Unfree in Palestine

Registration, Documentation and Movement Restriction

Nadia Abu-Zahra, Adah Kay

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780745325279
• eBook ISBN: 9781849647670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Libertad política

This book reveals the role played by identity documents in Israel's apartheid policies towards the Palestinians, from the red passes of the 1950s to the orange, green and blue passes of today. The authors chronicle how millions of Palestinians have been denationalised through the bureaucratic tools of census, population registration, blacklisting and a discriminatory legal framework. They show how identity documents are used by Israel as a means of coercion, extortion, humiliation and informant recruitment. Movement restrictions tied to IDs and population registers threaten Palestinian livelihoods, freedom of movement and access to basic services such as health and education. Unfree in Palestine is a masterful expose of the web of bureaucracy used by Israel to deprive the Palestinians of basic rights and freedoms, and calls for international justice and inclusive security in place of discrimination and division.

1

Introduction

When I close my eyes, I still hear the crash of ocean waves, I still feel the warm sun on my face, and I still taste salt from the sea spray.¹

So wrote one of 27 passengers on the SS Dignity, one of several small sailing boats containing doctors, lawyers, teachers, and Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire. Calling themselves “the freedom riders of the twenty-first century”, they were the first international vessels, in 2008, to enter the coast of Gaza in over 40 years.

Three years later, in the West Bank, six Palestinians stood at the 148 Bus stop near the Jewish colony of Migron, again, as “freedom riders”. The bus is operated by Egged, an Israeli company edging into the global market, despite boycott efforts. It serves exclusive Jewish colonies, built on Palestinian land, but where Palestinians are forbidden to enter. After five buses sped by the Palestinians and their placards reading “freedom”, “dignity”, and “we shall overcome”, a sixth bus pulled up, with a number of passengers already aboard. The Palestinians paid the fare and boarded. Israeli army and police vehicles surrounded the bus and boarded it when it stopped again. The settlers aboard the bus rushed off, including 54-year-old Haggai Segal from the colony of Ofra, once jailed for planting a car bomb that seriously wounded a Palestinian mayor.²

“This is our bus” said Maggie Amir, from the Jewish colony of Rimonim. “This is our land” said another passenger leaving the bus. Abraham, a 70-year old from the colony of Psagot, was more accommodating, “If they are good ... why not let them ride the bus?” A younger settler expressed irritation at the hold-up to her day, to which Palestinian activist Huwaida Arraf replied, “Your soldiers hold us up ten times longer than this, every day at checkpoints across the West Bank”. Two policemen crowded over Huwaida’s slight figure. Another policeman stood by, with two fully armed soldiers behind. Huwaida raised her eyebrows as they studied her ID.³

Another policeman asked for 38-year-old Badi’ Dweik’s ID. He had been seated a row away from bomber Haggai Segal. “I am not going to obey your discriminatory law” Badi’ said in Arabic.⁴ “So you are detained” replied the policeman, also in Arabic. “Fine. I am not moving” said Badi’. “Why don’t you ask the settlers for a permit?” That was enough for the policeman, “I am the law, you are not the law”.⁵

The freedom riders by sea and bus drew global attention to a system of movement restrictions that many considered unprecedented, despite powerful parallels to apartheid South Africa, the Jim Crow laws of the southern United States, and the internment of Japanese Canadians and Americans during the Second World War.⁶ As of 2012, 101 different kinds of permits govern Palestinian movement.

There are separate permits for worshipers who attend Friday prayers in Jerusalem and for clerics working at the site; for unspecified clergy and for church employees. Medical permits differentiate between physicians and ambulance drivers, and “medical emergency staff” ... There is a permit for escorting a patient in an ambulance and one for simply escorting a patient.

There are separate permits for traveling to a wedding in the West Bank or traveling to a wedding in Israel, and also for going to Israel for a funeral, a work meeting, or a court hearing.⁷

In 2011 the Israeli Border police started to train young Jewish teenagers to carry M16s (5.56 mm calibre semi-automatic rifles) and hunt down Palestinian workers without movement permits. High-school student Reut enjoys the chase:

I consider it a form of pleasure. It simply provides me with values, and I love the action.

I like catching the Palestinian workers. [...] The point is to catch them and return them back where they belong.⁸

Another youth, Eran, described his feelings:

It’s a fun feeling – you are filled with adrenaline and energy during such operations. We also feel pride for protecting our home. For instance, one time we went to a construction site and found a few of them there. We saw them hiding and we caught them, took their identification cards, sat them down in the vehicle, and called our commander to come check them.⁹

The teenagers also stopped and searched buses.

These small vignettes, of freedom riders and teens with M16s, speak to many of the key issues for Palestinians and Israelis today: ideology and discourse, history and international relations, land, coexistence, and resistance.¹⁰ Each of these subjects has its own, ever-expanding, library of key texts. What is particular to these vignettes, however, is the common theme of movement restriction.

1.1 FREEDOM AND UNFREEDOM IN PALESTINE

“A History of the IDs”

By most accounts, movement restriction is one of the most pressing current problems in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where identity documents, permits, and colour-coded license plates define who can go where, when, and for how long. If this book were to be translated to Arabic or Hebrew, it would probably have the simple title, “A History of the IDs”, because of the weight of local meaning carried by the word “ID” (hawiyya in Arabic, or teudat in Hebrew). Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in 1964 begins his oft-quoted poem on the ID:

Sejjil! Ana ‘Arabi. Wa raqam bitaaqati khamsoona elf.

Register! I am an Arab. And my identity card number is fifty thousand.

