Disengagement and the Frontiers of Zionism

[ProgressiveMuslim]

Darryl Li

February 16, 2008

(Darryl Li is a doctoral student in anthropology and Middle East studies at Harvard University and a student at Yale Law School. He spent January in the Gaza Strip.)

For background on Israel’s system of control over Gaza after 2005, see Darryl Li, “The Gaza Strip as Laboratory: Notes in the Wake of Disengagement,” Journal of Palestine Studies 35/2 (Winter 2006).
In mid-January, when Israel further tightened its blockade of the Gaza Strip, it hurriedly assured the world that a “humanitarian crisis” would not be allowed to occur. Case in point: Days after the intensified siege prompted Hamas to breach the Gaza-Egypt border and Palestinians to pour into Egypt in search of supplies, Israel announced plans to send in thousands of animal vaccines to prevent possible outbreaks of avian flu and other epidemics due to livestock and birds entering Gaza from Egypt.<1> Medicines for human beings, on the other hand, are among the supplies that are barely trickling in to Gaza now that the border has been resealed.

More than an act of enlightened self-interest -- or, more bluntly, a recognition that “the virus doesn’t stop at the checkpoint”<2> -- the reported animal vaccine shipment is a clue to how Israel is reconfiguring its control over the Gaza Strip. The story of the recent restrictions, when told at all to the outside world, has been conveyed largely through statistics: 90 percent of private industries in Gaza have shut down, 80 percent of the population receives food aid, all construction sites are idle and unemployment has broken all previous records.<3> Journalists and NGOs have rendered individual portraits of ruined farmers, bankrupted merchants and trapped medical patients. But the stranglehold on Gaza is not simply a stricter version of the policies of the past five years; it also reflects a qualitative shift in Israel’s technique for management of the territory. The contrast between Israel’s expedited transfer of animal vaccines to Gaza and its denial of medicine for the human population is emblematic of this emergent form of control, that, for lack of a better term, we may call “disengagement.”

“Disengagement” is, of course, the name Israel gave to its 2005 removal of colonies and military bases from the Gaza Strip. But rather than a one-time abandonment of control, disengagement is better understood as an ongoing process of controlled abandonment, by which Israel is severing the ties forged with Gaza over 40 years of domination without allowing any viable alternatives to emerge, all while leaving the international donor community to subsidize what remains. The effect is to treat the Strip as an animal pen whose denizens cannot be domesticated and so must be quarantined. Disengagement is a form of rule that sets as its goal neither justice nor even stability, but rather survival -- as we are reminded by every guarantee that an undefined “humanitarian crisis” will be avoided.

FROM BANTUSTAN TO INTERNMENT CAMP TO ANIMAL PEN

Since its beginnings over a century ago, the Zionist project of creating a state for the Jewish people in the eastern Mediterranean has faced an intractable challenge: how to deal with indigenous non-Jews -- who today comprise half of the population living under Israeli rule -- when practical realities dictate that they cannot be removed and ideology demands that they must not be granted political equality. From these starting points, the general contours of Israeli policy from left to right over the generations have been clear: First, maximize the number of Arabs on the minimal amount of land, and second, maximize control over the Arabs while minimizing any apparent responsibility for them.

On the first score, Gaza is a resounding success: Although it covers only 1.5 percent of the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, it warehouses one out of every four Palestinians living in the entire country. But on the second count, Gaza’s density has made it very difficult to manage and its poverty makes it an eyesore before the world community. Thus, Palestinian resistance and, to a lesser extent, international constraints, have forced Israel to revise its balance of responsibility and control several times. Each phase of this ongoing experiment can be understood through spatial metaphors of increasingly constricted scope: bantustan, internment camp, animal pen.



http://www.merip.org/mero/mero021608.html

[sam sarrha]

1. after checking the Dictionary, ...i think the term "Ghetto" is appropriate as a metaphor also.

[subsuelo]

2. "FROM BANTUSTAN TO INTERNMENT CAMP TO ANIMAL PEN"

that describes it about right. But what is even more shocking is the way it's condoned -- even here, among Democrats. Am I being inflammatory? Just ask me to prove it.