09.05.08
A surplus people
RG mail
The Palestinians: Warehousing a surplus people
Jeff Halper
So rapid is the pace of systemic change in that indivisible entity
known as Palestine/Israel that it almost defies our ability to keep up
with it. The deliberate and systematic campaign of driving
Palestinians out of the country in 1948 was quickly forgotten, the
plight of more than 700,000 refugees becoming an invisible non-issue.
Instead a plucky, European, socialist Israel became the darling of
even the radical left, and for many years after 1967 Israels
occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza also remained a
non-issue. Even the mention of the word occupation, not to mention
Palestinians, would get you labeled an anti-Semite in a wink of the
eye, especially given the identity of Palestinians with terrorism in
the 1970s and early 80s. Only with the outbreak of the first Intifada
in late 1987 did the situation of the Palestinians under Israeli rule
show upon the radar of public consciousness, in Israel as elsewhere,
becoming a full-fledged and official issue with the opening of the
Madrid and Oslo peace talks in the early 1990s. Still, Israeli ruled
the all-important realm of PR. Once Arafat refused Ehud Baraks
generous offer a mythical proposal which put a positive spin on a
blatant attempt to impose an apartheid regime of cantons on the
Palestinians the campaign to re-demonize Arafat and his people proved
a relatively simple exercise. Sharons imprisoning the Palestinian
president in a dark room of his demolished headquarters, eliminating
him politically, and I believe, physically, raised virtually no major
opposition or even criticism in the international community.
Still, a growing movement among civil society groups human rights and
political organizations, church and critical Jewish groups, trade
unions, intellectuals and even certain political figures, in Israel as
well as abroad succeeded in the past decade or so in raising the
Occupation to the status of global issue. A critical mass of
descriptions of Israels facts on the ground, combined with the witness
of international activists on the ground and a growing body of
analyses critical of Israels policies and intent, rendered both the
term occupation and critiques of it valid in public and political
discourse, despite the fact that Israel continued to deny the fact of
occupation, casting its rule as one of administration over a disputed
territory.
The rapid expansion of the facts on the ground, however, continued to
overtake language and political analysis. An occupation is defined in
international law as a temporary military situation. While the
establishment of more than 200 settlements and outposts in the
Occupied Territories, all tied inextricably into Israel proper by a
massive network of Israeli-only highways and, ultimately, the
Separation Barrier, seemed to indicate that the Occupation was no
longer temporary, that it grown into one indivisible system between
the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, many Palestinians, Israelis
and international observers and decision-makers alike, committed to a
two-state solution, were loathe to admit the transformation of the
Occupation into a permanent state of apartheid. The implications of so
doing were simply too daunting. The transformation of the Occupation
into a country-wide system of apartheid meant the end of the Zionist
dream of a Jewish state unless apartheid could somehow be packaged as
a two-state solution, a sleight-of-hand to which many liberal Israeli
and Jewish peace groups have succumbed. Nevertheless, slowly,
painfully (as Jimmy Carter discovered), the realization that we now
have a de facto regime of apartheid over all Israel-Palestine
officially sanctioned if the Annapolis Process succeeds has begun to
sink in, although resistance, even among the Israeli peace movement,
is still strong.
Yet no sooner have we begun to shift from occupation to apartheid than
political realities, defined in large part by an accelerated Israeli
campaign of expanding its facts on the ground, have rendered even that
conception, radical only a few months ago, completely outmoded. Signs
of this came, fittingly enough, from South Africans who knew the
apartheid regime there intimately. While experiences of oppression
cannot be compared in any objective way and cannot be minimized, a
number of prominent South Africans most of whom were labeled
terrorists, a favorite term employed by colonial regimes to discredit
indigenous struggles for freedom have commented that what is happening
to the Palestinians goes beyond even the despicable system they lived
under. While black South Africans were deprived of their rights,
apartheids policy of separate development did not deny the very
existence of black African peoples and nations, as does Israels policy
of Judaization. Demolishing the homes of African blacks was a common
policy, but it was never as extensive as Israels practice, which has
seen some 18,000 Palestinian homes demolished in the Occupied
Territories since 1967, on the background of tens of thousands of
other within Israel, a policy extending from 1948 until today ethnic
cleansing in a most tangible form. Torture and imprisonment under
Israels Occupation and more widespread and institutionalized than they
were in South Africa, Israeli courts are far less likely to challenge
military policies or actions, and the level of violence is far higher:
Apache helicopters never strafed Soweto nor were ANC leaders
systematically assassinated in their dozens. Even segregation, the
very essence of apartheid, is more complete, more institutionalized
and more rigorously enforced that it was in South Africa.
