Space and Mobility in Palestine

Julie Peteet

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780253024800
• eBook ISBN: 9780253025111
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Professor Julie Peteet believes that the concept of mobility is key to understanding how place and space act as forms of power, identity, and meaning among Palestinians in Israel today. In Space and Mobility in Palestine, she investigates how Israeli policies of closure and separation influence Palestinian concerns about constructing identity, the ability to give meaning to place, and how Palestinians comprehend, experience, narrate, and respond to Israeli settler-colonialism. Peteet's work sheds new light on everyday life in the Occupied Territories and helps explain why regional peace may be difficult to achieve in the foreseeable future.

1 “Permission to Breathe”

Closure and the Wall

I WAS STANDING AMID the debris of an uprooted olive tree, on land belonging to the villagers of Iskaka, on a sweltering summer afternoon. In the hot, still air, the only sound was the whirring of the two Caterpillar bulldozers that were busily yanking dusty olive trees out of the neatly terraced soil. Clumps of fresh soil clung to the trees’ gnarled roots, which had been tossed aside to rot in the open air. Hundreds of villagers, and their local and foreign supporters, were making their way over the rock strewn landscape to the orchard and the path being cleared for the wall. Two Israeli soldiers stood guard over the bulldozers, automatic rifles at the ready. And then a woman dropped to her knees, waving her arms in the air, and screamed, “We are in a prison. Everyone talks about Abu Ghraib—we—here—we are in prison.”

As I approached the now teeming crowd gathering in the orchard, I caught sight of Um Salim, a middle-aged mother of four in a long, black dress. She was standing in front of a still-rooted olive tree, tearfully yet defiantly waving her white scarf in a gesture of mourning. Then she picked up a broken olive branch, flailing it as she angrily wailed, “They can come from Poland, they can come from Russia, they can come from America, and they can come from Ethiopia, but this will always be ours! This is Palestinian land!” Pointing to different trees, she exclaimed, “This one feeds my children breakfast! And this one, dinner! How will I feed them? What will I feed my children!?” Her words carried a palpable place-based sense of history and belonging, of life itself. References to sustenance, the rhetoric of feeding the next generation, ran deep among this once largely peasant population.

Um Salim’s angry cries captured the relentless march of late-modern settler colonialism, with its rapacious destruction of natural resources and callous indifference to indigenous lives. Israeli military and civilian personnel, hand-in-hand with armed colonists, exercise a substantial measure of control over the daily lives of several million Palestinians. With Israel’s superior military weaponry and ability to quickly call in reinforcements, two or three soldiers could ensure the bulldozers’ ability to carve a destructive path through village lands, as Palestinians stood watching.

Back in Ramallah a few days later, I was enjoying a leisurely lunch in an office full of young Palestinians. Twenty-five-year-old Selma, articulate and assertive, exclaimed half-jokingly but with unmistakable bitterness: “I want to live a normal day just once in my life. I have never had one. I want a sweet morning, a peaceful afternoon and a quiet evening—a whole day where one doesn’t think about this mess. What would it be like to live a normal life?” When one of her colleagues scoffed, “It would be boring!” Selma ignored the comment and continued, “I visited Amman and Cairo and I saw young people and how they live. I was so envious. Youth here are frustrated and feel hopeless. We want to lead a normal life—the kind we see on TV.”

As people drifted back to work, Selma and Jihan, another employee in this office, sat in the kitchen and continued the conversation over coffee. “I have never had a normal life,” Selma said. “My father was in prison most of my childhood because he gave a sack of grain to a poor man in need who was later arrested for being a security threat. My mother worked and I had one brother and one sister. Those with larger families really suffered because the eldest had to help take care of the kids. At least we were just a few children.” Palestinian subjectivity is conditioned by multiple contexts, including age, gender, religiosity, and family, among others, but the occupation looms large: life in a contested space, the protracted violence of everyday life under occupation, chronic insecurity and unpredictability, and an acute consciousness of and desire for another way of life, the normal life that Selma dreams of.

Talking about the multiple checkpoints she must pass through on her way to work, Jihan complains, “Soon we will need permission to breathe,” capturing the suffocating physicality of immobilization. The West Bank has been carved into zones, many of which are off-limits to Palestinians. There is a well-honed regime of surveillance and control over the individual and aggregate body. Jihan’s “permission to breathe” and Selma’s desire for “a normal life” are recurring refrains about colonialism’s encroachment on daily life that illuminate the particular politics of subjectivity in Palestine. Both are bitingly poignant, for the act of breathing indicates life, its absence signals death. “Permission” evokes Palestinian subordination to the occupation’s domination over life and death. “Normal life” calls attention to both the immediate and prolonged effects of closure.

