1967 Arab-Israeli war: Fifty Years of Occupation – A Forum

Friday 9 June 2017, by ALLEN Lori, BEININ Joel, BHUNGALIA Lisa, CLARNO Andy, ERAKAT Noura, FELDMAN Ilana, GORDON Neve, JABARY SALAMANCA Omar, LOCKMAN Zachary, NASSAR Maha, RABIE Kareem, ROY Sara, SAMOUR Sobhi, SEIKALY Sherene, SHAFIR Gershon, TARTIR Alaa, TURNER Mandy

June 5, 2017 is the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which culminated in the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights, among other transformations of regional politics. The post-1967 occupation and its consequences continue to structure the mainstream conversation about resolving the conflict between Israel the Palestinians, and those between Israel and other Arab states, even as scholarship increasingly poses the occupation as part of a longer-term and more multi-faceted question of Palestine. We asked several specialists to reflect on the past, present and future of the question of Palestine at this historical juncture.

Contents

“Beautiful Israel” and the 1967 War

Joel Beinin

The 1967 Arab-Israeli war unleashed forces that reshaped Israeli politics and society. But much about the war is rooted in the military tactics, governance practices and political culture of “beautiful Israel,” as liberal Ashkenazi Zionists often nostalgically refer to the pre-1967 state. This is true of the decision to launch the war. It is true of the impulse for territorial expansion, manifested by the annexation of a vastly expanded East Jerusalem on June 28, 1967 and the establishment of the first civilian Jewish settlements in the Golan Heights and the West Bank in July and September. And it is true of the imposition, following the six days of fighting, of military rule on the Palestinians of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The countdown to the 1967 war began with sharpening military clashes between Israel and Syria. In a posthumously published interview with journalist Rami Tal, Moshe Dayan, former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff and minister of defense in June 1967, explained that before the war IDF methods on the Syrian border consisted of

"snatching bits of territory and holding on to it until the enemy despairs and gives it to us.
…After all, I know how at least 80 percent of the clashes there started. In my opinion, more than 80 percent, but let’s talk about 80 percent. It went this way: We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was…. We thought that we could change the lines of the ceasefire accords by military actions that were less than war."

Menachem Begin’s Herut (Freedom) Party, which emerged from a pre-state terrorist militia, the Etzel (commonly known as the Irgun in English), never accepted the 1949 armistice lines (the Green Line) as Israel’s legitimate border. The movement’s territorial aspirations were expressed in the refrain of a poem by the leading ideologue of the Zionist right, Vladimir Jabotinsky: “Two Banks has the Jordan / This one is ours, and that one as well.” Herut was marginal to Israeli politics until the 1967 war. On the eve of the war Begin joined the governing coalition as minister without portfolio. A decade later he became prime minister.

An influential kibbutz-based Labor Zionist movement—Le-Ahdut ha-‘Avodah (Unity of Labor)—which, like Herut, had opposed the partition of British Mandate Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state, also harbored irredentist sentiments. Its members dominated the officer corps of the pre-state Labor Zionist militias, the Palmach and Haganah. From 1954 on Le-Ahdut ha-‘Avodah was an independent party led by Yisrael Galili, former chief of staff of the Haganah, and Yigal Allon, a founder of the Palmach. Both were ministers in the government that launched the 1967 war. In June 1966, Le-Ahdut ha-‘Avodah’s theoretical guru, Yitzhak Tabenkin, declared, “Anywhere war will allow, we shall go to restore the country’s integrity” (Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War and the Year That Transformed the Middle East, p. 180). In July 1967 Tabenkin became one of the founders of the Greater Israel Movement, which advocated annexation and settlement of the territories occupied the preceding month.

Members of Le-Ahdut ha-‘Avodah-affiliated kibbutzim convinced Dayan to conquer the Golan Heights on the fourth day of the 1967 war, a decision he later regarded as his worst political mistake, as after Israel destroyed its air force on the first day of the war, Syria no longer posed a threat. As Dayan recalled in the same conversation with Tal,

The kibbutzim there saw land [on the Golan Heights] that was good for agriculture…. And you must remember, this was a time in which agricultural land was considered the most important and valuable thing…. The delegation that came to persuade [Prime Minister Levi] Eshkol to take the heights…were thinking about the heights’ land. Listen, I’m a farmer…. I saw them, and I spoke to them. They didn’t even try to hide their greed for that land.

Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek commissioned Naomi Shemer to write “Jerusalem of Gold.” The words express Jewish longing for the Old City of Jerusalem, then part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan:

How the cisterns have dried
The marketplace is empty
And no one frequents the Temple Mount
In the Old City.
And in the caves in the mountain
Winds are howling
And no one descends to the Dead Sea by way of Jericho.

“No one,” of course, means “no Jew,” since thousands of Palestinian Arabs did these things daily. Such Israeli erasures of Arab presence were routine by 1967. They were facilitated by the expulsion of some 725,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war. Subsequently, military rule was imposed on almost all of Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens until 1966. They were largely segregated in villages and impoverished neighborhoods in half a dozen “mixed cities.” In the early 1960s the army developed contingency plans to establish military rule over the West Bank and Gaza Strip should these lands be occupied in a conflict (Neve Gordon, Israel’s Occupation, p. 10).

The war broke out on June 4, three weeks after “Jerusalem of Gold” was first performed; it became the unofficial anthem of Israel’s victory. On June 7, when Israel conquered the Old City of Jerusalem and its environs, Dayan proclaimed, “This morning, the Israel Defense Forces liberated Jerusalem. We have united Jerusalem, the divided capital of Israel. We have returned to the holiest of our holy places, never to part from it again.”

To celebrate the “reunification” of Jerusalem, Shemer added a verse to her song that ensconced its annexation as uncontestable in Israeli popular culture:

We have returned to the cisterns
To the market and to the marketplace
A ram’s horn calls out on the Temple Mount
In the Old City.
And in the caves in the mountain
Thousands of suns shine—
We will once again descend to the Dead Sea
By way of Jericho.

The most disturbing aspect of contemporary Israel for those nostalgic for pre-1967 “beautiful Israel” is the hegemony of the alliance of messianic religio-nationalism and anti-democratic national chauvinism. This phenomenon, too, has pre-1967 origins. In 1924 Avraham Yitzhak Kook (1865-1935), the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Mandate Palestine, founded the Merkaz ha-Rav yeshiva (school for higher religious studies) in Jerusalem. There he taught “practical messianism”—the doctrine that returning to Zion and establishing a Jewish state were preparatory stages leading to the Messianic Era. Kook saw secular Zionists as the “Messiah’s donkey” (a reference to Zechariah 9:9)—God’s unwitting tool for hastening the coming of the Messiah.

Tzvi Yehuda Kook (1891-1982) radicalized his father’s teachings. His sermon on Israeli Independence Day, May 15, 1967, anticipated the ethos that eventually characterized post-1967 Israel.

“…Nineteen years ago, on the night when news of the United Nations decision in favor of the re-establishment of the state of Israel reached us, when the people streamed into the streets to celebrate and rejoice, I could not go out and join in the jubilation. I sat alone and silent; a burden lay upon me.… I could not accept the fact that indeed ‘they have…divided My land’ (Joel 4:2)! Yes [and now after 19 years] where is our Hebron—have we forgotten her?! Where is our Shechem [Nablus], our Jericho—where?! Have we forgotten them?!”

And all that lies beyond the Jordan—each and every clod of earth, every region, hill, valley, every plot of land, that is part of the Land of Israel—have we the right to give up even one grain of the Land of God?! On that night, nineteen years ago, during those hours, as I sat trembling in every limb of my body, wounded, cut, torn to pieces—I could not then rejoice.

When Israeli forces captured Jerusalem’s Old City three weeks later, Kook’s followers proclaimed these words a prophetic sign on the road to redemption. Kook and his followers regarded any withdrawal from “the eternal land of our forefathers” as religiously forbidden. They believed that settling all of the Land of Israel was the foremost of the 613 biblical commandments. Kook’s views informed the religious wing of the Greater Israel Movement and Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), the religio-nationalist settler movement founded in 1974, as well as settler leaders like Chanan Porat, a founder of the first West Bank settlement, Kfar Etziyon, established in September 1967 and Moshe Levinger, the principal figure of the Hebron/Kiryat Arba settlement established in 1968. Long before Kook’s views were openly articulated by cabinet ministers, as they have been since Benjamin Netanyahu returned for his second run as prime minister in 2009, they infused a new élan and direction into Israeli society, much as the kibbutz movement did before the 1967 war.

Joel Beinin is Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and professor of Middle East history at Stanford University and a contributing editor of Middle East Report.

Familiar Ruptures and Opportunities, 1967 and 2017

Noura Erakat

The 1967 war was a fundamental, damning failure for the Arab world. In the course of six short days, Israel expanded its jurisdiction across the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and the Syrian Golan Heights, as well as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. For 19 years, Arab states had regarded Israel as a foreign colony established by the collusion of imperial powers. Amid the anti-colonial fervor that animated much of the global south at the time, these states refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish homeland. They demanded that Palestinian refugees be allowed to return and given the right to govern themselves as promised by Britain, the League of Nations Mandate system and the UN Charter. Israel’s expansion of its territorial holdings blunted the force of those demands.

Among the less frequently cited deleterious effects of the 1967 war is the way in which it reified the juridical elision of Palestinian peoplehood and the attendant right of Palestinians to self-determination. This erasure was first accomplished with the drafting of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and then upon the incorporation of that text into the Palestine Mandate in 1922. Upon declaring its independence in 1948, Israel legally justified its right to statehood with reference to UN General Assembly Resolution 181, stipulating that Mandatory Palestine should be partitioned into an Arab and a Jewish state without discrimination as to the civil and religious rights of the minority populations. Israel denied that Palestinians had a similar right to statehood because Arabs had rejected Resolution 181.

Rather than correct this juridical erasure, UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed in an attempt to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, consecrated it. Resolution 242 predicated the return of Arab lands upon a permanent peace between Arab states and Israel. It failed to recognize the national rights of Palestinians, referring to them as a non-descript “refugee problem.” Egypt and Jordan, seeking to regain territories lost in the 1967 fighting and believing that Israel within its pre-1967 borders was there to stay, voted for Resolution 242. This failure catalyzed the Palestinian national movement, which took the helm of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1968 and insisted upon leading its own cause, rather than leaving it as a derivative concern of pan-Arabism.

The elision of Palestinian peoplehood remains central to the ongoing conflict as well as to Israel’s settler-colonial mechanisms of dispossession, removal and concentration of the native population. It was upon the fiction of Palestinian non-existence that Israel could construct a legal argument denying the de jure occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It is in accordance with this same fiction that Israel denies Palestinians the right to use armed force, as a matter of law, and deems all such incidents as criminal and terroristic. And of course, it is the fiction of non-peoplehood that permits Israel to deny Palestinian self-determination as a matter of positive right. The ambition to resist these conditions, and instead to inscribe the juridical peoplehood of Palestinians among other states in the form of recognition as well as within UN resolutions and procedures, drove the PLO’s legal and diplomatic agenda for nearly two decades.

Over the course of the early 1970s, the PLO achieved recognition as the sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people at the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the Non-Aligned Movement and the Organization of African States, as well as at the Arab League, over the protest of Jordan, which continued to lay claim to the West Bank. Having established the requisite groundwork among these regional bodies, the PLO turned its attention to the United Nations.

In 1974, it drafted General Assembly Resolution 3236, which aimed to supplant Resolution 242 as the guiding framework for establishing Middle East peace. Whereas 242 stipulated a permanent Arab peace with Israel without mutual recognition of Palestinians, 3236 reaffirmed “the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in Palestine, including: a) the right to self-determination without external interference; [and] b) the right to national independence and sovereignty.” UNGA Resolution 3236 was a coup as it enabled Palestinians to pursue a diplomatic strategy without having to recognize, negotiate with and reconcile with Israel. That same year, the PLO introduced and passed General Assembly Resolution 3237 recognizing the PLO as the sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and earning it non-member observer status at the UN. Together, Resolutions 3236 and 3237 created an alternative framework to UNSC Resolution 242 and re-inscribed the juridical status of the Palestinian people as a matter of international law, thus demonstrating the PLO’s efficacy.

