Beyond analogy: bare life in the West Bank

Abstract

This interview and photo essay provides a critical update on the ongoing situation in Palestine regarding the separation barrier being built by the Israeli government, more popularly referred to by its opponents as the apartheid wall. Jamal Juma’ is a Palestinian activist who helped establish the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign, also known as the Stop the Wall Campaign, in 2002. This interview is biographical in scope and pedagogical in intention, providing insight into his activism and that of others in the West Bank.

Notes

¹ For a pro-barrier perspective on this development, see David Makovsky, ‘How to Build a Fence’, Foreign Affairs 83(2), 2004, pp 52, 53.

² The literature on these issues is extensive. For a useful overview, see Leila Farsakh, ‘Independence, Cantons, or Bantustans: Whither the Palestinian State?’, Middle East Journal 59(2), 2005, pp 1–16.

³ For an Israeli government website, see: http://www.securityfence.mod.gov.il/pages/eng/default.htm.

⁴ Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation, London: Verso, 2007, ch 6. For a separate discussion on the politics of walls that draws from Weizman, see Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, New York: Zone, 2010, ch 1.

⁵ International Court of Justice, Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, General List No. 131, 9 July 2004.

⁶ On this analogy, see, for example, Uri Davis, Israel: An Apartheid State, London: Zed Books, 1987; Mark Marshal, ‘Rethinking the Palestine Question: The Apartheid Paradigm’, Journal of Palestine Studies 25(1), 1995, pp 15–22; Ran Greenstein, Genealogies of Conflict: Class, Identity, and State in Palestine/Israel and South Africa, Hanover, NH: New England University Press, 1995.

⁷ Al-Naksa Day (the day of ‘the setback’) is not to be confused with Al-Nakba Day (15 May), which commemorates the forced displacement (or ‘catastrophe’) of Palestinians following the independence of Israel in 1948.

⁸ This interview received research support through grants from the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC), a member of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC), and from the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

⁹ This law is the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Order) 5763, passed in 2003 and extended in 2008.