whereby new and alternative practices emerge in order to satisfy them. Examining the contentious politics of the urban subaltern, Asaf Bayat (2009) highlights the informal strategies used by the urban poor, women, religious and youth groups across the Middle East to survive and improve their lives. Through discrete, dispersed yet recognisable actions, they harness the

“power of presence” while effecting a “quiet encroachment of the ordinary” by “quietly impinging on the propertied and powerful, and on society at large” (Bayat 2009: 15). These subtle encroachments not only reveal the micro-political and prolonged strategies used by vulnerable groups to exercise their rights, but the ordinary and mobile ways in which they do so.

Even seemingly atomised activities such as walking or jogging in public spaces which are hostile or exclusive environments are, he reminds us, part of a contentious politics of reclaiming space in the city. They allow individuals to express feelings of joy, hope and defiance in a relatively safe, discrete and anonymous manner. They also involves a process of “latent communication” which allows them to “forge identities, enlarge solidarities, and extend their protest beyond their immediate circles to include the unknown, the strangers”

(2009: 12) and to silently activate “passive networks” based on familiar and recognisable patterns and routines. While Bayat points out that such practices do not always bring about major social or political transformation, he usefully emphasises the importance of these practices “in instigating such a transformation” (2009: 14), rendering an analysis of them salient in their own right. It is, in other words, the practice, or exercise, of rights rather than necessarily the attainment of them, that produces new lineaments of urban contention.

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“[B]orn and reborn at the heart of the contradictions between formal and informal rights, and between the state’s planning apparatus and spatial agenda on the one hand and the status of disadvantaged groups on the other” (Jabareen 2015: 1), the “production of space” necessitates the production of new and alternative mobility practices (including leisure-based mobilities). The right to the city is, after all, a “right-in-the-making” (Mitchell 2017) that requires an approach that is sensitive not only to the structural and material inequalities that produce uneven patterns of (im)mobility but also to alternative, insurgent and emerging practices that emerge as a direct result of them.

Mobility and Space in Jerusalem

Numbering over 360,000 people, Palestinians make up approximately 38% of the city’s total population. Some are Israeli citizens, but the vast majority (97.7%) are classified as

“permanent residents” (Guego 2006: 25) of the city. Denied the right to a passport, to vote in national elections and to pass on their residency rights to their children or spouses, these permanent residents retain the right to vote in local elections, to receive social benefits and, crucially, to travel across the city, inside Israel proper and PA-controlled areas of the West

Bank (Jefferis 2012).

These limited rights are, however, conditional. In 1995, the Israeli government introduced a new “Centre of Life” policy which required that Palestinian permanent residents demonstrate their continued presence in the city each time they renew their residency status

(Guego 2006). Failure to satisfy this requirement results in the loss of residency status and the rights that go with it. Approximately 15,000 Palestinians have been stripped of their rights in this way. For the remainder, the spectre of statelessness looms large, amplifying their generalised feelings of insecurity and stress in the city (Barakat 2012).

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The requirement of continued presence in the city is difficult to satisfy due to systemic neglect and underinvestment in Palestinian neighbourhoods as well as decades of discriminatory planning and building laws targeting Palestinian residents. It is estimated, for example, that 66% of ’s land area has been either confiscated or designated for public use as “open green lands and parks” and 20,000 buildings (which are home to approximately 80% of East Jerusalem’s Palestinian population) have been designated

“illegal”, making them subject to confiscation and demolition at any time (Jabareen 2015: 9,

13).

These policies have not only resulted in the contraction of Palestinian spaces to live in the city, but the gradual displacement, or “quiet transfer” (Guego 2006: 26), of thousands of

Palestinians to peripheral neighbourhoods where conditions of life are somewhat easier

(Chiodelli 2012; Alkhalili et al 2014). Sari Hanafi (2013) describes as “spaciocidal” policies which have the intent of strangling, suffocating and destroying the places and spaces which

Palestinians need to live. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2012: 8) notes that they also seek to break down social support networks and walls of privacy, generating “the strong sense that their bodies, daily movements and actions are under tight control” and constant surveillance both on the street and in their homes.

Feeling trapped and targeted, Palestinians nonetheless refuse to be made abject

(Hammami 2015) by these conditions of urban exclusion. By continuing to live and move in the city, they demonstrate their creative resilience and ongoing resistance to efforts to exclude and remove them from it. Alongside a steady growth in the number of highly mobile, educated and middle-class Palestinian Jerusalemites, Palestinian citizens from towns and villages inside ‘Israel proper’ are also moving into the city in search of education, work and family life (Weingrod & Manna 1998). The employment rates, average income levels, and car ownership rates (77%), of this (small) group are high (Masry-Herzalla & Razin 2014:

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1008). Yet, the vast majority of Palestinians in the city continue to live in extreme poverty

(78% live under the poverty line) and compete for work in a frail and segmented job market that is shaped by chronic levels of unemployment and underemployment (Alyan et al 2012).

