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Abstract
When Palestinian Jerusalemites refer to “the ministry” (al-dakhliya), they also refer to the sense of weightiness, lost time, frustration, exhaustion, and anxiety that accumulate to the Israeli Ministry of Interior located in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi al-Joz. Multiple pressures and limited access produce tedious and outright cruel conditions for Palestinians visiting the institution. This essay attends to the affective associations and meanings the institution represents to Palestinians in Jerusalem by drawing on the author’s own experiences there and while conducting ethnographic fieldwork, including conversations and interviews with interlocutors, journalistic reporting, fiction writing, and an examination of Google reviews of the ministry. It attempts to appreciate how the experience of delay at the ministry is configured as a tool of punishment within the context of ongoing Israeli settler colonialization.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Palestinian American Research Center.
Notes
1 Mahmoud Shukair, trans. Issa J. Boullata, “Shakira’s Picture,” 2003, https://www.banipal.co.uk/selections/29/71/mahmoud-shukair/.
2 Shukair, “Shakira’s Picture.”
3 Shukair, “Shakira’s Picture.”
4 Shukair, “Shakira’s Picture.”
5 “Projected Mid-Year Population for Jerusalem Governorate by Locality 2017–2026,” Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, last modified May 30, 2021, https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/statisticsIndicatorsTables.aspx?lang=en&table_id=707.
6 On the experience of Israeli permanent residency status, see R. Isa, “Precarious Living in Jerusalem: Return, Fear, and Sumud,” JPS 52, no. 1 (2023): 87–91, https://doi.org/10.1080/0377919X.2022.2157669.
7 For a rights-based review of the details of this policy and practice, see “Israel: Jerusalem Palestinians Stripped of Status, Discriminatory Residency Revocation,” Human Rights Watch (HRW), last modified August 8, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/08/08/israel-jerusalem-palestinians-stripped-status.
8 Usama Halabi, “The Legal Status of Palestinians in Jerusalem,” Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture 4, no. 1 (1997): https://pij.org/articles/505/the-legal-status-of-palestinians-in-jerusalem.
9 See, Amahl Bishara, “Driving While Palestinian in Israel and the West Bank: The Politics of Disorientation and the Routes of a Subaltern Knowledge,” American Ethnologist: Journal of the American Ethnological Society 42, no. 1 (February 2015): 33–54, https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12114; Amahl Bishara, “Killing Space, Stealing Time: The Stink and Burn of Occupation,” Society for Cultural Anthropology, January 25, 2022, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/killing-space-stealing-time-the-stink-and-burn-of-occupation; Rema Hammami, “Destabilizing Mastery and the Machine: Palestinian Agency and Gendered Embodiment at Israeli Military Checkpoints,” Current Anthropology 60, no. S19 (February 2019): S87–S97, https://doi.org/10.1086/699906; Rema Hammami, “On (Not) Suffering at the Checkpoint; Palestinian Narrative Strategies of Surviving Israel’s Carceral Geography,” Borderlands 14, no. 1 (2015): link.gale.com/apps/doc/A458263293/AONE?u=anon∼395e425e&sid=googleScholar&xid=c8765106; Rema Hammami, “On the Importance of Thugs: The Moral Economy of a Checkpoint,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 22–23 (Winter/Autumn 2005): 16–28, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/77939; Doaa Hammoudeh, Layaly Hamayel, and Lynn Welchman, “Beyond the Physicality of Space: East Jerusalem, Kufr ‘Aqab, and the Politics of Everyday Suffering,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 65 (Spring 2016): 35–60, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/198346; Amira Hass, “The Natives’ Time is Cheap,” Haaretz, February 23, 2005, https://www.haaretz.com/2005-02-23/ty-article/the-natives-time-is-cheap/0000017f-e26a-d568-ad7f-f36b3dd10000; Helga Tawil-Souri, “Checkpoint Time,” Qui Parle 26, no. 2 (2017): 383–422, https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-4208442; Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir, “(En)Gendering Checkpoints: Checkpoint Watch and the Repercussions of Intervention,” Signs 32, no. 4 (Summer 2007): 973–96, https://doi.org/10.1086/512623; Mikko Joronen et al., “Palestinian Futures: Anticipation, Imagination, Embodiments,” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 103, no. 4 (2021): 277–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2021.2004196; Julie Peteet, “Closure’s Temporality: The Cultural Politics of Time and Waiting,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 1 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-4282037; Julie Peteet, Space and Mobility in Palestine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017); Livia Wick, “The Practice of Waiting under Closure in Palestine,” City & Society 23, no. S1 (2011): 24–44, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-744X.2011.01054.x.
10 Shukair, “Shakira’s Picture.”
11 Reflecting the centrality of family unification as a mechanism to Israeli governance overall, the most recent 2021 Israeli governing coalition collapse that led to the fifth election in three years was triggered by a Knesset debate over the renewal of what is typically pro forma extension of the law governing family unification of Palestinians. Shira Rubin, “Israel’s Disparate New Coalition Splits over Law Separating Palestinian Families in First Big Test,” Washington Post, July 6, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/israel-palestinian-residency-intifada/2021/07/06/ade519d6-de24-11eb-a27f-8b294930e95b_story.html.
12 Noa Shpigel, “Israel’s Parliament Votes to Extend Ban on Palestinian Family Unification,” Haaretz, March 6, 2023, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-03-06/ty-article/.premium/knesset-votes-to-extend-citizenship-law-which-bans-palestinian-family-unification/00000186-b4f4-d9eb-abce-bcfffb860000?lts=1692382517078.
