What constitutes the metric of exhaustion? Where might we locate its ground zero? As Palestinians broadcast on social media the incommensurable devastation of their lifeworlds in Gaza, their exhaustion can be situated within the longue durée of the Nakba, an ongoing project of displacement, fragmentation, and systemic unmaking that has, since 1948, sought to sever the Palestinian body from its land.
Weariness here is not merely affective but structural, emerging from the rubble as both suspended time and aftermath—a liminal space where exhausted survivors confront the abyssal question of reassembly and repair after such totalizing erasure. Today, the Israeli colonial logic of tabula rasa reaches its zenith in Gaza, where the very possibility of life is foreclosed by the scale of annihilation. When the dust settles—if it ever does—what will remain to reconstitute a world? And what weight must the living carry, to keep memory standing?
Exhaustion in Palestine, in this sense, is not a rupture, but an iteration; an acute inflection within the chronic structure of settler-colonial violence. The mass destruction unfolding today in Gaza and the West Bank is entangled with the micro- and macro-histories of elimination that have, for over seven decades, worked to dissolve Palestinian presence into absence. The Palestinian genocide is neither event nor episode, but a recursive grammar of destruction, where each act of violence is both residue and renewal of all that came before.
Exhausted Metabolism
The rapid destruction brought by tons of bombs in Gaza over the past two years has been mirrored by the slow violence of home demolitions, land seizures, and settler violence in the West Bank.1 For the past two years, violence has been sharper, louder, more visible to the outside world. But exhaustion here isn’t new. It’s the slow peeling away of possibility. It is not the fatigue of a single day, but something deeper—an accumulation of deferred grief, protracted dislocation, and structural suffocation.
It was no surprise, then, to witness in the summer of 2024, the announcement of a new Israeli settlement in Al-Makhrour Valley, the first such declaration made by the Israeli state since 2017. Al-Makhrour Valley is a striking landscape nestled between Bethlehem and Jerusalem that we have both engaged with over the past two decades in different, though connected, ways. Samir, immersed in cultural heritage work with UNESCO, would walk and document the valley’s trails and a landscape increasingly scarred by the expansion of Israel’s apartheid wall. Emilio, teaching urban studies at Al-Quds Bard College in Abu Dis, would bring students to the area for walks and outdoor seminars—to witness, document, and reflect on the slow encroachment of land confiscation by the Israeli state.
Ten years ago, during one of Samir’s routine field excursions, he saw a house at the top of the hill, looking over the valley. This was odd, considering that Makhrour is located in an area where the Israeli Civil Administration (ICA)—the body of the Israeli military responsible for administrative control of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories—does not give building permits. Curious to find out more about this house, he drove up to the top of the hill a few days later, navigating the narrow roads through the village of Al-Walajah. When he reached the house, a Palestinian man stood before him, initially apprehensive, his gaze wary as he observed Samir’s approach from a distance. His look conveyed a deep sense of unease, a reflection of the fear instilled by the anticipated arrival of the ICA.
As Samir drew nearer, he noticed that the man was laboring to reconstruct a stone wall. With quiet resolve, Samir turned to him and remarked, “You are aware this is Area C, right? They will likely arrive soon with a demolition order.” The man nodded; his face worn with exhaustion. “Yes, they [Israeli military] have demolished it [the home] twice already. I am aware.” He explains, “I do this when I have some free time—I work in construction in Israel, earn my wages, and return home to rebuild my house. And then they come and destroy it. Every time.”
For decades, the rhythm of life for countless Palestinian workers and families in Area C of the Occupied West Bank has been governed by this harsh reality. To build on their own land in Area C, Palestinians must seek approval from ICA. In practice, however, such permits are impossible to acquire. Consequently, any Palestinian attempt to build or restore their homes is met with demolition orders, exacerbating the already high rates of destruction of Palestinian infrastructure in Area C.
