Cross-border mobilities: mobility capital and the capital accumulation strategies of Palestinian citizens of Israel

Abstract Over 10,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel – approximately half of whom are women – cross the Green Line on a regular basis to study at universities in the West Bank. Challenging views that would dismiss these cross-border flows as illustrative of their relatively privileged legal, material and socio-economic status as citizens, this paper engages the concept of mobility capital as well as the work of feminist scholars on the capital investment strategies of women and minorities to reveal the more limited capacity of Palestinian citizens to cross the Green Line as well as the defensively-oriented mobilising strategies which they have adopted not only to move but to maintain their presence, access their rights, and secure their future livelihoods in Israel. Arguing that these cross-border student mobilities should be seen as both a counter-hegemonic and ‘stacked’ form of capital accumulation that is heavily reliant on the bridging work of informal networks, this paper seeks to advance recent calls to centre settler colonialism within the field of mobilities while drawing attention to the more complex interconnections that exist between mobility and capital in the everyday life struggles of indigenous communities.


Introduction
A rich body of scholarship exists today which examines uneven patterns of cross-border mobility in Israel-Palestine and the ways in which these patterns are ethnically differentiated, classed and gendered (Halper 2000;Weizman 2007;Gordon 2008;Salamanca 2015;Berda 2017;Peteet 2017;Griffiths and Repo 2021).Much of this scholarship, however, focuses on the privileged and highspeed flows of Israeli Jewish settler-citizens compared with the slow and tightly constricted movements of Palestinian day-labourers as they navigate a complex system of gated settlements, checkpoints, permits, walls, fences and by-pass roads within the occupied Palestinian territories (Farsakh 2005;Tawil-Souri 2017;Handel 2014;Kotef 2015).Far less attention, by contrast, has been paid to the cross-border movements of Palestinian citizens of Israel who travel in-between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories in search of more affordable goods and services (Forte 2001); work and social opportunities (Masry-Herzalla and Razin 2014); a sense of community and place (Bishara 2015); access to spaces for leisure, recreation and social interaction (McGahern 2019); and, as this paper will examine, higher education qualifications.
Driven by persistent inequalities of access to education in Israel (Arar and Haj-Yehia 2016), as well as increased opportunities for employment in Israel's healthcare sector (IMA 2011), 1 the vast majority of these students are registered on nursing, medical and paramedical (occupational therapy, physiotherapy, radiography) degree programmes in the West Bank, and cross the Green Line (Israel's pre-1967 borders) on a weekly and sometimes daily basis over an extended period of time (4-6 years of university study) in order to gain the qualifications they need to secure work back in Israel.
Challenging reductive assessments that would dismiss these cross-border flows as simply illustrative of their relatively privileged legal, material and socio-economic status as citizens of Israel, this paper argues that the volume and regularity of their movements are instead indicative of a shifting pattern of defensively-oriented mobilities which not only reflects their tenuous legal and socio-economic status as citizens and their traumatic collective experiences of dispossession, surveillance and control; but also, crucially, their active, adaptive and ultimately counter-hegemonic strategies of capital accumulation which reveal their collective, yet increasingly mobile, struggle to maintain their presence, access their rights, and secure their future livelihoods in Israel.
Motivated by recent work examining the processes through which the boundaries of settlercolonial regimes are challenged by and reformulated through indigenous agency (Sabbagh-Khoury 2022), this paper engages with the concept of 'mobility capital' (Kaufmann, Bergman, and Joye 2004) as a useful way of examining the uneven yet actively contested capacities and potentialities of indigenous actors to move while incorporating insights from feminist critiques of the Bourdieusian notion of capital which cast light on the key role played by informal networks in developing alternative strategies of capital accumulation by minority and indigenous communities.Spotlighting the particular ways in which their struggle for higher education and job security has been mobilised and intertwined with a broader struggle to be mobile across contested borders, the approach adopted here challenges neat distinctions that are often made in the wider literature between different forms of capital in order to illustrate the more complex, multi-layered and 'stacked' nature of minority capital accumulation strategies that are developed in practice and on the move.
In advancing its analysis, this paper has four wider aims: First, to place these neglected crossborder student mobilities more squarely within discussions of both student immobilities in Palestine (Harker 2009) and Israel's wider mobility regime (Shamir 2005; Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013)that is, the fluid constellation of legal, social and material factors that ease and normalise the movements of some groups while limiting and problematizing the movements of others.Second, to advance the study of settler-colonialism within the field of mobilities which has been rightfully critiqued for its tendency to centre individual, white, and often male and middle-class experiences of being mobile over and above those of ethnically differentiated, racialised and indigenous actors (Peteet 2017;Carpio, Barnd, and Barraclough 2022).Third, to recognise the complexities of indigenous agency, and the ways in which repertoires of knowledge and knowhow of being mobile are not only ruptured but reformed in settler colonial contexts.Fourth, to make more explicit the link between mobility and the mobilizability of resources across a range of interconnected struggles in a way that recognises the central role of informal networks in bridging material gaps as well as gaps in knowledge and know-how, lived experiences, skills and confidence needed to be mobile across unfamiliar and securitised borders.
