This paper is an ethnographic exploration of popular Palestinian-Israeli-international, village-level protests over the Israeli wall and its encroachment on Palestinian territory, rights, and resources in the West Bank. This paper retrieves Mary Douglas’1 now classical anthropological formulation of “matter-out-of-place” and mobilizes current conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism to frame the protests and suggest why they elicit an aggressive response from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Douglas’ analysis of matter-out-of place assumed a socio-cosmological world structured around a series of binaries. While such binaries have been vigorously critiqued, there are instances where binaries are a desired and tangible reality. In Palestine/Israel discrete binary categories are violently crafted, policed, and maintained by an occupying military force and thus do take on a highly visible and experiential reality.
Spatializing Differences and Differentiating Space
Village protests can be contextualized locally, regionally and globally. In the past five to six years, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Lebanon have been sites of intense conflict. A regional re-mapping of the region is part and parcel of the ‘war on terror’ and what US Secretary of State Condalezza Rice referred to in the midst of the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon as the “birth pangs” of a new regional order. In Palestine/Israel, as in other areas, difference is a spatially constructed and space itself is simultaneously constituted through these categories of difference. Difference is also enacted physically, politically, discursively, and legally and is consistently monitored and policed. The Israeli impulse to territorialize – to separate, segregate, and miniaturize – proceeds through the regime of closure which includes confiscation of Palestinian land, over 500 checkpoints in the West Bank, the erection of a projected 400 mile long, 25 foot high wall of cement, in some places fencing, a Byzantine system of permits governing mobility, residency, and work, and life in confined spaces all of which are dramatically re-landscaping Palestine and re-territorializing Palestinians in novel ways.
Spatial fracturing of the West Bank is integral to the imposition of an ethnoreligious hierarchy of access to natural resources, sovereignty, and human rights. The spatial binary is neither equal and nor stable – indeed it is highly uneven and in constant motion. As Israel expands settlements and carves out their requisite by-pass roads2, Palestinian land is expropriated and access to these roads and land resources are denied. In other words, while everyone has an assigned space, Palestinian space shrinks as Israeli space expands. In addition, Palestinian immobility is hitched to a nearly unhindered Israeli mode of mobility. Thus once space has been defined as Jewish, and Israeli sovereignty has been extended, the binary becomes more or less fixed. So space is simultaneously fixed and fluid, the edges shifting and policed as settlements expand and Palestinians are spatially confined in well-defined enclaves. Israeli spatial strategies of segregation have reified the idea of difference and thus rendered it a fact on the ground.
Over the course of 40 years, the occupation has spatialized and vigorously policed ethnic, national, and religious differences3. In the early 1990s, the occupation forces signaled the beginnings of closure when Israeli checkpoints mushroomed around Jerusalem to control Palestinian access to the city. A decade later, a host of mechanisms physically separate and limit contact between Palestinians and Israelis and confine the former to highly de-limited areas. Closure refers to Israeli restrictions on the movement of Palestinian goods, labor, and people into Jerusalem, between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, between them and Israel and within the West Bank. Illegal settlements and closure, with its wall, by-pass roads, the permit system, and the checkpoints, form an interlocking set of controls over Palestinian mobility. They facilitate the continuing acquisition of Palestinian land and natural resources, impose economic crisis, and incorporate significant tracts of the West Bank into Israel. In effect, closure, a strategy of separation, control, and confinement, crafts spaces where a particular form of power is wielded and a vision of the ethnic, sectarian, and national composition of space is enacted.
Mobility in Palestine-Israel is strikingly uneven. Z. Bauman dubs this “most powerful and coveted stratifying factor” an “unequally distributed commodity”4. Checkpoints fragment Palestinian territory, divide communities and individuals, and severely obstruct mobility. Invariably, they signal an unmediated sense of immobility, highlighting in stark physical form the inaccessibility of spaces once known and accessible. Palestinian mobility is a scarce commodity, almost completely under Israeli control, a tangible thing that Israelis have and Palestinians are denied.
