Public Comment

Over a five-week period (so far) the Israeli army, in full sight of a world viewership, has killed more than 100 and injured more than 13,000 unarmed demonstrators positioned behind a security fence and mostly several football fields away from the firing line (although some approached the fence). How can Israel do this and suffer no repercussions whatsoever? Perhaps to ask this is to ask how Israel can do what it does in Gaza all the time. 

Of course, the international status of Israel is unique, for many complicated reasons. But I believe there is also something unique about Gaza. 

I’ll ignore the clearly absurd word “clashes” as in the frequently repeated “border clashes” and focus on the word “border.” In political usage, “border” denotes the demarcation between contiguous sovereign states. Although Israel has unusual characteristics, I have no trouble granting that it is a sovereign state. But what, on the other side of the so-called “border,” is Gaza? 

Technically it and the West Bank comprise the Occupied Palestinian Territories (as designated by the UN), and there are rules governing occupations, including the requirement that the occupying power is responsible for the welfare of the occupied. However, a 51-year “occupation” stretches the meaning of the term almost beyond recognition, and Israel has never agreed to it anyway, calling the West Bank “the disputed territories” and—in the aftermath of Sharon’s 2005 unilateral “disengagement” from Gaza, when he withdrew both the settlers and the army—refusing to acknowledge that the strip is still occupied and part of the OPT. 

Oslo also muddied the waters by creating the Palestinian Authority, beginning a now-25-year-long fiction that “Palestine” is a state-in-waiting, generally treated as if it were an actual state—capable, for example, of negotiating (although it lacks any of the attributes of actual states, such as defined territory, sovereignty, and the capacity to defend itself): thus the fiction of “borders” which trips so lightly from so many tongues. 

Finally, a rupture between Hamas, which won the last election held in the Palestinian territories (in 2006) and Fatah, which controls the PA and the West Bank, left Gaza not only physically but also politically isolated. 

We should note also that Israel wants/intends to incorporate the West Bank, which it has now annexed in every way but formally, but does not want the Gaza Strip, which is basically a holding tank for nearly two million Palestinians, who do not need to be counted. As for Gaza’s offshore gas deposits, Israel simply takes them as it takes West Bank water. 

What then is Gaza? Many have described it as the world’s largest prison, and perhaps this is accurate, although since prisons exist (usually) within the territories of states, those confined within them enjoy—at least theoretically—the legal rights and protections to which citizens are entitled. 

I have tended towards the idea that Gaza exists permanently in a state of exception, or state of emergency, a concept originated by the German Carl Schmitt and explored most thoroughly by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Agamben sees the entire Nazi period as a state of exception and the concentration camps in particular as places where the stripping of citizenship and the rights thereof which the state of exception permits was enacted. 

In Black Earth: the Holocaust as History and Warning, historian Timothy Snyder argues that before Jews could be killed, they had to be deprived of citizenship, and to accomplish that, state structures had to be dismantled. Wherever states remained intact, mass murder did not occur. 

About President George W. Bush’s November 2001 military order, Agamben has written, “What is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnameable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POWs as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of people charged with a crime according to American laws.” 

In Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War, Mark Danner also posits the “state of exception” to explain how the US government came to permit itself torture after 9/11, arguing, sadly, that while President Bush imposed the state of exception, President Obama normalized it. 

This stripping of protective legal status which political thinkers struggle to define has happened, I would argue, to the people confined to the Gaza Strip, not suddenly through a military order, but over time, through a succession of redefinitions which has left them “unnameable and unclassifiable”—with biological (“bare life”) but neither social nor juridical being. 

The writer of the leader in this past week’s issue of The Economist ignored all this highfalutin analysis and cut to the chase. He wrote: “Gaza is a human rubbish heap that everyone would rather ignore.” 

I think, by the way, The Economist is only partly right. Although Israel does not want 

Gaza, it has uses for it: as a shooting range [note 1]; a weapons testing ground [note 2]; and—perhaps—as a laboratory in which to discover just how far it can push slow genocide before the liberal democracies object. 

Note 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyLzRv_kNXU 

Note 2. Saar Koursh, CEO of Magal Security Systems, Ltd., which built the Gaza fence, noted that Gaza has become a showroom for the company’s “smart fences,” as customers appreciate that the products are battle-tested. Bloomberg News, 4/10/2018.