Underpinning the analysis put forward in this paper is three months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Spring 2019 incorporating individual testimonies and personal biographies collected in conversation with 75 students, teachers and faculty members on both sides of the Green Line.Structurally, the paper proceeds as follows: part one outlines the distinctive nature of mobility regimes in settler colonial contexts and relates this to the historical experiences of Palestinian citizens of Israel; part two outlines its approach to the study of capital and mobility capital, drawing particular attention to the capital accumulation strategies of women and minorities; part three provides a methodological note on its use of mobility biographies as a useful way of analysing the mobility capital of Palestinian students before presenting, in part four, a temporally staggered analysis of these biographies.The paper concludes with a discussion of the relevance of its findings to wider scholarship on cross-border mobility, the study of mobility capital and the capital investment strategies of minority groups and indigenous communities more generally.

The logic of settler colonialism: accumulation by dispossession
Settler colonialism is a form of colonialism whereby settlers move to, occupy and seek to replace the original population of a colonised territory with a new society of settlers (Elkins and Pedersen 2005;Wolfe 2006;Veracini 2012;Gordon and Ram 2016;Barnd 2017;Carpio, Barnd, and Barraclough 2022).'Grounded in space yet facilitated by mobility' (Katz 2022, 213), the emergence and continuation of settler colonial regimes is rooted in struggles over movement as much as it is in contestations over land.Despite the large volume of work tracing uneven patterns of mobility in a variety of different settler colonial contexts, settler colonialism itself has only recently emerged as a central focus of analysis in mobility studies (Carpio, Barnd, and Barraclough 2022).Critiqued for its heavy focus on the mobile experiences on individual, white, male and middle-class travellers within primarily Western liberal country contexts, the emphasis that the new mobilities paradigm (Sheller and Urry 2006) places on the complex interdependencies and multiple relationalities that exist between people and places in movement and stasis makes it well suited to deeper explorations of the 'politics of mobility' (Massey 1994;Creswell 2010;Sheller 2018) and, more particularly, the politics of fear and disorientation, as well as of dispossession and violence, that shape (im)mobilities in a settler colonial context.
As Hagar Kotef (2015, 3, 6) notes, political orders are 'regimes of movement' and 'any understanding of subject-positions (or identity categories) and the political orders within which they gain meaning cannot be divorced from movement'.As such, while it continues to be necessary to examine the spaces that people move through, the modes of transport that they use, or the practices, habits, and behaviours that they develop along the way, we must not lose sight of the structures that enable and perpetuate uneven patterns of (im)mobility in the first place.In particular, we must be mindful of not only spaciocidal dimension of settler colonialismthat is, the 'dispossession, occupation and destruction of Palestinian living space' (Hanafi 2009, 106)but also the processes of 'accumulation by dispossession' (Sabbagh-Khoury 2022) of land and resources, goods and services, rights and opportunities, as well as of technologies and infrastructures that facilitate and extend the mobility, autonomy and sovereignty of some while limiting or denying these same rights and opportunities, capacities and potentialities, to others.
During the Nakba (or disaster) of 1948, over 400 Arab villages were destroyed and approximately 750,000 Palestinians displaced or expelled from their homes on land that was to fall within the newly established borders of the state of Israel.Proximity to new borders, major highways and strategic junctions contributed to further patterns of depopulation, destruction and confiscation of land over subsequent decades (Khalidi 2006;Kadman 2015;McGahern 2017).Those who remained in Israel acquired their citizenship 'incidentally' (Bishara 2017), by virtue of their presence in the new state, and were 'entrapped' by it (Sabbagh-Khoury 2022, 5).Efforts to 'Judaize' the land, or 'fill' in the vacuum left by the destruction and depopulation of Arab neighbourhoods with new Jewish settlements (Falah 1991), were facilitated by eighteen years of military rule (1948)(1949)(1950)(1951)(1952)(1953)(1954)(1955)(1956)(1957)(1958)(1959)(1960)(1961)(1962)(1963)(1964)(1965)(1966) imposed unilaterally on the remnant Palestinian community.This included the introduction of a new regime of movement based on an extensive system of permits as well as a series of emergency regulations which included powers to restrict movement, arrest and deport 'infiltrators' (Palestinian returnees), introduce curfews, establish 'security zones' and no-go areas, and confiscate land (Jiryis 1968;Zureik 1979;Sa'di 2013;Robinson 2013;Sabbagh-Khoury 2022).
Strategies of 'circumvention, infiltration and illegal border crossing' (Ghanim 2014, 478) emerged as border-torn residents sought not only to return to their homes and agricultural lands, but to secure access to markets to buy and sell their goods and services.Such acts of border crossing carried an immanent threat to life with approximately 5,000 returnees estimated to have been killed as a result of 'shoot to kill' policies during this time (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2016, 170).While many of the overt measures of containing and immobilising the movements of Palestinian citizens have abated since the abrogation of military rule in 1966, or rather shifted territorial focus to the occupied Palestinian territories (Ben Arie 2020), systems of surveillance and control have remained, creating a climate of fear and paranoia, as well as acute levels of anxiety, stress and insecurity associated with the border and the act of border-crossing.
Formally, Palestinian citizens of Israel, like all Israelis, are legally prohibited from entering PAadministered areas in the West Bank but face little consequences for doing so (Bishara 2015, 36).Nonetheless, few do so out of fear of the risks of being targeted by a security apparatus that often fails to distinguish between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians from the West Bank and East Jerusalem (Bier 2017, 39).So endemic is the state of anxiety and uncertainty caused by the anticipation of violence at the border that Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian rightly identifies 'politics of fear' as a central pillar of settler-colonial projects which not only assists 'in disciplining, displacing and erasing communities' (2015, 7) but in constructing the moving Palestinian body as a security threat.This securitisation of Palestinian bodies and movements has also 'infiltrated' (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2016) the intimate relations of domestic Palestinian life, entrenching patriarchal attitudes towards women and facilitating the hyper-regulation of their lives, bodies and movements in particular.
