Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

Summary

Saree Makdisi argues that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem is an everyday occupation: enforced ultimately by armed force, but worked primarily through bureaucracy — application forms, title deeds, residency papers, permits, population registry entries and visa stamps — whose cumulative effect is to claim Palestinian land while clearing it, whenever possible, of Palestinians (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.4, p.43-44). In the parts read so far (the front matter, Alice Walker’s Foreword, the Author’s Note, the Introduction, Chapter 1, “Outsides”, and Chapter 2, “Insides”, both complete, and Chapter 3, “Outside In”, complete, and the opening of Chapter 4, “Inside Out”), Makdisi sets out the book’s core thesis: “At heart, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is actually very simple. It is not about religion. It is not about security. It is not about terrorism. It is about land.” (PDF p.52) Israel, he argues, does not want the people of the occupied territories but does want their land — the “Demographic problem” — and the shift since 1967 from outright expulsion to pressure inducing “voluntary Transfer” follows from that contradiction, which Baruch Kimmerling formulated as two mutually exclusive Zionist imperatives and Vladimir Jabotinsky stated openly in “The Iron Wall” (1923) (PDF p.47-53).

What the file is

A 453-PDF-page English book, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation by Saree Makdisi, copyright 2008, in a later printing carrying a new Foreword by Alice Walker (foreword copyright 2010) and an Author’s Note signed November 2009 (PDF p.11, p.13, p.33). Publisher W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, and W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., London; ISBN 978-0-393-06996-9; Library of Congress DS119.76.M3395 2008 (PDF p.13). The text copy is the supplied copy with === PDF p.N === markers for all 453 pages; it is generally clean, with scattered mojibake (for example “Author’s Note” in the Contents, PDF p.19, and a lone “” on PDF p.18) and blank leaves noted in the reading notes. No printed page numbers are visible in PDF p.1-86, so locators in this part are PDF pages only; the text itself carries a printed cross-reference, “see map, p. 336” (PDF p.56), that belongs to the printed pagination. Maps listed on PDF p.21 are images whose text is not extracted beyond the list. The body divisions, from the Contents (PDF p.19), are: Introduction; Outsides; Insides; Outside In; Inside Out; Coda; Epilogue; Acknowledgments; Notes on Sources; Notes on Statistics, preceded by Maps, Foreword and Author’s Note.

Section by section

Praise pages (PDF p.3-6). Advance praise quoted from reviews, in order: Times Higher Education Supplement; Najwa Najjar in Frontline; Desmond M. Tutu; Alasdair Buchan in Diplomat; Jonathan Mok in GlobalComment; Rashid Khalidi — “Makdisi shows that the so-called peace process has in fact accelerated the dispossession of the Palestinian people” (PDF p.4); Slavoj Zizek in The Guardian, calling the occupation an “‘occupation by bureaucracy’: it works primarily through application forms, title deeds, residency papers and other permits” (PDF p.4); Richard Falk, Special Rapporteur to the U.N. Human Rights Council, praising “a brilliantly argued, against-the-grain plea for a one-state, secular, democratic solution” (PDF p.4); Yitzhak Laor; Jim Miles in Palestine Chronicle; John Dugard; Monocle; Tariq Ali; Gideon Levy; Howard Zinn; and Publishers Weekly (PDF p.3-6).

Foreword — Alice Walker, “What Changes the World? Bearing Witness to the Truth” (PDF p.23-27). Walker places Makdisi in a line of witness-writers (Dickens, Stowe, Douglass, Hugo), recalls American racism and apartheid from her own parents’ experience, and retells colonisation as a parable of strangers who have “drawn maps that have your “territory” on it like a large pie, and they are busy dividing up slices of it. You, sitting by your fire, your little ones clamoring for a bedtime story or another mango, date, olive, or fig, are not on the map at all.” (PDF p.25) She anticipates the American reader’s realisation of paying, in taxes, “over a trillion dollars since 1948” for the suffering described — a figure given in the Foreword as an imagined realisation, with no source on the page (PDF p.27) — and the reactions continue: “Well, there’s nothing I can do!”, the matter being too tangled, too insane, too entrenched and too threatening to the reader’s sense of who they are and who “they” are, to which Walker replies “And you are right.” before turning to collective contemplation (PDF p.27). She grounds the turn in a claim about human nature — belief in human beings as “children of this paradise, otherwise known as Earth” who do, in fact, belong here: “We are designed, I believe, us human beings, to instinctively wish to protect and cherish each other. We must be taught—those who are not born sociopathic—how to be stonily unmerciful.” — and concludes that bearing witness to the truth can be done by anyone (PDF p.27).

Author’s Note (PDF p.29-33, signed “—S. M., November 2009”, PDF p.33). Makdisi recalls first seeing Palestine across the Dead Sea as a child, learning the name Filastin al-Muhtalla (Occupied Palestine) in a Beirut geography class, and, in the early 1990s in Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon with his brother Ussama, looking across the border: “But it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds after thinking to myself “So that’s Israel” that I startled myself with the observation “And that’s Palestine, too.”” (PDF p.30) A teacher of English literature (Wordsworth and Blake, language and politics), he stresses that word choices — “wall” or “fence”, “settlements” or “colonies”, “terrorism” or “collateral damage” — “both express and—more importantly—generate political effects” (PDF p.30-31). His position is mixed (Palestinian mother, Lebanese father, born in Washington, Christian family in a largely Muslim Beirut neighbourhood) and anti-nationalist: “What draws me to Palestine, then, is neither nationalism nor patriotism, but my sense of justice, my refusal to remain silent in the face of injustice” (PDF p.32). He records that the One-state solution, dismissed as utopian when the book first appeared in 2008, had within two years entered mainstream discourse as the two-state alternative broke down (PDF p.32-33).

Introduction (PDF p.39-53). The Introduction opens in early September 2006 with Sam Bahour of al-Bireh, ordered by Israel — through the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli administrative post in the Beit El settlement — to leave his wife Abeer, daughters Areen and Nadine, home and businesses, his family-unification application pending since 1994 because Israel retains complete control of the Population registry and family unification (PDF p.39-41). His 2006 visa was overwritten “LAST PERMIT”; other returnees and businessmen were denied re-entry in July 2006, and Amal al-Amleh, separated from her husband Muhammad and children after being denied re-entry at Allenby Bridge, stands for the hundreds affected: according to B’Tselem, 120,000 family-unification applications had been pending since 2000, and a study cited by the World Bank’s May 2007 report estimates 17 percent of West Bank families are affected (PDF p.41-43). A partial reversal at the end of December 2006 cancelled the “LAST PERMIT” stamp but left renewals capped at twenty-seven months and the registry in Israel’s sole hands (PDF p.42-43). Makdisi generalises: the occupation’s fabric is these silent bureaucratic encounters, under some 5,000 Israeli military orders (Amnesty International, PDF p.44); the World Bank concludes the closure system has broken the West Bank into three sections and ten enclaves, with seventy-eight comprehensive closure days in 2006 and two-thirds of Palestinians in absolute poverty by mid-2006 (PDF p.44-45). The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 is quoted (Article 27, PDF p.46) and its prohibitions listed against routine occupation practice; Israel’s claim that the Convention does not apply is noted as dismissed by the Security Council and the International Court of Justice (PDF p.46-47). Pressure to leave serves the “Demographic problem”: only half the residents of the land under Israeli control are Jewish, and “Israel does not want the people of the occupied territories, but it does want their land.” (PDF p.47) Separation policy under Arik Sharon and Ehud Olmert, Arnon Sofer’s expectation of “voluntary transfer”, the history of Transfer in 1948, the compulsory-transfer platforms of Moledet, the National Union (nine Knesset seats against Likud’s twelve, PDF p.49), Effie Eitam and Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu (PDF p.49-50), and the contrast between the Law of Return — “there is no Israeli nation separate from the Jewish people”, in the High Court’s early-1970s ruling (PDF p.51) — and the two legal systems in the territories, one civil for Jews and one military for Palestinians (PDF p.51), lead to the book’s thesis that the conflict “is about land” (PDF p.52), framed by Baruch Kimmerling’s two contradictory Zionist imperatives and Vladimir Jabotinsky’s “The Iron Wall” (1923), quoted at length: “Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population.” (PDF p.53) For Jabotinsky the iron wall was a metaphor; Israel, Makdisi writes, has built actual walls, and “This book explains how that happened” (PDF p.53).

