The Infrastructure of Israeli Settler Colonialism (Part 1): The Jordan Valley
Since its establishment, Israel has distinguished the persons under its civil and military jurisdiction based on religion. Throughout Israel Proper and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), comprised of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, Israel applies a different set of laws to its Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants respectively. By bifurcating Jewish nationality from Israeli citizenship, the State is able to afford demonstrable and significant privilege to Jewish persons even beyond Israel’s undeclared borders (hence the reference to Israel Proper) at the expense of the political and socio-economic well-being of its non-Jewish citizens. Within the OPT, the brunt of Israel’s policies are more severe as they are applied under a military occupation regime for which no oversight or legal redress exists. The impact of these policies is to diminish the number of Palestinians, to remove them from their original lands, and to concentrate them geographically. Within the OPT, they are concentrated into Area A; into no-man’s land within the Seam Zone between the Apartheid Wall and the Green Line; and into isolated communities surrounded by Israeli settlements and their associated military apparatus. Within Israel Proper, they are concentrated in urban townships, in unrecognized villages, and other ghettoized communities.
In this series of videos featuring interviews with Palestinians facing forced displacement, we seek to show a glimpse into Israel’s infrastructure of settler-colonialism.
We start with Part 1, on the Jordan Valley.
Click here to read more and scroll to the bottom for the second part of the above video.
![[Download full-sized version here.]
Not Enough Water in the West Bank?
This Friday is World Water Day and an opportune time to highlight the gross misallocation of water resources between Israel and the Palestinians. Water is one of the five permanent status issues in the Oslo Peace Accords, twenty years old this year. Accordingly, its accesss and consumption is relegated to political negotiations and beyond the purview of international law on water. As a result, the Palestinian Authority has had little basis upon which to challenge Israel’s confiscation of water for the past twenty years.
Sixty percent of one of Israel’s most significant water sources, the Western Aquifer, is located in the occupied West Bank. Israel derives eighty percent of the Acquifer’s annual yield and Palestinians receive the rest. Prime Ministers Menachim Begin, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Barak consider control and use of Palestinian water use as a precondition to any Palestinian state. Were it subject to international law, at most Israel would receive only fifty percent of shared water resources.
Failure to abide by these terms of reference has devastated the Palestinian economy. Consider that a little more than one-third of the irrigable land in OPT is actually irrigated, which costs the economy 110,000 jobs per year and ten percent of its annual GDP.
While the security sector remains robust, the agricultural sector has shrunk from 28.5% of the economy in 1993 to 5.8% today.
Continue reading here](http://24.media.tumblr.com/f85fdde4d721aa306a5373c8485d4117/tumblr_mk0mw1IuXS1rymxjqo1_400.jpg)
[Download full-sized version here.]
Not Enough Water in the West Bank?
This Friday is World Water Day and an opportune time to highlight the gross misallocation of water resources between Israel and the Palestinians. Water is one of the five permanent status issues in the Oslo Peace Accords, twenty years old this year. Accordingly, its accesss and consumption is relegated to political negotiations and beyond the purview of international law on water. As a result, the Palestinian Authority has had little basis upon which to challenge Israel’s confiscation of water for the past twenty years.
Sixty percent of one of Israel’s most significant water sources, the Western Aquifer, is located in the occupied West Bank. Israel derives eighty percent of the Acquifer’s annual yield and Palestinians receive the rest. Prime Ministers Menachim Begin, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Barak consider control and use of Palestinian water use as a precondition to any Palestinian state. Were it subject to international law, at most Israel would receive only fifty percent of shared water resources.
Failure to abide by these terms of reference has devastated the Palestinian economy. Consider that a little more than one-third of the irrigable land in OPT is actually irrigated, which costs the economy 110,000 jobs per year and ten percent of its annual GDP.
While the security sector remains robust, the agricultural sector has shrunk from 28.5% of the economy in 1993 to 5.8% today.
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- Mainstream Taboo on Criticizing Israel Suffers Visible Cracks (Video)
- Almost Two Years of Bloodshed in Syria: What End is There in Sight?
- The Sad Potential End of Beheadings in Saudi Arabia
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- She Who Tells a Story: Interview with the Photography Collective Rawiya
- Tunisia and the IMF: A Beggar State and an Impoverished People
- جميلة بوحيرد
- مجلس التعاون الخليجي وحق العقوبة المقدس
Mainstream Taboo on Criticizing Israel Suffers Visible Cracks (Video)
For those of us in the United States who have been advocating for Palestinian rights for many years, our impact can seem dismal by looking only at the unshakable bias of US foreign policy on the issue. However, since real political change happens from the ground up, and the political establishment is often the last element to respond to social change, the impact of our activism can be more accurately measured by looking at how public discourse has changed over the last decade.
