A frontier, a borderline, a membrane: Paradoxes on the Egypt-Israel borderland - Efrat Ben-Ze'ev

In recent years, since a fence had been built along the Israel-Egypt border, smugglers are publishing video clips documenting illicit cross-border activities. In one of these clips, entitled: "This is how drugs are smuggled from Sinai to Israel," a group of men is documented as it arrives near the fence with packs of drugs. They climb a ladder and throw the packs to the other side, and someone is quick to pick them up there. The scene is portrayed as adventurous rather than dangerous, and it ends with a smuggler dancing happily to the camera, the fence as his background.

In the clip, the newly built fence becomes a setting for performance, where daring, masculinity and skill are played out.  The border line is trivialized, its transgression almost mundane. Indeed, four hundred contraband activities are documented yearly on this border. Yet at the same time, the borderland is venerated as the appropriate site for delivering a message that contradicts the idea of the fortified nation state. The border fence is interpreted as contributing both to the lucrative smuggling business as well as to the essential role of those who carry out the trade.

The smugglers are but one example of a population for whom the borderland is familiar ground, one whose rules they understand and often also define.   By focusing on the more hidden aspects of the Egypt-Israel borderland, this talk explores what may seem like inherent contradictions. The talk will highlight the borderland's paradoxes, consider their unique manifestation on the Egypt-Israel frontier, and suggest that from the perspective of those who inhabit the border, these paradoxes are not so very paradoxical.     

Theoretical framework

Many contemporary state borders resemble a modernist grid system. They are defined by linear lines delineating quasi-rectangular blocks (Jameson). The outcome is a puzzle-like universe, parceled and packed into neat geographical pieces. These international borders preserve a colonial cartographic division which reverberates the interests of past and present empires rather than the local population's needs (Brian Harley). While many of these state borders are disputed, they nevertheless tend to persist.

Their persistence has partially to do with their contribution to the nation-state's image as a community.  Benedict Anderson (1983) and later Thongchai Winichakul (1995) argued that the imagined community is created through a widely circulated logo-like geo-body (Anderson 1983; Winichakul 1995). An initial border paradox stems from the gap between this imagined geo-body of the state, which supposedly envelopes a nation, and the fact that it oftentimes does not. Moreover, the lines which are imagined as the state's perimeter do not necessarily serve as such.

Yet the fundamental paradox inherent to state borders in general, not only those of nation-states, is that they are imagined as lines of division while their mere presence often turns them into sites of contact -- a magnet for a variety of people. Papadakis summarizes a large corpus of work which highlights the contradictory nature of borders:

An overview of border studies indicates that their discussions have been

phrased in a common trope of self-contradiction (hence as paradoxical),

even while speaking about different characteristics of borders. This is the common trope joining the diverse discussions of borders as, for example, sites of enclosures and mobilities (Cunningham and Heyman 2004); inclusion and exclusion, division and connection (Rosler and Wendl 1999); inside and outside, de-territorilialization and re-territorialization (Paasi 2011); barriers and opportunities (Wilson and Donnan 1998, 22); emplacement and displacement (Ballinger 2012); bridges and barriers (Anderson 2012, 118; Alvarez 2012; de Certeau 1984, 128); places of becoming and of belonging (Brambillia 2015); sites that connect and divide (Green 2005, 129; Rumford 2012, 895); spaces that divide and unite (Gasparini 2017); and mobility and fixicity (Sassen 2008, 383). (Papadakis 2018, p. 286)

Borders transpire as multi-faceted, diverging in different directions. Sassen writes that they embody various potentialities “typically seen as mutually exclusive” (2008: 379). Papadakis, whose work focuses on Cyprus' borders, notes that "in Greek, the word paradox is a synonym of atopo. Taken literally the latter means “without a place”, but it is used to describe what has “no place” conceptually: that which does not fit with established conceptual categories (2018:286)." Borders, he suggests, are places out of place and specific borders have their own paradoxes. Considering the Cyprus border, he describes it as a line of division as well as a magnet, a site of conflict and cooperation, of security and anxiety, of creativity and oppression, and of extreme expressions of nationalism and its contestation (Papadakis 2018). One question to be asked is what paradoxes are played out on the Egypt-Israel Border.

