In a black crater close to the borders of the Gaza Strip, about five years ago, I stood at the threshold of my intellectual and political capacities. In the distance, I saw the horizon of Jabalia and felt an instinctive pull towards the border. I had arrived at the crater because at the time, Barq, a resistance group in Gaza, was launching incendiary balloons, condoms, and fire kites over the border. Abu Yousef, the spokesperson who is reportedly responsible for some of the fires, told Al Jazeera “We came here to send a fiery message to the Israeli occupation that we in the Gaza Strip can no longer tolerate the blockade that’s been taking place for 13 years".[1] The area surrounding Gaza, known as “Gaza Envelope,” includes settlements and vast agricultural fields of peanuts, watermelons, wheat, sunflowers, bananas, and forests targeted by the "fiery messages". The area, located on the eastern border of the Gaza Strip, grew with the Israeli settlement around Gaza and the establishment of agricultural outposts in the 1950s by the Nahal military unit. As hybrid agricultural-military settlements, these Nahal outposts were placed along the Israeli border for strategic reasons, to prevent the shrinking of Israeli sovereign territory and to solidify the border through cultivation of extensive agricultural lands. The border was established, monitored, and maintained through agricultural labor carried out by soldiers and volunteers, while also preventing the return of Gazan refugees to fields that had once belonged to them.
Jonathan Omer Mizrahi, The Snake Charmer, 2024, (video still). Courtesy of the artist
In Bert Nielson and Sandro Mezzadra’s research on dynamic borders, they use the term “Borderscapes” to express the simultaneous expansion and contraction of political spaces, engaging with the resistances that arise at these sites, the challenges they pose, and the criticism directed at them.[2] The current definition of the “Gaza Envelope” region was measured by the Israeli army by comparing the physical distance from the border and the range of rockets and other threats posed by Palestinian armed resistance groups in the Strip. Unlike the Borderscapes perspective, from the unilateral disengagement in 2005 until the current ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the Israeli perception of the border with Gaza has been shaped around maximum siege and segregation, like extensive, but not airtight, insulation. Besides the land and sea blockade, in recent years, the border has undergone various sealing attempts by means of accelerated automation processes, and the development of military surveillance and artificial intelligence technologies. The border with Gaza functioned as a tool to delineate Israel as a space where legal frameworks could operate, to consolidate its identity as a unified ethnonational state. The border has hardened over this period with restrictions aimed at further isolating the Gaza Strip. Since October 7th, 2023, the border has remained breached by the Israeli military, which controls it. Inside the Strip, tens of thousands of Palestinian lives, cities such as Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia, and Jabalia, along with numerous villages, hospitals, schools, and cultural centers, have been wiped out by IDF air and land operations. The vast majority of agricultural fields and greenhouses in the Strip have been bombed, and thousands of food and humanitarian aid trucks have been stopped at the border.
Jonathan Omer Mizrahi, The Snake Charmer, 2024, (video still). Courtesy of the artist
The Israeli concept of the sealed border has disintegrated and has been replaced by a popular perception of military control alongside new settlements, as had been done previously and as can be seen in the West Bank over the last fifty years. Alongside the deployment of rigid and clear borders, Israel has been continuously blurring borders since its establishment, by triggering conflict which could reconfigure borders perimeter and deepen the segregation and oppression of Palestinians using geographic and civil disruption. In contrast to the misleading perception of borders as a fixed, clear, enforcing, and delineating line of a homogeneous national space, the borders of Israeli sovereignty have different faces for different groups. Israeli borders show complex, polysemic, dynamic, and heterogeneous structures. As in other territories, these qualities are reflected in immigration policies. Further, borders function as tools for control and as a way to shape or connect the global flow of migrant labor. In the Gaza Envelope, since the establishment of Nahal outposts around the notion of “Avoda Ivrit” (Hebrew labor), neoliberal policies of the Likud right-wing party have targeted the Israeli farmers. As a result, they became increasingly reliant on cheaper Palestinian workers from Gaza. During the first Palestinian Intifada (1987-1993), security forces and employers in Israel began to fear the rebelliousness of the Gazan proletariat, and the border began to tighten. Most Gazan workers were no longer allowed to enter Israel for work, and a new low-wage labor force was needed. Since then, in an oppressive migration regime, the entire agricultural sector in Israel has become dependent on migrant labor from Thailand and the exploitation of populations from the global majority. The replacement of Jewish labor by Palestinian hands, and later by Thai workers, reflects the ethnic separation between Israeli-Jewish landowners and employers and the foreign labor force. The "other", as a modular function, carries economic and psychological meanings. The anthropologist Shahar Shoham discusses how Israelis developed the term "Taylandi" (Hebrew for “Thai man”) as a synonym for agricultural worker, imagined as a submissive and compliant figure. Shoham shows how the discursive practices created by the Israeli migration regime otherizes the labourers, using the imagined figure as a disciplinary tool in exploitative labor relations.[3] In the Gaza Envelope, Thai national workers are required to endure war as well as neglect and discriminatory racism. Before the outbreak of the war in October 2023, approximately 6000 Thai national workers lived around the Israeli-Gaza border. It is difficult to assess how informed and prepared they were of the danger when they moved there. The absence of protected spaces, alarm systems, or accessible information provided to them by the Israeli government, Thai migrant workers in life-threatening danger at the border. Many were killed and taken hostage during the 7 October attack.
