The processes of Israeli domination

The period was much marked by contradictions and excesses: the expansion of settlements, continued land expropriation and proliferation of checkpoints to name but a few. The resulting Palestinian frustrations that culminated in the second intifada again marked the transition to Israel’s current policy of separation - that is the suspension of law; the restructuring of Palestinian space to confine the population in ever more restricted areas, disconnected one from another; the cantonments of the West Bank; and the enclaves created by the Separation Barrier.

In this phase methods of control have become more lethal and more remote. Apart from military incursions and night raids the army’s presence is reduced, or at least less visible. Checkpoints have become hi-tech terminals where the human interface is all but eliminated; human movement on the ground, fraught with uncertainty and danger, is reduced; even air-space has been harnessed in the service of control as aerial surveillance is intensified; death by bombing or shooting from the air is the commonplace, as in the targeted assassinations of alleged terrorists with their inevitable “collateral damage”.

This is remote control in every sense: not only has the Israeli army become faceless and unseen, the Palestinians too have been positioned as faceless objects, targeted if not for death then for reduction to the barest of bare lives, in the most literal sense. There is no longer even the pretence of normalisation but increasingly a move from a politics of life to a politics of death.

Despite its theoretical basis, the book avoids the pitfalls of academic jargon making it accessible to the interested layman. Drawing extensively on government and military documents as well as reports and personal testimonies, it is a valuable text for anyone trying to understand Israel’s apparatus of oppression - how the Occupation has worked in the past, how it continues to work in the present and how it is likely to continue to work in the future.

It shows clearly how Israeli policy over time has always been to hold on to the territory conquered in June 1967, detaching the land from its existing population - the Palestinians. The consequent contradiction of having to manage and control an existing non-Jewish population perceived as a demographic as well as a military threat, a population with no civil and even fewer human rights, has inevitably led to excess both by the Israeli side and in the form of Palestinian resistance - violent and non-violent.

While the facts recorded in the book will be familiar to many, Gordon’s cogent analysis gives a fresh insight and perspective as well as exposing the dangerous trajectory on which Israel’s current separation policy is embarked. Those who speak of “peace” and “solutions to the conflict” would do well to heed Gordon’s closing words: “The only tenable way to solve the conflict is by addressing the Occupation’s structural contradictions. Any attempt to reach or impose a solution ... without reuniting the Palestinian people and their land and offering them full sovereignty over the land including a monopoly over legitimate violence and the means of movement, will ultimately lead to more contradictions, and the cycle of violence will surely resume” (p225).