SIPA STORIES: Not all walls divide equally: from peacebuilding to activism in Israel-Palestine
Palestinians walk towards the Separation Wall near Bethlehem on the Occupied Territories side in December 2014. Photo by Michael Thomson
By Michael Thomson (MIA ’22)
The cylindrical stone guard tower seemed to watch us from its home below the border wall, which snaked alongside a road less than half a mile away. I stood silently alongside my friend, Muhammad, and the owner of the land on which we stood, Ibrahim (not their real names). The three of us spoke haltingly while balancing on the rubble of Ibrahim’s house, which had been bulldozed by the Israeli Civil Administration a few days earlier. While Muhammad consoled his friend with a handful of empty words, I stared at the tinted glass encircling the top of the tower, where I imagined the gaze of an 18-year-old Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier staring back.
I met Muhammad at a greywater recycling and people-to-people peacebuilding workshop in the spring of 2014 at Kibbutz Ketura in southern Israel. I was studying abroad at the institute sponsoring the workshop. Muhammad and I ate dinner together, after which he invited me to his home in Beit Jala if I visited the West Bank. After my program ended, I took him up on the offer. My week’s stay with Muhammad and his family was an odd and often incongruent mash of experiences. We ate knafeh and falafel in Bethlehem, planted a few hundred olive trees along with his colleagues at the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture, and played ping-pong with one of his friends a few days before this friend’s wedding. In between, we discussed contingency plans if the IDF raids that had become increasingly common in his neighborhood reached his home, and we stood on the rubble of Ibrahim’s bulldozed house.
In March 2022, nearly eight years after my visit with Muhammad, I stood on yet more rubble, listening to the story of a Bedouin family within the borders of Israel whose home is periodically destroyed by the Israeli authorities because it was built without the necessary documentation. Its owner will never obtain this documentation, our guide explained to us, because of Israeli policy mandating Bedouin relocation and refusing to recognize or provide basic services to the residents of at least 35 Bedouin villages in the Negev-Naqab. As I looked down at the twisted metal and crumbled limestone, I wondered how this family would put the pieces back together again.
Pots, pans, and household items are left behind from a demolished Bedouin home in the Negev-Naqab desert in March 2022. Photo by Ryan Lee
In Franz Kafka’s 1914 novel “The Trial,” the main character, Josef K., is indicted by an unnamed entity for a nameless crime and spends the duration of the book passively being pushed from one stage of a faceless and bureaucratic judicial system to the next. There is a faint hope throughout that the labyrinthine process will lead Josef K. to an acquittal and end the anxiety tormenting him throughout the story. In true Kafka form, though, he is killed abruptly and unceremoniously in the final scene, leaving the sobered reader reflective of how bureaucracy engenders atrocities and the apparent fatalism of Josef K.’s destiny from the start.
The Palestinians and Bedouins, who apply for permits they know they will not receive, who cling to identity documents that signify their second-class status, and who rebuild homes only to have them bulldozed or seized by Israeli authorities, embody the fatalism of Josef K.’s journey. The legal bureaucracy generating and reifying this reality instrumentalizes documents such as the 1950 Absentees’ Property Law, the 1995 Oslo II Annexes, and the 2018 Jewish Nation-State Law to provide ostensible legitimacy for its atrocities. However, as the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International have documented in significant detail, the key word is “ostensible.” The role of these laws is to provide a veneer of legitimacy to policies of dispossession, disenfranchisement, and, yes, apartheid.
To be clear, the designation of Israeli apartheid is not a nebulous, “is-this-like-South-Africa” one. It is a judgment about whether the actions of the Israeli state meet the international legal definition of apartheid as delineated in the 1973 Apartheid Convention. According to the Convention, the “crime of apartheid” refers to “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination of one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.” These independent assessments by third parties attempt to judge whether the acts of the Israeli state meet this definition, qualifying that “Jewish people” and “Palestinian people” are treated as distinct ethno-national groups. Every one of these assessments finds that Israeli policy “crosses the threshold” to fit these criteria.
Less than a year earlier, in 2013, I was formally introduced to the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” through a faculty member and rabbi at my undergraduate alma mater who taught a class called “The Dual Narrative of the Israeli-Arab Conflict.” He heavily influenced my decision to study abroad at an environmental peacebuilding institute in Israel with Palestinian, Jordanian, Israeli, and “international” students. As a mediator and conflict resolution student with some experience in international peacebuilding, I relished the 2.5-hour weekly peacebuilding seminar, made friends, read histories of the region from different perspectives, and grappled with the overarching purpose of — as the students in the program called it in our peacebuilding sessions — “what we’re doing here.”
