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Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

Edited Transcript of Remarks by Dr. Saree Makdisi
'For the Record' No. 297 (23 June 2008)

In his recently published book, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, Saree Makdisi takes the reader on a tour of what everyday life is like for Palestinians living under occupation. In its four chapters, the book describes how the Israeli occupation controls the lives of Palestinians from the 'Outside' as Palestinians struggle with military checkpoints, roadblocks and the Wall; from the 'Inside' in terms of family life, which is highly regulated; from the 'Outside In' as Palestinians and their communities are becoming increasingly isolated; and from the 'Inside Out,' which deals with the removal of Palestinians from their land. 

The Palestine Center
Washington, DC
28 May 2008


Dr. Saree Makdisi:

Thank you all for coming, and I'd especially like to thank Samar and the Palestine Center for inviting me to speak here. In fact, I was supposed to be speaking at a bookstore called 'Politics and Prose' today, a well-known liberal bookstore I gather. When they found out that my book, which is about the occupation mostly, ends by questioning the feasibility of the two-state solution [and] about the posing instead of a one state solution which Palestinians and Israelis would live equally as equal citizens in a state that treats all of its citizens equally irrespective of religion, they found that a completely unacceptable proposition and immediately cancelled my appearance at Politics and Prose. So, I think there's a lot to be said about that. I went back to them protesting on intellectual grounds; I quoted John Milton at them to say freedom of speech. I also said that seriously, you may or may not like the one state solution, you may believe in a two-state solution, you may believe in a six-state solution, but the point is all of these things are on the table and they all need to be discussed. It's not like you can just wish one away and say, 'No, this is off-limits. We're not going to talk about it because it's beyond the probable; it's unacceptable, unthinkable or unappealing.' It's there; it's becoming more real by the day not just because more and more Palestinians want it but also because that's what Israeli policy has created. That's something I will come back to at the end of my talk today.

What I want to talk about today is my new book, and I will tell you today a little bit about how the book works, what it's about, what it tries to do and then read you snippets from the book just to give you a sense of the flavor of the different chapters. So, the idea of the book was rather than taking the reader and immediately bombarding her with facts and figures and history of 1948, 1967, rather to begin by taking the reader on a tour of what everyday life is like for Palestinians living under occupation. So, to begin with the here and now, to begin with the everyday life right now and then gradually to work backwards or outwards to talk about the history, the wider context of the conflict, what it's all about, what's at stake and then how to make sense of the various obstacles that Palestinians encounter in their everyday lives. So, it's a book that works from the inside out but also it attempts to show in a sense how Palestine was turned inside out and is still being turned inside out and has been since 1948. That is literally emptied of its people to a large extent. Also, it's an attempt to give the readers everything they need to know about the Palestinian cause, its background, its history, its context and so forth. So, it tries to do all those things and to talk about the occupation.

There's a kind of play on words in the subtitle because it's an everyday occupation in the sense that it's, first and foremost, an occupation of everyday life. That is to say, if you're a Palestinian living under occupation, it dominates your everyday life. That is all the things that we take for granted in this country: going shopping, going to school, going to work or tending one's fields. All these everyday activities become much more difficult and problematic if you're living under occupation. That's how to understand the occupation best, not in abstract ideas but to understand how it works at an everyday level. As the book shows, for Palestinians, the occupation is everyday in another sense in just dealing with it as a Palestinian. That is standing in line, queuing up a checkpoint, getting permits and so forth becomes an occupation like a living, a job and so on. It's an occupation that takes over your everyday life and turns your everyday life into a job. Just to get from point A to point B requires an inordinate amount of work if you're a Palestinian whereas if you're a Jewish settler you can crisscross the Occupied Territories at will, freely [and] nobody stops you.

As I said, it's a book that works from the inside out. It starts with little things and works its way out. It has four main chapters which I called quite simply 'Outsides,' 'Insides,' 'Outside in' and 'Inside out.' The chapter on 'Outsides' deals with the ways in which Palestinians' everyday lives are controlled from the outside basically'access to roads or dealing with life in the shadow of the Wall that the Israelis have built in the West Bank or dealing with roadblocks and checkpoints and so forth. So, [it is] acting outside a geographical space effectively. The chapter on 'Insides' deals with the ways in which people's everyday inside life'that is their family circumstances, their personal identity, their identity card, their birth certificates, their family registrations and so forth'are also very highly policed and regulated by the occupation. The chapter 'Outside in' tells the story of how for more and more Palestinians, life is becoming a life living in communities that are increasingly cut off from the outside world. Gaza is the ultimate sort of prototype here'a world that has been turned almost literally 'outside in.' You can't go outside it, and you're living in a bubble basically that's controlled from the outside by the Israelis. Then, 'Inside Out' is the chapter that ultimately gets to 1948. That begins by showing that the process of removing Palestinians from their land is something that is happening on a daily basis today as much as it was in 1948 although it is quieter and its more at this level of one, two, three, five and ten people at a time rather than 500,000 people at a time or 700,000 people at a time as was the case in 1948.

