'Israel’s Colonial Siege and The Palestiniansby Bashir Abu-Manneh
[This essay appears in The Socialist Register 2008: Global Flashpoints: Reactions to imperialism and neoliberalism, now available from Monthly Review Press in the USA, Fernwood Books in Canada and Merlin Press in the UK and the rest of the world. For the table of contents of the whole volume, click here.]
If there’s one short phrase that can describe Palestinian reality under Israeli occupation today, it is this: enduring under permanent siege, without surrender.{1}
My aim in the following is, first, to defend the accuracy of this statement. Since the Oslo Agreements of 1993, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has developed into a colonial siege, gradually atomizing and strangling Palestinian economy and society. Compounded by international boycott, poverty levels are now between 70 per cent and 80 per cent, with extreme and unprecedented levels of unemployment and rising dependency on food aid.{2} Second, although Israeli policy is mainly to blame for this drastic worsening of Palestinian living conditions since 1993, the Palestinian national secular elite is far from blameless. They have, in fact, played a junior yet pivotal role in bringing this new regime into being. By legitimizing their people’s continued dispossession and domination by Israel, they have ended up corrupting Palestinian national aspirations for justice and self-determination. With no alternative left project in sight, religious fundamentalism was destined to carry the mantle of an abandoned nationalism and drastically increase its own popular political constituency. Third, siege and capitulation also eventually generated mass resistance. As with the first Intifada of the late 1980s that led to Oslo, Palestinians again revolted in popular protest against colonization and national denial. And with the al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000, resistance was re-legitimized.{3} This time round, though, conditions were much worse: social power and political leverage were in even shorter supply. Suicide bombing expressed growing Palestinian captivity and despair, and armed struggle replaced an earlier emphasis on mass political participation. I examine these new forms of resistance and scrutinize their prospects of achieving decolonization under continuing conditions of siege, Hamas-Fatah factionalism, and an absence of unified strategy.
ATOMIZED AND ENCIRCLED
Siege (or closure) is arguably Israel’s most pernicious instrument of colonial control and punishment. It basically means a denial of the Palestinian right to freedom of movement through the use of hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints, numbering 546 in total. Closure doesn’t just restrict movement of goods and persons externally between the West Bank and Gaza, as well as from either area to Israel or the outside world. It blocks freedom of movement internally within the West Bank as well. Initially imposed as far back as the first Intifada in 1991, this regime was consolidated and incorporated into Oslo, only to be massively intensified since the second Intifada began. As a result, 40 per cent of the West Bank is today inaccessible to Palestinians.
In a recent report by the World Bank on movement restrictions in the West Bank, Israel was strongly criticized for the way ‘closure has been implemented through a complicated agglomeration of policies and practices which has fragmented the territory into ever smaller and more disconnected cantons’.{4} While acknowledging (but without going into the deeper roots of the conflict) that Israeli security concerns are ‘undeniable and must be addressed’, the report clearly states that ‘...it is often difficult to reconcile the use of closure for security purposes from its use to expand and protect settlement activity and the relatively unhindered movement of settlers in and out of the West Bank... It is also difficult to account for the discriminatory enforcement of zoning and planning regulations which minimize the amount of land available for the normal growth and development of Palestinian areas...’. As a result, the Palestinian economy has been thoroughly devastated and is on the brink of collapse: ‘The practical effect of this shattered economic space is that on any given day the ability to reach work, school, shopping, healthcare facilities and agricultural land is highly uncertain and subject to arbitrary restriction and delay’.
Much of this has been known for years. Indeed, four years earlier Salem Ajluni, chief UN economist, described Israel’s economic strangulation of the Occupied Territories as a deliberate ‘mass impoverishment -- indeed immiseration -- a process that is unprecedented in modern Palestinian history’.{5} With the recent economic and political boycott of the Palestinian government following on the heels of Hamas’s election victory in January 2006, siege has been compounded by even harsher restrictions. As part of what the special rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Territories, John Dugard, called ‘economic coercion for regime change’, Palestinians have been strangled even more: ‘In effect, the Palestinian people have been subjected to economic sanctions -- the first time an occupied people have been so treated.... [they] have been subjected to possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions imposed in modern times’.{6}
So what started as ‘an ad hoc military-bureaucratic measure crystallized into a fully conscious Israeli strategy with a clear political goal: separation between the two peoples with an appearance of political separation, but with only one government -- Israel -- having any effective power to shape the destinies of both’.{7} If Israel’s strategy before the first Intifada was the exploitation and partial inclusion of the Palestinian working class into the Israeli economy as daily migrant labour, since 1991 Israel has reverted to its original Zionist goal of complete exclusion.{8} Unlike apartheid, then, Zionism combines political separation with economic exclusion. Azmi Bishara has described the logic of Zionist colonialism as ‘separation, within separation’: ‘This colonialism displaces people, confiscates their land or bypasses them (the term, often applied to roads, is pertinent). It “develops” the land for settlement, but not for the inhabitants’.{9} The process of Zionist conquest and siege is, thus, more reminiscent of whites’ treatment of Native Indians in North America than it is of Blacks under South African apartheid.{10} As Fayez A. Sayegh put it: ‘The people of Palestine has lost not only political control over its country, but physical occupation of its country as well: it has been deprived not only of its inalienable right to self-determination, but also of its elemental right to exist on its own land!’'
Lees verder: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=13979
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