Some scholars explain the instability of borders as stemming from their role as "actors" and as entities existing beyond their spatial dimension (Brambilla 2015:17). Brambilla (2009) does not limit the meaning of borders to demarcation lines but rather sees them as dynamic, processual social practices. The border dialogic, she writes, originates in "the interplay between practices of ordering and practices of othering" (2009:585). For Brambilla, "borders create identities and are created by them; they are sites where identities and alterities are invented and re-invented" (2009: 584). Going back to the clip described in the opening passage, the smugglers do not hide illicit actions in the dark. Rather, they represent themselves as those who can act as they please -- they take their time, transfer drugs in broad daylight, and they have the privilege of making the act into a performance.

To capture the paradoxes ingrained in what Brambilla summarizes as Bordering-Ordering-Othering, a specific type of observation is needed.  Van Schendel (2004), who had worked at south Asian borders, calls it re-scaling -- a move away from a state-centered approach. One of his methods is to explore places that can be defined as non-state spaces.  Relating back to James Scott's work (2009), van Schendel and de Maaker (2014) consider spaces which are outside of the state's control, at times due to their rugged terrain: mountain ranges or densely forested areas. Those tend to deter regular armies. The Sinai Peninsula, particularly its mainland, resembles these non-state spaces, both because of its desert terrain as well as its independent and at time rebellious population.

It is worthwhile to re-calibrate our gaze to consider the Israel-Egypt borderland and consider it as a center rather than a periphery, and as a site which is at least temporarily a non-state space. Van Schendel and de Maaker (2014) pose a question which is relevant to this paper: what are the practices that bear evidence of groups strategically distancing themselves from the state? By doing so, they contribute to exposing the illusion that a borderline is merely one of division.

Smuggling on the borderland is possibly the most common manifestation to the limits of governmentality and an ongoing challenge to the state's authority. The argument recently forwarded by Keshavarz and Khosravi's in Seeing like a smuggler: Borders from Below (2022) is that "smuggling can no longer be seen as a criminal act, as the state authorities would claim, but becomes part of social protest against different oppressions: economic inequality, differential access to welfare and the nation state hegemony over borders and borderland communities" (2022:1). Keshavarz and Khosravi adopt border-landers' perspectives -- those of the smugglers, the smuggled and others who are also involved. This is where a specific social order and identity are "created and recreated", turning what may seem as paradoxical into rather logical ways of being.

Outline of the rest of the talk

Methodology

This talk is based on a study conducted in the past decade with my colleague Nir Gazit. Our team included students of different backgrounds who assisted in fieldwork – Habtom Mehari interviewed asylum seekers in Tigrinya, Jorge Gomez met MFO Columbian personnel, and we had a group of research students from our college and from abroad. The study was first funded by the Ruppin Academic Center and by the Truman Institute and later with a generous grant from the German Research Foundation (The Social Construction of Borders). Our partners from the University of Gottingen worked in Ceuta, Melilla, and Morocco.

The research included:  

• Interviews/meetings with border populations: Asylum seekers (from Eritrea and Sudan), Israeli soldiers, residents (Jewish and Bedouin); members of the multinational task and observers' force; Asian farm workers; tourists. The interviews with asylum seekers and soldiers were set in advance and mainly conducted in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
• Ethnographic fieldwork at the Nitzana Gateway, a location chosen for being at "the heart" of this border, away from Taba in the southeast and from the Besieged Palestinian Gaza Strip in the northwest. Ethnographic work was conducted primarily between 2012 and 2016, through bi-monthly excursions, with occasional visits until 2020.

We watched the fence being built and the changes of outposts. We also witnessed the Holot Facility for the internment of asylum seekers being built, occupied (December 2013), and emptied (March 2017). We met with asylum seekers outside of the facility. We visited the cross-border terminal, the Israel-Egypt liaison office, agricultural plots, the grocery shop, the café in Ezuz. At these sites we conducted informal talks.

• We created an archive of media reports about this border, including articles published in Israeli, Egyptian and international newspapers, as well as video clips and filmed reports.

Limitations:

• Lack of access to the Egyptian side. Secondhand knowledge via interviews and media coverage.
• Suspicion towards our topic, primarily among the Bedouins, but also among soldiers and the MFO.
• Lack of access to smugglers who would speak about their worldview and actions

Findings

"Paradoxes" on the Egypt-Israel Borderland

1. A historical paradox: This border appears and disappears along the past century.  To use a metaphor, it is like a reef; exposed and concealed again and again.
2. Geopolitical paradoxes: The Sinai Peninsula is only partially controlled by the Egyptian State. Particularly its inland resembles other places that are non-state spaces (Scott 2009).  The Egyptian authorities have had ongoing clashes with dissidents (especially in the northern part of the peninsula). The Egyptian police guarding posts along the border had their apertures facing the Sinai rather than Israel (until recent renovation. photograph).

