Jerusalem Quarterly

Qalandia Checkpoint: warping strategies of adaptation

The Spring 2010 issue (No. 41) of Jerusalem Quarterly, edited by the estimable Salim Tamari, contains a fascinating — though academic — analysis of the disgraceful Qalandia (Qalandiya) checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah (and the rest of the northern, middle, and western West Bank).

Salim, who has been teaching for a semester at Georgetown University, writes in his introductory that “Rema Hammami’s pioneering work on Qalandia (the Palestinian Tora Bora)[this is explained in Part Two of this story — it refers to the stone quarry which is the only alternative route around when Qalandia becomes a real hell-hole] takes an ethnographic look at Israel’s regime of checkpoints and barriers within a global context of ‘policing inequalities’. In particular she examines the politics of security, which ‘creates myopia, blindness to the very facts it engenders’. Her essay also examines the creative forces of survival among its victims. In her work the carnavalesque atmosphere of market and circus that permeates ‘border’ zones like Qalandia (and Surda before it), both camouflage and underscore the misery created by the security regime behind it”….
Salim’s editorial can be read in full here.

Reema’s long analysis [Qalandiya: Jerusalem’s Tora Bora and the Frontiers of Global Inequality] tries — almost journalistically, though she probably wouldn’t like to hear it — to describe the infernal atmosphere.

You have to know the place to understand, however, that she is walking, and not driving, through the checkpoint, and that she is describing the passage going from the Ramallah side to Jerusalem —
“Heat, wind, dust, garbage. Cars stuck in line, jammed bumper to bumper – probably a two-hour wait. I squeeze through the few inches between an articulated lorry and the next car. On the other side is a porter shifting two television sets tied to his cart weaving in between the oncoming traffic. Ramallah, Ramallah Ramallah, the calls of a van organizer. I shake my head – and point toward the checkpoint. Up through the first set of blocks, the wind blows up white dust from the quarry, the peddlers clutch their sun umbrellas. I pick up my pace, it’s rush hour. Through the second row of blocks and I can see the crowd up ahead, spilling out from under the zinc roof and concrete pens of the crossing. I reach them and ask an old man, how long he’s been waiting: ‘From the time I was born’…

Continue reading Qalandia Checkpoint: warping strategies of adaptation

EU Ministers expected to issue statement on East Jerusalem today

Today could mark an important step in the Middle East peace process. EU Foreign Ministers are to meet to consider a statement on East Jerusalem and a future Palestinian state.

As the Jerusalem Post’s Herb Keinon reports, there has been heavy lobbying: “Israel is pushing for a text much shorter than the three-to-four-page Swedish draft, and one that would commend Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s housing-start moratorium in the settlements and urge the Palestinians back to the negotiation table. The Palestinian Authority, meanwhile, is trying to convince the 27 EU nations to support the Swedish draft resolution on the Middle East that for the first time refers to ‘Palestine’ [is this true? see below … ] and calls for a resumption of negotiations that would lead to a Palestinian state with ‘East Jerusalem’ as its capital. The draft resolution only ‘takes note’ of Netanyahu’s housing-start moratorium, and says the EU hopes ‘it will become a step towards resuming meaningful negotiations’. Such a resolution, were it to pass, would be the first time the EU has called formally for recognition of east Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state … The proposal by Sweden, which this month is winding down its tenure as rotating president of the EU, is also reportedly backed by Ireland, Belgium, Britain and Malta, while Italy, Holland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Romania, Poland and Slovenia have come out against the wording of the text. France has also opposed the draft on the grounds that more support should be given to Netanyahu for the settlement moratorium, and also because of a feeling that while France supported Jerusalem becoming the capital of two states in a future solution, the modalities of how this would be done should be left to the negotiations”. This JPost article can be read in full here.