Chapter 1, “Outsides” (PDF p.55-86, continuing beyond this part). The chapter opens with Mohammad Jalud of Izbat Jalud, south of Qalqilya: in September 2003 the wall reached the Qalqilya region, skirted Izbat Jalud and cut it off from its farmland to the west; his ten-minute walk became a journey of at least an hour through the Azun Atma gate (PDF p.55). The wall runs mostly inside the West Bank, not on the 1949 Armistice Line; almost 10 percent of the West Bank’s most fertile land falls in the “Seam zone”, which in October 2003 General Moshe Kaplinsky declared a closed military area — an order exempting anyone “eligible to emigrate to Israel in accordance with the Law of Return”, so that Mohammad could not reach his own land without a permit while Jews from anywhere could (PDF p.56-57). Up to a dozen kinds of permit, and the main hurdle of proving ownership, are set against traditional tenure, the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 and miri land, the Mandate-era registration effort that had registered only about a third of the land by 1967, Israel’s suspension of registration and its reinterpretation of miri reversion to declare “state land” (PDF p.57-58). B’Tselem is quoted that state lands are public property belonging to the West Bank’s lawful residents, administered by Israel exclusively for Jewish settlements; Peace Now’s November 2006 report found privately held Palestinian land accounted for some 40 percent of settlement land; settlements’ built-up area is 2 percent of the West Bank but their administrative control reaches some 42 percent (B’Tselem), and Israeli infrastructure takes almost 40 percent (UN-OCHA, July 2007) (PDF p.58-59). The Hague Convention, the Fourth Geneva Convention, Security Council Resolution 465 (1980) and the ICJ’s July 2004 Advisory Opinion are quoted or summarised to the same effect — none has changed how Israel administers the occupation (PDF p.59-60). The seam-zone permit regime in practice (PDF p.61-64): Eid Ahmed Yassin of al-Ras, whose family’s 110 dunums lie west of the wall and whose applications were returned overwritten with Hebrew handwriting asserting his property does not exist there; al-Ras’s figures (90 percent of its land west of the wall; 120 applications in February 2005, seven approved by April); rejection rates rising from almost 40 percent by mid-2005 to more than 80 percent by November 2007; and Mohammad Jalud’s gate-assignment trap of summer 2004 to September 2005, losing a year’s crops while miri land left uncultivated — “even if its cultivation is being actively and forcibly prevented” — reverts to state ownership on Israel’s reading (PDF p.64). A box, “Occupation by the Numbers” (PDF p.64-65), and subsection 2 (PDF p.65-71) widen the account: Mohammad Salim of Jayyus, Abdel-Latif Odeh of Daba’a, the death of Adel at the Azun Atma gate, education and health effects, the ICJ opinion quoted — “The Court is of the opinion that the construction of the wall and its associated régime impede the liberty of movement of the inhabitants of the Occupied Palestinian Territory” (PDF p.68) — Haggai Alon of the Ministry of Defense on “the spirit of the commander” being “stronger than any law or procedure” (PDF p.69-70), and John Dugard; the conclusion is that “the fracturing and division of Palestinian territory—which is the defining feature of the wall—is a long-standing feature of the Israeli occupation going back to 1967, rather than an innovation introduced with the wall itself” (PDF p.70). A box reproduces the UN-OCHA weekly briefing for 2–8 May 2007 (PDF p.71-73). Subsection 3 (PDF p.73-75) treats the two road networks — “sterile” bypass roads as virtual walls, routine olive-tree destruction, the Salfit–Ariel detour — opening: “The West Bank road network is one of the Israeli army’s most effective closure mechanisms. For Palestinians, roads have come to represent and embody paralysis rather than movement” (PDF p.73). Subsection 4 (PDF p.75-83) treats Palestinian roads, roadblocks, planned bridges and tunnels, car and transport permits (about $450 a year), and permit leverage by the GSS (General Security Service): “Since 1967, there is no one in the [occupied] territories who has requested a service or permit of some kind from the Military Government who did not receive an offer from the GSS [General Security Service, i.e., intelligence service] to act as a collaborator in return for his request being fulfilled”, in a Palestinian collaborator’s words quoted from B’Tselem (PDF p.80). Subsection 5 (PDF p.83-86, continuing) opens the checkpoint account: 561 fixed obstacles and 69 flying checkpoints in October 2007 (U.N. figures), through Laila Shqeirat of Sheikh Saad and access to work, medical care and shopping.

Chapter 1, “Outsides”, continued (PDF p.87-141, completing the chapter). Subsection 5 concludes with checkpoint testimony: Farid Subuh, detained with his family at Huwwara on a school-clothes trip and barred from returning home though he had crossed that morning; Abdallah Khamis, beaten by seven or nine soldiers at Huwwara after a three-hour wait and released about midnight; a B’Tselem list of checkpoint beatings from 2003 to May 2007; a World Health Organization investigation (2005) finding sixty-one Palestinian women gave birth at checkpoints between September 2000 and December 2004, thirty-six of the babies dying; and kidney patient Mohammad Kheiri, who died after soldiers drove off with his and his driver’s documents for about two hours and ordered the taxi back from Nablus. Israeli soldiers’ testimony follows: officers told one the checkpoint “has no security value and was meant to harass the population”; another describes the addictive feeling of power — “I am the Law! I am the Law here!” — and the text concludes the system reflects “a political logic that exists beyond them as individuals” (PDF p.98). A box reproduces the UN-OCHA checkpoint update for 28 March–3 April 2007 (Qalandiya, Ni’lin, Hizma, Al Ram, Al ‘Auja, Beit Iba, Gilo, Al Kasaba, Tel Rumeida) (PDF p.98-101). Subsection 6 (PDF p.101-102): by late 2006 the West Bank was broken into three or four large pieces plus East Jerusalem; the Jordan Valley ban of early 2005, which B’Tselem calls “the de facto annexation of the Jordan Valley”, the ditch system around Jericho, and the siege of Nablus (over 130,000 people, serving a further 350,000), with one day of total closure for every three of “normal” movement in 2006. Subsection 7 (PDF p.102-106): the “back-to-back” goods system (World Bank, 2004), its price effects (a Jericho–Hebron trip of just over an hour now taking five to six hours; a box of tomatoes jumping from 12 NIS to 40 or 50 NIS), the UNRWA study of Arroub Refugee Camp — the donkey-cart shuttle, the donkey shot in November 2002 for lacking a permit — and the World Bank’s findings that average incomes fell by more than a third after 2000 and that ‘closure’ was the crisis’s precipitator. A box, “Occupation by the Numbers” (PDF p.107-108), gives inter alia 528 fixed obstacles in January 2007 rising to 561 by October 2007, 180,000 Palestinians on a secret travel-ban list of whom none has been officially informed, and 3,412 of 46,166 licensed private cars permitted to circulate (July 2004). Subsection 8 (PDF p.108-110): Jerusalem — after 1967 Israel added almost 27 square miles of West Bank land (taken from twenty-eight Palestinian villages) to a city whose East Jerusalem had been a little over 2 square miles, boundaries drawn, in Meron Benvenisti’s words as former deputy mayor, to incorporate “a maximum of vacant space with a minimum of Arabs”; the village of Nu’man was annexed while its inhabitants were classified as West Bankers, in law “persons staying illegally in Jerusalem”; housing minister Ze’ev Boim’s dismissal of Condoleezza Rice over Har Homa after the November 2007 Annapolis summit is quoted. A box reproduces one week of the UN-OCHA briefing, 13–19 September 2006 (PDF p.111-113). Subsection 9 (PDF p.113-117): the wall hardens the 1967 lines; the Absentee Property Law is applied to Palestinians “absent” only because the wall stands between them and their Jerusalem land; only twelve gates pierce the 168 kilometres of wall around East Jerusalem, four theoretically available to West Bank residents; the July 2007 U.N. report finds a quarter of Jerusalem’s Palestinian population cut off from the city, the wall encircling Givat Ze’ev and Ma’ale Adumim while excluding Shu’fat Camp, Kafr Aqab and Samiramees (over 30,000); East Jerusalem unemployment approaches 20 percent and almost 300 shops have closed. Medical access collapses: al-Makassed’s emergency treatments fell from 33,000 in 2002 to 17,000 in 2005; the cases of Ahmad al-Mahahareh (Sheikh Saad) and of Mujahid al-Shati, a nine-year-old cancer patient whose Red Crescent ambulance crew was beaten at Anata, are told at length (PDF p.118-122). Jerusalem Palestinians in turn now need permits, proving their presence in the West Bank “essential”, to reach Ramallah — Amira Hass is quoted on the Shin Bet’s use of permits to enlist collaborators. Subsection 10 (PDF p.123-141) is the chapter’s history: the Allon Plan of July 1967 — “the Whole Land [of Israel] strategically, and a Jewish state demographically” — as the standing formula of land without people, complemented by Golda Meir’s 1969 denial (“they did not exist”); the integration-and-repression decades to 1987 (first settlement Kiryat Arba, 1968; more than half of Gaza’s workforce employed inside Israel; “moderate physical pressure” endorsed until the High Court’s 1999 ruling; 650,000 Palestinians held prisoner since 1967, per Addameer); the First Intifada (over 700 killed in three years, 20 percent children; almost 200 Israeli civilians killed by bombings by 2000) and the Palestine National Council’s November 1988 declaration (Israel rejected the offer and reiterated its refusal to negotiate with the PLO, and had to devise an alternative that neither granted citizenship — which would further compromise the state’s claim to Jewishness — nor allowed genuine independence, which would have meant relinquishing the territories it wanted to keep and was settling); the Oslo Accords as the Allon Plan repackaged — four principles, Areas A (under 18 percent), B (22 percent) and C (about 60 percent), the Palestinian Authority policing Palestinians on Israel’s behalf (“I prefer the Palestinians to cope with the problems of enforcing order”, Yitzhak Rabin, 1993), Israel retaining borders, airspace, water, the Population registry and family unification, taxation and a legislative veto, and the settler population doubling during the process; PA corruption (nearly half the 1997 budget lost, per an auditor; $900 million diverted by Arafat, per a 2003 IMF audit) and the elite’s loss of an autonomous language — language being virtually the only device left to a people lacking economic leverage, military power and diplomatic clout — against which Hamas rose in 2006 by rehabilitating the secularist language of national liberation; Camp David in 2000, where, on the negotiators’ published accounts, no written offer was made and what was discussed left Israel in control of the Jordan Valley, borders, airspace, water and the road network, with a “capital” in Abu Dis — Jimmy Carter is quoted that no Palestinian leader could have accepted and survived; the Second Intifada, sparked by Arik Sharon’s Haram al-Sharif visit and directed, in General Moshe Ya’alon’s words, at making Palestinians understand “that they are a defeated people”; the 2003 Road Map, whose premise Farsoun and Aruri state as blaming resistance rather than occupation; and Sharon’s unilateralism — the wall, the Gaza disengagement (twice as many settlers moved to the West Bank in 2005 as left Gaza) and Dov Weisglas’s boast that the policy supplies “the formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians” (PDF p.139). The chapter ends with the U.N.’s May 2007 map: what remains for Palestinians is “an area of habitation remarkably close to territory set aside for the Palestinian population in Israeli security proposals dating back to postwar 1967” (PDF p.141) — the occupation has “slowly and methodically accomplished precisely what it set out to do forty-one years ago”.