The first word is addressed to an unknown administrator or registrar, and the challenge to register or “record me” is later followed with a detailed catalogue of indigeneity and rootedness, punctuated with:

Fa hal tardheek manzilati?

Are you satisfied with my status?

The last word, however, means both status and house, mocking the colonial presence. For Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and before them, for Palestinians displaced within the 1949 Armistice lines, the ID was an instrument of suppression, repression, and humiliation. It was a denial of rights and the condition on which these rights were temporarily restored at the whim of Israeli authorities.

The power of Darwish’s poem is in the vivid explanation of all that the ID represents: population registration, denationalisation, and the stripping of all rights from the citizens of Palestine; a permit regime that makes all such rights subservient to Israeli state permission; the indignity of repeated ID checks in one’s home, land, and movements from place to place; and the patient, split attitude toward the ID – acceptance of reliance on it, but rejection of its authority – until an opportunity arises to restore one’s full rights.

Remarkably, although the separated pieces of the puzzle have all been painstakingly chronicled, and while this multifaceted history of movement restriction, identity documentation, and population registration and denationalisation is recognised as being the crux of the Palestinian problem, no single book-length document seems to draw the line from one phenomenon to the other in a continuous sweep.

Many publications on refugees, forced migration, and the right of return to their homes (as well as their rights in situ), cover only one piece of the puzzle: denationalisation. But there is little material describing the bureaucratic process of population registration.

In writing this book we have been able to draw on the extensive body of general and specialist literature on the bureaucracy of the occupation covering aspects such as the system of military rule and military courts, the secret services, the permit regime, the population registry, the Israeli high court, the Wall, collaboration, the role of architecture and planning, and so on. Other crucial sources include a range of specialist reports on the impact of movement restriction on: health and education; employment, agriculture, and the economy; and the family.¹¹

We also acknowledge the important anthology by Abu-Laban, Lyon and Zureik which deals with movement restriction, identity documentation, and population registration viewed within a wider global context of evolving international trends in surveillance and control.¹²

These and other writings on Israeli bureaucracy emphasise the ubiquity of identity documents.¹³ Darwish’s “Register!” has not ceased to echo for the past five decades, during which:

The permit regime functioned simultaneously as the scaffolding for many other forms of control and thus as part of the infrastructure of control, as well as a controlling apparatus in its own right.¹⁴

It is thus surprising that a chronological, cumulative account of registration, documentation, and movement restriction has not been written until now.

Fresh Perspectives

Some would argue that a continuous history is misleading, and that the bureaucratic policies of the Zionist movement and Israel toward Palestinians are instead phases, perhaps oscillating between benevolence and open conquest, depending on the limits implied by Palestinian resistance and international norms and laws. Israeli policy has been conceived as being first survival (1948), then expansionism or colonisation (1967), and then separation (late 2000 onward).¹⁵

While most authors use the term “Zionist movement” comfortably for the period up to June 1948, after that point the term seems to drop out of use. This has become the unspoken consensus, despite the reality that the Zionist movement did not cease to exist, and that an increasing body of work views Zionist policy within the West Bank and Gaza as inseparable from analysis of Israeli society and politics today.¹⁶

In this book we focus on denationalisation rather than displacement or dispossession. Thus, instead of enumerating only the 850,000 refugees (or fewer, depending on which source you choose), we draw attention to the 1.4 million denationalised Palestinians. This figure, therefore, acknowledges the loss felt by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, numbering at least 400,000 in 1948, as well as that felt by Palestinians displaced within their homeland (at least 150,000 in 1948). The former group, for instance, numbers over four million today – excluding the millions living abroad in the diaspora without internationally recognised documents of state citizenship. Their loss (that is, their denationalisation) took place in 1948. It was not postponed until 1967 – the point at which most analysis of their interaction with the Zionist movement begins.

The focus on denationalisation, rather than solely dispossession, implicitly recognises the nationality and citizenship of Palestinians prior to 1948. Others imply that Palestinians have always been stateless, emphasising a history of “foreign rule”. Yet, as international lawyer Henry Cattan points out, Palestinians were not stateless. International law professor John Quigley adds: they were passport-holding citizens of Palestine.¹⁷

1.2 SCANTILY-DOCUMENTED PASS SYSTEMS

This story is not unique: typically, movement restrictions are routinely unchronicled. In Canada for example, where indigenous peoples, the First Nations, were forced into reserves, very few publications exist on the pass system. Over 100 years after the pass system began, professor Frank Laurie Barron scoured the archives and found only brief mentions within half a dozen published accounts, amounting in total to less than 15 pages. Barron makes an important connection, however:

The entire regime was fundamentally racist, but the aspect which particularly conjured up images of apartheid was the Indian pass system, applied in selected areas of the prairie west. Essentially, the pass system was a segregationist scheme which, without any legislative basis, required Indians to remain on their reserves unless they had a pass, duly signed by the Indian agent or farm instructor and specifying the purpose and duration of their absence.

It is also relevant to note that in 1902 a commission from South Africa visited western Canada to study the pass system as a method of social control.¹⁸

Even if Canadians were not documenting the history and mechanisms of their pass system, South Africans involved in the construction of apartheid were keen to learn from it. This history placed Canada in an awkward position in the 1980s when it proclaimed opposition to South African apartheid. The same light-touch treatment of the pass system recurred in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Registration and Denationalisation
• 3 Blacklists
• 4 Coercion and Collaboration
• 5 Movement Restriction and Induced Transfer
• 6 The Health System
• 7 Education
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Index