The American position on Jerusalem is not totally clear. Officials tell us that the U.S. position has not changed — but what is that position? As I wrote in the latest issue (number 39, August 2009) of Jerusalem Quarterly that officials of the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama “have had to press Israel’s Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyanu, newly-installed after February general elections for (1) a recommitment to the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and (2) for a complete end to its settlement activities. European policy, however, continues to emphasize the role of international law and United Nations resolutions, while American policy may have not yet fully recovered from the view that some of that is ‘ancient history’ – and important American policy decisions still hang in the balance. Europe for several decades worked to have an independent policy … There were persistent reports that Obama’s special envoy George Mitchell had, after months of talks, only succeeded in extracting Israeli agreement to a qualified and limited settlement freeze that Israeli officials insisted would not, in any case, be permanent. One Israeli media report even stated that American officials privately told their Israeli counterparts that they would not require a full settlement freeze if the Palestinians did not insist … Netanyahu asserted in mid-2009 that ‘Jerusalem is not a settlement’ — and he made the immediately contested claimed that Jews and Arabs have equal rights to live and build in Jerusalem. In response, a U.S. State Department spokesman, pressed by journalists, explained that, ‘we believe that Israel has an obligation to cease all settlement activity in East Jerusalem or the West Bank or wherever it may be over the 1967 border’. A few days earlier, US Presidential Spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters, that in Obama’s view, Israeli plans to approve additional settlement construction are ‘inconsistent with Israel’s commitment under the Roadmap’ … The U.S.-European convergence of views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may well now be the closest since Europe fell out of favor following its June 1980 Venice Declaration in which it intended to prepare a ‘special role’ for itself in the Middle East, and that it believed the Palestine Liberation Organization should be associated with a new peace initiative that Europe would propose. The nine Western European states who were members of the European Community at the time were apparently persuaded that the Camp David negotiations between Israel and Egypt that started in September 1978 with the sponsorship and strong backing of U.S. President Jimmy Carter might have led to a bilateral peace treaty but had otherwise only exacerbated regional tensions. According to this 1980 Venice Declaration, ‘the time has come to promote the recognition and implementation of the two principles universally accepted by the international community: the right to existence and to security of all States in the region, including Israel, and justice for all the peoples, which implies the recognition of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people … A just solution must finally be found to the Palestinian problem, which is not simply one of refugees. The Palestinian people, which is conscious of existing as such, must be placed in a position, by an appropriate process defined within the framework of a comprehensive peace settlement, to exercise fully its right to self-determination … These principles are binding on all the parties concerned, and thus on the Palestinian people, and on the PLO, which will have to be associated with the negotiations‘ … European leaders did, indeed, stress in the Venice Declaration ‘the need for Israel to put an end to the territorial occupation which it has maintained since the conflict of 1967, as it has done for part of Sinai. They are deeply convinced that the Israeli settlements constitute a serious obstacle to the peace process in the Middle East. The Nine consider that these settlements, as well as modifications in population and property in the occupied Arab territories, are illegal under international law‘. The Venice Declaration also recognized ‘the special importance of the role played by the question of Jerusalem for all the parties concerned. The Nine stressed that they would not accept any unilateral initiative designed to change the status of Jerusalem and that any agreement on the city’s status should guarantee freedom of access for everyone to the Holy Places’. The European position on these two issues still stands to this day – and is now being echoed in statements made by the Obama Administration. What has not been published is the follow-up document approved in December 1980, by the Nine Western European leaders at a summit meeting in Luxembourg, after six months of intensive work to flesh out the European proposal for a new peace initiative. Shortly afterwards, it was suddenly put on hold, apparently out of consideration for the one-term Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, who took office after his inauguration in January 1981. [In the Luxembourg Document] The Nine said they could assert the interest of the Christian world in the holy places in Jerusalem. The Luxembourg document said that withdrawal, as mentioned in UN Security Council resolution 242, means also from East Jerusalem, but that the future of Jerusalem as a whole must be determined in negotiations. The document stated that the situation of Jerusalem in international law is not yet precisely defined, but the Nine did state that they do not recognize either the partition between Israel and Jordan (established in the cease-fire accord of 30 November 1948 and the armistice accord of 3 April 194;, or the Israeli Knesset’s proclamation of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel (23 June 1950); or the de facto annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967; or the fundamental law passed by the Knesset on 30 July 1980, proclaiming Jerusalem as the united and reunified capital of Israel. The Luxembourg document contains several different proposals concerning Jerusalem:
1) Internationalization of the entire city; 2) A new plan of partition which would give juridical value to the situation that existed between 1948 and 1967; 3) A “condominium” between Israel and the Arabs [this was the word used at the time, not “Palestinians”, though that may be what it meant, or it may have wished to be ambiguous] which would involve joint sovereignty; 4) A formula which would include common administration without physical divisions (either keeping de facto unity, without specifying respective sovereignty, or dividing sovereignty without any actual physical division of the city on the ground). In these cases, Jerusalem would be ruled by a municipal authority composed of elected Israelis and Palestinians [similar to a proposal made when the British mandate was still in place, but never implemented]. Religious places would be under the exclusive administration of religious authorities; 5) Internationalization of the Old City – i.e., everything within the city walls, where most of the holy places are. “This would give the Old City the character of the Vatican”, the Luxembourg document said. The Old City would then be administered by a special representative named by the Security Council for a determined number of years. This would require the parties to renounce their sovereignty over the Old City – and this last proposal could be combined and made compatible with most of the earlier options outlined above, the Luxembourg document said … The American chilly and distant reaction to the Venice Declaration and the Luxembourg Documents, caused a European retreat – or a sidelining — that lasted for several decades. The immediate problem, in 1980, was that the American administration of President Jimmy Carter was defensively protecting its heavy political and diplomatic investment in the Camp David strategy it had launched with Israel and Egypt. Carter’s singular focus on the importance of maintaining the Israeli-Egyptian negotiations was apparently responsible for compromising the publicly-stated U.S. position on Jerusalem in 1980 – which, if it did not actually change, at least to become so closely-held that it appeared less critical of Israeli actions concerning Jerusalem. On Carter’s orders, the U.S. abstained from a series of more than half a dozen UN Security Council resolutions condemning Israel’s “Basic Law” of proclaiming united Jerusalem as its eternal capital. The U.S. delegation did not restate the previously-declared American position on Jerusalem [see footnote 1 below] — and just kept quiet … The American silence, or obfuscation, about its position on Jerusalem, adopted for Carter’s political advantage in negotiations, and in an election year, also perfectly suited the worldview of the neo-conservatives who joined Ronald Reagan’s team, and who used this lack of clarity to suggest a much more pro-Israeli policy on Jerusalem … But did Jimmy Carter, who as U.S. president was so protective of the Camp David process that he had invested so much in, when he more recently visited the Hanoun and Ghawi families [evicted from their homes and replaced by Jewish national-religious settlers, see our other posts here] living on the sidewalks in front of their homes in Sheikh Jarrah on 27 August, as part of a delegation of The Elders – a group of former statesmen and women – and brought them a ‘gift of food’, did he remember that in 1980, he instructed officials in his administration just before he faced re-election in what became the final year of his presidency, to be ‘noticeably quiet’ on the subject of Jerusalem? [Footnote 1: On 14 July 1967 (after Israel extended its law and administration over East Jerusalem) U.S. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg (representing President Lyndon Johnson) stated in a UN General Assembly vote that “this Assembly should have dealt with the problem by declaring itself against any unilateral change in the status of Jerusalem … [O]n July 3, I said that the safeguarding of the Holy Places and freedom of access to them for all should be internationally guaranteed and the status of Jerusalem in relation to them should be decided not unilaterally but in consultation with all concerned. These statements represent the considered and continuing policy of the United States … We insist that the measures taken cannot be considered other than interim and provisional, and not prejudging the final and permanent status of Jerusalem”. In his speech before the UN Security Council, Goldberg also read excerpts from two statement issued on 28 June 1967: (1) the first from the White House, which stated that in the President’s view, “there must be adequate recognition of the special interests of three great religions in the holy places of Jerusalem. On this principle he assumes that before any unilateral action is taken on the status of Jerusalem there will be appropriate consultations with religious leaders and others who are deeply concerned … The world must find an answer that is fair and recognized to be fair”; and (2) the second from the State Department, saying that “The hasty administrative action taken today cannot be regarded as determining the future of the Holy Places or the status of Jerusalem in relation to them. The United States has never recognized such unilateral actions by any of the states in the area as governing the international status of Jerusalem”. And, on 1 July 1969, U.S. Ambassador Charles Yost (representing President Richard Nixon) told the UN Security Council that “the United States has always considered that Jerusalem enjoys a unique international standing and that no action should be taken there without full regard to Jerusalem’s special history and special place in the world community … The United States considers that the part of Jerusalem that came under the control of Israel in the June war, like other areas occupied by Israel, is occupied territory and hence subject to the provisions of international law governing the rights and obligations of an occupying power … The pattern of behavior authorized under the Geneva Convention and international law is clear: the occupier must maintain the occupied area as intact and unaltered as possible, without interfering with the customary life of the area, and any changes must be necessitated by immediate needs of the occupation. I regret to say that the actions of Israel in the occupied portion of Jerusalem present a different picture, one which gives rise to understandable concerns that the eventual disposition of East Jerusalem may be prejudiced and the rights and activities of the population are already being affected and altered … We have consistently refused to recognize these measures as having anything but a provisional character and do not accept them as affecting the ultimate status of Jerusalem”. This article can be read in full here.