Jonathan Omer Mizrahi, The Snake Charmer, 2024, (video still). Courtesy of the artist
It is relevant to the larger geopolitical positionality of Israel to note that there is evidence of a connection between the entry of Thai labor into Israel and security-military cooperation between the two countries. In his new book, Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture, Matan Kaminer demonstrates how Thailand's military government attempted to implement Israel's strategy of agricultural settlement in border areas, as embodied by the Nahal settlements. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the Thai government fought a Maoist uprising that received support from the communist authorities in neighboring Laos to the north. After the fighting along the Laotian border subsided in the early 1980s, Thailand became entangled in the civil war in its southern neighbor, Cambodia, and many refugees flooded the border region. General Phichit Kullavanijaya, who was in charge of the border areas, turned to Israel for assistance in establishing "border settlements" along the borders between Cambodia and Laos. The first stage of the plan involved a "border settlement" course that took place in the Gaza Envelope, the Golan, and the West Bank. On May 24, 1987, a delegation of 49 Thai military and government officials arrived in Israel to participate in the course, which was conducted under the guidance of the Israeli Defense Forces' Foreign Relations Department.[4] The above project can be understood in the ontological context of the Thai-Laos border since the 1970s, during which time it became a site of political tension and migration.
Jonathan Omer Mizrahi, The Snake Charmer, 2024, (video still). Courtesy of the artist
This border stretches along the Mekong River, the longest river in Southeast Asia. For many communities around it, the Mekong is not just a border between countries but also a threshold between the world of the living and the netherworld of the dead. In the river resides Phaya Naga, a dragon serpent god, also known as the King of Snakes, who, according to folklore, shaped the river’s path with its body. The Naga appears in numerous tales, from Buddhist scriptures to soap operas, and in most cases, its appearance is deceptive as it transitions between human and snake. Events witnessed by the Mekong’s human neighbors point to fluctuations in the river currents and the appearance of fireballs above the water as evidence of Phaya Naga’s presence. Many sites along the Thailand-Laos border are dedicated to Phaya Naga, with festivals, fairs, and statues depicting the god as a multi-headed dragon serpent. I visited one such site along the promenade of Nakhon Phanom, a province in the northeastern Isaan region of Thailand. I visited the funeral of the siblings of Settha Homsorn (Tom), who was murdered in the massacre in Kfar Aza on October 7th. The siblings sat by the riverbank and described seeing the Phaya Naga in the water. While branches drifted along with the current, Tom’s sister noticed a movement going against the flow. His brother asked the Naga to alleviate the suffering of their family.
Jonathan Omer Mizrahi, The Snake Charmer, 2024, (video still). Courtesy of the artist
For me, as a Jew visiting the serpent god for the first time, its revelation in the borderlands was accompanied by various interpretations. After all, the serpent is known as a symbolic means of crossing the Jewish border between sanctity and impurity. The serpent figure accompanies the story of Moses and is especially prominent in the Biblical myth of Nehushtan in the Book of Numbers, chapter 21, where God commands Moses to create a serpent statue to revive the faith of the Hebrews and heal them from snake bites. Years later, King Hezekiah destroyed the bronze serpent because it had turned from a symbol of transcendent healing to a belief in a serpent god. Nehushtan’s serpent moves along a metaphysical scale from the symbolic to the figurative, from the animalistic to the sculptural, and then back to the symbolic. From the Bible to modern writers including Micha Yosef Berdyczewski and Amos Oz, examples of the serpent’s presence appear in the traditional symbol network of the "Sitra Achra" (Aramaic, meaning "the other side"), describing the crossing of the threshold beyond symbols of sanctity as a process of sensual anti-rational eruption. The symbol reflects the fragile face of religious logic and serves as an alluring gate to a truer experience of profane sexuality and threatening nature. After crossing the symbolic border of holiness, for example, after sacrificing a red heifer, a marriage, or eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the corruption, decay, and stench of earthly reality are revealed. As long as holiness remains within the symbolic world and impurity dominates earthly reality, the Sitra Achra objects evolve as an iconoclastic device that uses the symbol against itself. Once holiness is shattered, we see how the other side is more real than our symbolic existence.
