File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_2001/foucault.0108, message 60


Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2001 05:42:39 +0100 (BST)
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?eldorra=20mitchell?= <manynotone-AT-yahoo.co.in>
Subject: Strata and Nomadic versus State War machines -guilt trip began with them

















[In this most recent communique from the invaluable
Middle East <BR>
Research and Information Project (MERIP), freelance
journalist Chris <BR>
Smith details the incredible contortions into which
Palestinian <BR>
civilians are knotted every day by the Israeli
Occupation.  Normal, <BR>
hardworking civilians become, due to closures and
roadblocks, <BR>
renegades evading the Israeli military just to earn
their daily <BR>
bread.  If the Israeli tourist industry has been
hurt badly by the <BR>
recent upsurge in the conflict, the entire Palestinian
economy has <BR>
been devastated -- and the hope of a normal existence
for most <BR>
Palestinians shattered.  All this reminds one of
the darkest moments <BR>
in Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman's
"Chronicle of a <BR>
Disappearance," whose title refers metaphorically
to the insidious <BR>
threat against a whole people.  The moral
ulceration of this <BR>
situation perfectly matches the geographical
ulceration of illegal <BR>
Israeli settlements built on confiscated land -- and
maintained at <BR>
such inconceivable human expense. --LS]<BR>
<BR>
MERIP Press Information Note 66<BR>
<BR>
Closure: The Daily Reality of Israel's Occupation<BR>
<BR>
Chris Smith<BR>
<BR>
August 27, 2001<BR>
<BR>
(Chris Smith is a freelance journalist recently
returned from the West<BR>
Bank.)<BR>
<BR>
As soon as the Israeli army jeep disappears around the
bend, a dusty minivan<BR>
emerges from the grape fields outside Beit Ummar, a
farming town in the<BR>
southern West Bank. Revving the engine as he
accelerates into the turn, the<BR>
driver leans out the window and yells, "Go!
Go!" On cue, eight Palestinian<BR>
workers bolt from their hiding places in the bushes
and run alongside the<BR>
van, jumping in as it tears down the empty highway.
After just a few hundred<BR>
yards, the van turns back into the fields to evade an
Israeli armored<BR>
personnel carrier at a checkpoint down the road. To
get here, the van had<BR>
followed a tortuous dirt path over the hills from
Bethlehem -- in which a<BR>
five-minute drive became an hour-long journey. The
return trip would be just<BR>
as grueling.<BR>
<BR>
Up the highway at another checkpoint, two taxi drivers
stand under the<BR>
midday sun, their minivans impounded for trying to
pass the roadblock.<BR>
"Since 7 am we've been here," says one of
the men, pointing to his watch.<BR>
"They took our identification cards." Upon
hearing this, an Israeli soldier<BR>
lounging in the shade tells him to shut up.<BR>
<BR>
Like much of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Beit Ummar
is effectively blocked<BR>
off -- in this case, by four Israeli army checkpoints
in little more than a<BR>
mile. Palestinian traffic is barred from most major
roads and, to avoid the<BR>
roadblocks, Palestinians spend hours bumping over
rutted donkey tracks or<BR>
traversing olive groves. The penalties for getting
caught can be severe:<BR>
residents and human rights groups report that soldiers
often confiscate car<BR>
keys and shoot tires out, and have detained and beaten
travelers.<BR>
<BR>
DAILY REALITY OF OCCUPATION<BR>
<BR>
Such cat-and-mouse games have become common all over
the Occupied<BR>
Territories since the second intifada began last fall,
when the Israelis<BR>
clamped down on Palestinian movement with a policy
called "internal<BR>
closure." Closure is less dramatic than Israel's
headline-grabbing<BR>
assassinations of Palestinian leaders, such as the
August 27 killing of Abu<BR>
Ali Mustafa, head of the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine<BR>
(PFLP). But the closures are the daily reality of
occupation for most<BR>
Palestinians, who often find it impossible to move
from one town to<BR>
another -- whether to go to work, to visit relatives
or to get to school.<BR>
Beit Ummar has been under closure for most of the
summer. "We're like birds<BR>
in a cage," says the manager of the local power
grid.<BR>
<BR>
Internal closures are nothing new -- the IDF first
introduced them in 1996,<BR>
following suicide bombings inside Israel -- but
Palestinians say they have<BR>
gotten tighter and more widespread in recent months.
