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Checkpoint 300 is between two of the most important centers of Palestinian life, Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Built into Israel's West Bank wall (the "separation barrier"), the checkpoint complex is itself an extraordinary organization of space: turnstiles and corridors corral and subordinate a colonized population for inspection and validation by soldiers and security staff. Crushing queues, unpredictable delays, and the always-pronounced threat of denial or detention have made crossing part of a punitive commute endured by thousands of West Bank Palestinians each day. Some can pass through as laborers using special work permits, others as students, hospital patients, or worshippers during religious holidays. Still others are excluded by Israel's strict permit system: many women, younger men, the blacklisted, and generally anyone without a sanctioned purpose to cross. Around Checkpoint 300, in a once vibrant part of northern Bethlehem, the residents and businesses that remain must endure the spacio-cidal effects of Israeli military control. As the wall carves out space for Israeli settlers on the other side, it reaches deep into a part of the city of cultural and economic significance, subjecting all Palestinian life in the area to intense surveillance and frequent explosions of military violence. Israeli soldiers and border police are stationed and readied to transform it into urban battle space, putting to use a vast arsenal of high-tech weaponry to target signs of Palestinian objection to colonial control. Those who supply the weapons and other security technologies inside the checkpoint compete for contracts in Israel and overseas, marketing their wares as "battle-tested" in the control of Palestinian land and population. Control, however, is of course not absolute: this part of Palestine remains steadfastly Palestinian as social and political life negotiates or counters Israeli rule. This book examines these multiple political geographies of Checkpoint 300 to tell the story of colonial space in Palestine.

A part of this story that must be foregrounded is that Checkpoint 300 is a border crossing that regulates the movement of Palestinians from one part of Palestine to another. To exit Bethlehem and emerge on the Jerusalem side is to remain on land owned by Bethlehemite families that has been sequestered by the Israeli state. It should also be remembered that the Green Line -- the demarcation between territories that are internationally recognized as Israeli and Palestinian -- is still approximately two kilometers to the north.

As I will reiterate at various points, everything described in this book takes place on Palestinian land, and this applies to definitions based on both historic Palestine and United Nations (UN)-defined Palestinian territories. 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. Checkpoint 300's location at this point is highly strategic; it is built across the historic Hebron Road (Tariq al-Khalil and sometimes Road of the Patriarchs), which runs from the south through Hebron, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem and northward to Nablus and Nazareth. In the Bethlehem section close to the checkpoint is Rachel's Tomb (also known as Bilal bin Rabah Mosque), a site of religious importance in the three main Abrahamic faiths and one that has been entirely enclosed by the ten-meter-high wall that Israel has built. Rachel's Tomb and the intersection to its immediate south are historically considered the northern entrance to the city of Bethlehem. A veer left after the tomb follows Manger Street to the Church of Nativity, the birthplace of Jesus; continuing straight leads to Hebron, twenty-five kilometers away, the burial site of Abraham and the Patriarchs of Abrahamic religions. To the north, of course, is Jerusalem, the city of Palestinian cultural and political importance that Israel seeks to control through a regime of segregation and elimination. Access to Jerusalem for West Bank Palestiniansis restricted by a bureaucratic permit system that is materially enforced by Checkpoint 300 and other checkpoints that dot the eastern perimeter of the city (e.g., Qalandia Checkpoint, between Ramallah and northern Jerusalem).

The 2005 construction of Checkpoint 300 and major renovations since (in 2010, 2014, and 2019) have produced a complex space made up of corridors and turnstiles, cameras and scanners, weapons and intimidation. Every morning, crowds of Palestinians gather to make the northbound crossing to reach their workplaces in Jerusalem or Israel. They do so only with permits that are granted by the Israeli military. Most permit holders are laborers who meet numerous other criteria that the Israeli state deems requisite for entry. Unmarried men are unlikely to gain a permit because they are considered an elevated terror threat; older men and women are not issued permits because they are less useful for low-wage sectors of the Israeli economy (e.g., construction, agriculture). Already, the segregating function of Checkpoint 300 comes to the fore; it is not only a mechanism that prevents Palestinians from entering Jerusalem but also one that sediments societal divisions as people are excluded from the checkpoint itself -- and also from each other. Those who are sanctioned to enter must negotiate overcrowding, slow-moving queues, faulty equipment that delays, demeaning identity checks, and the looming possibility of military violence. Those who are not afforded entry may have to pick up extra domestic labor, cross the wall at weaker and even more dangerous points, or face lower wages and unemployment in the West Bank. With a permit, crossing Checkpoint 300 can take up to two hours, adding significant time and stress to the days of permit holders -- and also, as is discussed in this book, to those of their families. At other times, crossings can be much quicker (one interviewee for this book considered forty minutes to be a smooth crossing); this seems to have become more often the case with the introduction of biometric "smart gates" in 2019. Still, the crushing crowds and violence persist, as do the more systematic issues of Israeli control over Palestinian mobilities, life, and land more generally. It is to this wider view that the book turns throughout, making connections between the details of Checkpoint 300 and Israel's wider colonial project in Palestine.

