Julie Peteet's Space and Mobility in Palestine is a much-anticipated ethnography of contemporary Palestinian life under Israeli military occupation. Although the constriction of Palestinian geography in the West Bank as a result of Israeli settler-colonialism is one of the most salient aspects of everyday experiences in the Occupied Territories, Peteet's work is the first book devoted solely to the exploration of this domain. Peteet was uniquely poised to capture these social dynamics given her long track record as one of the leading anthropologists of Palestinian society. While her scholarship has previously taken her to contexts such as Lebanon, her recent immersion in the West Bank for this project reveals a depth of knowledge, empathy, and solidarity.

The high quality, accuracy, comprehensiveness, and utility of this text for the anthropology of Palestine is also a result of the author's clarity in writing and the focus and organization of her manuscript. It is also a result of the depth of knowledge and authority in this field. By focusing the scope of her research on how Palestinians make meaning as a captive population who are immobile and, in many ways, incarcerated in their native lands, Peteet is able to explicate the requisite context for what this matrix of control entails and its implications for Palestinian individuals and communities.

The introduction, which contains helpful background information, is followed by six chapters including the conclusion. The first chapter explores the closure wall. The second is devoted to mobility and its relationship to bureaucratic control, permits, and roads. Chapter 3 examines anticipation that Palestinians experience under constraints on their mobility and the risks they face amidst checkpoints and other impediments to movement. The fourth chapter discusses experiences of waiting given unnerving temporalities. Chapter 5 provides examples of anti-colonial resistance to this closure regime, before giving way to the conclusion which synthesizes the book and then looks to the future and whether a third Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, could be on the horizon. Peteet presents the results of her study, whose foundation is anthropological and based on ethnographic research methods, including participant observation and interviews with a diverse group of Palestinians in terms of age, gender, and positionalities within Palestinian society. She acknowledges that she is an outsider to these communities who also has deep connections to them through marriage and a history of scholarship in this field.

Space and Mobility in Palestine provides a strong theoretical foundation for the conceptualization of Palestinian captivity and resistance to it in the West Bank. The analytical work that Peteet puts forward is compelling. For instance, she emphasizes the importance of deploying the term colonies instead of settlements in order to undergird these illegal Israeli structures with their settler-colonial origins. Peteet also recognizes the agency of Palestinians in the formulation of epistemologies to make sense of their own realities. This became clear in her discussion of the Palestinian notion of sumud as the “constant state of alertness to uncertainty and a readiness to quickly shift strategies in the face of ever-mutating obstacles” (p. 135).

Peteet's engagement with social theory is refreshing in its accessibility and lucidity. This also enables her to encapsulate the ethnographic vignettes that she interweaves throughout the book quite beautifully. I appreciated the richness of the ethnography and also the manner in which Peteet's voice does not overpower those of her interlocutors; in fact, the long block quotes, such as that from Rania, a mother struggling to move in her homeland with different Israeli regulations for her family, husband, and for their eight-month-old daughter. Rania's desire for a “normal” life and the tears she shed from missing her family as a result of a military checkpoint and closures in her area is heartbreaking (p. 164). These narratives reinforce Peteet's argument that Israel cannot justify its policies to severely limit Palestinian space and mobility in the name of security. The structures that keep Palestinians confined are tools of domination and subjugation. As Peteet writes, the “threat of violence” from Israel is often looming for Palestinians in order to maintain this system (p. 131). Peteet could have engaged more deeply with the Israeli arguments related to security and how these findings discredit those attempts to justify Israel's control over Palestinians in this manner.

One of the strongest parts of this book was Peteet's ethnographic account of the weekly protests of Palestinian residents in the West Bank village of Bilin. She describes the weekly protests against the occupation and the wall and settlement infrastructure there. As a participant observer at these protests, Peteet represented, with sensitivity, their gender, generational, and demographic dynamics, and the diverse political groups they united and social media exposure they garnered. She also captured the Israeli military's repression of the villagers through crowd dispersion methods and other forms of attempts to squash the protests. Peteet acknowledged the “small victories” that the villagers are able to celebrate nonetheless such as being able to hold on to some parts of their land (p. 194). Peteet's photos from Bilin are powerful and bring life to this narration by illuminating the landscape of the village and the people power during the protests. Throughout the book, the photos that she personally took add a level of intimacy between the author and her research subjects, as well as between the author and her readers, and therefore between the readers and the research subjects.

While reading this book, I felt the humiliation, pain, and suffocation of the people living under the spatial constraints of this decades-long military occupation. That writing on lived and embodied experiences could be so palpable is a testament to the richness of Peteet's ethnography. She demonstrates how this anthropological method can capture the lived reality of communities on the ground. It does not make for an easy read as a result but it is an invaluable read nonetheless. By sharing these narratives with the world, Peteet honors the Palestinian quest for dignity amidst humiliation, and she demonstrates the profound role that academics can take on in service of meaningful solidarity.