Mark Griffiths, "Checkpoint 300: Colonial Space in Palestine" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

Dec 3, 2025

In this discussion, Mark Griffiths, a Reader in political geography at Newcastle University, delves into the complexities of Checkpoint 300 in Palestine, unveiling it as a symbol of colonial oppression. He explores how this checkpoint regulates movement, creates spatial violence, and imposes gendered mobility restrictions on Palestinians. Griffiths also highlights the international complicity in Israeli colonial control and showcases stories of resilience amidst everyday struggles. Listeners gain insight into the profound impacts of colonial infrastructure on daily life and the enduring spirit of resistance.

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ADVICE

Hold Academic Institutions Accountable

Pressure universities and institutions to stop facilitating research and contracts that enable colonial security systems.
Support student and campus campaigns that link academic funding and technology to ethical accountability.

INSIGHT

Identity Cards Produce Mobility Hierarchies

Israeli ID and residency categories create layered mobility regimes among Palestinians.
These legal hierarchies determine who can drive, fly, or cross checkpoints and shape everyday freedoms.

INSIGHT

Permits Reshape Gendered Labor Roles

Work permits are gendered: men receive most labor permits tied to construction and agriculture.
This produces exhausting commutes for men and concentrates unpaid domestic labor on women.

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Checkpoint 300, the highly securitized border facility between occupied Bethlehem and Jerusalem, is a central feature of Israeli control of Palestinian land and life. An apparatus of turnstiles, overcrowded corridors, and invasive inspections, the checkpoint regulates the movement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, granting access to some while excluding most. Offering a nuanced exploration of space in Checkpoint 300: Colonial Space in Palestine (U Minnesota Press, 2025), Mark Griffiths reveals Checkpoint 300 as a stark symbol of Israeli colonialism that embodies larger systems of control and violence.

Griffiths’s sensitive and timely work highlights the myriad ways Palestinians are affected by Israel’s spatial control—whether they travel through the checkpoint or not—demonstrating how colonial infrastructures of inequity extend far beyond their physical boundaries to shape daily life. Drawing on nearly a decade of fieldwork, Griffiths examines how colonial power infiltrates family dynamics, enforces gendered mobility restrictions, shapes local economies, and extends into the global exchange of capital and security technologies. He also underscores how Palestinians endure and resist under oppressive conditions and how indigenous forms of life and living are sustained, illuminating how colonial space is contested and countered, unmade and remade.

Blending meticulous research with vivid human stories to show the lived realities of borders, power, and resistance in the West Bank, Checkpoint 300 portrays the checkpoint as an entry into the ways that colonial space is formed through security infrastructure that is both the product and producer of wider geographies of oppression, complicity, and control.

Mark Griffiths is reader in political geography at Newcastle University. He is coeditor of Encountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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