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ABSTRACT
Through home sealing in Palestine, the Israeli state utilizes the agentive materialism and political valence of concrete as settler colonial state building tools. By rendering the home uninhabitable, the walls of the home are transformed into border walls, while the sealed home rhetorically functions as a relic of collective punishment. Home sealing is an expression of the Israeli state's permanent anxiety surrounding Palestinian compositional power. This essay demonstrates the urgency for approaching settler-colonial state logics through a lens rooted in decolonial approaches to materialist rhetoric and rhetorical studies of space and place.
Notes
1 “After Welding It: Israeli Fills Abu Jamal’s Family Home with Concrete,” Palestinian News Network, http://english.pnn.ps/2015/07/02/iof-fills-abu-jamals-family-home-with-cement/ (accessed June 15, 2020).
2 “Israeli Forces ‘Seal Shut’ Home of West Bank Man Believed to be Responsible for Car Attack,” Global News, March 8, 2016, https://globalnews.ca/video/2564200/israeli-forces-seal-shut-home-of-west-bank-man-believed-to-be-responsible-for-car-attack#autoplay.
3 “Israel Seals Palestinian Prisoner’s Room with Concrete,” Memo: Middle East Monitor, November 11, 2016, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20161111-israel-seals-palestinian-prisoners-room-with-concrete/.
4 For a discussion of how understandings of “terrorist” and “terrorism” and racially and politically laden as well as deeply embedded in the reproduction of imperialist nation-states see Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 175; Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
5 Shane Darcy, “Punitive House Demolitions, the Prohibition of Collective Punishment, and the Supreme Court of Israel,” Penn State International Law Review 21, no. 3 (2003): 506.
6 Judah Ari Gross, “IDF Again Says It’s Sealing Apartment of Terrorist Who Killed Ari Fuld,” Times of Israel, December 16, 2018, https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-again-says-its-sealing-apartment-of-terrorist-who-killed-ari-fuld/.
7 Meredith McBride, “Collective Punishment: Home Demolition in Israel and Occupied Palestine,” Rights Wire: The Human Rights Blog of the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice, September 23, 2016, https://rightswireblog.org/2016/09/23/collective-punishment-home-demolition-in-israel-and-occupied-palestine/.
8 Within these statistics, the number of sealed versus demolished is unknown according to “Home Demolition as Collective Punishment,” B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, https://www.btselem.org/punitive_demolitions/statistics (accessed May 13, 2020).
9 “Statistics on Demolition for Alleged Military Purposes,” B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, https://www.btselem.org/razing/statistics (accessed June 15, 2020).
10 For Gaza, this policy was enacted until the 2005 implementation of Israel’s Disengagement Plan. According to B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, a military committee chaired by Major General Udi Shani concluded that the effectiveness of house demolition as a counterterrorism tool was questionable. While punitive home sealings and demolitions drastically decreased over the following years, the practice was regularly resumed in 2014 according to “Home Demolitions as Collective Punishment,” B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, https://www.btselem.org/punitive_demolitions (accessed June 15, 2020).
11 The differentiation between house demolition as a punitive measure or for “policy violation” is not clear. For instance, in their report exploring the legality of home demolition, Shane Darcy details one instance in which over sixty homes were completely destroyed by the Israeli army in Rafah Refugee Camp in January of 2002, the day after four Israeli soldiers were killed in the area by gunman. Despite the punitive aura of this action, the justification given by the Israeli forces was for security or military purposes. See Shane Darcy, “Punitive House Demolitions, the Prohibition of Collective Punishment, and the Supreme Court of Israel,” Penn State International Law Review 21, no. 3 (2003): 477–507.
12 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Counter-Spaces as Resistance in Conflict Zones: Palestinian Women Recreating a Home,” Journal of Feminist Family Therapy 17, no. 3 (2005): 120.
13 Henri Lefebrve, The Production of Space (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1991).
14 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xi.
15 Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (New York: Verso Books, 2007), 7.
16 John Ackerman, “Rhetorical Life Among the Ruins,” in Field Rhetoric: Ethnography, Ecology, and Engagement in the Places of Persuasion, ed. Candice Rai and Caroline Gottschalk Druschke (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2018), 172.
17 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 21.
18 Kundai Chirindo, “Micronations and Postnational Rhetorics,” Women’s Studies in Communication 41, no. 4 (2019): 390.
19 Weizman, Hollow Land, 5.
20 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no.4 (2006): 387.
21 Patrick Wolfe, “Nation and MiscegeNation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-Mabo Era,” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 36 (1994): 93.
22 Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 388.
