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Tuesday, June 24, 2008

 

Occupation by bureaucracy

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/24/opinion/edmakdisi.php

Occupation by bureaucracy

By Saree Makdisi

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

A cease-fire went into effect in Gaza last week, offering some respite from the violence that has killed hundreds of Palestinians and five Israelis in recent months. It will do nothing, however, to address the underlying cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Intermittent spectacular violence may draw the world's attention to the occupied Palestinian territories, but our obsession with violence actually distracts us from the real nature of Israel's occupation, which is its smothering bureaucratic control of everyday Palestinian life.

This is an occupation ultimately enforced by tanks and bombs, and through the omnipresent threat, if not application, of violence. But its primary instruments are application forms, residency permits, population registries and title deeds. On its own, no cease-fire will relieve the beleaguered Palestinians.

Gaza is virtually cut off from the outside world by Israeli power. Elsewhere, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the ongoing Israeli occupation comprehensively infuses all the normally banal activities of Palestinians' everyday lives: applying for permission to access one's own land; applying for what Israel regards as the privilege - rather than the right - of living with one's spouse and children; applying for permission to drive one's car; to dig a well; to visit relatives in the next town; to visit Jerusalem; to go to work; to school; to university; to hospital. There is hardly any dimension of everyday life in Palestine that is not minutely managed by Israeli military or bureaucratic personnel.

Partly, this occupation of everyday life enables the Israelis to maintain their vigilant control over the Palestinian population. But it also serves the purpose of slowly, gradually removing Palestinians from their land, forcing them to make way for Jewish settlers.

Just in 2006, for example, Israel stripped 1,363 Jerusalem Palestinians of the right to live in the city in which many of them were born. It did this not by dramatically forcing dozens of people at a time onto trucks and dumping them at the city limits, but rather by quietly stripping them, one by one, of their Jerusalem residency papers.

This in turn was enabled by a series of bureaucratic procedures. While Israel continues to violate international law by building exclusively Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, it rarely grants building permits to Palestinian residents of the same city. Since 1967, the third of Jerusalem's population that is Palestinian has been granted just 9 percent of the city's official housing permits. The result is a growing abundance of housing for Jews and a severe shortage of housing for non-Jews - i.e., Palestinians.

In fact, 90 percent of the Palestinian territory Israel claimed to have annexed to Jerusalem after 1967 is today off-limits to Palestinian development because the land is either already built on by exclusively Jewish settlements or being reserved for their future expansion.

Denied permits, many Palestinians in Jerusalem build without them, but at considerable risk: Israel routinely demolishes Palestinian homes built without a permit. This includes over 300 homes in East Jerusalem demolished between 2004 and 2007 and 18,000 Palestinian homes in the occupied territories demolished since 1967.

One alternative has been to move to the West Bank suburbs and commute to Jerusalem. The wall cutting off East Jerusalem from the West Bank and thereby separating tens of thousands of Jerusalem Palestinians from the city of their birth has made that much more difficult.

And it too has its risks: Palestinians who cannot prove to Israel's satisfaction that Jerusalem has continuously been their "center of life" have been stripped of their Jerusalem residency papers. Without those papers, they will be expelled from Jerusalem, and confined to one of the walled-in reservoirs - of which Gaza is merely the largest example - that Israel has allocated as holding pens for the non-Jewish population of the holy land.

The expulsion of half of Palestine's Muslim and Christian population in what Palestinians call the nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 was undertaken by Israel's founders in order to clear space in which to create a Jewish state.

The nakba did not end 60 years ago, however: It continues to this very day, albeit on a smaller scale. Yet even ones and twos eventually add up. Virtually every day, another Palestinian joins the ranks of the millions removed from their native land and denied the right of return.

Their long wait will end - and this conflict will come to a lasting resolution - only when the futile attempt to maintain an exclusively Jewish state in what had previously been a vibrantly multi-religious land is abandoned.