This systematic erasure of homes, farms, and wells can be understood as a process of metabolic exhaustion. Through the lens of political ecology, metabolism describes urbanization as a process of material accumulation that results from the circulation of resources from nature to the city via infrastructural networks that themselves develop over time.2 In Palestine, intensive social labor is routinely undertaken to develop the landscape—building roads, homes, restaurants, restoring farmlands, and digging water wells—which Israeli colonial structures block from becoming stable systems of everyday life, thus preventing long-term growth and the accumulation of resources and infrastructure. The repeated disruption and dismantling of people’s efforts to build and sustain their lifeworlds leads to a kind of exhaustion, one that is psychic, bodily, social, material, and territorial. It echoes what Frantz Fanon once termed the pathology of colonization, where exhaustion becomes not just physical fatigue but a structural condition of oppression.3
Legal Exhaustions
For Palestinians, Al-Makhrour Valley represents a cohesive cultural and ecological system, rich in historical depth, as well as natural and agricultural significance. Its landscape holds shared value for the surrounding Palestinian communities, towns, and villages, particularly Al-Walajah, Battir, and Beit Jala. The valley forms part of a broader network of interconnected valleys that link Bethlehem to Jerusalem and extend further north into historical Palestine. Over time, Al-Makhrour has evolved through successive historical periods while retaining its agricultural value. The name “Makhrour” itself is derived from the Arabic makhroura, meaning a place where rainwater accumulates to nourish the earth. Evidence of irrigation in the valley dates back over four millennia, with traces of human presence reaching back as far as the Middle Bronze Age, circa 1500 BCE.4 Yet in 1948, during the Nakba, the valley transformed into a passage of exile for Palestinian refugees fleeing villages near western Jerusalem as the armistice lines were drawn through Al-Walajah and Battir. The valley, along with other parts of Battir’s cultural landscape, was inscribed on the UNESCO List of World Heritage in Danger in 2014. Ever since the Oslo Accords, however, Israeli planners have viewed the region as an extension of the future Greater Jerusalem metropolitan plan. Hence, Al-Makhrour and its surrounding lands are repeatedly subject to illegal land annexation.
Throughout the 1990s, the valley became trapped in a tightening web of separation—legal, administrative, and physical—and subjected to Israel’s tactics of land expropriation: the declaration of “State Lands,” the seizure of land for “military” purposes, the confiscation of “absentee” properties, and, most commonly, the justification of “public needs” (a pretext for the construction and expansion of a road network exclusively serving Israeli settlers). Meanwhile, Palestinian properties are demolished, agricultural and infrastructure projects are frozen by the lack of permits. Cultivating land becomes impossible without efficient irrigation systems, as it is left dependent on precarious, sporadic rainfall to sustain it. In turn, uncultivated land or unused land is subject to being confiscated by the Israeli military and becoming Israeli state land. During our visits to Battir over the years, farmers often described how no intervention in terms of renovation or sustenance is now permitted. Many construction activities, even minor repairs, are met with demolition orders that exemplify the occupation’s control and harassment, regulating even the smallest processes of materially sedimenting Palestinian life.
Land confiscations in Makhrour Valley initially began with two major orders issued by the Israeli military, one in 1981 and another in 1982. Military confiscation orders written in Hebrew, often ambiguous, are presented in military map formats that require land surveyors to clarify which lands are affected. Lacking legal expertise, financial resources, and institutional support, Palestinian landowners were effectively unable to sustain legal resistance. This illustrates the phenomenon of legal fatigue—a form of structural exhaustion caused by prolonged and asymmetrical judicial processes. As a result, the village of Battir was unable to prevent the 1981 confiscation, resulting in the loss of a significant portion of Al-Makhrour Valley, and paving the way for the second seizure in 1982.
A mechanical engineer with expertise in land surveying from Battir, who was directly involved in trying to resist the 1982 confiscation order, showed us an old folder containing various legal documents related to the case filed with the Israeli Supreme Court.5 “I sent the surveyor from my side at my own expense,” he explained, aiming to determine which land was actually included in the confiscation order. In spite of such efforts, the confiscation orders designated the land as Israeli state land, and thus prevented Battir residents from using it. Since then, and especially after 2013, it has become a focal point of Israeli settler efforts to establish outposts, with two currently existing within the confiscated area.