The wall is another component of closure designed to keep Palestinians in their spaces and police their mobility as they near its shifting edges. Israeli spatial policing and punishment for transgressions aims to ensure that everyone is in their assigned place yet it is highly contradictory because as Israel expands deeper into Palestinian territory it continually re-maps zones of interdiction and mobility. The rules of immobility work largely to remove Palestinians from the settlers’ line-ofsight, contain their resistance to settler mobility, and facilitate continuing expansion. At a time in history when walls were falling, an eight meter (around 24 feet) high concrete wall built deeply into Palestinian territory5 was rising to impose separation. The dramatically stark slabs of upright concrete form a massive barrier that snakes its way through populated urban areas and villages punctuated by watchtowers and firing posts every 300 meters or so. At nearly 25 feet high and at an estimated 400 miles (700 kilometers) in length, it is significantly longer and taller than the 12 kilometer, 8 feet high Berlin Wall.
As justification, Israel argues that it will prevent Palestinians from carrying out militant attacks inside Israel which amounts to collective punishment. Yet the mantra of security is challenged by an open discussion of the “demographic” issues it can resolve on the one hand and by Israel’s long-range military weapons and dominance of the skies on the other. Designed to extend Israeli sovereignty, obstruct a geographically contiguous Palestinian entity, and draw a unilateral border that incorporates vast swathes of settlements, the wall is the material enactment and enforcement of a regime of segregation, separating people and imposing a visible and highly unequal allocation of space, mobility, juridical status and human rights along ethnic/national/sectarian lines.
While imperial and colonial projects transfer wealth and resources from the colony to the metropolitan arena or Empire, they affect the distribution of people as well. In other words, we need to be mindful of local demography and arithmetic of colonialism and how mass population movements are conceptualized, made policy, and materialize under relations of domination. Settler colonialism, in particular, requires removal in order to re-populate regions and mine their resources.
Concerns about a potential Palestinian demographic majority in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean have been driving the impulse to separate. Israeli geography Arnon Soffer6 argues that “initiated separation” offers the best solution to the “demographic crisis.” He echoes a “principle of segregation” that was “accepted by all parts of the Zionist movement, with a very few exceptions”7.
In order for transfers of wealth and people to occur with minimal Palestinian violence, pervasive segregation must be normalized. Based on an entrenched ideology of separateness, or an ethnic/national/religious enclave for everyone and everyone in their enclave, that are monitored and heavily policed, seems to be the order of the day. In 1994 Rabin declared that Israel was adopting “separation as a philosophy.”8 Notions of separation (hafrada) are hardly uncommon in Israeli Jewish society9. A lexicon of “separation” has replaced “peace” as a goal and closure was the enactment on the ground10.
Matter-out-of-Place and Cosmopolitanism
Over the past few years, joint Palestinian-Israeli-internationals protests have taken place in a number of West Bank villages constituting situational and fleeting cosmopolitan spaces and moments. The constitution of these heterogeneous spaces of resistance can be framed at the theoretical intersection of Douglas’ formulation of matter-out-of-place, cosmopolitanism, and the spatialization and policing of difference. Crafting and imposing homogeneity on space engenders the violence of expropriation and displacement as well as constant surveillance and policing. When Israelis enter Palestinian spaces, not as settlers in a project of domination, but as supporters in the struggle to end closure or the occupation, they challenge the prevalent Israeli moral and political narrative of separation and segregated spaces. This resonates with Douglas’ proposition that the classificatory order of space and what constitutes matter-out-of-place, or dirt, is an analogy “for expressing a general view of the social order.” Dirt is “essentially disorder” which “offends against order and convention.” Eliminating it is “a positive effort to organize the environment” and make it “conform to an idea.”11
Douglas’ concept of matter-out-of-place provides a theoretical framework for exploring colonial constructions of spatial separation and the violence their transgressions activate. Her notion of matter-out-of-place coincides with a vision of fixed national belonging and spatial categorization and ordering: Jews in Israel and its settlements and on by-pass roads, Palestinians in walled enclaves with severely limited mobility. I insert the phenomena of mobility or shifting-ness to Douglas’ formulation; in Palestine, the spatial is simultaneously fixed and in motion as Israel’s eastern border expands through the settlements while Palestinian territory simultaneously contracts12. As Israel incorporates and populates Palestinian territory, it becomes cleansed of ‘dirt,’ that is matter-out-of-place, and then redefined as Jewish. Where there is no longer matter-out-of-place (that is, Palestinians) Israeli space can thus be constituted by dwelling, arming (settlements are para-military outposts), extending sovereignty, and policing Palestinian mobility.
