Access Denied: Temporal Mobility Regimes in Hebron

The contested city of Hebron, or Al Khalil, in the Palestinian West Bank is well known for the spatial disintegration it has endured under the Israeli Occupation. The division of the city into Palestinian and Israeli zones, and the accompanying Israeli military force that oversees and upholds this territorial arrangement, renders Hebron a critical field site for the study of mobility and spatial politics, even as it generates extreme life challenges for its residents. Yet space and mobility in the Old City are likewise managed via temporal regimes, perhaps less familiar, but no less impactful. These regimes govern and structure mobility in accordance with epochal, seasonal, and diurnal rhythms as well as temporal dynamics such as periodicity, rhythm, sequence, interruption, and duration. In this formulation, time itself, alongside more visible and tangible artifacts, becomes a force that underlies mobility and generates particular political orders. Hebron is reconfigured as a space bounded not purely by physical materialities, but by relations that include temporal divisions, use-patterns, and alternating sovereignties. This article is based on fieldwork and interviews conducted in 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2021.