23 Ibid., 388. Deborah Bird Rose, Hidden Histories: Black Stories from Victoria River Downs, Humbert River and Wave Hill Stations (Canberra, AU: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1991), 46.
24 Tamara Zieve, “This Week in History: Herzl, Rabbis Clash on Zionism,” The Jerusalem Post, July 15, 2012, https://www.jpost.com/Features/In-Thespotlight/This-Week-In-History-Herzl-rabbis-clash-on-Zionism.
25 For Orthodox Jews, being Jewish means to exist in a state of galut, or a form of exile. The return of the Messiah will usher in the end of galut through the establishment of a religious Jewish kingdom in the holy land. Returning en masse or establishing a Jewish nation in the holy land prior to the coming of the Messiah is forbidden.
26 Ben Lorber, “Jewish Alternatives to Zionism: A Partial History,” Jewish Voice for Peace, January 11, 2019, https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/a-partial-history-of-jewish-alternatives/.
27 “Legal Ruling of the Leading Rabbis of Palestine and Other Lands Regarding the Obligation to Secede from the Zionist Nationalist Council,” Neturei Karta: International Jews United Against Zionism, https://www.nkusa.org/Historical_Documents/rabbis_of_Palestine.cfm.
28 James Eastwood, “Reading Abdul Fattah al-Sharif, Reading Elor Azaria: Anti-Mizrahi Racism in the Moral Economy of Zionist Settler Colonial Violence,” Settler Colonial Studies 9, no. 1 (2019): 59–77.
29 Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories (London, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2017), xviii.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., xiii.
32 Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (New York: Monad Press, 1973).
33 Ibid., 29.
34 Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth.
35 Ibid., xxi.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Martin Dean, “The Development and Implementation of Nazi Denaturalization and Confiscation Policy up to the Eleventh Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 16, no. 2 (2002): 218–21.
39 Eric T. Jennings, “Writing Madagascar Back into the Madagascar Plan,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21, no. 2 (2007): 187.
40 There is not a consensus on the causal relationship between the UN’s decision and the violence of the Holocaust. See Evyatar Friesel, “On the Myth of the Connection Between the Holocaust and the Creation of Israel,” Israel Affairs 14, no. 3 (2008): 446–66.
41 Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism,” 390.
42 Peter Buch, “Introduction,” in Israel, A Colonial-Settler State?, ed. Maxime Rodinson (New York: Monad Press, 1973).
43 Annamaria Brancato, “The Settler Colonial Paradigm and the Israeli Official Narrative: An Example of Elimination of the Natives,” Journal of Mediterranean Knowledge 3, no. 1 (2018): 29.
44 Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State: Theodor Herzl’s Program for Zionism (American Zionist Emergency Council, 1946), 84, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25282/25282-h/25282-h.htm (accessed June 15, 2020).
45 Edward W. Said, “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” Social Text 1 (1979): 29.
46 David Lloyd. “Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel,” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no.1 (2012): 61.
47 Wolfe, “Nation and MiscegeNation,” 96.
48 Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour, “Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine,” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no 1 (2012): 2.
49 Ronald Walter Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15, no. 1 (1998): 38.
50 Similarly, using Derrida’s notion of différance, Biesecker rethinks the rhetorical situation as articulation by de-centering the subject. Like Derrida’s conceptualization of language, Biesecker moves away from understanding subjectivity as an essence, thus also moving away from an understanding of the rhetorical situation as rhetor-driven. See Barbara Biesecker, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of ‘Differérance,’” Philosophy and Rhetoric 22, no. 2 (1989): 110–30.
51 Christopher N. Gamble and Joshua S. Hanan, “Figures of Entanglement: Special Issue Introduction,” Review of Communication 16, no. 4 (2016): 265.
52 Tim Cresswell, “Toward a Politics of Mobility,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28, no. 1 (2010): 17–31. See also: Joan Faber McAlister and Joshua P. Ewalt, “New Materialities and Precarious Mobilities: Reinventing Studies of Space and Place,” Women’s Studies in Communication 41, no. 4. (2018): 339–48.
53 Tiara R. Na’puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric: Remapping the Marianas and Challenging Militarization from ‘A Stirring Place,’” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (2019): 1–22; Kundai Chirindo, “Micronations and Postnational Rhetorics,” Women’s Studies in Communication 41, no. 4 (2018): 383–93.
54 Weizman, Hollow Land.
55 Ibid., 6.
56 Ibid., 5.
57 Ibid.
58 Gudrun Krämer and Graham Harman, A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 263.
59 Ibid.
60 “Ban on the import of concrete into Gaza for the private sector results in scarcity and price increases,” United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Occupied Palestinian Territory, April 28, 2016, https://www.ochaopt.org/content/ban-import-concrete-gaza-private-sector-results-scarcity-and-price-increases.