This rupturing of Palestinian lives, spaces and movements has, in this way, resulted in clear patterns of border-avoidance as well as of internalised patterns of 'self-surveillance in the everyday ' (2016, 187) as Palestinians seek to minimise the potential risks of physical harm as well as the potential for reputational damage.Such patterns of border-avoidance have been further compounded by the disorienting effects of shifting border fences and technologies.In her article 'Driving while Palestinian in Israel and the West Bank', Amahl Bishara (2015, 34) discusses the 'politics of disorientation' caused by Israel's expansive system of checkpoints and the unpredictability of its closure policies.The inability to plan journeys with confidence together with the lack of adequate road-signage to help navigate their way has heightened the anticipatory fear of being stopped, searched or abused.This protracted state of 'perpetual emergency' (Berda 2017, 45) associated with occupation as well as the arbitrariness of violence that often takes place at checkpoints (Kotef 2015, 42) has created a state of 'anxious anticipation of humiliation and violence' (Peteet 2017, 63-64) which has not only accentuated border-avoidance practices but directly limited the knowledge, know-how and 'sociality of travel' (Bishara 2015, 41) that would otherwise be gained through more ordinary and routinised cross-border movements.

Minority moves and counter-hegemonic capital accumulation strategies
While the previous section illustrates the importance of paying close attention to the processes of accumulation by dispossession that shape and limit the cross-border movements of indigenous communities in general, we also need to pay close attention to collective moves of racialised and indigenous communities across borders and 'in-between places' of different types (McGahern 2017).Settler colonial spaces are, after all, not only complex 'structures of mobility injustice' (Carpio, Barnd, and Barraclough 2022;Sheller 2018) but spaces of varied and variegated counter-hegemonic struggles where indigenous actors seek out new and alternative ways to move and mobilise, to exercise their rights to move (McGahern 2019), to assert their presence and re-appropriate places and spaces as part of their everyday life struggles and various other 'affirmation of life' tactics (Junka 2006, 426;Richter-Devroe 2016, 102).This is particularly important to recall in settler colonial contexts where formal citizenship rights are granted to the indigenous community, or certain elements of it, and where individual and collective mobile moves reflect 'a form of indigenous agency that does not simply accept purely individual rights offered via settler governmentality but seeks cracks and opportunities to assert and, to an extent, effectively deploy self-sovereignty' (Sabbagh-Khoury 2022).
The concept of mobility capital has, with some important correctives, the potential not only to trace the individual and collective 'moves' of indigenous actors living in settler colonial contexts but to analyse the more complex interconnections that exist between different forms of capital as well as the 'stacked' nature of capital accumulation strategies that help minority groups and indigenous communities to cope, withstand and resist the logic of accumulation by dispossession that inheres within settler colonial orders.In order to fully leverage the potential of this concept, we must first return to the Bourdieusian conceptualisation of 'capital' from which it emerges.
In his contribution to the Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, Pierre Bourdieu defined capital as 'accumulated labor (in its materialized form or its 'incorporated', embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e. exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor' (Bourdieu 1986, 241).Seeking to move beyond a purely economic understanding of capital, he outlined four types of capitaleconomic, cultural, social and symbolicwhich, he argued, forms the basis of social stratification.
The most straightforward of the four, economic capital, refers to capital that emerges from financial resources (for example, income, inheritance, property or business assets).Cultural capital, by contrast, exists in three distinct forms: 'in an embodied state, that is in the form of longlasting dispositions of the mind and body; in the objectified state, in the form of cultural goods; and in the institutionalized state, resulting in such things as educational qualifications' (Skeggs 1997, 8).Social capital, meanwhile, refers to 'mobilizable social ties and networks' (Anthias 2007, 788) of durable nature (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 119) while symbolic capital refers to 'the prestige or recognition which various capitals acquire by virtue of being recognized and 'known' as legitimate' (Lawler 1999, 6).
While other forms of capital (such as legal, female and ethnic forms of capital) have since entered the canon, the basic definition of capital remains the sameany set of resources which are 'mobilizable and usable in pursuing social advantage' (Anthias 2007, 789).The convertibility or mobilisability of different types of resources into particular forms of capital, or one form of capital into another, however, cannot be purely measured by economic gains, material benefits or profits alonetheir mobilizability or transferability 'to education, power, authority, enablement and functionings is arguably as important' (Anthias 2007, 792-793).As Anthias succinctly puts it (ibid), 'you may have money but you may not be able to buy anything with it because you cannot access the market'.Similarly, you may have a car or a passport, but without the skills or know-how to drive, or use certain routes, your right to move may not be fully exercised or mobilised to your advantage.
Similarly, not all forms of capital can be 'traded' easily or on equal terms (Skeggs 1997), so different sets of 'capital investment strategies' (Lovell 2000, 22) are required depending on a person's social, cultural, gender, ethnic and class positionings as well as the different sets of resources, networks and knowledge that they have access to.Discussing the ways in which the mobilizability of resources varies according to positions of relative advantage or disadvantage within a given hierarchical structure, Anthias explains that while the strategies of the advantaged seek to increase and consolidate their 'positively advantaged social capital' (through, for example, the quality and quantity of resources and type of social networks they already have access to), and should thereby be considered as exclusionary strategies, the strategies of the disadvantaged are coping strategies based on 'defensively oriented' mobilising strategies which seek to 'usurp' or seize opportunities where possible in order to survive (Anthias 2007, 794).
