From Activestills from a photoessay entitled "Life Under Occupation"

I don’t remember if that’s exactly how it went, but I do remember the teacher, Professor Gillian Hart, saying that apartheid was actually much more about what that old man was talking about than about even the most gruesome instances of physical violence. The violence of the white state was necessary to maintain and continue the unequal land and resource distribution created by hundreds of years of dispossession. The violence of the state and of the different militant organizations were all in the context of the systematic dispossession of black South Africans. Somehow, the TRC’s contributed to making reconciliation and truth all about confessing to different forms of physical violence while largely ignoring dispossession as the original, continuing, and fundamental form of violence that the modern apartheid regime itself was created to maintain.

This memory came to me during a recent discussion of the Israel/Palestine situation with a close friend. Though he recognized everything I had to say, he insisted on the familiar tropes of balance, symmetry, and “extremists on both sides.” When I pressed him on it, he recognized the power imbalances that made “balanced discussion” contrived and morally impossible, but he maintained that “both sides” have to stop using violence against each other, that nothing justified violence. Another close friend of mine recently posited a familiar Israeli perception, that if it hadn’t been for Palestinian attacks on Israelis there would be no checkpoints, no Israeli night raids, no hundreds of civilians mowed down and burned with white phosphorous in Gaza.

I began talking to him about how I am for the nonviolent resistance for this and that reason, and I mentioned the difference in casualties and how that reflects the power imbalance and so on and so forth. But at some point, I realized that when we were talking about violence, we were talking exclusively about a certain kind of violence: homemade rockets versus F-16 strikes, military assaults versus suicide bombings, even kidnapping vs. warrantless arrests. Our conversation was circumscribed solely by a particular kind of “point source” violence involving the violation by one human being of another’s physical body. I realized that this is how the conversation gets to be about how best to maintain Israeli security, because people see the conflict as one about physical violence: Palestinians attack Israelis, Israelis strike back, and so on and so forth about the cycle of (physical) violence. The problem then becomes about how to get each “side” to understand how badly each side wants to live without this physical violence. This probably explains why outsiders who accept the validity of this model become somewhat disgusted with the entire issue. After all, who doesn’t know that physical violence is not good? Do they really hate each other that much that they attack each other just for the hell of it? Good riddance to both of them.

Absent from the conversation is the entire question of Palestinian security. People can talk very well about Israeli security needs, which for most Israelis remains the only rationale that could come close to any justification for the occupation. But I think that the same people have a very vague idea of what the Palestinians’ “interests” are. Do they want a Palestinian state? Do they want more/our/the land? Maybe they just want to stop being attacked, or maybe they want to be richer and have their economy developed, or maybe they want to stop being humiliated at checkpoints, etc. etc. All these ideas are floating around, but the question of security never appears next to the adjective “Palestinian.”

I think that part of the reason that the question of Palestinian security is never asked is because it would immediately lead one to inquire about what happens to Palestinians when there is no physical violence,  before or laughter the latest round of fighting. One would have to ask, “when Israelis are secure, when they are safe, are Palestinians secure?

To anyone who is aware of the dispossession of Palestinians in the last 100 years, the answer is obvious. In the absence of physical violence or in its presence, in the absence of peace negotiations or in their presence, there is a systematic project of dispossessing Palestinians of their land and resources and turning them over to Jewish-Israeli purposes, on both sides of the Green Line of 1967. Palestinians who hold land are under constant attack from settlers, the army, and the occupation bureaucracy to give it over. Palestinians who have houses are in constant danger of having them destroyed, as construction permits are systematically denied to Palestinians and construction “violations” of this are enforced almost exclusively for Palestinian construction rather than Jewish settler construction. Palestinians are constantly in danger of being arrested for any reason. Palestinians who own businesses are entirely dependent on arbitrary permits to transfer buy, sell or transfer goods, and are in constant danger of having them taken away for any arbitrary reason. Palestinians who used to own land and now must sell their labor are in the constant mercy of this permit system as well. Palestinians are in danger of going thirsty, going poor or going hungry because of this ongoing dispossession, while settlers build subsidized villas beside them in an open bid to replace them.

In essence, Palestinians’ very existence is in danger in every part of Israel/Palestine, because as far as the authorities and the nationalist public are concerned, they are the only technicality standing between Israel and an empty, holy land awaiting their conquest. They can never be sure of what tomorrow will bring them.

In the ideal world my friend is implying, where no Palestinian lifted a single finger against Israelis for 100 years, then it is very possible that there would be less checkpoints, less raids, less soldiers having to perform them, and less dead Israeli and Palestinian children. But would the Israeli government be more interested in giving Palestinians equal rights as Israelis? Would those rights extend to control over land, resources, and equal protection before the law as well as voting rights? Would Israeli settlers and politicians be less interested in their land? When a village is demolished because an ancient synagogue was discovered beneath it (as happened in Susya), would the government step in because the Palestinians were nonviolent? Would Palestinians be allowed to harvest their olives in peace, or would the olive trees be burned and Palestinians beaten into submission, protected by Israeli soldiers counting the days to their release?

The forms of violence that fall under the heading of dispossession are unique in that Israelis never experience them. That is why these experiences are totally excluded or glossed over in coexistence discourse because Israelis would not be able to ‘balance’ the discussion as they are (to some extent) with experiences of physical violence. Talking about dispossession is a fundamental challenge to the idea that physical violence, rather than the violence of dispossession, is the problem. It would be impossible to insist on “quiet” for Israelis when one knows what continues to happen during that quiet for Palestinians. Physical violence can be an issue an issue that is ‘cyclical.’ Dispossession, on the other hand, is a crime in progress, a crime for its own sake, rather than a crime of passion or revenge. If there is a crime in progress, how can anyone apologize for it and expect its targets to move on? While physical violence can be a problem for two sides to resolve and reconcile about, dispossession is the relationship between colonizer and colonized, a relationship that has many sides but no symmetry, and many explanations but no justification.

All history of physical violence can be fully recognized, even apologized for, but a history of dispossession is off limits. The Nakba is not anathema to existing discourse because it was a physically violent act, not because of the cruelty of forcing Palestinians out of their towns, cities and villages. Rather, the Nakba is dangerous because it is about dispossession, land confiscation, and refugee camps; in essence, not allowing Palestinians to return and by doing so inscribing the act of violence into the very face of the land as “facts on the ground.” Physical violence, even the worst, is temporary. Dispossession has the flavor of forever, its influence stretching out into eternity.

Israel is not exactly like apartheid South Africa was, and I will point out some of the differences in another post. But if the TRC’s are any lesson to the future, then I believe they have one lesson to teach us. Right now as in the past, Israeli state policies are trying to dispossess as many Palestinians as possible and to bury their dispossession with thousands of cookie cutter Jewish-only villas and security fences, so that when the TRC’s/negotiations/enough pressure comes to Israel/Palestine, these “facts” will appear there, inscribing the dispossession of the Palestinians into the history books as an immutable fact. When the TRC’s come to Israel/Palestine, they must be about land. They must show the world that dispossession will not be forgotten, that it can be counteracted effectively, and if not reversed then at least written into the face of the land in such ubiquity that it will never be forgotten.