Between 1974 and 1977, the PLO participated in the preparatory conferences culminating in the adoption of the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions with the purpose of regulating irregular combat. The Protocols effectively legitimized armed force employed by non-state actors in civil wars and, more pointedly, in wars of national liberation. For the PLO, however, the primary aim underpinning participation in the Protocols talks was a further inscription of its embryonic sovereignty. These ambitions may have yielded positive outcomes for the Palestinian liberation struggle at the height of the power of the Non-Aligned Movement and the prevalence of national liberation movements worldwide, but as the relative clout of these forces began to wane, the PLO’s strategy fell out of place. The PLO’s diminishing influence, marked by its exile to Tunisia, the decline in external funding, and the rise of internal political threats from Hamas and organic leaders in from the Territories, exacerbated this condition. In the late 1980s, the narrow pursuit of juridical recognition ultimately led the PLO to embark on a strategy of capitulation and accommodation best captured by the unfavorable terms of the 1993 Oslo agreement.

By entering into the Oslo accords, the PLO’s moderate flank achieved what it had wanted the most since the early 1970s: Israel’s recognition of the juridical status of Palestinians as a people. It achieved this goal in exchange for freedom. Oslo was a reformulated draft of the autonomy framework first captured by the 1979 Camp David accords establishing peace between Egypt and Israel. Autonomy, unlike statehood, did not link sovereignty and jurisdiction to all peoples and lands. Moreover, autonomy is equally available to oppressed minorities, indicating the irrelevance of peoplehood in its governing apparatuses. Statehood, which is available only to a people, was explicitly off—and never on—the negotiating table. Unlike the Palestinian negotiators in Washington who rebuffed Israel’s efforts in that direction, the PLO in the Oslo back channel accepted Israel’s terms. It also agreed to amend its charter, relinquishing its commitment to armed struggle.

Over the following 24 years of the Oslo era, Israel, with the close cooperation of the Palestinian Authority (PA), has operationalized autonomy and transformed it into a viable arrangement. Not only has autonomy facilitated the dramatic increase of the settler population from approximately 200,000 to 600,000, but it has also retooled Palestinian police forces into a security apparatus for the settlements and their attendant infrastructure. Israel has entrenched its settler-colonial enterprise in Area C, or 60 percent of the West Bank, and is on the cusp of annexing this land as a matter of law. Notably, Israel’s settler-dominated government has revived a discourse of the non-existence of a Palestinian people evidenced by renewed calls to transfer Palestinians to Jordan as well as the 2012 Levy Committee finding that there is no occupation. Denying the juridical status of Palestinian peoplehood today would provide Israel with a (dubious) legal argument that it is annexing land that belongs to no other sovereign. On the horizon looms a reversal of the PLO’s ultimate achievement to date.

Worse, perhaps, is the fact that indefinite military occupation has severely altered the territorial, juridical, geographic and social status quo in place before the start of hostilities in early June 1967. Rather than revolt against these conditions, the Fatah-dominated PA, which has effectively subordinated the PLO, continues to pursue a statehood strategy without regard to the evolving conditions or new realities of de jure discrimination tantamount to apartheid. The PA/PLO strategy does not even remain committed to the PLO’s vision articulated in its Declaration of Independence (1988) and has, at nearly every juncture, attempted to accommodate rather than resist Israel’s domination. Not everyone has suffered equally, which helps to explain this conundrum. The unending process of negotiations has significantly enriched a Palestinian economic and political elite, which has acquired a vested interest in the new status quo.

What has become clear is that the framework of Palestinian nationalism established in the aftermath of the 1967 war is no longer sufficient to drive a liberation movement. That framework has been assaulted, and today is mutilated to the point of non-recognition. While Israel’s settler-colonial regime remains the most significant obstacle to Palestinian freedom, the first step in combating it must be the removal of a Palestinian national and economic elite that makes it viable. At the very least, Palestinians must also articulate and establish an alternative national liberation framework.

The bad news is that a robust nationalist movement does not yet exist. The most significant national body to emerge since 1993 is the Boycott National Committee (BNC), which guides the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The BNC, however, has been resolutely clear that it is not an alternative to the PLO and that, in practice, the BDS movement is an international solidarity movement based on human rights norms and devoid of a political vision. The good news is that Palestinians are in a very familiar position.

As in the aftermath of the 1948 and 1967 wars, when Palestinians took tremendous losses and were plagued by inept leaders, they face devastating odds today. What is coming next is a more serious deterioration of conditions on the ground, signaled by bolder Israeli moves to consolidate colonial takings and a securitization of the West Bank, much like it has already achieved in Gaza, that deepens the vulnerability of Palestinian civilians. But there is an end to this downward spiral. At that point, or in its approximation, Palestinians will likely initiate a new chapter of resistance shaped by articulations of freedom responsive to the present-day status quo. Perhaps this assessment is overly optimistic but, at the bottom of the well, there is no way to go but up. Either Palestinians meet this challenge or accept their erasure. Such surrender is even more unlikely than the scenarios conjured by unbridled optimism. The inscription of Palestinian peoplehood in the juridical corpus is insufficient to ward off erasure. A people only exist to the extent that they resist their elimination; it is the act of resistance, and not the language of law, that ensures existence. A once vibrant PLO made that clear in the aftermath of the 1967 war, and the dismal conditions today demand a similar resuscitation of intrepid vision and leadership.

Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney, assistant professor at George Mason University and co-founding editor of Jadaliyya. This essay is based on work for her forthcoming book, tentatively titled Law as Politics in the Palestinian-Israel Conflict.

One Anniversary Among Many

Zachary Lockman

In 1984 Meron Benvenisti’s West Bank Data Project issued a report warning that Israel’s colonization of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) had passed the point of no return on the road toward irreversible de facto annexation. The long-term outcome, the report suggested, would likely be “a regime ominously similar to that of South Africa.” At the time there were some 28,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and another 76,000 in the belt of Jewish neighborhoods established after 1967 in and around East Jerusalem.

Today, 33 years later, with the fiftieth anniversary of Israel’s conquest of the remainder of Mandate Palestine upon us, the number of Jews living beyond the 1967 border is close to 800,000—about one of every eight Israeli Jews and now growing mainly by natural increase. Benvenisti’s forecast thus seems more prescient than ever. Of course, in politics things can change, sometimes rapidly and in surprising ways, but for the foreseeable future the prospect of a viable, sovereign Palestinian state being established in the West Bank and Gaza seems very remote, owing largely to Israeli intransigence enabled by unstinting US support and political cover. I would not put my money on Donald Trump altering this pathological relationship.

Yet some continue to see the two-state solution as viable, indeed the only game in town. In his valuable new book, A Half-Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict (California), Gershon Shafir explores how Israel rules the West Bank (Gaza is less central to his study) but rejects the characterization of its settlement project there as irreversible. Among other things he notes that, despite Israel’s best efforts over the past half-century, the great majority of settlers live close to the Green Line and that the built-up area of the settlements occupies no more than 2 percent of the West Bank, making a future evacuation technically feasible. Shafir acknowledges that the obstacles to Israeli withdrawal are political rather than geographic, but nonetheless insists that they are not insurmountable. Yet, because the forces within Israel supportive of a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians are so weak, he pins his hopes on the BDS movement, which he thinks should refocus its efforts on ending the occupation and welcome Israelis as allies in that struggle.

I summarize Shafir’s argument here not because I agree with it but because, unlike many other advocates of the two-state solution, he readily acknowledges the extent to which Israel’s colonization of the West Bank and Gaza can be seen as a continuation of Zionism’s drive, stretching back to the late nineteenth century, to pursue state building in Palestine through settlement, with the goal of securing as much land, and ultimately as much of the country, as possible. Before 1948 the fact that Palestine was under Ottoman imperial rule and then British colonial rule imposed constraints on Zionist immigration, settlement and state building. The displacement in 1947-1949 of 80 percent of the Palestinian population that had lived in the three quarters of Palestine that became Israel temporarily solved Zionism’s central dilemma—how to have the land but not its indigenous inhabitants. Nonetheless, the campaign to secure land for Jewish settlement within Israel never ceased and continues to this day, most starkly in the ongoing effort to expel the Bedouin of the northern Negev from their lands. After 1967 the project of Judaization was extended to the West Bank and Gaza (though in 2005 Gaza was consigned to a different fate).

It should not be surprising that, its core ideology, institutions and ethos fueled by a powerful narrative of victimhood and of national (and for many divine) redemption, this settler-colonial enterprise continues to settle and colonize. This is not to depict the Zionist project as driven by some inexorable or ahistorical logic: It has in fact forged its path through a process of trial and error, evolving in the process. Nor is it all-powerful: It continues to face significant challenges, including ongoing Palestinian resistance, unfavorable demographic realities, and a failure to secure for the occupation the kind of international legitimacy that Israel within its 1967 borders enjoys (but that the occupation erodes there, too). Israel seeks to resolve the dilemmas it faces through a variety of means, including the bantustanization of the West Bank, the outsourcing of aspects of the occupation to the Palestinian Authority, and the incarceration of the population of Gaza and repeated brutal military assaults on it. But these measures are not entirely coherent or effective, and they generate new problems and contradictions for Israel.

The occupation and colonization of the parts of Palestine which Israel conquered in 1967 clearly have their specificities, and it is clear that these ongoing projects have been central to many of the political, social, cultural and economic transformations that Israeli-Jewish society has experienced over the past half-century (and that have affected Israel’s Palestinian minority as well). So we should not lose sight of how what June 1967 set in motion altered the historical trajectory of Palestine, broadly defined, nor should we elide the difference between what goes on in the Occupied Territories and what goes on inside Israel. Nonetheless, the 1967 occupation is clearly embedded in a larger, more long-term story.

So perhaps, instead of fixating on the anniversary of the 1967 war, we should consider some other approaching dates that get much less attention. August 29 marks the one hundred and twentieth anniversary of the convening of the first Zionist Congress, which launched Zionism as an effective, modern political movement promising to rescue Europe’s Jews from antisemitism and persecution by securing a Jewish-majority nation-state in Palestine, notwithstanding the fact that that land was already inhabited. November 2 is the hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, which signaled Britain’s embrace of Zionism even as its military forces were conquering Palestine and for the first time made Zionism’s state-building project a realistic possibility. During the Mandate period the Palestinian national movement marked this latter anniversary with public protests; maybe this practice should be revived to highlight how the denial of the Palestinians’ human, civil and national rights continues to be enabled by an imperial power. In any case, given the current balance of forces in Palestine, the region and the world, as well as the disarray of the Palestinian national movement and its lack of a coherent or effective vision and strategy, it seems all too likely that more bleak anniversaries lie ahead.

Zachary Lockman is professor of modern Middle East history at New York University and a contributing editor of Middle East Report.

Resistance and Solidarity Across the Green Line

Maha Nassar

Of the many consequences of the 1967 war, one of the more unexpected has been the integration of the Palestinian citizens of Israel into the Palestinian national cause. Largely overlooked during the early years of the Arab-Israeli conflict, since 1967 Palestinians inside the Green Line (i.e., the 1949 armistice line) have gained prominence in Palestinian intellectual and political spheres. As we mark the passage of 50 years since the June war, we must recognize the efforts of these Palestinians, who are not only fighting for equal rights at home, but are working to bring greater awareness to the plight of Palestinians under occupation as well.

Israel has long tried to separate those Palestinians who managed to remain on their land and obtain Israeli citizenship from the majority who fled or were expelled from their homes. From 1948 until 1966 officials promoted the narrative that “Arab Israelis” were a content minority in a democratic state, despite being placed under harsh military rule. Far from being quiescent, scores of Palestinian individuals, intellectuals and political organizers in Israel challenged military rule and the Zionist ideology that underpinned it through a range of organized and everyday resistances. But with physical and political barriers between Israel and the Arab states severely restricting contact across the Green Line, most Palestinians and Arabs were unaware of this defiance within the state.

The 1967 war fundamentally changed this dynamic. The occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem meant that Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line could reconnect with one another for the first time in 19 years. Contact with the fedayeen emboldened some younger Palestinian citizens of Israel to take a more oppositional stance against the state. At the same time, many Palestinians in the Occupied Territories were inspired by the cultural and political resistance they saw among the Palestinians “inside,” who maintained their identity and fidelity to the Palestinian cause despite living under Israeli rule for nearly two decades. Israeli officials tried to disrupt these growing connections by barring Palestinian intellectuals and activists on both sides from traveling across the Green Line. Nonetheless, throughout the 1970s and 1980s Palestinian citizens of Israel gained greater visibility in the Palestinian, Arab and international arenas as they came to be seen as part of the larger Palestinian movement.