Most can only secure part-time shifts for minimum or sub-minimum wages outside their neighbourhoods, and many juggle multiple jobs across the city in order to survive.

Approximately 37% of Palestinians in the city work in (Shtern 2016).

This expansion of their daily action spaces produces another struggle: getting to and from work each day. Roads in Palestinian neighbourhoods are heavily congested, slow-moving and in a general state of disrepair (Handel 2014; Peteet 2015). Public transport provision is fragmented and inadequate, such that Palestinians must rely upon cars or a “para-transport system of shared taxis, vans and buses” (Pullan 2007: 59) to get around. The extent to which even the much feted (JLR) – built in 2011 to provide direct transport links between the east and west of the city (Nolte & Yacobi 2015: 28) – is accessible to

Palestinians is questionable, but it has had little observable impact in easing the level of road congestion in Palestinian areas where cars, buses and shared taxis remain the main form of transport.

The constriction of Palestinian lives, mobilities and spaces is also facilitated by the expansion of a sophisticated system of segregated ‘beltways’, roads and tunnels across the city that bypass their neighbourhoods. The route of the separation wall also zig-zags in such a way as to annex Jewish settlements into the city while cutting off entire Palestinian neighbourhoods from it (Weizman 2007). Access to major roads, such as Road 1, the main north-south artery connecting Jerusalem with Ramallah to the north and Bethlehem to the south, is similarly blocked by the wall (Pullan 2007: 58). A system of permanent and mobile checkpoints renders other roads impassable at various times. In the Palestinian

10 neighbourhood of Isawiyya, a permanent mound of dirt and rubble blocks the main road to the city (Bier 2017: 174).

These “blunt tools of division and bounding” (Pullan 2013: 136) have caused huge disruptions to the everyday lives of Palestinians in the city. “The Wall in Jerusalem is one of the [most] important factors that deprive Palestinian Jerusalemites from the Right to the City”

(Wari 2011: 462), but it is not the only one. Walls of consciousness perpetuate the constriction and siloing of Palestinian movements (Klein 2005). Collective fears of the

“other” as well as lived experiences of discrimination, harassment and violence at certain places in the city are internalised in individual and collective mental maps (Greenberg-

Raanan & Shoval 2014), demarcating no-go areas as well as areas of relative safety and risk and reinforcing group patterns of movement and avoidance in the city (Pullan 2007: 50).

Palestinian Leisure Practices

Both the constriction and segmentation of Palestinian spaces to move and live in the city challenges, and is actively challenged by, Palestinians who seek not only to survive in the city but to live out a (more) meaningful life for themselves within it. This is especially evident in their leisure practices and the alternative mobilities that they produce.

In a study of the spatial activity of three different groups of women in Jerusalem

(secular Jews, ultra-orthodox Jews and Palestinian Muslims), Greenberg-Raanan and Shoval

(2014) found that the boundaries segregating Jewish and Arab neighbourhoods in Jerusalem are more flexible among the more socio-economically deprived. Observing that their more well-to-do “secular Jewish subjects appeared to be the most segregated group both according to their spatial behaviour and according to their perceptions” (2014: 34) they not only found that socio-economic disadvantage was a key push factor motivating individuals to move

11 outside their neighbourhoods, but that, crucially, “the crossing of borders by minority groups appeared to be mainly for recreational activities and not for forced reasons”.

In more recent studies of ethnic segregation in Jerusalem, scholars have observed a substantial increase in the number of Palestinians moving out of the tight confines of their neighbourhoods to use playgrounds, parks, malls and other public amenities located in more affluent Jewish areas across the city (Baumann 2016; Shtern 2016; Shtern & Yacobi 2018).

This work reinforces earlier findings that Palestinian leisure mobilities are transgressive but is more circumspect about their transformative potential. Some have, for example, identified these trends as productive of either a minimal or tenuous form of “co-presence” (Rokem &

Vaughan 2017) in Jewish-dominated spaces, or of “conditional inclusion” that requires tactics of “self-surveillance” (Meneley 2019) and “immersive invisibility” (Hackl 2018) on the part of Palestinians who enter these spaces, including the choice of clothes they use to avoid attracting attention.