I also conducted independent research that supposedly affirmed the applicability of Gordon Allport’s Intergroup Contact Theory for peacebuilding programming that brought Israelis and Palestinians into contact and dialogue. The premise was that these programs contribute to a greater understanding between members of groups prejudiced against each other, and that dehumanization of “the other” was the single most insidious and entrenched force preventing meaningful listening and productive dialogue that could pave the way to a lasting and just peace. I left ambivalent but largely still convinced of the efficacy of peacebuilding organizations like The Parents Circle – Families Forum, Seeds of Peace, and the Arava Institute to transform beliefs and bring about the transformations needed to advance a just “peace in the Middle East.”
A few months after I returned from visiting Muhammad in 2014, a group of Palestinians abducted and murdered three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank, catalyzing a campaign of collective punishment by IDF soldiers in the West Bank and a devastating war in Gaza that killed thousands of Palestinians in response to rocket attacks from the Al-Qassam and Al-Quds Brigades that killed six Israeli civilians. I watched in disgust and disbelief at both the atrocities I witnessed on the news and how the close, yet fragile, relationships formed among my cohort over four months blew apart on social media in irreparable ways. It brought back the question, “what are we doing here?” But instead of being asked earnestly, it came across as a bitter rebuke of people-to-people programs in the face of a political reality shaped by a stark power disparity.
Late that same year, in 2014, I traveled back to Palestine to live in Hebron (Al-Khalil in Arabic, Chevron in Hebrew), the only Palestinian city in the West Bank with Israeli settlements inside it. I spent two months living with a Palestinian family in the Old City while teaching English at a local Palestinian NGO and conducting research on physical and narrative-based barriers in the Old City. Since its division in 1997 into two zones, H1 and H2, the H2 area of Hebron, encompassing a mere 16 square kilometers, remains one of the most divided cities in the world. UN OCHA’s 2011 map of the city’s checkpoints and legally segregated streets — “sanitized streets” in the euphemistic phraseology of the IDF — looks like a pre-surgery incision plan, mapping out what will be cut out, put in, and carved through. Ironically, the tumor driving this surgery is the burial place of the Prophet Abraham, the unifying figure of the three monotheistic religions, whose tomb became a rallying point and settling destination for adherents of all three religions.
It was an unsettling few months, to put it mildly. It is difficult to express the feeling of one’s need for safety not being met. While Palestinians have killed and wounded IDF soldiers and Israeli settlers in H2, the overwhelming proportion of violence is carried out by IDF soldiers and settlers against Palestinian civilians. The motives of this violence are blurred. They span from deterrence and retribution against Palestinians for their violence and nonviolent protests to displays of force meant to make life intolerable, and thus to displace Palestinians from their homes and shops. Indeed, when I returned seven years later to walk through the Old City in March 2022, our guide noted that my former host family, who had lived in their home for centuries, had left. I do not know where they have gone, but I was relieved and hope they can find more peace wherever they are.
The outposts, checkpoints, walls, and makeshift barriers create a panopticon where Palestinians are forced to self-regulate and look over their shoulder. In documenting the same barrier from the “Palestinian side” and the “Israeli side,” I catalogued how these mechanisms of separation do not divide equally and create opposing sensibilities of protection and imprisonment. This disparity seemed to represent a physical manifestation of the broader inequities of the conflict, and the limitations of the dual narrative approach to peacebuilding that had introduced me to the conflict.
One of my more jarring experiences occurred after traveling from Hebron to northern Israel to visit an Israeli friend and stay a few nights in the yurt next to his home. Even though I had only been living under the occupation for a month and could use my U.S. passport as a “get out of jail free” card, the burden of the occupation felt like a visceral weight lifted during those few days. The sudden realization that I was not being constantly watched, would not be interrogated by soldiers at the next turn, and was not surrounded by walls was overwhelming.
I could not sleep for months after I returned to Vermont. At times, I would simply get despondent, cynical, and nihilistic, scribbling down a monologue to flesh out what I had seen. Everyone appeared to have an agenda, all equally impure and contrived. This included the white woman working for a Western pacifist NGO who I observed positioning a small Palestinian child carefully between herself and a soldier, so she could get the photograph just right. And yet, although thinking of this scene still makes me sick, I cannot pretend that my cynicism blankets all sides and perspectives into equal obscurity. The atrocities, the violence, the inequities — they were all heavily imbalanced against the Palestinian population, which carried the disproportionate weight and trauma of living under an occupation.
