Insurgent Infrastructure: Tunnels of the Gaza Strip

• Main Author: Toufic Haddad
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies 2018-06-01
• Series: Middle East : Topics & Arguments
• Subjects: tunnels; politics of verticality; Gaza Strip; separation control; apartheid; captured infrastructure
• Online Access: http://localhost/ep/0003/article/view/7594

This article explores the emergence of tunnels within the Gaza Strip. It argues that tunnels emerged as an implicit response to Israeli policies of separation and control, and the increasingly sophisticated means used to realize these ends during the peace process and thereafter. The latter included approaches that actively embraced a “politics of verticality,” incorporating a volume-based approach to Israeli geopolitical interests and designs. Tunnels would come to reify an insurgent impetus vis-à-vis Israeli ideological, political and military doctrines on the one hand, and the structured dependency and ineffectiveness of the Palestinian Authority on the other. Their emergence speaks to the organization and coagulation of many externalities generated by both dynamics, which effectively captured existent infrastructural assemblages toward colonial imperatives.