Preface

       The Vertical Apartheid

      In the context of a recent, mildly critical interview about the political deadlock between Israel and the Palestinians, a former Israeli general, until recently the chief commander of the West Bank, claimed that the Israeli military has become ‘world champions in occupation’ and has managed to turn its control of millions of Palestinian into ‘an art form’, as if this two-generation-long degrading and lethal regime is some sort of sport or managerial challenge.¹ But bragging is not necessarily an exaggeration. This preface to the new edition of Hollow Land – published almost exactly fifty years after the beginning of the 1967 war (and ten years after the first edition) – charts the way Israel’s system of control, which evolved in fits and starts throughout the occupation’s first four decades, has, during its fifth decade, hardened into an exceptionally efficient and brutal form of territorial apartheid.

      Indeed, on its fiftieth anniversary, the Israeli occupation seems to be in excellent form. Though the Gaza settlements have been removed, those in the West Bank and East Jerusalem prosper, and settler numbers have been growing at a rate of 15,000 people annually.² The domination of more than four million Palestinians has stopped being an economic burden and proven to be profitable. The people under occupation are a captive market (literally) for many surplus Israeli-manufactured goods. Private industries, including international companies working in the Jewish settlements, prosper thanks to tax breaks, low rents, government subsidies, and a Palestinian labour force that is rendered cheap and flexible because it enjoys no civil or labour rights.³ Israel’s international exports – many of them military and marketed as ‘road tested in action’ (on the Palestinians, that is) – are also steadily growing as more nations, including the United States and European states, adopt Israel-like xenophobic politics towards minorities, refugees, and migrants (especially Muslim ones).⁴

      Within the Israeli political system there is currently no serious opposition to the settlement project. International diplomacy is largely inconsequential and there is no ‘peace process’ to threaten the settlements’ further expansion. Representatives of the settler movement hold power in all major governmental offices, running not only the occupation, but also the business of the state.

      Dissent is confronted with paranoid fervor and righteous rage. Activists are vilified as traitors, spied upon, threatened, and arrested. State officials, and even the prime minister, now openly refer to human rights groups as ‘the third strategic threat’ (after Iran and Hizbullah), treating them as foreign agents and spies, and the Israeli parliament has legislated laws to constrain their work. Civil society groups calling for boycott of and divestment from the Israeli economy and culture – one of the last peaceful means to challenge Israeli hegemony – are made illegal locally (and severely limited in some key countries such as Britain, France, Ireland, Germany, and the United States) and foreign activists promoting it are no longer allowed into the country,.⁵

      Happy fiftieth birthday, indeed!

      The durability and expansion of Israel’s settler-colonial project in Palestine is no small achievement given the turns of recent history. In the ten years since the first edition of this book was published, the world was shaken by a series of transformative processes, none of which loosened Israel’s grip on power over the Palestinians. In 2008, a global financial crisis overwhelmed the world economy and devastated real estate markets worldwide. At the same time, in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem the number of houses and settlers has nearly doubled: there were 400,000 settlers there when Hollow Land was first published and there are about 750,000 today. This number includes the residents of 131 official, state-sanctioned settlements and the twelve Jewish neighbourhoods in occupied East Jerusalem (this is what settlements there are called) as well as ninety-seven smaller outposts in the West Bank and the thirteen Jewish outposts inside Palestinian neighbourhoods in occupied East Jerusalem.⁶ While the official settlements have expanded in terms of the extent of their built-up area and number of residents, the number of official settlements has not changed much. At the start of the Oslo process in the early 1990s there were already 120 settlements in place. It is the rogue outposts that have grown in number and expanded as their settlers torch fields