Crucially, the work of these feminist scholars has allowed us to not only recognise women as not solely 'capital-bearing objects' but as 'capital bearing subjects' (Huppatz 2009, 47) in their own right, and to consider 'femininity' and 'femaleness' as resources which can, in certain circumstances, be mobilised in pursuit of some form of some form of advantage.While this allows us to critically interrogate the 'use-value of feminine and female capitals' (Huppatz 2009, 60), it has had more limited traction in understanding the ways in which patterns of social mobility and spatial mobility are interlinked.
Seeking a more comprehensive understanding of mobility that recognises the interconnectedness that exists between spatial and social mobility and the role that spatial mobility plays in processes of social integration and stratification in a way 'that is not limited to actual or past displacements', Kaufman, Bergman, and Joye (2004, 749-750, 752) define mobility capital, or 'motility' as they also refer to it, as both 'the capacity of entities (e.g.goods, information or persons) to be mobile in social and geographic space' as well as 'the potentiality of movement' that they possess to do so now or in the future' based on three interdependent elements: access, competence and appropriation.
'Access' refers primarily to the wide range of structural factors which facilitate or constrain the potentiality and capacity to move, such as access to economic means, legal documents and material resources (such as a car or the correct ID) but also access to time (or rather the ability to take time away from other responsibilities and duties).'Competence' signifies the sets of skills and aptitudes as well as the knowledge or know-how needed to undertake a journey and be mobile (such as possession of a driver's licence, knowledge of particular roads and terrain, the location of checkpoints, points of congestion and the timings of closures).'Appropriation', or more specifically, 'the cognitive appropriation of opportunities to realise projects' (Moret 2018, 103), by contrast, refers to the ways in which 'agents (including individuals, groups, networks, or institutions) interpret and act upon perceived or real access and skills' (Kaufmann, Bergman, and Joye 2004) and relates to the particular calculations, choices and adjustments made, that are based on the perception of constraints and opportunities but also lived experiences and shared repertoires of knowledge of moving.
The accumulation of embodied and shared knowledge, skills and practical experiences of being mobile over time is particularly important to stress here.'Savoir-circuler' (Moret 2018, 105), the knowledge and skills produced through regular practices of circular mobility, is based on this wider repertoire of lived experiences.People learn from their own experiences and the experiences of others, whether positive or negative, and make determinations based on that whether they are prepared to experience the same situations again, or not.Socialisation during childhood is particularly crucial in determining habits and behaviours in adulthood (Flamm and Kaufmann 2006, 177).If a person has accumulated a specific 'stock of experiences' (Kalwitzki 1994, cited in Flamm andKaufmann 2006, 177) of border-crossing throughout their youth, their levels of comfort, confidence and willingness to do so on an individual basis as an adult is likely to be higher.Where that stock of experiences is limited or absent, the potentiality of being mobile is reduced unless other strategies must be deployed.
The role of networks in increasing the capacity and potentiality of actors to move is thus key in assessments of mobility capital on the individual or group level, but also in formulation of capital accumulation strategies more generally.While its role is acknowledged across all three elements of analysis, its significance remains downplayed in the literature.As will be shown in the subsequent analysis of this paper, the need to be mobile often extends beyond the pursuit of mobility capital to other forms of capital, and their capacity to do so often depends upon their access to informal networks not only to address particular resource gaps, and gaps in knowledge, know-how and experience, but also, crucially, to overcome fear, manage anxiety and build the confidence needed to be visible, present and mobile in unfamiliar, unpredictable and risky spaces (Bayat 2010;Richter-Devroe 2016;McGahern 2019).While this 'social network work' (Moret 2018, 124) does not always guarantee a positive outcome for disadvantaged or indigenous groups with weak or absent ties to dominant networks (ibid), these networks nonetheless provide an essential set of practical and psychosocial resources which help to shore up the potentiality and capacity to be mobile, as well as the potential to accumulate economic, cultural and other forms of capital together.

Methodology
The analysis which follows is based on semi-structured interviews with more than 75 Palestinian students, teachers and faculty members which were undertaken on both sides of the Green Line over 3 months in Spring 2019.Locating its analysis at the level of individual 'mobility biographies' (Flamm and Kaufmann 2006, 177) where respondents were invited to share retrospective descriptions of their personal experiences of border-crossing, the research that underpins this study is motivated by an ethnographic sensibility which not only seeks meaning in the patterns as well as the contradictions of social life (Peteet 2017, 29) but takes seriously the epistemic erasure of subaltern voices from the intellectual project of narrating the political (Spivak 1988).
More specifically, it seeks to trace the extent of these students' mobility capital by exploring the levels of access, competence and appropriation which their personal biographies reveal.Recognising the interdependency that exists between these three elements, as well as between different forms of capital and capital accumulation strategies, the analysis is structured in a twopart temporal sequence: part one examining the capital accumulation strategies of Palestinian students and their families before the decision to study in the West Bank was taken, and part two examining the capital accumulation strategies developed to ease or facilitate their physical movements across the border after the decision to study in the West Bank was taken.This temporally staggered approach helps to illustrate the extent to which economic and legal forms of capital have been mobilizable and convertible into other forms of capital over time and the important role of informal networks in facilitating the capacity and potentiality of Palestinian citizens to be mobile now and the future.It also helps to make an important distinction between the changing capacities and potentialities to be mobile across a securitized border as reflected in shifts in embodied knowledge, know-how, skills, and confidence levels.
