Bodies at the Check Post: Sovereignty, Borders and Lack of Access to Health Care Services

The paper analyzes restrictions to Palestinians’ access to health care services in the Occupied Territories as an example of the ways in which Israel’s de facto sovereignty, as the power to draw borders and to decide on the exception, makes the Palestinians’ nude bodies homines sacri. It shows how the check post functions as the mark of sovereignty, as the place where Palestinians’ lives are reduced to what Giorigio Agamben calls “bare life.” The paper also shows that, even in cases where the state of exception has become the norm, there is still a need to appeal to a discourse of fictitious legal sovereignty in order to sustain the state of exception