The state of Israel is in a constant legal state of emergency, a colonial legacy from the British Mandate, enabling it to legally determine Palestinians residing between the river and the sea as a dangerous population and prevent their entry to selected areas at various times. While Palestinian citizens of Israel ceased to be defined as potentially dangerous (that is, only formally) when the military regime was removed in 1966, residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip are defined as such by Israel today. The potential danger that Palestinians represent in the eyes of the state constitutes, for it, the justification for the many checkpoints piercing the land, the separation wall that rises up to a height of eight meters in urban areas such as Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Qalqilya and Tulkarm and for the permit regime through which the movement of West Bank Palestinians into the Green Line and the Jewish settlements is regulated, mainly for employment purposes in the Israeli labor market. That is because despite the collective definition of West Bank Palestinians as a dangerous population, a wide consensus prevails in Israel’s political sphere, on its various representatives along the years, regarding the legitimacy and need for their employment.
In Israel, the terms “National Resilience” and “Social Resilience” are intertwined and bound together, often represented as an ideal state of protection from the danger threatening Israeli society – as a whole. However, this protection is not only from an assailant lurking on the doorstep, an external threat that is about to break into the house; it is from those who live among us or commute daily to build our homes – including the structure we sit in right now – and the roads and bridges leading to them, the businesses scattered between them and the water, sewage and electricity infrastructure that connects them. At the same time, the discourse of resilience in Israel includes within it a civil demand, both from the collective and the individual, to be part of a “culture of preparedness” for the crises that is always about to erupt.[1] It is the demand for both constant alertness and civil cohesion to ensure maximum protection against threats to the individual and collective body alike, maintaining the connection between different institutions, and their ability to suddenly work together against such threats in times of need. It is a demand for extreme flexibility; always prepared for the possibility of the everyday suddenly erupting and being able to quickly recover each time it does.
In a report titled “Shared Future for Israeli Society – Strengthening Social Resilience: Insights and Recommendations”, published to the public in 2022 by the Team on Social Thought at the Institute for National Security Studies, edited by Gadi Eisenkot, the word “solidarity” appears 96 times.[2] In a note written at the beginning of the report, the authors explain that although the Hebrew equivalent of the word “solidarity” literally translates as “social cohesion”, they chose to adopt a non-Hebrew term since in their eyes it expresses a relation that transcends beyond connections between communities, shared values, and a sense of belonging. The word “belonging”, by the way, appears 19 times in the report, mostly in a combined form. For instance, “belonging to a unifying collective”, “belonging to the community, the state and its institutions”, and so forth.
The report defines “solidarity” as “a sense of brotherhood between individuals and diverse social groups, which manifests in individuals or groups standing up to support other individuals or groups besides themselves. Solidarity, the report states, is an essential feature for the existence and resilience of a society. The challenges to produce, maintain and deepen solidarity in Israeli society, which the report characterized as a deeply divided society, touch on political questions of identity, nationality, class, religion, and narrative. “The tensions and rifts between the different groups differ from one another in their depth. Jews and Arabs suffer from the most significant one, being part of a deep ongoing national conflict, which consequently mandates particular attention, both outwardly and inwardly”.
According to this report, solidarity is an essential component for Israel’s existence and resilience, but since there are “rifts” in Israeli society, this need is particularly challenging. The report expresses a distinction between inside and out, between social civic resilience constituting an internal mechanism of cohesion, and national resilience, which constitutes an internal mechanism operating faced outward. According to the authors of this report, social resilience or internal solidarity cannot be attained or sustained without national resilience, i.e., without a collective sense of belonging to and identifying with the State. Yet how can a society living under a state with obscure and ambiguous borders produce and maintain national resilience? Where is inside? Where is outside? When am I inside? When am I outside?