Others have observed more complex processes at work, noting that the quiet encroachment of Palestinians on Jewish enclaves “can alter the character of the enclave permanently” (Baumann 2016: 179) while producing new Palestinian knowledges, tactics, and socialities of travel (Bishara 2015) that reconfigure the sensory, embodied and interpersonal experience of moving through the city. While increasing attention has been given to these micro-political moves that Palestinians make on foot, by car, bus or shared taxi, their running practices have yet to be meaningfully explored.

The Power of Running

The physiological benefits of running are well-known. Running reduces stress and change the relationship between mind and body in life-changing ways (Barnfield 2016). Alongside

12 the so-called “runner’s high” – that euphoric moment during which “runners are seduced by their own rhythmicity and a lingering sense of well-being, providing a heightened sensitivity to the present moment” (Cook et al 2016: 750) – regular running increases general levels of wellbeing, confidence and self-esteem. It also promotes the sense of being in control of one’s life and feeling comfortable or ‘at home’ in one’s body and neighbourhood (Barnfield 2016:

629) which, in turn, encourages more engaged, assertive, participatory and exploratory outlooks on life.

In a study of freerunning (parkour) in a refugee camp in Gaza, Holly Thorpe and Nida

Ahmad (2015) found that participation in this new urban action sport is a powerful strategy not only of “reclaiming youthfulness” through “physical play, self-expression and public performance” but of reappropriating and renegotiating physical and symbolic spaces through an “everyday politics of fun”. Observing the social-psychological benefits of freerunning, they also found that it provides Palestinian youth with a way of overcoming obstacles in their daily lives, dealing with anger and depression, and coping with all the “frustrations, fears, anxieties and pains of living in Khan Younes refugee camp” that are otherwise denied to them (2015: 695).

Nonetheless, running also brings with it risks, fears and insecurities, particularly for women and other groups who are often more vulnerable to verbal and physical harassment or assault in public spaces (Allen-Collinson 2011). The experience of “running lows” (Cook et al 2016: 750) – those moments of discomfort, fatigue, disconnection, anxiety and precarity – has attracted more attention in recent years. This work has usefully emphasised the time- spaces of running and some strategies that runners use to handle, manage or overcome these challenges. Yet, explorations of social running – that is, the collective experience of running in public together – as a motivational aid, incentive strategy or a support system remains

13 under-analysed and -explored, with a continued tendency to focus on the experience of individual, casual runners (Hitchings & Latham 2017).

Similarly, while there have been an increase in the number of studies examining the impact of the built environment in generating transgressive running practices (Cidell 2014) as well as new “jographies” (Cook et al 2016) of running in the city, the bulk of this work has been placed on particular routes and particular types of social encounter that take place on them, downplaying the cumulative effects of running together in different parts of a city in changing how runners perceive, move through, and experience their lives in the city.

Talking While Running: The “Run-Along” Method

Inspired by mobile methods of research (Ingold & Vergunst 2008; Buscher et al 2010; Adey et al 2014; Merriman 2014), particularly the “go-along” method (Kusenbach 2003) of

“talking whilst walking” (Anderson 2004) with mobile subjects, the run-along method advanced here has been uniquely adapted for the purposes of this study to the running subject, to the multi-sited nature of Palestinian recreational running in the city, as well as to explorations of the meanings, perceptions and values that are produced in these different spaces “on the run”.

As Margaret Kusenbach (2003: 466) explains, the go-along method is well suited to explorations of five themes related to mobile subjects: (1) perceptions of the social and physical environment, (2) spatial practices and the ways in which people engage with their environment, (3) personal biographies and stories “which lend depth and meaning to their mundane routines”; (4) the social architecture of neighbourhoods and friendship groups; and

(5) patterns of interaction with people and places as they move through them. While “data” produced on the move is necessarily of a fluid and somewhat superficial nature, limited to the

14 particular time-spaces of walking, or in this case running, “[r]esearchers who use this method seek to establish a coherent set of data by spending a particular yet comparable slice of ordinary time with all of their subjects – thus winning in breadth and variety of their collected materials what might get lost in density and intensity” (Kusenbach 2003).

