Description
This paper explores the mobile struggle for educational rights in Israel through a spatial analysis of emerging patterns of cross-border travel by Israeli Palestinian citizens who study at West Bank universities. As citizens of an ethnocratic regime who are denied equal access to higher education opportunities in Israel, a new generation of young Palestinians has mobilised their right, as citizens, to move in order to satisfy their right to education outside the borders of “Israel proper”. By exploring this new phenomenon of cross-border student mobility, this paper exposes the contested nature of Israel’s “liberal bargain” with its Palestinian citizens as well as the excesses and contradictions of ethnocratic governance. In so doing, it draws attention to the potential of cross-border student mobilities to reterritorialize Palestinian citizenship and generate new and alternative geographies of mobility, power and sovereignty in Israel-Palestine more generally.
