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Life
behind Bars: Collective Punishment in the Name of Security
By
Bassem Eid
This
appeared in
The Center for Policy Analysis on
Palestine's
Information Brief No. 76, 17 May 2001.
Overview: A
general and comprehensive closure has been imposed on the
Palestinian territories-the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the
Gaza Strip-since the Oslo agreement was signed in 1993.
Palestinians wanting to enter Israel or to travel between the
West Bank and Gaza Strip need to obtain an exit permit, despite
the establishment of a so-called safe passage route between the
two areas in 1999. Permits are also required to travel abroad,
and Israel uses this dependency to pressure Palestinians into
collaboration. In addition, Israel's internal closure has
divided Palestinian cities and towns from each other. Since the
eruption of the second intifada, the comprehensive
closure has been almost continual, and all permits canceled. The
movement of goods-even food and medical supplies-has also been
restricted. This closure has had disastrous economic, social,
and psychological effects.
The Israeli army justifies
its closure of the territories based on "security needs," or
what is known in international humanitarian law as the "doctrine
of military necessity." A wave of suicide attacks inside the
Green Line, however, has shown that even the tightest closure
cannot stop violence from spreading to Israel. In effect, such a
policy amounts to collective punishment, which punishes every
Palestinian for the acts of a few.
Siege: Makhsom
is the Hebrew word for checkpoint, but it has found its way into
the local Arabic dialect, replacing the Arabic word haijez.
It is as if for the Palestinians, checkpoints are a singularly
Israeli invention. Israel's internal and external closure has
placed towns, villages, and areas in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip under siege, preventing entry and exit. This strategy has
reached such extremes that ever-larger segments of Israeli
society are raising their voices against it.
First encircled by
checkpoints complete with soldiers, the villages have gradually
found themselves isolated by concrete blocks, booby-trapped
roadblocks, piles of dirt, and trenches. Some of the roadblocks
were erected by Jewish settlers. According to the Palestinian
Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation, internal
closures divide the West Bank into 64 clusters and Gaza into 3
clusters.
The closure is quite
inconsistent: Palestinians often drive on back roads in full
sight of Israeli soldiers who do not attempt to stop them. The
closure is also indiscriminate. North of Jericho in the Jordan
Valley the Jiftlik area has not seen any clashes or incidents
since the beginning of the intifada. Its villagers do not have
permits to work in Israel and rely instead on the selling of
their agricultural produce in the markets of Tulkarem and
Nablus. Regardless, the road to Tulkarem has been closed since
early December 2000; farmers can hardly make a living under
these conditions. In a further escalation, the Israeli army has
made some 25 incursions into Palestinian-controlled territories
in recent weeks, including into Tulkarem.
Phone and electricity
lines are cut during the digging of trenches, leaving
Palestinians further separated from friends, relatives, and
emergency services outside their villages. They cannot count on
the occasional compassion of an Israeli soldier to get them to a
hospital in case of emergency. People die. Women give birth at
the soldiers' feet. Students and teachers cannot attend school.
Men cannot reach their workplaces. Agricultural produce cannot
be sold in neighboring towns, so it rots on the spot. Some
villages are lucky enough to remain accessible through an olive
field or dirt road-when it does not rain. Others are completely
isolated for weeks.
In the worst cases,
Palestinians are not allowed to leave their houses, almost a
constant condition for the past eight months for more than
30,000 Palestinians living in the Old City of Hebron. There the
curfew is an attempt to ensure a quiet life for the 400 Jewish
settlers who live in the heart of the city. The villages of
Huwwarah (Nablus district) and Silet al-Daher (Jenin district)
have also been placed repeatedly under curfew for the misfortune
of being located along a route used by settlers. In short, the
role of the army is to make the settlers feel as if they live in
Tel Aviv.
Economic and
Psychological Costs: The siege imposed on the Palestinian
territories is a form of collective punishment forbidden under
international humanitarian law and in contradiction of the most
basic principles of humanity. It has resulted in an unbearable
strain on the fragile Palestinian economy. The daily costs of
closure are estimated at more than $12 million. Israel has also
razed large swaths of Palestinian orchards and fields, uprooted
thousands of olive and fruit trees, demolished hundreds of homes
both with bulldozers and tank shells, and in other ways created
destruction that will have long-lasting economic effects.
Closure is a racist policy
whose psychological consequences-coupled with the reality of
more than 470 Palestinians killed, 87 under the age of 16, and
15,000 wounded-are hardly measurable at this stage. Still,
psychotherapists from Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without
Borders) are confronted with children who are more violent at
school, increasingly religious at home, and wet their beds at
night. A whole generation that had been spared Israel's
crackdown on the first intifada is now suffering from the
repression of the second one.
These psychological
effects are not difficult to understand if one visits the
Occupied Territories. Gaza, for example, is a tiny piece of sand
cuddled along the Mediterranean Sea, barely 45 kilometers long
and 5 to 12 kilometers wide. More than a million Palestinians
live cramped together in 60 percent of this area, while about
6,000 Jewish settlers occupy the remaining 40 percent. For the
past several months, crossing the 45 kilometers from Netzarim
Junction in the north to the south of the Gaza Strip has been a
time-consuming and hazardous adventure. There is one main road
linking the north and the south-a crucial thoroughfare for the
movement of people and goods-but for months at a time, Israel
has closed this junction, then reopened it for restricted time
periods, only to re-close it again.
Imagine a situation-quite
common-in which more than a thousand cars wait at Netzarim to go
south; the same number wait by Kfar Darom settlement to go
north. There are also donkey carts, trucks with food,
vegetables, livestock, gas, and equipment, United Nations and
Red Cross vehicles, ambulances, buses, and taxis. Vehicles start
lining up three to four hours before "opening hours." Israeli
tanks and armored cars are stationed at the roadblocks. If
vehicles come too close to the barriers or if the soldiers at
the checkpoints want vehicles to move, they simply start
shooting at the ground or in the air. Masses of people waiting
behind the first series of cars and trucks do not know where the
shooting is directed, so they start running away in chaos;
donkeys panic and children scream. This can happen several times
before the soldiers open the road.
Palestinians have two
hours to complete this arduous trip. If they do not make it,
they are stuck between checkpoints and will not be allowed to
turn back. If this happens during the afternoon, they are forced
to spend the night. Only one side of the road is open from Kfar
Darom, because the Jewish settlers are using the other side
(which has been separated by concrete barriers for "security
reasons"). Since only one side of the road is open, Palestinians
must frequently stop for oncoming traffic, losing time. If a
Jewish vehicle wants to cross, all Palestinian cars are stopped,
costing more precious time. They face the constant worry of
whether or not they will make it to the other side; they
constantly worry about gunshots from Israeli soldiers.
Not surprisingly given
this scenario, the closure is one of the reasons for Palestinian
anger and frustration, a permanent reminder during the last
seven years of the grip that Israel retains over the Palestinian
territories even after the establishment of the Palestinian
Authority. One hopes that common sense and the humanity of
Israelis and the international community may ease this iron grip
and allow the Palestinians to breathe. Like their Israeli
neighbors, Palestinians want to live in peace.
Bassem Eid is
Director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. The
above text may be used without permission but with proper
attribution to the author and to the Center for Policy Analysis
on Palestine. This Information Brief does not necessarily
reflect the views of the Center for Policy Analysis or The
Jerusalem Fund.
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