Israel’s borders are tantalizing and unclear, continually taking shape since its establishment, manifesting a site of constant struggle over legitimacy. Israel is a state that has no borders, since they transcend beyond space and time – Israel belongs to every Jew across the world which has the right to become citizen.[3] Additionally, the Green Line is a flickering border – the Israeli Ministry of Education itself has forbidden institutions to use maps that show it.[4] This is because the Green Line is only enforced on Palestinian bodies, while Jews and tourists cross it without difficulty or prior notice, Palestinians experience it daily, in the most immediate and physical way.[5]
“It’s shit to escape but they don’t give me a permit
so I just said fuck it you know[…] I found work in
Herzelia and the guy told me come tomorrow. So
I packed my stuff while my family was waiting to
say goodbye. My mom was really worried, but I
just went. I had to make money, so I escaped the
wall to work.”[6]
This quote is taken from a conversation I had in 2015 with Amir, then 18 years old, from Qalqilya, the fourth largest Palestinian city in the West Bank and the closest to Israel, surrounded by the separation wall – except one small eastern part not blocked by it. At the time Amir worked inside the Green Line without a permit, a shabash (שב”ח) according to the state, an acronym for illegal dweller used as a term almost solely in the context of Palestinians.[7] Alongside the matrix of checkpoints that pierce the land, the tall separation wall built along the Green Line and the ramified bureaucracy of the permit regime, the state maintains an ongoing blind eye policy lasting today, enabling masses of West Bank Palestinians to cross inside without a permit every month.[8] This policy is shaped and reshaped according to the states changing needs. In this way, Israel operates in two contradictory ways, on the one hand it prevents Palestinians defined as a security threat from entering through the checkpoint and on the other, informally, under the record, it continually enables them to enter in the masses without going through a single security check.
Everyone sees the documentation published in Israeli media along the years of the crowds of people, WB Palestinians, standing or walking in long rows stretching throughout hill tops, passing through the openings, crossing in; and the dozens of cars waiting for them on the other side.[9] West Bank Palestinians who fail to meet the conditions to obtain a permit, jump over the wall, smuggle their way in a trunk of a car, walk for long hours across mountain roads to reach a place where the separation wall has not yet been built, risking arrest and worse. Throughout the last decades, there have been long periods during which it was relatively easy to cross without a permit, though at other times, when Israeli enforcement is tightened, the Green Line becomes deadly. Amir’s description quoted above reveals the West Bank as a kind of prison, a reservoir of cheap and easy-to-exploit workers. His words also point at the profit generated through the maintenance of a constantly breached border, and the perception of a successful escape. It seems that the persistence to continue moving despite tall odds, which Amal Bashara pointed out to be a Palestinian feature, is exactly what is exploited in the most sophisticated way by Israel, which regularly allows the passage of “illegal workers”, defined by it as potentially dangerous and therefore denied entry, who are in practice the easiest to exploit and therefore the most profitable.[10]
Hundreds of thousands of West Bank Palestinians are scattered in construction sites throughout the cities, legally and illegally laboring on infrastructure, building, or renovating businesses and family homes, using heavy and dangerous equipment for prolonged periods of time. Israeli public and media occasionally discusses the constant infiltration of the Green-Line, mostly framing Palestinians entering without a permit to be a national crises. As a result, enforcement along the separation wall is tightened and police raids and mass arrests are showcased in the media, often accompanied by images of groups of men with blurred faces, bodies alone, standing handcuffed in a room, lying in a trunk of a car or other more grotesque and degrading graphic documentations.[11] Why are those people defined as shebaim? What differentiates them from those able to obtain a permit and enter through a checkpoint?
Israel classifies West Bank Palestinians through the permit regime, a mechanism with a publicly declared goal to identify and eliminate threats before they are actualized. In practice, the distinction between the “Worker” and the “Enemy” is continually blurred and is under constant formation.[12] Entry permits are obtained after a security check is undertaken through a system called “Rolling Stone”, which stores and sorts all information obtained about WB Palestinians from a variety of Israeli security, criminal and administrative institutions. Entry permits are issued for specific needs, such as employment – which is the most distributed permit permitting employment in restricted few industries only – for legal, health, religious matters, and disturbingly even for the cynical purpose of tourism. Each type of permit performs as a population management mechanism, distributed in quotas set by the government from time to time accompanied with various conditions, limitations and restrictions defined yearly by Shabak.
For example, to obtain a work permit in the field of construction, which accounts for most work permits distributed, West Bank Palestinians must be married and over the age of twenty-two.[13] In other words, work permits are only granted to those who have heavier financial responsibilities and are therefore more likely to be bound to their employers. The restrictions over age and marital status enable the state to interfere and intervene in the most intimate textures of Palestinian life. These restrictions encourage many WB Palestinians seeking to obtain a work permit – considering the high rates of unemployment in the occupied territories – to marry early and establish a household, undertaking heavier economic commitments. As a result, workers become dependent on the stability of their employment, completely devoted to their employer, thus regulated into becoming “ideal workers”. Moreover, these restrictions collectively and automatically define all young, single West Bank Palestinians as a dangerous threat.