For the purposes of this study, I participated in 8 tracked “run-alongs” with members of the running group, alongside 2 training sessions at a private sports ground in East

Jerusalem, the Palestine (half) Marathon in the neighbouring city of Bethlehem, as well as a small number of follow-up unstructured conversations with runners over a one-month period between March and April 2018. The run-alongs took place on three set routes across the city

(one in West Jerusalem and two in East Jerusalem) at three set times per week. Each run- along lasted approximately one hour, covering an average distance of 10km. Anywhere from

10 to 25 Palestinians of varying ages (13-38) participated in each run. The majority were

English-speaking, middle-class, young professionals and university students. Most were permanent residents of the city, but some were Israeli citizens. A significant number were car owners or users. Approximately one third of the participants on each run were women.

In all, conversations of varying lengths of time (anywhere from 5 minutes to 50 minutes) were undertaken with 27 adult runners over the course of the study.

While this “sample” of Palestinian runners is not representative of the vast majority of

Palestinians in Jerusalem who are poorer and less privileged, it is important to note that the run-along method does not seek to establish a representative sample or an “authentic” account of a singular Palestinian experience in Jerusalem (Vannini 2015). Instead, it represents “a more modest but also more systematic and outcome-oriented version of

‘hanging out’ with key informants” in order to capture “the stream of perceptions, emotions and interpretations that informants usually keep to themselves” (Kusenbach 2003: 463) which are not only produced on the move but which can often only be accessed on the run. As

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Anderson (2004: 254) notes, both the places in which people move and the ways in which they move through them can serve as “an active trigger to prompt knowledge recollection and production”.

While the run-along method poses challenges in terms of mobile communication

(talking while running), as well as data collection and retention – something which the project sought to address through the use of a GPS-tracking device to record routes taken as well as a field diary to record anonymised accounts, observations and memorable accounts after each run – it has other distinct advantages. As a white, European, female academic, as well as an enthusiastic but amateurish runner, my privileged access, non-native gaze as well as my own personal need to run inevitably shaped my outlook, observations and interactions.

The participatory nature of the run-along, however, provides a unique opportunity to observe the fluid landscape and engage with runners on terms that are set by them. The run-along is, after all, based on active participation in place-based practices that are “natural” to local runners – that is, rooted in their own chosen routes, rhythms and routines rather than those set or contrived by the researcher (Kusenbach 2003: 463).

More crucially, however, the run-along provides an inbuilt mechanism through which runners can opt-in and opt-out of conversation at any time based on their personal preferences and comfort levels. “The presence of a partner or friend can reduce some of the obvious discomfort that a number of informants feel about being followed in, and queried about, their mundane logical practices by an ethnographer” (Kusenbach 2003). Similarly, the ability of the researcher to hold a “conversational pace” of running (or not!) allows local runners the opportunity to initiate, or close, conversation with relative ease. The option to accelerate or slow down the pace of running to run on with others or continue alone provided a safe and non-pressurised atmosphere to participate, observe and gauge perceptions while responding

16 to the different needs, moods, preferences and comfort levels of runners, a key ethical benefit of the run-along method.

Exercising the Right to Move in the City of Jerusalem

In order to explore how the RTM-Jerusalem exercises their right to move in the city, this section analyses the spatial topography of the routes they used, the running patterns that were observed, as well as the feelings, perceptions and meanings that the runners attached to running in their city.

The Running Routes

[Figure 1: The First Station Route, West Jerusalem]

The first route – the First Station route – is situated in West Jerusalem, next to the affluent

Talbiya neighbourhood which was once home to some of the city’s most well-to-do

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Palestinian Christian families until they were expelled in 1948. This provided a major motivation for running here, as did the spacious nature of the route itself. So-called because it was the first stop on the old Ottoman Jerusalem-Jaffa railway which operated from 1892 until 1998, the station was converted in 2013 into an outdoor mall and its tracks were pedestrianised, providing miles of uninterrupted paths for runners, walkers and cyclists. The runners meet next to one of the entrances to the mall. The sight and sounds of a group of

Palestinian runners chatting energetically in blends in easily. After a five-minute warm-up, we run south-west on half-timbered, half-asphalted pedestrian paths. The group quickly splinters into smaller groups of two or three friends who chat energetically amongst themselves as they weave their way around other visitors to the mall. Once past the initial congested area of shops and cafes, the path opens up and the pace and rhythm of running becomes quieter, steadier and more relaxed. A few minutes later, we hit a one kilometre stretch of path that is indistinguishable in its appearance from the rest of the route. My running companions are quick to point out that we are now running on the , through the Palestinian neighbourhood of which it divides. The landscape begins to open up to green hills dotted with colourful spring flora, neglected terraces and disused shepherd huts. Here, runners begin to outnumber walkers with more direct eye-contact, nods and even the occasional smile of acknowledgement exchanged between them. A cement overpass adjacent to mall marks the half-way point for most runners who then double back to the First Station. Faster runners and those wishing to run longer distances continue several kilometres further along the trail before looping back to the First Station where the runners stretch and quickly dissipate.