While respondents were randomly selected using a loose snowballing method, efforts were made to ensure a wide geographic sampling.More specifically, interviews were undertaken with 34 high school principals and Grade 12 teachers employed at 21 different high schools located in 13 different localities in the north (the Galilee), centre (the 'Triangle') and coastal stretch of Israel as illustrated on the map in Figure 1 the three areas with some of the highest concentrations of Palestinians in Israel.Interviews were often accompanied by more informal conversations with small groups of final year students enrolled at these schools.Semi-structured interviews were also undertaken with 40 university students aged 20-28 years (half of whom were female), and 25 faculty members based at three universities in the north West Bank which lie next to or in close proximity to the Green Line: Arab American University of Palestine (AAUP), in the north West Bank area of Jenin, and Al Najah University, with campuses in the cities of Nablus and Tulkarem.A small number of follow-up interviews were also conducted with recent graduates in 2021 and 2022.

The pursuit of education
Education is everything.We have nothing else left.Our land is almost gone and it's not easy to be accepted in almost any government job.Many places won't accept us at all.Education is a passport.
The pursuit of education is central to wider multiple, 'stacked' strategies of capital accumulation by Palestinian and extends beyond the cultural benefits they offer (in the form of educational qualifications) to the wider capital gains that they enable through access to better paid jobs and increased levels of personal fulfilment and job security.In Israel, where Palestinian children are subject to a separate and fragmented system of education where structural deficits of investment in Arab schools, and where towns and public transport systems compound wider inequalities of access and opportunity (Arar and Haj-Yehia 2016), the pursuit of education requires a significant up-front investment of economic resources that few families can afford.
Tuition fees at private Arab secondary schools typically range from 3,000 to 5,000 NIS ($845-$1,405) per year.As Yasmine, a Grade 12 student in one of Nazareth's best secondary schools notes: going to the best schools improves your chances of getting a higher education and those able to afford private tuition tend to be the children of parents with secure and wellpaid work, illustrating the heightened awareness of the ability of a privileged minority to capitalise on the economic and cultural capital of their parents.Yasmine's school tuition sets her family back 5,000 NIS (1,405 USD) a year which, she notes, is unaffordable for most Palestinian families.She is lucky, she points out, to have educated parents with independent financial means but many parents who would wish to provide the same level of opportunity to their children, she goes on, simply don't have the means to do so.
The high cost of a 'good' education means that high school drop-out rates remain high among the less economically well off, particularly among young men from poorer backgrounds who come under increased pressure to start working early to support their families.As one high school principal observed: 'Generations of young men don't have the option to think about education.They are stuck in a vicious cycle of work, doing the same jobs for little to no reward and being unable afford to get the education they need to break out of it'.
Nonetheless, the sense that education is the 'only way left' for Palestinians to improve their lot and the situation of their families remains widespread as one high school principal observed: We believe in education and invest in it.Even the poor send their families to university.Some make huge sacrifices.Fathers sell their land.Mothers work long back-breaking hours doing manual labour.All for their children's education.( … ) The only way we can survive here in this land is through education.( … ) We're always having to adapt, to pivot and twist to whatever opportunities we see around us.Everything is dynamic according to the political and economic situation.Nothing is stable.
As a result, students and their families find themselves anxiously trying to predict the best pathways to education.A career in medicine is widely considered to be a less risky route to take.'If you ask students here what they want to do next, most still say they want to be a doctor', one high school principal explained referencing the high symbolic capital associated with having a doctor in the family but also the strategic calculations made by families of Israel's labour market and a perception of it being a 'good choice' in terms of the potential economic rewards it can offer.
Yusuf, for example, in his 4th year of his medical degree at Al Najah, explained that studying medicine was the only realistic choice available to him.Other degrees are more interesting to him, he says, but they 'lead nowhere in the end' and to pursue them would just be a waste of his time and his family's money.For Ahmad, in his 3rd year, becoming a doctor was not his dream either, but he believes it will pay well, and if he wants to advance in his career or continue in education he knows that there will be more opportunities for him to progress if he studies medicine.
Strategic assessments of gaps and opportunities in Israel's labour market have also increased the appeal of related career paths.For Samah, awareness that 'there is a major shortage of nurses in Israel', and that 'nursing pays well' in relative terms, particularly if she works overtime and on Jewish holidays, was her main motivation in choosing nursing as a degree, but it was not the only one.Reflecting on her decision-making processes, she, and many other female students, referenced the view that medicine, while being prestigious, demanded significant long-term investments of time (long shifts, long time-frames to specialise) and excessive spatial mobility in terms of requirements to secure placements in different parts of the country, while other career tracks in nursing, dentistry and occupational and physical therapy, for example, were considered to offer more opportunities to secure work in or close to their local communities, as well as increased possibilities to take career breaks to accommodate marriage, motherhood and other family responsibilities.
These decision-making processes also reflected heightened awareness of who in a family is most or more likely to 'succeed'.As one Grade 12 teacher noted, girls are now more likely to continue into higher education than boys.There has been a growing awareness among families, she explains, about the importance of getting girls into education not only so they become successful and independent in their own right but because they are increasingly identified as the more likely breadwinners for their families in the future.There is a growing perception of daughters, she continues, as not only being better students and more 'mature' and 'serious' in their studies but, crucially, as being more likely to succeed in navigating the structural obstacles and cultural prejudices which Palestinians face in trying to enter Israel's skilled labour market.The sense of their femaleness and femininity (Huppatz 2009) as strategic assets and resources that can be mobilised for the sake of the family is clear.While this has brought about radical change in the structure and gender dynamics of many Palestinian households, she concludes, the longer-term impact upon these young women of absorbing these pressures and balancing their own desires and the expectations with those of their families is changing more slowly.