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Meanwhile, with fine irony, Haaretz’s Akiva Eldar writes today: “Who would have believed that Benjamin Netanyahu would get the settler minister Avigdor Lieberman to agree to a settlement freeze? Ever since Netanyahu replaced Ehud Olmert as prime minister, there has been a significant decrease in the number of roadblocks in the West Bank. Peace Now reports that Housing and Construction Ministry tenders for housing beyond the Green Line are at a low. So why are the Europeans now plotting to divide Jerusalem (even though they never recognized its unification)? Why have the Russians vetoed the Quartet proposal to issue a statement of support for the freeze Israel has imposed? What do they want from Bibi? The answer lies in statements Netanyahu made Thursday to settler leaders protesting the temporary settlement freeze. ‘This move makes it clear to key players around the world that Israel is serious in its intentions to achieve peace, while the Palestinians refuse to enter negotiations for peace’, the prime minister told the anxious guests. And to remove all doubt, he added: ‘There is a side that wants [to talk] and another that does not. This move has made clear who is refusing peace’. In other words, we want to get out of the occupied territory, but the Palestinians insist that we stay. Netanyahu has in essentially confirmed that he knew in advance that a limited settlement freeze wouldn’t bring the Palestinians back to the negotiating table. He could have bet that Abbas wouldn’t accept less than what the road map gave the Palestinians more than six years ago: a total freeze that includes natural growth and the immediate dismantling of all outposts established since March 2001. You don’t have to be the head of Military Intelligence to expect that no Arab leader would take part in a move that recognizes, or even implies, Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem” … This Akiva Eldar piece can be viewed here.

