Rebel Attentiveness

Living under Israeli occupation, Palestinians face countless controls over their daily lives and movement. This research focuses on the reflections of cycling group founders and participants in the occupied West Bank, who ride despite efforts by the Israeli occupation to control and limit Palestinians’ movements. Cycling groups bring Palestinians together to connect to the land and each other. Their communal, intentional, and immersive approach to feeling and experiencing Palestine on bikes – both idealistic connections to the land and the increasingly dangerous encounters with the Israeli military and illegal Israeli settlers – make the rides a method for political education and mobilization. I locate such cycling groups as new iterations of long-standing Palestinian traditions of mobility (sarha, or ‘wandering’) and mobilization (mujaawarah, or ‘neighboring’). In its slow attentiveness to Palestinian land, people, and heritage, cycling in the occupied West Bank is rebel movement. It refuses to comply with common narratives about what counts as activism (urgency; predetermined goals) and what cycling is for (speed; fitness). Instead, cycling is a way to understand shared Palestinian identity and heritage through the stories, knowledge, and connections that emerge through rides and to demand the right to roam in Palestine, as Palestinians. Cycling as rebel movement resists settler colonial architecture and practices that aim to separate Palestinians from their homes, land, roads, and each other. It counters settler colonial logics that see land through the lens of ownership and property by approaching land as a meaning-making process.