And the pressures are considerable.Aside from a minimum-age requirements on some courses, all prospective students wishing to study in Israel today must achieve a certain grade average in the Bagrut (a standardised matriculation exam at the end of high school), meet a certain threshold of marks in psychometric exams and, for medical track courses, achieve a high grade in an interview with faculty (the MOR exam).The threshold for acceptance varies by programme of study and institution but is notably high in medicine and allied medical fields.Beyond this, all Palestinian students must also achieve a certain mark in English (AMIR) and Hebrew (YAEL) language proficiency tests before being formally accepted onto their degree programme.
In order to improve their chances of success, many students will take private courses to improve their chances of success, with a typical 3-month preparatory course for the psychometric exam alone costing 3,600 NIS ($1,025).Many will also take on part-time jobs in nearby Jewish towns and cities in order to save money and improve their Hebrew.As many teachers noted, only young Palestinians living in mixed cities like Haifa and Jaffa will have good enough Hebrew language skills to do well in the YAEL exam.For most others, Hebrew is not a second but rather a weak, third language (after English).
Shifaa and Tasmin are Grade 12 students at the same school in Umm el Fahem.They both want to study nursing at Tel Aviv University.For the previous three months they had been working 3 days a week for 6-10 hours a day at a McDonald's outlet in Tel Aviv.Part time work in their city is hard to come by and unlike other employers they know who only pay 10 NIS ($2.80) an hour, McDonald's offers the minimum wage of 30 NIS ($8.45) an hour.In addition to the good pay, it was also their first real opportunity to meet with 'real' Israeli Jews and practice their Hebrew in a normal setting.
As with many other Grade 12 students, this was also their first time travelling alone outside their city.The bus to and from work takes them over an hour each way.'Life is impossible without a car', they say.Limited and unreliable public transport, bad roads and traffic jams in Arab towns generally means that as soon as they hit the legal age to drive (which is 16 years and 9 months), the vast majority of high school students apply for a licence.As one Grade 12 teacher pointed out, 'you need a car if you have any hope for the future here', reinforcing the deep interconnectivity that exists between the capacity to be mobile and a wide range of capital accumulation strategies.
Families will invest considerable amounts of time, labour and money to help their children develop the skills and aptitudes needed to secure a place at an Israeli university because 'they know', as one student explained, 'that employers give preference to people who study in Israel even if they're a weaker candidate'.Nonetheless, and in spite of the incredibly high levels of hope, ambition, hard work and resourcefulness involved, their struggle often ends in failure, revealing the systemic challenges which Palestinians face in converting economic capital to cultural capital.The consequences of such feelings of failure are traumatising, as one high school principal noted: Many must deal with disappointments after taking the psychometric exam.Failing, even after multiple repeats, is not only frustrating but it can be really traumatising.Students find themselves anxiously trying to predict the best pathways to success.It's not uncommon for students to have to twist between dream and goals.All of this creates instabilitynot just in their lives but in their mindsets.

Expanding action spaces
It is within this context of restricted access to Israeli universities that Palestinian students have had to reorient their horizons towards universities in the West Bank and adjust both their capital accumulation strategies and spaces of physical mobility (action spaces) at short notice.Siwar, who was in her third year OT student at AAUP when I met her, had never been to the West Bank before the start of her degree despite the close proximity of her village to the Green Line.As a result, she completely lacked a 'stock of experiences', habits and behaviours connected to cross-border travel (Flamm and Kaufmann 2006, 177).The idea of crossing the border was inconceivable to her and when she did so for the first time on the first day of classes it was a source of great emotional distress to her and to her mother who cried all the way in the car to Jenin.
Nonetheless, a number of factors enabled her rapid reorientation towards the West Bank as well as expansion of her action spaces across the border.In addition to the more straightforward entry requirements based solely on students' Bagrut (high school matriculation) results, the proximity of AAUP and Al Najah to large concentrations of Palestinians living in the northern Galilee and central Triangle regions of Israel, the use of English and Arabic as languages of instruction, as well as the wide availability of sex-segregated dorms close to campus attract students and reassure parents nervous about letting their children, but especially their daughters, travel far away from the family home.Cheaper accommodation charges and discounted tuition fees for students who achieve the highest marks in their Bagrut, as well as a range of scholarships, further incentivise students to take the decision to cross the border, albeit reluctantly so.
Crossing the border, however, is not a straightforward experience and one which can feel overwhelming and dangerous (Bishara 2015).In practical terms, students' entry from Israel into the northern half of the West Bank is funnelled primarily through two main checkpoints administered by private security companies and reserved for Palestinian use only -Jalama checkpoint near the city of Jenin and the Galilee region, and Jabara checkpoint next to the city of Tulkarem and the Triangle region, illustrating the ways in which Israel's system of checkpoints perpetuates segregation while blurring the distinction between Palestinians from Israel and the West Bank (Bier 2017).Both checkpoints have extensive security infrastructures in place similar to terminal checkpoints, but the systems of surveillance, triage and control at each differ and produce perceptively different experiences for students which are further differentiated by the method of transport used.