On August 14, 2024, the ICA unveiled the so-called “blue line” for the proposed Nahal Heletz settlement, marking the first new settlement in the West Bank since 2017. This line demarcates a strangely shaped area of 602.7 dunams (approximately 150 acres).6 The “blue line” is the term Israeli occupation authorities use, referring to the marks drawn on maps, to reclassify Palestinian land as state or public property. The line drawn in 2024 extends Israel’s control of Makhrour well beyond the areas confiscated in the early 1980s, and is a deliberate step toward authorizing construction plans within the core areas of the UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The Colonial Structure of Exhaustion
In Trait d’union, Frantz Fanon wrote about weariness as something deeper than physical fatigue. It’s when your arms feel too heavy to lift, your legs won’t move, and your mind goes blank. It’s the moment you realize the system is designed to break you. Fanon conceptualized exhaustion not simply as a physical affliction but as a profound response of the soul to the unyielding burden of structural racism and colonial subjugation. Confronted with the alienation of the self from the colonial reality, the colonial subject perceives no avenue for escape. Within this space, exhaustion either forces passive resignation or propels one to retreat entirely from the struggle. Fanon reflects on the human condition as one inherently inclined to weariness and renunciation, for which to give up is to crave only sustenance—but to surrender is to lose even the hunger for food or drink. Weariness is not merely born from others, but from the deep, unspoken exhaustion of the self.7 Weariness, as Fanon suggests, becomes the very fabric of life under colonization.
Until today in Al-Makhrour, the feeling of exhaustion manifests in the persistent tension between built infrastructure and the looming threat of demolition. For the villagers of Battir, constructing even the most basic infrastructure is an act weighed down by anticipation—aware that sooner or later, the ICA will destroy what has been built. This tension produces a paradoxical form of spatial practice: to (re)build becomes both a practice of autonomy and a source of psychic and physical depletion. Yet, unlike the retreat described by Fanon, Palestinians continue to craft spatial solutions that defy imposed erasure, such as land rehabilitation, planting new trees, and, in Battir, promoting hiking trails and walking in Al-Makhrour Valley to break its isolation from Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and the surrounding area.8 These acts reflect more than mere survival; they signal a deeper struggle to assert mental freedom under a regime that disciplines through spatial precarity.
Two examples from Battir and Al-Makhrour further illustrate this complex relationship between exhaustion, space, and resistance. In 2012, the people of Battir took the decision to pave the historic road connecting Battir to Beit Jala without permits from the ICA. After repeated permit denials, the Joint Service Council (JSC) for Battir and nearby villages paved 2.5 kilometers of the road overnight.9 Within a month, Israeli authorities excavated the asphalt, erasing the work and returning the path to dirt. The rapid reversal of this modest infrastructural gain exemplifies a broader colonial strategy to not only deny Palestinian development but to wear down the collective will to try again.10 But it should be seen within what Adam Hanieh has described as “the emergence of independent Palestinian labor struggles,” where the very act of labor—whatever the outcome—becomes an assertion of dignity and agency.11
Following Battir’s 2014 designation as a UNESCO World Heritage site, Palestinian landowners in Area C began exploring tourism as a viable form of development. In 2022, a local entrepreneur described the logic of building in a context of inevitable demolition, where exhaustion shapes design and the act of construction itself.12 Cottages were designed using materials like wood and prefabricated panels so that they could be dismantled before bulldozers arrived, and hence avoid being demolished. At once fragile and strategic, this approach reflects an evolution in the ways the people of Battir have come to challenge demolitions and develop a pragmatic resistance to imposed precarity. It is also a refusal—an insistence on land use and livelihood, even within the violent spatial regime of Area C.
