Search Results

This chapter discusses the legal status of the territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, from both the point of view of international law and that of Israeli municipal law. As this status was intertwined with major peace processes that took place in the region, such as the Camp David Accords and the Oslo Peace Process, as well as other unilateral actions such as the Israeli settlements project, disengagement from the Gaza Strip, and the building of the Separation Wall/Fence, and Palestinian statehood, the implications of these processes on the status of each of these territories are also laid out here.

This chapter examines the suicide missions (SMs) related to the Arab-Israeli conflict that took place from 1981 to December 2003. SMs are a relatively recent phenomenon in the Middle East, with only sporadic cases before 1981. In the two decades under examination, the great majority of the SMs related to the Arab-Israeli conflict took place in three geographic areas: Israel, the Occupied Territories (Gaza Strip and the West Bank), and Lebanon (primarily in the south). This concentration is largely due to the outcome of the 1967 war, the so-called Six Day War. Israel managed to sign effective peace agreements with its neighbours in the south (Egypt) and in the east (Jordan), but not in the north (Syria). Hence, a shift in the conflict towards the Occupied Territories and Lebanon, the latter squeezed between the Israeli army in the south and Syrian influence in the north.

This chapter analyzes Israeli compliance with its obligations on safe passage for Palestinians between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, on the establishment and operation of a seaport and airport in the Gaza Strip, on economic questions, and on other related questions of infrastructure and civil affairs. It argues that most of the so-called ‘Israeli responsibilities’ on ports, passages, and economics are really joint obligations of negotiation and implementation. In particular, Israel and Palestinian Authority are both obliged to negotiate and implement in good faith.

This chapter examines the Islamic Resistance Movement or Hamas, which was established at the beginning of the first Palestinian uprising in December 1987. This analysis of Hamas focuses on its social dimensions and on the relationship between its social and political sectors, primarily in the Gaza Strip, where the Islamist movement in Palestine is most concentrated. The chapter also explores the ways in which Islamic political institutions interact with and/or influence social institutions and vice versa, the nature of Islamic social and political mobilization in Palestine and the links between them, the changing nature of Islamically legitimized action in the public and political spheres, and the slowly emerging secularization of religious discourse as a way of adapting to existing social and political realities.

Between December 2008 to January 2009, the Israel militaries assaulted the Gaza Strip displacing over 50,000 people. This assault accentuated the already long history of Palestinian forced migration. It created ‘internally stuck persons’ (ISPs) who were no longer able to flee conflict areas to safer grounds. For the ISPs, the Gaza Strip has become a prison which is controlled by outside force. Within the context of open-air prison, the ISPs have become ‘internally displaced persons’ because they are compelled to remain within this circumscribed boundary. IDPs receive less assistance and protection than refugees. This chapter discusses the scope, extent and repercussions of the involuntary migratory movements within the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It focuses on the physical barrier created by the Government of Israel (GoI) within the oPt. Although the displacement in Gaza, the East Jerusalem, and the West Bank is often triggered by similar and indirect factors, the latter two areas face a distinct set of triggers. A review of the preliminary displacement patterns have shown that forced displacement is both a result of and a means by which the GoI has expanded its hold of East Jerusalem and the prime areas of the West Bank. This review thus asserts that displacement cannot be simply viewed as a humanitarian crisis or a consequence of conflict or Israel’s security needs.

This introductory chapter offers a historical overview of the occupation that draws attention to the way in which the Palestinian inhabitants have been managed. In so doing, it exposes how Israel's means of control have actually helped to mold the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thus, Israel's Occupation fills a lacuna in the existing literature not only because it offers an overview of the occupation, but also because it is the first attempt to make sense of Israel's policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by means of a detailed analysis of the controlling apparatuses and practices. Finally, an interrogation of this kind is advantageous because it helps us see beyond the smoke screen of political proclamations and statements, and sheds new light on the way power, people, and place have been shaped in this bitter, ongoing conflict. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Palestinian national identification slowly but consistently strengthened following the 1967 War despite Israel's ongoing effort to undermine it. Not unlike Zionism, which, as some scholars claim, precipitated the appearance and development of Palestinian national identity at the turn of the twentieth century, Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip helped generate the reemergence of Palestinian nationalism. This chapter argues that many of the controlling apparatuses employed to manage the inhabitants affected the Palestinian population as a whole, thus highlighting the similarities among the residents of the two regions rather than their differences. Thus, while Israel deployed several controlling practices to repress Palestinian nationalism and to encourage other forms of identification, the contradictions and excesses of its controlling apparatuses actually reinforced the sense of a shared predicament, which strengthened national identification. In hindsight, it is not surprising that Israel failed to suppress the rise of national identity. But in order to better understand how Palestinian nationalism reemerged and how it, in turn, led Israel to emphasize sovereign power and de-emphasize disciplinary and biopower, it is useful to look back at one of the sites where the struggle over national identification manifested itself most forcefully: the municipal elections in the West Bank.