Chapter 2, “Insides” (PDF p.143-151, continuing beyond this part). PDF p.142 is a blank leaf. Subsection 1 (PDF p.143-146) opens at the East Jerusalem office of the Israeli Ministry of the Interior, serving the quarter of a million Palestinians with Jerusalem residency: the queue forming from midnight, policed by thugs selling places; Daoud Kuttab’s ten-hour wait with his daughter, the reformers’ list twice lost; forms printed only in Hebrew; years of bills, certificates and contracts demanded, any gap meaning rejection. The West Jerusalem branch nearby has no queues and clerks there to serve. Samira Aliyan, born and raised in Jerusalem, came to renew her Jordanian-citizen husband’s stay permit while their family-unification application was considered, and was told unification would be granted in fifteen days if she brought her residence records. Subsection 1 concludes (PDF p.146-147) with her return: the clerk took her identity card and told her, “You shouldn’t be here. You should go back to where you were. You have two weeks to sell your furniture and leave.” Subsection 2 opens (PDF p.147-151): she had fallen under the mid-1990s “Center of life” regulation — several years in Jordan, despite yearly returns, meant Jerusalem had not continuously been her center of life, so her residency was revoked; another branch of the same ministry was meanwhile granting instant citizenship under the Law of Return to Jews worldwide (about a million immigrants from Moldova and Russia through the 1990s). Revocation is one component of the strategy John Dugard calls “de-Palestinization”: suspended in 2000 after outcry, then quietly reintroduced; 1,363 residencies stripped in 2006 alone, 8,269 between 1967 and 2006, revocation typically discovered only at a routine procedure. No Jewish Israeli has been asked to prove a center of life: “this right is inherent in being a Jew”, in David Ben-Gurion’s words presenting the Law of Return in 1950 (PDF p.149). A box, “Segregation by the Numbers” (PDF p.150-151), gives inter alia poverty at 48 percent for Palestinians in Israel against 15 percent for Jews, 4 of 429 priority-development localities Palestinian, and infant mortality of 8.4 against 3.6 per thousand. The subsection’s framing argument — that classification as Jerusalem resident, West Banker, Gazan or citizen decides a Palestinian’s inner and family life, on the single distinction between being Jewish and not — continues beyond this part.

Chapter 2, “Insides”, subsection 2 continued (PDF p.152-156). Planning in Jerusalem is structured by the Jew / non-Jew difference: Israel Kimchi, the municipality’s director of planning policy, in 1977 called the demographic question “A cornerstone in the planning of Jerusalem”, and Amir Cheshin, former advisor on Arab affairs to the mayor, explains that the planning and building laws rest on placing obstacles in the way of the Arab sector to preserve the ratio of 72 percent Jews against 28 percent non-Jews; the 1978 Master Plan proposed promoting Jewish growth while squeezing non-Jewish growth, and Teddy Kollek, then mayor, says the plan holds that “it is necessary to make life difficult for the Arabs, not to allow them to build”. Jerusalem is a microcosm of the West Bank, its Jewish areas dispersed so they cannot be detached, in Meron Benvenisti’s words. A box reproduces the UN-OCHA weekly briefing headed 2–8 May 2007 with eviction and demolition orders at Beit Furik, Beit Sahur, Jinsafut, Al Lubban ash-Sharqiya, Al Hadidiya and Al ‘Aqaba (PDF p.153-154). Five waves of expropriation took about a third of the annexed area for exclusively Jewish settlement; Palestinians, a third of the city’s population, have access to less than 10 percent of its land, and 90 percent of the annexed territory is off-limits to their development (PDF p.154). The comprehensive plan for the Palestinian areas promised in 1974 had still not appeared thirty years later; neighbourhood plans took decades (Arab el-Swahrah from 1979, unfinished after twenty years; Beit Safafa 1977-1990; Beit Hanina and Shu’afat from the early 1980s, their remaining permits to be issued, one planner estimates, over the next fifty to a hundred years) and systematically reduced Palestinian building potential, while Pisgat Ze’ev was built alongside (PDF p.155). The turn to building without permits follows: Daoud Abu Kaf of Ras al-Amud, refused permits from 1982, built two apartments in 1987, saw an agreed fine-and-partial-demolition settlement overturned when the Planning and Building Committee’s membership changed, and lost the building, over $100,000 and a fine; Yusuf Abu Hamad, owner of five plots, all refused, built in July 1994 and had the house destroyed the same day it neared completion, police saying no demolition permit was necessary. Over 150 Palestinian homes in Jerusalem were demolished in 2004 alone, and some 9,000 unpermitted homes stand subject to demolition (PDF p.156).

Chapter 2, “Insides”, continued: demolition (PDF p.157-162). Demolition in East Jerusalem is outpaced by the rest of the territories: half of the 5,000 Palestinian homes demolished between 2000 and 2004 were in Gaza, in frequent night operations, as testified by Mithqal Abu Taha (Rafah, a July night in 2001; his nephew Hussein, 13, struck in the neck by a fragment as he fled) and Jalal Abu Luz (spring 2001; his family of eight on the ruins, the Red Cross tent of Thursday 12 April, the children’s nightmares). Amnesty International’s 2004 report is quoted: the scale was unprecedented, the justifications “military/security needs” or lack of permits, and “Some of these acts of destruction amount to grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and are war crimes.” The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights has documented the destruction of 20 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land (PDF p.160). Jerusalem’s occupation was inaugurated in 1967 with the demolition of some 150 homes by the Western Wall, and in early 2005 the municipality announced plans to demolish up to a thousand homes in Silwan, city engineer Uri Shetrit wanting to restore the King’s Valley: “I remember walking there 20 years ago and there were gardens and running water. I want to return to that state.” A box, “Occupation by the Numbers” (PDF p.161), gives inter alia 305 East Jerusalem homes demolished in 2004-7 (958 made homeless), 668 punitive demolitions in 2000-2005 (in 79 percent the punished person was dead or in prison), 2,540 Gaza homes demolished in 2000-2004 (23,900 homeless) and 18,000 Palestinian homes demolished since 1967. Since 1967, 100,000 sponsored housing units have been built for Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem against 500 sponsored for Palestinians and 9,000 Palestinian permits — 9 percent of permits for a third of the population; in July 1993 a Jewish majority in East Jerusalem was announced (160,000 Jews, 155,000 Palestinians) (PDF p.162). Kollek, after leaving office, says the sewerage and water installed for East Jerusalem were installed against cholera the Jews feared catching, and Ehud Olmert admits the infrastructure gap; the municipality spends less than 10 percent of its budget on East Jerusalem, about six times as much per Jewish resident (PDF p.162). A box reproduces the UN-OCHA weekly briefing for 29 November–5 December 2006, a week of demolitions for building without permits from Adh Dhahiriya and Al Baqa’ to Qalqiliya and Al Khadr (PDF p.163-164).

Chapter 2, “Insides”, continued: birth, registration and family unification (PDF p.164-170). Separation begins at birth: a Jewish baby is automatically granted a birth certificate and identity number; a Jerusalem Palestinian baby with one West Bank parent receives only a “Notification of Live Birth”, a secondary application yields a certificate still without a number, and a tertiary application for the number may demand Center of life evidence no Jewish family is asked for, on pain of the whole family’s expulsion — B’Tselem and HaMoked are quoted that clerks do not tell parents the child lacks a number. Hala Odeh’s daughter, given no number, was refused re-entry at Allenby Bridge as a weeks-old baby and refused a Jordanian passport in Amman as a Jerusalem resident; three months of appeals followed before mother and baby returned to the city of their birth (PDF p.165-166). Family unification for East Jerusalem is, per B’Tselem, not processed or processed very slowly: until 1994 women’s applications were summarily denied on a claimed respect for Arab tradition which the text corrects; the backlog passed 7,000 by the end of 1997 and now exceeds 100,000; in early 1997 a further five-year wait was added after approval (PDF p.166). The 2003 law, renewed yearly and endorsed by the High Court in May 2006, prohibits residents of the territories married to Israeli citizens or Jerusalem residents from acquiring citizenship or residency — a similar South African law of 1980 was rejected by that country’s (white) supreme court — and affects up to 24,000 families; Eli Yishai, minister of the interior in 2002, defended it against a “creeping right of return”, the Population Administration claiming 140,000 had entered since 1993 (PDF p.166-167). Couples must live apart or break the law in either direction, and children registered in the West Bank need military permits at fourteen to stay with their parents in Jerusalem and must leave at eighteen: Amal Abu Jawila, sixteen; Yasser Abu Marir, whose wife has lived illegally in Beit Safafa since 2002 and, since her arrest that July, “almost never leaves home”; and a Ramallah family of fall 2004 — Gazan husband, Nazareth-citizen wife, Ramallah-born son — of whom only the son may legally live where they live. “Under such circumstances, all the normal markers of inside, home life—the relationships of family members to each other, the legality of their existence as a family, the security of their most intimate domestic spaces—are undone.” (PDF p.170)

Chapter 2, “Insides”, continued: the settlements turned inside out (PDF p.170-179). The annexed “vacant” spaces were filled with Jewish residents: dozens of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem now hold almost half a million people, distributed to maximise territorial claims. In Eyal Weizman and Rafi Segal’s phases: first, under Labor in 1967-1977, the Jordan Valley on Allon Plan principles — Thomas Leitersdorf, planner of Ma’ale Adumim, calls the strategy “capture ground”; second, from the mid-1970s, Gush Emunim and, after Menachem Begin’s Likud came to power in 1977, the mountain ridge under the Drobles Plan of 1978, which calls Palestinians a “minority” in their own majority territory and holds that, “Being bisected by Jewish settlements”, they “will find it hard to create unification and territorial contiguity” (PDF p.171-172). Planning deliberately maximises damage to Palestinian development (the 1980s Master Plan’s Road 60 “psychological wedge”), and restriction works by not planning: development remains under British 1940s regional plans, most of the West Bank zoned agricultural or nature reserve, village plans of the early 1990s drawn to force inward growth, and “not a single Palestinian village council has ever been defined as a special planning committee”, while every settlement has one (B’Tselem, PDF p.174-175). The settlements are units of surveillance: High Court justice Alfred Vitkon argues their presence “substantially contributes to the security in that area”, and Weizman and Segal show vision dictating design at every scale, from the 1984 Housing Ministry guideline’s rings around summits to bedrooms turned inward and living rooms to the view — the state “drafts” the civilian population “to inspect, control and subdue the Palestinian population” (PDF p.175-176). In return settlements are priority development areas with benefits from six ministries (grants averaging NIS 2,224 per resident in 2000 against NIS 1,336 inside Israel); twelve settlements inside Jerusalem’s expanded borders hold almost a quarter of a million people (PDF p.176-177). Har Homa, initiated in 1991 as Madrid convened, stands on Jabal Abu Ghneim, Bethlehem and Beit Sahour families’ land reserve, held as a Green Area for two decades and expropriated in 1991 under a British land law of 1943 for “public use” — a public from which its owners are excluded — for thousands of units housing up to 30,000 Jewish residents (PDF p.177-179).

