Disengagement
and the Frontiers of Zionism
Darryl Li
February 16,
2008
(Darryl
Li is a doctoral student in anthropology and Middle East studies
at Harvard University and a student at Yale Law School. He
spent January in the Gaza Strip.)
In mid-January,
when Israel further tightened its blockade of the Gaza Strip,
it hurriedly assured the world that a “humanitarian crisis” would
not be allowed to occur. Case in point: Days after the intensified
siege prompted Hamas to breach the Gaza-Egypt border and Palestinians
to pour into Egypt in search of supplies, Israel announced plans
to send in thousands of animal vaccines to prevent possible outbreaks
of avian flu and other epidemics due to livestock and birds entering
Gaza from Egypt.[1] Medicines
for human beings, on the other hand, are among the supplies that
are barely trickling in to Gaza now that the border has been
resealed.
More than
an act of enlightened self-interest -- or, more bluntly, a recognition
that “the virus doesn’t stop at the checkpoint”[2] --
the reported animal vaccine shipment is a clue to how Israel
is reconfiguring its control over the Gaza Strip. The story of
the recent restrictions, when told at all to the outside world,
has been conveyed largely through statistics: 90 percent of private
industries in Gaza have shut down, 80 percent of the population
receives food aid, all construction sites are idle and unemployment
has broken all previous records.[3] Journalists and NGOs have rendered individual
portraits of ruined farmers, bankrupted merchants and trapped
medical patients. But the stranglehold on Gaza is not simply
a stricter version of the policies of the past five years; it
also reflects a qualitative shift in Israel’s technique for
management of the territory. The contrast between Israel’s expedited
transfer of animal vaccines to Gaza and its denial of medicine
for the human population is emblematic of this emergent form
of control, that, for lack of a better term, we may call “disengagement.”
“Disengagement”
is, of course, the name Israel gave to its 2005 removal of colonies
and military bases from the Gaza Strip. But rather than a one-time
abandonment of control, disengagement is better understood as
an ongoing process of controlled abandonment, by which Israel
is severing the ties forged with Gaza over 40 years of domination
without allowing any viable alternatives to emerge, all while
leaving the international donor community to subsidize what remains.
The effect is to treat the Strip as an animal pen whose denizens
cannot be domesticated and so must be quarantined. Disengagement
is a form of rule that sets as its goal neither justice nor even
stability, but rather survival -- as we are reminded by every
guarantee that an undefined “humanitarian crisis” will be avoided.
FROM BANTUSTAN
TO INTERNMENT CAMP TO ANIMAL PEN
Since its
beginnings over a century ago, the Zionist project of creating
a state for the Jewish people in the eastern Mediterranean has
faced an intractable challenge: how to deal with indigenous non-Jews
-- who today comprise half of the population living under Israeli
rule -- when practical realities dictate that they cannot be
removed and ideology demands that they must not be granted political
equality. From these starting points, the general contours of
Israeli policy from left to right over the generations have been
clear: First, maximize the number of Arabs on the minimal amount
of land, and second, maximize control over the Arabs while minimizing
any apparent responsibility for them.
On the first
score, Gaza is a resounding success: Although it covers only
1.5 percent of the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean
Sea, it warehouses one out of every four Palestinians living
in the entire country. But on the second count, Gaza’s density
has made it very difficult to manage and its poverty makes it
an eyesore before the world community. Thus, Palestinian resistance
and, to a lesser extent, international constraints, have forced
Israel to revise its balance of responsibility and control several
times. Each phase of this ongoing experiment can be understood
through spatial metaphors of increasingly constricted scope:
bantustan, internment camp, animal pen.
From 1967
to the first intifada of 1987-1993, Israel used its military
rule to incorporate Gaza’s economy and infrastructure forcibly
into its own, while treating the Palestinian population as a
reserve of cheap migrant workers. It was during this stage of
labor migration and territorial segregation that Gaza came closest
to resembling the South African “bantustans” -- the nominally
independent black statelets set up by the apartheid regime to
evade responsibility for the indigenous population whose labor
it was exploiting.[4]
During the
Oslo phase of the occupation (1993-2005), Israel delegated some
administrative functions to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and
welcomed migrant workers from Asia and Eastern Europe to replace
the Gazans. A new infrastructure of movement controls also emerged.
Permits for travel to Israel and the West Bank, once commonly
granted, became rare. Ordinary vehicular traffic ceased. In the
second half of the decade, Israel erected a fence around the
territory and commenced channeling non-Israeli people and goods
through a handful of newly built permanent terminals like the
ones that have recently come to the West Bank. It was during
this period that Gaza under Israeli management most resembled
a giant internment camp. The detainee population was, to a certain
extent, self-organized and appointed representatives to act on
its behalf (the PA) who nevertheless operated under the aegis
of supreme Israeli military authority, within the framework of
agreements concluded by Israel and a largely defunct Palestine
Liberation Organization (which are now basically agreements between
Israel and itself).
