The mobile and carceral logics of Haifa Port
| Published date | 01 November 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211066278 |
| Author | Sharri Plonski |
| Date | 01 November 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: Race and Security in World Politics |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211066278
Politics
2024, Vol. 44(4) 567 –587
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/02633957211066278
journals.sagepub.com/home/pol
The mobile and carceral
logics of Haifa Port
Sharri Plonski
Queen Mary University of London, UK
Abstract
This article investigates Haifa Port’s carceral and mobile geographies by examining how Israel
is being re-made, rebranded, and harnessed as ‘safe and secure space’ for the transits of global
capital. The article contends with ports as key protagonists of empire, situated in an enduring
and ongoing history of colonial routes and route-making that are raced and moving with/through
the transits of colonised bodies and commodities. Haifa Port – and Israel itself – are examined
as nodes in a matrix of global colonial-capitalist relations, moulded to an essential geographic
rationale, in which everything moves and must continue circulating. Yet, in exploring the specific
dense and durable materialities of Haifa Port – and the racial logics of the settler colonial state –
the article also works to understand that which becomes contained and fixed in particular sites,
spaces, bodies, and lives. This also helps point to whom and what sits outside them – vulnerable
and threatening to Israel’s participation in global economic circuits and orders.
Keywords
infrastructure, logistics, Palestine/Israel, ports, settler colonialism
Received: 22nd January 2021; Revised version received: 1st September 2021; Accepted: 1st November 2021
Introduction – A series of port revelations
The exciting history of the State of Israel is interwoven with Haifa Port, and therein is our future
as a central economic engine and as a bridge to peace in the Middle East . . . Our innovative
technology, professionalism and efficiency give us hope that in a future of peace, Haifa Port
shall become the entry and exit gateway for all the countries of the Middle East. (Haifa Port
Publicity Brochure, Haifa Port Company (HPC), 2019: 2)
The above quote, which appears on the first page of Haifa Port’s publicity brochure
(pictured below, in figure 1), is keen to point out that Israel’s largest deep-water port is
deeply entangled in Israel’s sense of self, and vice versa. Planned, funded, and built by the
British Mandate (Norris, 2013), it opened for business on the Mediterranean’s northern
coast in 1933. It has been a key target and site of Zionist/Israeli nation-building, ever
since:1 It became an anchor for the Zionist Labour Union (the Histadrut) since Zionist
Corresponding author:
Sharri Plonski, School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London, London E1
4NS, UK.
Email: s.plonski@qmul.ac.uk
1066278POL0010.1177/02633957211066278PoliticsPlonski
research-article2022
Special Issue: Race and Security in World Politics
568 Politics 44(4)
leaders first sought to replace Arab labour monopolies at the port in the 1930s. It was home
base to the clandestine missions of the ‘Palyam’ (the pre-state naval militias), famed for
their sabotage of British ships and ‘daring rescues’ of Jewish refugees from British deten-
tion camps in the 1940s. It was also a key site of Palestinian expulsion in 1948, as Haifa’s
Arab residents were syphoned by Jewish militia units into docked ships that transported
them northward into Lebanon (Masalha, 2012); and it was the first point of encounter for
the flow of Jewish immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, who came
to replace them.
These gestures towards fundamental moments in Israel’s national memory are what
drew me to Haifa Port, with its trajectory as Israel’s ‘national pride’ – another trope from
the brochure – tied to this past. Particularly as Israeli officials and port spokespeople
have projected and translated this past into an imagined global present and bright future,
as one of the world’s most efficient, technologically secure, and green ports (HPC, 2019;
Merk and Dang, 2012; Port Technology International (PTI), 2015). This is a future that
includes seeing the port, and thus Israel, as an integral ‘gateway for all the countries of
the Middle East’. A provocative idea, given Israel calls itself a ‘villa in the jungle’ (Bar
and Yosef, 2013; Yacobi, 2016: 2), a racial discourse and practice famously materialised
through the capture and containment of Palestinian bodies and compounded in ever-
evolving high-tech fortifications along intentionally undefined borders (Weizman,
2012). Thus, while Haifa is imagined as a space of/that flows, it is quite literally grounded
in a past, present, and future reality of carceral limits (Chua, 2018). This paradox points
to Haifa as a significant site for examining the enduring story of Israeli – and global –
colonial and capitalist mobile and immobilising logics, and one I am particularly inter-
ested in exploring in this article.
This article makes three claims, stemming from these seemingly contradictory threads
of material groundings and fantasy flows. First, that Haifa Port, like all contemporary
ports, offers a window into the centrality of maritime infrastructures to the movements
Figure 1. Cover of the Haifa Port Publicity Brochure, 2019 (Haifa Port Publicity Brochure, HPC,
2019).
Get this document and AI-powered insights with a free trial of vLex and Vincent AI
Get Started for FreeStart Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
Start Your Free Trial of vLex and Vincent AI, Your Precision-Engineered Legal Assistant
-
Access comprehensive legal content with no limitations across vLex's unparalleled global legal database
-
Build stronger arguments with verified citations and CERT citator that tracks case history and precedential strength
-
Transform your legal research from hours to minutes with Vincent AI's intelligent search and analysis capabilities
-
Elevate your practice by focusing your expertise where it matters most while Vincent handles the heavy lifting
