Mapping the Occupation: Performativity and the Precarious Israeli Identity

The ‘mapping procedure’ is a routine military operation of the Israeli Army in which soldiers map the houses of civilians, collect personal details of family members or take a photograph of the family. The ‘Information’ collected in the ‘mapping procedure’ is not archived or passed to the intelligence services following the operation. As the documentation produced is not collected, the central question of this paper concerns how the ‘mapping procedure’ functions as a practice of governing and how this relates to Israeli colonial identity. The paper contributes to the understanding of the implications of maps within colonialism, and it examines mapping as a de-territorialized performance that contributes to the production of identity. This paper suggests three readings of the ‘mapping procedure’. Firstly, as a performative governing tool that implements the hierarchical categorization of people into occupiers and occupied; colonized and colonizers. Secondly, the soldiers that produce the maps are considered as policing forces of a colonial ideology that repeats and mimics British colonialism. Finally, the ‘mapping procedure’ is framed as a tool to refine and redraw the ethnic Jewish-Arabic binary that is needed to maintain the precarious Israeli colonial identity.