This visibility was dealt a major blow in the 1990s with the signing of the Oslo accords. By focusing almost exclusively on the conditions of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, the agreements effectively excised those living inside the Green Line from the Palestinian national agenda. But the eruption of the second intifada, and in particular the October 2000 killing of 13 unarmed Palestinian citizens of Israel who were marching in solidarity with those under occupation, served as a bitter reminder of how intertwined these struggles were. Since then a number of organizations inside Israel have initiated concrete, on-the-ground actions to work against the occupation and to highlight the relationship between the multiple forms of oppression and discrimination that Palestinians face. One of them is the grassroots Ta‘ayush Arab-Jewish Partnership, whose members have recently faced down Israeli attacks as they accompanied Palestinian farmers and shepherds to their fields in the West Bank.

To be sure, even as Palestinian activists continue to work together across the Green Line, numerous challenges remain. Israel still tries to isolate Palestinian citizens of Israel from the larger Palestinian national body through, among other things, the targeting of Christian and Bedouin Palestinian citizens for recruitment into the Israel Defense Forces. Others worry that members of the younger generation who are immersed in a Hebrew-language environment are finding it increasingly difficult to connect to their Arab literary and cultural identity. Moreover, many Palestinians and Arabs around the world still harbor misgivings about the “Arab Israelis,” assuming that they have betrayed the Palestinian cause by accepting Israeli citizenship, even if it is the price they pay for remaining rooted in their homeland.

Despite these obstacles, this solidarity and resistance work continues to make gains as Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line draw attention to the intersectionality of their respective struggles. In April and May Palestinians inside the Green Line launched numerous initiatives in support of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails who launched a hunger strike on April 17 that lasted 40 days. In the Nazareth studio of the Musawa satellite channel (which reaches audiences throughout the Arab world), anchors provided daily updates on the hunger strikers and their demands for more humane treatment in Israeli jails, as well as coverage of the numerous protests and demonstrations taking place inside the Green Line. The channel’s popular host Fadi Zgairy also took the “salt water challenge” on air to demonstrate his solidarity with the prisoners, who were sustaining themselves with a daily glass of salt water in the absence of food. And on May 22, scores of municipalities throughout the Galilee, Nazareth, Little Triangle and Naqab regions joined Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere in observing a one-day general strike to support the prisoners and their demands.

Today, as the occupation enters its sixth decade and as Israeli state discrimination against its Palestinian citizens nears the end of its seventh, recognizing such acts of solidarity and resistance across the Green Line is necessary if we are to envision a just solution for all the peoples living on this land.

Maha Nassar is assistant professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona and author of Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford).

Fifty Years of Disavowal

Ilana Feldman

Israel has now occupied the Gaza Strip, West Bank and Golan Heights for 50 years. And throughout this long time it has disavowed its role and responsibilities as an occupier. By annexing land (Jerusalem and the Golan) it has claimed sovereign authority over occupied territory. By supporting settlements and the infrastructure they require it has acted as if these territories are Israel’s to do with what it wants. And all of this Israel has done as it has tried to undermine the capacity of the Palestinian population to thrive—or even remain on their land. Disavowal has always been a central occupation tactic, but its forms have shifted over the years. It seems fitting to mark the ignominious fiftieth anniversary by reflecting on these forms.

When Israel first gained control over the territories in June 1967 it deployed two forms of disavowal: 1) the claim that these territories were not occupied in the sense covered by the Fourth Geneva Convention, but rather were “administered” or “disputed” and 2) the argument that Israeli occupation was “benign.” Even as there might seem to be something contradictory in these disavowals, they generally went together. The first allowed the Israeli government to argue that, under international law, it had no particular obligations to the population and no particular constraints in its use of the land and its resources. The second permitted it to suggest that it was a benevolent ruler, anyway, so its lack of responsibility should not be troubling to international observers.

The first intifada against the occupation, which began in 1987, put an end to the language of benign occupation. It was increasingly hard to sustain this claim in the face of the widespread and evident Palestinian rejection of it and the extensive Israeli use of force to put down the uprising (captured in Yitzhak Rabin’s notorious policy of “breaking bones”). But the argument about administered territories remained a key Israeli government line until the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993 and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority the following year.

The Oslo process divided Palestinian territories into three areas reflecting the degree of Palestinian autonomy and Israeli military and administrative control over these zones. The Oslo years were marked by a significant expansion of Israeli settlement in the West Bank, with an infrastructure to match, but they were also a time when the status of the occupation was muddled. While Palestinians never had territorial contiguity, freedom of movement or anything approaching real independence, the idea that a Palestinian state was (supposed to be) coming led many observers to imagine that the occupation was already over.

The second intifada of 2000, and Israeli military re-invasions of Palestinian population centers in 2002, brought the occupation back into focus for many. But disavowal then took another turn. In 2005 Israel pulled its settlers and soldiers out of the Gaza Strip and declared the occupation of this territory over. But settler-colonialism is not required for occupation and Israeli control over Gazan lives did not cease with the pullback. In 2007, after Hamas gained control of Gaza, Israel declared it to be a “hostile territory.” This nomenclature not only continued the disavowal of occupation, but also seemed to aver that the beleaguered Gaza Strip was an entity with power and military force equivalent to Israel. The designation was accompanied by a ramping up of Israeli restrictions on the movement of goods into Gaza.

Each of these mechanisms for refusing the responsibilities of the occupier laid out by international law, and for deflecting attention from the nature of Israeli practice and repression in the Occupied Territories, has been deployed alongside an ongoing and increasing entrenchment of Israeli control over Palestinian lands and people. In the West Bank this entrenchment involves the continued seizure of land to support settlement expansion, the development of a separate infrastructure for Jewish populations, and the increasing immobilization and separation from each other of Palestinian populations. In Gaza it has evolved into squeezing of the territory and its population, inward, away from the boundaries. Gazan fishermen no longer have much available sea in which to work. Gazans have no consistently available crossings for travel by land—whether into Israel and Egypt or further afield. They are not safe from assault from the sky, by drone or warplane.

Palestinians have resisted occupation from its inception. International observers have a responsibility first to recognize this ongoing, brutal occupation and second to stand with Palestinians in opposing it.

Ilana Feldman is professor of anthropology at George Washington University.

A Mosaic of Control

Gershon Shafir

The legal historian Lauren Benton has observed that the European empires from the fifteenth century on were constituted by two simple legal principles, both derived from settler-colonial practices. On the one hand, the empires sought to export their legal systems to protect their citizens who colonized the imperial territory and to expand the domain of European cultural mission. On the other hand, they resisted the complete annexation of their imperial territories and the assumption of full sovereignty, since that would have extended citizenship to all inhabitants. This contradiction created a mosaic of military colonies, enclaves connected by corridors surrounded by areas outside of imperial control, areas under martial law and states of exception. Sovereignty in settler colonies, therefore, remained incomplete, elastic and contested. To add the missing element to Benton’s framework, the uneven geographies of settler-colonialism are equally dependent on the colonial power’s withdrawals and redeployments in response to the occupied population’s resistance.

In spite of the geographical and historical differences between early modern European and contemporary Israeli colonization, Benton’s observations serve as a fitting framework for an account of the tangled web of a half-century of Israeli occupation. The Israeli occupation has evolved in the crucible of this very same paradox—the attempt to annex territory without its Palestinian residents, who consequently remain a legal anomaly. Jewish settlers, as well as all other Israelis and all Jews (namely, people who fall under the Law of Return) for the duration of their stay in the Occupied Territories, and the territory of their settlements are subject to Israeli legal frameworks. In contrast, for occupied Palestinians the Israeli military serves as the judicial, legislative and executive authority. Palestinians are subject to Jordanian law and the orders of military governors. Though it is the occupation that places Palestinians under a military regime and, therefore, under military law, it is not the occupation but the settler colonization that creates a dual legal system for the West Bank, an apartheid regime. Withholding citizenship from occupied Palestinians colors Israel as a colonial empire builder.

One of the central features of Israeli occupation, and means of control, is the multiplicity of jurisdictions under which it places Palestinians, making it all the harder for them to act in unison. The Oslo accords divide the West Bank into three zones. Area A encompasses eight large Palestinian cities that enjoy full Palestinian civilian and security control and make up 18 percent of the West Bank. Area B includes 440 Palestinian villages and their surrounding areas, under Palestinian civil and Israeli military control, encompassing 22 percent of the West Bank. Between 165 and 190 checkpoints, commissioned and decommissioned according to the levels of Palestinian resistance, control movement within Areas A and B; many of these areas are non-contiguous “islands” separated by portions of Area C. Area C is the only area with territorial contiguity. It includes the areas within settler local and regional council boundaries, is under full Israeli civilian and security control, and makes up a full 60 percent of the West Bank. But Area C also includes 297,000 Palestinians in 532 communities and villages. The land belonging to some of the villagers in Area C is found in Areas A and B, and their access to it is restricted through multiple checkpoints. The Palestinian Authority provides health and educational services to the remaining Palestinian population in Area C, while the construction and maintenance of infrastructure are Israel’s responsibility. A special arrangement places 20 percent of the Arab city of Hebron, Area H2 within Area C, under full Israeli control.

The completed part of the separation wall runs in large part through the Occupied Territories and has created a series of geographical anomalies of its own. The “seam zone” (merchav hatefer)—the area between the Green Line and the wall itself—is home to more than 57,000 Palestinians. Another 100,000 Palestinians live east of their land, which is located west of the wall. Residents needing access to their fields require special permits from the Civil Administration. On the occasion of the separation wall’s construction, Kafr ‘Aqab, Shu‘afat and part of the Qalandia refugee camps were separated from Jerusalem, to which they had belonged since the annexation of East Jerusalem to Israel. There is even a single-family enclave, the Ammar family’s house, trapped between the colony of Elkana and the separation wall; it has its own special gate in the wall.

Finally, there is the Gaza Strip, from which Israel withdrew its settlers and military in August 2005, making this area the least occupied among the Palestinian territories. Though Gaza has no colonists or settlers, Israel still maintains “effective control” over the Strip, the defining characteristic of belligerent occupation. Since the takeover of Gaza by Hamas in 2007, Israel has imposed a blockade of supplies to Gaza. Israel maintains direct control over all six of Gaza’s land crossings that border on Israel, as well as its airspace and seacoast. Israel opens some of the land crossings to allow in hundreds of trucks each day with goods it deems non-military that supply the amount of calories Israel has calculated to be sufficient per person. Most unusually, Israel maintains Gaza’s population registry to control the entry and departure of its residents, in effect retaining the governmental authority to determine who is and who is not a lawful resident of Gaza. Finally, Gaza remains dependent upon Israel’s supply of the majority of its water, electricity and telecommunications, and still uses the Israeli shekel as its legal tender. Gaza, in short, remains occupied, but from the outside.

Under the legal umbrella of occupation, Israel has been engaging in an intensive colonization project to extend its pre-1948 state-building project and unite the new with the ancient Jewish homeland. But what appears to be 50 years of solid accomplishments of sustained colonization is an opportunistic project that uses now one method of land acquisition and now another, establishes now one type of settlement and now another, settles one group in one part of the West Bank and another in a different part. Each segment—the Allon Plan settlers on the security frontier, those in search of a suburban lifestyle, religious Zionist and messianic groups, haredim—settled on its own terms and in areas of its own choice. “Settlement” carries within its structure all the diverse and conflicting interests of Israeli society and in many respects remains a hollow undertaking. The mosaic-like geography, the legal contortions, the administrative maze and even the blatant illegality of a considerable part of settlement construction all demonstrate that Israeli colonization is not a single or single-minded project and is vulnerable to challenges and pressures. The settlements’ and the occupation’s future, as well as the future of Palestinians within its geographic and legal mosaic, is yet to be written.

Gershon Shafir is professor of sociology at the University of California-San Diego, past president of the Israel Studies Association and author of A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict (California).

Notes on a Preoccupation

Omar Jabary Salamanca

Around 2002, as Palestinians were again up in arms to defy Israel’s relentless and vicious colonial policies, a renowned Israeli graphic designer, David Tartakover, released a poster series titled “Stain.” The prints display a glowing red blot in the shape of the West Bank over portraits of Israeli politicians and of Tartakover himself. Later, the artist recycled this design into other works, including a piece to mark “35 years of occupation,” the book cover of A Civilian Occupation and a poster titled “Stain, Herzl,” which features Theodor Herzl, one of the founding fathers of Zionism.

