From: "Middle East Report Online" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>---End of Forwarded Message---
Subject: Apres Nous, Nous: Covering the Colonial Retreat
Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 19:30:02 -0400
Après Nous, Nous: Covering the Colonial Retreat
Peter Lagerquist with Tom Hill
May 19, 2005
(Peter Lagerquist is a freelance journalist based in Israel and the West
Bank. Tom Hill is a doctoral candidate in history at Cambridge University.
The authors thank Mitri Karkar for his translation assistance.)
It was vintage Shimon Peres. On April 18 Israel's deputy prime minister
emerged from a tete-à-tete with French President Jacques Chirac proclaiming
a shining vision of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. "We could convert a
settlement into a Club Med," he suggested. "We must not wait for the
political solution, but create economic and social hope." The assembled
press might have been even more bemused if Peres' proposal had not sounded
so in tune with other recent statements about the fate of Gaza after Israel'
s promised withdrawal in mid-August 2005. A week earlier, Peres, Palestinian
Authority Civil Affairs Minister Muhammad Dahlan and World Bank officials
had emerged from a forum convened by the Washington-based Aspen Institute
also touting plans for major investments in the impoverished territory. On
both occasions, talk about what will be done with Israel's Gazan settlements
after they are evacuated echoed deeper concerns over the order that will
emerge after the "disengagement."
The real gold nugget unearthed at the Aspen Institute proceedings was a
deal, struck behind closed doors, whereby Israel will "coordinate" its
disengagement with the Palestinian Authority. It answered Israel's need for
a "dignified" pullout, voiced by Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz in meetings
with Vice President Dick Cheney and other top US officials three weeks
earlier. "Israelis are especially worried that a terrorist takeover of
settler properties -- a Hamas flag, say, flying over the settlement of Neve
Dekalim after the withdrawal -- would be a propaganda bombshell that would
effectively gut popular Israeli support for withdrawal," reported the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency. Mofaz's audience would already have been well-briefed.
The specter of post-pullout chaos has roamed the news headlines and op-ed
columns ever since Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon launched his country
on the path to disengagement in late 2003. Less attention has been paid to
the concerns of Gaza's Palestinian inhabitants, which only begin with what
Israeli generals will do to strike dignified poses.
"I've heard that the Israelis will close down all of Gaza when the settlers
evacuate," says a young man seated at an evening meal in the Nusseirat
refugee camp. "It will be very difficult." People here do need "economic and
social hope." The UN puts unemployment in the Strip at 68 percent -- much
of it because after the current Palestinian uprising began, very few Gazans
have been allowed to go to Israel, or anywhere else, for work. Yet if the
projects of "hope" bruited about in overseas capitals seem surreal in the
Gaza that Israel will leave behind, it is also because they are conceived
around the understanding that Israel will not really leave. This talk does
not so much anticipate a "political solution" as supplant it, along with
enduring Palestinian narratives of past injustices and future hopes. In what
it says and what it does not say, the discourse of "hope" recalls the
similar vision of a business-oriented New Middle East that Peres talked up
during the 1993-2000 Oslo "peace" process. In reality, and much like the
experiences marketed by Club Med, such talk rehearses a colonial fantasy.
Chirac, who once did duty in French Algeria, would know it well.
SOUNDING THE RETREAT
Well before its colonies in Africa and Indochina rose in the twilight
decades of European empire, France conjured a vision of the approaching
darkness in which its own dimming lights might still flicker. Once we leave,
went the wisdom of that day, natives no longer bound by a higher order would
fall on each other to divide the spoils, and chaos would ensue. The idea
found _expression_ in a phrase: Après nous, le deluge. Although millions of
Algerians and Vietnamese died while it held sway in Paris, the idea did not.
As politicians, journalists and other disengagement entrepreneurs grapple in
advance with the order that will follow Israel's in Gaza, questions about
whether disengagement is a retreat at all only heighten the sense of déjà
vu.
In March, the BBC condensed a televised report by Alan Johnston into an
online feature titled "Pullout Problems." A snapshot of what slides quietly
by in the press, it largely mirrored prevailing media coverage of
disengagement. Over the week that it was posted, it slipped by 3-6 million
BBC online readers, coasting on what can only be described as a historically
loaded subtext: can the Palestinians handle withdrawal? "Israel worries that
what were the homes of settler families might immediately become the loot of
groups like Hamas, which claim that it was their rocket and other attacks
that forced the Israeli retreat," wrote Johnston. Palestinians are
supposedly worried too: "There has certainly been reform of [the Palestinian
Authority's] financial affairs, but ordinary people here will still have the
gravest doubts that the settlers' assets will be managed properly.... The
Palestinian Authority has a dismal reputation for corruption. And there is
another concern -- law and order in the days after the army pulls out. The
Palestinian Authority worries that with their pent-up loathing of Israel,
local people might try to storm the settlements en masse and loot and
ransack whatever is left."
