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

Dec 3, 2025

Mark Griffiths, a Reader in political geography, explores the complexities of Checkpoint 300 in his latest book. He highlights how this site symbolizes Israeli colonialism and impacts Palestinian daily life through spatial control. Griffiths discusses the intersection of gender and mobility, revealing how permit systems reshape family dynamics. He also touches on global complicity, emphasizing the role of security technologies and international solidarity. Ultimately, he showcases the resilience and resistance of Palestinians amidst oppressive conditions.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Checkpoint 300 As A Bordering Apparatus

Checkpoint 300 is an upgraded terminal-style crossing that controls hundreds of thousands of West Bank Palestinians' movement into Jerusalem.
Mark Griffiths emphasizes it functions as a bordering apparatus embedded in the West Bank wall rather than a neutral international border.

ANECDOTE

Researcher’s First Encounter At The Checkpoint

Mark Griffiths recounts his 2015 visit where he could walk through the checkpoint with minimal scrutiny, unlike Palestinians.
That experience drove his focus on racialized spatial control and long-term research in Bethlehem.

INSIGHT

Why 'Border' Masks Colonial Logic

The wall and checkpoint cut into Palestinian-owned Bethlehem land, so calling it a border accepts the colonial logic.
Griffiths argues for describing it as colonial space with a bordering function, not as a legitimate international border.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science