When Israelis cross over to the Palestinian zone to protest the expansion of Israeli space and sovereignty they undermine these spatial arrangements and their ideological underpinnings. The concept of matter-out-of-place is not enough as a framework for understanding spatial transgression; it describes but doesn’t take into account the existing structure of power and the way people reject categorization. One way to frame these issues is by fleshing out the relationship between matter-out-of-place and cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is a deeply problematic concept. However flawed, it may be a concept, like culture although certainly not as widespread in usage, which we cannot do without. In simple terms, cosmopolitanism registers a sense of belonging to a world wider than that constituted by narrowly defined primordial religious, ethnic, and nationally territorialized communities and identities13. It suggests belonging to a wider world of differences. B. Turner contends that vulnerability and the embodiment of suffering are common features of the human condition that by transcending culture and time form the basis of a shared humanity and thus the foundations of cosmopolitanism. Contemporary cosmopolitanism, he argues, is closely tied to globalization and is associated with the “erosion of national sovereignty and the growth of post-national citizenship; the emergence of global markets… and diasporic communities; and cultural hybridity…”14. In his view, “cosmopolitanism does not mean that one does not have a country or a homeland,” but rather that one has a “certain reflexive distance from one’s own culture” which produces a “humanistic skepticism toward the grand narratives of nationalism and modernization.”15
In a somewhat different vein, J. Ferguson writes that cosmopolitanism “implies nothing about travel or cultural competence; it is less about being at home in the world than it is about seeking worldliness at home.”16 Further he claims that cosmopolitans “cannot or will not be bound by the claims and proprieties of the local”17. Cosmopolitanism is not an end point on a scale of dualities of cosmopolitan/ provincial or local; nor is it a fixed quality. It is “defiance and rejection of localist expectations”18.
Cosmopolitanism also registers a refusal of a given social order of separation akin to the “clash of civilizations” lens on the world. Turner casts cosmopolitanism as an “antidote” to the purported “clash” because a reflexive sense of self is less in need of an “other.”19 Thus, I would argue the decision of Israelis to participate in a political community and engage in a set of actions based on ideological grounds, which categorizes one as matter-out-of-place, suggests both a critique of one’s own community or state and a willingness to embody that critique through the risk of physical violence. In this transgressive coming together, a spatially and temporally bounded moral community of opposition to occupation is crafted that transcends national, ethnic, and religious origins. In other words, in this setting, matter-is-allover-the-place, unleashed so to speak.
D. Rabinowitz writes that “Israelis have an inherent tendency….to associate themselves and their collective project with a “cultured Europe”…often played out through disassociation” from the Arab world20. He identifies a streak in Zionist thinking from its inception that Jews are to be distanced from the backwardness of the Arabs. Cosmopolitanism is contingent to some extent on positionality and its grounding in geo-political direction. When Israelis turn west and “associate themselves” with Europe, they claim cosmopolitanism; they hesitate to turn east, to the larger Arab-Islamic world in which they are geographically and politically embedded. The wall is an expression of a turning away, if not a sealing off, from the east. One cannot avoid the observation that the wall locks everyone in somewhere. Granted the Israelis are constructing the wall from a position of unparalleled power but they also lock themselves in and out of a larger social world. In other words, they are cosmopolitans when they locate themselves in the west but are hardly so when they turn east.
In elaborating on “matter-out-of-place,” Mary Douglas writes that it “implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order”21. In addition she writes that “where there is dirt there is system”22. With everyone in their assigned spaces, certainty about identities can be assured. Joint Palestinian-Israeli protests are transgressive, I would argue, because they subvert the categories that make up “ordered relations” and their assigned spaces and thus contravene the spatial order. Supposedly homogeneous spaces (Jewish and Arab) separated socio-legally and physically are traversed by a sector of Israeli Jews precisely in order to contest this spatio-demographic arrangement. In a situation where spaces of hybridity and cosmopolitanism are considered abnormal, if not indeed transgressive, what happens to this ostensibly binary order when defiant Israelis and internationals cross over into Palestinian areas for collective protest? The classificatory order is transgressed in a way that elicits enhanced surveillance and violence by Israeli military forces.
Village Protests
Weekly protests in some villages are highly organized, peaceful affairs where Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals engage in protest to halt land expropriation and construction of the wall and settlements. Bil’in, a village of about 1,700 people located about four kilometers east of the Green Line and 17 kilometers from Ramallah, is one such village. A series of land expropriations in 1978, 1991 and 2004, have led to the village losing 50-60 percent of its agricultural land. Bil’in is well-known for its protests on Fridays after noon prayers. The protests began in February 2005 and have continued to the present. While other villages have had protests Bil’in is known for its ability to engage in sustained and well-coordinated protest. Prior to the 2000 second intifada and the Israeli strategy of replacing Palestinian labor with foreign workers, much of the village’s work force was employed in Israel. Although some of the village leadership had actively participated in the Village Leagues in the early 1980s their collaboration did not spare them land confiscation. S. Tamari states that the Village Leagues were “helpless” in preventing land confiscation in their own villages23.