The failure
of the settlement enterprise and the ferocity of the armed resistance
during the second intifada beginning in the fall of 2000
undoubtedly contributed to the decision to remove settlements
and withdraw soldiers. Aside from buying Israel crucial political
cover to push ahead with its colonization plans in the West Bank
and elsewhere, disengagement has also drastically reduced vulnerability
to Palestinian armed groups. From 2000 to 2005, Gaza contained
less than 1 percent of the Jewish population of Israel-Palestine
but accounted for approximately 10 percent of Israeli intifada-related
fatalities (and more than 40 percent of all Israeli combatant
deaths). At the same time, the threat was almost entirely located
inside the territory, against soldiers and settlers. Gaza’s hermetic
closure largely neutralized the threat of suicide bombs, leaving
Palestinian armed groups in Gaza with few effective means of
harming Israel. Since August 2005, Qassam rocket attacks have
killed four people inside Israel, less than 2007’s weekly average
of Palestinians killed in Gaza by the Israeli military.[5]
Critics have
been quick to point out that disengagement did not change Israel
’s effective control over Gaza and hence its responsibility as
an occupying power under international humanitarian law. At the
military level, Israel continued to patrol Gaza’s airspace and
seacoast, and ground troops operated, built fortifications and
enforced buffer zones inside the Strip so regularly that the
major difference seems to have been a mere relocation of their
barracks a few kilometers to the east. With the removal of permanent
military bases, however, critics also tended to decry Gaza’s
ongoing dependency on Israel as evidence of control. The taxation
system, currency and trade remained in Israel’s hands; water,
power and communications infrastructure continued to depend on
Israel; and even the population registry was still kept by Israeli
authorities.
Israel’s
response has been simple, if disingenuous: If responsibility
for Gaza arises from Gaza’s dependency on Israel, then it would
be more than happy to cut those ties once and for all. And this
is exactly what Israel started doing after Fatah’s military defeat
in Gaza at the hands of Hamas in June 2007. Indeed, even if the
Rafah crossing on the Gaza-Egypt border reopens with a liaison
role for Fatah (or the PA security services under the command
of President Mahmoud Abbas), as is still the case at Erez, the
only crossing point for people between Israel and the Strip,
this is only likely to furnish Israel with another pretext for
washing its hands of responsibility for Gazans. In any event,
in Gaza the Oslo experiment in indirect rule seems to be over.
Israel now treats the territory less like an internment camp
and more like an animal pen: a space of near total confinement
whose wardens are concerned primarily with keeping those inside
alive and tame, with some degree of mild concern as to the opinions
of neighbors and other outsiders.
The difference
is most apparent in the question of electricity. In 2006, Israel
responded to the capture of one of its soldiers and the killing
of two others by bombing Gaza’s only power plant, which, even
after some repair, now operates at roughly one third of capacity.[6] Now it seeks to accomplish the same deprivation through cutting
the electricity that it supplies directly to Gaza, compounding
the daily blackouts that were already common. These reductions,
as approved by the Israeli Supreme Court on January 30 and as
first implemented on February 7, will be calibrated to ensure
that the “essential humanitarian needs” of the population are
met. In November, the court endorsed the same standard in permitting
reductions of the amount of Israeli fuel sold in Gaza. This shift
in Israel’s approach from 2006 is akin to the difference between
clubbing an unruly prisoner over the head to subdue him and taming
an animal through careful regulation of leash and diet.
DISENGAGEMENT
AND “ESSENTIAL HUMANITARIANISM”
In order to
understand the management differences between an internment camp
and an animal pen, it may help to start with the place where
Israel’s control over Gaza is most physically manifest: the
crossings.
Karni crossing
is the sole official crossing point for commercial traffic between
the Gaza Strip and Israel, a highly fortified facility straddling
the frontier on the site of an old British military airfield
near Gaza City. Karni has approximately 30 lanes for handling
different types of cargo -- from shipping containers to bulk
goods -- needed to meet the diverse needs of a modern economy.
Karni is a creature of the Oslo period, concretizing its logic
of impressive spectacle and laborious inefficiency in order to
balance Israeli control with the image of Palestinian autonomy.
The crossing operates on the wasteful principle of “back-to-back”
transport: Goods are left by one party in a walled-off no man’s
land and then picked up by the other without any direct contact,
essentially doubling shipping costs.
In recent
months, Israel has completely shut down Karni except for occasional
shipments of wheat grain and animal feed.[7] At
the same time, Israel has routed a few types of permitted “essential
items” mostly through the Kerem Shalom and Sufa crossings further
south. Unlike Karni, Kerem Shalom and Sufa are operated entirely
by Israel and make no gestures toward Palestinian partnership.