13 HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual, “Petition to Israeli High Court of Justice: Inhuman Conditions at the East Jerusalem Office of the Ministry of Interior and the Employment Service,” news release, March 13, 2018, https://hamoked.org/document.php?dID=Updates1965; “‘It’s Hell’: The Bureaucratic Nightmare Facing East Jerusalem’s Palestinians,” Middle East Eye, July 18, 2019, https://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/node/137821.
14 Nir Hasson, “Four Employees of East Jerusalem’s Interior Ministry Office Arrested in Bribery Probe,” Haaretz, August 20, 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-08-20/ty-article/.premium/four-arrests-in-bribery-probe-of-e-jerusalem-interior-ministry-office/0000017f-df00-df9c-a17f-ff184d1d0000.
15 Eetta Prince-Gibson, “Comfortable Interiors: The Interior Ministry Has Opened Its New Offices in East Jerusalem,” Jerusalem Post, March 9, 2006, https://www.jpost.com/local-israel/in-jerusalem/comfortable-interiors.
16 Human Rights Watch (HRW), Separate and Unequal: Israel’s Discriminatory Treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, December 19, 2010, https://www.hrw.org/report/2010/12/19/separate-and-unequal/israels-discriminatory-treatment-palestinians-occupied.
17 Organized and economic abandonment as articulated by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Elizabeth Povinelli, respectively, among others, may be fruitful conceptual language for thinking about some forms of structural violence in Jerusalem. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007); Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
18 Google reviews are a neglected yet excellent, if highly variable, avenue into examining the leveraged effect of frustration and anger, in general. Reviews can be particularly useful in settings with little alternative means of public complaint or accountability, as in the case of Palestinian Jerusalem.
19 Hasson, “Four Employees of East Jerusalem’s Interior.”
20 The text for this example was translated by Google from Hebrew.
21 The text for this example was translated by Google from Hebrew.
22 Limits to defining an Internet space like Google reviews as “public” include the unequal distribution of Internet access, and the fact that Google privately owns the space and has ultimate control on what is allowed and made visible to others. This is to say that it is a very narrow version of “public” that is referred to when the object is the mainstream Internet.
23 The transportation system in Jerusalem is heavily segregated and disproportionate between Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian neighborhoods. The bus terminal referred to here is Palestinian owned and run, and serves only those communities. It emerged out of the historic abandonment of Palestinian neighborhoods by the Jerusalem Municipality. Yet, just by looking at the routes the bus company operates, it is possible to see an integrated Palestinian Jerusalem and alternative to the Israeli claim of a sovereign capital city. The work of Maryam S. Griffin and Amahl Bishara describe these issues of transportation, movement, and overlapping geographies in detail.
24 My thanks go out to the members of the Sharaf family who invited me into their home and allowed me to interview them in November 2022.
25 Anonymous interview conducted by the author, Jerusalem, November 2022. Names of those interviewed have been changed to protect their identity.
26 Anonymous interview conducted by the author, Jerusalem, September 2022.
27 The ministry was built on appropriated lands—olive groves—in the Karm al-Mufti area of Wadi al-Joz. See Martina Rieker and Dalia Habash, “Wadi al-Joz: In Focus,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 43–50, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/78253.
28 Nir Hasson, “East Jerusalem Palestinians Can Now Use Job Bureau in City’s West, Israel Says,” Haaretz, June 26, 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-06-26/ty-article/.premium/east-jlem-palestinians-can-now-use-job-bureau-in-citys-west/0000017f-dbd6-db5a-a57f-dbfe9dda0000.
29 Hasson, “Four Employees of East Jerusalem’s Interior.”
30 Prince-Gibson, “Comfortable Interiors.” This article also refers to a man in his 20s who earned NIS 100 daily, suggesting that a person in his position could have made more money holding spots in line than in his wage-labor job. Another article from the same time period reported that scalpers typically sold their spots in line for between NIS 100–150, suggesting that $450 is an exceptional sum. See Joseph Nasr, “Interior Ministry to Be Made More Accessible to Jerusalem Arabs,” Jerusalem Post, November 25, 2004, ProQuest.
31 Ibtisam Iskafi, “Traveling through the ‘Borders’ of the Israeli Interior Ministry and National Insurance,” Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture 21, no. 4 (2016): 57–59, https://www.proquest.com/docview/1865399427.
32 Daniel K. Eisenbud, “Gov’t Strike Leaves Tens of Thousands of Arabs in East Jerusalem Unable to Leave Country,” Jerusalem Post, February 24, 2015, https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/govt-strike-leaves-tens-of-thousands-of-arabs-in-east-jerusalem-unable-to-leave-country-392077.
33 UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, “UN Experts Condemn Israel’s ‘Sadistic’ Punitive Measures against French-Palestinian Rights Defender Salah Hammouri,” news release, October 19, 2022, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/10/un-experts-condemn-israels-sadistic-punitive-measures-against-french.
34 Addameer: Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, “Israeli Minister of Interior to Officially Revoke Permanent Residency of Lawyer Salah Hammouri,” news release, October 18, 2021, https://www.addameer.org/news/4531.
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Thayer Hastings
Thayer Hastings is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. His dissertation explores the relationship between the bureaucratic forms of proof Palestinians produce to document their “center of life” in Jerusalem and Israel’s settler-colonial anxiety over maintaining a Jewish demographic majority in the city. The research investigates how crises of and within colonialism shape and take shape in everyday life, and the analytical openings revealed by attending to spaces of intimacy, relationships, and the home.