It is apt that the article opens with a nod to Israel's need for a dignified
withdrawal. Though the reader would not know it, such reportage transplants
diverging worries into a discussion almost completely framed by Israeli, and
to a lesser extent, international concerns. Palestinians -- "ordinary
people," no less -- are called forth to address these as if they were their
own preoccupations, even if not a single ordinary person speaks directly
through the online reportage. But as journalists write about disengagement
as if it were already a fact -- much as they talked about peace during the
1993-2000 Oslo "peace process" -- and conjure concomitant visions of a
seething mass waiting at the settlements' gates, Gazans worry about things
at once more mundane and remote.
Few ordinary Gazans will believe evacuation until they see it. "First of
all, I hope they get out, but I really don't think so," says a young man in
the southern town of Rafah. His skepticism is not unfounded. Withdrawal has
already been postponed from July to August, despite the earnest urgings of
the White House and the other members of the "Quartet" who sponsor the road
map that supposedly points the way toward negotiations for a comprehensive
Israeli-Palestinian peace. Polls show steady erosion of the Israeli majority
supporting disengagement as talk of "chaos" proliferates. Sitting members of
the Israeli cabinet are on record questioning even this timetable -- indeed
whether disengagement should happen at all. On May 9, Foreign Minister
Silvan Shalom noted that it would be "unreasonable" to complete the
withdrawal if Hamas wins Palestinian parliamentary elections scheduled for
July. Israel, he cautioned, should not "hand over the territories only for
Hamas to create there a 'Hamastan.'"
Having yet to embrace Club Medistan, Gazans post more prosaic worries. "And
then what?" is the next question at the dinner in Nusseirat. "Where will we
find work? Gaza is the world's biggest prison," quips a middle-aged
policeman bleakly. "There is still a fence around Gaza. When I am able to go
to Egypt, to Saudi Arabia, this will be a withdrawal," echoes an older man
in Rafah. Both would be familiar with a joke now making the rounds of
Palestinian coffee shops -- a parable for the diplomatic "concessions" made
to the Palestinians from the "generous offer" at Camp David in July 2000 to
periodic promises of an "easing of closures" to disengagement. The joke goes
as follows: a man living in a cramped room with his family asks how he can
get more space. "Move in the donkey," he is told. "But now it is even more
crowded!" he complains. So bring in the horse, he's told. "It's even more
crowded!" he exclaims. So he is told to move out the donkey and the horse.
The man marvels: "Now it feels so spacious!"
CIRCULAR DEPENDENCE
Diplomats and media pundits spend little time in Palestinian coffee houses,
however. For those who portray disengagement not as a political diversion
but a push toward peace -- needing a supportive partner -- the question of
what to do with the settlements has become another opportunity to remind the
Palestinian would-be state of its managerial responsibilities. Though blind
to the writing on Israel's wall in the West Bank, they might nevertheless
have been embarrassed by Shaul Mofaz's confessions to the daily Yediot
Aharonot on May 11, the anniversary of Israel's independence. Promising that
disengagement will allow Israel to extend its borders into the West Bank,
Mofaz prophesied that "the settlers of [the West Bank] and Gaza will be able
to say in years to come that they helped establish the eastern frontiers of
the state of Israel." In foreclosing what might seem rational responses to
such intentions -- like resistance to occupation -- "good governance" is a
highly circumscribed program. But because good governance is the only
internationally approved path to popular credibility open to the Palestinian
Authority (PA), and because governance is, after all, about taking care of
"your own people," diplomats and journalists alike successfully frame it as
an issue that not only should be, but actually is, at the forefront of
ordinary people's concerns.
It is true that the PA is keen to reassure its international patrons. But
meanwhile and perhaps more than at any previous historical juncture, the
Palestinian "street" and its leadership are talking past each other. As
ordinary people "doubt" the integrity and capability of their government,
the PA voices its own version of foreign fears of clamoring hordes of real
estate speculators beating at the settlements' doors. "These houses [to be
evacuated] could be a poisoned chalice," Deputy Finance Minister Jihad
al-Wazir told the BBC's Johnston. "How would we decide who would live in
them? They would create social tension. Maybe the rich and the elite would
live in these homes, with their very nice gardens and views of the beach,
while the housing crisis would continue in the rest of Gaza." This social
conscience is belied by a towering apartment complex on the road from Gaza
City to Jabalya, with many times the capacity of the villas in the large
Gush Katif settlement bloc. Financed by the late ruler of the United Arab
Emirates, Sheikh Zayed Al Nahayan, it stands empty today, inviting only the
angry queries of Gaza taxi drivers.