Chapter 2, “Insides”, continued: settler domesticity and expulsion (PDF p.179-186). Settlers and their organisations market this ordinariness: Tehilla’s pitch for Har Homa (“a warm, affordable community right at Jerusalem’s doorstep”), RE/MAX listings for French Hill and Ramat Eshkol, a Brooklyn brochure for Emanuel, and Amana’s promotion of Eli as “located at the center of Israel” though Eli is a northern West Bank colony; the settlers’ mundanities, down to toilet habits, are mobilised as occupation policy. Tovah, a British settler at Eli, writes her family letter — 7 children, 15 grandchildren, a son in an elite army unit working “in and around the Arab towns and villages in the Shomron”, anti-stone windows, a bullet-proof vehicle accepted for a delivery near Jenin — without registering the collapse of the personal into the political (PDF p.180-183). The 5 June 1974 Elon Moreh convoy carried a seesaw and playground slide with its tents and religious library; Shimon Peres, defense minister, “identified with goals of the group’s members” — “This is a government of settlement,” “but it has an earlier and a later” — and Labor itself, under Rabin and Peres, built Ma’ale Adumim; Moshe Dayan declared Judea and Samaria the visa, and Gershom Gorenberg’s history is quoted: one people’s home was premised on the negation of another’s (PDF p.183-184). Gush Emunim regards Arab residence itself as theft: Rabbi Yisrael Ariel (1980), via Nur Masalha, reads the commandment to settle as expulsion of the non-Jew from Eretz-Yisrael; the secular mainstream is close by — Tzvi Shiloah in Davar (“The only solution is to organize their emigration”), Eliezer Livneh in Ma’ariv, and Dr. Dov Yosefi (“the transfer of the Arab population of the Land of Israel to Arab states”) — and Deputy Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1989 regretted that the Tiananmen distraction had not been used for “large scale” expulsions; Transfer parties, above all Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, declare it still (PDF p.185-186).

Chapter 2, “Insides”, continued: South Hebron and Hebron (PDF p.186-196). The double process is played out daily at Jinba and Twaneh, herder communities south of Hebron facing total expulsion: army bulldozers destroyed tents, blocked caves and filled wells in 1999 and 2000, court cases suspended the army, and armed settlers keep up the pressure under the dual legal system — B’Tselem: investigations are prolonged, end without action, or draw “extremely light sentences”. Ta’ayush brings aid against settler violence; David Shulman’s Dark Hope is quoted at length on a barley-sowing attack (“I am a Jew. That’s why I am here.”) and on “pure, rarefied, unadulterated, unreasoning, uncontainable human evil” sustained by official Israel (PDF p.187-189). On 29 October 2007 the army eliminated one cave-dwelling community of 1948 refugees from Beit Jibrin, depositing its water containers “beyond the Barrier” and leaving most residents homeless in Idhna (B’Tselem, PDF p.189). In Hebron — 130,000 Palestinians, some 500 settlers, 10 soldiers per settler — a circulated video shows a Tel Rumeida mother inside the wire cage her family built over its doorway, stoned by settler boys while soldiers fail to stop them, and a settler woman moaning “Shaghmouta” through the wire; a British crew is told “We killed Jesus, and we’re proud of it”; Gideon Levy writes that not an hour passes in Tel Rumeida without stones, garbage and feces thrown at barricaded neighbours (PDF p.190-191). The abuse aims to loosen the Palestinian grip: Najah D’ana’s hundred olive trees cut in 2002 and three to four dunums seized by Kiryat Arba settlers; Maryam al-Natsheh’s home invaded, her son Falah beaten unconscious and Ahmad, eight, stabbed; Fadel al-Samuh’s night attack by over 150 settlers at Beit Hadassah, his water tanks smashed; and Tareq al-Shartabi’s house occupied by Avraham Avinu settlers, its contents destroyed, the family unable to return — “and the settlers are there to this day” (PDF p.192-196). A box, “Occupation by the Numbers” (PDF p.196), gives inter alia 5,666 army raids in 2006 against 1,878 in 2005, 10,000 prisoners in mid-2007, detention without charge of 15 days for a settler against 180 for a Palestinian, and childhood ending at 18 under the civil law applied to settlers against 12 under the military law applied to Palestinians.

Chapter 2, “Insides”, concluded: inside Israel (PDF p.196-206). The dual structure is the extension of Israel’s own frameworks: what happens in the territories extends what happens inside Israel. Against the American shared-values account (Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times disputing Walt and Mearsheimer; Victor Davis Hanson in the National Review), Makdisi sets the juridical distinction between “nationality” and “citizenship”: Israel is the state of the Jewish people, not of its citizens, so Jewish noncitizens hold rights denied to Palestinian citizens; Israel recognises 140 “nationalities” but, as the High Court ruled in 1972, “there is no such thing as an Israeli nation separate from the Jewish people”; discrimination runs on nationality, letting Israel claim equal citizenship (PDF p.197-199). The “national” organisations — the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund, mandated to benefit Jewish nationals only — are quoted through the U.N. committees that found JNF policy institutionalised discrimination (1998) and a violation of the racial-discrimination convention (2007), and through the JNF’s own 2004 defence: it “is not a public body which acts on behalf of all the citizens of the state. Its loyalty is to the Jewish people and its responsibility is to it [i.e., the Jewish people] alone” — equality retreats before Jewishness (PDF p.199-201). Palestinian citizens are barred from JNF and Jewish Agency land and from Jewish community and rural settlements whose councils control some 80 percent of the land; the 2000 Qa’adan ruling on Katzir was limited to that case and took four more years to yield a plot; Jews owned about 7 percent of Palestine before 1948, against 93 percent now state land, of which the JNF owns about 13 percent, mostly confiscated refugee property transferred in 1949-1953 and administered, through the Israel Land Administration it half-controls, by its own criteria; in July 2007 the Knesset passed, 64 to 16, the first reading of Uri Ariel’s bill to lease JNF land only to Jews, such leasing “will not be seen as improper discrimination” (PDF p.200-201). More than twenty Basic Laws and other legislation discriminate, the Law of Return first; a quarter of Palestinian citizens still suffer their 1948 internal displacement, and about 10 percent live in dozens of Unrecognized villages with no grid, water, schools or permits, all subject to demolition (PDF p.202). Inequalities among Jews follow: no civil marriage, the Orthodox rabbinate’s monopoly over marriage, divorce and (until July 2003) conversion, the agunot and mamzerim, and the “Who is a Jew?” minefield — yet the ultimate, structuring distinction remains Jew against non-Jew (PDF p.202-204). A box, “Segregation by the Numbers” (PDF p.204-206), gives the education figures: 25 of 1,600 child-care centres in Palestinian towns, $428investedperJewishstudentaged5-15against$128 per Palestinian, 4 of 553 highest-priority education communities Palestinian, 25 art schools for Jewish students against 0, university rejection at 16 percent for Jewish applicants against 45 percent, and one Palestinian woman university lecturer in Israel. Chapter 2 ends at PDF p.206; PDF p.207 is a blank leaf.

Chapter 3, “Outside In”, subsection 1 (PDF p.208-212, continuing beyond this part). PDF p.207 is blank. The chapter opens with Dr. Mona el-Farra of Gaza, due to lecture in Ireland on the situation of women: in January 2007 Rafah, shut continually since June 2006, never opened in its scheduled week — some two hundred patients waited in the cold and rain for urgent care in Egypt — and her London engagement passed. On 24-25 February 2007, as printed, with a Trócaire invitation and HaMoked’s promised help, her Erez permit first failed, then the Irish embassy’s intervention cleared the way at 7:30 in the evening after soldiers had told her, through the Palestinian officials, “You cannot cross today, come back tomorrow”; through the cement tube, past the families returning from visiting prisoners, an officer declared her permit expired, and only further negotiations let her and her fifteen-year-old daughter — seeing anything beyond sealed-off Gaza for the first time — into Israel, where at Allenby Bridge the next morning the one-day permit was again declared expired and again, after embassy calls, stamped (PDF p.208-211). Her flashback is to a Swedish volunteer at Al Awda Hospital in 1999: “Every human being is a VIP.” For most Gazans her experience minus the embassy is the norm: since the 2005 redeployment Israel still controls Gaza’s land, sea and air access, its imports, exports, fishing, fuel and electricity, refuses West Bank–Gaza links despite the unimplemented November 2005 movement agreement, and alone, through the Population registry and family unification, determines who is a Gazan; Meron Benvenisti calls the redeployment “the confinement of one and a half million persons in a huge holding pen.” “Gaza is, in short, a world turned outside in” — and the prototype of the enclosure now applied in the West Bank: Henry Siegman writes that Gaza “was intended to serve as the first in a series of Palestinian Bantustans”, and the World Food Programme’s Kirstie Campbell (March 2007) calls the Palestinian economy an “‘island’ economy” (PDF p.211-212). A box, “Occupation by the Numbers”, begins (PDF p.212) with Palestinians working in Israel or settlements falling from 180,000 in 1987 to 68,000 in 2007 and West Bank unemployment rising from 9.6 in 1999 to 18.6 in 2006.

Chapter 3, “Outside In”, continued: the box concluded, and Rafah in reverse (PDF p.213-215). The box concludes (PDF p.213): Gaza unemployment 34.8 in 2006, private-sector unemployment 85 in 2007, 80 percent of Gazans in poverty in 2006, 80 percent dependent on food aid in 2007, and a 30 percent increase in chronic disease in the occupied territories in 2005-7. Subsection 2 turns to Laila el-Haddad, trying months earlier to enter Gaza from Egypt with her parents and two-year-old son Yousuf: Rafah closed, thousands waiting — patients, businessmen, students, labourers — “packed together elbow to elbow like cattle, penned in between steel barriers”; seven Palestinians died of exposure and deprivation at Rafah in July 2006, and in March 2007 a sixty-one-year-old heart patient died in a surge when 5,000 had piled up. Egyptian guards ordered everyone out of the terminal on Israeli orders; a guard told her: “no one gives a damn what happens to you—you could sit here and suffocate for all they care. You are simply not human enough for them to care.” Inside, “It was nothing short of an internment camp”; hundreds slept at the crossing itself, and the next day, after five more hours and spreading rumours, a man pushing his bags through the crowd answered an Egyptian officer’s challenge with bitter irony: “To Jerusalem! Where do you think?”

Chapter 3, “Outside In”, continued: Gaza City and its people (PDF p.215-216). Subsection 3: Gaza City, population nearing half a million, is the largest Palestinian city, Canaanite-founded some five thousand years ago, a merchants’ city at the crossroads of Asia and Africa. Some 80,000 lived in Gaza and its coastal area by 1948; the population almost tripled in April and May 1948 with refugees mostly from Jaffa and villages south of it, who remained after Israel refused their return, under Egyptian control. Almost 1.5 million now live in the Strip, three-quarters of them 1948 refugees and descendants, in less than 7 by 35 miles — almost 80,000 in the Beach Refugee Camp in less than 1 square kilometre, against about 25,000 per square kilometre in Manhattan — with 80 percent under fifty and half under fifteen.

