Maya Hilmi L&S Social Sciences
Labor Barriers, Military Restrictions, and Palestinian Adaptation.
My research investigates how Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem resist Israel’s economic suffocation through grassroots strategies that reclaim autonomy amid systemic violence. Israeli policies, like mass work permit revocations, movement restrictions, and fiscal controls, enforce dependency through what I term “necropolitical extractivism”, referring to the exploitation of resources while governing life or death under occupation. In the midst of ongoing Israeli settlement, surveillance, and arbitrary raiding, Palestinian communities subvert these tactics by reviving traditional olive harvest networks, barter economies, and leveraging diaspora support. In practice, they enact steadfastness as a mode of decolonial resistance. Combining geospatial analysis of checkpoint closures with unemployment and GDP data, I map how structural violence intersects with the adaptive survival of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, like rerouting supply chains or reviving agriculture in Hebron and Jenin. These micro-strategies disrupt narratives of Palestinian helplessness by revealing how everyday acts of “commoning” challenge settler colonial erasure.
Message To Sponsor
I am deeply grateful for your generous support of my research. As a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, this work amplifies my community’s collective steadfastness against systems designed to erase Indigenous agency. Your investment enables me to document acts of decolonial resistance and challenge dominant narratives of victimhood. By centering Palestinian voices, this project contributes to global conversations on justice and the right to reclaim sovereignty in spaces of fragmentation.