Spreading and concentrating

Through the analysis of camps in Israel/Palestine and their use in the past and present for two complementary purposes--to rapidly spread and settle the Jewish population and to concentrate and suspend Arab populations--this paper explores the versatile role of the camp in the struggles over the frontiers of this contested territory. Within this geopolitical context, I empirically examine two frontier camps in the Negev/Naqab desert: the historical ma'abara immigrant transit camp of Yeruham and the neighbouring Rachme Bedouin 'unrecognised village'. The former was created as part of a state project to deal with mass immigration and became a minor 'development town', while the latter is similar to other makeshift settlements constructed by the displaced indigenous Arab populations. I argue that, as a zone in which hegemony has not yet been established, the frontier is a territory where the camp in its varied typologies is prevalently used to spread, re-settle, concentrate and suspend different populations, both indigenous and new to the area. I contend that, while camps facilitated the instant creation and growth of Jewish frontier urban settlements in order to establish a social engineered civic control over the land, the same instrument enables the suspension of local ethnic minorities in time and space, abandoning them in an ongoing situation of enduring temporariness, in order to make them settle in a concentrated form according to the interests of the state.