Mobilities and Forced Migration by Nick Gill & Javier Caletrio & Victoria Mason

Author:Nick Gill & Javier Caletrio & Victoria Mason [Gill, Nick & Caletrio, Javier & Mason, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780415857956
Google: 2wq6mAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 17573796
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mamnu’ at-tajawwul [walking outside is forbidden] […] It is prohibited to leave your house. This curfew is imposed until further notice. Whoever does not abide by the rules will be shot at. (announcements by Israeli soldiers patrolling the streets of Ramallah, July, 2002)

The recent Palestinian history of movement is a history of forced mobility, internal immobility and external immobility. Forced mobility has left the majority of Palestinians homeless, colonised, stateless and displaced, while internal immobility for those remaining in part of Mandate Palestine means facing immobility on practically every level of life: a cocktail of curfews, checkpoints and military zones combining to form quasi-Bantustans. And there is external immobility, marked by territorial dividing lines, such as the annexation of (border) land. Movement restriction is an important feature of social and colonial control and clearly an expression of the existing power relations in Palestine (Brown, 2004). For years now World Bank reports have confirmed that this imposed immobility lays the foundations for unemployment, poverty and malnourishment. Closure, as the general movement restriction in Palestine, is applied indiscriminately to the whole population. Though a reality since 1948, the practice dramatically increased since the 1991 Gulf War – turning into a lengthy collective punishment – and was finally formalised after the Oslo ‘peace’ Accords of 1993. Immobility in high-dense territories such as is the case in Gaza is especially distressing.1 Thus ironically under Israeli occupation mobility and peace are not only unrelated, but immobility has increased specifically during the ‘peace’ era.

The system of immobility in Palestine is an outcome of artificial geography based on a mythic narrative of entitlement, implemented through military power to set land boundaries and to sort and grade the people (Ra’ad and Nafi’, 2007, p. 33). The Israeli colonial project unfolds into a double occupation: an occupying military force and a colonial-settler presence – now solidified with a snake-shaped wall penetrating deep into the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). This is not coincidental or an aberration but part of Israel’s fait-accompli policy to annex parts of the West Bank (via Jewish settlements and the wall). And this form of colonialism not only halts mobility but results in the most detested practices that symbolise life under occupation. A case in point is the southern West Bank city of Hebron, where I regularly observed a few heavily armed soldiers closing off the main road in the city and freezing all movement, so that three colonist children could be escorted from their school to their settlement. The occupants of the settler-colonies penetrate Palestinian space and meanwhile enjoy what seems to be an unlimited mobility. Yet, this free mobility is never ‘complete’ because it takes place in a colonized space and context, where the oppressor can never be totally free. Settlers and occupying forces fear for their safety particularly on so-called ‘settler roads’ where kids often throw stones from hills at their cars.

While places like downtown-Hebron are the embodiment of everyday apartheid, the Palestinian cause in general has particularly since 9/11 become part of a multilayered geo-political logic.

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