The later image is for me evocative of a hostile and widespread settler imaginary, with critical material effects to be sure. This imaginary for the past five decades, and particularly since the signature of the Oslo colonial treaty, has come to define how insiders and outsiders to the Israel question are often socialized into, think about and act on Palestine. It is, in many ways, a fabulous visual illustration that reduces a people´s century-old struggle to its contemporary minimum expression.

The West Bank, the red stain in this image, reveals itself as an abstract and dislocated figuration that can be read in terms of the elisions and erasures it produces. The most obvious is the spatial fragmentation that occurs in the replacement of contemporary Palestine, from the river to the sea, with what could well be a place called Judea and Samaria. Attached to the spatial imaginary is a temporal obliteration, the seamless transcendence of 1967 as singular historical point of departure and the collapsing of everything prior. The elusiveness of this hollow land, like cartographic depictions often do, additionally severs the social body politic within and extending beyond its opaque boundaries—Palestinians, with as many inhabitants living in the diaspora as in the land of milk and honey, are nowhere to be seen. Though more subtle, perhaps, is the conceptual partition emerging from this representation. Occupation, now as ontological certainty with its own spatial and temporal boundaries, disavows the broader collective experience and structural condition of Palestinian dispossession and displaces it with a singular, exceptional and temporary event.

In the shadow of oblivion, a particular fiction begins to sink in. Palestine becomes the West Bank; the West Bank, and the West Bank only, becomes synonymous with occupation; and, in turn, occupation redefines, decenters and whitewashes the settler-colonial and racial capitalist nature and trajectory of Zionism—after all, kibbutzism was always a bigoted negation of socialism and, today, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, not Modi’in Illit or Beitar Illit, are the major colonial settlements in Palestine.

This abstraction, however, also operates as a productive and cautionary tale. Occupation, understood as a legal and technocratic affair, corrupts the soul of an otherwise moral and necessary settler utopia—one marked by its own modern experience of erasure yet inevitably haunted by emptied houses, erased villages, devastated communities and the ghosts of those that die(d) for living. The West Bank metamorphoses into a convenient container for settlers on the proper side of a malleable Green Line, a site to dump their own sins, fears and pangs of conscience. This safe space absolves Zionism, and Israel itself, of confronting its criminal past while attempting to contain its boundless thuggish present. Simultaneously, the West Bank and the possibility of an end to its occupation, enables a refuge for liberal ideas of reconciliation and peace without social justice—an illusion that temporarily appeases embarrassment and guilt while cementing an endless time of injustice.

In the last instance, the perimeter of this blood-like stain, contained by the personification of Zionism and a lingering emblem of occupation, determines and prefigures an impossible Palestinian futurity. If there is a cure for the Zionist hemorrhage, then the answer must necessarily pass through and be contained within the strict boundaries of the West Bank. Relinquishing this territory, however, becomes itself an impossibility sustained through capital, violence, colonial amnesia and existential settler anxieties. The West Bank story becomes tautology; the stain must somehow disappear.

But the stain won’t go away. The cracks in this settler imaginary have become so deep, its contradictions so surreal, that they are no longer possible to hide and repair; the hemorrhage is terminal. Underneath, out of the fissures of this madness, a rebellious people are finding oxygen in unfettered imaginaries and practices that reclaim different ways of looking and listening, seeing and hearing—beyond the hollow promise of the state, outside the modern glossary and imperatives of racial capitalism and colonialism, past technocratic formulas of messianic solutionism. This radical imaginary is both necessary and transformative. It renders visible and challenges the ways in which structural oppression and inequality operate, recognizes how these mechanisms of domination are made common sense, and ultimately threatens to dissolve the iron cage. These dangerous potentialities constitute a fierce battlefield, and, as on other occasions, are being responded to with an extraordinary degree of violence, in Palestine and elsewhere.

Amid the hypocrisy of imperial insolence and the crumbling ruins of the current disorder, today, like yesterday, we observe a century of settler-colonial occupation, we mark the determination of a people to remain alive and stay on the ground as they continue a struggle for return, land, dignity, freedom and autonomy. We cheer the courage of a movement, beyond the certitudes of government and party politics, with its ups and downs, learning from past and present mistakes, in dialogue and solidarity with other struggles, accumulating knowledges and experiences from Palestine to Standing Rock, from Rojava to Chiapas, and from Ferguson and South Africa to Andhra Pradesh and Mahalla. We support recurring eruptions as moments that define a movement in motion, situated in the longue durée, navigating different understandings of what we are and who we could become in spite of all odds. We are in this together but not everybody stands in the same power position. This understanding is crucial for thinking how our various communities can and should be in solidarity with one another.

When Palestine and Palestinians are seen in this light, in transition, beyond the narrow perspective of Zionist settler-colonialism, tied to other struggles for liberation, we can begin to envision collectively what Palestinian futurity might look like and how we might bring it into being.

Omar Jabary Salamanca is lecturer in the Department of Conflict and Development at Ghent University.

Against Occupation

Sobhi Samour

Once the e-mails announcing talks, conferences and book projects about the fiftieth anniversary of the “occupation” started landing in my inbox, I felt a sense of trepidation, foreboding and irritation. My annoyance was caused, in many instances, by the regurgitation of conventional wisdom and moralizing about the irrationality and unsustainability of the “occupation.” As Salim Tamari observed in 1994, “[N]o Arab society has been researched, analyzed and written about as much as Palestinian society, and yet remained so poor in the theoretical treatment of its subject.” In the age of instant punditry, think tanks and self-promoting experts, this assessment sounds even more pertinent.

What, then, is left to say about the “occupation”? One could start by noting that it is a misnomer, as it suggests both temporariness and a static situation devoid of movement. Israel without the “occupation” is 19 years old; Israel with the “occupation” 50; and, to boot, the Oslo process that some think was supposed to end “occupation” is almost half the age of the “occupation” itself. And throughout this process, the size of the territory that Israel (presumably temporarily) occupies has steadily increased, hilltop by hilltop. One must live in an acute state of cognitive dissonance to assume that Israel could sever itself from the “occupation” in much the same way that an army would withdraw from a foreign territory. Indeed, giving the “occupation” an explanatory primacy—often the result of tying one’s research agenda to the downward trajectory of the Palestinian leadership, giving credence to the feigned concern of EU diplomats, ignoring the double-speak of Washington or basking in the warmth emanating from the fuzzy rhetoric of liberal Zionists—has had devastating consequences for the development of critical scholarship.

This is not to suggest that “occupation” is permanent or that its everyday horrors do not require our attention and documentation. Nor is it to say that the demand to end “occupation,” along with defense of the Palestinian right to self-determination, should not be at the forefront of mobilization for international solidarity. But just as Israel bars Palestinian refugees from returning to their land and hinders Palestinians inside Israel from achieving equal rights, so it is inconceivable that Israel will ever voluntarily end the “occupation.” Therefore, as an epistemological category, as a framework that informs our political praxis and commitment to emancipatory scholarship, “occupation” fails. Israel and the “occupation” are not independent categories that can be studied separately and then brought together, but rather must be understood as forming each other as the outcome of a larger historical process. One may quibble about whether such a process started in Basel in 1897 or before, but it did receive a significant boost in 1917 in the form of the Balfour Declaration, gained a major diplomatic victory at the UN General Assembly in 1947, captured its “dowry” in 1967, was temporarily disrupted in 1987, institutionalized a political split in 2007 and, in 2017, had to grapple with a 40-day hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners. The politics underlying each of these single dates, and many more, cannot be grasped individually but must be read together as occurring within a continuum. If, to use a Hegelian expression, the truth is the whole, then each of these parts—including the “occupation”—make up the settler-colonial whole.

A satisfactory contribution to theorizing the “occupation” can only be achieved if it is systematically interwoven with the conditions of Palestinian refugees and those living inside Israel to reflect on the persistence of the Palestine question. Conversely, using the “occupation” as an overdetermining factor not only produces theory that revolves around appearance of “occupation” instead of its settler-colonial essence, but also, wittingly or not, feeds the fragmentation of Palestinians and undermines the collective political Palestinian identity informed by return, equal rights and an end to foreign domination. Undoing this analytical separation, in which the epistemological category of “occupation” becomes an anti-dialectical device, can indeed provide theory as a weapon. In this theoretical arsenal, settler-colonialism supersedes “occupation.” The latter is not the cause of the conflict or a turning point but the consequence of Israel’s settler-colonial logic; it does not constitute a historical accident; it is not irrational; it does not persist due to institutional inertia, as questioning the legitimacy of colonizing Judea and Samaria would also mean having to question the legitimacy of colonizing the Galilee or the Naqab. Nor is the “occupation” an ugly appendage to an otherwise democratic Israel—to paraphrase Karl Marx, a people that occupies another cannot itself be free.

I do not intend to read the history of Zionist settler-colonialism as a process without a subject, or to understand “occupation” as a teleological product of it. The agency of those on the receiving end continues to throw a spanner in its works, thwarting it from achieving its ultimate ends. Rather, these reflections follow critical contributions that have seen through the veil of “occupation” and are grasping the essence underlying it—that ending the “occupation” cannot be achieved by demanding such, but only by overturning the whole that sustains it. Needless to say, the essence is only slowly trickling down to theoretical praxis and, categorically, has no chance of becoming the political praxis informing the existing Palestinian leadership. In both the occupied West Bank and the occupied Gaza Strip, Palestinians are increasingly referring to the ruling authorities as a second “occupation.” Israel has long tried to institutionalize indirect rule by entrusting an indigenous leadership to manage the unruly natives on its behalf. The Village League, for instance, ended in disaster. But one must grudgingly admit that, so far, the Palestinian Authority has been a relatively successful institution through which Israel mediates its rule by linking its collaboration with material rewards, which, in turn, cement a social base of support. As it is, and while I would like nothing more than to be proven wrong, I look forward to reading more reflections on the “occupation” on its sixtieth anniversary.

Sobhi Samour has a doctorate in economics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London and was Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University during the spring 2017 term.

Jekyll and Hyde in East Jerusalem

Mandy Turner

My research mostly focuses on the policies and practices of Western governments and multilateral agencies in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT), and so I will concentrate my comments on these governments and agencies, to whom I will refer, for reasons of shorthand, as the “international community” (despite the label’s conceptual inadequacies). I will also focus on East Jerusalem, whose annexation by Israel in 1967 makes its experience of the occupation a specific one: It exposes the extensive practices of “Judaization” powered by Israel’s aspirations to make Jerusalem its undivided capital, isolation from the rest of the OPT by the separation wall and the permit system, and disintegration of the Palestinian economy and society. Indeed, the experience of annexation has meant that the East Jerusalemite Palestinian population has been marginalized while a number of struggles take place around it (but are largely beyond its control). These struggles are between Israel and the Palestinian Authority/Palestine Liberation Organization; between Israel and Jordan; and between Jordan and the PA/PLO. East Jerusalemites are locked out of these crucial struggles because they lack leadership since Orient House, the operational residence of the PLO in the city, was closed down in 2001 by Israeli military order, and has not been allowed to reopen. Since then, any meetings in the city deemed to involve PLO officials are stopped by military order. And, of course, the PA is not allowed to operate in East Jerusalem, either.

In this context, the policies and actions of the international community toward East Jerusalem suffer from a form of psychosis known as the Jekyll and Hyde Syndrome. The novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, tells of a man with a split personality—between someone who performs good works (Dr. Jekyll) and someone who does bad deeds (Mr. Hyde). The story has come to signify a person who is vastly different in moral character from one situation to the next—which, I argue, perfectly encapsulates the actions of the international community in East Jerusalem and the wider OPT.

The international community’s Jekyll and Hyde Syndrome is the product of two fundamental contradictions. The first relates to the disjuncture between what we could call the “high” politics of diplomacy and Track One negotiations related to the currently non-existent peace process (including discussions about the status of Jerusalem), and the “low” politics of aid and development cooperation (where the international community supports the Palestinian presence in East Jerusalem). The second contradiction relates to the disjuncture between, on the one hand, Western governments’ support for the state of Israel and their reluctance to use tools available to them to prevent Israel eradicating the Palestinian presence in the city; and, on the other hand, their declared support for a two-state solution with Jerusalem as the capital of both states and international support for the Palestinian presence.

And it is these fundamental contradictions that allows the international community to claim it does a lot in East Jerusalem; but it means critics are right to say the international community is not doing enough.