These two examples speak to a broader condition in Palestine: exhaustion as an architecture of resistance. Before exhaustion is a feeling, it is a structure—one that exposes the limits of what is possible under settler colonialism. It draws individuals and communities to the edge of the abyss, the point at which future imaginaries collapse into despair. But what happens when the abyss no longer lies ahead, but beneath one’s feet? This question becomes particularly urgent considering the ongoing genocide in Gaza, where the scale of destruction has rendered exhaustion nearly immeasurable. But what is taking place in Gaza does not materialize in a vacuum. Indeed, from the demolition of stone terraces in Makhrour to Gaza’s annihilation, Palestinians face a continuity of violence that operates across geographic and temporal scales. Yet within this continuum of devastation, exhaustion does not simply mark an end. It becomes the culmination of impossibility—and, paradoxically, a source of radical agency.
In this sense, from Gaza to the West Bank, exhausted individuals and communities begin themselves to exhaust the structures that aim to annihilate them. They resist not only with direct action but through the persistence of presence, the repetition of rebuilding, the reoccupation of ruin. This echoes Nasser Abourahme’s powerful argument that at the heart of every struggle for freedom and national liberation lies the strength of ordinary people to refuse surrender and to demand life even amid devastation. He underscores this point by recalling how, since the spring of 2024, “the Israeli army re-invaded areas in the north of Gaza it had claimed it had cleared not because the resistance factions remained standing, but primarily because people insisted on returning to inhabit the ruins.”13 Such forms of resistance also subvert the genocidal logic embedded in reconstruction narratives that frame “recovery” as economic peace built atop obliteration and displacement.
For generations, Palestinians have had to imagine and enact ways of existing that reject colonial logics—methods of forging autonomy in spaces explicitly structured to dismantle the self. Exhaustion, in this context, is not passive. It exists at the threshold between renunciation and resistance, failure and hope. Fatigue is not simply an end-state, but a condition from which new, subversive counter-practices emerge. This is not a romanticized form of resistance, but an enduring mode of anti-colonial world-making. People return to the ruins—not in submission, but in defiance. They rebuild, not to restore what was, but to refuse the logic that reduces them to “bare life”—a life stripped of potential, creativity, and futurity. In this context, exhaustion becomes not a symptom of defeat, but a mode of existence that generates new possibilities. It is a radical stance: to live, build, and imagine otherwise, even when every system says you should not. In the words of poet Moe Moussa:
We have so much anger in our hearts that it could burn the entire planet but instead we choose to sit on the rubble of our home in northern Gaza—drink a cold tea and stitch the wounds of a stray dog who was injured by a stray bomb.14
Dorota Golańska, “Slowness as Warfare: Towards a Relational Approach to Political Violence in the West Bank,” Geography Compass 17, no. 11 (2023): e12725.
Nik Heynen et al., eds., In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism (London: Routledge, 2006).
Samir Harb, “Exhausted Circulation: The Limits to Cement Transportation and Urban Metabolism in the West Bank,” Journal of Palestine Studies 51, no. 4 (2022): 45–67.
Hubert Murray, “Landscape as Resistance in the West Bank,” Places Journal (June 2021), ➝.
Mechanical Engineer from Battir (anonymized), interview by Samir Harb, Battir, June 19, 2008.
“Israel Approves New Illegal Settlement on UNESCO Site Near Bethlehem,” Al Jazeera, August 15, 2023, ➝.
Frantz Fanon, “Trait d’union” in Alienation and Freedom, ed. and comp. Khalfa et al. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).
See Alessandra Gola et al.,“The Recovery of Historical Paths for Tourism as Tool for Social and Territorial Development: The Palestinian Case of Battir,” Almatourism - Journal of Tourism, Culture and Territorial Development 1, no. 1 (2010): 60–66.
Samir Harb, personal field notes, Battir, 2010.
JSC Road Engineer from Battir (anonymized), phone interview by Samir Harb, May 19, 2025.
Adam Hanieh, “Stone, Labor, and the Building of Israel,” Journal of Palestine Studies 49, no. 2 (Winter 2020).
Owner of Sama Battir Restaurant and Chalets, interview by Samir Harb, Battir, June 22, 2022.
Nasser Abourahme, “In Tune with Their Time,” Radical Philosophy 2.16 (Summer 2024): 18.
Gaza Poets Society (@gazapoets), untitled image post, February 4, 2024, ➝.