Checkpoint 300: Colonial Space in Palestine
The images evoked in writing by Mark Griffiths in Checkpoint 300: Colonial Space in Palestine (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) are only the beginnings of an intricate, complicit web that links Israel’s colonial violence to the rest of the world. Through detailed descriptions of the actual checkpoint space, its restrictions and implications, Griffiths takes the reader beyond the statistical data with which everything related to Palestine is now measured. The introduction also makes one important observation: “Checkpoint 300 is a border crossing that regulates the movement of Palestinians from one part of Palestine to another ... This is not, then, a crossing between Palestine and Israel but a crossing within Palestine, a colonial imposition that funnels Palestinian movement through Israeli security architecture.”
Normally associated with movement restrictions, Griffiths exposes implications that go beyond the obvious. Utilised mostly by Palestinian men working in Israel, Checkpoint 300 manifests as a space of intense surveillance which, through manufacturing and exports, reaches within and far beyond Palestine.
Of Palestine, Griffiths notes that the colonial settlers move freely while the indigenous Palestinians are “subject to discriminatory and often violent border mechanism.” Drawing on nine years of research from 2015 to 2014, the book’s six chapters and conclusion delve into the restrictions of colonial space, starting with the checkpoint itself and the economic dependency and deprivation experienced by the Palestinian people as the colonised population. More men than women navigate the checkpoint on a daily basis. The book then goes on to expound on how the checkpoint limits women’s movement as Israel grants less permits to women, while those who do obtain a permit are subjected to degrading, humiliating treatment, as well as separation from their children. These dynamics imposed by Israel have repercussions on Palestinian family life – the punitive measures endured by men who obtain a permit, as well as the long, daily absences from home, put unnecessary stress on the family, limiting women’s freedom which can be already restricted as a result of a patriarchal society by placing additional burdens relating to the family home and children’s upbringing.
Just as Israel forces Palestinians to wait at Checkpoint 300, waiting is also reinforced back in the Palestinian family home. As Griffiths writes, “It must therefore be recalled that the power dynamics of waiting – alternatively the power to make wait and the powerlessness of being made to wait – is replicated in the home among the family.” Palestinian women whose husbands pass through the checkpoint daily for work note that life revolves around waiting. Israeli colonialism as reinforced waiting as part of daily life. At home, waiting produced anxiety, exhaustion and the theft of time. The checkpoint, therefore, not only serves as an impediment for all those crossing daily; it also interferes back home, forcing the remaining family members to wait, according to the politics employed by the colonial space that is Checkpoint 300.
Surveillance technology and the impact on Palestinian livelihood is another consequence of Checkpoint 300, while the international complicity with Israel over surveillance equipment further entrenches Israel’s colonial violence against Palestinians. Griffiths writes, “Colonial space is formed through important global processes that simultaneously exceed and constitute the colonial state; Checkpoint 300 and the Hebron Road are both produced through and producers of the power geometrics of globalisation.”
Global technology manufacturing plays a role in surveillance systems. Checkpoint 300 employs the same system. Foreign companies produce technology that is tested by Israel upon Palestinians. As one whistleblower, quoted in a report and partially recorded in Griffiths’s book stated of the link between Israel and technology companies, “The Israeli government was the proof of the concept for everything we were doing globally. The technology was field-tested in one of the world’s most demanding security environments, and we were now rolling it out to the rest of the market.” The detailed insight into global links to Israeli colonialism shows “ideological contiguity,” as Griffiths states, and therefore the global complicity as regards Checkpoint 300 cannot be eliminated.
Within the oppressive colonial space, however, there is also anticolonial resistance by various means. Griffiths notes that Palestinian life remains even Israel appropriates space through colonial expansion. “Everywhere around the entrance to Checkpoint 300 and along the Hebron Road are signs that Israel’s colonial project is incomplete, that it can never be complete precisely because Palestinian agency holds on to or remakes spaces.” Refusing to engage with a checkpoint is another form of Palestinian anti-colonial resistance, as it constitutes a refusal to normalise the colonial space created by Israel. Griffiths also makes historical references to colonialism and Israel’s current security narrative, noting that early Zionist leaders asserted the need for control.
While Palestine is not decolonised, Palestinians are applying decolonial practices. As Griffiths concludes, despite the oppression and violence embodied by Checkpoint 300, Palestinian presence on their land points towards “a decolonised future”. The book is also instrumental in demonstrating how complicity in colonialism renders the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle also international. Checkpoint 300, therefore, is not just a site of violence but a site where various means of global technological violence meet to aid Israel in perfecting its colonial power and reinforcing its security narrative.