They are not commercial crossings but essentially gates in the
fence, never designed for trans-shipment of goods and incapable
of handling many types of difficult-to-package items such as
building materials and piped gases.[8] When open, Kerem Shalom and Sufa
together can process perhaps 100 truckloads of cargo per day
compared to Karni’s capacity of approximately 750 truckloads.[9]
Most revealing,
however, is the manner of transfer: Cargo at Kerem Shalom and
Sufa is offloaded from trucks and then left on pallets in the
open for Palestinians to come and pick up when they are allowed
to approach. The contrast with Karni’s elaborate security procedures
and regimented distribution system is striking. “At least in
prison, and I’ve been in prison, there are rules,” Gazan human
rights lawyer Raji Sourani told the New York Times. “But
now we live in a kind of animal farm. We live in a pen, and they
dump in food and medicine.”[10]
The physical
move from Karni to Kerem Shalom and Sufa and the official restriction
of passage only to “humanitarian items” embody the shift in Israel’s
blockade policy, from trying to punish the Gazan economy to dispensing
with the economy altogether (except when Israeli producers need
to dump cheap surplus in Gaza). Israel is also selectively disengaging
from other economic relations with Gaza: Major Israeli banks
have announced their intention to sever ties with Gaza, and Israel
has since autumn limited the inflow of US dollars and Jordanian
dinars, endangering Gazans’ ability to purchase imports and make
use of remittances.
The sheer
redundancy of Gaza’s economy in Israel’s eyes is most obvious
in the context of the Israeli Supreme Court decision approving
fuel cuts to Gaza on the basis that if it is possible to ration
the remaining fuel for hospitals and the sewage network, then
Gaza’s economy need not play a role: “We do not accept the petitioners’
argument that ‘market forces’ should be allowed to play their
role in Gaza with regard to fuel consumption.”[11]
The logic of the Court’s decisions on fuel and electricity suggests
that once undefined “essential humanitarian needs” are met, all
other deprivation is permissible.
In practice,
the neat distinction between vital needs and luxuries is often
impossible to implement since it ignores the enormous swath of
human activities and desires in between that are no less important
simply because they can be temporarily deferred. This has been
most poignant in the case of permits to leave Gaza for medical
treatment, which are now granted only to those with “life-threatening”
conditions.[12] Under the scheme, according to Human Rights
Watch, permits for mere “quality of life” procedures such as
open heart surgery have been denied, leading to patient deaths.
In the case of the electricity cuts, the Supreme Court blithely
acted as if Gazans could easily redirect remaining power to hospitals
and sewage networks despite clear evidence to the contrary.[13] To
the extent that electricity can be redistributed within areas,
technicians must physically go to substations several times per
day and manually pull levers that are designed to be operated
only once a year for maintenance purposes. As a result, there
have been numerous breakdowns and at least two engineers have
been electrocuted.[14]
Even if it
was possible to implement and was done with the best of intentions,
the logic of “essential humanitarianism” (it is unclear what
would constitute the “inessentially” humanitarian) promises nothing
more than turning Gazans one and all into beggars -- or rather,
into well-fed animals -- dependent on international money and
Israeli fiat. It allows Israel to keep Palestinians and the international
community in perpetual fear of an entirely manufactured “humanitarian
crisis” that Israel can induce at the flip of a switch (due to
the embargo, Gaza’s power plant only has enough fuel at any one
time to operate for two days[15]). And it distracts from, and even legitimizes,
the destruction of Gaza’s own economy, institutions and infrastructure,
to say nothing of ongoing colonization elsewhere in Israel-Palestine.
The notion of “essential humanitarianism” reduces the needs,
aspirations and rights of 1.4 million human beings to an exercise
in counting calories, megawatts and other abstract, one-dimensional
units measuring distance from death.
THE NAMES
OF INEQUALITY
As Israel
has experimented with various models for controlling Gaza over
the decades, the fundamental refusal of political equality that
undergirds them all has taken on different names, both to justify
itself and to provide a logic for moderating its own excesses.
During the bantustan period, inequality was called coexistence;
during the Oslo period, separation; and during disengagement,
it is reframed as avoiding “humanitarian crises,” or survival.
These slogans were not outright lies, but they disregarded the
unwelcome truth that coexistence is not freedom, separation is
not independence and survival is not living.