Separately, Amos Harel notes in in Haaretz today that “U.S. President Barack Obama has united the settlers. At the moment, the struggle against the freeze is being waged on both sides of the separation fence … America’s demand for a comprehensive freeze has created, for the first time in a while, common ground between Beit Aryeh, Yitzhar and Migron. Settlers of all stripes have signed the High Court petition against the freeze … Foundations have been laid. The past few months, in which the government delayed responding to pressure from Washington, gave the settlers time to organize. Because the date for the freeze was set in late November, great efforts were made to lay hundreds of housing units as facts on the ground. The missions seem to have worked – building continues in many such settlements, viewed as legitimate by the government and exempted from the freeze … The recurring complaint last week, heard among regional council heads across the West Bank, was that the freeze was halting plans about to be carried out, plans supposedly already authorized. It’s a surprising claim, as for years the settlers have complained of being ‘dried out’ by the government, which they claimed wouldn’t allow them to so much as enclose their balconies. If indeed all of the recent administrations, from Sharon to Olmert, ‘dried them out’, then when exactly did these construction projects Netanyahu is trying to undermine actually spring up?” This is posted here.

And, Zvi Bar’el writes, also in Haaretz, that “In 10 months, when the bubble bursts, the High Holidays will be around the corner and the Palestinian Authority will or will not have Abbas and perhaps a united government with Hamas. Netanyahu and the Yesha government will be able to ridicule and celebrate. No one will be able to demand further ‘concessions’, because such a ‘trauma’ must not happen again. Therefore this pseudo-trauma must be magnified. As Rabbi Moshe Levinger shouted to the settlers who were to be evacuated from the Sebastia train station in the mid-1970s, ‘Rend your clothing’ – as Jewish mourners do. The moratorium on construction must be presented immediately as no less than a national disaster, a real holocaust, so that 10 months from now no one will ever consider demanding that the freeze continue. Should, heaven forfend, a peace process begin, this way the State of Israel will know that it is facing off against the entire settler state. The show this time has to be bigger than the one for the disengagement from Gaza. After all, that disengagement was to have assured that there would be no more withdrawals. And suddenly – treachery. Although life this time is easier, because the settlers are not going up against Ariel Sharon or Menachem Begin; it is just Netanyahu, the ball that was meant to be pushed around. But his logic is not that of the settlers. All he wants is to show, particularly to the Americans and generally to the world, that Israel is the one that made the sacrifice. The settlers, in contrast, see every day of the freeze as a national defeat. Their war is not against the Americans or the Palestinians. It’s a matter of them or the government of Israel. It is a struggle for the national consciousness, as they wrote in a document of principles of ‘the renewed Yesha [the council of settlers and settlements]’ (as opposed to the old Yesha, which ‘lost’ Gaza). No more chances must be taken in such a struggle, and the settlers are taking none. This state has 300,000 citizens, and those who want a peace process will have to negotiate with its leaders, not with the Palestinians or Americans”. Zvi Bar’el’s analysis can be viewed in full here.

The Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and lives – continued – 21 years after the Proclamation of a State of Palestine

Today is the 21st anniversary of the Proclamation, by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at a meeting on 15 November 1988 of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s National Council (PNC) in Algiers, of the still-unrealized State of Palestine.

Still, today is marked as Palestinian Independence Day, here in Ramallah and the rest of the West Bank, and in Gaza as well — and also in East Jerusalem (though there, where I also live, it will have to be surreptitiously, because the Israeli Ministry of the Interior, and the Israeli national and Border Police, are mobilized against any manifestation, however far-removed, of the “authority” of the Palestinian Authority…)

And today, we are informed by YNet, the Israeli English-language website of the country’s most popular Hebrew-language daily paper, Yediot Ahronot, that “Palestinian plans to possibly unilaterally declare a state continue to yield reactions in Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to reject the increasingly strengthening Palestinian imitative during his speech at the Saban Forum in Jerusalem on Sunday“. YNet added that Netanyahu “will warn the Palestinians against moving forward with the initiative, emphasizing Israel’s objection, and will stress that the solution for the establishment of a Palestinian state can be found in negotiations with Israel. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman warned in a speech at the Saban Forum on Saturday that a withdrawal to the 1967 borders will not end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. ‘A return to 1967 borders and the establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria will not end the conflict, but rather, shift it into Israel’s borders’, he said, adding that such circumstances would prompt Arab-Israeli demands for autonomy in the Galilee and the Negev”. This YNet report can be viewed in full here

Yasser Arafat himself was strongly warned against “unilaterally” declaring a state, as he had “threatened” to do, in 1999 and in 2000 (after the end of the five-year “transition” period of Palestinian autonomy that was agreed in the Oslo Accords, and just before the start of the Second Palestinian Intifada that was sparked by a militarized visit of Israel’s Ariel Sharon to the mosque plateau known to Palestinians as the Haram ash-Sharif, the third-holiest site in Islam, which Jews believe is the site of the Second and possibly also the First Jewish Temple, the central focus of the most sacred site in Judaism.)

