An Israeli check point at Qalqiliya. Thousands of workers from the area arrive at the checkpoint before 4am to pass through the checkpoint to go to work in Israel (photo by Richard Wainwright, click for photographers blog).
Hello, again, to everyone here in Amptoons Int3rWebzzz L4nd! It’s been a while since I’ve been posting on here, not sure why, crazy life got in the way, I guess. But I have been posting regularly at my blog The Mustard Seed and I’ll begin cross-posting my stuff on this blog again. I’m filling the crazy union organizing Marxist void that this blog oh so needs…or not, whateva.
Since the failures of the Israel/Palestine peace talks and the subject of Israeli settlements have been in the news lately I thought I’d highlight a recent interview on “Voices of the Middle East and North Africa.” Israeli professor Eyal Weizman (who wrote the book Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation) argued that Israel’s boarders are not concrete boarders the way many Western Europeans see as boarders. In reality, Weizaman states, Israel’s boarders are colonial boarders harkening back to the days that Africa and the Middle East which were carved up by European powers.
During this segment of the interview he states:
I think that, at least where I am now, the European imagination of national conflicts, conflicts are about boarders. We can push the boarder a little bit more here a little bit more there and it seems to people it is a boarder issue, the Israel-Palestine conflict…Whereas in fact we need to think very much in the context of colonial geography of control and subjugation. Where the separation of “We are here and they are there” is in fact not possible because the entire geographical-military-political system operates by creating that overlap: this is the very system that wherever there would be concentration of populations there would be close to it the Other, they would draw colonization into it. This is why there is a Jewish-Israeli colonization inside Hebron around the big Palestinian cities, within the Palestinian populated parts of Jerusalem.
It is not as if there is a certain magic line that could be drawn and miraculously separate Palestinians from Israeli by putting these on one side and that on the other. Colonial geographies have always been mixed, they’ve always been confusing, they’ve always been built more around enclaves, patchworks of territory, that are intermixed rather than solid territorial bodies. In fact the idea of territorial separation is impossible and this is where the book is both rather pessimistic and rather hopeful. Because it says, and it shows, it refutes the possibility of partition. I mean, it is actually kind of a proof by refutation: it kinda shows the complexity of separation that all these issues of overlaps of territory but in fact it kind of creates, or describes the territory as so complex and so intertwined, that would in fact (we can only reach the conclusion) that it would collapse under its own contradictions and intensities because the project of separation is really, territorially, impossible…And I think that if we think about transformation then we can not break [Israel and Palestine] apart. We can not say “Well let’s look for a solution for the Arab Palestinians in Gaza and another solution for those in Galilee and another solution for those in the Southern West Bank, those in Jerusalem, or those in the North West Bank, etc.”
I think that those designations and the attempts to look for other solutions for these different regions is in itself part of the mechanism of control which seeks to differentiate, to separate, between the different places and different Palestinians that live within that sphere of Israeli control.
The hope, in this, for Weizman is that he is left to the conclusion that the only way forward is a unified Palestinian/Israeli state were equal rights are attributed to everyone.
Hi, I’m pretty sure you mean “borders” and not “boarders.” Interesting post!
Where the separation of “We are here and they are there” is in fact not possible because the entire geographical-military-political system operates by creating that overlap: this is the very system that wherever there would be concentration of populations there would be close to it the Other, they would draw colonization into it.
Can someone translate this sentence for me please? I’m having a tough time parsing it out.
Many of the current national borders in the Middle East were established by retreating colonial powers, including major non-European powers like Turkey, so what exactly is the professor’s point? Does he consider the borders of Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq, etc. to be illegitimate as well?
The thing is, the insane micro-partitions of the Green Line, which produced chaos like the “battle of the dentures” around Notre-Dame in Jerusalem, were manageable when they were treated like real borders by the UNTSO, the IDF, and the Jordanian army. So I tend to think that it is the permeability of the Separation Wall that is the issue, and that a functional PA that could treat the Green Line as a border (instead of a treat for the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades) and an IDF that acted likewise would stabilize the situation. Weizmann simply wants Palestine in place of Israel, and I tend to think of him as a future Jean-Sénac-in-waiting. But, y’know, nothing that Israel does except vanishing is really going to satisfy a Marxist anti-Zionist.
The hope, in this, for Weizman is that he is left to the conclusion that the only way forward is a unified Palestinian/Israeli state were equal rights are attributed to everyone.
The only way forward is for a massive shift in the political and social organizational preferences of millions of people, very few of whom have expressed a particular interest in either a “unified Palestinian/Israeli state” or attributing “equal rights” to each other (much less both)? Ouch.
But the bigger problem is that Prof. Weizman badly begs the question. It’s almost definitely true that no border could provide complete separation between the Israelis and Palestinians, most notably because there already is a large Israeli Arab population which has no interest either being drawn into or forced into any new Palestinian state. It’s also possible that rather than evacuating some settlements, the settlers will remain where they are and become part of a Palestinian state, though I’m doubtful that will happen.
Because of that, Professor Weizman says “separation” is impossible, and thus any solution based on demarcating borders is futile. But there’s no evidence that total separation is what is desired. What Israelis and Palestinian want — at least, those who are willing to countenance a deal with each other — is fulfillment of their democratic, national aspirations. This is quite compatible with the existence of some non-Jews in Israel and some non-Palestinians in Palestine, and so it’s quite compatible with creating the borders of two states. It is quite incompatible with a unified state, which is why there is virtually no constituency amongst either Israelis or Palestinians for “the only way forward”.
There is more to the imaginations of Israelis and Palestinians than is dreamed by someone like Prof. Weizman. It is his narrow understanding of the aspirations at issue that circumscribe his choices, not anything inherent in the idea of borders or territoriality. They do see another way forward, and as embarrassing as it may be that justice can coexist with the Jews possessing a national homeland, such is the crazy world we live in.
@Penny: Haha, yeah, “borders” my bad. Thanks!