The permit regime enables the state to manage the movement of West Bank Palestinians across time and space. For example, work permits define a rigid timeframe, mostly excluding nighttime and lasting between 05:00 to 19:00/22:00. Consequently, apart from time spent in the workspace, West Bank Palestinians can in effect only be on their way to and from work. Thus, these strict temporal restrictions exclude them from formulating and taking part in interactions that do not include employment while inside the Green Line. These restrictions are profit oriented, channeling towards maximum productivity while reducing West Bank Palestinians to their function as laborers. In practice, many of them avoid standing in crowded checkpoints for long hours, and remain in Israel overnight, becoming “illegals” with the sun goes down.
Resilience in Israel means safety, self-protection, a way of self-defense – never aggression. The state of emergency in which Israel exists, and the justification mechanism on which its security rhetoric is grounded, produces a society in permanent alert, within which violence is constantly denied (e.g., Israel’s *Defense* Force). The state’s violence is always framed as an act of survival, a necessary response, violence inflicted due to the circumstances, and which is consequently crowned as heroism, framed as necessary, and glorified as holy. The permit regime, the checkpoints, and the separation wall, claimed to be designed to prevent danger, in practice, perform as profitable mechanisms that deepen Jewish supremacy across the land, using West Bank Palestinians as a cheap and disposable workforce – a resource exploited to the maximum. That is because with their very bodies, West Bank Palestinians build the Zionist state, illegally employed under impossible conditions that reduce their presence to the most profitable minimum.
Work permits, like all any other permits, can be canceled at any given moment. Closures over the West Bank are announced in surprise while security tensions are high or regularly every year (on Jewish holidays and election days), automatically cancelling all permits and effectively collectively criminalizing all West Bank Palestinians inside the Green Line. Employers themselves can revoke their workers permits immediately, by sending a request on a government website or by calling the police. In fact, any citizen, Jewish citizens in the most significant way, can bring about the arrest and cancellation of entry permits of West Bank Palestinians, without much effort, under the protection of our inherent legal supremacy. The difference between the “worker” and the “enemy”, or between danger and profit, is constantly blurred, just as Israel’s so-called border itself is enforced, arbitrarily and according to the changing interests of the various agents on the ground.[14]
In Israel, the discourse of resilience includes within it a civil demand to always be watchful and keep an open eye, ensuring the safety of the entire collective body. This requirement is grounded upon the legal authority given to all citizens to act according to their judgment and bring to the elimination of identified threats.[15] Recently, the expectation to carry weapons within the Green Line and the settlements to assist security forces in managing potential threats has increased.[16] All citizens are agents of the state, responsible for the protection of the collective body with the authority to inflict violence on its behalf, if sufficient suspicion of threat arises. In this constant tension filled state of emergency, tragic “mistakes” happen, and Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews have been shot and killed when wrongly suspected of being dangerous.[17]
The State of Israel does not wish to definitively define its territories and continually blurs its borders. it does not intend to include West Bank Palestinians as citizens – as this would damage its demographic efforts for ensuring Jewish supremacy. The discourse of resilience in Israel, expressed in the report I opened with, requires Israeli society to maintain “relationships that transcend beyond community ties, shared values and a sense of belonging” and this is because it is deeply rooted in a narrative of illusion. Israel does not have a defined geographical border with the West Bank and yet it demands that we protect it. The distinction between inside and outside collapses, the border is everywhere, on both sides of the Green Line, marked on the Palestinian bodies wherever they are, embodying the end and the beginning of the state. The emergency that never ends enables the constant changes in status of West Bank Palestinians, allowing the state to fully exploit them to verge of extinction, for the sake of deepening Jewish domination between the river and the sea. Yet, at the same time, Israel creates a divided society, always on alert, with its finger on the trigger, postponing the end that is about to arrive.
[1] Israel is an extremely militaristic society. The mandatory military service for Jews is a deep consensus and is an initiation process of transition and a springboard to the Israeli employment world. It binds individual identities with the state and turns everyone from a young age into its agents.