Overall, while both peoples suffered extreme economic oppression
leading to the impoverishment of their entire populations, the daily
repression suffered by Palestinians is on a scale that apparently
surpasses that of South Africa in its apartheid days. The absolute
control of people’s lives, said Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, a former
deputy minister of defense and of health and a current member of
Parliament on a recent visit to the West Bank, the lack of freedom of
movement, the army presence everywhere, the total separation and the
extensive destruction we saw.What I see here is worse than what we
experienced.. Ronnie Kasrils, a Jewish South African cabinet minister
and former ANC guerrilla, concurred. This is much worse than
apartheid. The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look
like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had
sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying
houses. We had armoured vehicles and police using small arms to shoot
people but not on this scale. John Dugard, Special Rapporteur on the
situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied
since 1967 to the United Nations Human Rights Council: Many aspects of
Israel’s occupation surpass those of the apartheid regime. Israel’s
large-scale destruction of Palestinian homes, leveling of agricultural
lands, military incursions and targeted assassinations of Palestinians
far exceed any similar practices in apartheid South Africa. No wall
was ever built to separate blacks and whites. Dugard, a prominent
South African judge, wrote in his report to the United Nations Human
Rights Council: Many aspects of Israel’s occupation surpass those of
the apartheid regime. Israel’s large-scale destruction of Palestinian
homes, leveling of agricultural lands, military incursions and
targeted assassinations of Palestini ans far exceed any similar
practices in apartheid South Africa. No wall was ever built to
separate blacks and whites.
Apartheid is nevertheless a useful term. It advances the political
discussion in that it helps people to get it, to understand that we
are speaking of a system that has gone beyond occupation in its scale
and permanence. Boiled down to its essentials, apartheid comprises two
elements: the separation of populations, whether on a racial basis or,
in the case of Israel, according to religion or nationality, and the
subsequent domination of one privileged people over others,
institutionalized into a permanent system, supported by law. Not only
do these elements accurately describe the system Israel has instituted
over the entire country, Israel and the Occupied Territories included,
but the Israeli government itself calls its system apartheid: hafrada
in Hebrew, separation in English. The wall Israel is constructing is
officially named the Separation Barrier (Mikhshol HaHafrada), not the
Security Barrier. Its tortuous route deep into the Palestinian areas
of the West Bank, where it incorporates seven major settlement blocs
into Israel comprising 80% of the settlers, is known as Israels
demographic border. In the end, Israel will expand to about 85% of the
country, take all of its resources and elements of sovereignty (such
as control of movement and borders), and leave the Palestinian
majority to live in a truncated bantustan with no meaningful
sovereignty, no freedom and no economy.
Apartheid is linked to occupation in the sense that both are conceived
as political situations, as political issues that must be resolved by
the parties with the intervention of the international community. Both
possess a political dynamic involving grassroots resistance, the
mobilizing of public opinion and political forces, appeals to
international law, human rights and competing political claims.
Israels Occupation, now more than four decades old, fully entrenched
and with no end in sight, appears to have moved beyond both of these
systems. It has evolved into a system of warehousing, a static
situation emptied of all political content (Israels policies are cast
as a war on terrorism with no reference to occupation, which Israel
officially denies having), which Israel is attempting to present as a
permanent given, a non-issue, a state of status quo (another Israeli
term for its policy towards the Palestinians) immune to any genuine
solution. What Israel has constructed, argues Naomi Klein in her
powerful new book, The Shock Doctrine,
is a system,a network of open holding pens for millions of people who
have been categorized as surplus humanity.Palestinians are not the
only people in the world who have been so categorized.This discarding
of 25 to 60 percent of the population has been the hallmark of the
Chicago School [of Economics] crusade.In South Africa, Russia and New
Orleans the rich build walls around themselves. Israel has taken this
disposal process a step further: it has built walls around the
dangerous poor (p. 442).
Warehousing is the best, if bleakest, term for what Israel is
constructing for the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories. It is
indeed worse than the apartheid-era South African bantustans. The ten
non-viable mini-states established by South Africa for the black
African majority on only 11% of the countrys land were, to be sure, a
type of warehouse. They were intended to supply South Africa with
cheap labor while relieving it of its black population, thus making
possible a European dominated democracy. This is precisely what Israel
is intending its Palestinian Bantustan encompassing 15% of historic
Palestine, but with a crucial caveat: Palestinian workers will not be
allowed into Israel, which has found a cheaper source of labor, some
300,000 foreign workers imported from China, the Philippines,
Thailand, Rumania and West Africa, augmented by its own Arab, Mizrahi,
Ethiopian, Russian and Eastern European citizens. From every point of
view, historically, culturally, politically and economically, the
Palestinians have been defined as surplus humanity; nothing remains to
do with them except warehousing, which the concerned international
community appears willing to allow Israel to do.
