The Gaza Strip as laboratory: Notes in the wake of disengagement

Journal of Palestine Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 38-55

  Li, Darryl ^a  

^a Palestinian Centre for Human Rights   (Israel)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

POLITICS;

ASIA; EURASIA; GAZA STRIP; MIDDLE EAST; OCCUPIED TERRITORIES;

EID: 33645241402     PISSN: 0377919X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/jps.2006.35.2.38     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. The city of Gaza is one of the oldest inhabited places on earth, long tied to its hinterland while straddling routes to distant lands, but the Gaza Strip is an entirely novel entity, born out of the 1948 war that led to the establishment of the state of Israel. Delineated not by geographic or economic considerations but rather by the exigencies of war, this tiny slice of mandatory Palestine under Egyptian control was crammed with 200,000 Palestinian refugees alongside 60,000 locals. Gaza has more history than almost any other inhabited place on earth; the Gaza Strip has less.
2. One model I will not use here is the figure of the camp, as developed by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. For Agamben, the camp is the spatial expression of the sovereign's ability to indefinitely suspend the legal order and its attendant rights, legitimizing an unlimited violence. Inside the camp, Agamben has argued, a specific form of subjection that he calls biopower emerges in its purest form, which renders biological life (not only its termination but also its regulation) subject to sovereign decision. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) and Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999). Agamben's notion of the camp as a condition of possibility for various kinds of violence is relevant to many contexts (including the Gaza Strip), but for the same reason it is too general to be usefully applied here. In contradistinction, his concept of biopower, developed primarily in an analysis of the Nazi death camps, is too specific, notwithstanding some striking parallels with the Palestinian situation. Rather, Michel Foucault's typology of power, which distinguishes one modality that takes populations as its object (governmentality, also called biopower but not in Agamben's sense) and treats them according to various notions of risk management - as opposed to the better-known "disciplinary power," which shapes and controls individual subjects - captures better the experimental, calibrated, and contingent aspects of Israeli policy and practice that I would like to emphasize here. See especially Michel Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population: Cours an Collège de France, 1977-1978 (Paris: Seuil, 2004).
3. The formulation "a Jewish state" is imprecise. Israel is not simply a state whose population happens to be mostly Jewish, nor is it a state ruled primarily by Jewish religious law; it is a "Jewish" state insofar as it is constituted for the entire Jewish people as one nation. In other words, the state "belongs" to Jews who are not citizens while excluding the 20 percent of its citizens who are not Jews (to say nothing of the indigenous non-Jews in exile).
4. Nur Masalha employs this phrase primarily in relation to various proposals for the "transfer" of Palestinians from their homes, but it also guides settlement and annexation policies generally. See Nur Masalha, Land Without a People: Israel, Transfer, and the Palestinians, 1949-1996 (London: Faber and Faber, 1997).
5. Efrat Weiss, "IAF Renews Air Strikes in Gaza," Ynet News, 28 September 2005, emphasis added. Ziv was commander of the Gaza Division from 2001 to 2003 and of the northern Gaza district in the early 1990s.
6. Limitations of space and competence prevent me from addressing the situation of the Palestinian citizens of Israel here. This article's focus on the West Bank and Gaza Strip should be taken not as a denial of the parallels with the situation inside the Green Line, but rather a recognition that the different juridical situation there, especially the dilemma of citizenship, merits specific attention.
7. Obviously these are categories of nationality as recognized and conserved by the Israeli state ("Israeli" is not a recognized nationality); approximately half of the self-described Jewish population of Israel is of Middle Eastern origin.
8. Statistics for population and land area are taken from fact sheets compiled by the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (www.passia.org).
9. The laws of armed conflict (international humanitarian law - IHL) permit closure as one of the security measures allowed to an occupying power by Article 27(4) of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949). Such measures, however, cannot violate other rules of IHL (such as allowing access to medical and aid workers) and must conform to human rights standards generally. The ambiguity of defining when closure become illegal has allowed Israel to use such measures in favor of its own demographic goals, especially settlement construction.
10. Between 2000 and 2003, the fence was reportedly breached eight times, with all infiltrators being captured soon after entering Israeli territory. Ori Nir, "Bush Drops Opposition to Building of Barrier," Forward, 24 October 2003. The only two successful suicide attackers from the Gaza Strip since the completion of the barrier were smuggled out through Erez and Qarni, respectively.
11. Designated under the Gaza-Jericho Agreement (1994), Annex I, Article 4(4).