The Peace Agreement between Egypt and Israel stated that the Sinai should remain a demilitarized zone. However, Israel has allowed Egyptian military operations within it, thus cooperating in breeching the agreement. This is partially because Egyptian crackdowns on dissidents serve Israeli interests.

Soldiers unable to understand the other side of the border – who is there? soldiers watching skirmishes on the Egyptian side; soldiers as witnesses to the torture camps (rape and killing) while staying idle; soldiers as witnesses to Israelis shooting at asylum seekers on the fence, 2014).

1. Paradoxes of social interaction:

• Confusion during encounters between asylum seekers and soldiers on the border: "who is who": Quotes from asylum seekers who cannot tell Egyptian from Israeli soldiers; quotes of Israeli soldiers speaking Arabic to Eritrean asylum seekers; soldiers using the term "Sudanese" for all illegalized crossers.
• Those asylum seekers arriving are treated both as a terror threat and as humanitarian cases. (There is vast literature on the convergence between humanitarianism and military operations). On certain stretches of the border, asylum seekers were sent back to Egypt while on others they were taken in.

c.  Soldiers (Jewish) suspecting comrades (Bedouins) and arranging for a "secret" ambush of smugglers.

4.  
5. The paradox of the present absentees: People who operate on the borderland but remain semi-transparent:

• The Asian laborers – in fact the largest population at the Nitzana Gateway region, are uncounted and unaccounted (see the work of Yacobi and Tzefadia 2019).
• Intelligence sources (quote from our interview with the border police intelligence officer.); The secret Mossad cemetery inside the Nitzana Terminal.

Reframing the paradoxes/borderlands' typologies

1. The membrane borderland

The selective nature of its permeability;

roughly 400 contraband a year, with merchandise worth at least 300 million dollars. The events at this border often determine the price of drugs in Israel. In parallel, asylum seekers who wished to cross the fence after it was completed were shot (2014 event).

1. The hybrid borderland

Smugglers as informers; soldiers as smugglers;

A memorial garden for those who had worked for the Israeli intelligence, hidden inside the Nitzana land crossing Terminal.

1. The liminal borderland—no constraints that operate at other spaces; a borderland mentalité.

References

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso.

Ben-Ze’ev, E. and N. Gazit. 2022. Dialectics of a Border-frontier: Settlers, State and Global Forces at the Nitzana Gateway, Kriot Yisraeliot (Hebrew)

Ben-Ze’ev, E. and N. Gazit. 2020. The Fickle Zone: Borderland and Borderlanders on the Egyptian-Israeli Front, The Journal of Borderlands Studies 37:5, 1025-1045.

Ben-Ze'ev, E. and N. Gazit. 2016. Juggling Logics on the Egyptian-Israeli Borderland: Soldiers between Securitization and Arbitrary Humanitarianism. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, December 2016:1-23.

Harley, Brian. 2002. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Jameson, Frederic. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Keshavarz, Mahmoud and Shahram Khosravi (eds.). 2022. Seeing like a smuggler: Borders from Below. London: Pluto Press.

Newman, David. 2012. Contemporary Research Agendas in Border Studies: An Overview. In The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies, ed. Doris Wastl-Walter, 33–48. Farnham: Ashgate

Papadakis, Yiannis. 2018. Borders, paradox, and power, Ethnic and Racial

Studies, 41:2, 285-302, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2017.1344720

Sassen, Saskia. 2008. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

van Schendel, W. 2004. The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia. London: Anthem Press.

van Schendel, Willem & Erik de Maaker. 2014. Asian Borderlands: Introducing

their Permeability, Strategic Uses and Meanings, Journal of Borderlands Studies, 29:1, 3-9, DOI: 10.1080/08865655.2014.892689

Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Efrat Ben-Ze'ev (D.Phil, Oxon) is a social anthropologist, associate professor at the Department of Behavioral Science, the Ruppin Academic Center. Her topics of interest include the Palestinian 1948 uprooting and refugee memories, social silence and war, spatial perceptions of Palestine-Israel and the Egypt-Israel border. She is currently working on a book titled, The parallel universe of Eritrean asylum seekers.