[2] There are many examples of cases where citizens have taken the powers of the state into their own hands. But it is also interesting to examine the reaction to opposite scenarios, in which there was no one to do so. On November 15, 2022, for example, a 19-year-old Palestinian resident of the village of Hares ran over and stabbed to death three people and badly wounded four others, at the entrance to Ariel’s industrial zone. The news of this tragedy was circulated in Israeli media, including surprised reactions from security officials, who wondered why it took twenty minutes to “neutralize” the Palestinian boy. These voices did not point an accusing finger at the army and the Shabak, but rather at the citizens around, among whom there was no one to stop him sooner. This surprise reflects a how encompassing the role that the state assigns to its Jewish citizens, to always prosecute its policy everywhere. See: “The failures of the attack and the dangerous effect”, Ron Ben Yishai, Ynet, 11/15/22
[3] Examples of this: “The immediate suspect: Jews with an oriental appearance became a target in the wave of terror”, Tamar Dressler, Ma’ariv, 14.10.15, “A serious incident in Kochav Yair: a man mistakenly suspected of being a terrorist was shot by an Israeli citizen”, Moshe Nussbaum and Nitzan Shapira, N12, 24.11.22; “Tragedy in Ra’anana: A mentally disabled man was suspected of being a terrorist – and was shot to death, watch”, Haredim 10, 14.11.22; “The Jew who attacked a Bedouin man suspected of being a terrorist; “I apologizes, it was in the heat of the moment”, Yanir Yagna, Walla!, 26.11.15
[4] The tension filled dual position of the Enemy Worker (on which I expanded about in the past) is reflected in Israeli discourse and media repeatedly, for example; “In the complex reality of Yesh, the infiltration of “Shabahaim” is not necessarily a bad thing”, Noam Amir, first source, 29.3.21; “Parents complain: many workers work in kindergarten without supervision”, Niki Gutman, nrg, 26.9.17; “The Minister of Defense confirmed: Palestinian workers will not be able to travel on buses in Israel“, Noam Amir, Ma’ariv, 26.10.14; “A city in fear: Shebaim roam freely. By a miracle a massacre was avoided”
[5] I thank Michal Givoni for the conceptualization of the “discourse of resilience”, presented by her in a meeting of the research group leading to the publication of this issue.
[6] The report was first published to the public on the website of the Institute for National Security Studies, Tel Aviv University, February 2022. The report was first printed in October 2021 but was only distributed internally.
[7] Tawil-Souri, Helga (2009). New Palestinian centers: An ethnography of the “checkpoint economy”. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 12(3), 217-35.
[8] “The Ministry of Education demands that the Tel Aviv Municipality bands all maps showing the Green Line from their schools”, Or Kashti, Haaretz, 24.8.22
[9] Palestinian citizens of Israel, defined as a dangerous population until 1966, cross the Green Line though generally endure a humiliating experience. West Bank Palestinians on the other hand are defined as a dangerous population today and cannot cross in without a permit. The entry for Palestinians from Gaza is virtually impossible since the blockade was imposed in 2005. The disgraceful employment conditions of the few Gaza residents who are granted the “privilege” of working in Israel are described in an appeal submitted in January 2022 by the organizations Kav LaOved (Worker’s Hotline) and Gisha (Access) – Legal Center for Freedom of Movement to the Ministry of Economy and Industry and the Administration of Border Crossings, Population and Immigration. In addition, although foreign citizens that received tourist visas from Israel can easily cross barriers, they are not allowed to teach, study, volunteer, work and live in Israel. For more on this, see: “New rules for entering the West Bank exacerbate the isolation of the Palestinians”, published on the Human Rights Watch website on 1/23/23.
[10] Field notes, 12.4.15. The quote is originally in English.
[11] It would be interesting to examine the few media moments in which refugees, asylum seekers and migrant workers are called illegal residents (שב”חים).
[12] For example: “Calculated risk: what happens in the separation fence every morning should worry Israel“, Nir Davori, N12 30.1.21.
[13] Bishara, Amahl. Driving While Palestinian in Israel and the West Bank: The Politics of Disorientatio n and the Routes of a Subaltern Knowledge, in American Ethnologist, Vol. 42, No. 1,(2015): 38
[14] There are no exact estimates of the number of Palestinians crossing the Green Line without a permit.
[15] For example: “Rest in peace? Shebaim found hiding in graves“, Azri Amram, N12, 23.11.14; “The police were amazed: there were many in the refrigerator and in the cupboards. Documentation“, Guy Ezra, Srugim 3.7.17.
[16] The short framework of this essay does not allow me to address the Israeli intelligence apparatus, which is significantly responsible for this blur. Shabak trades in permits for intelligence purposes and uses them to convince many to cooperate. This tactic used by Shabak instills deep suspicion within Palestinian communities and between them and Jews in the area.
[17] Status of permits for Palestinians to enter Israel, for their departure abroad and for their transit between IoS and the Gaza Strip 13.1.22