The recent killing of three Israeli citizens, and the disproportionate retribution visited upon hundreds of Palestinians, has brought back talk of the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict." But using such words does no one any favors, says Eda Pepi
AMMAN, Jordan — The bodies of three young Israeli settlers murdered by random vigilantes were found near the Palestinian city of Hebron on June 30th. A few days later, the body of a young Palestinian, who was burned alive by other vigilantes, was found in Jerusalem. The military retaliation prompted by these murders lays bare the injuries inflicted on Israelis as well as Palestinians when we insist on calling the cyclical violence between Israel and Palestine a “conflict.”
In the course of my dissertation work in anthropology, I have witnessed how using “conflict” to describe the violence between Israelis and Palestinians normalizes the everyday indignities of occupation in the West Bank and in Gaza. The collective punishment of Palestinians by the Israeli military that began in mid-June as part of Operation Brother’s Keepers continues in full force—with air raids of Gaza and with the Israeli Defense Forces conducting home demolitions, nightly searches and mass arrests in the West Bank that violate all aspects of due process. The city of Hebron has been closed off, with over 23,000 Palestinians unable to travel to their jobs in Israel. These acts, in which one state disciplines the people of another sovereign entity, would be unimaginable in an international conflict, even an asymmetrical one like that between the Sudan and the newly independent South Sudan. In Israel and Palestine, the two sides perpetuating and suffering this violence are not capable of, or permitted in, exacting equivalent retaliation on each other.
Smoke rises from a neighborhood following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City on July 8
[quote]A word like "conflict" normalizes the everyday indignities of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza[/quote]
I have spent the past year and a half conducting ethnographic research with Palestinians in Jordan. For more than five years, I have studied the history of the region and the social practices and beliefs that fuel the multiple, and sometimes contradicting, narratives over a future Palestinian state. It has become hard for me to ignore the structural and pervasive racism that targets Palestinians—by painting the deaths of three teenagers as a full-scale attack on Israel, for example—and enables the Israeli state to violate basic civil liberties of all Israelis in daily practice even as it, in theory, claims them as sacrosanct.
In my research, I have repeatedly noted how housing, employment, health, and national security laws that were initially meant to discriminate against Arabs inside Israel are increasingly used to marginalize Israelis of all walks of life. I have examined the emergence of segregation in the Negev, where not only Palestinians but also Mizrahi Jews (Jews of Middle-Eastern or North-African descent), persons of Ethiopian origin, persons with disabilities, senior citizens, religious persons and single parents are categorized as “undesirable.” The Admission Committees Law allows residents to “screen” those who do not meet the criteria of “suitability to the community’s life” or “suitability to the socio-cultural fabric” of the community. Segregation and structural racism against Palestinians and non-Palestinian minority groups is effected as well through the controversial private medical services.
Palestinians workers wait to have their IDs checked by soldiers using barcode readers, so they can enter Israel for work
[quote]It has become hard for me to ignore the structural and pervasive racism that targets Palestinians[/quote]
According to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, discrimination in the workplace and in the provision of all public services disproportionately affects the same minority groups. “Open-air facilities,” the arrest and detention of children, the ubiquity of firearms, police brutality, pressure by employers for job applicants to disclose their criminal record—things that are prohibited by law but allowed in practice—are all made palatable to reasonable citizens by amplifying the threat posed by Palestinian young men, but are also affecting racialized minority groups and all Israelis more and more.
[quote]I am not Israeli, Arab, Jewish, Muslim, or Christian[/quote]
I am not Israeli, Arab, Jewish, Muslim, or Christian; a demoralizing disclosure for a social scientist made necessary by indiscriminate accusations of anti-Semitism and, to a lesser extent, Islamophobia. Amnesty International, B’Tselem, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual, Adalah, Rabbis for Human Rights, and Breaking the Silence have all documented and condemned this institutionalization of racism.
It might be tempting for some to argue that the Israeli government’s discrimination and mass punishment of Palestinians is about ensuring the future existence of Israel. It is also tempting for others to argue that Israel’s systematic violations of human rights are meant to humiliate and erase an ethnic culture as well as to slowly displace the remaining Palestinians into neighboring Arab countries. There is certainly some truth to both stances. While the human rights abuses and deaths of Palestinians are even more soul-wrenching than the civil rights violations listed above, cynical as it sounds, this form of mass punishment also happens to be a cyclical reality for Palestinians living within Israeli territorial reach. The acceptance of pervasive racism and the mass punishment of Palestinians by Israeli citizens, however, has allowed the Israeli state to govern through the mentality of the refugee camp: segregation under a constant state of emergency, long after any realistic threat to Israel’s physical existence has waned.
The murders of young Israeli and Palestinian boys, which at this point symbolically double as the threats looming over the future of the boys’ respective nations, have moved even the disinterested but influential masses drained by the seemingly intractable nature of the Israeli-Palestinian “conflict.” What’s heartbreaking is that the world would rather just not have to deal with Palestine or Israel. Indeed, Western outrage could only be mustered up after much was made of the fact that one of the murdered Israeli teens and the brutalized cousin of the murdered Palestinian boy both had American citizenships. That they are American children shocks and scandalizes outlets like CNN.
Relatives of Marwan Saleem, who died in an Israeli airstrike, mourn during his funeral in the central Gaza Strip on July 7
Indignation over the “searing hypocrisy” of Western media thus erupted across the world. Read, for example, Susan Abulhawa’s piece in The Hindu. Israelis have sought to touch the parental, and patronizing, sensibilities of the West with campaigns like #bringbackourboys. And Palestinians sought to overwhelm with the sheer number of their children who die in the hands of the Israeli military every day. Never mind that the end of one life, any life, is one life too many. This war is playing out on Western TV screens, tweets, and Facebook timelines. At stake is the sympathy of Western audiences that dictate US/European military and foreign aid. And as long as the distribution of Western aid is predicated on a conflict unfolding not on a level playing field, the reactions of Israel and the West will seem to accept and endorse the violations of human rights and mass punishment.
So let’s stop calling it the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Palestine is not a state with a legitimate military to preserve its sovereignty, and it cannot, as such, be engaged in a conflict. If you believe that there is no such thing as Palestine and that the occupied territories are part of Israel—or that a Palestinian state is an unrealistic dream—even then you cannot call the violence a conflict. What you have in your hands is a civil war, with a long civil rights struggle ahead for Palestinians and Israelis—not unlike the struggle of black South Africans or that of African-Americans. If, on the other hand, you believe that Israel and Palestine are two separate states, regardless of where the borders are drawn, then you have a colonial occupation, the shame of which will haunt the international community for a long time to come.
Words won’t stop the long and painful struggle ahead. But starting to talk about this recurring violence as civil war and occupation might just crack up a few spaces for collaboration among individuals from both sides. It might even compel the international community to make demands and contributions that are proportionate to the inequality between the Israeli state and the quasi-state Palestinian coalitions.
Eda Pepi, a Fulbright Fellow and a PhD candidate in Stanford University’s Department of Anthropology, is conducting dissertation fieldwork in Jordan.