By the turn of the new millennium, Israel had almost totally abandoned forms of control whose goal was to manage the lives of the Palestinian inhabitants residing in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and was also reluctant to allow the Palestinian Authority to continue administering the occupied population. The difference between Israel's decision to distribute clubs and Rabin's “break their bones” policy from the first intifada and the firing of a million bullets during the second uprising's first month signifies a change in the primary principle informing Israel's occupation, that is, a shift from the principle of colonization to the principle of separation. This chapter describes these two principles and emphasizes that they actually contaminate each other so that there is always a trace of one in the other.

Despite its swift rise to power in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Hamas did not become a topic of debate outside Palestine until the early 1990s. There were two basic schools of thought, both obstinately ideological. According to the first, Hamas was a pragmatic political organization that followed its interests like any other political organization. Toward that end, it built schools, libraries, orphanages, and infirmaries, and provided much-needed services to the people of Gaza and West Bank — services that other political bodies of Palestine ignored or left to the United Nations. Proponents of the second school, on the other hand, argued that Hamas was antipolitical to the hilt, the very id of the Palestinian body politic. Through its various pedagogic institutions, it indoctrinated children with visceral hatred.

This chapter documents the authors' lunch conversation with Hasan, the older brother of Yusuf's best friend, Jamal. Hasan's family house was situated at the major war zone between Bani Suhaial and Khan Yunis. Hasan questioned the democracy of America and insisted that the people who did this to them should pay. He was still smiling when he said that Americans should be thrown out of the Middle East. It was his way of making them feel that the problem was as much theirs as his. He also insisted that he wanted to die, seeking an effect.

On September 19, 2002, the author of this book spent her last day in an Israeli military court. She went with Andre Rosenthal, a leftist Jewish Israeli lawyer, to Erez, the court located in a base at the edge of the Gaza Strip. In the courtroom, waiting for the hearings to get underway, soldiers on guard duty kept instructing the five Gaza women and her not to talk or lean on the benches in front of them, and they periodically ordered one or another to move to a different spot. Rosenthal's first case was the high-profile and widely publicized “Palestinian from al-Qaeda.” Rosenthal pointed out a gap in logic between the charges and the confession. Here the author expresses how much she learned in an Israeli military court. In fact, she states that she not want to leave behind or turn away from the suffering and the struggles for rights and justice.

This chapter examines the peace process historically as a strategy of the settler colonialist state and as a native response to it. It argues that the peace process was conceived at a particular moment, in June 1967, as part of the settler colonialist state's attempt to reconcile Israel's wish to remain demographically a Jewish state and its desire to expand geographically without losing the pretense of being a democratic state in the post-1967 context. It is also argued that the Israeli political and military elite knowingly engaged in this dilemma, contemplating the possibility of a scenario of its own or of others' making that would place it in control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. All three vantage points suggest that the two-state solution and the process that is supposed to bring it about are an Israeli plan, with modifications, by a powerful coalition of the US, EU, European Union, Russia, the United Nations, most of the Arab states, the Fatah Palestinian leadership, the Zionist Left and Center in Israel, and some well-known figures in the Palestinian solidarity movement. It is the power of the coalition and not the logic of the solution or the process that has maintained the “peace process” for so long, despite its apparent failure.