To return to the Jekyll and Hyde analogy, if Jekyll supports the two-state solution with Jerusalem as the shared capital of both states and gives money to the weaker party to assist in keeping this vision alive, Hyde makes sure that Jekyll does not put economic or political pressure on Israel, the dominant party, which is trying to undermine the internationally accepted solution. Maybe we can even stretch the analogy further. In the novel, Jekyll tries to destroy Hyde by drinking a special potion, but this potion allows the evil Hyde, not the ethical Jekyll, to take over. Maybe we can think about that potion as being the 1993 Oslo accords and the ensuing framework, which have accelerated the contradictions in the policies of the international community in Jerusalem.

One obvious form of the international community’s engagement is its insistence on the illegality of Israel’s occupation and annexation of East Jerusalem despite attempts by Israel to change the international consensus. It also continually confirms its support for the status quo regarding the Holy Sites as codified in the 1994 Wadi ‘Araba peace agreement between Israel and Jordan. The second is represented in the aid programs funding key sectors of the East Jerusalem Palestinian economy and society, such as education, social services, health, economic development, cultural heritage and tourism.

There are, of course, dozens of donors and UN agencies operating in East Jerusalem (and the OPT), and they all have different emphases and mandates. Some are regarded as being more “pro-Israel,” while others are regarded to be more “pro-Palestinian.” These differences are visible each time there is a vote in the European Union among member states or at the UN on issues related to Israel and Palestine.

So much for Dr. Jekyll.

Now for Mr. Hyde.

By leaving discussion of Jerusalem to final status negotiations, Oslo largely gave Israel a free hand to try to change the status quo. In this context, the international community has not done enough to stop Israel from restricting Palestinian political activity and organization in East Jerusalem, or shutting off East Jerusalem to the rest of the OPT thus choking economic and cultural interchange. There is a fundamental lack of political will to restrain and oppose Israel’s annexation and its policies that have created negative political, economic and social circumstances for East Jerusalemite Palestinians. And yet, in recent years, the international community has expressed increasing alarm at the accelerating problems for Palestinians in East Jerusalem. On paper it calls for the implementation of international law vis-a-vis East Jerusalem, but then fails to use any of the mechanisms it has to ensure they are implemented. Indeed, quite the opposite: While the UN is forced to steer a course of “neutrality,” relations between Israel and Western governments have never been better. There is, of course, the “unshakable alliance” between the US and Israel: a free trade agreement since 1985, a $3 billion military aid package per year (including, as one of the last acts of the Barack Obama presidency, a ten-year pact with $38 billion of military aid, the biggest pledge of US military assistance ever made), and diplomatic support in international forums. And in terms of EU-Israel relations, in the past 20 years, economic, cultural and scientific connections have increased and deepened. Certainly the EU is in confrontation with Israel regarding the labeling of goods from settlements in the OPT, but is this dispute really significant? Even when it comes to such an anodyne gesture as supporting Palestine’s membership in UNESCO, less than one third of EU member states voted in favor—while at the same time the EU continually draws attention to Israel’s erosion of Palestinian cultural heritage in the city and the wider OPT.

Consequently, unlike the character in the novel, Jekyll and Hyde have been able to coexist reasonably comfortably in the body of the international community in terms of how it relates to East Jerusalem. And while this situation persists, the Palestinian presence in Jerusalem and the Palestinians’ right to the city will continue to be undermined and eroded.

Mandy Turner is director of the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem and a senior visiting fellow at the London School of Economics’ Middle East Centre.

Settler-Colonialism and Neoliberal Capitalism

Andy Clarno

After 100 years of imperial support for Zionism, 70 years of an ongoing nakba and 50 years of military occupation, Israel aggressively continues to colonize Palestinian land and displace Palestinian people. Along with direct expropriations by settlers and the state, Israel’s settler-colonial project now operates through neoliberalism. But the connections between settler-colonialism and neoliberal capitalism have not received sufficient attention.

In the Occupied Territories, Israel’s colonial project in the era after the 1993 Oslo agreement involves concentrating the Palestinian people into a series of isolated enclosures and colonizing the rest of the land. This colonial project is closely articulated with the neoliberalization of the economy. As Israel underwent a transition from a state-managed economy focused on the domestic market to a corporate-driven economy integrated into global markets, Israeli business elites envisioned a “peace process” that would open Arab markets to Israeli and US investors. After Oslo, Israel quickly signed free trade agreements with Egypt and Jordan.

Neoliberalism dovetailed with settler-colonialism to transform the Palestinians into a truly disposable population. Whereas Israel previously incorporated Palestinians into the economy as low-wage workers, the state now treats jobs in Israel as a privilege for “good behavior.” Reduced dependence on Palestinian labor enabled Israel to carry out its project of enclosing and abandoning the occupied Palestinian population. Although Oslo led to the growth of a small Palestinian elite, most Palestinians confront a perpetual crisis of poverty and unemployment. In the West Bank, the two principal options for employment are constructing Israeli settlements on confiscated Palestinian land or joining the PA security forces and helping Israel to suppress Palestinian resistance.

While Palestinians are concentrated into urban enclaves, Palestinian villages in the West Bank have become the front lines of neoliberal colonization. Many Palestinian villagers who used to work in Israel have attempted a return to farming in recent years. But farming has become increasingly untenable due to a severe agricultural crisis manufactured by the state through land confiscations and restrictions on access to land, water, and local and international markets. In addition, Palestinian villagers confront intense violence from Israeli settlers, including unilateral expropriations of village lands and brutal attacks on farmers trying to reach their fields.

Although driven by political motives, the colonization of Palestinian village land is shaped by neoliberalism. To begin with, the West Bank villages are undergoing a process of rapid urbanization. Palestinians increasingly describe their villages as cities or slums. In part, this shift is due to the densification of the built environment. Under Oslo, the PA has jurisdiction over land use and planning within the core residential areas of the villages (Area B). But at least 75 percent of the land in most villages is designated as Area C—including cultivated fields, grazing land, and land set aside for future residential and commercial development. Israel has jurisdiction over land use and planning in Area C and systematically refuses to issue permits for Palestinians to develop this land. As a result, new construction is concentrated in the existing residential areas of Palestinian villages, which are becoming increasingly dense while also expanding vertically.

In describing the urbanization of their villages, Palestinians are also commenting on the sharpening class divisions. When asked about the biggest problem in the villages, residents generally point to the crisis of unemployment. Situating the crisis historically, they argue that Israel encouraged fallahin (peasants) to leave their lands in the 1970s by opening the Israeli labor market. This move provided Israeli firms with a source of cheap labor and enabled the Israeli government to confiscate lands that were not being cultivated. Yet the introduction of permits, closures and the wall has eliminated access to jobs for thousands of Palestinians. People without Israeli permits or jobs with the PA have few options in the villages. At the same time, Palestinian elites are buying land and building multi-million dollar mansions in the villages. Moreover, because restrictions on land use in Area C have inflated the value of the land in Area B, wealthy Palestinian speculators are now building residential towers in the villages.

High rates of unemployment, a manufactured farm crisis, limited space for expansion, growing inequality, and attacks by settlers and the state put pressure on the rural poor to leave their villages and seek opportunities in the cities. Some Palestinians describe this as a neoliberal, do-it-yourself form of expulsion. The rural exodus not only contributes to overcrowding in the urban enclaves, it also opens the door for another form of neoliberal colonization—land purchases by Zionist organizations.

In the 1980s, Israel began encouraging private investors to buy land from West Bank Palestinians. The state facilitated the process by waiving requirements that land sales be publicized and allowing people involved in the transactions to conceal their identities. As a result, transfers of ownership over the most contested land on earth are masked in secrecy and obfuscation.

A vast web of organizations and individuals mobilizes millions of dollars to purchase Palestinian land in Jerusalem and the West Bank. Much of the funding comes from wealthy international donors and is funneled through tax-exempt organizations in the US and offshore tax shelters. The process generally involves an Arab “front man” who negotiates the transaction and transfers the land to an Israeli company.

Despite the secrecy, Palestinians are well aware of the process. Community organizers complain about land sales and individuals share stories about being offered “blank checks” worth millions of dollars for their land. When a poor Palestinian buys a new car or builds a new house, neighbors often suspect he has sold land. The lack of transparency creates not only suspicion, but also the potential for fraud—including the use of forged title deeds by organizations claiming to buy land.

Dating back to the early twentieth century, Zionist organizations have presented land purchases as a consensual, market-based practice that has nothing to do with colonialism. Yet the land market is embedded in the broader settler-colonial context. The settler state not only facilitates the transactions, but it also creates the crisis conditions that lead some people to sell their land. The “free” market in land, therefore, is a neoliberal mechanism of colonization. And Israel’s settler-colonial project is now a process of neoliberal colonization.

Andy Clarno is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois-Chicago and an editor of Middle East Report. This essay is based on work for his book Neoliberal Apartheid: Palestine/Israel and South Africa After 1994 (Chicago).

A Constant Process of Becoming

Kareem Rabie

When I agreed to write a post marking the fiftieth anniversary of Israel’s occupation and annexation of parts of the West Bank and Gaza, Sinai and Golan, I began by looking at the 2007 iteration of this forum. Back then, contributors circled around similar themes: What does it mean for an occupation to look and be described as so intractable in some ways, and so temporary in others? Ten years later those questions are still relevant, and it’s not hard to imagine MERIP contributors asking them again in 2027.

Anniversaries compel us to look backward, and the fact that we’re still asking similar things shows how much 1967 has oriented Palestinian history. Ten years ago, Samera Esmeir convincingly argued that a politics of amnesia and the shifting definitions of occupation have relegated events like those of 1948 to an irrevocable past. She pointed out that the demands for a state have happened in response to and within the dispossession that has given it weight as an appropriate solution to the problems of occupation.

It’s not only the state-like process that frames our history and political frameworks in ways that reinforce the problems of the present or reiterate historical claims made within the terms of the fragmentation they produce. Part of the legacy of 1967 is to have given us a narrow political imaginary, based on a resuscitation of cultural legacies of Palestinian-ness. Given the real geographical fragmentation of Palestinians, and the difficulties in unifying atomized communities, this imaginary makes sense. Yet it also works toward a kind of exclusion, and a graying out of continuities and discontinuities between Palestinians in different places, with different experiences, different class bases or aspirations, and so on.

Generally, the idea of occupation as a moment of rupture has meant that much of our history has been understood in terms of an agrarian, prelapsarian peace disrupted by the impositions of Zionist colonial modernity. It’s not difficult to see a contradiction when we’re talking about some of the longest-inhabited and most world-historically important cities on the planet, crusades, waves of colonization, intervention and so on.

Lisa Taraki has written about some of the critiques of pre-1987 intifada cultural festivals and forms of cultural politicization that emerged after 1967—the “museumization” of Palestinian culture. She describes a styrofoam Palestinian village built in Birzeit in 1984, and quotes Mohamed Al-Batrawi complaining about the absurdity of a festival explaining village life to a people who mainly live in villages, and don’t need to eat replica musakhan or za‘tar. Salim Tamari has shown some of the ways in which Palestinian urban populations are left out; he and Ted Swedenburg have traced the emergence of agrarian identity and how it has been mobilized to organize political claims. Idealization of this kind of Palestinian presence was a response to 1967, and it led to a specific version of village life being sanctified in political imagination. Consequently, other ways of life no longer fit the narrative.

If claims of Palestinian historical presence are responsive and based on political need, we’re dead reckoning our national understanding and political trajectory. And we’re doing it with relatively recent and contextual terms we have taken to be stable and meaningful.

How does this all touch the ground? My first major research project is on state building and privatization as viewed through real estate development, and I’ve found a similar tension in master plans for the future, for “the day after” occupation. Today, the predominant liberal/international solution to the question of Palestine is economic development, and many actors explicitly argue for modernization in terms of the national economy. But those interventions take the present for granted, work to produce the kind of Palestine in which they would like to intervene, and enable precedent and possibilities for ongoing intervention. I’m thinking here of large-scale housing and real estate development—massive projects that require significant capital investment, state support, assertions of eminent domain and so on. For families and aspirants, housing in particular produces and orients social and economic relations through the promise of a different kind of lifestyle in a different kind of place, through debt relations and through local governance. (This is a subtle difference from some recent critiques that focus on rent seeking as a primary motivation among foreign capitalist classes and institutions. Surely rent is a big part of it. But I think that as Palestinian capitalists and NGOs figure out how to profit from the contemporary situation, they are making something new, organizing and creating new markets that contribute to a reorientation of what Palestine is and can be within given terms.)