("External closures,"<BR>
by which Israel prohibits Palestinian workers and
goods from entering or<BR>
passing through Israel, were first employed in March
1993.) By the<BR>
Palestinian Authority's latest count, there are 97
manned checkpoints in the<BR>
West Bank and 32 in the Gaza Strip, allowing the IDF
to shut down<BR>
Palestinian movement at will.<BR>
<BR>
An Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman avers that
internal closures are<BR>
necessary security measures. "Internal closures
around cities are based on<BR>
intelligence assessments of specific threats," he
says. "When [Israeli]<BR>
intelligence knows that terrorists are planning to
leave a city, we'll<BR>
institute a closure. It prevents a large number of
terrorist attacks. It's<BR>
not 100 percent effective, but it does help." But
to the Israeli human<BR>
rights group B'Tselem, the closures are simply
collective punishment. "The<BR>
sweeping nature of the restrictions imposed by Israel,
which are not<BR>
directed at specific individuals who constitute a
security danger, but<BR>
indiscriminately against millions of people,"
turns the closure policy into<BR>
a "clear form" of collective punishment,
according to a January 2001 report<BR>
published by the organization.<BR>
<BR>
ONCE THRIVING TOWN<BR>
<BR>
In the West Bank, the closure is perhaps most
consistent in Jericho, the<BR>
once thriving tourist town in the Jordan Valley.
Flanked by bare brown hills<BR>
to the west and the Jordanian border to the east, the
city is almost totally<BR>
cut off from the outside world. There are only three
roads in or out: one to<BR>
Jordan across the Allenby Bridge, one to the north and
one to the south.<BR>
Nowadays, all three are often shut tight by army
barricades. Non-Jericho<BR>
residents and foreigners are denied entry, and locals
are only<BR>
intermittently allowed in or out. On a recent visit,
all three roads had<BR>
been closed for four days. The southern checkpoint was
deserted -- no taxis,<BR>
no people, just Israeli soldiers in wraparound
sunglasses drinking orange<BR>
soda.<BR>
<BR>
No has counted the days of total closure in Jericho,
but its effects are<BR>
obvious. Tell al-Sultan, an archaeological site
holding the remains of the<BR>
oldest city in the world, sits forlornly at the edge
of an empty parking<BR>
lot. Nearby hotels and restaurants are shuttered, and
the newly built<BR>
gondola -- designed to whisk tourists up from town to
a monastery on the<BR>
mountainside -- hasn't moved since October. Its
cherry-red cable cars hang<BR>
in the air, swaying slightly in the breeze. Arabic pop
music, startlingly<BR>
loud in the silence, drifts from a radio in the
distance.<BR>
<BR>
At Tell al-Sultan, the ticket-taker sits in the shade
chewing his lip.<BR>
"Every month there were 10,000 people,
14,000," he says. "Now there's no<BR>
one. The parking lot was so full of buses we couldn't
hold them all. They<BR>
spilled out into the street." He sold six tickets
last month -- about<BR>
average these days, he says. According to the city's
department of tourism,<BR>
from October 1999 to February 2000, approximately
35,000 tourists visited<BR>
Jericho each month. From October 2000 to February
2001, the number of<BR>
monthly visitors was no more than 10.<BR>
<BR>
The ticket-taker is lucky. He still has a job, and the
Palestinian Authority<BR>
(PA) still pays him, if not always on time. By local
estimates, some 80<BR>
percent of Jericho's workforce is now unemployed. This
figure -- double the<BR>
United Nations Special Coordinator's estimate for the
Occupied Territories<BR>
as a whole -- is in line with the numbers in the
destitute Gaza Strip. More<BR>
than 500 jobs were lost as hotels and restaurants shut
their doors. The<BR>
town's biggest moneymaker, the Austrian-run Oasis
Casino, laid off all 1,500<BR>
of its employees in November. In addition, the closure
prevents farmers from<BR>
taking their produce to market and rural Palestinians
and Bedouin from<BR>
reaching the Jericho hospital, which is the only one
in the area. Iman<BR>
Amleh, who directs three Union of Palestinian Medical
Relief Committee<BR>
(UPMRC) clinics in outlying villages, says that even
she has problems<BR>
passing the checkpoints sometimes, despite official
permission from the<BR>