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[Figure 2: The Route, East Jerusalem]

The second route is in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. Once the heart of the city’s Muslim elite, the urban life of this Palestinian neighbourhood was decimated in 1948. Located next to the Green Line – the former “no-man’s land” that once divided the city and which has since become a major road artery and dual carriageway (Haim Barlev) through it – Sheikh

Jarrah is today home to a host of international consulates, diplomatic missions and research centres. It is also home to the neighbourhood’s remnant pre-1948 Palestinian population as well as Palestinian refugees who resettled here after 1948 and again after 1967. We meet in a small carpark located between the Spanish Consulate and a playground where local youths are playing football. After a five-minute warm-up, we run northeast along the wide and well- lit main road, past Israeli government quarters (where the ministries of Public Security and

Construction and Housing are located), into the ‘students village’ area of . From here, we move along wide, well-paved and tended pedestrian paths where a Palestinian solitary runner was shot and killed one night in 2004, at the height of the second intifada, by

19 a gunman (later affiliated with the Al Aqsa brigades) from a passing car (Shehadeh 2017:

164), until we cross the Green Line into . This UN-protected Israeli exclave was established in 1949 and contains prominent Israeli institutions such as Hadassah Hospital and the Hebrew University as well as the large Palestinian neighbourhood of Isawiyya which is hemmed in by the wall and permanent roadblocks. After a short while, we cross back over the Green Line where we now run through a loud and extended landscape of highways and concrete overpasses back to Sheikh Jarrah. From here we pass by Israel’s looming National

Insurance building (which is responsible for issuing and revoking the social benefits for

Jerusalem’s permanent residents), a succession of gated compounds (including one which houses officials attached to the Quartet diplomatic mission), before turning down a narrow, poorly lit and unevenly paved road. In rapid succession, and mostly in silence, we pass a small building with a watchtower that is draped with an Israeli flag that has been occupied and heavily fortified by Jewish settlers; the empty site of the Palestinian-owned Shepherd

Hotel that was recently demolished by the municipality to make way for new housing units for Jewish families (the hotel owners had to pay for the demolition themselves); ultra- orthodox Jewish settlers walking hurriedly; small Palestinian children playing in a cramped carpark in front of a large skeleton of a building (which had been erected in the 1990s to house the Palestinian ministry of education, but has since been taken over by tens of

Palestinian families who live there “illegally”); and a nearby which opens directly onto the pavement. The air feels tense but my running companions is quick to point out particular buildings to ensure that their significance is not lost. Before we reach the

American Colony Hotel and the more congested downtown area, we turn right back onto

Haim Barlev where we once run on less congested, more spacious pavements all the way back to our meeting point.

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[Figure 3: The Route, East Jerusalem]

The third and final route is in Beit Hanina. Situated approximately 5km north of the ,

Beit Hanina is one of a cluster of congested, underdeveloped and socio-economically deprived Palestinian neighbourhoods on the outskirts of East Jerusalem that have witnessed a significant growth in population since 1967. The village’s main road is one of the main routes to and from Ramallah (via Qalandiya checkpoint) and is as such regularly congested.

It is also one of the few roads in the village that is paved, albeit unevenly. Surrounded by several Jewish settlements, most notably Pisgat Ze’ev, as well as by the Palestinian neighbourhood (and adjacent refugee camp) of Shaufat, the neighbourhood was divided in

2006 by the Separation Wall with only the eastern built-up section falling within the expanded municipal boundaries of the city. The runners meet on a narrow pavement outside a sports club on the main road. Following a brief warm-up which takes place between parked cars, we run down the main road towards Shaufat. Here, the road is heavily congested with multiple lanes of cars stuck in extremely slow-moving traffic. At the traffic lights, we pass two men who have left their cars and started to fight presumably over a lane infraction. At a

21 nearby corner, a small group of teenage boys are hanging out, smoking and chatting. As we pass, they turn their attention and laughter from the brawl to us. Two of them run along with us for a few yards, laughing and jeering, before they eventually get bored and drop back. At this point, we cross the dual carriageway over a major pedestrian junction, and then under a massive concrete bypass flyover, where we are met with the much quieter and open spaces of the French Hill neighbourhood. From here we run familiar sections of the Sheikh

Jarrah/French Hill route that we have used before, before running back up Road, alongside a section of the JLR line. As we approach Beit Hanina, the road gets more congested and we must weave in and out between haphazardly parked cars, large overflowing metal rubbish bins, fruit and vegetable stalls and late evening shoppers, back to our meeting point.