Development helps enable a wide social project that produces markets, relations, cultural practices, and forms of aspiration and class identity. It’s an aspect of social, spatial and political economic becoming, and it is a Palestinian process not epiphenomenal to internal dynamics. It’s logically coherent within a history framed by pre- and post-, and political aspirations to emerge from the dispossession of occupation, among an occupied population. Writing about the idea of “civil society,” Ellen Meiksins Wood has argued that a sphere of action somehow apart from the state ought to be understood instead within totalizing social, political and economic processes of capitalist relations of production. It’s why capitalist development can come to seem either somehow new, or as a way around political problems.

Let me put it another way. In his excellent forthcoming study of land defense politics and private land registration in the highland West Bank, anthropologist Paul Kohlbry argues that individual market relations contradict territorial collective ambitions. But I think housing development demonstrates the ways in which collective logics (and it could be largely in language) enable market relations. That is to say, if private developers can make a convincing and logically coherent case for modernization at the same time as they seek to stabilize Palestinian relationships to the land, why can’t it be both? Is it possible to understand Palestinian economic development projects as a new form of class-based nationalism both based in, and at odds with, the cultural projects that emerged from 1967? I’m reminded of a speaker I heard at the last Palestine Investors’ Conference in 2010 encouraging Palestinian investors to do their “national duty as Palestinians and return…. It is difficult to be sure, but make no mistake, there are returns to be made here.” The latter is, obviously, a different kind of “return” than the majority of Palestinians are accustomed to asserting. And it is not a politics for the masses.

What accounts for the stability of the occupation? It is, in my view, a constant process of becoming and stabilization. It’s not the kind of top-down, Big Brother situation that it often seems (and indeed, that many of us saw when we first started writing about it, or going, or going back). The occupation is cohesive and coherent, but that does not mean it’s impregnable. It’s not something that happened once in 1948 and again in 1967, but is continually being made and remade in response to difficulties and contradictions. It’s like a tire that needs to be patched over and over. In 2007 we had the state project organizing privatization; by 2017 privatization has come to explicitly orient the state project. In 2027 it might be something different. Many of the actors and much of the political language might change, but the shape and direction stay the same.

The best I can do here is grossly insufficient, but it’s to suggest that we try to chip away at historical and ideological coherence that begins at the moment of dispossession. That we ask how we got here, and what present modes of political action emerge out of and are doing to shape the future. Geographical and ideological vernaculars for occupation may have changed over time, but politics responsive to those changes can work to obscure both general historical continuities and the possibilities for a way forward.

Kareem Rabie is collegiate assistant professor in the social sciences and Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago.

1967’s Ghosts: Beyond a Truncated Imaginary

Lisa Bhungalia

In one sense, Israel’s capture of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights in 1967—now a half-century on—is part and parcel of a longer history of Palestinian dispossession and fragmentation spanning from the British Mandate, to the mass displacement and expulsion of Palestinians in 1947-1949 from what became the State of Israel (referred to by Palestinians as the nakba) and into the present. As Palestinians have long pointed out, and as echoed by Patrick Wolfe, the nakba is not an event etched in history, but rather a process that persists through multiple means and mediums, whether ethnically exclusive citizenship laws, restrictive mobility regimes, continued land expropriation, mass incarceration or military violence, alongside more quotidian forms of bureaucratic dispossession, urban planning and resource allocation. Cumulatively, the ever-evolving modes and modalities of settler-colonial rule have continued processes of demographic engineering unabated since the mid-twentieth century. Thus, while 1967 should be read within a longer history of Palestinian dispossession, it also marked a pivotal acceleration of this trend due to the ways in which its legacy continues to shape and constrain how Palestine is narrated and conceived today.

The transformations of 1967, wherein Israel seized effective control over the remainder of British Mandate Palestine, inaugurated a new geopolitical grammar—Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. In the wake of the six-day war, international attention and condemnation quickly turned on the latter. Passed in November 1967, UN Security Council Resolution 242 declared the territories seized by Israel illegally occupied, a position reaffirmed by the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 2334 in December 2016, which deemed Israel’s settlement expansion beyond the Green Line to be a “flagrant violation under international law.” Even before the passage of Resolution 242, however, key Arab states had already begun to shift their position, as Ahmad Khalidi contends, from “outright rejectionism to a more nuanced and flexible political-diplomatic stance.” Indeed, as Khalidi insightfully observes, oft-forgotten lines prefacing the “three noes” approach of the Khartoum Resolution passed at the Arab League summit in August 1967 called upon Arab states to concentrate their political and diplomatic efforts on eliminating “the consequences of the [1967] aggression.” In this way, the occupied territories constituted a kind of exceptional space unmoored from the broader structures and processes of the settler-colonial project. It was this position undertaken by the Arab League in August 1967 that paved the way for the endorsement by key Arab states—Jordan and Egypt, in particular—of UN Resolution 242 three months later, which further fortified the division between contested territory and a naturalized political order. Indeed, as Samera Esmeir argued a decade ago, this new occupation effectively “set the older one of 1948 in stone.”

The various legal and diplomatic frameworks deployed to manage the ongoing “conflict” between Israel and the Palestinians have only reinforced this division. International humanitarian law (IHL), for instance, pertains only to those territories Israel occupied in 1967 and establishes permissible and impermissible actions on the part of Israel as the occupying force therein. Palestinian citizens of Israel, despite being subject to ongoing land expropriation, disenfranchisement and relegation to second-class citizenship, are definably outside the scope of IHL, as are the more than 5 million Palestinian refugees who reside outside the borders of Israel-Palestine. Notwithstanding the many inadequacies of IHL for dealing with the particularities of the Palestinian case, including, most notably, the lack of “temporariness” of occupation, the limited application of IHL to the 1967 territories does a certain kind of political work. It creates, as Darryl Li has argued, a kind of bifurcated imaginary wherein the occupied territories constitute a kind of exceptional space—a space of “otherness”—set against a naturalized political order. This is not to argue that international law has created this distinction, nor is it to make the case for the universal application of IHL to the entirety of the population residing in Israel-Palestine, for to do so would effectively eliminate any kind of social contract between the de facto government (Israel) and the Palestinians. Rather it is to query the kind of work that this distinction does and ask how it both produces and is produced by politics. In this case, the instruments of IHL and relatedly, various iterations of the “peace process,” perhaps most notably the Oslo accords, have produced a truncated political imaginary wherein the “problem,” and thus the “solution,” are limited to those territories occupied in 1967. History and geography start in 1967.

Contemporary critical scholarship on Israel-Palestine has likewise not escaped the trappings of 1967. While there has been a marked—and welcome—increase in critical contemporary scholarship on Palestine, and especially on post-Oslo Palestine, much of this work has tended to study “the occupation” and the evolving modalities of rule therein. Crucially important studies on the role of the Palestinian Authority as a native administrator for colonial rule, and critical accounts of foreign aid intervention and the neoliberal transformations it effects, alongside accounts of the post-2006 isolation and siege of Gaza have importantly shed light on the ever-evolving modalities and strategies Israel has employed to manage the “native problem” in these sites. But this trend toward studying the occupation, as Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie and Sobhi Samour have rightly pointed out, isolates and internalizes the post-1967 occupation and renders it ontologically distinct from the broader settler-colonial project. Rather than putting Israel’s differential regimes of subjugation on both sides of the Green Line, as well as beyond it, into conversation, much of this work tends to bracket Israel’s tactics in the “occupied territories” as bounded and distinct. This bracketing of Palestinian space to the “occupied territories” and relatedly “the Palestinians” to those living under belligerent occupation is a direct function of settler-colonial processes at work. Nixed from the frame is over 70 percent of Mandate Palestine and the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian population that resides outside the borders of Israel-Palestine, as well as the some 1.5 million possessing Israeli citizenship. Put differently, international legal regimes, diplomacy and scholarly production on Palestine have, to varying degrees, reinforced the fragmentary logic inherent to settler-colonial rule.

Yet, perhaps perversely for the Zionist leadership at the time, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 produced two unintended effects. It was in the context of Israel’s direct military occupation that a new generation of Palestinian leaders began to emerge. Driven in large part by a populist reaction to the traditionalist leadership of the nationalist movement, and in particular what was perceived as the “degeneration of the ideology of sumud” (steadfastness) by traditional elites, as Salim Tamari has detailed, this new generation sought to build the “nucleus of the future Palestinian state (and society) as a parallel power to the occupation authority.” This trend only intensified with the outbreak of the first intifada, which shifted the center of gravity in the Palestinian national struggle from the “outside” to the occupied territories. Second, Israel’s territorial expansion across the Green Line, alongside the fact that it exercises supreme authority over Mandate Palestine, has, in turn, produced conditions for the emergence of a new kind of geopolitical imaginary. The de facto production of a “one-state condition” has opened up space for a more robust discussion of what a vision for Palestine might look like that is not predicated on a return to pre-1967 borders. This is the ghost and opportunity that presents itself 50 years on.

Lisa Bhungalia will be assistant professor of political science at Kent State University starting in September 2017.

The Politics of Hope: 1967 and Beyond

Sherene Seikaly

The last two years have marked an inventory of commemorations, some global and momentous, such as World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, and others specific and momentous—the Balfour Declaration, the Suez war and, of course, the six-day war of 1967.

The act of commemoration is never innocent. It requires a critical and cautious approach that reflects on continuity and rupture, ponders the past’s haunting of the present and envisions the future.

Envisioning futures in this present of the ascendancy of a global right and the celebration of stupidity is no small order. In the midst of an uprising-turned-civil war-turned international proxy war, foreign intervention, a new brand of vigilante Islamism, ongoing occupation and a refugee crisis of unprecedented proportions—that is not today Palestinian but Iraqi, Syrian and Yemeni—those of us who study the Middle East, or call it home, face a paralyzing landscape of despair.

I propose that we approach hope and despair not as enemies but as a troubled couple. In narrating this dialectic, in its Palestinian iteration, the story cannot begin in 1967. Of course, the ghost that must always haunt narration is 1948, the year of that twin birth: the Israeli state and the Palestinian refugee condition. The Palestinian need not conjure the ghost of 1948, as it is always present—in inherited memory, in experience, in the shaping of ways of being and understanding.

The legacies and living memory of 1967 are not specters of the same sort. They are more like zombies, the walking dead brought to life without speech or free will, feeding on our contemporary landscape and bleeding on our imaginations. 2017 is the fiftieth year of the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The occupation is a half-century old. It is not temporary or incidental. It is structural.

What can a commemorative return to 1967 teach us about decolonization and the possibilities of a politics of hope?

In March, on the shores of the Dead Sea, under the auspices of King ‘Abdallah II of Jordan, the withered remains of another zombie, the Arab League, declared the imperative of restarting the stalled peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians so as to reach a two-state solution based on 1967 borders. The statement went on to say that it would be unacceptable to relocate the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Beyond an initial reaction of faint disgust, mixed with irritation at the repetitive strain of the gaping abyss between Arab regime rhetoric and Arab regime practice, we should see this statement as one place to think about the tenacious ubiquity, sometimes latent, sometimes explicit, of the 1967 defeat/zombie.

I want to think about the ruptures of 1967 briefly, and then plead that we un-think them. The six-day war was certainly a rupture in Palestinian and Arab time, land, power and politics. The most enduring and painful wound was to the land itself, as in a matter of hours Israel tripled its size and consolidated, in Guy Laron’s words, “a regional empire stretching from the banks of the Suez Canal in the west to the Jordan River in the east, and from Sharm al-Sheik, jutting deep into the Red Sea, to the snowy peaks of Mount Hermon, within sight of the suburbs of Damascus.” Historical Palestine was united once more, and under one state, the Israeli state that sought at all costs to overtake and deny Palestine as history, as present, as future. This return of territorial contiguity had the paradoxical effect of reuniting families across the open wounds of 1948. Children in Nazareth, who themselves were just emerging from a period of military rule, that constriction of mobility and freedom that Israel would neatly transpose onto the West Bank and Gaza, could suddenly experience the roads, sights and spaces of Nablus and Jenin. A network of long-lost uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters could now come together. It was a moment in which the Israeli government had sabotaged the imperative that informs policy and practice until today—to separate Palestinians from one another.

But the 1967 war did not rend the terrestrial plane alone. It also tore holes in the air; the quick destruction of the Arab air forces meant a looming, incessant Israeli presence in the sky. The ruptures would happen too in the realm of law, a realm of coloniality that has brought into being the categories of the human and non-human, as Samera Esmeir’s work has powerfully delineated.

