Freedom, Movement, Subjectivity

Time and again we find the idea that stability, and with it the possibility of moderated movement, is based on a particular relation to the ground (appropriation, ownership, settlement . . .). On the one hand, those who have land . . . are not merely entitled to move in it freely; . . . their movement is free movement and must therefore be protected. On the other hand, the movement of others may be restricted because this restriction is not conceived as an infringement upon freedom, but primarily, as the containment of a security problem.

—Hagar Kotef

These words, which appear toward the end of Hagar Kotef ’s Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility, summarize the core idea that ties the book’s individual chapters together, namely, that freedom, understood as the freedom of movement, is constitutive of the liberal subject and that it by definition involves the dispossession, imprisonment, and exclusion of those deemed unruly and hence dangerous to liberalism itself.

A compact volume, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom is about the evolution of liberalism and liberal ideology in Europe, and at the same time, about the Israeli apparatus of control and restriction of mobility in the Occupied Palestinian territories. At times the interweaving of these two seemingly separate lines of inquiry works better than others, but all in all the book brings together the careful analysis of the Israeli occupation with a broader engagement with liberalism and its foundational texts by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill. Indeed, Israel/Palestine emerges in the book as a site from which the much vaster political theory of liberalism and its main concerns, including the constitution of modern subjectivity, the role of the state in controlling the movement of citizens, and the relationship between freedom and constrained movement, can be critically reexamined and reevaluated.

The importance of such reevaluations of liberalism cannot be overstated. While Europe is facing a “refugee crisis” of an unprecedented magnitude, the United States is preoccupied with the so-called problem of illegal immigration and is busy deporting immigrants and securing the US-Mexico border. It is clear, then, that mobility and restrictions on mobility are key concerns of Western liberal states today. The anxiety about refugees, terrorists, undocumented immigrants, and individuals who are said to be unable to adapt to Western cultures and “secular values” is, of course, an anxiety about unruly bodies that cross both geographical and cultural borders, fences, and walls. It is in this sense that Kotef ’s engagement with movement as both a category constitutive of the liberal subject and a category of exclusion (certain bodies must be controlled and their movement arrested in order to secure the movement of the liberal subject) is of great political importance.

The book opens with a reading of the Israeli checkpoints as a massive web that captures, regulates, and prohibits movement. Focusing on “the imaginary lines” used by Israeli soldiers as a disciplinary mechanism, Kotef demonstrates the means by which “Palestinians passing through the checkpoints [are produced] as undisciplinable” and hence as subjects whose movement must be restricted and monitored (34) and whose identity is reduced to a one-dimensional subjectivity articulated only in terms of movement (38). If this extreme case of movement control appears at first to be in opposition to the idea of freedom as elaborated within liberal imagination, Kotef persuasively demonstrates in the following chapters that rather than an opposition, there is a direct continuity between the liberal conceptualization of freedom and colonial restrictions of movement. Indeed, for the movement of the liberal subject to thrive, the movement of the colonized population has to be policed and restricted. A short second chapter examines the separate road systems built in the West Bank to control the movement of Jews and Palestinians, enforcing the principle of partition underlining the Israeli control regime.

The third chapter moves away from the focus on the Israeli occupation and its mechanisms of control to engage with a much broader theoretical and historical account of...