Here are a few bare facts of the day from the English-language publication in Israel, the Jerusalem Post, (generally considered more right-wing than the English-language version of the Israeli paper, Haaretz). [The JPost and the Ma’an News Agency in Bethlehem are the only two media covering such news as this] —

(1) This report is talking about the Israeli-occupied West Bank:
Nov 15, 2009 8:09
IDF troops detain 4 Palestinian fugitives in West Bank ops
By JPOST.COM STAFF
“IDF troops detained four Palestinian fugitives Saturday overnight near Ramallah and Bethlehem. The military said all detainees were transferred to security forces for interrogation”. This JPost report can be read in full here.
These reports appear several times a week, sometimes daily. The Palestinians (men, usually) who are seized, often from their beds, are variously described as “suspects”, “fugitives”, “wanted”, and so on. No one ever really bothers to ask what happens to these people. Most often, they are eventually, if not immediately, taken out of the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) to jails inside Israel, which is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. (Today it was reported that the Arab League has decided to request an advisory opinion from the UN’s International Court of Justice in The Hague about Palestinian and Arab (yes, there are others, from Lebanon, Syria, and other countries, some of whom are explicitly being held in exchange for release of information about missing Israelis) prisoners in Israeli jails

(2) This report is talking about the State of Israel:
Nov 15, 2009 9:48 | Updated Nov 15, 2009 9:52
Border Police arrest 252 illegals over weekend
By JPOST.COM STAFF
“Border Police arrested 252 illegal aliens over the weekend. The Palestinian illegals were working in Israel without permits. Three people were arrested for employing the illegals and thirteen on suspicion of transporting them”. This JPost report can be read in full here.
These reports appear once every couple of months. Often, the figures are larger — 1000 or 1,500 “illegal aliens” from the West Bank, who are working in Israel, often with the complicity of Israeli employers who can, among other things, pay them a lower wage with fewer benefits…

Then, let’s take a step back and try to understand what is going on here.

Suad Amiry, a Syrian-born Palestinian architect who came to Ramallah to teach at Bir Zeit in the 1980s and who now heads the Ramallah-based organization Riwaq, dedicated to preserving Palestinian architecture, has written a new book entitled Murad, Murad, about the life of Palestinian West Bankers who — despite The Wall and Israeli bureaucratic and military restructions — continue to try to work in Israel. (Her earlier book, Sharon and my Mother-in-Law, chronicled life under house confinement during the forceful military Israeli re-occupation of Ramallah in 2002). Suad Amiry said in an interview published in the Summer issue (number 38) of the Jerusalem Quarterly that: “We who are professionals in Ramallah are able to make a living away from Israel. It’s difficult to understanding the complexity of Murad and other workers’ relation to Israel. Murad went to Israel when he was 13. All his growing up happened there. He is oppressed, beaten, and lately has been put in prison – but in a strange way, Israel is also his home. In this contradictory relation, he is more like the Palestinians inside Israel”. The Jerusalem Quarterly interview reports that “Suad tells a story of lives that are largely invisible – invisible to her before her journey, and invisible to much of the Palestinian public, as well as to the world. She notes that when the Palestinian Authority didn’t pay salaries [to its employees, over half of whom work for the security services] for several months, it was the talk of the town. But Murad told her: ‘Why the big fuss? When we are thrown into prison, no one helps us’. In the year 2000, there were about 100,000 West Bankers workers in Israel, with many more family members dependent on their work. While numbers fluctuate today, it is no exaggeration to say that the lives and rights of a substantial proportion of the population are rarely acknowledged … Suad Amiry’s new book, Murad, Murad, scheduled for publication in Italian in the summer of 2009, is the story of her eighteen-hour journey in 2007 with Murad, an ‘illegal’ Palestinian worker and his friends, as they attempt to cross the ‘border’ into Israel and find work. Starting off at midnight from the village of Mazra el Noubani, in the Ramallah-area, a group of workers, accompanied by Suad in male disguise and Mohammed, Murad’s brother who is a colleague of Suad, set off in a rackety bus on a journey that resembled a maze, as they struggle to avoid army patrols, skirt the Wall, walk through ditches, orchards and tunnels to reach the ‘other side’ and work in Israel … Murad, who has worked in Israel since he was thirteen and is utterly determined to continue to work there, despite the enormous odds against him”. This is published in the Summer issue of Jerusalem Quarterly, and posted on the internet here.