Three pictures of the main Palestinian street in the Old City of Al-Khalil in 2015. Left: During the day, the city is vibrant with life as shops open and people come to buy and sell goods. Middle: At night, the shops are closed and the Old City becomes a ghost town. Most Palestinian families who lived in the Old City have left due to the oppression they feel from the IDF and settlers. Those who remain rarely go outside at night due to IDF patrols. Right: One of several outposts perched on top of buildings along the main street. At night, there is a constant sense of being watched on these streets. Photos by Michael Thomson
Two separate but related conversations relating to “Israel-Palestine” deserve elaboration and careful distinction. The first is the debate rationalizing violence, which is where news articles and social media debates often end up. We know the script of this debate well:
“Hamas fires rockets and Israel defends itself”
“Palestinians are killed at almost 20 times the rate that Israelis are killed”
“Israel has nothing to apologize for if it has an Iron Dome guarding against rocket attacks, and if Hamas intentionally operates in highly populated areas and uses human shields”
“A lot of evidence shows that Israel is not only attacking military targets, but is also using excessive and unnecessary force to intimidate and control”
“That is just leftist, Hamas-produced propaganda and Israel has the most stringent use of force guidelines in the world”
“This is not even about security, but rather the colonialist stratagem to dispossess Palestinians from their land and either force them into second-class citizen status or into exile”
“Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East!”
And on and on we go. This conversation becomes stale quickly.
Then there is the second conversation about what should be done to “resolve the conflict.” This conversation generally revolves around five issues: 1) mutual recognition, 2) borders and settlements, 3) Jerusalem, 4) right of return, and 5) security. This is the more prudent and more complex conversation, which requires analysis of parallel and conflicting histories, an understanding of the drivers of political power in the region, and a review of previous peace processes and agreements. Additionally, it necessitates at least a surface-level grasp of domestic Israeli politics, the national and international legal architecture shaping the occupation, and the façade that is Palestinian governance.
More than any of this, however, it requires ethical decisions and epistemological questioning around what and whose knowledge matters most. Should one’s politics be guided entirely by human rights? Should one’s allegiance to an in-group, religious ideology, or economic orientation inform this political ethic? I have come to believe that a fundamental difference in Israel-Palestine debates boils down to the core ethical beliefs that determine someone’s answers to these questions. While I generally agree with my friends advocating for Palestinian human rights, their claim that this situation “is not complicated” is not one to which I can adhere.
The only guiding star I have found any use for in this ethical questioning is the framework of human rights. When examining each of the issues at the core of Israel-Palestine from a human rights framework, I land almost unequivocally on the “Palestinian side.” One observation from this framing is that there is a fundamental contradiction between democratic governance and Zionist ideology in its contemporary manifestation in Israeli politics, as seen in the recent Nation-State Law that gives de facto primacy for Jewish Israelis: “The exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish People…The State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value.”
The central political and ethical question, then, is this: Does the traumatic history of the Jewish people, including a history of genocide, persecution, and the contemporary currents of anti-Semitism, justify the Zionist ideology in its current manifestation as settler colonialism and apartheid? According to a human rights framework, the answer is unambiguously negative. With these positions solidified, I realized that peacebuilding was an inappropriate and inadequate means to realize such normative ends.
I do not believe these views are hostile towards anyone, nor does my holding them mean I seek to create an unwelcoming atmosphere in any social space for people who disagree. I have spent years trying to understand — through books, museums, documentaries, and conversations with friends and peers — the history of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in particular, in part because I believe this history plays out through collective and generational trauma that informs Israeli politics and justifies Zionism. William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” made a particularly strong impression on me in this regard. I believe it is wrong to compare the Holocaust and anti-Semitism to the atrocities that the Israeli state commits against Palestinians. We must understand the former history on its own terms, through its own implications, and without recourse to a “yes, but…” retort.
Indeed, we must be vigilant against anti-Semitism in all its forms, which continues to be insidious and pervasive in the United States, and which I have already experienced here at Columbia. For instance, I have heard a Columbia graduate student (not at SIPA or among those advocating for Palestinian human rights) claim that financial decisions made by certain Columbia University leaders were based on greed, and insinuated a connection with these leaders’ Jewish faith. The line between calling out the harm that Israeli government policies can and have caused, on the one hand, and anti-Semitic expressions based on the dehumanization of Jewish people, on the other, must be clear, explicit, and reiterated as often as possible. Moreover, the condemnation of the latter has to be loud, proactive, unconditional, and unwavering.