What I want to do is read a couple of snippets from each of these sections to give you a sense of how the book feels, and I'll keep the reading very, very short just to give you an idea. So, the first one comes from the chapter 'Outsides.' Like I said, that's the chapter that talks about the way in which one's everyday outside life is controlled'how you can get from point A to point B, what kind of obstacles you face in the conduct of your everyday life, physical obstacles that you have to deal with. The chapter really begins with the encounter of a Palestinian farmer with the Wall that Israel has built in the West Bank. (Referring to a PowerPoint presentation) The map here is a relatively recent map and the situation hasn't changed all that much since 2006. The Wall as you can see is not built for the most part on the 1967 border. It's built largely inside the West Bank; about 80 percent of it is inside the West Bank. So, what that means is that there's a gap that's opened up on the west side of the West Bank between the 1967 border and the Wall. That's an area that Israelis call the seam zone. So, it's still part of the West Bank it's West Bank land'but it's cut off by the Wall. There are tens of thousands of Palestinians who own farmland on the West side of the Wall inside the West Bank but who now live on the other side of the Wall because that's where the Israelis put it. They put it for the most part between Palestinian farmers' houses and their lands.

That chapter begins with the story of a guy who wants to get to his farm where he grows tomatoes and cucumbers. And basically, he can't or it becomes very difficult to do so. So, I will just read you a couple of pages from this:

Mohammed Jalud lives in a small village of Izbat Jalud, just south of Qalqilya in the West Bank. He has been eking out a living by farming a small plot of land, growing tomatoes and cucumbers and other crops. Until recently, it took him ten minutes to walk from his house to the plot of land that he owns just to the west of the village. In September 2003, the immense wall that Israel started building in the West Bank came to the area around Qalqilya and cut off the village that he lives in from the land.  The Israelis built a gate in the wall, right near the village actually, that theoretically would enable access for Palestinians from their houses to their land, but the gate wasn't open to Palestinians so he couldn't use it. So to reach his crops, he had to start travelling far to the south to another gate that was open to Palestinians at Azun Atma.

(Referring to a PowerPoint presentation) This is a zoomed in map. So, this is the village we're talking about here. This is the gate that's near his house. He lives in the village and his land is over here. This is the seam zone here. This dotted line is the 1967 border; the pink line is the Wall. So, his land is all over here. He couldn't use this gate; he had to go to the gate that's all the way down here, cross through this gate and then cross over and back up to his land just on the other side of that gate.  It's about two kilometers down and then back up, it's two kilometers; it becomes a four kilometer round trip walk:

To reach his crops, Mohammed had to start traveling several kilometers along the wall to the gate of Azun Atma, which was open to Palestinians. For a couple of months, he was able to go south to Azun Atma, cross through the gate there, and then go back north on the other side of the wall to reach his land'just across from the gate at Izbat Jalud (which is just across from his house), which remained closed to him. What had once been a ten-minute walk to the land that he farmed now involved at least an hour, assuming that there was no delay crossing the gates and coming and going. But at least, he could get to his crops.

As I said, most of its length, the Wall, is not built on the borders. It's built inside the West Bank. So, there's a huge chunk of territory that's affecting tens of thousands of Palestinian farmers who are in this situation. And what you have to do to get access to your land is to apply for a permit to the Israeli authorities. To apply for a permit means that you have to prove that the land is where you say it is and that it really is yours, not your uncle's, your cousin's or your brother's. If you want to get permits for yourself, that's one thing; if you want to get permits for your farm lands, that's another permit; if you want to get a permit for your kids to help you, that's another permit; if you want to get a permit for your donkey, that's yet another permit. So, it becomes a nightmare applying for permits.

Applying for permits means going and standing in line, filling out forms and waiting to hear back. It becomes a bureaucratic nightmare just to get to your own farm land in your own territory, mind you. So, I give the description of what it's like to get the permits finally.  And I point out that even when one can get a permit, it doesn't mean that you can actually get to your land because there are still other obstacles that you face. Even if a land owner is granted a permit to access his land in the gap between the Wall and the 1967 border, his immediate family may not be. He may not have anybody to help him plow, sow, water, wheat or harvest his crops. And even if various members of the family are granted permits, seasonal or day laborers will almost certainly be denied permits. At this point, in fact, the Israelis are denying permits to over 80 percent of those who have one farm land in the gap between the Wall and the border.