The Balfour Declaration had initiated the erasure of the Palestinian as a named subject worthy of politics. UN Resolution 242 recuperated and repeated this erasure by conjuring a refugee problem that appeared as the result of a natural disaster rather than political design. At stake here, of course, is what successive Israeli governments have perfected in their self-representation as at once militarily superior and existentially threatened. More importantly, in 1967, the Israeli government would begin a treacherous itinerary through the terrain of international law. As Noura Erakat’s forthcoming book will show, Israeli governments sought at each turn to take the land of the West Bank and Gaza, without also acquiring the people living on it.

The six-day war also cemented a politics of deferral, a phenomenon historically in process since 1919, when the Covenant of the League of Nations divided the world into “advanced nations” and those peoples who were “not yet able to stand by themselves.” The 1967 war and UN Resolution 242 escalated this “not yet” condition—not yet ready, not yet worthy of self-rule, not yet free.

The Palestinian fedayeen would initially reject their erasure in the halls of international moral and political claims. And in this sense, historians, scholars and observers of Palestine and the Palestinians have identified, and perhaps overdetermined, the most positive shift of the 1967 war. We have learned that those six days marked the transformation of the Palestinian guerrilla from a passive actor dependent on and derivative of regional revolutionary projects into a central icon of a new global age of revolution. The parallels between and solidarities across Cuba, Vietnam, Algeria and the Black Power movement in the United States were exhilarating and everywhere to be seen. The imperative of armed struggle underwrote this ephemeral and deeply flawed era of revolution.

It was the famed battle of Karama that would provide the affective registers to narrate Palestine politically and visually. Art and the visual field were sites of intense struggle and contestation. The “cinema of the people” and the fedayeen’s film, documentary and photography cadres would use Karama as a representational tool. They created exhibits, in which, as revolutionary filmmaker Hani Jawhariyeh put it, “the Palestinian people saw themselves [for the first time] in images that spoke of their national cause and revolution.” Indeed, it was in these post-1967 and, importantly, 1968 moments that Jawhariyeh would explain “photography had become a new weapon in the Palestinian revolution.”

It was not long, however, before the Palestinians, too, would concede and begin the ostensibly realistic and ultimately devastating process of allowing the six-day war to set the terms of political action, and more devastating still, the limits of political imagination. The constriction of imagination is clearest in the Arab League’s implicit delineation of Israel and Palestine. Where are the borders that separate these two places? Is not Palestine the always-already underbelly of Israel?

The 1967 war brought into focus the two main dynamics that Laron’s recent work highlights— the deepening rule of the generals, on the one hand, and the growing disparities between the very wealthy and very poor, gaps to which the IMF played conspiratorial nurse, making prescriptions that simply served to aggravate the illness. It is this rule of the gun that is perhaps the most lasting regional legacy of the 1967 defeat. For it was after all in 1967 that military rulers would use all necessary means to contain dissent in the rapid and parallel processes of the erosion of standards of living and the increase of class inequality.

Because of all of these ruptures of 1967, we must think again, carefully and cautiously, about continuity. Elias Khoury, a poetic leader in the battle against the walking dead, recently asked at a conference titled “The Naksa Fifty Years Later”: Where are the Arab archives? This is a crucial question. Its answer can lead us once again to the condition of the present, the condition of the last 50 years, indeed the last century. That condition is the uneasy but steady marriage between Israeli settler-colonialism and Arab authoritarianism.

It is not coincidental that every Israeli invasion or attack on Palestine and/or the Palestinians since 1948 has targeted a Palestinian archive. The story of Khalil Sakakini’s daughters as they entered the Hebrew University library in Jerusalem just after 1967 to find their father’s books, with his handwriting in the margins, organized neatly on a shelf, is one example of many. The Israeli targeting of Palestinian archives is a state of siege, the evidence, should we have needed it, of an ongoing settler-colonial enterprise.

But the targeting and confiscation of archives work in multiple other ways. They constrain who has what academic freedom to tell which histories. The shards of the colonized archive in their locations in Israeli institutions and libraries are the very material conditions that determine who narrates the past, who writes history and who gets to don the warm robes of objectivity. As Mezna Qato warns us: “Our attention often focuses on the materials Israel has seized from Palestinians, but Israel holds documents belonging to Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon (at least). Most of that material remains classified. We only know of it because Israeli historians working in service of the state, or as part of military research, have published studies utilizing this material.”

To decolonize knowledge production, we must think critically and rigorously about archives, not simply as collections of documents but as what Ann Stoler has described as transparencies of power relations. And part of the task moving forward, in both scholarship and political work, is peeling away the transparencies, not the least of which are our inherited epistemologies and assumptions.

If art is the highest form of hope, we must look to art to navigate our attempts to decolonize. Here the production of knowledge at its optimal height must take creative forms. While the archives are locked away in the vaults of an ever tightening and resilient Arab authoritarianism, or held hostage by the equally tight and resilient enterprise of Israeli militarization and dominance, the search for other sources is a necessity. Indeed, this search is one crucial way to recover continuities and, in so doing, decolonize time.

We can and must find other sources and texts—oral accounts, pamphlets, declarations, speeches, literature, media—to tell the lost tales that the zombies obscure. There are many scholars who have led the way in this effort to transgress periodization: Frances Hasso on gender, sexuality and women’s movements; Shira Robinson on the experiences of the 1948 Palestinians as “citizen strangers”; Kimberly Katz on Jordanian Jerusalem; Mezna Qato on education and popular mobilization; and Leena Dallasheh on pre- and post-1948 Nazareth. We can follow these pioneers to think again and anew.

Perhaps, for example, we can begin the history of the fedayeen not in the 1960s, but the 1950s, the 1930s or indeed the nineteenth century. Perhaps, for another example, we can think again and anew about the central question of land in Palestine, and its inextricability from histories of global and regional capital, whether in the bantustans of the contemporary West Bank or the coastal strip and interior hinterlands of nineteenth-century Palestine. Perhaps we can think again and anew about the possibilities of internationalism and revolution, not just in the 1960s, but much earlier, before the nation-state paradigm became the only way to organize collective life and liberation. Here of course I am thinking of Ilham Makdisi’s seminal work, in which she de-exceptionalizes the intellectual history of the Middle East by narrating the significance of socialism among thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The historian’s task, then, is to decolonize Palestinian and Arab periodization—to not begin and end in 1948, 1967 or 1993, but to transgress temporality and look beneath, across and beyond Israeli colonization as the way to understand history.

Perhaps these lessons can help us return, not to a space or a time, but to hope as a political act—an act that must continue in the face of death and failure, an act that must suspend the expectation of change and victory, an act that sees despair not as the opposite of hope but as its companion.

Sherene Seikaly is is associate professor of history at the University of California-Santa Barbara, editor of the Arab Studies Journal and co-founding editor of Jadaliyya.

The Pretense of Stasis

Neve Gordon

During a Labor Party meeting not long after the June 1967 war, Golda Meir turned to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, asking him: “What are we going to do with a million Arabs?”

Eshkol paused for a moment before he gave his answer. “I get it,” he said. “You want the dowry but you don’t like the bride!”

This anecdote underscores that, from the very beginning of the post-1967 occupation, Israel made a clear distinction between the land it had occupied—the dowry—and the Palestinians who inhabited it—the bride. This distinction swiftly became the logic informing the structure of Israel’s colonial project, while the mechanisms developed to expropriate Palestinian land and to manage the colonized inhabitants produced a series of contradictions that continue to shape the geopolitical reality between the Jordan Valley and Mediterranean Sea to this day.

Not surprisingly, the overarching contradiction is the one between geography and demography. Israel’s insatiable appetite for Palestinian land, its ongoing effort to confine the colonized residents in enclaves, and its policy of transferring hundreds of thousands of Jews to the West Bank and East Jerusalem have rendered the two-state solution increasingly untenable. The ongoing invocation of this solution by virtually every Western leader, as well as the Gulf states, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and even Hamas has become a chimera, which merely reinforces the status quo.

The status quo, however, cannot last forever. The de facto annexation of the West Bank may ultimately satisfy Israel’s territorial desires, but it has simultaneously produced a new reality that will be impossible to sustain in the long term. While this reality clearly involves the changing demographic balance, its ramifications are undoubtedly political.

Currently there are about 6.5 million Jews between the valley and the sea. Within the same territory there are 6.2 million Palestinians—both Muslim and Christian—and about 400,000 non-Arab Christians, members of other religions or people of no religion, as well as more than 180,000 foreign nationals. The territory over which Israel has effective control does not have a Jewish majority. These facts suggest that the drive to expand does not sit well with Zionism’s ethno-demographic reasoning and produces, in Israel’s own eyes, an existential threat.

Moreover, there is only one real sovereign in the territories Israel captured in 1967 (excluding the Sinai Peninsula, which was returned to Egypt). And within this territory two legal systems operate simultaneously—one for Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens and the other for the occupied Palestinian inhabitants—indicating that this sovereign entity should legally be characterized as an apartheid regime. It is undoubtedly different from South Africa’s apartheid, but then Italy and the US are also different from each other even though both are considered liberal democracies. Apartheid clearly operates differently in diverse historical, demographic and geographical settings, yet it still retains its fundamental characteristic—a legal system of racial segregation, oppression and dispossession.

Paradoxically, the Israeli right—as opposed to liberal Zionists—recognizes this reality and so it is exhorting the political center to abandon the two-state paradigm. The right’s immediate objective is to transform the de facto annexation of the West Bank into a de jure one, and while its strategies for warding off the “Palestinian demographic threat” are opaque, two major ideas have been percolating in Israel.

The first is the Jordan option, which asserts that Jordan is the real Palestinian state and accordingly suggests that the Palestinian population should be transferred to the East Bank of the river. The second invokes former Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s “Palestinian autonomy” script, whereby the Palestinians live in West Bank enclaves and are responsible for their own health care, education and other public services, like collecting the garbage. This idea, too, has a precedent—in South Africa, they called these enclaves bantustans.

Thus, though none of them clearly says so, the future envisioned by Israel’s current political elite is either one of widespread expulsion or fortification of an apartheid regime.

But the abandonment of the two-state paradigm also has the potential to bring about a new and long overdue debate. A one-state paradigm would allow for the avowal of history, namely the idea that the conflict did not begin in 1967 but rather at the turn of the nineteenth century, even before the Palestinian nakba and Israel’s independence in 1948. Only when history is acknowledged and confronted can the injustices of the past be genuinely addressed and a viable solution forged.

Unfortunately, instead of facing up to history the Israeli government has introduced a spate of draconian laws, policies and regulations while launching incitement campaigns against the Palestinian citizens of Israel and, increasingly, against Jewish liberals as well. Indeed, the governing strategies developed and deployed by Israel in the occupied areas are currently colonizing the Jewish state. The fact that the colonial leviathan is finally recoiling inward, instituting the apartheid logic inside the pre-1967 borders, is perhaps most obvious in the Israeli Negev, where the state has intensified its campaign against the indigenous Bedouin population.

Umm al-Hiran, a village of Bedouin citizens destined to be destroyed and replaced by a Jewish settlement called Hiran, is the clearest example. Just a few kilometers from the village, about 30 religious Jewish families live in a makeshift gated community, waiting patiently for the government to expel the Bedouin families from their homes. During a recent visit to this Jewish community, I saw houses scattered around a playground and a pleasant kindergarten with joyous paintings on the exterior wall. Needless to say, the bucolic setting was both surrealistic and unnerving considering the coming violence that underlies it. Ironically, the people who are destined to dispossess the residents of Umm al-Hiran are West Bank settlers who have returned to Israel to colonize Bedouin land.

Surely the chickens have come home to roost. Yet as the settlers seize the dowry from the bride they are assisting the government in the entrenchment of its apartheid regime, while simultaneously undermining the pretense of stasis, thus sowing dragon’s teeth for the future.

Neve Gordon is author of Israel’s Occupation (California). A longer version of this piece appeared in The Nation.

Threatening Us Here and There

Lori Allen

The dangerous antics of President Donald Trump have prompted a range of responses from those who disagree with the extremism of his regime and its far-right assaults upon democratic principles. The quadrupling of the ACLU membership, the spontaneous demonstrations at US airports in response to the so-called Muslim ban, and the participation of some 4 million people (in the United States alone) in the Women’s March on January 21 are just a few indications of the alarm of US citizens at what is going on. Some of these people have been surprised to learn that the infringement on, for example, immigrants’ freedoms under Trump is just an intensification of policies in effect during Barack Obama’s presidency.

