Deterritorializing Cyber Security and Warfare in Palestine: Hackers, Sovereignty, and the National Cyberspace as Normative

Cybersecurity strategies operate on the normative assumption that nationalcyberspace mirrors a country’s territorial sovereignty. Its protection commonlyentails practices of bordering through infrastructural control and service delivery, aswell as the policing of data circulation and user mobility. In a context characterizedby profound territorial fragmentation, such as the Occupied Palestinian Territory(OPT),1 equating national cyberspace with national territory proves to be reductive.This article explores how different cybersecurity strategies – implemented by theIsraeli government, the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas – intersect and producea cyberspace characterized by territorial annexation, occupation, and blockade.Drawing on this analysis, it then employs the conceptual prism of (de-)–(re-)territorialization to reflect on how these strategies, as well as those of Palestinianhackers, articulate territoriality beyond the normativity of national cyberspace.