Institute For Middle East Studies

This talk will offer a rare institutional perspective on the Israeli permit regime in the West Bank. Yael Berda (Princeton University, PhD Student) will discuss the practices of the bureaucratic apparatus that controls the movement of Palestinian workers between Israel and the West Bank, situating her analysis within colonial histories of population management. Based on two years of research and data collected while Berda represented cases in Israel's Supreme and Military courts, this institutional ethnography will provide a rich empirical account of the Israeli permit system based on Berda’s interviews, official correspondence, legal decisions and participant observation.