Chapter 3, “Outside In”, continued: integration, then closure (PDF p.216-219). Subsection 4: by the 1980s Gaza’s economy was completely integrated into and dependent on Israel’s, well over half its workforce employed inside Israel as a low-wage resource — Palestinian labour built the settlements swallowing Palestinian land. Fewer than 9,000 Gaza settlers (against almost 500,000 in the West Bank and East Jerusalem) occupied about 15 percent of Gaza, used a disproportionate share of its water, and with settler roads, “security zones” and checkpoints over a third of the territory was reserved for the 1 percent of Gaza’s population that was Jewish. After the First Intifada, with around a million Soviet immigrants and global migrant labour reducing Israel’s need for Palestinian labour, closure orders from 1991 were made permanent by early 1993 and institutionalised in the Oslo Accords: individual permits to leave Gaza, no night work or overnight stays, employer approvals — Gazans working in Israel fell from 80,000 to some 17,000 by summer 1993, Gaza’s GDP fell by a third to a half, and UNRWA food assistance rose from fewer than 8,000 families in the 1980s to 120,000 by the mid-1990s; 342 days of total closure were imposed between 1993 and 1996. A box reproduces the UN-OCHA Gaza update for 18 April–1 May 2007: Rafah open 4 days (3,934 in, 4,293 out), Karni open 11 scheduled days (3,140 truckloads in, 619 out, 72% of scheduled hours), Sufa 4 days, Kerem Shalom 1 day, Erez closed over 13 months for workers (PDF p.218-219).

Chapter 3, “Outside In”, continued: redeployment, crossings and the Agreement on Movement and Access (PDF p.219-223). Subsection 5: the 2005 redeployment was supposed to improve matters, and the official 2004 disengagement plan stated that with it “there will be no basis for the claim that the Gaza Strip is occupied territory”; John Dugard answers: “Gaza is a prison and Israel seems to have thrown away the key,” and, following the August 2005 withdrawal, Gaza became “a sealed off, imprisoned and occupied territory.” All six crossings, including Rafah on the Egyptian border, are ultimately controlled by Israel; Erez, closed 135 days from September 2005 to April 2006, allows at best 3,000 to 4,000 workers (down from 25,000 before 2000), each over thirty-four, married, with a named employer, papers routed through employer, Labor Office, Permits Office and Shin Bet to the Palestinian Ministry of Labor, queuing from midnight, admitted four at a time, often forced to strip to their underwear and subjected to recruitment extortion. Rafah was hermetically sealed for sixty-five days from September to November 2005, marooning thousands in an 8,600-square-foot hall, blocking medical travellers and thousands of students — Gaza students in West Bank universities have dropped to virtually zero. The U.S.-brokered Agreement on Movement and Access of mid-November 2005 institutionalised Israeli control (Egyptians monitoring Palestinians, Europeans monitoring Egyptians and Palestinians, Israeli surveillance monitoring all, Israel entitled to block individual passengers, all other goods and people through Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom) and was then abrogated: James Wolfensohn told Ha’aretz that “powerful forces in the US administration” under Elliot Abrams worked behind his back, and “Every aspect of that agreement was abrogated,” Karni was closed 80 percent of the time in January 2006; the AMA’s 400 export truckloads a day became a 2006 average of 12; only 4 percent of the 2005-6 harvest was exported (over 100 tons of produce given away or destroyed); 90 U.N. humanitarian containers were stuck at Ashdod in January 2006; medical supplies were already short before the summer assault, and the West Bank–Gaza convoys due from 15 December 2006, as printed, never took place. Restrictions damage family life — 40,000 arrested during the Second Intifada, about 10,000 still held, generally off-limits to family visits — and the post-2006 sanctions after Hamas defeated Fateh left PA employees, who provide about two-thirds of Gaza health care, unpaid for months; by November 2007, 85 essential medications were depleted and at most a three-month supply remained of another 138, 3,000 hearing-aid batteries for the Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children were held up, and Nasser Hospital had closed half its intensive care unit.

Chapter 3, “Outside In”, continued: dying patients, fishing, hunger (PDF p.223-228). At Nasser Hospital Dr. Bushra Lubbed watched a seven-month-old die for want of a pediatric dialysis machine — “I sat in front of the patient and I could do nothing for her” — a ten-year-old with a suspected brain tumour died after an approved West Bank transfer was delayed (there is no MRI machine in Gaza), and twenty-one-year-old Mahmoud Abu Taha died a few hours after finally crossing to Israel, ten days after his first ambulance was turned back at Erez and his accompanying father arrested. Fishing, restricted to three miles and banned altogether since June 2006, has put 35,000 out of work (B’Tselem); fishermen who go out anyway have been fired on and forced at gunpoint to strip, swim to patrol boats — floats dangled and yanked away — and held in Ashdod up to forty-eight hours before being dropped back off Gaza in their underwear, as Ismail Basleh testifies; the navy calls interdiction a security measure against smuggling. By summer 2007, 85 percent of Gaza’s private-sector workforce was out of work or unpaid (20,000 farm jobs lost since 2005; 35,000 textile workers affected, exports at 15 percent of capacity); by March 2007 UNRWA and the World Food Programme fed 80 percent of the population; more than half of families eat one meager meal a day, over 22 percent of children under five suffer malnutrition and 16 percent anemia (Palestinian Centre for Human Rights). Dugard calls it a humanitarian crisis “carefully managed by Israel, which punishes the people of Gaza without ringing alarm bells in the West,” a “controlled strangulation”; Weisglas states the strategy: “The idea” “is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not make them die of hunger.” A box reproduces the UN-OCHA Humanitarian Update for 20–27 June 2007: Rafah closed 17 days, Karni 16, Erez for traders 14; Kerem Shalom’s maximum 25 trucks a day against 175 required daily; only 21% of daily consumption needs met by imports; flour for 9 days, sugar 3, rice 15, oil 14, beans 51; WFP feeding 275,000, UNRWA 860,000; 81 Essential Drugs List items out of stock; flour prices up 34 percent.

Chapter 3, “Outside In”, continued: territorial cells, bombardment, sonic booms, DIME and the power plant (PDF p.228-233). Subsection 6: Gaza is where Israel perfected isolating communities into “territorial cells” whose food, resources, medicines and supplies pass through Israeli checkpoints and can be cut off at will, each cell subject to further “treatment” (Alex Fishman, Yediot Aharonot, early 2001). Between September 2005 and June 2006 Israeli artillery fired more than 6,000 shells into northern Gaza — regulations permit firing up to 300 feet from homes though fragments are lethal at twice that — and on 9 June 2006 shelling of a Gaza beach killed all but one of a picnicking family, ten-year-old Huda Ghalia surviving; Amnesty found the army’s internal inquiries “fail to meet even the most basic requirements of an independent and impartial investigation.” Mock air raids followed the redeployment: jets breaking the sound barrier at night, which Dr. Eyad el-Sarraj of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme describes from 23 September 2005 — “Gaza is in a state of panic, children are restless, crying, frightened and many are wetting their beds”; B’Tselem by July 2006 reported three or four booms a night, their “sole purpose” to prevent sleep and create fear, with a 30- to 40-percent increase in miscarriages in Palestinian medical reports, in breach of the principle of distinction. Operations Summer Rains and Autumn Clouds killed over 400 Palestinians, half civilians and one in four a child (3 Israeli soldiers and 2 civilians killed by Palestinian fire in the same period); doctors reported unprecedented amputations, bodies that seemed to have “melted” and organs crushed or burnt without exterior wounds, and reports following an Italian investigation attributed the injuries to dense inert metal explosive (DIME) — a carbon-fiber casing with tungsten powder focusing blast in a tight radius. On 28 June 2006 the air force destroyed Gaza’s only power plant, which generated almost half its electricity; B’Tselem’s investigation concludes the plant “was a purely civilian” object, the attack did not impede rocket fire, and “Whatever the case, it was forbidden and was a war crime”; half of Gaza went without electricity through summer and into fall 2006, diarrhoea cases rose 163 percent, and the transformers were ultimately replaced by the Arab League and Sweden.

Chapter 3, “Outside In”, continued: Beit Hanoun, Nablus, home invasions, Jenin (PDF p.233-242). Operation Autumn Clouds culminated at Beit Hanoun in November 2006: hundreds of boys and men detained, 40,000 confined to their homes, some 300 homes, an almost thousand-year-old mosque, public buildings and networks destroyed, 82 Palestinians killed (half civilians, 21 children) and over 260 injured; the artillery bombardment of the al-Athamah family home killed 19 civilians, 16 from one family, with up to fifteen shells over half an hour — Israel claimed a “technical failure”, refused a Human Rights Council mission led by Desmond Tutu and an international investigation, and the United States vetoed the Security Council resolution backing one; Dugard called the attack “grossly disproportionate and indiscriminate and resulted in the commission of multiple war crimes” in a “culture of impunity”. Subsection 7 turns to Nablus, recalled from the 2002 offensive and still besieged: medic Lutfi — “Every night, until now,” “they come into the city” through doors and holes blown through walls; a soldier explains the logic: “peace and quiet is not necessarily good, and if there isn’t mayhem, we’ll create it. To demonstrate power, to demonstrate that we are everywhere.” Testimony follows of a January 2002 Golani raid leaving evacuated families standing eight hours in a cold street, refused toilets even after the suspect surrendered; of a 5 April 2002 building occupation (seventeen people held in one room, a pregnant woman refused the bathroom unless accompanied, a father denied stroke medication) used as fire base and detention centre; and of human shields — “The neighbor goes in first. If somebody is planning something, he is the one who gets it” — Anan Abu Dahar beaten, strangled and used as a rifle rest, the practice admittedly ended only in May 2002 under human-rights pressure with B’Tselem reporting continuing evidence. Routine invasions follow the same logic: “Every day,” a six-man unit crosses roofs into a house chosen on the map — “Jaysh, jaysh, iftah al bab” — whose soldier imagines the reverse at his own family home and concludes: “There is no justification for this, it definitely should not be happening.” Jenin closes the sequence (PDF p.240-242): between 19 and 28 April 2002 at least 140 buildings were completely destroyed and over 200 more rendered uninhabitable or unsafe, 4,000 people — more than a quarter of the camp — made homeless (Human Rights Watch); Red Cross access was blocked for nearly eleven days; Amnesty concludes the acts “amount to grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and are war crimes” and meet the definition of crimes against humanity; the U.N. investigation team was refused access and disbanded. Bulldozer operator Moshe Nissim: “For three days, I just destroyed and destroyed, the whole area”; “I got a real kick out of every house that was demolished, because I knew that dying means nothing to them, while the loss of their house means more to them”; and Fathiya Suleiman’s deaf, paraplegic son Jamal, 38, was brought down inside his house after soldiers refused to wait one minute for the women to carry him out.

Chapter 3, “Outside In”, continued: Nablus old city, ambulances, curfews (PDF p.242-253). Nablus took even more of the brunt in 2002 — around 600 killed, more than anywhere else in the West Bank — with a tank-wide avenue of obliteration carved through the old souks and soap-factory neighbourhood; a ten-day, twenty-four-hour curfew under which anyone venturing out could be fired on; a Ras al-Ain house whose father and eight children were dug out dead after a week, the grandfather and wife alive (Ala’a Abu Dheer); hospitals receiving no wounded for a week; and B’Tselem’s conclusion: “The IDF completely blocked the movement of ambulances in the West Bank during Operation Defensive Shield,” wounded bleeding to death, hospitals shelled, and a soldier’s report of orders “to fire heavy machine guns at ambulances that ignored the inspection point”. Pharmacist Tahani Fattouh’s premature baby died for want of an incubator two kilometres away after the ambulance was turned back and fired on. Raids continued almost daily thereafter: 436 in the Nablus governorate in the first half of 2007, detaining over 600 (UN-OCHA); curfew totalled 4,808 hours from summer 2002 to fall 2004 — 200 days — with 1,300 of about 1,350 hours from mid-June to mid-August 2002 under curfew. Residents Jihad Muhalad and Ghazi Bani Odeh describe children kept indoors, work lost, family life turned to “hell”; a soldier describes the curfew routine’s most-used word — “No” — and human rights organisations hold that curfew, which international law allows only for short-term civilian protection, is routinely used as collective punishment. Curfews are often unannounced even to the soldiers imposing them, lifted verbally and only as the break begins (Majdi Alawna, Palestinian DCO, Jenin), and suddenly reinstated; enforcement testimony covers confiscated ID cards, keys given “if we remembered” to checkpoint 300, cars impounded in a house-post’s backyard, walkers cuffed and blindfolded on a staircase for two to seven hours, a barefoot child dragged through sewer water, the summer 2002 Jenin market shelling that killed four Palestinians, three of them children — Sojad al-Turki dead on arrival, her brother Na’il wounded — which the army said was fired in error, and fire-department electrician Ahmad al-Qurini shot in the head while his crewmate Ahmad Sma’aneh watched, after being motioned forward, leaving seven children orphaned. Hundreds have been killed and thousands injured under such circumstances since 2000; the army’s regulations permit live ammunition “to enforce the curfew” even against civilians not endangering soldiers, which B’Tselem and other organisations hold flagrantly violates international humanitarian law.

Chapter 3, “Outside In”, continued: Bethlehem (PDF p.253-255). Subsection 8 frames the asymmetry: Palestinian factions can kill and injure Israeli civilians, but such attacks pose no mortal threat to Israel, while Israel can devastate whole communities, shut down the economy and punish a whole community with total impunity — and what was true for Gaza is true for the West Bank pockets. Bethlehem has been turned outside in: a U.N. report counts nine settlements, a stretch of the Barrier, Israeli-only roads and “Approximately 78 physical obstacles” around urban Bethlehem, cutting the centuries-old Jerusalem lifeline, the ancestral olive groves of Beit Jala, Beit Sahour and Bethlehem, and all open green space; 156 days of 24-hour curfew were imposed in 2002, 10 percent of Bethlehem’s Christian population has emigrated in a few years, only 10 percent of the eighty businesses around Rachel’s Tomb in 2002 survive, and monthly tourists have plunged from almost 100,000 before 2000 to barely 7,000: “Bethlehem has become an isolated town, with boarded-up shops and abandoned development projects.” A box, “Occupation by the Numbers” (PDF p.255-256), gives inter alia 854 Palestinian children killed in 2000–2007, 93 percent of Palestinian children living in fear (2003 USAID study), 580 schools closed in 2002 affecting 226,000 children, 180 assaults on schools in 2003–5 killing 181 students and teachers, 400,000 university-age Gazans against 70,000 capacity, and Gaza students at Birzeit falling from 350 in 2000 to 15 in 2007, none with permits.

Chapter 3, “Outside In”, concluded: Qalqilya, the seam zone, education (PDF p.257-266). Subsection 9: the wall as the “Gazafication” of whole cities, visible at Qalqilya — a thriving town of about 60,000 serving another 40,000 to 50,000, a market and agricultural centre at the 1949 Armistice Line — now a walled peninsula: about 6,000 acres of farmland absorbed north of the city, twenty or so towns separated from their land, six or seven wedged between wall and Green Line, the souk listless, the farm road buried under earth mounds, gates, razor wire, patrol roads and an electric fence under a fortified tower, a hundred-yard devastated swath inside the wall with the miri expropriation clock ticking, and western concrete slabs 24 feet high — twice the Berlin Wall — with Tel Aviv’s towers 10 to 15 miles away and Kafr Saba’s houses, emptied by the Haganah’s Alexandroni Brigade on 13 May 1948, visible beyond. Habla and Ras Atiya are reached by a tunnel under the wall and the Alfe Menashe bypass road, in a trench 15 feet deep; Daba’a, plowed through by that road, has its mosque and main school across the wall, and its land toward Ras Atiya is designated for Alfe Menashe’s expansion. In the Seam zone, tens of thousands must apply for a “permanent resident permit” to go on living at home — dozens had not received one by November 2007, and granted permits can be cancelled at any time; almost half of seam-zone communities reported households leaving, over half reported household heads leaving for work (UN-OCHA, November 2007), with 30 villages already cut off from medical care, rising to over 70 on completion. Colonel Shaul Arieli states the purpose: “The objective is for them to not have access to the State of Israel, for demographic reasons,” so that residents “will abandon their homes and go to the big cities, at which point it will be possible to expand the borders of the State of Israel without paying the demographic price. It would be voluntary transfer.” Subsection 10 closes the chapter with education: before Israel declared Gaza an “enemy entity” in September 2007, Gaza’s 400,000 schoolchildren were missing one textbook in three, came to school “hungry and unable to concentrate” (John Ging, UNRWA), and UNRWA reported failure rates up to 80 percent in some subjects — a generation growing up stunted physically, emotionally and academically, while 400,000 university-age Gazans face 70,000 places and Gaza students in West Bank universities fell from 350 in 2000 to 15 in 2007, all there in violation of the permit system; West Bank students cross checkpoints daily (Ahmed Malhi’s three checkpoints to school in East Jerusalem; Omar Musallam in Jenin, an hour from Ramallah, whose family is “like they are living in another country”), and discrimination inside Israel repeats the “Segregation by the Numbers” disparities — 25 of 1,600 day-care centres in Palestinian towns, 10 percent of university students, 3 percent of Ph.D. students, 1 percent of lecturers Palestinian. Education, virtually the only way to transcend the limits imposed on inside and outside lives — Wordsworth’s old man who “does not move with pain, but moves / With thought” — “is gradually being blockaded, narrowed, and closed.” Chapter 3 ends at PDF p.266; PDF p.267 is a blank leaf.

Chapter 4, “Inside Out”, subsection 1 (PDF p.268-270, continuing beyond this part). The chapter opens at the Qurtuba Elementary School in Tel Rumeida, Hebron: Palestinian schoolgirls with their mothers, teachers and international volunteers cross a rocky hillside from the school, are obstructed and verbally abused by Jewish settler girls picnicking on a Jewish holiday, and then pelted with stones by settler boys — some five or six years old, watched by settler adults who do not intervene — as they descend narrow, slippery stairs with no banister and an open drop, the school’s main entrance having been sealed with razor wire by the army in 2002. The soldiers present are under orders to protect the Jewish girls and are not allowed physically to restrain them, while barking “Yalla, imshi!” at the Palestinians. At least three international organisations escort the children, including the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH) and the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI); escorts cannot physically protect them, and have themselves been attacked — Duduzile Masango smother-attempted with a towel in June 2006, three EAPPI workers stoned in April 2006 (the Swiss lawyer needing seven stitches), and Swedish TIPH worker Tove Johansson’s cheekbone shattered by a bottle in November 2006 while soldiers stood by, settlers cheering, and police threatening to arrest the internationals. Hebron, the only Palestinian city besides East Jerusalem with an active settler presence, concentrates the West Bank’s inside/outside features intimately: a 1997 agreement divided it into H1 (about 7 square miles, over 100,000 Palestinians, the equivalent of Area A) and H2 (just over 1.5 square miles, the equivalent of Areas B and C), contrary to Oslo’s stipulation that Palestinian cities be Area A; the account continues beyond this part.