In Palestine, a shift to spatial forms that monitor and entrap a surplus population is apparent. This chapter explores segregation/separation, closure, and immobilization by exploring two of its main pillars: the wall and the enclaves. Chapters 2 and 3 detail the other mechanisms: identity cards (bitaqat hawiyyaat), permits (tassrihaat), roads, surveillance, and checkpoints. Under segregation/separation, populations are assigned to different spaces and are constrained in their access to other spaces. Thus segregation aptly describes the situation in Palestine. Life behind the wall and in the enclaves sheds light on the intricate, often twisted relationship between space and subjectivity. As a dynamic arena, space is productive of subjectivity. French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1991, 143) contends that a primary purpose of spatial formations is to “produce subjects obedient to spatial rules.” Thus this chapter asks: What is it like to inhabit the spaces of closure? What do closure and spatial fragmentation look like on the ground?

A blight on the landscape, the mammoth wall simultaneously produces order and disorder, drawing an unmistakable line of inclusion and exclusion. On the Palestinian side, a cruel dystopia has settled over a landscape of increasingly disconnected and isolated enclaves. These are spaces of despair, where time has slowed, patterns of sociality are disjointed, and the future appears bleak. The wall is both a counterinsurgency technique to maintain control and squelch resistance and a massive land grab. Along with checkpoints and the division of Palestine into Areas A, B, and C, the wall has engendered a new spatial form in Palestine: the enclave and the sequestered subject.

An inescapable backdrop to daily life, the wall, or the fence in some areas, is at once taken for granted and yet a constant part of conversation. When I visited Um Salim a day after the protest, her house was packed with neighbors and relatives talking animatedly about the previous day’s demonstration and the tear gas that drove many protesters to seek first aid in the village’s small clinic. When I had trouble following the multiple strands of conversation, she laughed heartily and said, “We are all storytellers now. Every Palestinian has lots of stories, and everyone tells stories all the time. Our lives are a series of stories about how we went from here to there, what happened along the way, and who has land and can make a living.”

Separation and Closure

Closure is touted as a security measure to prevent militant attacks on Israelis. Under international law it is a form of collective punishment. Separation and closure complicate the standard observation that expanding frontier and colonial populations meet and interpenetrate colonized societies in networks of economic exchange and sociality, however skewered the power relations between them (Brooks 2002). It is worth remembering that in building the wall, Israel made a statement about its detachment from the region and positioned itself westward. Some Israeli scholars argue that Zionism has produced an inward-looking, parochial, and xenophobic subject with a siege mentality. This ostensible Jewish “return to origins in the Middle East” and the establishment of a state “ideologically and politically oriented almost exclusively toward the West” (Shohat 1999, 7) is paradoxical. Israelis have “an inherent tendency … to associate themselves and their collective project with a ‘cultured Europe’ … often played out through disassociation” from the Arab world (Rabinowitz 2001, 44). As an “extension” of Europe, Israel is “in,” but not “of,” the Middle East (Shohat 1999, 14). The wall keeps Palestinians out and cuts off any direct link with the Arab world; in so doing, it lets Israel imagine itself as part of the West. This is an instance of “selective cosmopolitanism” (Mandel 2008, 14), of being open to the world but not to the other in their midst. However, the separation is not airtight. Indeed, it has some porosity, especially as concerns work permits. Israeli employers still manage to obtain permits for needed Palestinian workers.

Separation has a genealogy traceable to early Zionist notions of exclusivist land and labor and the imputation of cultural difference. It derives from a ranked classificatory scheme “perceived as the norm” in Zionist ideology (Warschawski 2006, 47), which distinguishes Jews and Arabs. With the consolidation of the Israeli state and the nakbah, the 1948 Palestinian catastrophe of defeat and exile, the multiethnic and multireligious space of Palestine gave way to an impulse to carve out seemingly homogenous spaces. In the process, historical narratives and memories of past coexistence were gradually marginalized, if not silenced (see Shohat 1988, 2003; Campos 2011), obscuring a historical past and a memory of pluralism as well as Israel’s own internal social complexity. The Palestinians in Israel constitute between 20 percent and 22 percent of the population, while Jews of Arab ancestry (Mizrahim) constitute about half of the Israeli Jewish population.¹ Thus Israel has always been more ethnically and religiously plural than its dominant narrative and self-image might suggest.

