Australians For Palestinians
January 16, 2010
Trajan's Column: Roman soldiers building a fortress
If Eric Hobsbawm were to add a fifth volume to his classic four-volume historical study on the Ages of Capital, Empire, Extremes and Revolution, and if he were to devote this new volume to the 21st century, he would probably consider the “The Age of Walls” as a title.
Admittedly, most people in the world thought that the Age of Walls had already tumbled down with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but Israel seems to have declared its commitment, in action, to perpetuating such an age. Israel is completing a concrete wall in the Palestinian territories it occupied in 1967, another iron wall is being constructed along Egypt’s borders with the Gaza Strip, and Israel is about to start the construction of a “technological wall”, or a “barrier”, as it puts it, along with the borders with Egypt. Concrete, iron, technological, these are the new walls being constructed in the region. Very soon, perhaps, we might begin to award prizes for the best wall plan made of other “material”.
The latest episode of “walling the region” was announced on Sunday, 10 January 2010 when Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu approved plans to erect the said barrier. The first stage will commence by building “fences along the sections of the border south of the Gaza Strip and north of Eilat”. In addition, “technological measures will be deployed along the entire border that will allow for the location of infiltrators and hazards in a timely fashion.”
Of his decision, Netanyahu said: “I decided to close Israel’s southern border to infiltrators and terrorists after prolonged discussions with government ministries and professional elements. This is a strategic decision to ensure the Jewish and democratic character of the state of Israel. Israel will remain open to war refugees but we cannot allow thousands of illegal workers to infiltrate into Israel via the southern border and flood our country.”
The threats that this barrier is said to protect Israel against are: “Illegal workers, infiltrators, smugglers, terrorists, Africans, Gazans, prostitutes, drugs, and arms.” Only by closing the border and securing Israel against these “threats”, Netanyahu in effect said, will Israel remain “Jewish and democratic”. But what does it mean to “close” a border that stretches over a couple of hundreds of kilometres? And how exactly do these persons and things threaten the “Jewish and democratic character of the state of Israel?” In what way do walls, or barriers, protect the character of a state? And finally, what does the proliferation of walls tell us about the psyche guiding Israeli politics?
The use of the word “close” to describe how the border with Egypt will be policed is significant. “Close the border” is an expression that has been used in the US in reference to its border with Mexico. In Israel, the expression signifies an illusion that a population can preserve its purity by sheltering itself from its surroundings (and the lives it has displaced). At stake here is by no means the fear of others, but a deep sense of superiority against those who inhabit the same, or nearby, geographies, and a genuine desire to engineer a way of life that eradicates them, conceals them, or deports them. “The Promised Land” is after all far from abstract; it belongs to concrete geographies and histories. Its secularisation as an instrument of Israeli nation state formation in the midst of these geographies and histories transforms the land- turned-state into an engine of racism, colonisation and exclusion.
Indicative of this sense of superiority are the statements Netanyahu made about the proposed barrier last December. In a meeting of the Committee on Security and Foreign Affairs, he reportedly said that Southern Israel was the only place in the world where one could walk from the Third World to the First World: “The problem is that it is possible to walk from Africa to Gush Dan. This is impossible to do on the way to Paris or Madrid, because there is an ocean on the way.” He also added that “we shall have to wall all the country, we will not have any other option.”
Indeed, if Israel is to preserve its sense of itself as a superior and more advanced power in the region, it may have no other choice but to wall itself. That is to say, it may have no other choice but to literally construct this self-claimed superiority. But to entertain the idea of walling an entire country denotes that walling is not simply an act of sovereignty. Rather, walling here is the capacity to invent and to preserve the purity of a people, and of a territory, while keeping them in a constant state of paranoia. In this sense walling intersects with evil. As purity is sought more, the responses against practices that violate this purity are destined to become ever harsher. The effect of walling, therefore, is not simply the prevention of “Africans, terrorists, Palestinians, drug and arms dealers” from “infiltrating” the southern border. Rather, the far more reaching effect is the production of an enclosed space, which transforms attempts at claiming or reclaiming it into violation that legitimates bloody responses. The more walling, the more military campaigns.
To be sure, however, Netanyahu is not the author of this new plan. The idea has been in the making for several years and seems to be dating back to at least 2005, when a plan titled “Sand-Clock” was first prepared by Israel’s Ministry of Defence. Since then the Israeli Parliament Research and Information Centre has prepared a number of reports on the “threats” faced at the borders with Jordan and Egypt, while recommending closing the border with Egypt. In addition, several committees in the parliament discussed the southern border. And finally, Ehud Olmert’s government examined a number of plans to close the border, including the Sand-Clock plan. It took several years to formulate and approve a final plan because different options were considered, given the geological and topographic conditions of the borderline.
The identity of the politicians responsible for the new walling project is important. But what is most significant is the discourse, which frames the said threats and relates them to the supposed “Jewish and democratic character of the state of Israel”. This discourse is both global and local. From its global end, it draws on the practices of other Western states against foreign labour and unwelcome immigrants (Black, Muslim, Arab, Asian, etc.); it deploys concerns against trafficking in women, drugs and arms as if border smuggling is their main cause or source; it transforms Africa into the source of eternal darkness, fuelling Western racist consciousness and projects; and finally it employs the vocabulary of the global war on terror.
But what reads like a contemporary typical Western discourse on borders contains additional local references. The talk about “infiltration” has a particular local history. The “infiltrator” in Israeli collective memory is the name that Israel gave to the Palestinian refugee, who attempted to return back home in Palestine after the 1948 war, and who was expelled again upon the discovery of this return. The term was also used to describe other Palestinians who did not leave Palestine during the war, but who were later labelled infiltrators in order to expel them. The infiltrator was therefore the Palestinian whose expulsion, and second expulsion, was necessary in order to construct a purely Jewish state.
It follows that the expansion of the identity of infiltrators to include other persons and things, by referencing the global discourse on immigration and security, fails to conceal the following two facts: first, the persistence of the Palestinian as one of the main figures to be expelled; and second, the extent to which the treatment of all other non-Jews will be modelled upon the treatment of Palestinians as infiltrators. And it is in this context that we can understand Netanyahu’s citation of the Jewish state. For this state until recently was mainly aimed at excluding the Palestinians. Nowadays, its Jewishness also serves to exclude Africans and other “infiltrators”. The work of racism and exclusion that birthed the Jewish state is the very work that continues to order its operations in relation to other populations. Ironically, Israel might be turning all other non-Jews in the world into Palestinians.
Citing the preservation of the Jewish and democratic state of Israel has additional consequences. This citation effectively legitimises the project of the Jewish state by associating it with a global discourse on immigration and security. Put differently, the preservation of the Jewish state becomes integral to this global discourse. But there is an irony to this new dimension of exclusion. Israel reveals itself once again to be insecure about the reality of its Jewishness. This insecurity is evident when Israel demands that the Palestinians recognise it as a Jewish state. It is also evident in the obsessive walling against everything outside its zone of self-claimed superiority. Palestinians, as it turns out, are not the only reminder of the factual impossibility of Israel’s “pure” Jewishness. And if it needs to wall itself in order to preserve its Jewishness, is not this an indication that Israel has never been Jewish? Might this walling project teach us that a Jewish state is either an illusion, or an aspiration that would require much more destruction and expulsion in order for this aspiration to tentatively be fulfilled?
Samera Esmeir is professor of rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley.
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
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