Separation will always require threats or actual violence; a genuine peace will come not with more separation, but with the right to return to a land in which all can live as equals. Only a single democratic, secular and multicultural state offers that hope to Israelis and Palestinians, to Muslims, Jews and Christians alike.

Saree Makdisi is professor of English literature at the University of California, Los Angeles and author of "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation."

Comments:
Dear umkahlil

Thank you for all your good work

May I ask you a favour please

I have been banned (blocked) from the Guardian, and my poem there has been deleted

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/26/israelandthepalestinians.middleeast?commentpage=1

I am being blocked by either hackers or the people who run this site

I had to change my details several times, but even that is not working anymore


People on the site don't know that I am blocked, and I have no idea why the guardian had banned me, my comments and poems are never offensive or abusive

I would be obliged if you could let people know, and if you could ask the moderators on my behalf, as why do they keep blocking me

many thanks in advance

nahida

http://poetryforpalestine.spaces.live.com/
 
Hi Nahida,

I left a comment on the post as well as writing to Comment is Free. I hope that this is cleared up right away; I feel so alone commenting there, and I was so happy to see another Palestinian posting there.
 
Thank you again dear Umkhalil for that effort

With regards to contacting CIF, I have tried that before, but I never got a reply, not even an acknowledgement

In fact, I have been blocked several times, under different names, never with any explanation

This time however, I am not even allowed to register using a new email. I think they blocked my IP

All this I find so absurd and frustrating, because the internet is our last platform of freedom of expression, but I think we are losing even that

If there is any hope, it will have to be through people becoming aware of what’s going on (which is either hacking or bold censorship), and bringing it to the attention of CIF to identify the cause, and if the cause was indeed censorship, people must not stay silent, as this is a very serious breach of our rights to freedom of speech
 
Hi Nahida,

I just received this response from CIF.

Hi, thanks for your query, I have looked at this users account and she is not blocked or banned. She is completely free to post on CIF. If she is having problems doing so, it is porbably to do with her server, but I assure you there are no problems from this end.

Moderator.
 
if that is the case, where is my poem?
 
Hi nahida and umkahlil

I've been following this story on the thread and find it scandalous that your poem has been deleted and you yourself are being prevented from posting. The moderators have said that you are not banned - so can you try posting again now on the thread to see if this is true?

I'm going to print this on CIF

Moderators, we need top know :

-why Ninexile's poem was deleted, since it could not conceivably have been in breach of the Talk Policy - even Ziongate said it was "a moving poem". No one has expressed any outrage about this poem on the thread, so I cannot see how you could possibly construe it as "offensive"

-can you confirm that the palestinan poster ninexile has full posting rights here?

Thank you.

ninexile/umkahlil - you can reach me on gingerwaster@netcourrier.com
 
Thank you ginger, and umkhalil

I already have tried posting to no avail

I don't have any problem with my server, as I can post freely on other website, except CIF AND Common Dreams, which I also have been banned there, and they have deleted EVERY single post and poem of mine

You can see for example people commenting on my poem here, but the poem has disappeared:

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/28/9240/
 
well I just reposted your poem on CIF and I have asked the mods for an explanation - I will also tell them that you confirm you can't post.

Either the mods are being underhand here or someone higher up the chain (security services?) is blocking your IP - or there is a technical glitch somewhere. Try posting from a different computer if you can.

BTW when you try posting what happens - do you get a message that says "your posting rights have been withdrawn"?
 
Ginger,

Thanks for re-posting Nahida's beautiful poem. As to why your (Nahida's) poem was deleted, perhaps the moderator didn't know that it was yours and thought that you were breaching a copywrite. It certainly is on topic and reminds me of Kamil Nasir (I'll post of bit of "Kamil Nasir's Last Poem" on CIF.
 
Umkahlil and Nahida

Drop me a line at gingerwaster@netcourrier.com

Cheers to both of you!
 
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