Running Patterns

Variations of these three routes were occasionally used but the accounts provided here are broadly representative of each one. As noted above, two of the routes were in East

Jerusalem, but the West Jerusalem route was the most commonly used of the three. This was the first major pattern observed. In fact, half of the eight run-alongs were organised at the

First Station, compared with three in Sheikh Jarrah and one in Beit Hanina. This route preference was underscored by the number of runners who participated in each. On average,

24-26 runners participated in runs on the First Station route, compared with 12-18 on the

Sheikh Jarrah and Beit Hanina runs. Only a small handful of runners took part in each run organised across the city each week, with a significant number running only once in either

East or West Jerusalem only.

The preference for running in one or other part of the city was shaped by two main factors. The first factor was the location of routes relative to each runner’s daily action

22 spaces – that is, its distance or proximity to places of residence, work or study – while the second related factor concerned the means of transport that were available to them to get there. Those who lived, studied or worked close to one were most likely to take part in that one. Most of these tended to walk, jog (or cycle) there.

None of the runners, bar two international visitors, reported using public modes of transport to get to or from their runs. Many explained that public transport was simply not an option for them. The nearest JLR station to the First Station route in West Jerusalem was over half an hour walk away, and despite the presence of two JLR stations next to the meeting points of the East Jerusalem routes, most lived, worked or studied in areas that the

JLR did not service. The lack of direct public transport links between their places of residence, work, study and leisure thus rendered public transport unfeasible in practice.

Most of the runners who travelled from further afield, therefore, travelled by car.

Several young professionals owned their own cars, while others had access to a family car.

Some drove significant distances across the city (and sometimes from outside it) to participate in runs. Several travelled together by car, with carpooling especially common on weekends. This pattern of ownership of (or access to) a car in not uncommon in other cities but it reveals an important classed dimension to running here. Running is not an equal opportunity for all. But, without a car, many would simply not be able to get to runs on time, revealing the contingency of social running upon the availability of independent material resources.

In addition to this resource gap, carpooling also revealed the significance of informal or passive social networks in the group. Two members of the group coordinated the activities of the group via private social media groups, led the runs and warm-up activities, and notified members of any changes to routes and activities. The group chat also allowed members to

23 arrange lifts or simply reassure themselves of meeting times and locations. As part of a wider network of RTM runners, this provided them with the opportunity to take part in organised runs and hikes in other parts of the country.

This type of running-related tourism provided an additional incentive to move, meet other RTM members, and to see other parts of the country. It also allowed the group to scope out new possible running routes, such as one which took place after I left in Sataf Forest. The forest, which is 10km west of Jerusalem, had once been the site of the Palestinian village of

Sataf that was depopulated and destroyed in 1948. Running through the forest for the first time, and sharing breakfast together afterwards, gave the runners the confidence to explore this place and expand their horizons in the city together.

Nonetheless, efforts to expand group membership have proven difficult. A promotional event in a popular café in downtown East Jerusalem struggled to attract new members. Most new members tended to get involved only as a result of having friends, brothers, sisters or cousins in the group who encouraged or inspired them to join. This again reveals the importance of informal or passive networks and especially of close interpersonal networks of family and friends in providing important practical, material and logistical support to get to and from runs, motivating and encouraging those who feel unable or unwilling to run alone, and forging new bonds of community and belonging.

Running Feelings

Feelings of freedom, joy, euphoria, elation, hope and empowerment were frequently expressed on the run. The runners attributed them to the act of running as well as to their experience of runner’s high. They also, however, connected them to their own individual stories of personal development and confidence-building in the city. Many related that running in the city was not only a radically new experience for them (“I would never have

24 imagined even the possibility of being able to run here before”, one remarked) but that it made them feel more “themselves”, in control of their lives, and open to the possibilities that the future holds for them both inside the city and beyond it.

One young man, who was training to be a vet, described running as central to his struggle to take control of this health and wellbeing in general. A mechanical engineering student from East Jerusalem shared his dream of one day representing Palestine as a marathon-runner with the ultimate hope of completing the Berlin marathon. A graphic designer from East Jerusalem who worked several jobs across the city, including long shifts with his father in the old city, described his vision of becoming an entrepreneur and designing a mobile app that would help Palestinian students find accommodation in different university- cities across Israel-Palestine.

