WAR ON GAZA (27 Dec 2008 - 18 Jan 2009)

Gaza: How the system of occupation and control
leads to extreme exposure to violence

ARAB EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTE (AEI) - OPEN WINDOWS

2009 JANUARY 13 | BETHLEHEM 

The violence to which Gazans are presently exposed is the culmination of a system of interlocking practices of control developed by Israel over years of occupation and siege. Challenging this system as well as sustained support for Palestinian sumud (steadfastness) and national and individual rights are essential to safeguard the human security of Palestinians.

A major element of the control system that has created and rendered normal the extreme exposure of Palestinians we now witness in Gaza is the radical inequality in power between Palestinian and Israeli society. This is obviously true for the capacity to inflict military violence, which is some 1000 times larger in Israel’s case than in the case of the stateless Palestinians. Less obvious is the difference in capacity to inflict violence through administrative means. In controlling the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli army has over the years of occupation grown accustomed to making far-reaching decisions about Palestinian civilians’ lives. It is no exaggeration to say that the army exercises totalitarian control. Decisions do not only affect the Palestinians’ physical integrity, but in fact touch every aspect of Palestinian life up until the smallest details. Ordinary daily talks among Palestinians are all the time focused on the consequences of the occupation and siege for family relations, study or work. Israeli control is primarily exercised by blocking access to traveling routes, and the very selective granting of permits for any kind of activity.

Life-and-death decisions

While such practices to some extent may be allowed to happen in war situations, under the restrictions of international humanitarian law, the present system of control is decades-old and has become part of ordinary life in Palestine. Israeli soldiers and administrators regard it as normal that they, as if representatives of God, can take life-and-death decisions about others on a routine base. Absolute power is spread among not just local commanders or bureaucrats but among very young soldiers and reservists. An average Israeli can give many personal examples of encounters whereby they are able to do with Palestinians whatever they wanted. Extreme inequality in power has become the norm on both the macro level, from society to society, and on the micro level, from person to person. “I am the law”, as Israeli soldiers tell Palestinians. In Israeli consciousness the system has become part of a given, tacit world view as to what is normal in Israeli-Palestinian relations. The system is not answerable to its subjects, and their welfare is clearly not its concern.

Decisions about Palestinian lives are routinely based upon another controlling mechanism: the practice of giving institutional life to a great many administrative group categories, adding to the distancing and dehumanization of Palestinians. As a Palestinian from Gaza, Hebron, Nablus, East-Jerusalem, Galilee, Jordan, or as a Moslem or Christian, one is treated with various degrees of restrictions with regard to personal status, access to traveling and services, and life chances. Restrictions are almost always related to group membership and geographical location. When you are member of a certain family, a local quarter or community, or you live in a certain house or with a certain family, and circumstances are against you, you can be subjected to the consequences of collective punishment, around-the-clock curfews, and acts of wanton destruction such as house demolitions. Some social and geographical categories are associated with a greater level of threat to Israel, and treated accordingly. When you are from Gaza, you are a greater threat, and you belong to a category that in almost all cases cannot travel outside the Strip. Even Palestinians themselves get used to think of geographical and social categories being split up. For “West Bankers”, “Gaza” has come to stand for another world to which there is no access, even though the inhabitants of Gaza are nationally and politically similar to those in the West Bank.

The army routinely takes decisions about Palestinians based on their membership of artificial groups or their residence in certain locations. For instance somebody from a certain area or who is a member of a certain geographical-social group is allowed to go on this day from the West Bank to that place or street in Jerusalem. While taken in an atmosphere of administrative regularity, such decisions are at the same time usually quite arbitrary (nobody knows why this family member gets a permit and the other family member not, for instance), and with far-reaching consequences on the personal level.

The system is in place for reasons of security, Israel says, to prevent or combat terrorism. However, the concepts of both security and terrorism have gone beyond any meaningful definition. Any Palestinian is a potential terrorist and can be acted upon as such, and almost any kind of opposition against the occupation is regarded as directly or indirectly supporting terror. Hamas and Islamic fundamentalism are automatically associated with terrorism, and distinctions between Hamas military and civilians have been completely eroded.

Containment

A main tool for enforcing Israel’s security policy is another mechanism of control and distancing: containment, the practice of locking up large groups of civilians in modern ghettos, through Walls, towers, security zones, and border policing. Again, Gaza is the clearest example, but the practice of creating closed military or civilian zones has been very common throughout the years of occupation, and the more recent building of Walls or other barriers in the West Bank is only a culmination of that practice.