Jonathan Omer Mizrahi, The Snake Charmer, 2024, (video still). Courtesy of the artist
In 2006, Hamas began digging tunnels through the soil to escape and counter the siege and trespass the border dividing Gaza from Israel. In response, the Israeli military sought ways to deal with the tunnels through complex, transdisciplinary systems of cameras and sensors, seismic motion detectors, robotic ground-penetrating devices, and a new subterranean border wall that reached the aquifer’s water. Among these systems, the Israeli military developed a robotic snake for collecting intelligence along the tunnels. The snake is controlled from a great distance and moves silently without being detected. The engineers who designed it explained that the robot was inspired by direct observations of a local viper. The mechanical snake was first revealed to the public in a 2009 television report [5], described as "the Israeli military’s new toy", capable of spying, listening, and surprising the enemy. In the report, the robot moved along the grass, entered a small hole, and twisted sharply and erratically. Its movements were loose, and it did not meet expectations based on viper biomimicry. In addition to the camera, it carries a microfiber communication cable to compensate for the lack of reception underground, as well as a microphone, a flashlight, and, sometimes, explosives, making the serpent a lethal weapon. In the past, soldiers from the Givati Brigade would enter the tunnel openings they discovered along the border with rifles and flashlights raised, alert for unexpected threats. The risk of abduction led to soldiers being tied to long ropes so that they could be pulled back to Israel in the event of an incident, dead or alive. In her article, Turning the Inside Out, Laliv Melamed examines the robotic snake development as a military tool, analyzing the snake via the concept of "penetrative aesthetics", combined with technologies including thermal and medical media that penetrate the threshold of visibility, flipping the inside out. Melamed examines how developments in the snake allow for border-crossing videography, from the outside in, as well as penetration into the human body (like the medical snake bioscope) or dangerous and collapsing structures (as in the case of the “rescue/retrieval snake”). Penetrative aesthetics, thus, reveal how new technologies can penetrate both the earth and bodies. Like the medical snake, the military serpent technology enables precision action aimed at specific threats, isolating and removing "sick" parts from the system. Through the example of the robotic snake, Melamed demonstrates how increasing reliance on optics and machine learning has led to the rise of biometric warfare, where the goal is not only to eliminate threats but also to manage life and care as a mechanism for control, occupation, and expression and dilution of sovereignty.[6] The serpent’s gaze echoes Vilém Flusser’s analysis of forensic photography as a means of “decoding”. Flusser argues that images are illusory meta-codes, where text is disguised as reality and the automation of the photographic apparatus conceals any human agent. These are illusory automatic reflections of the world that are harder to decipher. When operating the robotic snake, the soldiers’ proxy slithers around its data prey, ready to swallow it. The special mechanism of the robot carries a trans-species perspective on and within forbidden places and renders an offensive image that penetrates across national and human borders. Through such a device, the Israeli military’s systems embody the physical manifestation of the state's eye, realized in the body of a serpent. The videographic resources produced by the serpent actualize the enactment of a power that is now detached from its snake body.
Jonathan Omer Mizrahi, The Snake Charmer, 2024, (video still). Courtesy of the artist
Throughout this research project, I aimed to present the fluctuations I documented at the threshold between our material world and netherworlds, with particular attention to the Israeli boundary with Gaza and the Thai border with Laos. I didn’t cross these borders, but I observed and documented them from the outside. Nevertheless, the vast horizons of the other side’s landscape stretched, surrounded, and swallowed me whole. Since the ruthless violent escalation and the rupture of the Israeli boundary fence, the concept of the border as a two-dimensional line, as a tool for wrapping, sealing, and separating, has collapsed. In the past, the borderness of the Gaza Envelope region seemed to me like an object that consumes and obscures another object, like the box that does and does not contain Schrödinger's cat. Today, although this border has collapsed, with tens of thousands of soldiers crossing into Gaza and Israeli pseudo-journalists “reporting” from there, the sealing and lack of access to Gaza are still maintained. The lives of the Palestinians and the Israeli hostages are obscured, dissolving into the blurred image of the destruction of the Strip. The deliberate removal of non-approved documentary footage from Gaza in the media allows the military to act to destroy the area without facing the judgment of civil society, especially within Israel, and the destruction continues to distance the perception of Gaza as an actual place. The map warps, and the territory perishes, allowing for repeated crossings over the border within the ruins; this is reflected in the violence and the strange technologies like the mechanical viper camera as it pursues its lowly path into the body and the earth.
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- Footnotes
[1] Muhammad Shehada and Walid Mahmoud, “Gaza Incendiary Balloons Are ‘Distress Signals’.” Al Jazeera, 21 August 2020. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/8/21/gaza-incendiary-balloons-are-distress-signals
[2] Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor, Duke University Press, 2013
[3] Shahar Shoham, The Heroes from Isaan Working in Israel: The Production of Migrants in the Thailand-Israel Migration Regime. PhD diss., Humboldt University of Berlin, 2024.
[4] Matan, Kamier, Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture, Stanford University Press, 2024
[5] Channel 2 News, YouTube, 11 June 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-dzZBa6TQE
[6] Laliv Melamed, Turning the Inside Out, University of Groningen, 2023
Cover Image: Jonathan Omer Mizrahi, The Snake Charmer, 2024, (video still). Courtesy of the artist