Within the circular argument in which the PA, international mediators, the
Israeli government and journalists are engaged, more pointed questions also
go unasked. What business is it of Israel's what the Palestinians do with
the Gaza settlements? One answer is that it is Israel's business because it
is business. The settlements, writes the BBC, are "some of the most valuable
assets in poverty-stricken Gaza." The greenhouses in the Gush Katif bloc
alone are worth $80 million. Tellingly, such facts have impressed themselves
first and foremost on Israel and its international interlocutors.
Dignity in mind, Israel's original preference was to bulldoze all settlement
"assets" entirely. Despite its coordination agreement with the PA, Israel is
still nervous about the disposition of settlement assets. Yet plans had
already shifted by the time Peres went to the Aspen Institute conference.
The talk is now of transferring assets to an "international third party"
that would then pass it on to the Palestinians in a gradual transition. For
Peres this would also provide a justification for delaying withdrawal
further. "If we destroy the homes, it will lengthen the process by three
months," he told the Jerusalem Post, "since according to international law
we will need to clean up the debris." Outgoing World Bank President James
Wolfensohn, who has now been installed as the Quartet's special envoy on
disengagement, has renewed discussion with Peres over the possibility that
an international third party would buy the "assets" from Israel.
In this debate, the US Agency for International Development has been a step
ahead of everyone else. In mid-January, USAID invited tenders for its own
"transition" plan, which would have an Israeli-approved private security
force take over agricultural land and $80 million worth of greenhouses in
Gush Katif, and, later, possibly other settlements. A local operator, funded
by USAID and substantially staffed with Israelis, would then upgrade the
land and channel its produce to Israeli agribusiness for re-export to the
European and US markets. The idea was to "focus on business expansion,
growth and export development in a way that accepts Israeli security
controls as parameters and devises approaches to work around them," said the
work plan. "We are looking at a win-win situation both for Palestinians and
Israelis," explained a USAID officer in Tel Aviv to Middle East
International. If this "transition" looks more like a "takeover," perhaps
that is because occupations have a way of remaining a going concern.
Gazans understand this reality. "We have to keep in mind that the economy of
Gaza is dependent on Israel. Its impossible that we'll be disconnected from
Israel," says 25-year old Abu Hassan in Rafah's Tuffah neighborhood. He is
unemployed like nearly everyone here. It therefore came as a shock when
Israel in April announced it will sever Palestinian access to its labor
market after withdrawal -- to "reduce mutual dependence" between Israelis
and Palestinians. Though its official status is not clear, the announcement
underlined longer-standing plans to completely close the Israeli labor
market to Palestinians by 2007. As Israel restructures its relationship with
a Strip closed off from other markets, Gaza's inhabitants are finding it
even more difficult to see beyond the exigencies of daily survival to any
wider horizons. Asked what she thinks about withdrawal, a wizened woman in
Rafah answers in the language of diminished expectations: "God willing, we
hope for the best, for us and them. We only ask the United Nations and UNRWA
to build us a sewage line."
HISTORY, BUT NOT THEIR STORY
Though the media likes to dub the Gaza withdrawal a "historic event," the
coverage actually elides both history and the political narratives that are
grounded therein. Obsessions over maintaining order and capital stocks after
disengagement particularly ignore the legacy of colonial "order." To clear
space around the space that has already been cleared around Israel's Gaza
frontiers, 30,000 people have seen their homes razed since Israel first
launched its counterinsurgency in 2001. "Rome created a desert and called it
peace," the Roman chronicler Tacitus famously wrote. Israel ruined a country
and called it assets. For this reason Israel is not "returning" land -- the
word never appears in the BBC's coverage, or a surprising amount of other
disengagement coverage. Rather, land is to be "handed over." The
Palestinians are "receiving," not reclaiming, occupied territory. In Rafah
such language is met with incredulity: "A gift? From the Israelis to the
Palestinians?" laughs a young man. "How many children were killed here, in
Rafah alone? Hundreds!" echoes another.
They could also have been talking about places like the "Austria"
neighborhood in Khan Yunis, a collection of shelled-out and demolished
European-funded apartment buildings wedged between a cemetery and a disused
slaughterhouse. The reason rises 300 meters away: a welter of concrete walls
and sniper towers surrounding the nearest Gush Katif promontory of Neve
Dekalim. Or he could have been talking about the Mawasi enclave, whose 8,000
inhabitants have lived for over four years as literal prisoners between Gush
Katif and the sea.
Yet such sites of national trauma will not enjoy any formal commemoration.