Students had to quicky develop new competenciesthat is, the skills and aptitudes as well as the knowledge and know-how (Kaufmann, Bergman, and Joye 2004)needed to cross the border quickly and safely.Due to its relative proximity to campus, and the unpredictability of internal checkpoints inside the West Bank, most students attending AAUP generally enter the West Bank at Jalama.In the absence of a common or shared system of public transport across the Green Line, they began to use different methods of transport that were largely determined by where they live and what material and financial resources were available to them.A sherut (shared taxi) service, for example, runs several times a day from Nazareth city centre to Jalama checkpoint.This service is cheap, costing just a few shekel each way, but is extremely slow and time-consuming as passengers must disembark on either side of the checkpoint with their bags, pass through the checkpoint on foot, pass through security checks, board another bus on the other side and wait for it to fill before setting off again.It is also the most unpredictable and stressful option of all as passing through a checkpoint on foot makes those travelling through them more vulnerable to delays and the whims of security guards.
Students with greater independent financial means travel by car, demonstrating the relative ease which some students have had in capitalising on pre-existing resources (in the form of having their own car or access to the family car).By far the quickest and most stress-free option, a car journey from Nazareth to AAUP takes only 30-40 minutes when traffic is moving well.Crossing Jalama early one morning with Nadja, a 3rd year dentistry student from Nazareth in her family car, her books strewn across the back seat, we passed the checkpoint with barely a glance from the guards.A significant minority of students make use of family cars or have access to cars of their own.For some, travelling by car was their only option.Ola, for example, who is a dentistry student and mother of a two-year old boy who travels back and forth from campus to her hometown near Nazareth each day.She would be unable to study, she says, if it were not for the car her family makes available to her.
Most students, however, do not have access to a car.In such cases, car-shares are more common, particularly among students travelling from the same town or village, illustrating the importance of interpersonal networks in helping to address resource gaps and provide a means of transport to and from university.Other students covered at least part of their journey by car, either arranging to get dropped off or picked up by a parent, friend or family member at particular junctions or checkpoints each week.Thabat, a student from the Triangle region, for example, takes a servis from AAUP to Jabara checkpoint where she is picked up by her parents.Because of the ways in which the movement through the checkpoint is regulated, it was easier for one of her parents to drive into the West Bank with their Israeli car plates, turn around and collect her at the entrance of the checkpoint and then drive back into Israel, than it would have been for her to cross to the other side on foot.
The vast majority of students, however, who do not have access to a car travel on specially chartered private busses which pick them up from set locations in Israel (usually a town or a major junction close to a cluster of villages) and drop them off directly at the gates of campus each week.These busses are organised and paid for in advance by families, illustrating once again the particular importance of informal networks in helping students and their families to pool resources in order to bridge the mobility gaps caused by inadequate public service provision and the lack of sufficient knowledge and know-how of border-crossing.Pick up points are determined by where demand is highest with a number of large towns benefitting from their own dedicated bus service.Malak, for example, is a dentistry student at AAUP who takes a private bus from the large town of Ar'ara in the Galilee each week.'Half the town are here in Jenin', she jokes, so while she could borrow the family car, she says, the direct bus that travels non-stop from her town to campus suits her and her family much better.
In terms of the routes they take, buses usually follow the paths of least resistance and greatest predictability for their drivers so that students can get to university on time, showing once again, the collective efforts involved in addressing the practical, material and logistical challenges of crossing the border quickly and safely.This sometimes involves taking longer journeys on unrestricted roads inside Israel.A private bus organised by AAUP brings students from Bedouin towns in the southern Negev region to and from campus each week.The bus travels up and around the full length of the Green Line, along a major highway, before entering the WB at Jalama checkpoint.
Travelling by bus, however, is not equally convenient for everyone.Dala is from Nazareth but lives in Jerusalem with her family.She is one of at least 200 students from Jerusalem studying at AAUP.Most of the boys from Jerusalem have cars, she says, so the busses are generally full of girls only.The bus runs at a limited number of fixed times each weekdeparting from Jerusalem on Saturday morning, departing from Jenin on Wednesday afternoons.With its Israeli registration plates, it passes through Hizma checkpoint which is easier to get through as it is mainly used by Jewish settlers.The guards there sometimes make their passage difficult.Once they refused to let their bus pass for two months forcing them each time to go back through Qalandiya checkpoint, notorious for its long queues and turnstiles.In many cases, she has no option but to go through Qalandiya anyway as her classes are scheduled from Saturday to Tuesday.On those occasions, she often has to take multiple trips by servis (shared taxi) from her home to Qalandiya, from there to Ramallah, and from Ramallah to AAUP which is both exhausting and frustrating for her.
Aya travels by bus from the city of Taibe in the Triangle region.While Jabara is closer to her home, the bus she takes travels up along the Israeli side of the border, stopping at other Arab towns and cities along the way before entering the West Bank through Jalama.The extent of internal restrictions inside the West Bank makes Jalama a more reliable route for their bus driver, she says.When Jalama is closed, as it often is during major holidays and political events, they have to go through Jabara anyway.This takes more time and is more of a hassle for the driver but she finds the journey itself less stressful than Jalama.The guards at Jabara barely look at you, she says.They wave you through relatively quickly, and while they sometimes stop you, at Jalama they like to 'flex their muscles', pulling the bus aside, forcing everyone off, and subjecting them to random searches of all their bags and belongings as the mood takes them.
