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

Dec 3, 2025

Mark Griffiths, a Reader in political geography at Newcastle University, dives into his book about Checkpoint 300, a pivotal site of control over Palestinian movement. He discusses how this space embodies broader colonial dynamics and shapes daily life for Palestinians. Griffiths reveals the intersection of global complicity, gendered mobility restrictions, and the economic impacts of urban militarization. He emphasizes resilience through everyday adaptations and global solidarity, while advocating for decolonization and accountability in conflict zones.

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INSIGHT

Checkpoint 300 As Colonial Space

Checkpoint 300 is a terminal-style crossing with turnstiles, biometric checks, and corridors that control hundreds of thousands of West Bank Palestinians.
Mark Griffiths argues it functions as colonial spatial control rather than a neutral international border.

INSIGHT

Design, Dehumanization, And Everyday Effects

Griffiths started visiting the checkpoint in 2015 and noticed its deliberate design to dehumanize people and racialize movement.
He emphasizes the checkpoint's effects extend beyond crossings to shape family life, businesses, and daily routines.

ADVICE

Hold Institutions Accountable For Tech Use

Scrutinize university and corporate research that feeds surveillance technologies used in colonial control.
Pressure institutions to stop contributing expertise or funding that enables human-rights abuses.

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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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