Minefield, Temple: National, Theological, and Military Power and Site-Making in Israel

The project explores sites in Israel/Palestine that have been home to militarily charged events and projects of theological practice, and have been transformed by national, theological, and military power: custom house turned hotel in the Golan; Ottoman train station in Jaffa; and the imagined Third Temple in Jerusalem. Using ethnography, this project asks: how do diverse forces interweave with each other in site-making in Israel? How do initiatives enacted upon the physical territory of the land resist, hinder, utilize, or encourage the state as a political project? Through narratives of the past and visions for the future, the project shows how sites bring together a messianic and mythic national vision, settler-colonial history, and a neoliberal merger of security, war, and capital.