Even less well known is how the misogynist class and race war that the Trump regime is pursuing against women, the poor and the non-white in the US is materially and ideologically intertwined with Israel’s ongoing settler-colonial war against the Palestinians. And much less publicly discussed is how this partnership with Israel is also an intensification of what has gone before. It is time for the outraged liberals digging into their pockets for the ACLU and other worthy non-profits to connect the dots and direct their anger internationally, too.

Some parts of the picture have long been clear. The US facilitation of Israel’s colonialism is well documented by historians and other scholars. The American government’s support of the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem that began in 1967 is an extension of its deep complicity in the settler-colonial takeover of Palestine by the Zionist movement and the continued development of the settlement project by Israel since that state’s establishment in 1948. Trump’s appointment of bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman, a donor to Israeli settlements and an opponent of Palestinian statehood, as US ambassador to Israel is one symbol of the uninterrupted intentions of the US political class to encourage the systematic Israeli violation of international humanitarian and human rights law that are endemic to the occupation. It is an occupation, as Israeli historian Avi Shlaim explains, that has “very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism.” Israel can thrive within the status quo, without peace with the Palestinians, while it gobbles up more and more Palestinian land. Throughout the long history of American connivance with Israel, Palestinians have suffered every kind of deprivation, abuse and indignity. And these two regimes are increasingly turning on their own citizens to keep the deal going.

What threatens the values of freedom, rights and democracy—what threatens us here in the US—is what threatens Palestinians living under long-term military occupation, as well as the few Israelis who try to defend them. The “repertoires of the far right” that “set the tone” for Israel’s policies, as David Shulman described it, come from the same songbook that Trump and his ilk are singing from. The attempts to intimidate those who dare dissent from the government line, the laws for crushing protest and threatening civil society, are mirrored here and there. The supporters of Trump decry protesters as paid liberal agitators. Hear the echoes in the Netanyahu government campaign against Israeli human rights and other opposition groups such as Breaking the Silence for accepting foreign funds. Here and there see the arrests of protesters, the legislation aimed at deterring peaceful demonstrations, the surveillance of activists and criminalization of speech on social media in order to crush dissent. Neither regime hesitates to violate the rights of its own citizens. Both turn on anyone who dares to object.

The racism that is at the heart of the US and Israeli security systems, and the training and tools shared between the two countries’ militarized police forces, fuel the shoot-to-kill actions of officers in both places. That is what leads to the murders of children like Trevon Johnson (one of 400 or more people killed by police in the US so far in 2017) and 16-year old Fatimah Hjeiji in occupied East Jerusalem. Very few are ever held accountable for these extrajudicial killings, and officials in both countries encourage the impunity. When citizens in both countries object to the deplorable attitudes of their “leaders” and the actions of police forces, their protest is criminalized.

The ruling classes of Israel and the US are two peas in a pod, goading their supporters into enacting their racist-nationalist populism in ever more violent ways. The increase in the number of hate crimes across the US since Trump’s election is just one manifestation. Trump’s late May visit to Israel and the region showed how he and Netanyahu stoke fear of terrorism among the population in order to have excuses for various actions that do little but increase the funds available for destruction and repression. Claiming that terrorism is the world’s largest challenge, Trump and Netanyahu stepped up the rhetoric against Iran, and found in fear of terrorism an excuse for engorging defense budgets, and in Trump’s case, sealing massive arms deals with Saudi Arabia, one of the most regressive, authoritarian regimes around today. Anyone who is shocked by or afraid of what the Trump regime has unleashed in the US may be getting a small sense of what Palestinians have been contending with during five decades of life under occupation.

Fortunately, many US citizens can see through the false justifications of the political elite. They see the ideological and material connections between what is threatening their values and lives in the US and what is maintaining Israel’s military occupation and its systemic discrimination of Palestinian citizens of Israel. There is a generational shift among Jewish Americans, with younger Jews especially becoming more able to speak out critically against Israel’s claims to act in their name, people no longer willing to defend Israel’s actions at any moral or material cost. Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, Birthright Unplugged and Open Hillel provide hope that the blind consensus of the US political and Jewish leadership can be shifted. Also offering hope is the growing movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), which has the backing of these Jewish groups, in addition to the endorsement of many academic associations, unions and church groups, as well as Black Lives Matter and associated organizations fighting for racial justice in the US. As more people recognize that they live under connected regimes of oppression, that they share liberatory goals, they can combine their energies and resources, learn from their diverse experiences and analyses, and work collectively to change these systems that keep us all down.

Lori Allen is senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at SOAS University of London.

How to End the 1967 Israeli Colonial Occupation

Alaa Tartir

As we mark the anniversaries of the Balfour Declaration, the Palestinian nakba, the Israeli occupation, the Oslo accords and the intra-Palestinian divide, the realities on the ground get worse, the ramifications of these tragic events become more entrenched, and justice and peace recede further and further into the distance. Given these political trajectories, and the new global, regional and local orders, a discussion of how to end the Israeli occupation that began in 1967 might appear odd to some.

Yet such qualms must be categorically rejected, for ending the post-1967 occupation is the most appropriate way to “celebrate” its fiftieth anniversary. Ending the occupation is neither an ideological fantasy nor a nationalist aspiration. It is a duty on the part of the international community, and a commitment the nations of the world are obliged to fulfill under international law.

To answer the question of how to end the occupation, it is crucial first to answer the question of why this illegal occupation has been perpetuated over the decades. There are seven major reasons why. Only when we reverse these conditions will justice and rights will be closer to realization.

Firstly, and fundamentally, the occupation has lasted until today because its root causes were (and still are) left unaddressed, namely the 1948 ethnic cleansing of historical Palestine and the dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinians. Unless these causes are addressed, the occupation will continue.

Secondly, by design and definition, peace and colonization are incompatible paths, even if they may run in parallel. Imposing peace under colonial occupation—instead of engaging in decolonization—only distorts the basic meaning and value of peace. It turns peace into a mere security arrangement on behalf of the occupier.

Thirdly, when the occupier is protected by a one-sided “peace process” and also is let off the hook with regard to the root causes, the greed and brutality of the occupation and the system of apartheid will simply grow, particularly when nurtured by increasingly racist and violent Israeli governments.

Yet it is not only Israel that is to blame for the continuation of the occupation. Upon its establishment in 1994, the Palestinian Authority (PA), or at least its leadership, accepted a subcontractor role in the occupation. Subcontracting repression made the Israeli occupation cheaper and sustainable.

Fifthly, the occupation was further entrenched by the deep horizontal and vertical schisms in the Palestinian national movement. The absence of strategic Palestinian cohesion was detrimental to the effectiveness and endurance of Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation.

The sixth element in the equation is the complicit international community. To assuage its guilt, the international community has “invested” more than $30 billion of aid in the Occupied Territories to bring about peace and development. In the absence of peace and development, aid essentially functioned as a subsidy to the Israeli occupation, making its costs even more bearable.
And lastly, the failure of these financial and economic tools was accompanied by an enormous political failure as international diplomacy remained controlled by the United States, and as the international governance systems and institutions, primarily the United Nations, moved from one deficiency to another.

The reversal of these seven conditions would pave the way for an end to the Israeli occupation. More concretely, to answer the question of how to end the Israeli occupation, there is an urgent need to reinvent the global governance systems and institutions to become more effective and accountable. Israel-Palestine provides the best case study for assessing the efficacy, relevance and responsiveness of global governance frameworks and structures. That reinvention must bring about new accountability mechanisms for the donor community in the Occupied Territories. Business as usual cannot be the mantra any longer.

As for the Israelis, they need to recognize the existence of the illegal occupation and burst the well-sealed bubble in which they live; to address the notion of God’s chosen people and its implications of supremacy; and to tackle the exaggerated security phobias in which they are imprisoning themselves. In undertaking these tasks, justice and equality for all—and therefore meaningful peace—can draw closer.

As for the Palestinians, they need to end their vertical and horizontal fragmentation; to reinvent their political system, institutions, representative bodies and leadership; and to construct the pillars for a culture of debate that allow them to strategize for the future. In addition, Palestinians need to move beyond the Fatah-Hamas binary and reconfigure the duties and responsibilities of the PA, especially its security forces. These actions must be accompanied by a narrative and discursive shift, which is more urgent today than ever, but can only be realized with a new Palestinian intellectual leadership. Without such serious engagement, Palestinians will trap themselves in cycles of oppression and injustice resulting from the continuation of the Israeli colonial occupation.

In a nutshell, Palestinians, Israelis and the international community should stop talking about peace and one- and two-state solutions. These concepts are irrelevant. Ending the occupation is the only thing that matters, as it is a prerequisite for any future solution.

This is not a postcard from the future or a letter written by an astrologer from a different galaxy. It is simply a call to abandon the fake parties—the “peace process,” pursuit of statehood or quasi-sovereignty under occupation, one- or two-state solutions, the quest for greater Israel—and instead join the real party. This party, when celebrated, will bring peace and justice to millions of people spread all over the world. And the time for that real party is now.

Alaa Tartir is program director of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, a post-doctoral fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, and a visiting research fellow at the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

Hunger

Sara Roy

Tel Aviv, 1996
I was in the home of my beloved aunt Frania, my mother’s sister. Frania and my mother, Taube, survived the Holocaust and during seven years of horrific incarceration, including in Auschwitz, managed, miraculously, to stay together. There were many stories but the most recurrent and agonizing centered on hunger, unimaginable hunger. This hollowness translated into Frania having a powerful need to husband bread in her home at all times. We used to eat bread and butter for dessert with a cup of coffee.

On this particular day, something happened that had never happened before: Frania ran out of bread. I was standing in her kitchen while she was preparing breakfast. She opened the bin on her kitchen counter where she kept fresh bread and found only a few slices. She then opened her freezer, expecting to find at least two loaves, but found none. For a moment, she stood motionless in front of the open freezer, trying to process the want she had long ago defeated. She closed the freezer door slowly and turned to me with a look of controlled panic in her eyes. She began to tremble. Hugging her tightly, my eyes welling with tears, I promised to run out immediately and buy her bread. There was a big supermarket literally two blocks from her apartment in one of Tel Aviv’s busiest shopping areas. But, of course, the abundance of food just yards from her home could not, for those few unbearable moments, mitigate her pain and her fear. Even after I ran home with a bag filled with bread, she remained apprehensive and uncertain.

Gaza, 2016
It was my last day in Gaza after an intensive week of work. I was in a UN bus heading to the Erez crossing point with several UNRWA employees. We were driving along one of Gaza City’s main commercial streets. The bus stopped at a red light at a busy intersection. I was staring out the window and noticed below me, in a parallel lane, an old man in a car. He held some pita bread in his hand and was attempting to make a sandwich with some other kind of food.

Suddenly the old man looked up from his sandwich and motioned to a young boy who was about 11 or 12 years old. The boy was standing on the sidewalk, peddling packs of cigarettes he carried in a wooden tray that was clearly too big for his small frame. The young boy approached the old man and they spoke briefly. I assumed the old man was going to buy a pack of cigarettes but instead the young boy handed him two individual cigarettes, which appeared to be all he could afford. The old man paid the boy and then, in a gesture that the youngster did not expect, the man threw half of his pita sandwich into the cigarette tray. The child hurried off and I kept staring at the old man thinking about his simple act of kindness. As our bus began to move, I looked up and saw the young boy standing at the corner of the intersection ravenously eating his half of the pita bread. He ate with a hunger that startled me.

When I was asked to write this reflection on a half-century of Israeli occupation, these are the stories—one distant, one recent—that kept coming to my mind, insisting to be heard. Bread. Hunger. Deprivation. Without equating their experiences or suffering, my aunt and the little boy in Gaza are linked to each other not only by the occupation but also by what it has wrought after 50 years of denial. Is it not policy-driven hunger and want—so far removed from settlement freezes and land swaps—more than anything else that binds Palestinians to Jews? And such deprivation is not just about hunger; it is also about place and the certainty of that place, which was never fully resolved for Frania or for the Palestinian boy.

What constitutes an acceptable response to such visceral deprivation? It must begin with what I, as a Jew, have been told I must never do: Claim a relationship between my aunt and the child in Gaza, embracing that child as part of our moral universe. Despite the variance in their lives, each of them deserve and require the same ethical and principled response to their shared humanity, a response the occupation has, from its inception, demanded we reject.

No more.

Sara Roy is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University.

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