Mohammed Jalud, however, had cleared all these hurdles. He actually got the permit. Shortly after November 2003 when the Israelis institutionalized the process of applying for permits, he was able to obtain the two permits he needs to get to his lands. And they gave him the permits specifically for the gate of Azun Atma to the south, the southern one, but they didn't let him take his tractor in. So, he had to walk the whole way in and out. If was going to take in fertilizer, he had to do it on his own back. If he was to harvest anything, he had to take in produce on his own back too. Like I said, he could apply for a permit for a donkey, but that also means waiting in line and doing several applications, etc. Anyway, he kept on doing this, he kept going, tending his crops, fertilizing, watering, etc. Then, the Israelis started playing games with the opening and closing times of the gate. Instead of being open all the time, they would open them for ten minutes in the morning, again in noon and again in the evening. So if he just wanted to water, he had to go through, do what he wanted to do, then wait hours to get back out because the gate was closed. 

Suddenly in 2004, the Israelis decided to open the gate near his house after all, which is great news because that means he can start walking again the ten minute walk he had before with the permit. So, he goes with his permit in hand to the northern gate, the one near his house, and the soldiers there tell him, 'Yeah, this gate is now open, but unfortunately your permit is for the southern gate.' So he says, 'Ok, so what do you want me to do?' They say, 'Well, you have to go to the southern gate.' So, he goes down to the southern gate, and the Israeli soldier say, 'Yeah, your permit is for the southern gate, but unfortunately there's a gate closer to your house and your land so you have to use the northern gate.' He goes back to the northern gate, and they say, 'No, your permit is for the southern gate.' So, he applies for a new permit, which takes weeks. Finally, he gets a new permit and it's for the southern gate. So, he applies for a new permit again and again. He keeps getting permits that are all for the southern gate that they won't let him use. A year goes by and he was unable to get to his crops.  Then finally, he gets a permit to use the northern gate after all, but it had been a year.

The point is according to Israelis' unique interpretation of the Ottoman land code, if a Palestinian farmer doesn't tend his fields for a certain amount of time, the land can be expropriated. It's illegal; it's a violation of international law, but that's how the Israelis read the Ottoman land code. So, it's a risk even if they stop you from tending your crops by building a wall between you and your crops, for example, or by not letting you get through the Wall. It doesn't matter; you still run the risk of losing your land. So, that's just one case that I like to mention because I think it symbolizes what's going on. 

I want to read you another little snippet from the chapter 'Outsides,' which is again about the conduct of everyday life and dealing with the obstacles that one faces like the Wall or as in this case the greed of checkpoints that the Israeli army operates throughout the West Bank. You all know that there are hundreds and hundreds of checkpoints and roadblocks in the West Bank. In November 2006, there were about 520 checkpoints. The last time I checked the U.N. statistics, which was March this year, there were 612. So, it's gone up.  There's always talk about Hamas is in Gaza [and] Fateh is in the West Bank, so the Israelis are going to liberalize things in the West Bank. It's not true. They have actually increased the number of checkpoints and roadblocks.

This is a story about a guy trying to live his life, trying to cross a checkpoint only this time with his family. I'll just read it. It's his story, so I'll speak in his voice so you can hear what his story is. This is just a normal guy living his life under normal but really abnormal circumstances in the West Bank. And this is what his everyday life is like. So, just imagine putting yourself in his shoes.  The story takes place by a checkpoint called Huwwara near Nablus in the northern West Bank. It's about a guy called Farid, who is a 39-year-old father of two kids, and he's stuck at the checkpoint with his whole family'his wife and kids are with him. So, this is his story:

I left my house at around 5:00 A.M. this morning. My wife, Nu'am, and my children, Suleiman, age seven, and Muhammad, age six, came with me. I took my family to Nablus this morning in order to get the children clothes for school. We drove through the Huwwara checkpoint. When we got there, one of the soldiers checked my papers and my ID card and he let us through. I drove toward the central vegetable market in Nablus and sold my vegetables. When I finished, we went to get school supplies and books and clothes for the kids. When we finished shopping, we got back in the car and started driving home. We got back to the Huwwara checkpoint (the same check point) at 8:00 A.M. (so three hours later). I noticed that the soldiers who had let me through in the morning had been replaced by a new bunch of soldiers. I stopped the car in front of the checkpoint, and the commander, who had tags on his arms, told me to show him my ID card. I gave him my ID card and the special permit I got from the Israeli authorities which allows me to drive through that checkpoint. The commander checked my papers and then told me to park the car by the concrete blocks near the checkpoint. After I parked, the commander took my keys and said to me: 'You have to wait.' He also told my wife and my kids to stand by the checkpoint. About an hour later, I went over to him to see if there was some sort of problem because of which he wasn't letting us through. The commander said that there was no problem, but that I couldn't pass through the checkpoint today. I told him that I had crossed in the morning in order to go to Nablus to sell my vegetables and that I wanted to go back home. The commander said: 'Don't argue. Today, you're not allowed to pass.' He then told me to stand on the side of the road with my family. I know Hebrew, so we spoke in Hebrew. At around 9:30 A.M., my children got hungry and wanted breakfast. My wife decided to ask the commander to let us through. He told her, in bad Arabic, that she and the kids could go through but that I couldn't go through with them with the car. My wife told him that we had passed through the checkpoint earlier and that we are a family. She asked him why he was trying to separate us, and why he wants them to leave their breadwinner at the checkpoint. The commander yelled at my wife, saying: 'Hush. Go away, before I get mad.'  He pointed back towards Nablus. About ten minutes later, I went up to him again. I said: 'Stop tormenting us. I want to get home. My kids are crying from hunger and boredom.' The commander said: 'Take your papers and your keys.' He told me to park the car on the side of the road and then took my keys from me. He gave me the keys and papers back and told me to go back to Nablus. He said not to try to come to the checkpoint again this morning. I said: 'Take pity on me. Stop this suffering,' but he motioned me to leave the checkpoint.  I stayed put and asked him: 'Why did you let me through in the morning if you're not going to let me get back home afterwards?' He told me: 'I didn't let you through.' He told one of the soldiers who was at the checkpoint with him to write down my license plate and to inform the next round of soldiers not to let me through again. I left the checkpoint and went back to Nablus to buy food for the kids. From there, I went to the 'Awarta checkpoint (a different one outside Nablus) to try and get through there, which is about a kilometer away from the Huwwara checkpoint. When I got there, I asked the soldiers to let me through. They said I had to go through the Huwwara checkpoint because that's the one I have a pass for. Now, I'm standing about 200 meters from the Huwwara checkpoint and I don't know what to do. I'm considering going back to Nablus and sleeping in a hotel with the family. 

So, this is what everyday life is like for literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank. Just going from point A to point B has become a virtually impossible proposition. And their stories here and elsewhere, you can find for yourselves'not just about the hassle and the humiliation and the frustration. If you could imagine what it would like to be with two little kids at one of these checkpoints, and you're just told to wait, wait and wait for who knows what and for how long. You can just imagine what that's like. But if you can imagine being a medical case and you're trying to get to the hospital because you're dying and being held up at a checkpoint or being a woman about to give birth and being held up at a checkpoint, you can imagine that's far worse or far more serious than dealing with frustrated kids at a checkpoint. In fact, I can't remember, but there's something like 50 or 60 Palestinian women have given birth at the checkpoints in the mud on the side of the road. And of the 50 or 60 kids born, about half died more or less since the day of the checkpoint or shortly after birth because they're in the mud near a road.

The next little snippet I want to read is from the chapter on 'Insides.' So, it's not about outside life: checkpoints, walls, roads and so forth. It's about personal identity issues and identity cards and family registration and so forth. This has to do with a woman; she's a Jerusalem resident, a Palestinian from Jerusalem. She's going to renew her residency papers in Jerusalem. So, she goes to the Israeli Ministry of the Interior's East Jerusalem office, which is the one that deals with Palestinians. All she wants to do is to renew her husband's permit to live with her. Her name is Samira by the way:

Her husband, who is also Palestinian but with Jordanian citizenship, had been living in Jerusalem with Samira and their children for four years. During this time, their application to the Israeli authorities for family unification (that is the right to live together as a family) was being considered: a process that generally takes years and years to complete (if it's ever completed). In the meantime, Samira had been able to apply for a renewable permit in order to allow her husband to stay with them until the family unification application is completed. So, she was here at the ministry just doing the application one more time for a temporary permit. 

