Cartographies of Sumud: Reading Palestine beyond occupation

My thoughts return repeatedly to Palestine. Its contours are mapped through reports, testimonies, and the bureaucratic language of “security coordination.” Each road, wall, and zoning decree is a decision about who may exist with stability and who must live in uncertainty as part of the same design. If we have learned anything so far, it is that what is often described as “instability” is, in fact, highly structured. For decades, Western policy and academic analysis have treated Palestinian life through the lens of “conflict management” as though imbalance were a neutral condition. Yet, this is exactly how “conflict” becomes governance, because, as simple as it can be, normalisation of the occupation here is not an interruption of order; it is the order.

Within two weeks of the US-brokered ceasefire, reports indicated that Israeli operations had already killed around 100 Palestinians despite the truce. According to OCHA, about 1.5 million people remained in urgent need of food, water, and medical care while crossings at Rafah and Kerem Shalom stayed largely sealed. Electricity reportedly reached most neighbourhoods for fewer than six hours a day, sewage treatment plants stayed offline, and roughly 66,000 tons of unexploded ordnance contaminated the ground. As a result, the tools of destruction appeared to shift from bombs to blockades and from explosive power to administrative restriction, suggesting that Gaza’s “pause” revealed how peace processes can reproduce coercion by bureaucratic means. In parallel, the West Bank shows the same architecture rendered territorial. As Gaza entered its so-called cease-fire, the repetition of a well-rehearsed script unfolded elsewhere, with coercion in the West Bank intensifying. By mid-October 2025, OCHA  reported the killing of 40 children and the displacement of about 3,000 people since January, and Reuters documented 158 settler assaults during October 2025, coinciding with the olive-harvest season, linking this spike in attacks to a “climate of impunity”. 

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Between 2018 and 2024, Israeli authorities advanced 28,872 settlement housing units (9,884 in the West Bank and 18,988 in East Jerusalem), marking a 250 per cent increase since 2018, which the European External Action Service interpreted as a deliberate policy of spatial domination. Meanwhile, according to OCHA, Israeli infrastructure expansion has entrenched physical fragmentation across the territory with extensive settler-only roads now carving through Palestinian areas, and a significant share of the West Bank (particularly Area C) being redesignated into military zones, settlement blocs, or so-called “nature reserves” that are off-limits to Palestinians, creating a patchwork of managed enclaves.  In total, since January 2025, over 2,787 Palestinians (including 541 children) were injured, and nearly 500 of those injuries were caused by settlers. Meanwhile, OHCHR notes that around 99 per cent  of complaints filed by Palestinians against settler violence end without indictment, reflecting a systemic failure of accountability. Impunity, therefore, emerges not as a malfunction of justice but as its operational logic, an organising principle within a broader architecture of domination. Furthermore, according to the World Bank, restrictions on Palestinian access to land and water in Area C drain an estimated 35 per cent  of potential GDP each year, underscoring how structural constraints perpetuate economic dependency and underdevelopment. Israeli settlements consume several times more water per capita than nearby Palestinian communities, with some settlers using up to 20 times more. Many Palestinian villages receive fewer than 80 litres per person per day, well below the World Health Organization’s 100-litre standard for minimum daily water access.

Critics often describe Palestinian institutions as weak or fragmented. Nevertheless,  per cent of the West Bank (Area C) remains under direct Israeli control, prohibiting Palestinian development and economic expansion. Moreover, between January and July 2025, 113 Palestinian structures were demolished in East Jerusalem for lacking Israeli-issued permits, displacing 321 people, including 168 children. Each demolition, nevertheless, signifies more than the loss of property, interpreted as the erasure of continuity through the quiet revocation of belonging; the kitchen was rebuilt three times, the olive tree planted again in defiance of policy.  Therefore, every act of building requires the authorisation of an occupying authority, making construction itself a negotiation of existence. In such a system, governance becomes a performance within confinement rather than an exercise of genuine agency. The Palestinian Authority’s apparent ineffectiveness, therefore, is the predictable condition of authority stripped of autonomy. In 2025, the Israeli army requisitioned over 23,100 dunums  (roughly 5,700 acres) in Qalqiliya and Nablus and the E1 settlement plan, approved in August, authorised 3,400 housing units east of Jerusalem, effectively bisecting the territory. Each of these measures deepens fragmentation, converting land into leverage and verifies that annexation appears as incremental administration.

Yet, beneath these material structures lies a legal one. Two systems operate simultaneously in the same territory: civil law for Israeli settlers and military law for Palestinians, a dual framework documented by B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch, which both describe it as a form of institutionalised discrimination or apartheid. Administrative detention, house demolitions, and the blockade of Gaza together constitute a regime of permanent exception, one that suspends basic legal protections under the pretext of security and like this, the ongoing erosion of humanitarian law in Palestine has become a normalized global precedent, revealing how the principle of universality can be quietly suspended when the victims are colonised. And still, at the global level, humanitarian responses reveal the same asymmetry. Violence by non-state actors provokes immediate mobilisation – sanctions, emergency sessions, counter-terror campaigns. Conversely, state violence that flattens entire neighbourhoods is met with “deep concern”. Accordingly, this selectivity sustains the illusion of an impartial world order while preserving existing hierarchies of power. 

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If the international community continues to frame Palestine as a regional dispute rather than a test of universality, the ideal of human rights will remain hollow. Because domination in Palestine operates through law, space, and economy, any pursuit of justice must be equally multidimensional. Linking Gaza and the West Bank as one integrated regime of governance reveals the unity of control across geography. Historicising the present situates current policies within the continuum of dispossession since 1948 and enforcing accountability through legal and economic conditionality transforms solidarity from sentiment into structure. Only through an interconnected approach can global analysis move beyond the colonial grammar of “conflict” and toward a politics of equality grounded in justice rather than management.

Even so, amid the architectures of restriction and ethnic erosion, Palestinian life insists. Cultivation resumes where bulldozers have passed, and homes rise again from ground declared off-limits, acts of sumud, everyday steadiness that rebuilds even under rubble. These gestures, seemingly ordinary, unsettle the very logic of erasure: they transform presence into a spatial politics that contests displacement as destiny, and immobility here is not paralysis. It is an embodied claim to continuity, a refusal to translate dispossession into exile. Each replanted olive tree and reopened market is not only a return to routine but an act of re-mapping- inscribing history back onto a terrain repeatedly redrawn to exclude it.

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