Hollow Land. Eyal Weizman
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lands. The official settlements simply expand while relying on the military and the courts to do the same.
Another global process that Israel’s regime of domination has been immune to is the so-called Arab Spring. Starting in 2011, a series of popular revolts, particularly within the Magreb and Middle East, toppled (or tried to) presidential regimes across the region, resulting in, not a series of popular democracies, but bloody civil wars and foreign military interventions. While these states were engulfed in revolutionary fervour, resistance remained relatively subdued in the West Bank and Jerusalem (though, as I will later show, it was fierce in Gaza). Civil protests and desperate, increasingly personally motivated armed actions (often with knives), were put down brutally with the help of the Palestinian Authority.
Despite popular protests, the wall and other physical barriers have expanded. Hundreds of miles of fencing systems and prefabricated concrete elements have been erected on Palestinian lands to protect Jewish settlements. These barriers are the physical manifestation of what Israeli officials call the ‘segregation policy’, a policy that seeks to separate Jews from Palestinians everywhere across the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Separation, in space and by law, is the most fundamental component of Israel’s system of colonization.7 Even when settlers, Palestinians, and soldiers are brought together in the same incident, at the very same place, each group is still bound by different laws. The applicable law for the settlers is the Israeli civil law, by which settlers enjoy full Israeli civil rights including the right to vote. The reality for Palestinians is a military dictatorship in which civil and human rights rarely apply.8 In military courts, where Palestinians are tried, the conviction rates for alleged violence against settlers or occupation forces are 99.74 per cent.9 For soldiers the ratio is inversed. The mandate of the military legal system, inasmuch as it deals with Israeli military personnel, assigns criminal responsibility via the most narrow of frames and is oriented exclusively toward low-ranking soldiers: it investigates only harm caused by a breach of commands, never the legality of commands and the violence that underpins them. Less than one third of a single per cent of complaints brought against soldiers’ violence lead to charges. This legal reality guarantees that violence is exercised with the full backing of the law. As a result, Israel’s politics of separation has, in the past decade, surpassed South African apartheid, not only in the extent and sophistication of its architectural manifestations, but also in its duration: the South African version collapsed under international pressure after forty-three years.
Israeli domination of Palestinians is not confined to the spaces occupied in 1967. In its early decades, Israel’s rule in the occupied territories used techniques of domination that were well-honed on those Palestinians who survived and remained in place during the expulsions of 1948. In recent decades, techniques of domination, land grab and separation, more intensely exercised in the 1967 occupied areas, inspired the further separation of Jews and Arabs within Israel itself. The occupation can thus not be thought of as an aberration of Israeli democracy, a ‘cancerous tumour’ that can be removed by dissecting more or less along the internationally recognized Green Line of 1949, as left-liberal apologists of Zionism propose. Rather, it is a local manifestation of Israel’s regime of domination and separation that extends, in different forms, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Examples of this policy within Israel are abundant. In recent decades the state-sanctioned ‘battle for the Negev’ has radically escalated, with Israel repeatedly, violently sending its demolition squads to destroy ramshackle homes and animal pens on lands that have been continuously inhabited by Bedouins for generations, and this to clear space for Jewish settlements and forests.10 The Bedouins are amongst the only Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons (those displaced within Israel) to enact, continuously, repeatedly, on the ground, their right of return, rebuilding again after every act of demolition.
In Galilee, Jewish outposts are designed to break apart the continuity of Palestinian space and limit the growth of villages. Elsewhere, Palestinian neighbourhoods in Jerusalem, Nazareth, Lydda, Ramle, and Jaffa are split into enclaves by roadways and barriers. An important aspect of Israel’s overall domination of all the territorial fragments into which Palestine was shuttered is manifested in its control of the population registration. Every Palestinian birth in Gaza, death in the West Bank, marriage in Jerusalem, or change of address in Galilee must be entered into Israel’s Interior Ministry database in order to exist. No one can travel, work, open a bank account, or even emigrate without it.
The Strangulation of Gaza
In the past decade, the focus of the armed struggle and the worst of Israel’s policy of domination has shifted to Gaza. This took place against the backdrop of a punishing siege, which severely escalated after Hamas took power there in 2007. The siege replaced one system of control with another. As long as they were inside Gaza, several blocks of Jewish settlements and a string of military bases exercised a traditional form of territorial control – they controlled the roadways and surveyed the cities. In 2005 the Sharon government removed the settlements and relocated the military bases beyond Gaza’s perimeter wall. Domination is now exercised from beyond the borders, from the sea and the air. Gunboats keep presence just off the coastline, shooting at fishermen that dare to venture more than a few hundred meters from the shore. The airforce controls things from above. Agreements with Egypt ensure Israel has some say over who can pass through Gaza’s border crossing in Rafah.
The siege is a giant and unparalleled exercise in population control. It seeks to isolate the strip from the external world and gradually increase the collective hardship by reducing the incoming flow of all life-sustaining provisions. Israeli intelligence agencies monitor the effects of the siege and claim to be able to calibrate the privation to a level that is hard enough for the civilian population to reject Hamas but one that does not fall below some so-called ‘red lines’ that would ‘bring the strip to a humanitarian crisis’.11 The supply of food, calculated in calories, was gradually reduced to the UN humanitarian minimum of 2100 calories per adult (less for women and children). The inflow of electricity, petrol, and concrete was also gradually turned down to levels that ground life to an almost complete standstill, devastating infrastructural systems, hospitals, the economy, and civil institutions.
Unemployment shot up to 43 per cent (highest in the world), 72 per cent of the population fell below the poverty line, and the absolute majority of residents became dependent on international welfare, an important point of leverage when it is Israel that could decide to start and stop those welfare provisions. Electricity was reduced so radically that residents have power for only a few hours a day, hospitals are incapacitated, and there is not enough power to contain all sewage from flowing untreated. The shortage in basic medicines has become more severe, with people dying from easily preventable diseases and for lack of basic treatment. These deaths, unlike those from direct violence, are not statistically recorded. The United Nations has desperately repeated that a massive humanitarian crisis is already unfolding in Gaza and warned that if the current trend continues, the entire strip could become uninhabitable by 2020. Where does Israel want these two million Palestinians to go? The government does not feel it has to care. It claims that Gaza is ‘no longer occupied’ (the ‘no longer’ is strange because when the settlements were there, Israel never accepted it was an ‘occupation’) and thus its duties as an ‘occupying force’ under international law no longer apply (it never applied them anyway). Gaza is rather an ‘enemy entity’ – a designation that allows it to be attacked and starved as an enemy state but without the sovereign rights that come with statehood. This continues a double game that has been in place since 1967. Israel uses the rights afforded to a military occupier under international law, for example to build ‘temporary military installations’, while ignoring its duties by claiming that the situation isn’t one of occupation at all. The UN, however, has never accepted this self-serving and paradoxical designation of Gaza and still regards Israel to be occupying Gaza because it has control over all aspects of life there.
Its interference extends into minute details. Decisions otherwise exercised at municipal levels are still undertaken by Israel – for example, by deciding how much concrete and steel are to be allowed in and how much should be allocated for which construction or reconstruction project,