61 AFP, “Gaza Strip Cement Import Ban Lifted by Israel,” Middle East Eye, May 23, 2016, https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/gaza-strip-cement-import-ban-lifted-israel (accessed June 15, 2020).
62 “Bans on the Import of Cement into Gaza for the Private Sector Results in Scarcity and Price Increases,” United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, April 28, 2016, https://www.ochaopt.org/content/ban-import-cement-gaza-private-sector-results-scarcity-and-price-increases (accessed June 15, 2020).
63 “Chronological Review of Events Relating to the Question of Palestine,” United Nations Division for Palestinian Rights, https://www.un.org/unispal/chronological-review-of-eventsapril-2016-dpr-review/ (accessed June 15, 2020).
64 Samira Kawash, “415 Men: Moving Bodies, or, the Cinematic Politics of Deportation,” in Deleuze and Guatarri: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture, ed. Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 137.
65 Weizman, Hollow Land, 6–7.
66 Chirindo, “Micronations and Postnational Rhetorics,” 390.
67 Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth.
68 Ibid., xxv.
69 Ibid., xxviii.
70 Clyde Haberman, “Israel Resumes Sealing of Houses as Punishment,” The New York Times, December 4, 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/04/world/israel-resumes-sealing-of-houses-as-punishment.html.
71 Weizman, Hollow Land.
72 Haberman, “Israel Resumes Sealing of Houses as Punishment.”
73 Casey R. Schmitt, “Contours of the Land: Place-As-Rhetoric and Native American Effigy Mounds,” Western Journal of Communication 79, no. 3 (2015): 308.
74 Ackerman, “Rhetorical Life Among the Ruins.”
75 “Israeli Police Complete Sealing Jabal Mukabbir Home with Concrete,” Altahrir, News of Islam, Muslims, Arab Spring, and Special Palestine, March 23, 2017, https://altahrir.wordpress.com/2017/03/23/israeli-police-complete-sealing-jabal-mukabbir-home-with-concrete/; Daniel K. Eisenbud, “Israel Beings Sealing Homes of Palestinian Terrorists in East Jerusalem,” The Jerusalem Post, January 4, 2016, https://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Israel-begins-razing-home-of-Palestinian-terrorist-in-east-Jerusalem-439311. While the video documentation included in Eisenbud’s article is somewhat blurry, the intensity of sound that emanates from a concrete truck can be clearly heard.
76 Todd Hamilton and Nick Holdren, “Compositional Power,” Turbulence: Ideas for Movement (2007): 1, http://www.turbulence.org.uk/index.html@p=41.html (accessed June 15, 2020).
77 Christopher Harker, “Spacing Palestine Through the Home,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34, no. 3 (2009): 325.
78 Weizman, Hollow Land, 237–58.
79 Christopher Harker, “Precariousness, Precarity, and the Family: Notes from Palestine,” Environment and Planning A 44, no. 4 (2012): 855.
80 Ahed Tamimi is a 17-year-old Palestinian activist who was arrested and imprisoned for eight months after a video, in which she slaps an IDF soldier who had just shot her cousin, went viral and sparked international attention.
81 Jaclynn Ashly, “Mohammad Tamimi: ‘They Beat Me Into Confessing,’” Mondoweiss: News & Opinion About Palestine, Israel & the United States, February 28, 2018, https://mondoweiss.net/2018/02/mohammad-tamimi-confessing/.
82 Christopher Harker, “Precariousness, Precarity, and the Family,” 855.
83 Weizman, Hollow Land.
84 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 156.
85 Matthew Bost and Ronald Walter Greene, “Affirming Rhetorical Materialism: Enfolding the Virtual and the Actual,” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 4 (2011): 441.
86 David Lloyd, “Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel,” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012): 61; Ilan Pappé, The Biggest Prison on Earth.
87 Lloyd, “Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception,” 61.
88 Mae Rice, “Photos: Inside the Demolition of the Notorious Cabrini-Green Projects,” Chicagoist, https://chicagoist.com/2015/09/29/photos_inside_the_demolition_of_the.php.
89 The term “pogrom” is used to refer to outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence by non-Jewish street mobs in the Russian Empire from 1881 to 1884, although pogroms continued well into the early and mid twentieth century as a larger manifestation of anti-Semitic sentiment. See Monty Noam Penkower, “The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903: A Turning Point in Jewish History,” Modern Judaism 24, no. 3 (2004): 187–225.
90 Edward González-Tennant, The Rosewood Massace: An Archaeology and History of Intersectional Violence (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018).
91 Brown, Walled States, 8.