Political Geography 93 (2022) 102526 0962-6298/© 2021 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Full Length Article Passing as a tourist: Exploring the everyday urban geopolitics of tourism Marik Shtern Postdoctoral Fellow, The Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace, Department of Geography, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Tourism geopolitics Performative tourism Urban geopolitics Contested cities Israeli-Palestinian confict Jerusalem ABSTRACT This paper presents a case study of territorial boundary transgression and intergroup encounters mediated by tourism in a volatile and contested urban space. I present the notion of ‘passing as a tourist’ as a prism to investigate the nexus between performative tourism and everyday urban geopolitics. Situated in East Jerusalem’s core geographies of colonization and political violence, this paper uses archival news material and a textual analysis of primary questionnaire data to critically examine how Jewish Israeli Jerusalemites visiting the Muslim Quarter in the Old City negotiate encounters in a conficted space. The study reveals how the performative di- mensions of ‘tourism’ in a context of polarized ethnonational division expose the role of embodied, everyday geopolitics in the production of urban spaces of tourism. 1. Introduction There is arguably no better exemplar of the constitutive relations between urban geopolitics and tourism than Israel/Palestine. Since 1967, the Israeli government has leveraged domestic and international tourism in the region to rebrand and normalize the state (Brin, 2006; Gelbman, 2008; Isaac, Michael & Higgins-Desbiolles, 2015). A notable example of this process is the ‘pink-washing’ of Tel-Aviv as a gay-friendly urban utopia, which serves to reframe Israel’s international image as a liberal country (Ram et al., 2019; Ritchie, 2015; Schulman, 2011). Another prominent instance is the contested tourist development in Silwan, East Jerusalem. South of Jerusalem’s Old City, in the Pales- tinian village of Silwan, the powerful, quasi-governmental Ir-David Foundation (El’ad) has established a massive tourism destination combining Zionist archeology with aggressive settler colonialism (Noy, 2013). This site, among others in Israel/Palestine, highlights the role of politically oriented tourism as an important visitor draw, shaping both Zionist and Palestinian political meta-narratives. Tourists’ positioning within this context varies according to these visitors’ political ori- entations—from neutral observers of geopolitical dynamics to active partisans (Brin, 2006). Notwithstanding discussion of the top-down institutional utilization of tourism for the sake of geopolitical claim-making, the actual, everyday manifestations of tourism geopolitics in Israel/Palestine have not been thoroughly investigated. This paper addresses this lacuna by interrogating the spatial practices of localized Jewish-Israeli tourism in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. In the last two decades, the Muslim Quarter has become an epicenter of Israeli colonization and Palestinian resistance (Dumper, 2002, Isaac et al, 2015; Rokem, Weiss & Midownik, 2018). Many Jewish Israelis ceased visiting the area (Jabareen et al., 2019; Romann & Weingrod, 1991), fearing hostility and physical harm. Yet some Jewish-Israeli Jerusalemites remain attracted to the orientalist allure of East Jerusalem’s Arab cityscapes and tradi- tional market fare. This paper explores the ways in which these visitors navigate this contested territory in light of the perceived risk of (phys- ical) political violence, as well as their conficted positionality as Jewish-Israeli residents of Jerusalem within Palestinian spaces of the Old City. To encapsulate the ways in which Israeli visitors access and navigate occupied Palestinian touristic localities, I suggest the concept of ‘passing as a tourist.’ The notion of ‘passing’ has typically been applied with reference to marginalized groups navigating spaces of socioeconomic and racial exclusion (Ginsberg, 1996, pp. 1–18; Piper, 1992; Kawash, 1996). While cognizant of the hardships imposed upon Palestinians trying to move throughout Jerusalem (Greenber-Raanan & Avni, 2020), in this case study, I focus on the spatio-performative practices that enable Jewish Israelis to experience a sense of legitimacy and security when visiting historical and culinary destinations in the Muslim Quarter. The right to pass as a tourist, in this asymmetric political context, is a privilege, but also a sign of weakness. When local residents intentionally embody the social category of tourist in order to establish a sense of safety and belonging within parts of their city, it indicates an essential foreignness within this arena. Within complex spatial dialectics of in- clusion and exclusion, the tourist performance emerges as a mediating space of encounter between colonizer and colonized, between insider and outsider, between communities simultaneously contesting and E-mail address: marik.shtern@mail.huji.ac.il. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102526 Received 30 April 2020; Received in revised form 9 August 2021; Accepted 15 October 2021