12. Travelers without PA identification generally require explicit Israeli approval. According to the Agreed Principles for Rafah Crossing (15 November 2005), "excepted categories" including diplomats and aid workers should not require Israeli permission, though it is unclear as of this writing whether this provision is being followed. The principles also provide for the PA to export goods through Rafah (subject to existing trade restrictions), though Israel has not yet allowed this.
13. UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), "Special Focus: Closure Count and Analysis," August 2005.
14. See Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, "Israeli Assistance Steps and Humanitarian Measures toward the Palestinians," May 2005. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is providing $50 million to purchase scanning equipment for use at the crossings (USAID West Bank/ Gaza Mission press release, 10 December 2005).
15. Amira Hass, "Donor Countries Won't Fund Israeli-planned Separate Roads for Palestinians," Ha'Aretz, 30 November 2004. For a map of the proposed network, see "Central West Bank: Road Rehabilitation Project - Sep 2004," available online at www.humanitarianinfo.org.
16. See "Suffering in Isolation: A Report on Life Under Occupation in the Mawasi Areas in the Gaza Strip" (Palestinian Center for Human Rights [PCHR], Series Study 32, August 2003);
17. "Al-Mawasi, Gaza Strip: Intolerable Life in an Isolated Enclave" (B'Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, March 2003);
18. "The Bitter Life: A Report on Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Yellow Areas in the Gaza Strip" (PCHR, Series Study 16, June 1999); and regular Gaza Strip access reports published by UN OCHA, Jerusalem.
19. The unannounced census took place from 23 to 25 July 2001. "Suffering in Isolation," p. 36.
20. Israel Defense Force, "Declaration in the Matter of Closing Territory Number s/2/03 (seam area) (Judea and Samaria), 2003," 2 October 2003.
21. "Not All It Seems: Preventing Palestinians Access to Their Lands West of the Separation Barrier in the Tulkarm-Qalqiliya Area" (B'Tselem, June 2004).
22. Needless to say, the buffer zone policy is a recipe for war crimes. IHL allows for property destruction absolutely necessary during or preparatory to combat (Article 53, Fourth Geneva Convention), not as a blanket security measure (see "ICRC Deeply Concerned over House Destructions in Rafah," International Committee of the Red Cross [ICRC] press release, 18 May 2004). Further, shoot-on-sight policies violate the fundamental duty to distinguish between civilian and military persons and objects at all times and to ensure that all attacks are proportional (customary rules of international law, codified in the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions [1977], Articles 48, 51[5][b]). When illegal property destruction is extensive and wanton, it rises to the level of a war crime; similarly, killing a civilian merely for entering a buffer zone may constitute a willful killing, also a war crime (Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 147).
23. Doron Almog, The West Bank Fence: A Vital Component in Israel's Strategy of Defense (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Policy Focus #47, April 2004). Almog also served as commander of the Gaza division from 1993 to 1995. After retirement from active duty, he was a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. On 10 September 2005, the Bow Street Magistrate's Court in London, exercising the universal jurisdiction provided for by Article 146 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, issued an arrest warrant against Almog for war crimes related to house demolitions in Rafah on the eve of a private visit to the U.K. Almog learned about the warrant upon landing at Heathrow airport and stayed in the airplane until it returned to Israel.
24. In addition, the Israeli military carried out intense campaigns of highly concentrated destruction during specific high-profile incursions into Palestinian population areas, often with punitive intent or as a "show of strength" to both Palestinian and Israeli publics. This was most obvious during major incursions into Bayt Hanun (July 2004, October 2004) and "Operation Rainbow" in Rafah (May 2004).
25. "Razing Rafah: Mass Home Demolitions in the Gaza Strip" (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2004).
26. Samia quote: Akiva Eldar, "Under Cover of Revenge," Ha'Aretz, 15 January 2002.
27. Zuaretz quote: Tsadok Yehezkeli, "Regards from Hell," Yedi'ot Aharonot, 11 June 2004.
28. "Evidence: In the Zone," Harper's, May 2005, p. 19.
29. Anshel Pfeffer, "On Cloudy Nights, the Soldiers Carry Out 'Preventive Shooting,'" Ha'Aretz, 12 February 2002.
30. "Razing Rafah," p. 63.
31. Arieh O'Sullivan, "Army: New Gaza Fence Is Formidable Barrier," Jerusalem Post, 8 September 2005.
32. On buffer zone incursions: "Humanitarian Briefing Notes, 14-20 September 2005," UN OCHA, p. 3;
33. "Seven Days Following Their Redeployment from the Gaza Strip, IOF Plan to Create a Buffer Zone in the North," PCHR press release, 19 September 2005;
34. "Israel: Palestinians, Egypt Have Sealed the Border," Ha'Aretz, 20 September 2005. On construction of the barrier: "Humanitarian Briefing Notes, 12-18 October 2005," UN OCHA, p. 3.
35. "Humanitarian Briefing Notes 26 October-1 November 2005," UN OCHA, p. 3.
36. Daily Star (Beirut), 21 June 1967, cited in Nur Masalha, The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem (London: Pluto Press, 2003), p. 215;
37. Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, "Expelling Palestinians; It Isn't a New Idea, and It Isn't Just Kahane's," Washington Post, 7 February 1988.
38. Yet similar principles of distance, surveillance, and license apply, as can be seen in how the placement and layout of West Bank settlements utilizes height and lines of sight in order to monitor and better control the Palestinian population. See Eyal Weizman, "The Politics of Verticality," OpenDemocracy.net, 27 April 2003.
