AMAHL BISHARA Tufts University Driving while Palestinian in Israel and the West Bank: The politics of disorientation and the routes of a subaltern knowledge ABSTRACT Israel’s system of closure divides Palestinian citizens of Israel from Palestinians of the West Bank. For members of both categories, road journeys spur political analysis, explicitly stated or implicitly packed into jokes or offhand comments. If, in liberal traditions, political knowledge is idealized as disembodied, abstract, and dispassionate, Palestinian knowledge gained while driving is none of these things. Yet it can provide important insights into the operations of Israeli power less easily represented in more formal outlets. Because the road system is an everyday site at which its users come into contact with the work of the state, driving is an important practice through which to examine popular conceptions of politics. Still, these two communities of Palestinians face obstacles in communicating about shared understandings of space and politics. In examining everyday political knowledge of subaltern people, we must attend to varieties of subalterneity to examine how these differences can perpetuate marginalization. [mobility, infrastructure, Palestinians, subalterneity, the state, Israel, place] T wo Palestinian journalists and I burst out of downtown traffic in Ramallah, in the occupied Palestinian territory, 1 onto the main road north on a spring morning in 2004. The aroma of toasted sesame seeds and cheese from fresh boureka pastries wafting through my companions’ company SUV and everyone’s energetic banter signaled that this was not just a commute; it was a road trip. But just as we gained momentum, we encountered our first Israeli checkpoint. We slowed down. We stopped. Then, the driver maneuvered to the front of the queue, swerving across the yellow line. The Israeli soldier at the post waved us past. I was stunned. I was more accustomed to sitting in the shared taxicabs that were the standard form of public transportation in the West Bank, and the drivers of these cabs would never attempt such a maneuver. I gathered that the journalist’s unarticulated strategy of cutting in line was a performance of mobility, a gesture through which he asserted the right to move, even though under Israeli military rule this right was hardly secure. Later, the journalist, whom I will call Samer, told me that Israeli soldiers’ treatment of journalists was arbitrary. They could go easier on journalists at checkpoints because of their identity or not allow them to pass at all. The two Palestinian journalists had set out to cover a story about the loss of agricultural land due to Israeli policies, and I was accompanying them as part of my research on journalistic production. Their story was located in the West Bank village of Falamiya. Yet, from the moment we left Ramallah, they made clear that the same politics affecting that village would be apparent to us all along the road. Driving entails practical knowledge, and, for Palestinians especially, driving and riding in cars are the foundations for a grounded political analysis that often challenges the assumptions of mainstream state-centric political analysis published in AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 33–54, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C  2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/amet.12114