Another article in the same issue of the Jerusalem Quarterly is an excerpt of remarks made earlier this year by leading Palestinian academic and writer, who has also participated in multilateral negotiations under the Madrid Process, Salim Tamari, in a discussion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which were summarized in the Summer 2009 issue (no. 38) of the Jerusalem Quarterly, which he edits, for the Institute for Jerusalem Studies, which he heads. The Institute for Jerusalem Studies (a branch of the Institute for Palestinian Studies) was formerly located in Jerusalem, but was forced by Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement to re-locate to Ramallah. Salim Tamari is commenting, here, on an analysis also presented at MIT in a discussion last February at the Department for Urban Planning, by Israeli academic Eyal Weizman:
An Architectural Laboratory of the Extreme? Reflections on Weizman’s Hollow Land by Salim Tamari
“Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land is the first systematic study of Israel’s regime of spatial control, combining the insights of political geography, architecture, semiotics, theories of counterinsurgency, and an appreciation for the shifting ideological tenants of Zionism and the history of settler regimes. It combines a majestic sweep of broad conceptual paradigms about population control, with a meticulous examination of the detailed mechanisms of such control and the thinking among military strategists who plan it, as well as their willing and unwilling accomplices among them. Those are the social scientists, contractors, and service providers who cater to their vision, and who often provide humanitarian services to mitigate the dire human costs and the disastrous results of these strategies. One of the most rewarding features of this study is the manner in which it posits architectural knowledge and affiliated disciplines in social science, engineering and politics as partners, willing or sometimes unconscious, in the process of colonial conquest. The study provokes a number of issues that are only partly examined, and in need of elaboration. Here are some of them, listed briefly as questions:
…
The Process of ‘Distanciation’. One of the most significant achievements of the Oslo Agreement from an Israeli governmental perspective (as pointed out in The Hollow Land) is the creation of a spatial geography of fragmentation in which the de-linking of the Palestinian and Israeli population has enhanced the legitimacy of occupation. This happened through withdrawal to the periphery of urban areas and handing over the administrative control and welfare of 80 percent of the Palestinians, in areas A and B, to the Palestinian Authority. In effect it created conditions for population control from a distance, either through surveillance and checkpoints, or through administrative autonomy by a non-sovereign Palestinian regime.

But the process is not complete. Rural areas in region C, the settlements, and the greater Jerusalem area (outside the municipal borders), remained zones of direct military control. Arab Jerusalem also continued to be ruled directly, but was separated both from other Palestinian communities and from Palestinian leadership. To a large extent the process removed the physicality of the confrontation and therefore made the tactics of civil insurrection and strategy of disobedience (which defined the first uprising) virtually impossible. No alternative resistance strategy since then evolved partly due to the absence of physical encounters, but also due to the absence of a leadership.

One area where I differ with Weizman is over the issue of the illusion of sovereignty, which he illustrated through the semiotics of the one-way mirror: the example from the pre-intifada period was the presence and power of Israeli officials at the King Hussein/Allenby bridge who used a one-way mirror to monitor (and approve or disapprove ) Palestinian passage. I do not believe that there was an “illusion of sovereignty” here, and it did not need the conditions of dusk to unravel the real power behind the mirror. What existed rather is rather a consensual delusion in which Palestinians (as in La Vita è Bella) shared in the self-deception in order to make life more tolerable knowing that they could not resolve the issue of sovereignty, given the existing power relationship between them and the Israelis.

Normalization of Occupation?

One consequence of removing the physical military presence in the major urban areas has been to create a sense of normalcy. Weizman refers to the normalization of the ‘absurd’ system of population control through filtering checkpoints. The system creates a mechanism of routinization of arbitrary military control that is internalized by the subject population, leading to protocols of acceptance through negotiating its loopholes (permits, exceptions, smuggling). But this system of normalization of oppression has built-in weaknesses that undermine its own sense of normalcy.

