Checkpoint 300: Precarious checkpoint geographies and rights/rites of passage in the occupied Palestinian Territories

Checkpoint 300, in Bethlehem, is one of the most intensively crossed checkpoints in the West Bank, used mainly by Palestinians hailing from the south of the West Bank on their way to Jerusalem and Israel. According to ActiveStills, an NGO involving Israeli, Palestinian and international reporters, an average of 15,000 Palestinians pass through Checkpoint 300 each morning (ActiveStills, 2018). Checkpoint 300 has been categorized as a ‘terminal checkpoint’ by the Israeli army in 2005 (Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem Society, personal communication, 2017) – a term used for large checkpoints that are meant to function as official, ‘neutral’, airport-like border crossings – although the majority of the terminal checkpoints, including Checkpoint 300, are not located on the Green Line, but inside the West Bank.1 Inspired by Eyal Weizman's spatial analysis of the occupation of the Palestinian Territories presented in his influential Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation (2007), we consider checkpoints as (bio)political technologies aimed at producing a set of selective, arbitrary and mutable geographies of mobility affecting the people subjected to them. Furthermore, in line with Reviel Netz's (2004) understanding of barbed wire as a spatial political technology, we focus on how the assemblage of biopolitical categories, material devices and barriers, procedures of control, calculative rationalities and selective practices that we call ‘checkpoints’ do things. We treat checkpoints as geographical formations capable of producing spatial effects that respond to specific strategies of control and limitation of the mobility of people and things.