These experiences of cross-border travel not only reveal the swift 'cognitive appropriation of opportunities to realise projects' (Moret 2018, 103) but also the rapid development of detailed repertoires of knowledge needed to do so in practice.They also reveal the gradual expansion of their action spaces beyond the border.Siwar, for example, rarely ventured off campus until the start of the clinical practice element of her degree.Based in Bethlehem for two 40 day placement periods, her experiences of working and traveling across the West Bank was transformative for her, boosting her confidence to travel alone in the West Bank.This is just as well, she added, as she knows that most recent graduates need to travel far and wide in order to get work back in Israel.A sister of her friend from home who also studied OT at Jenin is now working in Beer Sheva.It is a problem, she says.There aren't many opportunities left in the north where most Palestinians live, so they often have to travel far from home to get the experience they need.She expects that it will be the same for her when she finishes.She's not looking forward to it but, she adds, you just have to get on with it.
When I met Siwar again three years later, in 2022, she had finally secured her first job as an occupational therapist at a clinic in the coastal city of Netanya after a 2-year struggle to secure the necessary accreditation of her degree from the Israeli Ministry of Health.While deeply relieved to have secured a job doing what she loves at a clinic relatively close to home (just a 1hour drive away), she references many of her classmates who have not been so 'lucky' and are still looking for work.Her experience speaks not only to the additional hurdles that many graduates face upon re-entry into Israel's labour market and the increasingly expanding action spaces which they are required to carve out in order to secure employment and their future livelihoods in Israel, but also to the high-stake and unpredictable nature of their capital accumulation strategies.

Re-assessing mobility capital in a settler colonial context
The mobility biographies discussed in this paper reinforce several overlapping points of relevance to broader understandings of student immobility's in Israel-Palestine (Harker 2009) and the shifting constellation of Israel's wider mobility regime (Shamir 2005;Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013), as well as to deeper understandings of the concept of mobility capital (Kaufmann, Bergman, and Joye 2004) and the strategies of capital accumulation that are developed by minority groups and indigenous groups living in in settler-colonial contexts more generally.First, they reveal that the pursuit of cultural capital, in the form of educational qualifications, should be considered to be a primary driver in the development of the capacity and potentiality to be mobile (mobility capital) among Palestinian citizens of Israel forcing many young students to overcome their fears and lack of knowledge and know-how of border-crossings to expand their spaces of physical mobility (action spaces) within and across borders in order to get the educational qualifications they need to better their situation in Israel.
Second, these mobility biographies reveal the ways in which capital accumulation strategies among Palestinians, and among minority groups and indigenous communities more generally, are 'stacked' to facilitate not only the pursuit of cultural capital (in the form of educational qualifications) and mobility capital (in terms of the capacity and potentiality to move), but, simultaneously and concurrently, to facilitate the pursuit of economic, social and symbolic capitals in terms of the pursuit of better-paid, more secure, more fulfilling and prestigious work which they could not otherwise achieve.In this case, students' strategic assessments of exclusionary entry requirements in Israeli universities, ongoing gaps in Israel's labour market, together with societal pressures and their own individual aspirations, have resulted in a complex and overlapping set of capital accumulation strategies which they have developed to navigate multiple obstacles and limited opportunities available within Israel's settler colonial mobility regime.
Third, these mobility narratives reveal the broad salience of informal networks in bridging mobility gaps, pooling resources, building confidence, and filling in gaps in knowledge and know-how among members of minority groups and indigenous communities.This 'social network work' (Moret 2018) plays an essential role not only in terms of the practical, material and psychosocial support that they offer in facilitating new levels of knowledge and spatial awareness as well as the gradual expansion and widening of their action spaces over time, but in challenging, disrupting and rupturing the socio-economic marginalisation, dependence and enclavisation they would otherwise face.While reliance on local networks for the purposes of material and practical support varies, particularly with respect to modes of transport, all students interviewed for this study relied extensively on local, interpersonal and social networks for the purposes of knowledge-sharing and psychosocial support more generally.
Fourth, and finally, these mobility biographies demonstrate the risky and tenuous nature of capital accumulation strategies developed by minorities living in a settler-colonial regime which continues to pursue its own settler-colonising logic of accumulation by dispossession.As one faculty member at AAUP observed: 'In hospital wards up and down Israel, chances are that you will be treated by a Palestinian doctor, a Palestinian nurse, a Palestinian pharmacist, a Palestinian eye specialist, and a Palestinian occupational therapist.The health service would collapse without them.They need them, but they don't want to need them'.For now, she explains, the Israeli authorities are comforted by the knowledge that they can make life extremely difficult for Palestinian students, and for the university, if they want to, by simply refusing accreditation for one of their degrees or by closing a checkpoint or a border crossing whenever they want and for as long as they want.'The first and last problem is always the occupation and, as such, it is always going to be an unstable situation'.
As such, in spite of the considerable amounts of time, labour and resources that Palestinians must find, invest or mobilise in order to gain access to a higher education and skilled employment in Israel, as well as the high levels of creativity, ingenuity and perseverance that their strategies of capital accumulation reveal, mobility capital is not something that Palestinian citizens of Israel can be considered to 'possess' (Moret 2018, 103) either now or in the future.Instead, what the cross-border mobilities of these students impels us to recognise is the heavy burden and pressure to be mobile in order to access their rights, live their lives and secure their livelihoods into the future.While this has compelled them to continuously find new and different ways to move and mobilise, the capacity to be mobile does not always result in 'success' or a benefit to their socio-economic status more generally.Nonetheless, it is in tracing these needs-based and defensively oriented (Anthias 2007) patterns of mobility that we can not only better recognise the shifting contours of settler colonial mobility regimes but, crucially, take stock of the dynamic and actively contested struggles for lives, livelihoods and futures that take place within them.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Map showing the location of AAUP and Al Najah universities in the West Bank and the placement of the main checkpoints which funnel the movements of Palestinian citizens of Israel who travel there to study (Source: Author).