The village’s Popular Committee Against the Wall plans and coordinates the protests. In talking with Hassan, a member of the Popular Committee, I asked how this village has been able to sustain active opposition to the wall. He replied, “There are four clans in this village and every political faction is represented. We all coordinate together for the protests. No one clan or organization is dominant.” Later he mentioned that every family has lost some land to the settlers.
Spatial fragmentation of the West Bank and immobility mean that resistance has become quite localized. Geographical fragmentation may be opening new spaces for localized activism and the emergence of local leaderships; indeed Palestinians in such places often voice a sense of abandonment by the urban based leadership. As villagers struggled with closure and the wall, the Palestinian leadership has been strangely silent. This may presage a new political space where the immediacy of local issues temporarily and situationally overrides larger national questions and Palestinian political factionalism as a destructive force. On another level, this is not a descent into the provincialism of the local. Bil’in activists consistently use the term “joint struggle,” which refers to Palestinian, Israeli, an international participation, underscoring their awareness of the impossibility of struggling alone.
Israelis from many walks of life participate – the elderly, immigrants from US, high school and university students, peace activists, and women’s groups, among others. “Anarchists Against the Wall,” founded in 2003, and Gush Shalom, an Israeli peace organization, are prominently represented. Internationals hail from all over the globe
– Buddhists monks, a wide range of international peace groups, American-Jewish youth on Birth Right tours (or Birth Right Unplugged), a large contingent from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), EU Parliament members, Nobel laureates, women peace activists, etc. The scene in the village streets evokes a Tower of Babel image as a multiplicity of languages run together – Arabic, Hebrew, English, Spanish, German, and French, among others. Some Palestinian cynically refer to the weekly protests as “political tourism” for foreigners. Israeli groups coordinate with the ISM and the local Popular Committee Against the Wall.
The scene in the center of the village as hundreds of people converge to march through the village and to the wall area is one of semi-indeterminacy as to ethnic, religious, and national affiliations. Yet there is a conscious spatial distribution. Internationals and Israelis, are positioned in the front; the expectation is that Israel’s military forces will hesitate before attacking foreigners and Israelis; young Palestinian village boys often join those at the front of the protest. Many “observers” from various peace groups attend as well. Cameras are ubiquitous at these protests.
Activists on all sides agreed that Israeli tactics are often determined by who is participating; if is only Palestinians there is more violence. The presence of Israelis and internationals as participants and observers is thus perceived as critical to minimizing the violence inflicted on the Palestinians. Yet Israeli forces do engage in violence against Israelis.
Many Fridays the protests are marked by a theatrical theme; some involve inversion. For example, one Friday, protesters handcuffed themselves with plastic toy handcuffs. Another Friday, protesters donned long, colorful, snake costumes, reminiscent of Chinese New Year celebration, as symbols of the Israeli occupation; soccer matches with teams of local and international youth have taken place as have musical concerts as part of the protests. There is a standard, almost ritualized script that everyone seems to follow.
The protesters carry no weapons in stark contrast to the heavily armed Israeli forces with rubber bullets, automatic rifles, stun grenades, tear gas, and sound bombs, and more recently sewage water and the “skunk”24, and communications technologies that enable quick reinforcements. Indeed, middle-aged village men circulated in the crowd with bullhorns reminding people not to engage in any violence and repeating with intensity, “Throwing stones is forbidden” and “No one throws a stone.”
In the hour or so before the end of Friday noon prayers, hundreds of people gather in the center of the village in front of the ISM apartment. In ritualized fashion, the village men emerge from the mosque and head to the gathering crowd. Slowly, deliberately, the mass of people begen to move forward as the march proceeds along the road leading from the village to its orchards and now the site of the wall. As the long line of marchers wind its way to the village lands, suddenly the occupation forces appear on the horizon – three or four jeeps parked and out spill a couple of dozen well-armed occupation forces. The protesters marche up as close as possible to the occupying forces. With hands in their pockets, rifles slung casually over the shoulder, they just stood around for over half an hour. Israeli photographers, some in uniform and some in street clothes, openly snap photos of the crowd.