Disengagement,
however, is not merely the latest stage in a historical process;
it is also the lowest rung in a territorially segregated hierarchy
of subjugation that encompasses Palestinians in the West Bank,
East Jerusalem and within the Green Line. Half of the people
between the Mediterranean and the Jordan live under a state that
excludes them from the community of political subjects, denies
them true equality and thus discriminates against them in varying
domains of rights. Israel has impressively managed to keep this
half of the population divided against itself -- as well as against
foreign workers and non-Ashkenazi Jews -- through careful distribution
of differential privileges and punishments and may continue to
do so for the foreseeable future. Of course there is always the
possibility of occasional, dramatic acts of resistance like the
breaching of the border -- which temporarily transformed a desolate
stretch of demolished houses into a giant open-air market --
and incremental technocratic changes such as a possible arrangement
to reopen the Rafah crossing. But between these two paths, the
inexorable governing logic of controlled abandonment seems likely
to remain intact.
It is telling
that despite all of the talk of separation, even the most remote
and isolated segment of the Palestinians living under Israeli
control are still close enough to Israeli Jews for the introduction
of livestock and fowl from Egypt to prompt rapid public health
action. For the transfer of animal vaccines speaks not only to
Israel’s control over Gaza and its disclaimer of any responsibility
for the people living there, but is also a tacit reminder of
the intimacy that persists through 40 years of domination. The
people of the southern Israeli town of Sderot, too, were unpleasantly
reminded of this intimacy when, one morning in 2005, they awoke
to find hundreds of leaflets on their streets warning them in
Arabic to leave their homes before they were attacked.[16] The Israeli military had airdropped the fliers
over neighboring parts of the northern Gaza Strip in an attempt
to intimidate the Palestinians there, but strong winds blew them
over the frontier instead.
Endnotes
[1] Associated Press, January 30, 2008.
[2] This phrase (ha-virus lo ‘otzer ba-mahsom)
is the title of a 2002 book on the health care system in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip whose English edition appeared under
the more politically correct Separate and Cooperate, Cooperate
and Separate: The Disengagement of the Palestine Health Care
System from Israel and Its Emergence as an Independent System (Tamara
Barnea and Rafiq Husseini, eds.) (London: Praeger, 2002). Thanks
to Deema Arafah for this reference.
[3] UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs (OCHA), “The Closure of the Gaza Strip: The Economic
and Humanitarian Consequences,” December 13, 2007.
[4] Dark visions of a bantustan future for Gaza are
as dated as they are irrelevant. As early as 1985, two authors
noted “Gaza is effectively a Bantustan -- a dormitory for day
laborers in the Israeli economy. It is for this reason that the
much vaunted ‘two-state solution’ has rather less appeal to the
people of Gaza than to some on the West Bank.” Richard Locke
and Antony Stewart, Bantustan Gaza (London: Zed Books, 1985), p.
2.
[5] More than 70 percent of Israeli fatalities in the
Gaza Strip pre-disengagement were armed security personnel, as
opposed to 50 percent in the West Bank and 15 percent inside
the Green Line. Statistics on Israeli fatalities are culled from
“Victims of Palestinian Terror Since September 2000,” updated
regularly by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs at http://www.mfa.gov.il/ and from the tallies
kept by the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem at http://www.btselem.org/English/Statistics/Casualties.asp.
According to p. 6 of B’tselem’s draft annual report for 2007,
293 Gazans (armed and unarmed) were killed by Israel in 2007.
[6] For an overview of the effects of the strike and
an assessment of its legality, see B’tselem, Act of Vengeance:
Israel’s Bombing of the Gaza Power Plant and its Effects (September
2006). Israel has continued to hamper repairs, leading to widespread
power outages even before the more recent deliberate power cuts.
OCHA, “Gaza Humanitarian Situation Report: Power Shortages in
the Gaza Strip,” January 8, 2008.
[7] OCHA, “Gaza Closure: Situation Report,” January
24, 2008.
[8] World Bank, Two Years After London: Restarting
Palestinian Economic Recovery, September 24, 2007, p. 16;
OCHA, “Gaza Humanitarian Situation Report,” June 27, 2007,
p. 3.
[9] OCHA, “Gaza Humanitarian Situation Report,” November
6, 2007.
[10] New York Times, November 18, 2007.
[11] Israeli High Court of Justice (HCJ) 9132/07, Jabr
al-Basyuni Ahmad v. The Prime Minister (interim decision
of November 29, 2007), para. I.4.
[12] HCJ 5429/07, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel
v. The Minister of Defense.
[13] HCJ 9132/07, Jabr al-Basyuni Ahmad v. The
Prime Minister (final decision of January 30, 2008). For
more on the Court’s dubious factual findings (including its
reliance on a government claim that unnamed “Palestinian officials”
had assured them that redistribution of power to hospitals
was feasible, despite multiple signed affidavits to the contrary
from senior Palestinian utilities managers), see Gisha (Legal
Center for Freedom of Movement), “Briefing: Israeli High Court
Decision Authorizing Fuel and Electricity Cuts to Gaza,” January
31, 2008.
[14] OCHA, “Electricity Shortages in the Gaza Strip:
Situation Report,” February 8, 2008.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ynet, September 27, 2005.
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