TOURISTIC ENTANGLEMENTS ii TOURISTIC ENTANGLEMENTS Settler colonialism, world-making and the politics of tourism in Palestine Dorien Vanden Boer Dissertation submitted in fulfillment of the requirement of the degree of Doctor in the Political and Social Sciences, option Political Sciences Ghent University July 2020 Promotor: Prof. Dr. Christopher Parker iv CONTENTS Summary .......................................................................................................... v List of figures.................................................................................................. vii List of Acronyms ............................................................................................... ix Acknowledgements........................................................................................... xi Preface ........................................................................................................... xv Part I: Routes into settler colonial fantasies ............................................. 1 Introduction: Making sense of tourism in Palestine ................................. 3 1.1. Setting the scene: a cable car for Jerusalem ................................... 3 1.2. Questions, concepts and approach ................................................ 10 1.2.1. Entanglements of tourism ..................................................... 10 1.2.2. Situating Critical Tourism Studies and tourism as a colonial practice ................................................................................. 13 1.2.3. State of the art of tourism research in Palestine and Israel ... 17 1.2.4. Settler colonialism as a paradigm ......................................... 22 1.2.5. Tourism as a method for making worlds .............................. 30 1.2.6. The production of settler colonial tourism space .................. 36 1.3. Methodology and method ............................................................. 43 1.3.1. Epistemological travels ........................................................ 44 1.3.2. On being a tourist/researcher in Palestine ............................ 46 1.3.3. Empirical and methodological detours ................................. 51 1.3.4. A patchwork of data collection ............................................. 53 1.3.5. Navigating Israel/Palestine ................................................... 56 1.4. Outline of the chapters ................................................................. 57 Chapter 2: Reordering Palestine as a Zionist destination ...................... 63 2.1. Introduction .................................................................................. 63 2.2. The emergence of a modern tourism market in Palestine ............ 65 2.3. The place of tourism in the Zionist settler project ........................ 73 2.3.1. Zionist narratives of travel: A modern Holy Land ............... 78 i 2.3.2. The work of Jewish guides and tourists ............................... 87 2.4. Globalizing a Zionist destination.................................................. 92 2.5. Conclusion .................................................................................... 97 Chapter 3: Touristic orderings on the frontier: the Jordan River Peace Park ............................................................................................................. 99 3.1. Introduction .................................................................................. 99 3.2. The logic of the frontier and the production of space................. 103 3.3. A Zionist tourism experience on the frontier ............................. 106 3.3.1. A wild west on the Jordan River ........................................ 107 3.3.2. Bridges of connectivity ...................................................... 110 3.3.3. Celebrating electrification and nation-building .................. 113 3.3.4. Visiting the last Jewish frontier in Jordan .......................... 118 3.3.5. Tourismification of the Zionist frontier .............................. 120 3.4. The Peace Park reordering: a frontier of protected nature and tourism ........................................................................................ 123 3.4.1. Tourism and the reordering a frontier nature...................... 125 3.4.2. A neoliberal eco-frontier?................................................... 130 3.4.3. Contestation and stakes at the frontier ................................ 133 3.5. Conclusion .................................................................................. 135 Part II: Tales of touristic dissidence and resistance ............................ 137 Chapter 4: Settler and indigenous world-making in Jerusalem: Aspirations and contestation of tourism in a settler city ...................... 139 4.1. Creating Palestinian tourism in Jerusalem: unlimited opportunities? ............................................................................. 139 4.2. Reordering the Holy City ........................................................... 144 4.2.1. Shaping West Jerusalem as the new Jewish Jerusalem ...... 148 4.2.2. Tourism as a strategy for settlement and Judaization ......... 155 4.2.3. Controlling the narrative by all means: guides ................... 160 4.3. Beyond the Holy Land: producing spaces of constructed Palestinian visibility ......................................................................................... 165 4.3.1. Tourism, activism, and resistance ...................................... 168 4.3.2. Experiential tourism of the Jerusalem Tourism Cluster ..... 173 ii 4.4. Conclusion .................................................................................. 181 Chapter 5: Walking Watan: Hiking, affect and resistance in the West Bank ........................................................................................................... 185 5.1. A note on walking in the West Bank .......................................... 185 5.2. Walking, affect and the material world ...................................... 189 5.3. Methodological reflection on ‘hiking’ ........................................ 193 5.4. Walking in a settler colony ......................................................... 195 5.5. Hiking in Palestine, the revival of a culture of walking ............. 198 5.6. Assembling new geographies on foot......................................... 202 5.6.1. The politics of fun and food ............................................... 203 5.6.2. Experiencing and shifting geographies of the ‘Watan’ (homeland).......................................................................... 207 5.6.3. Picturing Palestine: Watan online ...................................... 210 5.7. Leisure as resistance by default .................................................. 214 5.8. Conclusion .................................................................................. 218 6. General Conclusions......................................................................... 221 6.1. A relational approach to tourism, space, and settler colonialism 221 6.2. A colonial political economy of tourism .................................... 225 6.3. The subversive potential of tourism ........................................... 228 6.4. Hopes for decolonial tourism? ................................................... 231 References ................................................................................................. 235 Archival material .................................................................................... 275 iii iv SUMMARY This dissertation contributes to critical tourism studies by integrating a settler colonial perspective with the concepts of world-making, ordering and placemaking, and focusing specifically on the case of Palestine. While the colonial legacy of tourism has already been examined more widely, the specific implications of the settler colonial logic in tourism remain rather underexposed. A relational approach to settler colonialism sheds a different light on the relation between the production of space, knowledge, and power in tourism. By employing literature on ‘world-making,’ Actor-Network Theory and ordering, I analyze how tourism produces spaces and in fact worlds that are entangled into ongoing political processes of colonization and contestation in Palestine. This dissertation is the result of qualitative fieldwork and archival research in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Israel, and Jordan, combined with a literature study. The case studies I explore range from Palestinian hiking movements to tourism infrastructure in Jerusalem, the development of a Peace Park on the Jordan River, as well as the historic development of tourism in Palestine and its relation to Zionism and settler colonization. The cases expose the complex entanglement of space, settler colonization and tourism as a messy process of co-constitution. The production and consumption of touristic spaces goes hand in hand with the making of affective relations, that reproduce colonial and decolonial ontologies. The research contributes to a critical understanding of how tourism and settler colonialism are intertwined in Palestine and also develops a notion of the subversive capacity of tourism as a way to both make sense and actually produce alternative, decolonial worlds. v vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1: Overlay of OCHA access restrictions map with the Emek 4 Shaveh maps of the touristic sites managed by Elad. Figure 1.2: The map produced on the Elad’s website for the