Some young village boys taunt the military forces. Young Mohammed, probably no more than twelve years of age was the most audacious. Standing just inches from the occupying forces, he would shout defiantly and eloquently: “Ya Abu Nimr, you snake, I am here, come and arrest me. You see me – my name is Mohammed and I will resist!” Israeli peace activists would get right up in the faces of the increasingly agitated soldiers to try, alternately to shame, berate, or convince them to desist or try to initiate a friendly conversation. Gradually the occupation forces began shifting from a relaxed stance to an increasing ready-to-attack one.
As though following a script, the call went up in the crowd: “To the wall” and the younger marchers were off and running down the hill through the rocky olive groves to the site of the coming wall. Most of the soldiers followed just as quickly. Three or four would catch a protester, throw him to the ground and started beating him. International observers with cameras would rush to take photos. Three soldiers caught an Israeli university student and threw him down on the rocky ground fairly close to where some of us had stayed behind to observe. They held him down by his arms and legs and he thrashed around trying to get free. They proceeded to beat him with batons as several internationals pleaded for him to be let go and snapped photos of the scene. The soldiers shouted for us to get back. When they finally let him go, his face was bloodied and his arm broken. He was helped by fellow protesters to the waiting Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) ambulance for first aid. The object of the violence seemed less to squelch protests and more to perform subjugation and to convey that not only would non-violence not alter the occupation’s progress but it would only bring about violence.
Transgressions
While a paper of this length cannot do justice to a long history of non-violent Palestinian resistance, suffice it to say that they have engaged in non-violent actions ranging from boycotts, sit-ins, strikes, demonstrations, tax revolts, and hunger-strikes. These have often been met with a violent Israeli response. Legal challenges are occasionally won but have little overall impact on occupation and are not always implemented. Samud is the most common form of Palestinian non-violent response occupation. Highly resonant in the Palestinian lexicon, it means staying put, refusing to move in face of a machinery of dispossession and tactics to winnow the population. Palestinian non-violence is particularly subversive because it does not conform to the dominant and widely circulated image of the irrationally violent Palestinian and a pathological Arab-Islamic culture. Indeed, the Palestinian leader Mubarak Awad, who initiated a non-violent movement, was deported in the 1988 as the first intifada erupted. Indeed, he was accused of direct participation in the intifada by authorizing the leaflets that guided the uprising.
These running, ritualized non-violent protests and spectacles challenge both the sacrosanct narratives about Palestinian violence and the normalization of Palestinian-Israeli segregation. They can be conceptualized as illicit encounters; Israeli Jews are legally not allowed in these areas25. Through the practice of collective protest, where people come together on the basis of shared political sentiments and a demand for justice and thus present an alternative vision of the social order, a dangerously heterotopian and thus subversive space is constituted. The participation by Israeli Jews, internationals and Palestinians represents a danger to the conceptualization of binary space, the standard narratives of Palestinian-Israeli relations, and the dominant classifications and assignments of space and mobility. By their participation in these protests, Israeli activists and internationals unsettled these narratives and classificatory categories, their rules and practices, and their spatialization. Traversing these boundaries upsets the rules of interaction which are based on allegedly primordial identities and loyalties which are enacted spatially. In coming together for protest, a liminal space is temporarily constituted; it is an effervescent moment in which, like a battery, people are charged up. In coming together in a liminal state, a sense of communitas emerged as did a moral community based on cross-linkages that undermined notions of fixed, singular identities.
Protests undercut one of the very purposes of the wall which is to isolate Palestinians and Israelis from one another. In reality, with some effort, closure can be breached. People can seep through – in this case Israelis faced an easier time than did Palestinians in getting through the wall and checkpoints. Israelis are forbidden by Israeli decree from entering Palestinian A areas. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism and forefather of the Likud, coined the term the Iron Wall. His formulation of an “…iron wall which the native population cannot break through…”26 is, I would contend, inverted by Israeli transgressions, by people armed with political and moral convictions. The Iron Wall refers to an impregnable Jewish military force that would signal to the Arab world, in unambiguous terms, their inability to weaken the Israeli state. Most significantly, it precludes any concessions to the Palestinians. In order to construct a viable Jewish state, Jabotinsky proposed an Iron Wall which the Arabs could never break through that included not just military might but a refusal to concede territory or sovereignty27. Peace would come through the complete acquiescence of the Palestinians. Perhaps Jabotinsky never thought Jews would perform the “break through” in search not of more land to expropriate and settle but to join with Palestinians to press for justice and offer a vision of a shared future.
