Erez Tzfadia and Liat Savin Ben Shoshan  

Abstract 

Research on the rehabilitation of Gaza border communities (the ‘Tekuma region’) and the activities of the Tekuma authority—established after October 7, 2023, by emergency decree and through the suspension of law—raised questions about the impact of the emergency in creating a controlled space where resource and rights allocation produce hierarchies among groups. These questions led us to the spatial conceptualization proposed by Agamben—the “Camp”—a legal-political-spatial mechanism in which the law is suspended and replaced by orders and regulations that grant exceptional powers to the sovereign. Using this framework, we theoretically contextualized the Tekuma Region. This opaque mechanism operates without public scrutiny and involves accelerated, yet inefficient, planning powers, embodying the contradiction between the suspension of law and the flawed, unequal bureaucracy it produces.

Our contemporary research extends from Tekuma to various manifestations of “Camps” woven throughout the legal, political-geography of Israel/Palestine: unrecognized Bedouin villages, moshavim (cooperative settlements) of new immigrants, ma’abarot (transit camps), Arab localities under military rule, settlements, occupied territories, outposts in the Galilee, farms, and new urban neighborhoods. In all these cases, the law is suspended, generating sovereign and colonial-settler utility. Agamben’s model of the Camp involves creating hierarchies of rights—those “barred” from legal protections and others whose rights are elevated beyond the law’s provisions. It distinguishes between those within the Camp and those outside.

Our central argument is that Israel has historically built an archipelago of Camps—both temporary and permanent—that transcend time and space: from 1948 to today, from the Negev to the West Bank, and from Gaza into the Green Line. Camps appear temporary, yet some features of their temporality persist. They are always present in space: when one Camp ends, others—old and new—lie in the background. This archipelago functions as infrastructure for a settler-colonial mechanism, where law suspension has become a permanent method for population management, resource accumulation and allocation, and territorial expansion. Therefore, as a legal-political-geopolitical formation, the Camp is not just an emergency response but a routine mode of governance in Israel-Palestine, producing hierarchies of rights, social borders, and the erosion of civic morality and the rule of law.

Gaza is portrayed as the largest Camp—an area where law is completely suspended, yet Israeli control persists in its biopolitical form through surveillance of infrastructure, borders, and daily life. The events of October 7 pierced the boundaries of the Camp, pushing violence beyond its fences: a breakdown of borders, an exposure of vulnerabilities on both sides, and the formation of the “Tekuma Region,” which itself becomes a Camp. This creates a dual dynamic: Gaza as a Camp of devastated and barred lives, and the Gaza envelope region as a wounded and battered yet bureaucratically privileged Camp, still under a state of emergency.