The campaign slogan used by Israeli Labor politician Ehud Barak in his 1999 run for prime minister, “Us here, them there” (quoted in Gordon 2008, 197, 282), epitomizes these socio-spatial categories. Central to human cognition and meaning making, classification is deployed to effect a hierarchical social order. The essentialized categories of Arab and Jew constitute the parameters of ordered relations and the assignment of space and political-legal rights. The ostensibly homogeneous spaces, Jews here and Arabs there, are separated socio-legally and physically. Between closure and the wall, the categories become literally cemented in space.

Following the 1967 occupation, there was little commingling of communities, and certainly little intermarriage. It was in the realm of labor, and the unequal economic relations it entailed, where interpenetration was most clearly at work. Although the Green Line blurred as Palestinians and Israelis traversed it easily until the early 1990s, residential segregation remained prevalent. Contemporary Zionism’s separatist impulse, captured by Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin in 1994, when he declared, “We have to decide on separation as a philosophy” (Makovsky 2004, 52) was consolidated by Oslo.

States often hold “categorical identities” as a kind of trump card over fluid ethnic, religious, and national lines of distinction (Calhoun 1994, 26–27). How are these categories constructed and around what putative differences are they organized? Akin to sociologist Charles Tilly’s (1998, 6) “distinctly bounded pairs,” classificatory categories “do crucial organizational work.” Separation (hafrada) operates through and simultaneously reifies categorical difference, and in Palestine/Israel, these lines of distinction are unabashedly spatialized. For example, the concept “legal unidirectionality” characterizes land ownership. Once land has been transferred to the Jewish National Fund, whether it was expropriated or bought, it belongs to world Jewry and cannot be sold to or owned by non-Jews (Yiftachel 1998). Law provides another example as well. The colonists brought their legal system into the Occupied Palestinian Territories, providing rights and protections for themselves that don’t extend to the occupied population. Thus, within the area ruled by the state, two legal systems prevail. Israeli citizens, including those residing in the OPT, enjoy legal rights not available to the noncitizen Palestinians.

State-generated identities and the classifications of space they configure, for example, Israel, Gaza, West Bank, Jerusalem, Areas A, B, and C, and H1 and H2 are both products of and artifacts that accomplish the work of separation. The materiality of categories “appears always and instantly” (Bowker and Starr 1999, 3) as they work to maintain boundaries of rights to citizenship and mobility. In other words, a host of rights and restrictions flow from these categories. For example, Palestinians’ passage through checkpoints depends on their having the correct identity cards and/or permits. East Jerusalem Palestinian residents can enter Israel and reside in Jerusalem, whereas Palestinians with West Bank and Gazan identity cards cannot enter the city without a permit.

Although Tilly (1998, 7) notes that “completely bounded categories are rare,” separation and closure are attempts to impose just such boundaries and “lock categorical inequality in place” (ibid., 7–8). Classification and ordering fix a segregated and increasingly absolutist sense of space and national belonging: Jews in Israel and its colonies enjoying fairly unhindered mobility and West Bank Palestinians immobilized in multiple, noncontiguous enclaves. Israel classifies those under it rule, citizens and noncitizens, by more than a simple binary. An examination of the varied identity cards carried by those under its rule bears witness to a generalized Jewish/non-Jewish binary within which a monothetic logic can be discerned. Lines of distinction are first and foremost ethnic, religious, and national, but among the Palestinian population in the OPTs, there are multiple categories of Israeli-issued identity cards, color-coded for quick and easy assessment of risk and the holder’s rights to mobility and residency. This suggests that separation and closure are not just about distinctions between Arab and Jew but also the imposition of different legal identities on Palestinians. The occupation has divided Palestinians into multiple categories: holders of Jerusalem residency cards, West Bank residents, those with Gaza identities, and those with Jordanian passports. There is “a multiplicity of hierarchically stacked citizenships” that includes citizenship extended to Palestinians who remained in Israel after 1948, albeit with “curtailed” political rights, and the potential for automatic citizenship made available to Jews anywhere through the Israeli Law of Return based on descent and religion (Shafir 2005, 55).