The occupying forces’ response to these protests ranges from rubber bullets, tear gas, water canons, and beatings to arrests. Soldiers are confronted with the taxonomic order coming undone provoking cognitive dissonance and anger on the part of some.
Their world view and the dominant narrative of Jewish rights and pathological Palestinians relentlessly focused on attacking Israelis are up-ended; an alternative vision is apparent in the mixed protests. Israeli attacks on peaceful protests convey a starkly unambiguous message: non-violent opposition and protests will not be tolerated. If images and news of peaceful protests were circulated by the international media, and if the Palestinians were to gain anything as a result of them, these nonviolent movements of Palestinians and Israelis might gain moral stature. It would go against the grain of standard, hegemonic representations of Palestinians as inherently violent and it would violate the concept of segregation and spatial binaries.
To conclude, I would argue that the violence of the occupying forces is less in response to the actual actions of the demonstrators but more to the blurring of the classificatory order and its categories i.e, to the violence done to the categories of a demon Palestinian other and the spaces of civilization. In other words, the mixing and mingling at the protests may incur violent reactions not just because they are protesting the state’s actions but because they are mixing categories to do so – thus subverting the order of things. While matter-out-of-place usually engenders discomfort, anxiety, and confusion, in this case it arouses violence intended to obstruct slippage through and around boundaries. The highly symbolic nature of the Bi’lin protests and the violence they elicit point to the way symbolic challenges are conceptualized and responded to as real challenges to the occupying authorities. Nonviolence is thus understood as violence, however symbolic.
Mixed protests transgress spaces of segregation; they are a rejection of the mantra of security and criminalization that masks relations of domination and the continuing appropriation of Palestinian resources. In these settings, Israelis and Palestinian are crafting small subversive spaces of cooperation suggestive of a vision that defies segregation. The violently crafted spatial enclave and the responses to it – transgression and protests – reaffirms simultaneously the brutality of a modern colonial enterprise and its recourse to primordial identities and the rejection of these in favor of more cosmopolitan social relations and formations.
Acknowledgments
A shorter version of this paper was presented at the American Anthropology Association’s Annual Meeting, Washington D.C. November 30, 2007 and at the Anthropology Research Working Group at the University of Louisville in spring 2008. I would like to thank the participants at both these sessions for their comments.
Julie Peetet is professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Louisville her most recent book is Landscapes of Hope, Landscapes of Despair: Place and Identity in a Palestinian Camp. University of Penn Press, 2005.
Endnotes
1 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. (Ark Paperbacks, 1966 [1984]).
2 The West Bank is traversed by a series of bypass roads that connect settlements to Israel proper. Palestinians are not allowed to use these roads unless they have a permit. These roads permit settlers to by-pass native villages.
3 For an interesting article on the spatialization of difference, gender and policing see Thomas Abowd, “National Boundaries, Colonized Spaces: The Gendered Politics of Residential Life in Contemporary Jerusalem,” Anthropological Quarterly 8(4), 2007.
4 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization. The Human Consequences. (New York: Columbia university Press, 1998), p.9, 2.
5 In a parallel sort of move, the US is constructing a wall on its border with Mexico; about 70 miles have been completed.
6 Arnon Soffer, “Demographics in the Israeli-Palestinian Dispute” Policy Watch/ Peace watch #370. Special forum report (Washington, D.C.: The Washington Institute for Near east Policy. Soffer is emeritus professor of political geography and geostrategy at Haifa University. The Chronicle of Higher Education (November 23, 2007, 1 and 9-12) described him as the “self-styled Jeremiah of the demographic threat posed by Palestinian birth rates.” He is “widely considered the “intellectual father of Sharon’s decision to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and build a security fence along its boundary, in an effort to shore up both Israel’s border and its Jewish minority” (p.10).
7 Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete. Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate Trans. by Haim Watzman. (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2000), p.284.
8 David Makovsky, “How to Build a Fence” Foreign Affairs March/April, 2004, p.52.
9 According to a 2007 report by the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, “The State of Human Rights in Israel and the Occupied Territories” www.acri.org.il/eng half of Israeli do not think Arabs and Jews should have equal rights and more than 75% would not agree to live in the same building as Arabs.
