Active Settler Frontiers: Shifting Israeli Borders and the Forced Displacement of Palestinian Bedouin Communities

This book chapter examines how Israel's shifting borders and frontier policies systematically facilitate the forced displacement of Palestinian Bedouin communities. Through analysis of legal documents, spatial policies, and community testimonies, it demonstrates how displacement operates as a key mechanism of territorial expansion and demographic engineering in occupied Palestine.

The chapter analyzes specific cases of displacement in areas like the Jordan Valley and Jerusalem periphery, documenting how various legal and administrative tools - from military orders to planning laws - are deployed to fragment Bedouin communities and appropriate their lands. It argues that these localized displacements form part of a broader settler colonial logic aimed at clearing indigenous populations from strategic territories.

Drawing on critical legal geography and settler colonial studies, the analysis reveals how Israel's frontier policies create zones of legal exception where normal protections are suspended. The chapter explores how courts and planning authorities legitimate displacement through seemingly neutral bureaucratic procedures while obscuring their violent effects on communities.

The work concludes by examining Bedouin resistance strategies and alternative legal frameworks that could better protect communities from forced transfer. It argues for approaches that recognize indigenous land rights and sovereignty claims rather than treating displacement as merely a humanitarian issue.