Good news, she was told (by the authorities): there was no need to renew the permit after all, as, in fifteen days, Samira and her husband would finally be granted family unification. All she had to do now was return to the ministry with documents showing where she has been and when, (where she had lived and when and for how long) in order to establish a record of having lived in Jerusalem all of her life: municipal tax records, for example, rental contracts, water bills, electricity bills, children's school records and so forth. 'You must bring everything,' the Israeli clerk told her, 'and if you lie, you will lose any chance of obtaining family unification.' At once thrilled by the news and deeply apprehensive about her ability to assemble a comprehensive set of records going back so many years'

Imagine if somebody came and told you, 'We want to see ten to twelve years, in fact, a life time's worth of water bills, electricity bills and tax documents'every record you've ever had. Not where you can go Google it and get it all back electronically. It is bits of paper. I don't know where I keep these things, frankly. So, she was deeply apprehensive about being able to assemble all these documents. A few days later she returned to the ministry and after waiting in line'it's a nightmare to get in'anyway, she got in, and she had her turn:

So, 'I sat with the clerk in booth number one,' she says. 'He asked for my identity card and I gave it to him together with all the other documents they had requested,  and then he gave me a piece of paper and said, 'You shouldn't be here. You should go back to where you were. You have two weeks to sell your furniture and leave Jerusalem.' Not quite believing what she had heard, Samira had burst into tears. She started to scream. She demanded to see the officer in charge. 'All right,' the clerk told her, and he took her to the supervisor's office. She was still crying. On the way there, they passed another clerk. 'Why are you crying?' the other clerk asked. 'They took my identity card,' Samira said. The other clerk said, 'Well, apparently you shouldn't be here.' Still unable to hold back her tears, Samira finally met the officer in charge. He said, 'Why are you crying?' She said, 'Well, because of what's happening.' He said, 'If you continue to act in this manner, not only will we expel you anyway, we'll take all the money you received from the National Insurance Institute (sort of like social security) for two years.  So, you should behave properly because if you don't, we'll also take your oldest son's identity card. You have two weeks to settle your affairs in Jerusalem and leave to go back to where you came from.'

But Samira was, of course, already where she came from. She was born in Jerusalem  after all. That's not what the officer meant. For Samira, like thousands of other  Palestinians at the same time, the mid-1990s, had fallen foul of a new Israeli regulation  designed to strip Jerusalem Palestinians like her of their Jerusalem residency papers if  they're unable to prove to Israel's satisfaction that Jerusalem has always continuously  been their 'center of life.'

If she's studied abroad or lived abroad for any amount of time or traveled, it hadn't always continuously been her center of life, therefore, according to Israelis, she loses her right to live in Jerusalem, which is something that no Jewish resident of Jerusalem is ever asked to substantiate. Ever. If a Palestinian in Jerusalem residency loses her Jerusalem residency papers, she will not be allowed back into Jerusalem ever. So, she's forced to move to the West Bank. She won't be able to ever to go back to Jerusalem, the city in which she was born.

So, we all talk about 1948; we just commemorated the Nakba 60 years later. This is something that's happening now. It didn't just happen 60 years ago. It's happening right now and, of course, while one branch of the Israeli Ministry of the Interior was busy revoking Samira's residency papers in Jerusalem, another branch of the same ministry was granting immediate residency to Jewish people from all over the world who wanted to come live in Jerusalem because they're Jewish. And because they're Jewish, they have the right to do so instantly according to Israeli law. So, here's a process where one population is being removed and the other population is being allowed in, and it's not with tractor trailers and bulldozers and trucks and so forth. It's just with bureaucratic documents essentially. Well, that's the point about the everyday: it's something that takes place in everyday life; it's not just large-scale, dramatic, sort of Hollywood-style things. This is minute, even almost boring, bureaucratic procedures to which this happens.

So, the next snippet I want to read to you is from the chapter 'Outside In,' which again talks about the process of the ways in which Palestinians are increasingly finding themselves living in little communities or enclaves cut off from the outside world. Gaza, as I said before, is the prime place to understand this phenomenon. So if you think of Gaza, it's a strip of territory that is tiny. It's a little bit bigger than Manhattan with one and a half million people living in it, essentially cut off from the outside world and slowly and gradually being starved basically. That's what it comes down to. So, I talk about Gaza in the book.  But I don't want to talk about Gaza now because I've written about it and it's in the press all the time. What I want to talk about instead'what I want to read from instead'is a little section towards the end of that chapter which has to do with education, which I think is appropriate because I am obviously an educator among other things. And it shows you about the logic, the Israeli logic, of closing Palestinians in again, not just necessarily in terms of large-scale camps or prisons like Gaza but also in a smaller even individual scale:

Even before Israel declared Gaza an 'enemy entity' in September 2007 and threatened to  cut off the last remaining supplies of fuel and electricity to the impoverished and still- occupied territory, Gaza's 400,000 schoolchildren were facing problems of their own.  Israel's refusal to allow imports into the territory meant that Gaza was short not just of  raw textiles and other economic inputs, but also of paper, ink, and vital school supplies.  Gaza's schoolchildren started this academic year missing one textbook in three.