39. Yossi Klein Halevi, "Fenced In," New Republic, 30 October 2003.
40. Israel's ongoing exclusive control over the Gaza Strip's airspace is stipulated in the Gaza-Jericho Agreement, Annex I, Article 12 and reaffirmed in the Revised Disengagement Plan (2004), Article 3(1)(1).
41. Legally, a sharp distinction must be drawn between Israel's use of Palestinian airspace and no-fly zones, such as the one established by the UN Security Council over Bosnia-Herzegovina. (The Iraq no-fly zones were never endorsed by the Security Council.) The Bosnia no-fly zone was meant only to exclude unauthorized air traffic; in contrast, Israel uses the Gaza Strip's airspace as a means of asserting and exercising authority on the ground, bringing it closer into line with the definition of occupation under Article 42 of the Hague Regulations (1907): "Territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army. The occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised."
42. Barbara Opall-Rome, "Israel AF Wants Wider Role in Anti-Terror War," Defense News, 5 January 2004. Yadlin obtained a master's degree in public administration from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in 1994.
43. Gideon Levy, "Demons in the Skies of the Gaza Strip," Ha'Aretz, 11 November 2005.
44. Barbara Opall-Rome, "In Israel, Air Power Takes on Ground Jobs," Defense News, 28 February 2005.
45. Israel's use of airpower reflects a broader tension in how to evaluate Israeli actions against its international legal obligations. Under international humanitarian law, an occupying power is permitted to use military means against civilians only when they directly participate in hostilities - otherwise, it can resort to either specific penal sanctions (arrest, imprisonment) or general security measures (checkpoints, internment, etc.). While legal scholars disagree about the exact definition of direct participation in hostilities, the availability of law enforcement and general security alternatives expands the scope for reconciling the interests of the occupying power and the civilian population. The disengagement has effectively created a situation in which resort to military means appears as the only recourse available because arrests would effectively require reinvading populated areas. Similarly, the Israeli military court with jurisdiction over the Gaza Strip, whose workload fell precipitously from the mid-1990s onward, was dissolved after disengagement. Israel's assassination policy is thus a form of extrajudicial execution not only in the traditional sense of circumventing a given legal order, but also because the legal order itself has receded, without any other authority allowed to fully take over.
46. See "IDF Aerial Attack of Access Routes in Gaza Strip Last Night," IDF press release, 5 January 2006, plus press releases with identical or similar titles and content dated 4 January 2006, 2 January 2006, 29 December 2005, 28 December 2005, and others.
47. Shmulik Haddad, "Leaflet 'Barrage' Hits Sderot," Ynet News, 27 September 2005;
48. Hanan Greenberg, "Residents Complain: Artillery Battery to Move," Ynet News, 6 January 2006.
49. Before disengagement, the ratio of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip killed by Israeli forces to Israelis killed as a result of Palestinian attacks in or from the Strip was approximately 11 to 1. In the first three months after disengagement, over 30 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip, while no Israelis were killed in Palestinian attacks in or from the Strip. Figures for Israeli casualties were compiled from the Web site of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (www.mfa.gov.il), last accessed 11 January 2006. They do not include 11 non-Israeli workers and three American security personnel killed. Figures on Palestinian deaths were compiled from e-mail communications with Suhair Abdi, B'Tselem, 19 December 2005 and Jehan al-Alami, PCHR, 20 December 2005.
50. Colonization of occupied territories is prohibited by Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention. At the same time, the legal model of occupation is vastly preferable to Israel to the other viable alternative in the current international legal regime, namely annexation (and Israel has whenever favorable claimed the prerogatives accorded to an occupying power under international law). For this reason, it is difficult to accept the good faith of Zionist partisans who charge the international community with hypocrisy in considering the West Bank and Gaza Strip to be occupied but not Tibet, the Kurdish regions of Turkey, and Chechnya. Unlike China, Turkey, and Russia, Israel itself has never claimed full sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
51. While some observers invoke the specter of the South African Bantustans as a frightening future scenario for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Bantustan analogy is actually much more apt for the earlier periods of the occupation, since the South African Bantustans coupled residential isolation with continued economic exploitation. As two observers wrote twenty years ago: "Gaza is effectively a Bantustan - a dormitory for day labourers 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.
52. Niall MacDermot, "Self-Determination and the 'Independent Bantustans,'" Notes and Documents 13/85 (New York: United Nations Center against Apartheid, December 1985), pp. 83-93.
53. For an overview of Ariel Sharon's "frontier" thinking in Sinai and the West Bank, see Eyal Weizman, "Ariel Sharon and the Geometry of Occupation," OpenDemocracy.net, 10 September 2003.
54. Revised Disengagement Plan, Article 3(3).