Simultaneously, we must recognize that this history of anti-Semitism and the persecution of Jewish people is interwoven into the 19th and 20th century formation and spread of Zionism, the rationalization of Palestinian dispossession, and contemporary pro-Israel discourse. Indeed, it is the foundation of the argument “if not here, then where?” that justifies dispossession and the steadfast denial of Palestinian human rights.
During a 2014 visit to Yad Vashem, the harrowing and powerful museum in the heart of Jerusalem documenting the Holocaust’s atrocities, my guide ended the tour by pointing to Jerusalem and stating, with an air of severity, “and this (the history of the Holocaust) is why that (the Israeli state, policies of apartheid and dispossession, etc.) is necessary.” Sometimes I wonder, taking on a Kafkaesque view again, whether this should be turned into a question: “Does this make that necessary?” as this often seems to be the underlying question of many Israel-Palestine debates.
What, then, is the most effective way to halt and reverse Israel’s policies of apartheid and advance human rights for all residents in Israel and Palestine? One common argument from the “both sides” approach is that we should engage the failures of Palestinian governance, on the charge that Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip are corrupt, immoral, and facilitate — even orchestrate — the murder of Jewish Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers. These claims hold up to scrutiny, and the recent wave of attacks in Israel, which mark the deadliest period of Palestinian attacks against Israelis since 2006, provide an important reminder that Israelis’ right to security is also not being met. However, it is worth noting that the rate of killing that marks this “deadliest period” is not far from the average rate of Palestinians killed in Gaza and the West Bank throughout last year: 1.22 Israeli deaths per day over nine days, versus 1.04 Palestinian deaths per day over 365 days. This is a grotesque comparison that minimizes the tragedy of every life lost, but a necessary one for perspective.
Moreover, neither the Palestinian Authority nor the Hamas “government” in Gaza hold the legitimacy or capacity to change the forces perpetuating crimes of apartheid. Have both regimes proven to be inept, corrupt, and comfortable committing atrocities? Yes. But policy change within Fatah and Hamas has limited impact on Palestinians achieving their human rights, because of course governing authorities that lack the basic pillars of autonomy will be illegitimate and ineffective. Fatah is powerless to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes or the issuing of permits that relegate rights and privileges in the territory it supposedly governs, and Hamas is incapable of changing the Israeli policies that stifle Gazans through restrictions of goods and movement.
Palestinian residents get the identity cards that limit their freedom of movement and the permits that dictate where, when, how, and if they can build homes or start businesses from Israeli authorities, not Palestinian ones. There is no evidence to suggest that Fatah and Hamas enacting policy changes that curb corruption and violent rhetoric would contribute to a change in the fundamental conditions advancing crimes of apartheid and persecution for Palestinians.
So, if the above analysis is correct, four claims hold true:
The current policies of the Israeli state are the primary drivers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the primary barrier to realizing human rights for all in the region. These policies are emboldened by the tremendous amount of aid that the United States provides to Israel, which totals $150 billion to date and is annually larger than U.S. aid to any other country in the world.
Palestinian governing authorities do not have the capacity or legitimacy to change these policies of the Israeli state.
Current trends will reinforce the establishment of one state realized through annexation, where apartheid becomes further entrenched and institutionalized.
These policies are not inevitable and can be reversed.
What, then, should be done to reverse these policies?
Despite, or perhaps because of, my engagement in peacebuilding work in the U.S., Croatia, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, I do not believe peacebuilding activities, including people-to-people programs that enable dialogue, are the answer to this question. Peacebuilding programs are inadequate to address the bureaucracy of atrocity-making driving these harms.
Rather, the most effective approach is the maximum application of political pressure on the Israeli government and the U.S. government, including advocacy for a conditional aid policy, the pursuit of nonviolent action, emails to representatives, marches, social media campaigns, support for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, and civil disobedience. These actions may come under fire for being disruptive and engendering discomfort and inconvenience, but that’s the point: a history of nonviolent movements in the United States, including recent movements like Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock, validate the efficacy of disruption and discomfort to reverse policies and practices that perpetuate atrocities.
Above all, we must accept that this rhetoric is not polemical or unnecessarily severe. It is descriptive, not normative, and based on observation and evidence, not political disposition. It is time to recognize that not all sides hold equal weight, not all atrocities balance out, and not all walls divide equally.
Michael Thomson is a second-year Master of International Affairs student studying international conflict resolution.