From Walls to Corridors: The Global Logistics of Israel's HaEmek Railway

In the last two decades, research, policy and activism on Israel/Palestine has narrowly focused on the management and violation of (contested) borders, and the symbols of their asymmetrical control by Israel: checkpoints, fences, soldiers and of course, 'the Wall'. Yet, while this work has attuned us to Palestinian 'immobility', it neglects the much more flexible ways in which Israel shapes its local, regional and global relationships. This project shifts focus to the infrastructures Israel has developed to bypass its own built-up fortresses, unseen and under-the-radar: rather than the walls that keep people and violence in or out, it examines the corridors being built to channel goods, capital and people through them.

The need to shift focus away from walls to corridors goes beyond Israel/Palestine. Wall infrastructures have engulfed populist politics throughout the globe. Yet, as states develop new means and technologies to control their borders, corridors are built alongside them, surreptitiously reconfiguring national and regional lines, opening territories to the needs of an ever-mobile capitalism. The most prominent of these is China's 'One Belt One Road' project that connects over 10,000 km of sea and land corridors across Asia and Europe; but other significant examples include the Kenya-South Sudan-Ethiopia transport corridor (that connects ports, pipelines and airports across some of East Africa's most volatile terrain), or the Asia Pacific Gateway, that treats Canada as a corridor between the US and Asia. These operate through both soft and hard infrastructures, made possible through a revolution in technological and logistical capacity. The logistics industry organises the information, technology, customs regulations and security operations that link global transport hubs, and keep these chains moving past potential human, legal or physical obstructions. The 'corridor', a narrow archipelago of physical and virtual transport links that cut across national boundaries, is the material partner to the logistics industry: together, they ensure that the right capital, goods and people keep flowing at any cost, in large part by ensuring threats are contained. While few are looking, these channels are changing global economic and political relations.

This project examines one such corridor-in-the-making in Israel: a seemingly innocuous train line inaugurated in 2016 to channel traffic between the Eastern Mediterranean and the larger Middle East via Israel's port in Haifa and its border with Jordan. Like Israel itself, this corridor is physically cut-off from surrounding connections; a fact heightened by Israel's volatile and fortress-like relations with its neighbours. Thus, links are being forced through material, virtual, bureaucratic and regulatory infrastructures (under-written by intensive security operations) that intentionally bypass local politics, geographies and potential obstacles and disentangle the flow of the corridor from the terrain through which it travels. At a time when other such routes through the Middle East are being closed-down (i.e. the land-bridge between Turkey and Syria), Israel repositions itself - via the train - as a secure and controlled passage through allegedly unstable space, tapping into global markets without disrupting the status quo.

The project is designed to explore the corridor as it is being made, following the different components that make it mobile and global, as well as the spaces it bypasses and the communities it impacts. In so doing, the project seeks to reveal how the global economy is being reconfigured through corridor infrastructures, while walls are erected and borders are fortified. It also aims to challenge how Israel/Palestine is analysed, using a range of innovative visual/mapping methods that spotlight the agents that tunnel things past borders - enabling Israel to reshape its regional relationships - while (or rather because) others are blocked by them.

In addition to revealing how corridor infrastructures transform global economic relations, the project seeks to change the way researchers, policy-makers and practitioners understand the politics of Israel/Palestine as part of regional and international relations. With these 'users' in mind, the project's impact is geared to operate at multiple, intersecting scales. With outputs designed in consultation with direct beneficiaries (local organisations, UK officials, and critical scholars), these will work to 1) enhance the research capacity, knowledge and skills of public officials and non-governmental organisations; 2) increase public engagement with innovative social research (especially through the online archive and atlas) and 3) generally change the institutional lenses and culture for dealing with the politics and people of Israel/Palestine.

Beneficiaries
1. The Alternative Planning Centre (AC-AP): Given the PI's extensive expertise working with local organisations (during her PhD on Palestinian-citizen community struggle, in her role as Resource Director for HaMoked, an Israeli human rights organisation and coordinating action-research with Israeli and Palestinian social movement activists with the Oxford Research Group), the project has explicitly been designed in collaboration with a local organisation, with extensive networks, knowledge, and technical expertise, but which could also benefit from the direction of the project.
The project adds to AC-AP's knowledge repository by sharing expertise on the impact of national, regional and global corridor projects on the (im)mobility of local communities. At the same time, working with a professional organisation, with 18 years expertise in planning advocacy and geographic technologies, as well as extensive policy, practitioner and community networks (and on-the-ground legitimacy), will expand the capacity of the study to resonate with a range of audiences. A collaborative report will be designed for and disseminated to their constituent groups; as well as a joint workshop (in-country), with a cohort of planning practitioners and scholars, to further extend the exchange of knowledge developed through this project; some of whom will be invited to join the workshop in London, which will extend their work and further extend their impact on UK scholarship (and vice versa).
With potential implications for changes to Israeli and international legal, regulatory and economic policy, the work with AC-AP will be disseminated to and have direct impacts on: a) international and local human rights, peacebuilding and development organisations developing research and advocacy on the infrastructures of 'the occupation'; b) local constituencies, affected by the infrastructure matrix.
2. Middle East focused International Development and Peacebuilding Organisations: Given the implications for regional policies and practice, outputs will be disseminated through the extensive networks developed while working with Conciliation Resources (CR) (2016-2018), an international peacebuilding organisation with extensive contacts across the region, and high legitimacy among UK and US NGOs and policy-makers.
3. UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO): A key output of the project is a course on the politics of Middle East infrastructures, designed in partnership with the FCO, to be co-produced/co-delivered with AC-AP. It will further extend the research outputs and ensure direct impact on policy-makers in the UK and elsewhere. Learning materials will be disseminated through the FCO's online internal repository, and through the project's online archive.
4. General audiences interested in the politics of Israel/Palestine: The online atlas and archive, which will include an ongoing blog of project outputs and findings, will be a) developed for general audiences, with accessible visual and written materials; b) disseminated through QMUL's twitter feeds (which collectively have over 120,000 followers)