Israeli authorities. "It's really
miserable," she says with a shrug.<BR>
<BR>
Jericho's isolation makes it especially vulnerable to
the closure. "It's<BR>
impossible to close Ramallah [completely] -- there are
houses all the way<BR>
from Jerusalem," says Mohammad Attiyeh, a general
practitioner who works at<BR>
a local UPMRC clinic. "But Jericho is an oasis,
all by itself."<BR>
<BR>
GAZA AND JERICHO FIRST<BR>
<BR>
The remote but strategically important Jordan Valley
has seen less<BR>
Palestinian guerrilla activity than the rest of the
West Bank, but the IDF<BR>
has tightened the closure here as the months have worn
on. Shortly after the<BR>
February election of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon, the army began<BR>
digging a network of trenches -- six and a half feet
deep and almost as<BR>
wide -- along the town's eastern, southern and
northern reaches, with the<BR>
declared aim of preventing Palestinian attacks on
Jewish settlers driving on<BR>
a nearby bypass road. On many days, the only way in or
out is through the<BR>
desert to the west in cars rugged enough to stand the
journey. Even then,<BR>
residents and rights groups claim that the IDF
sometimes bars the way with<BR>
tank patrols. On one bad day in June, locals say,
soldiers made a taxi<BR>
driver strip to his underwear and dance for them. They
also say that<BR>
soldiers forced another driver to drop to his knees
and bark like a dog.<BR>
<BR>
Jericho, ironically, was one of the first cities
transferred to PA control<BR>
following the 1993 Oslo accords. The first phase of
Israel's "redeployment"<BR>
under these accords was known as "Gaza and
Jericho First." Amid great<BR>
fanfare and international approval, Israeli troops
pulled out of Jericho in<BR>
1994, but they never went very far. A sprawling
military post overlooks the<BR>
town from a mountainside to the west, and now the IDF
is back, its chokehold<BR>
on Jericho enforced not by soldiers patrolling the
streets but by concrete<BR>
barriers and trenches on the outskirts of town.<BR>
<BR>
Inside the boarded-up town, residents have little to
do but wait for things<BR>
to change. Abu Hani, a bus driver, shuttles travelers
between town and the<BR>
border crossing, and when the roads are closed there's
no work. One closure,<BR>
he remembers, lasted 17 days. "I have nothing to
do when there's closure,"<BR>
he says. "No job, no money. I just sit." His
wife, Umm Hani, has watched the<BR>
family's grocery store lose 60 percent of its business
since the closure<BR>
began last fall. Last month, the couple's oldest son,
Youssef, left for New<BR>
York to try and find work with a cousin. "He just
called this morning," says<BR>
his mother. "I wanted to tell him to come back
because we miss him. But if<BR>
he came back he would just sit. It's better that he's
away."<BR>
<BR>
(When quoting from this PIN, please cite MERIP Press
Information Note 66,<BR>
"Closure: The Daily Reality of Israel's
Occupation," by Chris Smith, August<BR>
27, 2001. The author can be contacted at
smithca77-AT-aol.com.)<BR>
<BR>
-----<BR>
<BR>
For more on Israeli occupation policies, see MERIP
Press Information Note<BR>
63: Under the Guise of Security: House Demolitions in
Gaza:<BR>
<a
href="http://www.merip.org/pins/pin63/html">http://www.merip.org/pins/pin63/html</a><BR>
<BR>
For analysis of how closures affect the Palestinian
economy, see Leila<BR>
Farsakh, "Under Siege: Closure, Separation and
the Palestinian Economy," in<BR>
Middle East Report 217 (Winter 2000). The article is
accessible online at:<BR>
<a
href="http://www.merip.org/mer/mer217/217_farsakh.html">http://www.merip.org/mer/mer217/217_farsakh.html</a><BR>
<BR>
To order individual copies of Middle East Report or to
subscribe, please<BR>
call Blackwell Publishers at 1-800-835-6770.<BR>
<BR>
-----<BR>
<BR>
Press Information Notes are a free service of the
Middle East Research and<BR>
Information Project (MERIP). To subscribe to the MERIP
PIN distribution<BR>
list, simply respond to ctoensing-AT-merip.org and
provide your address in the<BR>
text message box, indicating "SUBSCRIBE PIN"
in the subject line. To<BR>
unsubscribe, indicate "UNSUBSCRIBE" in the
subject line. Thank you!<BR>
<BR>
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