Very much the primary scene of Checkpoint 300: Colonial Space in Palestine is the checkpoint itself in the early hours of the morning, when thousands of permit-holding Palestinian men are corralled through its corridors and vetted by the colonizing state. Immediately to view is thus a disciplinary function of Checkpoint 300 to sift for able-bodied, politically compliant, male subjects to provide low-wage labor for Israel's economy. Given that the checkpoint and permit system are designed to facilitate and control this particular type of mobility, an obvious question follows: how does the checkpoint affect people who do not fit that profile? For women, permission to cross Checkpoint 300 is less frequently given and is tied mostly to gendered roles of care and piety. Faced with this discriminatory system of permission and a record of gendered humiliation and violence of staff inside Checkpoint 300, women tend to remain in place, taking on more homemaking duties than their husbands who pursue work in Jerusalem and beyond. From the checkpoint, we are thus led to the Palestinian homes where the wives and children of the thousands of permit-holding men pick up surplus domestic physical and emotional labor. Partnering and parenting are strained; women fill the gaps -- cooking more, caring more, and worrying more -- all as a traceable result of the family's reliance on checkpoint permit-enabled wage labor. Residential and economic space is also considerably affected by Checkpoint 300 and the wall into which it is built as the northern part of Bethlehem is rendered a colonial borderland that is marked by de-development, exception, and the ready transformation into urban battle space. This is made possible, following the trail, via an even wider geography of exchange in ideas, objects, and people; Checkpoint 300 is both produced through and producer of the power geometries of globalization. And yet, amid these multiple levels of spatial control, Palestinian political agency persists and consists in the re/making of space via artistic, adaptive, or strategic means. Colonial space is thus both multiple and contested, produced not only by the colonizer but also by the colonized, whose presence on the land remains a steadfast gesture toward a decolonized future.

This is not therefore the story only of Checkpoint 300, nor solely an account of a particular colonial space; it is also an exegesis of colonial space across Palestine and beyond. From the racialized permit system and architecture of the border resonate structural and gendering impositions on the household, as well as spacio-cidal effects across northern Bethlehem and into the southern West Bank. It is from this perspective a sure claim that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are, at different removes and by various degrees, brought within the checkpoint's extensive spatial reach. This reach extends much farther: into Israeli and overseas research and development laboratories, Zionist philanthropic and donor activities, and even the lives and families of guest workers who are imported as an alternative pool of low-wage labor to serve Israel's economy. A Palestinian home and, for instance, an Arizona tech park or a Belfast research laboratory, a New York school fundraising event and an economic migrant's home in Thailand can thus all be seen as partly coconstitutive spaces -- each is produced by the other. We thus learn that colonialism in Palestine forms through a great many figures, from the more visible (low-wage Palestinian laborers, Israeli soldiers and private security staff) to the less visible (their families, local business owners and residents, Israeli settlers) and those who tend to be out of view altogether yet are instrumental in producing colonial space (software developers, munitions manufacturers, donors, guest workers, university and private researchers). This is to name but a few of the many actors who are brought into view in the details of Checkpoint 300 and its surroundings. As I hope is clear, Checkpoint 300 is not simply an interesting colonial space in and of itself; it is also instructive of the wider spatial dynamics of colonialism a way beyond its corridors and turnstiles. It is, as I hope to convey in Checkpoint 300, a codependent of Palestinian household intimacies as well as a coconstitutive site of the (big G) geopolitics that operate at all scales between those poles. It connects material, bureaucratic, and discursive forms of colonial power as an imposing edifice that regulates via physical violence and documentation underpinned by the instrumentalizing logics of a terroristic Other. Checkpoint 300 is, as I show in this book, an entryway into understanding how colonial space is formed through security infrastructure that is both the product and producer of wider geographies of oppression, complicity, and counter.