Not only should the permanent warehousing of an entire people be of
concern to the Palestinians and those who support them, it should, as
Klein stresses, concern anyone troubled with warehousing as a global
phenomenon. In fact, it may constitute an entirely new crime against
humanity, one that affects, Klein says, those who have been judged
irrevocably superfluous: the urban poor (more than a billion of whom
are imprisoned in what Mike David, in his seminal book Planet of
Slums, calls global slums), the rural poor, particular minorities,
refugees and undocumented immigrants and, most recently, peoples,
religions and countries demonized for political purposes as evil or
uncivilized. To the extent that what we call Israels Occupation is, in
fact, a model of warehousing, it has implications far beyond a
localized conflict between two peoples. If Israel can package and
export its layered Matrix of Control, a system of permanent repression
that combines Kafkaesque administration, law and planning with overtly
coercive forms of control over a defined population hemmed in by
hostile gated communities (settlements in this case), walls and
obstacles of various kinds to movement, then, as Klein writes starkly,
every country will look like Israel/Palestine: One part looks like
Israel; the other part looks like Gaza. In other words, a Global
Palestine.
This goes a long way towards explaining why Israel is unconcerned
about entering into genuine peace processes or resolving its conflict
with the Palestinians. By warehousing them it has the best of both
worlds: complete freedom to expand its settlements and control without
ever having to compromise, as a political solution would require. By
the same token, it explains why the international community lets
Israel get away with it. Instead of presenting the international
community with issues that must be resolved violations of human
rights, international law and repeated UN resolutions, let alone the
implications of the conflict itself it is instead providing a valued
service: it is offering a useful model that can applied to surplus
populations everywhere, including right at home.
Israel, then is in complete sinc with both the economic and military
logics of global capitalism, for which it is being rewarded
generously. Our mistake, encouraged by such terms as conflict,
occupation and apartheid, is to view Israels control of the
Palestinians as a political issue which must be resolved. Instead, it
will be resolved when the Palestinians are disappeared, just as people
were disappeared in Latin American under its military regimes. Dov
Weisglass, the architect of the Sharon governments disengagement from
Gaza, said as much in a revealing interview (The Big Freeze, Haaretz
Magazine, Oct. 8, 2004):
The disengagement plan is the preservative of the sequence principle.
It is the bottle of formaldehyde within which you place the
president’s formula [that Israel can retain its settlement blocs,
including a Greater Jerusalem] so that it will be preserved for a very
lengthy period. The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It
supplies the amount of formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there
will not be a political process with the Palestinians.
Is what you are saying, then, is that you exchanged the strategy of a
long-term interim agreement for a strategy of long-term interim
situation?
The American term is to park conveniently. The disengagement plan
makes it possible for Israel to park conveniently in an interim
situation that distances us as far as possible from political
pressure. It legitimizes our contention that there is no negotiating
with the Palestinians. There is a decision here to do the minimum
possible in order to maintain our political situation. The decision is
proving itself. It is making it possible for the Americans to go to
the seething and simmering international community and say to them,
What do you want. It also transfers the initiative to our hands. It
compels the world to deal with our idea, with the scenario we wrote.
Warehousing is the most stark of political concepts because it
represents the de-politization of repression, the transformation of a
political issue of the first degree into a non-issue, a regrettable
but unavoidable situation best dealt with through relief, charity and
humanitarian programs. It is a dead-end, a given, for which no remedy
is available. This, of course, is not the case. Warehousing is a
policy, an economic and political consequence that can be addressed to
the degree that a just structural adjustment is made to the system,
including the possibility of replacing it if it proves recalcitrant.
Using the term warehousing, then, is not meant to name the final stage
of repression but, rather, to highlight it so as to better eliminate
it. For despite the almost unlimited and unchecked power Israel has
over every element of Palestinian life, it has failed to nail down
either apartheid or warehousing. Palestinian resistance continues,
supported by the Arab and wider Muslim peoples, significant sectors of
the international civil society and the critical Israeli peace camp;
the conflicts destabilizing effect on the international system grows
steadily; and neither the Israelis nor the Americans (with European
complicity) can force the outcome they seek, despite their
overwhelming power.
The term warehousing, then, is meant as a warning. We must continue
our efforts to end the Israeli Occupation, even if this is meant in a
wider sense, of creating a genuine Palestine/Israel, or a wider
regional confederation, rather than an apartheid-cum-two-state
solution or outright warehousing. Yet looking at Palestine as a
microcosm of a broader global reality of warehousing enables us to
more effectively identify those elements appearing elsewhere and grasp
the model which Israel is developing, all the better to counter it.
Regardless, our language and the analysis it generates must not only
be honest and unsparing; they must keep pace with political intentions
and ever more rapidly developing facts on the ground.
(Jeff Halper is the head of the Israeli Committee Against House
Demolitions (ICAHD). He can be reached at [1]jeff@icahd.org.)
References
1. mailto:jeff@icahd.org