The system of occupation and control implies a routine distancing by the occupier from its subjects, both physical and psychological. Administrative routines have a distancing effect. The same applies to the policing of borders, or the checking of permits by uninterested soldiers hidden behind thick glass windows. Insulation has become the rule, as for instance Israelis are presently not allowed to visit the West Bank, even not in areas where and at times when it would be relatively safe for them to enter.

The practice of occupation and control, in all its dimensions, has created an extremely hierarchical, distanced, controlling and arbitrary relationship between Israel and the population in the West Bank and Gaza. “Us” stands opposed to “them”. In the Israeli mind and practice, Israel is a place of civilization where normality rules, while Gaza and the West Bank are dangerous and “wild” places. Especially Gaza has become over the years a heart of darkness as if there are no normal people living there, but just potential terrorists, not humans. The status of many Gazans as poverty-stricken refugees is held against them, as if they are for that reason all the more unsettling and threatening.

Rule of exception

The consequences of this binary practice and thinking are double. First, almost everything is allowed in areas where there is the rule of exception, of perpetual emergency. We see the consequences today in Gaza. Secondly, those responsible manage to disappear behind a cloak of administrative, security-type of jargon and justifications, well-known from global discourse after 9/11 but pushed to its limits in the Israeli case. It is a jargon which allows the executioners of security policies to live in a lie, distancing themselves from what happens on the ground, not answerable to those affected, and keeping total control as a matter of course over a population which lives next door.

In this system of extreme power differentiation and distancing, it becomes possible that people at checkpoints are treated like cattle, and that even the architecture of checkpoints makes waiters feel they are subhuman. Worse, it has become legitimate over the years to think that it is somehow acceptable to deprive people of basic services such as food, fuel, electricity, water and medicines, when that is thought to be an “incentive” for people to take distance from whomever is considered to be the enemy. As part of the treatment of civilians in the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians have noticed how manipulation of such supplies and services has gradually become a legitimate security option. A few years ago a senior government adviser even indicated that it was policy to put the Palestinians, as a behavioral incentive, on a “diet”. We have thus arrived at a situation that reminds of the famous experiment of the 1960s by Milgrom in which random subjects were asked to comply with orders given by authority persons to inflict electrical shocks of increasing magnitude on others they did not see but whose screams they could hear.

Israel says that Israeli lives can be saved when such controlling and cruel policies are implemented on geographically contained and powerless categories/communities of Palestinians. This is the background for what is happening in Gaza, a siege which is combined with systematic bombing in crowded areas that obviously can never be “surgical”. Where elsewhere in the world is it today accepted to systematically bomb crowded populated areas? The paralysis of the world shows to what extent the present system of violent control has over time been accepted by the international community.

Our argument is that what happens now in Gaza is only possible as a result of a long-time system of control and occupation in which it has become routine and somehow acceptable, also internationally, that whole communities of people are categorized, put in contained spaces, open-air prisons and exposed to extreme forms of violence and intended deprivation.

Bare life

Extreme vulnerability of civilians is sometimes called “bare life.” People are contained, insulated, and exposed to vicious violence (including phosphorous bombs), without escape routes. Neither buildings, like the targeted UNRWA schools in Gaza, nor institutions or authority persons are able to provide protection. Mental health organizations in Gaza have warned for years about the consequences for youth and families when especially fathers are unable to protect their children, and when youth search for substitute protective role models, in the first place those who engage in armed action and who are prepared to die for it.

When fathers, teachers, educators, are unable to protect, it is extremely difficult to engage in meaningful education. Any dignified life starts with basic human security. We have often pointed to the capacity of Palestinians to stay sumud or steadfast, to keep courage and hope for the purpose of surviving and challenging oppression and struggle for human and national rights. Sumud too is a form of social protection and resistance. In fact, even in a situation of bare life and extreme vulnerability and suffering, people find in the far, unconscious corners of their will various sources from which to nourish steadfastness and hope, supported by deep faith and a sense of collective identity. On the social level, it is well-known that Palestinian families have also been extremely protective to their members.

However, community, family and individual strength reach the limits of their protective capacities when confronted by massive violence at all levels; military, economic and symbolic. Decades of occupation and siege have given birth to a monstrous and violent structure which needs to be removed. A powerful, direct intervention of the international community to end occupation and siege is needed and basic individual and national Palestinian rights need to be implemented. Only that creates real and sustained protection.

Established in Bethlehem in 1986 by a group of Palestinian educators, AEI-Open Windows is an Arab-Palestinian NGO engaged in the field of community education to contribute to the general causes of human rights, peace and justice.

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