Female runners expressed similar hopes and dreams for the future, but often made more direct reference of the impact that they hoped it would have on their immediate lives and action spaces. Describing the group as a “safe space” for them to run and “just be themselves”, one veiled runner described running as part of her personal journey of self- discovery and empowerment as well as her struggle to redefine her position within her family and neighbourhood as an independent, working woman. Another young woman who had recently begun cycling to and from work in addition to regularly participating in group runs, expressed the freedom that she felt while running and the motivation and confidence it gave her to find new ways around the city on her own.

Having said this, most of the runners also expressed feelings of nervousness, discomfort and anxiety at various points. Some expressed these feelings flippantly after moments of silence (“I hate that bit”) before explaining why. The source of their discomfort and anxiety was often attributed to poor road conditions, bad lighting, and the presence of

25 loitering youth, but it was also regularly linked to the highly securitised, policed and unpredictable nature of the city. Sites of physical and structural violence – historic and recent, actual and potential – dotted our routes (such as the site in French Hill where a solitary Palestinian runner was shot and killed in 2004). Most we passed in silence, but some, such as the National Insurance building, which looms large in the minds and lives of

Palestinians, was the butt of several remarks (often with expletives attached).

General fears of encounters with the police or other evolving “security situations” in the city were more pronounced. One Saturday morning run which was scheduled to take place around the Old City was cancelled as it coincided with the start of the Gaza March of

Return protests the day before. As with major protest events in the past, the runners knew that a solidarity protest would be held in the downtown area and that there would be a massive scaling up of police presence, roadblocks and mobile checkpoints in the downtown area. This reveals the group’s highly tuned and tacit knowledge of the city and their internalisation of hot-spots and no-go areas within it.

This knowledge, as well as more general feelings of risk and discomfort, were temporally fluid and spatialised. A distinction was often made between the running routes themselves and the spaces around them. While the majority described feeling “free” and relatively unimpeded on the run, getting to and from the running routes was a cause for concern and anxiety for some. These concerns were allayed by having access to a car. As mentioned before, one male runner could not contemplate the possibility of jogging to the meeting point in West Jerusalem alone in his running gear, while two female runners said that they never participated in any of the runs in East Jerusalem. Nonetheless, a third of all runners in East Jerusalem were women (the same ratio of women in West Jerusalem). In fact, those female runners who regularly ran there expressed strong and pronounced feelings of

26 pleasure in defying social expectations and seeing the surprised expressions of locals who would often stare open-mouthed at them as they ran past.

Nonetheless, negative encounters were more common in East Jerusalem. On the run- along in Beit Hanina described above where two local youths mocked and cajoled us in a relatively common act of male bravado, one of the female runners reacted by daring them to

“keep up” as she accelerated the pace slightly – a pace which they could not maintain for long. Her act of humorous defiance was somewhat undermined by the taser one of them carried and repeatedly flicked on and off next to her. Her discomfort was, however, shared by everyone, including two male friends who flanked her. The vulnerability she might have felt if running alone was mitigated by the act of running together and the group took pride in the strong and visible presence of female runners in the group.

On another run in Beit Hanina, a young male runner who joined the group at a very young age with his older sister but who enjoyed running so much that he would often run alone in his neighbourhood, experienced the open contempt and opprobrium of an elderly lady carrying shopping who stopped in her steps and shouted “This is what we [Palestinians] need?” as he ran past. This story was recounted to me a number of times with a mixture of humour, irritation and resolve. As one of the group leaders noted, such incidents only reinforce the importance of group running and the need to organise more regular group runs in Palestinian neighbourhoods “to change local people’s perceptions and attitudes”.

Nonetheless, she acknowledged that most runners found such encounters difficult.

Indeed, several runners recounted that they experienced bouts of depression, negativity and hopelessness by the regular reminders of their alienation and loss from, and within, the city. Some of these negative feelings were triggered on the run while others

“crept up” on them afterwards. Reflecting over coffee on the hassle of long commutes,

27 regular experiences of street-level harassment, as well as the pain of running through the beautiful old Ottoman houses in and Sheikh Jarrah which had once been home to bustling Palestinian communities, one female runner expressed a whole gamut of emotions from anger, sadness and weariness, to defiance, stubbornness and pride. Explaining that running for her is part of a wider awareness-raising campaign and a struggle for social and political justice in the city, she said that the sense of responsibility she felt of “doing this for the next generation” is what helps her to keep on running, as did the sense of pride that she gets from “doing something different to what people expect” of her.

