Wassim Ghantous
Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow
Academic Year 2021-22
Wassim Ghantous completed his Ph.D. in Peace and Development Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2020. In 2020-21 he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG) located at the Faculty of Management and Business at the University of Tampere, Finland. SPARG is part of the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence in Research on the Relational and Territorial Politics of Bordering, Identities and Transnationalization. Previous to his academic career, he worked in several Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, most notably at the BADIL Resource Center and B’Tselem.
Wassim Ghantous will be working on his book manuscript, The Rise of the Israeli War Machine: Palestinians’ Encounters of Spectral Violence, Destructive Velocities, Intensive Elimination. The book explores the increasingly diffused operations of the contemporary Israeli regime of colonization in rural areas of the West Bank – the “frontier zone” – and the ways in which Palestinians develop sumud (steadfastness) maneuvers to evade this diffused regime. Based on extensive empirical research on Palestinian villagers’ everyday encounters with an assemblage of Israeli public, hybrid, and civilian colonial actors, and informed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ontology of “assemblages” and their theorizations of politics and war-making, the book is an interdisciplinary exploration of Israeli colonization and Palestinian sumud as they unfold in spatiotemporal, conceptual, and affective registers and domains. More specifically, guided by the concepts of the State and the War Machine, the book draws connections between Israeli political objectives of elimination, relations of enmity, and the movement and intensity of violence and control inflicted on the Palestinians. Through this intersectional analysis, the book tracks the transformation of the Israeli regime of colonization into a war machine and tries to capture in novel ways its projections onto Palestinian bodies and landscapes through the concepts of spectral violence, destructive velocities, and intensive elimination. Simultaneously, the book interrogates the limits of such colonial machinery by shedding light on particular affective and spatiotemporal modes developed and deployed by rural Palestinian communities as means to evade domination and elimination, and to keep on existing in their (home)land.