Key passages

• “it is an ‘occupation by bureaucracy’: it works primarily through application forms, title deeds, residency papers and other permits.” (Slavoj Zizek, The Guardian, quoted in the praise pages, PDF p.4)
• “Makdisi shows that the so-called peace process has in fact accelerated the dispossession of the Palestinian people.” (Rashid Khalidi, quoted in the praise pages, PDF p.4)
• “drawn maps that have your “territory” on it like a large pie, and they are busy dividing up slices of it. You, sitting by your fire, your little ones clamoring for a bedtime story or another mango, date, olive, or fig, are not on the map at all.” (Alice Walker, Foreword, PDF p.25)
• “But it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds after thinking to myself “So that’s Israel” that I startled myself with the observation “And that’s Palestine, too.”” (Author’s Note, PDF p.30)
• “What draws me to Palestine, then, is neither nationalism nor patriotism, but my sense of justice, my refusal to remain silent in the face of injustice” (Author’s Note, PDF p.32)
• “Israel does not want the people of the occupied territories, but it does want their land.” (Introduction, PDF p.47)
• “At heart, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is actually very simple. It is not about religion. It is not about security. It is not about terrorism. It is about land.” (Introduction, PDF p.52)
• “Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population—an iron wall which the native population cannot break through.” (Vladimir Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall”, 1923, quoted in the Introduction, PDF p.53)
• “The practical effect of this shattered economic space,” the World Bank report concludes, “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.” (World Bank, May 2007, quoted in the Introduction, PDF p.45)
• “the Whole Land [of Israel] strategically, and a Jewish state demographically” (Yigal Allon’s plan as summarised in “Outsides”, PDF p.124)
• “I prefer the Palestinians to cope with the problems of enforcing order” (Yitzhak Rabin to a Labor party meeting, 1993, quoted in “Outsides”, PDF p.130)
• “the formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians” (Dov Weisglas to Ha’aretz, quoted in “Outsides”, PDF p.139)
• “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness,” “that they are a defeated people” (General Moshe Ya’alon, quoted in “Outsides”, PDF p.138)
• “The Judaization of Jerusalem is a cynical exercise in social engineering” (John Dugard, quoted in “Insides”, PDF p.149)
• “the fracturing and division of Palestinian territory—which is the defining feature of the wall—is a long-standing feature of the Israeli occupation going back to 1967, rather than an innovation introduced with the wall itself” (“Outsides”, PDF p.70)
• “it is necessary to make life difficult for the Arabs, not to allow them to build” (the 1978 Jerusalem Master Plan, as stated by Teddy Kollek, “Insides”, PDF p.152)
• “There were some cases of cholera there, and the Jews were afraid they would catch it, so we installed sewerage and a water system [to protect] against cholera.” (Teddy Kollek on East Jerusalem infrastructure, “Insides”, PDF p.162)
• “Over the years, the main tool used by Israel to restrict building by the Palestinian population outside the borders of the municipalities was simply to refrain from planning” (B’Tselem, quoted in “Insides”, PDF p.174)
• “Under such circumstances, all the normal markers of inside, home life—the relationships of family members to each other, the legality of their existence as a family, the security of their most intimate domestic spaces—are undone.” (“Insides”, PDF p.170)
• “is not a public body which acts on behalf of all the citizens of the state. Its loyalty is to the Jewish people and its responsibility is to it [i.e., the Jewish people] alone” (the Jewish National Fund on itself, quoted in “Insides”, PDF p.201)
• “the confinement of one and a half million persons in a huge holding pen” (Meron Benvenisti on the Gaza redeployment, quoted in “Outside In”, PDF p.211)
• “Gaza is, in short, a world turned outside in.” (“Outside In”, PDF p.212)
• “Gaza is a prison and Israel seems to have thrown away the key,” (John Dugard, quoted in “Outside In”, PDF p.219)
• “Every aspect of that agreement was abrogated,” (James Wolfensohn on the Agreement on Movement and Access, quoted in “Outside In”, PDF p.221)
• “I sat in front of the patient and I could do nothing for her,” (Dr. Bushra Lubbed, Nasser Hospital, quoted in “Outside In”, PDF p.224)
• “is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not make them die of hunger.” (Dov Weisglas, quoted in “Outside In”, PDF p.227)
• “Gaza is in a state of panic, children are restless, crying, frightened and many are wetting their beds.” (Dr. Eyad el-Sarraj, Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, quoted in “Outside In”, PDF p.230)
• “The sole purpose of these sorties is to prevent the residents from sleeping and to create an ongoing sense of fear and anxiety,” (B’Tselem on sonic booms, quoted in “Outside In”, PDF p.231)
• “grossly disproportionate and indiscriminate and resulted in the commission of multiple war crimes” (John Dugard on Beit Hanoun, quoted in “Outside In”, PDF p.234)
• “peace and quiet is not necessarily good, and if there isn’t mayhem, we’ll create it. To demonstrate power, to demonstrate that we are everywhere.” (an Israeli soldier on raids, quoted in “Outside In”, PDF p.235)
• “For three days, I just destroyed and destroyed, the whole area.” (Moshe Nissim, bulldozer operator at Jenin, quoted in “Outside In”, PDF p.241)
• “The IDF completely blocked the movement of ambulances in the West Bank during Operation Defensive Shield” (B’Tselem, quoted in “Outside In”, PDF p.244)
• “The objective is for them to not have access to the State of Israel, for demographic reasons” (Colonel Shaul Arieli on the Seam zone, quoted in “Outside In”, PDF p.263)
• “It would be voluntary transfer.” (Colonel Shaul Arieli, quoted in “Outside In”, PDF p.263)

Evidence the work relies on

In the part read so far: personal testimony and named cases gathered or reported by the author (Sam Bahour and his family; Amal al-Amleh; Mohammad Jalud; Eid Ahmed Yassin; Mohammad Salim; Abdel-Latif Odeh; Yasser Alian; Laila Shqeirat); reports of the World Bank (May 2007, on the Palestinian economy and movement), B’Tselem (family unification; state land; collaborator testimony), Peace Now (November 2006, settlement land), Amnesty International (some 5,000 military orders; 2001 report), and UN-OCHA (July 2007 infrastructure report; weekly briefing 2–8 May 2007; November 2007 seam-zone figures); international law as quoted in the work — the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Articles 13 and 16), the Hague Convention, the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949, including Article 27), U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 (1949), Security Council Resolution 465 (1980), and the International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion of July 2004; Israeli statements and documents as quoted — Ariel Sharon, Arnon Sofer, Moledet’s English-language Web site, Effie Eitam, Avigdor Lieberman, General Moshe Kaplinsky’s October 2003 closed-area declaration, and the High Court of Justice ruling of the early 1970s on Israeli nationality; and Vladimir Jabotinsky’s 1923 essay “The Iron Wall” and Baruch Kimmerling’s formulation of Zionism’s two imperatives. In part 2 the work also relies on: the World Health Organization’s 2005 checkpoint-births investigation; the World Bank’s 2004 economy overview; UNRWA’s closure study (Hebron and Arroub); UN-OCHA’s checkpoint update for 28 March–3 April 2007 and weekly briefing for 13–19 September 2006, both reproduced as boxes; checkpoint testimony collected by B’Tselem and testimony of Israeli soldiers on checkpoint duty; Addameer (650,000 prisoners since 1967); a PA auditor’s report (1997 budget) and the IMF’s 2003 audit ($900 million); the published accounts of Israeli, American and Palestinian negotiators on Camp David; Samih Farsoun and Naseer Aruri on the Road Map; Henry Siegman on the peace process; the Economist on residency revocation (2006); and Israeli statements as quoted: Yigal Allon (1967), Golda Meir (1969), Yitzhak Rabin (1993), housing minister Ze’ev Boim (2007), Mati Steinberg, General Moshe Ya’alon, Arik Sharon (2004) and Dov Weisglas. The praise pages and Alice Walker’s Foreword are credited to their own authors, not to Makdisi. In part 3 the work also relies on: Jerusalem municipality officials and planners as quoted (Israel Kimchi, Amir Cheshin, Teddy Kollek, Ze’ev Baran, city engineer Uri Shetrit); Amnesty International’s 2004 demolition report; the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (Gaza agricultural land); UN-OCHA weekly briefings for 2–8 May 2007 and 29 November–5 December 2006, reproduced as boxes; a joint B’Tselem and HaMoked report on birth registration; testimony of named Palestinian families (the Abu Kafs, Abu Hamads, Abu Tahas, Abu Luzes, Hala Odeh, the Abu Jawilas, Abu Marirs, D’anas, al-Natshehs, al-Samuhs and al-Shartabis) and of Mona el-Farra; the Drobles Plan (1978) and the 1980s settlement Master Plan as quoted; High Court justice Alfred Vitkon; Eyal Weizman and Rafi Segal on settlement design; settler organisations’ own materials (Tehilla, Amana, RE/MAX listings) and a settler’s letter (Tovah of Eli); Gershom Gorenberg’s history of the settlement movement; Rabbi Yisrael Ariel as presented by Nur Masalha; Tzvi Shiloah in Davar, Eliezer Livneh in Ma’ariv and Dr. Dov Yosefi; B’Tselem on settler violence and the 29 October 2007 demolition; David Shulman’s Dark Hope; Gideon Levy on Tel Rumeida; Tim Rutten and Victor Davis Hanson on American support; Steven Mazie in Jewish Week and Nathaniel Popper and a July 2003 editorial in The Forward on marriage, the agunot and conversion; the U.N. Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1998) and Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (2007) on the Jewish National Fund; the JNF’s 2004 legal response and the July 2007 Knesset bill; Henry Siegman on Gaza as the first bantustan; and the World Food Programme’s Kirstie Campbell (March 2007).

In part 4 the work also relies on: Laila el-Haddad’s Rafah testimony; Gaza demographic and historical figures as presented in the text; the UN-OCHA Gaza update for 18 April–1 May 2007 and Humanitarian Update for 20–27 June 2007, both reproduced as boxes; John Dugard on the 2005 redeployment and on Beit Hanoun; James Wolfensohn on the Agreement on Movement and Access and Elliot Abrams; U.N. figures on Rafah and Karni operation in 2006; Gaza health-ministry figures for November 2007; testimony of Dr. Bushra Lubbed and the family of Mahmoud Abu Taha; B’Tselem reports on fishing, sonic booms and the Gaza power plant, and its report on ambulances in Operation Defensive Shield; a January 2007 World Bank-financed report on textile exports; the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights on child malnutrition; Dov Weisglas on the “diet”; Alex Fishman in Yediot Aharonot on territorial cells; Amnesty International on the 9 June 2006 beach killings; Dr. Eyad el-Sarraj and the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme on sonic booms; an Italian investigation reported in the text on DIME injuries; the U.N. Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur on the power-plant aftermath; testimony of named Palestinian residents (Ala’a Abu Dheer, Tahani Fattouh, Jihad Muhalad, Ghazi Bani Odeh, Majdi Alawna, Alam Ghanem, Ahmad al-Turki, Ahmad Sma’aneh, Fathiya Suleiman, Anan Abu Dahar, Ismail Basleh) and of Israeli soldiers (a Golani Brigade soldier, Sergeant Nati Aharoni, Moshe Nissim, and unnamed soldiers on raids, human shields, home invasions and curfew enforcement); Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International investigations of Jenin; a U.N. report on Bethlehem; a 2003 USAID study in the numbers box; the UN-OCHA seam-zone survey of November 2007 and Colonel Shaul Arieli on its purpose; and John Ging of UNRWA on Gaza schoolchildren.