Others expressed similar struggles to balance the rewards of running with the negative experiences that it can sometimes bring. Describing the deteriorating conditions of life in the city as well as the political ramifications of the 2018 decision by Trump to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, one student expressed his increasing sense of weariness, despondency and hopelessness about his future in the city that was interrupted only by the momentary reprieve or “bubble” of running. Emphasising how running has become for him primarily a coping mechanism and an active form of therapy, he sighed and said, “this is all that we can do to feel whole, to resist”.

Conclusion

The ethnographic snapshots provided here reveal the challenges of running in this fragmented city and the great lengths that these runners go to in order to exercise their right to do so. It shows that “running while Palestinian” – like “driving while Palestinian” (Bishara 2015) and

“walking while Palestinian (Meneley 2019) – is inherently transgressive of multiple social, psychological and material barriers that constrain and constrict Palestinian lives and lived spaces. Running expands the daily action spaces of individual runners and produces

28 alternative strategies and modes of movement in the city. The reliance on cars to get to and from runs points to a classed dimension to their recreational running practices but it also reveals the necessity of autonomous and flexible modes of transport in a city with pronounced infrastructural gaps and enduring inequalities of access to public transport.

The pursuit of basic social needs through running, including their need for “security and opening”, “organisation and play”, “certainty and adventure”, “isolation and encounter”

(Lefebvre 1996: 147), not only reveals the multiple modalities of minority mobilities, but the different spatial lineaments of contention at different sites. In West Jerusalem, the group’s running practices may initially be suggestive of tactics of “immersive invisibility” (Hackl

2018) – they blend in easily with other public space users and their mobile presence goes mostly unnoticed. Yet, running here is socially, spatially and politically contentious and transformative – for them. It enables those who rarely frequent this part of the city to do so together. Here, they are not so much interested in seeking out encounters with Israeli Jewish public space users as they are in developing connections with each other. Running together, they seek not only to re-centre themselves in these Jewish-majority spaces, but in their city and their own lives. In so doing, they are reclaiming the city as if it is theirs “to explore, possess, feel [they] have a stake in it” (Merrifield 2017).

In East Jerusalem, by contrast, the act of running is more conspicuous, unconventional and convention-breaking. The sensory and embodied experience of moving here, particularly through more confined and congested spaces, produces heightened levels of self- and spatial awareness which accentuate feelings of discomfort and vulnerability as well as resistance and autonomy. While a tendency to avoid these routes in favour of the more well-trodden First Station route can be observed, the desire to persevere and normalise running within these neighbourhoods makes manifest their claim and demand for mobility justice (Sheller 2018) at the community level. Running as a group provides the necessary

29 framework to do this – to move, take risks and navigate multiple, complex terrains together.

Given the targeting of more traditional social support networks by the state’s policies of urban exclusion (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2012), group running provides a relatively safe and inclusive space to move and subtly mobilise while helping individuals to cope with feelings of stress and uncertainty experienced on the run as well as in their everyday lives. By running together, they feel able to manage, if not fully reconcile, conflicting feelings of freedom and restriction, confidence and fear, hope and hopelessness, as well as belonging and loss in the city.

The aim of this paper is not to suggest that they have “achieved” their right to the city, or even that such a right is fully achievable, but rather to draw attention to how these runners have sought, in spite of the restrictions they face, to advance their right to move – as a political claim and a political exercise – on the run. Far from smooth or frictionless, their collective struggle to exercise their right to move in their city has enabled them to push the boundaries of their lived experiences and spaces in the city while, rightfully, demanding a right to not only survive in the city but to live a more meaningful life for themselves within it.

This analysis of Palestinian group running practices ultimately provides a lens through which to re-examine the different ways in which the right to the city is an ongoing and open-ended “right-in-the-making” (Mitchell 2017). Focusing on the right to the city as a fluid and mobile exercise of rights, it identifies recreational running, which has hitherto been neglected and depoliticised in the literature, as part an ongoing and active struggle for mobility justice in their home city. While the findings presented here have valence for work on the politics of movement in other contested cities, it also lends itself to further research on ethnically-differentiated leisure mobilities, as well as the ordinary, multi-sited and multi- modal strategies that vulnerable groups living in other fragmented, marginalised and disconnected contexts must adopt in order to exercise their right to the city.

30

Acknowledgements I am sincerely grateful to the members of RTM-Jerusalem for welcoming me to their group and allowing me to join them on their runs. I am especially grateful to Hussam Halawane for sharing with me many of the photos he took on his runs, including the three that are included in this paper. I would also like to thank Matt Davies, Katharine Wright and my colleagues at the Ethnographic Methods Reading Group at Newcastle University for their feedback on earlier drafts. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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