From the Sky to the Underground: Colonial Spatial Warfare and Palestinian Counter-Geographies

CCSRE Faculty Research Network: Arab Futures and Pasts: Palestine+

This talk examines how space, territory, and infrastructure are produced within the Israeli settler-colonial system. Rather than approaching colonial domination solely as a political or military structure, the lecture analyzes it as a spatial regime that continuously reorganizes land, mobility, and the built environment in order to consolidate territorial control and fragment Palestinian life. Drawing on critical geography, settler colonial studies, and anti-colonial theory, the lecture explores how the Israeli colonial project operates through the production of territory as a system of spatial domination.

The lecture focuses on the spatial mechanisms through which colonial power reorganizes Palestine. These include the fragmentation of territory, the strategic use of infrastructure, and the vertical reconfiguration of space through aerial surveillance, military technologies, and subterranean penetration. Such mechanisms transform the landscape into a multilayered colonial terrain that extends from the sky to the underground, producing new geographies of control that regulate movement, access, and everyday life.

At the same time, the lecture highlights how Palestinians produce counter-spatial practices that challenge and disrupt these colonial spatial formations. Through adaptive infrastructures, alternative networks of mobility, and subterranean geographies that emerged in Gaza, Palestinian spatial practices generate forms of anti-colonial resistance that reconfigure survival, movement, and territorial imagination under conditions of extreme spatial control.

By placing colonial spatial engineering and Palestinian counter-geographies in dialogue, the lecture argues that the struggle in Palestine is not only over land but over the very production of space itself. Understanding this spatial struggle reveals how settler colonialism operates through competing spatial projects and how anti-colonial practices generate alternative geographies of resistance, survival, and territorial reimagination.

* Abdalla Bayyari is a researcher in political geography and settler colonial studies at the Institute for Palestine Studies and a member of the editorial board of The Journal of Palestine Studies. His research examines the spatial logics of settler colonialism, with a particular focus on territory, urbicide, and the production of space in Palestine. His work explores how colonial power operates through infrastructure, urban destruction, and territorial reorganization, and how anti-colonial spatial practices emerge under conditions of extreme spatial violence.