The West Bank Palestinians: Occupied, Walled In And Going Where
Roger Owen Al-Hayat - 11/01/08//
However well-prepared you may think you are, your first sight of the Israeli separation wall comes as something of a shock. Mine came during a trip through the West Bank up to Qalqiliya arranged for the participants of an Edward Said memorial conference at Bir Zeit university just before Christmas. There we were in the centre of the town bustling with preparations for Eid. Then, suddenly, after only a five minute drive down just a few streets towards the west, we suddenly come to a desolate strip of land which must once have been gardens with the dirty grey wall rising high above it, foreign, menacing, obscene.
Just as menacing was the further discovery that the well is built of vertical strips of concrete set upon, rather than dug into, the earth, and so quite easily moved. This gives the impression that it is always ready to press further inwards into the Palestinian lands, imprisoning their inhabitants more and more tightly, with their only exit once they were banned from using Tel Aviv airport in 2002, the time-consuming process of crossing the Jordan bridge to Amman.
But, apart from it prison-like character, the existence of the wall raises many other questions as well. One is the obvious contradiction between its main purpose - separation - and that of the continuing Israeli expansion into Palestinian land in Zones A and B which jumbles up the Palestinian and Israeli populations yet again, albeit in separate towns and villages and often using separate roads. What is to happen to the Israeli town of Ariel, for example, with its population of 35-40,000, just east of the wall, or new new Israeli industrial towns which you also see encroaching into Palestinian territory just south of Nablus? What is to be done about settler complaints that the wall makes their relationship with Israel proper that much more difficult?
The obvious supposition would seem to be that the process of expansion itself, far from being stopped by the policy of separation, may even be being encouraged by it as it builds up pressure for the wall to be moved yet again to include more Israeli settlements on more Palestinian land. And if so, there is nothing but the dismal conclusion that there is still no end in sight, that the Palestinian leadership, however resolute in asking for a total halt to new settlement, will always be ignored and defeated. In such circumstances there cannot be, and can never be, a final Israeli map showing the limits of the land they propose to take, and so what little they are prepared to concede to a putative Palestinian state.
The wall, as well as the rules preventing West Bank Palestinians from crossing into Israel and Israelis from crossing into the West Bank, also has important consequences for the nature of occupation itself. For one thing, Israeli relationships with the Palestinian population have now become almost exclusively a military affair with everything subject to the logic of security, and with little attempt to assess, let alone try to improve, its pitiful existence.
Hence, the positioning of the flying check-points which do so much to disrupt Palestinian life seems to be entirely at the discretion of the local Israeli military commander. Hence too the only information that matters to the Israeli authorities if of an intelligence nature, that is which persons or families are seen as dangerous, which simply hostile, which apathetic and so harmless. And, as always in such occupations, the classification of those who can be trusted and those not tends to be informed, generally, by the kind of crude racism associated with the management of subject populations.
The effect of this process is amplified by the difficulties which both Israeli civilians and Palestinians experience in tracking developments on the West Bank, whether in the form of collecting data or conducting more in-depth economic or sociological research. The once fruitful collaboration between Palestinian academics in Ramallah and the Israel ones in Jerusalem, less than ten miles away, is now almost impossible. Meanwhile, the Palestinians themselves generally prefer not to move about very much so as to avoid what Amira Haas of the newspaper, Ha-aretz has called the 'theft' of their time as a result of the possibility of long and humiliating waits at the hands of the Israeli soldiers controlling the many hundreds of check points. It requires an extra-special effort to remain interested in scientific or simply humanitarian inquiry in such soul-destroying circumstances.
Probably the only group that benefits from separaration are the criminals. The wall, like all such barrier, not only makes certain types of smuggling more lucrative but also generate special kinds of thefts, for example, that of Israeli-registered cars belonging to the settlers or left unattended at check-points, which are quite easily spirited away into the Palestinian enclaves. Some appear to be broken down for their spare parts, others can be seen being driven quite openly around the streets of Ramallah and other towns, often prompting yet more Israeli police incursions to get them back.
Once final thought: the occupation, now forty years old, has gone through many stages and seem destined, like all occupations, to go through many more as practices change, opposition rises and falls arise, peoples expectations change in Israel as well as Palestine, as world opinion becomes more or less engaged. Certainly no one on either side of the wall expects that it has reached its final, and irrevocable stage. The forces for change are too strong for that.
Nevertheless, bvjust how matters will develop, just what the dynamic of the present situation is, cannot easily be evaluated, the more so as research is so difficult, the identification of the major trends so problematic. It would seem to me that, as I have suggested, the most important factor at work is that of the contradiction between separation and further Israeli expansion. But no one I spoke to in either Israel of Palestine has any real idea how this will play out except in the most general of terms.
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