Two features of this system are its unpredictability and irrationalism. It is supposed to create mechanisms of control in order to prevent penetration, circumvention and deceit. But in overdoing its objective of population control it leads to immense resentment and conditions of rebellion. A relevant question here is why does the system resort to extreme humiliation of the population when such humiliation defeats its function of security control?

The question of agency in Weizman’s analysis is also problematic. The system of control chartered by the author produces an occupation regime that is all pervasive. Does the cunning adaptation of the subject Palestinian population to this regime through subversion of building regulation and getting around the blockade, constitute resistance to the regime, or a normalization of oppression?

The System is over-designed. Weizman skillfully draws an architectural system of control that is omnipotent and omnipresent. The regime of population control through the technology of monitoring and surveillance; of countless filtering systems; of segmented road systems; of counter-insurgency through predicting every possible contingency of the enemy and pre-empting it, is ultimately overdesigned. It ostensibly operates through open and closed spaces, underground and in the air, and through the bureaucratic regime of permits and civil administration. By investing so much conceptual capital in detailing its omnipotence Weizman produces a paradigm that is hermetically sealed and has the force of nature. There seems to be no escape from it.

Even on the intellectual plane, in this paradigm the military commanders have captured the terrain, utilizing critical theory, Foucault, Deleuze (and Marx, in the case of the Village Leagues) to (successfully) engineer a counter-revolutionary reality. The weakness of this paradigm is that it overdetermines the omnipotence of the hegemonic power by attributing to it exaggerated capacities of control both at logistic and intellectual levels. It leaves unexamined its own contradictions; its misadventures; its control by politicians who have myopic ideological visions, whose thirst for land grabbing will make them choke on excessive expansion of limited economic capacities; and who seem to behave as if they are independent from the world around them. But after all, as Weizman points out in “Demographic Architecture,” it is indeed remarkable that Israel’s planning policies in Jerusalem have not succeeded in transferring the requisite number of Palestinians outside of the city; even the most powerful do not operate in a laboratory where they control all the elements”. These comments, and more, can be viewed in full on the Jerusalem Quarterly website,
here.

NOTE: The Two-State Solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has, since the Second Palestinian Intifada, become the central credo of Israel and American diplomacy, and thus also of “international” efforts (backed by the European Union and the United Nations). However, there is still no Palestinian state. After returning to power in February general elections, the current Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu resisted for months agreeing to this Two-State formula, and only did so in a speech months later at Bar Ilan University, in which Netanyahu posed several major limiting conditions. Opposition leader (and former Israeli Defense Minister) Shaul Mofaz has just proposed Israeli support for a Palestinian State on 50-60 percent of the West Bank (excluding existing Israeli settlements, which would remain under Israeli sovereignty). As the climate has deteriorated, with intense Palestinian disappointment in the position of Barak Obama’s Administration, Palestinian negotiator Sa’eb Erekat has “threatened” that the Palestinian Authority is ready to jettison its commitment to the Two-State Solution, and to mobilize behind a theoretical “One-State solution” — by which is generally meant Palestinians and Israelis living together with full and equal rights, as if they had the choice… But this option it is not on the table. The only alternative to the Two-State solution now appears to be a continuation of more of the same, with continued direct Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem — now officially ruled by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, with limited autonomy given to the present Palestinian Authority and its security forces, and also of Gaza (where Hamas may or may not be allowed to continue its present “de facto” rule if it becomes a “responsible address” that Israel can count on to limit attacks against Israel. It is not terribly surprising that the powerful Israeli military leadership opposes ending the occupation — they feel more comfortable being in control, and they would like a 25, 50, or 100-year period to continue the current status quo, with checkpoints and all (perhaps even inside Israel, certainly also in the Golan Heights), to see if the Palestinians have peaceful intentions, these Israeli miltary officials say, after which they might begin to consider talking about territory. The impression is given that they would not mind if all of Israel, or even all of the world, became like the West Bank… But this current status quo is, simply, unsustainable. What will happen next is unclear…