Within the framework of global neoliberalism(s), separation and closure join other forms of structural and spatial management of racialized inequality and expulsion. The new era of immobilization and incarceration takes many forms—from the US prison system and its military prison at Guantanamo Bay to the wall in Palestine. In Palestine, physical separation mimics and carries forward the distinction between ruler and ruled, citizen and noncitizen, Israeli and Palestinian, as the wall concretizes identities. Separation resembles Jim Crow America: the dominant sector of society is unable to imagine life in which the other is equal, and the other inhabits a world hedged with restrictions and boundaries whose transgression can elicit a swift and violent response.²

Closure’s most immediate effect has been to obstruct Palestinian mobility and access to employment, education, health care, political organizing, commerce, and family and social relations. Most significantly, closure disrupts the notion of a schedule, or trust in a daily temporal rhythm. In trying to grasp this lived reality ethnographically what came to mind for me was the notion of “calibrated chaos.” Chaos began to crystallize as a planned, observable, and lived pattern. After one particularly long wait, over an hour, to pass through the Qalandia checkpoint, a delay that had no discernable reason except that the checkpoint personnel were chatting and horsing around, seemingly oblivious to a long line of cars waiting to pass, I complained to the driver, a friend with a Jerusalem identity card, who said, “The soldiers have told us chaos is their policy—sometimes when I joke with them about why it is so chaotic—they laughingly tell me this.” Control through the creation of calibrated chaos, the changing of rules and procedures with no warning or explanation, is enacted daily at checkpoints and in applying for permits. Intermittent and prolonged curfews punctuate these measures.³ Unpredictability is the new norm. The common expression inshallah (God willing) has political resonance; its utterance in the context of this unpredictability makes it much more freighted than usual.

On a late spring afternoon, I met Muna, an elegant woman approaching her seventies, for lunch. I ask, “how are you?” and she replies, “’aisheen” (“We are living” or “We are still breathing”). Muna’s collective use of “’aisheen” points to an unlivable life in which breathing, the state of being alive, is hedged with an uncertainty that underscores a subjectivity characterized by a profound awareness of the simple, yet life-sustaining, act of breathing. This brings to the fore the questions: What is it like to live in a state of exclusion and confinement? What are the implications of this for shaping subjectivity?

From her apartment in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Dis, Fatima Fayyad, a twenty-six-year-old engineer by training, cannot avoid seeing the wall, just twenty or so meters from her house. For Fatima, her husband, Hasan, and their three young children, its looming shadow blocks the natural sunlight that once warmed their home. Most of their relatives live on the West Bank side. When I visited her on a dreary, rainy winter morning, she summed up the meaning of separation and the wall:

The idea of the wall has been there for a long time. Some Israeli writers and politicians used to say the best thing is to put the Palestinians behind walls so the new generations will have no images of Israelis and thus they will be afraid of them—the enemy—we will be afraid of them. The new generation would not be as strong as the generation who fought in the intifada and struggled for years. So what can Palestinians see now? They don’t know Jerusalem; they don’t know the West Bank—only their own village or area. They live in terrible economic and social conditions and the situation is deteriorating every day. So these people—it is easy to deal with them, it is easy to destroy them or kill them or perhaps they will kill each other. So, this is what they want, I think. They, the Israelis, always feel they are living in a state of war, that they are targeted so they are always afraid. They are afraid from inside. Perhaps, some of them, they know they have done something wrong and that this land is not theirs and that is why they have to act strongly to keep what they have achieved. So for them it is a good idea to put us behind walls and then they can forget about us. But I don’t think this will work. I don’t think walls will work in our world now. It is a different world. If the wall were built in 1967—perhaps. But now it is different. The world is so small. You can easily talk and what you say reaches everybody in the whole world via the internet.

They are always worried about demographics because we have more children and that is why they can never dream of allowing the refugees back. That is why they have these strategies of getting people to leave. If you don’t have a place to live, and you can’t rent, can’t visit your family, and you do not have a job—you will easily go abroad. If you are educated and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Space and Mobility in the Time of Closure
• 1 “Permission to Breathe”: Closure and the Wall
• 2 Mobility: Legibility, Permits, and Roads
• 3 Geography of Anticipation and Risk: Checkpoints, Filters, and Funnels
• 4 Waiting and “Stealing Time”: Closure’s Temporality
• 5 Anti-Colonial Resistance in the Time of Closure
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index