Though the Khiam prison and torture center operated by Israel's South
Lebanese Army proxy was converted into a museum after Israel's withdrawal
from Lebanon in 2000, no one seems interested in financing memorials among
the remnants of the Gaza settlement enterprise. It is an implicit admission
that a liberation narrative is not possible in talking about this particular
retreat, that museums would be testimonies to a story yet to be told. "No,
destroy them," answers a twenty-something man in the Tuffah neighborhood
when asked whether a memorial should be left for future generations. "The
occupation is in their hearts."
Few Gazans, meanwhile, worry very much about what will be done with the land
that would be left them. "The people should claim it because it belongs to
the people who suffered," one young man opines after some prompting. But
even he is in a minority. "This is state land. Let them do what they want
with it," says an older donkey driver dismissively. His indifference is not
surprising. In a population that is 80 percent comprised of refugees,
withdrawal amounts to little more than yet another reshuffle of space. "I'll
go back to my damaged house, over there in the western neighborhood," says
one man. "I can't afford to replace the windows, and I don't even feel like
it. This is not our place. Our houses are in Haifa and Acre and Majdal. We
had a house and orange plantations in Asdoud. My grandfather told me about
it. How can we ever forget it? They say they came to their houses after
3,000 years. And what about us? We have the right to return, after 50 years,
and our children after 100."
ENDURING FAREWELLS
To capture the significance of Israel's withdrawal, the media likes to turn
its long lenses on Gaza settlement villas and concrete fortifications. It
need not look so far. At the Erez checkpoint that connects the territory to
Israel, and through which Israel thereby also controls its links to the West
Bank and the wider world, the post-disengagement order has already dawned.
Along with its sister terminal in Karni -- also on the Gaza border -- Erez
offers a template for a new generation of "high-tech terminals" that Israel
will build to deflect demands by Wolfensohn and the Quartet that it act to
facilitate the movement of Palestinian people and goods after disengagement.
To this end, the US will divert $50 million from a $350 million aid package
that President George W. Bush had earlier this year earmarked for the
Palestinian Authority -- because, in the words of a White House
apokesperson, it is "presumed to be a help to the Palestinian economy."
Ordinary Gazans have even more cause to feel diverted. On a hot spring
afternoon at Erez, a family waits into a fifth hour to pass through. A
Palestinian security officer finally receives instructions from the other
side, ushering them into a lengthy tunnel that eventually terminates in a
screen of steel bars, wire mesh and remote-controlled turnstiles. On the
other side is a containment zone, then another set of bars, wire mesh and a
gate. Beyond the gate are two concrete towers with sniper slits covered by
sand bags. There are about a dozen other Palestinians here, leaning on their
suitcases, squatting on the floor. "I've been here for an hour," says a
businessman. Two middle-aged men wearing orange vests say they work as
helpers at the checkpoint. The soldiers cannot be seen; no one is sure if
they are actually there and as time passes the doubt grows.
There is a sound of construction; on the other side, Palestinian workers can
be glimpsed enlarging the checkpoint. Finally, a disembodied voice crackles
through an intercom. The Palestinians get in line; the turnstiles buzz and
instructions are barked; one by one they squeeze through. The intercom
instructs the Palestinians in orange vests; they pat down the other
Palestinians, collect all passports, ID cards and pre-issued permits.
Finally, two Israeli soldiers appear on the other side and the papers are
passed through the bars. After some time, the Palestinians are let out. With
them they carry an afterthought for the times: the Israelis were not there
most of the time. They did not need to be. At the Aspen Institute gathering
in Washington, participants spoke of launching five Gaza investment projects
by the end of the year -- one of which would be a uniform factory. It is
perhaps most ironic that it would not matter if these were Palestinian or
Israeli uniforms. This is occupation by remote control, as Israeli
commentator Meron Benvenisti once called it, a model of orderliness. USAID
would prefer to call it a win-win situation, but the French might have said
it best: Après nous, nous.
When they crossed back over the Mediterranean, France's soldiers sang Edith
Piaf's "Non Je Ne Regrette Rien" (No, I Regret Nothing). If Israel's
soldiers sing, it will be with the knowledge that things are being taken
care of after they leave. "We'll definitely try to make sure that the
security exists to ensure that there is no lawlessness," Jihad al-Wazir told
the BBC. He is also planning "a proper public relations campaign, to make
sure that there is the utmost transparency and people know what to expect."
Perhaps Wazir also already senses that it is not what happens, but what kind
of people it happens for. When the Germans overran the Berlin Wall and took
apart with their bare hands what was left, to carry off as souvenirs, it was
depicted as a joyful celebration. If the people of Gaza were to overrun
Israel's settlements, to "loot and ransack whatever is left," it will be
portrayed as a frenzied riot. Gazans would find it hard, for their own
reasons, to narrate disengagement as liberation. Says a young man on the
bluffs overlooking Rafah: "It will be one degree warmer, but we are still
below zero."
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