This chapter focuses on how each of the groups in conflict in this study represents itself to itself, by comparing field trips for high school students that narrate the past and the present, performing continuity with a younger generation. Settlers in the Gaza Strip represent the present in the occupied territories as a continuation of the socialist Zionist foundations of the state. The secular Left expresses outrage at this representation by religious settlers as they seek to differentiate between pre-state history and the current occupation in post-1967 territories. This desire to differentiate protects a sense of moral legitimacy, which is threatened by right-wing settler representations of continuity. This is the threat that lies at the heart of the antagonism between settlers on both sides of the Green Line, which is analyzed by using the Freudian concept of a narcissism of minor differences.

Reviewing historical landmarks in Palestinians’ civil resistance, this chapter shows that, if any nation in the region had a tradition of people’s power, it was the Palestinians. Nonetheless, despite significant grievances and identification with Arab brethren, Palestinians did not launch a rebellion in 2011. This chapter explores why the Arab Spring did not spark a Palestinian spring. It argues that this outcome did not depend primarily on regional diffusion of a revolutionary mood, transnational activist networks, or the demonstration effects of successful tactics in neighbouring countries. Rather, it was a product of Palestinians’ own internal circumstances. Given the devastating toll of the uprising that began in 2000, Palestinians generally longed for calm and recovery more than revolutionary upheaval. Their spatial, political, and affective conditions did not facilitate mass-scale mobilization, even as localized acts of violence and non-violent resistance continued, and another war devastated Gaza in 2014.

This chapter examines the principle of proportionality under international humanitarian law and the foundational question of humanitarian law as a compromise between state sovereignty and humanitarian protections. It considers the balance between universal attempts to humanize war by protecting individuals in conflict settings and the kind of thinking that states do to meet their national security objectives—a core tension that forms the prescriptive force of the laws of war. In particular, it assesses the implications for this balance when warfare becomes not only a legal institution but a politicized one. After providing a black-letter law overview of the principle of proportionality, the chapter contextualizes its vulnerabilities by analyzing Israel's actions during Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip between December 27, 2008, and January 18, 2009. It argues that the proportionality principle suffers from significant shortcomings that affect its usefulness as a predictable tool for distinguishing between the lawful and the unlawful, particularly in the context of asymmetric warfare.

This chapter discusses the ongoing war with Hamas at Israel’s southern border as criminal investigations continued to ravage the Olmert administration. With the Gaza Strip under siege and the soldier Gilad Shalit still imprisoned by Hamas, Israel’s actions against Hamas enjoyed international support, most notably from President George W. Bush, who was at the time pursuing an aggressive antiterrorism policy. Yet the government failed to decide to topple the Hamas illegal regime in Gaza Strip and would end up establishing a ceasefire agreement with Hamas, which the latter took as a sign of weakness. The ceasefire collapsed at the end of 2008 and Israel launched Operation Cast Lead. The Supreme Court also made its interventions during the conflict, despite having little reason to do so, dealing both with the military operation as well as with the supply of electricity and fuel to Gaza. Following the elections held in February 2009 the prime ministership passed from Olmert to Benjamin Netanyahu. Shalit, meanwhile, would return to Israel as part of a prisoner exchange facilitated by Netanyahu, which signaled yet another victory for Hamas.

This chapter discusses the present condition of Israel and Iraq after their involvement in various conflicts. It explains that Israel had already unilaterally withdrawn settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, leaving the territory to Palestine, and discusses the continuing presence of U.S. troops in Iraq. The chapter summarizes the effects of two centuries of Western involvement in the Middle East.

This chapter examines a literary depiction of the repeated borders encountered on the Palestinian journey of return from exile in Raba‘i al-Madhoun’s Lady from Tel Aviv (2009). While many earlier examples of the common Palestinian literary trope of return, such as Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s In Search of Walid Masoud (1978), either ignore the border or go silent altogether at the crossing back towards Palestine, al-Madhoun’s novel metafictionally reimagines the narrative of the protagonist’s return from London to the Gaza Strip by way of Tel Aviv as a series of encounters with borders that progressively blur distinctions of past/present and real/imaginary. At each crossing, new narrative voices appear, and gradually the lines between characters, narrators, and authors disintegrate, producing a cacophony of voices and an uncontrollable narrative of return. The novel performs and thereby exposes the disorienting effect of the border and its production of an unpredictable, “stray” life in blockaded Gaza. The Lady from Tel Aviv reveals that an unruly multitude of voices can offer a response to the silencing effect of the border.