Analysis

Makdisi’s method in this part is cumulative and case-led: a single family’s paperwork (the Bahours) is widened, step by step, into the registry, the permit web, the closure map, the land-law reinterpretation and the demographic rationale, so that the thesis — land taken, people unwanted — is assembled from administrative detail rather than asserted. His evidence is heavily institutional (World Bank, U.N. agencies, Israeli human-rights organisations and Israeli officials’ own words), which he sets against the legal texts Israel is said to violate. The limits visible so far are those of the form: figures are other bodies’ estimates, given with attribution and as-of dates but not independently derived, and the Israeli security rationale is stated in one paragraph (PDF p.45) and answered by the Palestinian and human-rights framing rather than examined at length. The Author’s Note declares the standpoint openly — justice, not nationalism — and the one-state conclusion is announced in the front matter before the evidence chapters begin. Part 2 adds a long historical arc inside Chapter 1: the Allon Plan is presented as the template that Oslo, Camp David, the Road Map and Sharon’s disengagement each repackaged, an argument carried by map comparison and by Israeli officials’ own quoted words (Rabin on PA policing, Weisglas on formaldehyde, Ya’alon on a defeated people) rather than by Palestinian sources alone. Chapter 2 then mirrors Chapter 1’s structure, moving from external division to the paperwork that decides inner life, opening with the Ministry of the Interior queue and Samira Aliyan’s revocation. Part 3 completes Chapter 2 by following one distinction — Jewish against non-Jewish — through every register in turn: municipal planning ratios stated by the planners themselves, demolition testimony, the registration of newborns, the marriage law of 2003, settlement architecture read as surveillance, settler marketing read as policy, and finally the constitutional distinction between nationality and citizenship inside Israel, where the Jewish National Fund’s own defence is left to state the priority of Jewishness over equality. The method stays cumulative and quotation-led: at each step the decisive words are those of Israeli officials, judges, planners, settlers or institutions, set against named Palestinian families’ accounts of the same rules from inside the home. Chapter 3 then turns the structure outward again: Gaza, sealed since the 2005 redeployment, is presented as the completed form — a world turned outside in — of the enclosure the West Bank chapters describe in progress.

Part 4 completes Chapter 3 by widening the enclosure argument to its military and collective forms: closure becomes siege (crossings, the AMA’s abrogation, the “diet”), siege becomes bombardment (artillery, sonic booms, DIME reports, the power plant, Beit Hanoun), and the same projection of power is then shown inside West Bank homes and streets in 2002 and after (human shields, routine invasions, curfew enforcement), before the wall’s “Gazafication” at Qalqilya and the Seam zone is given its purpose in an Israeli colonel’s own words — demographic separation producing “voluntary transfer” — and the chapter closes on education as the last avenue of escape being blockaded. Chapter 4 then opens by shrinking the scale to a single Hebron school path, where settler children, soldiers under orders to protect them, and unprotected international escorts stage the inside/outside structure in miniature.

People, organizations, places and events

Saree Makdisi, Alice Walker, Sam Bahour, Mohammad Jalud, Samira Aliyan, Yigal Allon, Allon Plan, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, Jimmy Carter, Yasir Arafat, Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Fateh, Palestinian National Council, First Intifada, Second Intifada, Daoud Kuttab, Amira Hass, Meron Benvenisti, David Ben-Gurion, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Baruch Kimmerling, Arnon Sofer, Eyal Weizman, John Dugard, B’Tselem, UN-OCHA, International Court of Justice, Qalqilya, Arik Sharon, Ehud Olmert, Peace Now, Oslo Accords, UN General Assembly Resolution 194, Gaza, Israel, Teddy Kollek, Drobles Plan, Mona el-Farra, Har Homa, Hebron, HaMoked, Ta’ayush, Jewish National Fund, Jewish Agency, Gush Emunim, Menachem Begin, Moshe Dayan, Nur Masalha, Laila el-Haddad, Nablus, Bethlehem, Jenin, UNRWA

Concepts

Occupation by bureaucracy, Center of life, Seam zone, Separation wall, Closure system, Population registry and family unification, Demographic problem, One-state solution, Transfer, Zionism, Settler Colonialism, Right of Return, Judaization, Bantustans, Unrecognized villages, Apartheid, Present Absentees

How it relates to other sources

Makdisi’s Transfer is Pappe’s concept continued into the present: where The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine traces transfer as ideology and 1948 practice, Makdisi argues the post-1967 form is pressure toward “voluntary transfer” under a permanent occupation, and quotes Vladimir Jabotinsky’s 1923 candour as the programme’s early statement. His everyday-bureaucracy account complements Manna’s military-government history of the Palestinians who remained inside Israel: both rest on permits, registries and land law, Makdisi for the territories occupied in 1967 and Nakba and Survival for 1948–1956 inside Israel. His announced One-state solution is a present-day, secular-democratic programme of the kind Said discussed as the Secular Democratic State; the relation is noted here as the works present themselves, with the fuller comparison reserved until the book’s own solution chapters are read. Part 3 extends the Jewish National Fund line that runs through Sayegh, Said and Pappe: where Said records the JNF holding land in trust for Jews only and Pappe its 1953 law and the bar on leasing to non-Jews, Makdisi gives the arrangement’s present form — the Israel Land Administration bound to the JNF’s criteria, the JNF’s 2004 refusal of an equality duty, and the July 2007 bill writing Jews-only leasing into statute. His Apartheid material is narrower than Sayegh’s general comparison: a single law, the 2003 nationality law, set against South Africa’s rejected 1980 analogue. His quarter of Palestinian citizens still suffering 1948 internal displacement, barred even from family-titled land, is the condition Manna documents as the Present Absentees, though Makdisi does not use that term in this part. His Gaza Bantustans passage, quoting Siegman, applies to the post-2005 enclosures the term Sayegh used for the reserves of the 1948 remnant.

Part 4 extends the Transfer line: where earlier parts quote Arnon Sofer expecting “voluntary transfer”, Colonel Shaul Arieli describes the Seam zone’s hardship as designed to produce exactly that outcome without a demographic price. His Qalqilya account also deepens the earlier Seam zone and Separation wall material from the permit regime of Chapter 1 to the wall’s completed urban form, and his Beit Hanoun and Jenin sections set Makdisi’s impunity argument — investigations refused, vetoed or disbanded — beside Pappe’s and Manna’s accounts of 1948 and military government, as the works present them.

Open questions

• The text copy gives no printed page numbers in PDF p.1-86; printed locators cannot be supplied for this part and the printed cross-reference “see map, p. 336” (PDF p.56) cannot be reconciled with PDF pagination here.
• Edition: the book is copyright 2008 (PDF p.13) while the Foreword is copyright 2010 and the Author’s Note is signed November 2009 (PDF p.13, p.33); no edition statement in this range says which printing this copy is.
• Alice Walker’s Foreword anticipates a reader’s realisation of paying “over a trillion dollars since 1948” in taxes (PDF p.27); no source is given on the page, and the figure is Walker’s, not Makdisi’s.
• Spelling varies as printed: “Abdel-Latif Odeh” against “Abel-Latif Odeh” on the same spread (PDF p.66), and “al-Zaitun” (PDF p.84) against “al-Zeitun” (PDF p.85).
• The High Court quotation on PDF p.51 prints “Disaspora Jewry” [as printed in the text copy].
• The UN-OCHA box (PDF p.72) prints the Beita vegetable-market closure in near-identical words for both 7 May and 8 May 2007; the entries stand as printed.
• The annual cost of a car circulation permit is given as about $450intheroaddiscussion(PDFp.80)andas$454 in the “Occupation by the Numbers” box (PDF p.108); both figures stand as printed.
• The text copy prints “the Olso Accords” (PDF p.128) and repeats “published” in the World Health Organization sentence (PDF p.92), and the UN-OCHA box prints the Beit Iba sentence about 120 diverted trucks twice in succession (PDF p.100); all stand as printed.
• Printed-pagination cross-references continue: “see map, p. 83” for the Oslo II areas (PDF p.132) and “see maps, pp. 340 and 341” for the U.N. May 2007 map (PDF p.141); neither can be reconciled with PDF pagination here.
• Whether Samira Aliyan was among those whose residency was “quietly restored” after the center-of-life policy was suspended in 2000 (PDF p.148) is not stated in the part read so far.
• Seam-zone and land percentages are source-specific and measure different things — settlements’ administrative control of some 42 percent (B’Tselem) against almost 40 percent taken by Israeli infrastructure (UN-OCHA) (PDF p.59) — and are kept attributed rather than merged.
• The UN-OCHA box at PDF p.153-154 carries the same heading and dates — “Weekly Briefing, 2–8 May 2007” — as the box reproduced at PDF p.71-73, but with entirely different items (eviction and demolition orders, settler occupations); both stand as printed.
• The el-Farra narrative’s weekdays stand as printed — “Sunday, the 24th of February 2007” (PDF p.208) and “Monday the 25th” (PDF p.209) — against the calendar, in which 24 February 2007 was a Saturday and 25 February 2007 a Sunday (calendar check).
• “RafiSegal” is printed without a space at PDF p.171 and again at PDF p.175; sic spellings in Tovah’s letter (“indroduce”, “beautifull”, “Shomrom”, “Male Lavonah”) stand as printed (PDF p.181-182).
• The West Bank–Gaza convoys under the Agreement on Movement and Access are said to have been due “as of 15 December 2006” (PDF p.222), although the agreement itself is dated November 2005 in the surrounding text and in part 3; the date stands as printed.
• The number of Gaza students in West Bank universities is given as having “dropped to virtually zero recently” in the crossings discussion (PDF p.221) and as 15 in 2007 in the numbers box (PDF p.256) and the education discussion (PDF p.264); both formulations stand as printed.
• Nablus deaths in the 2002 assault are given as “around 600” killed there, “more people … than anywhere else in the West Bank” (PDF p.242); no source for the figure is named on the page.
• Printed-pagination cross-references continue: “see map, p. 342” for Erez and Rafah (PDF p.220) and “see map, p. 343” for Hebron H1/H2 (PDF p.270); neither can be reconciled with PDF pagination here.
• “Lutfitold” is printed without a space (PDF p.235) and “RafiSegal” likewise in part 3; both stand as printed.
• Chapter 4, “Inside Out,” subsection 1 begins on PDF p.268 and continues beyond this part’s range; its remaining account belongs to part 5.

Coverage

PDF p.1-270 of 453, read in parts 1-4 of 7. Parts remaining: part 5, PDF p.271-331; part 6, PDF p.332-388; part 7, PDF p.389-453.