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 archival materials, it demonstrates how displacement operates as a key mechanism of territorial expansion and demographic engineering in occupied Palestine.

The chapter analyses specific cases of displacement in areas like the Ber Saba', South Hebron 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 localised displacements form part of a broader settler colonial logic aimed at clearing indigenous populations from 'strategic' territories or what Abu Zuluf and Amara call the 'active settler frontiers'.

Drawing on critical legal geography and settler colonial studies, the analysis reveals how Israel's frontier policies create zones of legal exception where Palestinian existence on their land is 'illegalised'. The chapter explores how courts and planning authorities legitimate displacement through seemingly neutral legally 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 recognise indigenous land rights and sovereignty claims rather than treating displacement as merely a humanitarian issue.