10 In a report prepared by an Israeli think tank in collaboration with US officials in the mid-1990s, a new strategy that emphasized a “clean break” from the formulations of “comprehensive peace” and “land for peace” to be replaced by “peace for peace” and “peace through strength” and the pursuit of “unconditional acceptance by the Arabs of our rights, especially in their territorial dimensions” was proposed for the Netanyahu government. The bold text was intended as possible parts of a speech; the italics were in the text as well. The Study Group that prepared the report included Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser. See Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire. Western Footprints and America’s Perilious Path in the Middle East. (Beacon Press, 2004) pp.49-55 for a discussion of the Report and the Study Group’s connections with the war on Iraq.
11 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, p.3, 2.
12 Palestinian-Israeli negotiations can be viewed as an attempt to legitimize in the international arena the expansive borders of the state and the contraction and fragmentation of Palestinian space.
13 See Nefissa Neguib, “The Fragile Tale of Egyptian Jewish Cuisine: Food Memories of Claudia Roden and Collette Rossant” Food & Foodways 14:35-53 (2006); Amy Mills “The Place of Locality for Identity in the Nation: Minority Narratives of Cosmopolitan Istanbul” International Journal of Middle East Studies 40(3): 383-401, (2008); and Sami Zubaida “Middle Eastern Experiences of Cosmopolitanism” in S. Vertovec and R. Cohen (eds.) Conceiving Cosmopolitanism. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) pp.32-42 on cosmopolitanism in the Middle East.
14 Bryan Turner, Vulnerability and Human Rights. (Philadelphia: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), p.23-24.
15 Ibid. 62, 64.
16 James Fergusen, Expectations of Modernity. Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). p.212.
17 Ibid. 18 Ibid.
19 Turner, p.64.
20 Dani Rabinowitz, Borderline Collective Consciousness: Israeli Identity, “Arabness” and the Green Line” Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economic and Culture Vol. 8 No. 4 and Vol. 9 No. 1: 38-49, 2001, p.44.
21 Douglas, p.35.
22 Ibid.
23 The source for analyzing the Village Leagues is Salim Tamari,“In League with Zion: Israel’s Search for a Native Pillar” Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. 12, No. 4 (Summer): 41
56. p.42. He writes: “The Leagues constituted the second historical attempt by the Zionist movement to establish a collaborative base among Palestinian peasants. The goal was to mobilize “the conservative peasantry against its own urban-based national movement.”
24 In summer 2008, Israeli forces began using the “Skunk” against demonstrators; it is an organic compound that when sprayed releases a stench that sticks to skin, clothes and hair even after repeated washings. Its use, along with other innovations such as the “scream” which is a “large loudspeaker that sits on a truck and emits a dissonant and deafening sound’ and sponge bullets, have led to characterizations of Bil’in and nearby Ma’ilin as a “laboratory of experimentation.” Kobi ben Shimon, “Making a Stink” Haaretz September 6, 2008. www. haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1018282.html, online English edition, p.4).
25 As part of the Oslo agreements, the West Bank was divided into three areas of differential control and jurisdiction. Area A encompassed Palestinians towns and urban centers such as Ramallah, Jericho, Bethlehem, Tulkarem, and Jenin and was to be under the full control of the Palestinian Authority. Area B, villages and less populated areas would be under Palestinian civilian jurisdiction with Israel remaining in control of security. Area C is land confiscated for settlements and under exclusive Israeli control; it includes the Jordan Valley.
26 Quoted in Lenni Brenner, The Iron Wall. Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir. (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1984) p.75.
27 Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall. Israel and the Arab World. (W.W. Norton & Company, 2000). p.504. Later, PM Rabin in the early and mid 1990s “recognized that the iron wall of Jewish military power had achieved its purpose” and negotiations were in order (504). Jabotinsky believed in negotiations only when the Palestinians conceded their weakness and Israel’s “invincibility” (599) and were obliged to submit to Israeli demands. (598). Shlaim writes that this is what has occurred: “The history of the state of Israel is a vindication of Jabotinsky’s strategy of the iron wall” (598-99). Shlaim perceptively notes that Jabotinsky did not envision a permanent wall but eventual peace, even if on unequal terms. In contemporary conceptualization of the iron wall, exemplified by former PMs Shamir and Netanyahu, it is seen as a means of “keeping the Palestinians in a permanent state of subservience to Israel” (599).