A decade ago, sympathy for the Palestinian quest for justice was virtually nonexistent in the United States. But in the last ten years, some noteworthy signs of change have appeared: a former President wrote a book about Israeli apartheid in the occupied territories; leading academics at Harvard and the University of Chicago wrote a book criticizing the Israel lobby’s influence in Washington; and major Jewish American organizations emerged to challenge the fiction that AIPAC speaks for a singular American Jewish community on U.S. policy towards Israel. Also, a plurality of Americans and a majority of Democrats now believe that Israeli settlements should be dismantled and the land returned to Palestinians. We certainly still have a lot of work ahead of us in expanding the debate further as well as translating the shift in discourse into an actual shift in policy. Still, it is important to remember that we are making a difference. The following video shows the extent to which our efforts have penetrated mainstream American media.
Syria: A war or a revolution?
Almost Two Years of Bloodshed in Syria: What End is There in Sight?
With the second anniversary of the Syrian uprising fast approaching, there seems to be no end in the near future to the nightmare the country is currently going through. What are the myths and realities of the Syrian uprising, as well as the roots and the trajectories? Professor Beshara Doumani of Brown University spoke about these issues with Syrian-born activist and sociologist Yasser Munif.
VOMENA also received an update on the current Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) efforts at Stanford University from Omar Shakir; a member of Students for Palestinian Equal rights.
“The last decades have seen the emergence of a range of attempts to address the conflict of Palestine that use music, along with several Western classical musical initiatives that seek explicitly to involve Palestinians. These are in themselves examples of a much broader contemporary phenomenon in which the arts are brought into sites of political conflict or other strife.”
An excerpt from Rachel Beckles Willson, Orientalism and Musical Mission: Palestine and the West. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Read a longer excerpt, as well as in interview with the author here.
“Twitter is important. When there is an action on the ground, it is extremely important that people are on Twitter tweeting about it and spreading the word. The problem is that the majority decide to take that role. The balance is not quite as everyone hopes. We need more people on ground. Nonetheless, as I said before, a lot of the tweeps are active on ground. And when they tweet, they tweet from the field.
It is human nature to have a tendency to slack off. But at the end of the day, I cannot judge the level of activity of anyone by how active they are on Twitter. And let us remember, the acts of struggle and resistance are not only the ones we see.
Sometimes actions could be so sensitive that they remain covered in secrecy during planning and after execution. Many Palestinians are in Israeli prisons now just because of this unhealthy phenomenon. Many people have full time jobs of just pointing fingers at people and deciding who is an activist and who is not, or who is patriotic and who is not. In a way, they help the occupation in trying to make actions planned in secrecy surface, and thus fail.”
[Left: Old market in al-Khalil. Image by Isis Nusair.]
[Middle: Israeli security checkpoint by the Ibrahimi Mosque. Image by Isis Nusair.]
[Right: Israeli security tower at the entrance to al-Shuhada Street. Image by Isis Nusair.]
Parallel Walks in al-Khalil: A Photo Essay
I last visited al-Khalil (Hebron) with my family when I was a child in the mid 1970s. I only have vague recollections of that visit, except for the place where Ibrahim (Abraham) was to sacrifice his son. For some reason, and maybe because as a child I was unable to comprehend why a father would be asked to sacrifice his son, that visit remained ingrained in my memory for years to come.
While studying in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, I always visited Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Birzeit, especially for solidarity student visits during the first Palestinian Intifada. I have been living in the United States since 1993, yet despite my repeated visits back home for research and to see my family in Nazareth, al-Khalil was never on my agenda. It was not until I agreed to be a discussant for the film This is My Country Hebron—which at the time was to be screened in January 2012 as part of the annual Human Rights Film Festival at Denison University—that I went back to al-Khalil to see with my own eyes what was happening on the ground. I went again for another visit in early May of that year, and by now it seems that al-Khalil will be part of every future visit I make.
“Situating intra-family femicide within the global economy and the feminization of poverty in the new world order makes it possible to interrogate the ubiquity of misogynistic violence in patriarchal cultures not only in Arab countries but also around the world. In its global expansion to the remote corners of the world in search for new markets and cheaper sources of labor, the neoliberal ideology of economic globalization recodes women’s labor and redefines the parameters of their mobility. Consequently, traditional gender formations themselves get disrupted as Western notions of freedom and the division of labor are negotiated and appropriated. This cultural disruption happens in complete disproportion to the deteriorating economic conditions among Palestinians. More than ever, the Palestinians are excluded from Israel’s capitalist economy, which is now increasingly outsourced to migrant workers from around the world. And the crisis of tradition and gender, in turn, is violently acted out on women’s bodies.”
The conversation on honor killings under occupation continues with The Invisible Link: Honor Killing and Global Capitalism
For previous pieces on this matter read:
