The sun had just come up at Erez terminal, the only crossing point for non-Israelis between the Gaza Strip and Israel. Erez had undergone quite a few changes since my last time there, in October 2004; it seems that every time I have been back over the past four years there has been a new row of concrete blocks, another line of barbed wire, one more gate.
Everyone I have ever met who has been there compares Erez either to a prison, a cattle-processing plant, or both. After having your documents cleared by the Israeli military, you pass through a series of narrow rows separated by metal railings, and then try to mangle your luggage through revolving steel gates apparently designed for midgets (they used to have barbed wire at the top), all while the voice of a soldier barks at you through a loudspeaker perched somewhere above. Then you enter a sort of airlock area where one remote-controlled steel gate must close before the next opens. This leads to “the tunnel,” a large covered passageway which on this morning was filled with a few dozen Palestinian workers waiting to enter Israel (a fraction of the numbers that entered before 2000), sitting in a long line. A few were engaged in a fistfight while the others waited with strained smiles.
After what seems like a half-kilometer walk through the tunnel, you get to Palestinian “border control,” which consists of a few hapless officers sitting at a table where they may or may not bother to write your passport details into a notebook. Then you officially enter a land described as one of the most densely populated places on earth; what that means concretely (so to speak) is that you are always in sight of a tightly clustered built-up skyline. Gaza is the only place I have ever been where the horizon itself feels oppressive.
I arrived in Gaza at a strange time – after the weepy spectacle of the evacuation of the Israeli settlers, but before the army completed its own redeployment outside of the Strip. Going from Erez to Gaza City feels like a loosening of the shackles – the air in the city seems quite a bit more relaxed than during the darkest days of 2001-2004; no more being buzzed by F-16s, for instance (they were patrolling Gaza's skies at a higher altitude). People breathe more easily; a few new businesses have opened in the more prosperous neighborhoods. In the southern town of Khan Yunis, surrounded on three sides by a settlement bloc, I could sleep without the constant thuds of heavy machine gun fire from Israeli positions spraying bullets into the nearby refugee camp. My friends' children, infants not long ago, now have fiery personalities – terrifying to think that I'm now old enough to say, “I remember when you were this big!” Gaza City's overcrowded beach, where I used to swim during chilly dawns, is now even more crowded.
Politically, disengagement has succeeded in turning Palestinian energies inward. After I returned to Boston, a Palestinian friend emailed me about seeing Gazans near Erez getting into a fistfight over scraps of metal left behind by the Israelis in one of the settlements, a metaphor so dripping with irony that it would be considered over-the-top if it weren’t so sad.
This scrambling takes one form in the colorful banners hanging above Gaza's streets, as Fatah and Hamas vie for the credit for what is being billed as a major Israeli defeat. They are both also trying to respond to critics. The Fatah-dominated Palestinian National Authority (PNA), long stained with the charge of being a willing subcontractor for the occupation, reassures Gazans with banners like: “Today, Gaza! Tomorrow, the West Bank and Jerusalem!” Hamas, for its part, argues that “Four years of pain is better than ten years in vain!” This banner alludes to the failures of the Oslo process (which witnessed not the evacuation of settlements but their doubling), while implicitly acknowledging the role its armed activities played in provoking massive and indiscriminate Israeli reprisals. Neither Fatah nor Hamas, however, seem to have any agenda or strategy for ending the occupation, however; instead, both are more focused on the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections scheduled for January.
It is too early to tell how the elections will go. Fatah, which thanks to a Hamas boycott has dominated the PLC since its first and only elections in 1996, seems more fragmented than ever. Whenever I asked what was going on with Fatah, friends would shoot back sardonically, “Which one? There are a thousand Fatahs.” Infighting also appears worse; while I was in Gaza, a band of gunmen executed Moussa 'Arafat, a particularly unlikable former head of PNA military intelligence, longtime Fatah leader, and relative of the late Palestinian leader (adding insult to mortal injury, they kidnapped his son, also a PNA officer). The conspicuous absence of any reinforcements to save 'Arafat (despite the headquarters of the powerful Preventive Security Service being near by) led many to speculate that the hit was sanctioned by rivals in Fatah, to which this symbol of ‘old guard’ politics was a clear liability. Meanwhile, in recent months a power struggle between two Fatah factions in Khan Yunis resulted in one of them opening fire at the office of the International Committee of the Red Cross in order to embarrass the PNA.
Even if Fatah does not pull together in the face of the elections, it will still have help from outside, as a Hamas victory at the polls would signal a collision between the hollow slogans of “fighting terror” and “promoting democracy,” precipitating a new political crisis. Ariel Sharon has already indicated that Israel will not allow voting to take place if Hamas is allowed to run. Other external actors are taking a more subtle approach: according to aid workers I spoke to, James Wolfensohn, the former World Bank president and White House-appointed unofficial coordinator of Gaza-related donor efforts, is determined to bolster Fatah as much as possible with aid projects.
To describe the situation as “anarchy” would go too far; the violence is rarely random per se, though of course it is even less rarely justified. But its use is undeniably spreading. The number of reported “honor killings” has increased throughout the West Bank and Gaza in the past year. Less dire but more widely publicized is the kidnappings of foreigners. A feud between two Gazan families has boiled over in recent months, fueling a spate of kidnappings of foreigners to extract concessions from the PNA (reports indicate that hostages were not mistreated and released relatively quickly). Foreigners rarely walk the streets of Gaza City now, getting around town instead by car.
The increasing fragmentation of Palestinian politics in Gaza is in part shaped by Israel's attempt to reconfigure the occupation of Gaza without actually ending it. The longstanding “dilemma,” as an analyst at a center-left Zionist think tank in Tel Aviv explained to me, is how to maximize control over the territory of the Gaza Strip while minimizing responsibility in the eyes of the world for the welfare of its inhabitants. The upshot is a situation in which Israel exercises less direct control than before, while preventing anyone else from fully taking over. In this context, the question of Gaza's legal status becomes crucial – is it occupied (and thus under Israeli responsibility) or not?
The disengagement plan claims to dispel any Israeli responsibility for “the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip" - note the reference to people, not land (1). Over the latter, the plan accords Israel prerogatives normally reserved for occupying powers: Israel will keep complete control over Gaza's airspace and coastline as well as a veto on any foreign security presence (presumably including a very senior Egyptian intelligence official who has effectively taken up residence to help the PNA keep a lid on things). Israel reserves the “right” to reposition its forces into the Strip at will and the Gaza Division of the Israeli military (currently headed by a 1997 Kennedy School alum, Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi) has not dissolved, but merely relocated to a new base just across the border. In the meantime, Gaza will remain dependent on Israel for water, sewage, electricity, and telecommunications; Israel will continue to control imports and exports and collect customs duties on behalf of the PNA; the Israeli shekel will still be the currency. Israel is reportedly still in charge even of Gaza’s population registry, which means that it must approve all PNA decisions on issuing identity documents and granting residency rights in Gaza (2); in other words, the very bureaucratic existence of Gaza’s Palestinians is kept in an Israeli computer and is subject to Israel control. Needless to say, the PNA remains without the authority or power of a state and has no say in the process at the end of the day.
As for the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, Israel still seems very much to have the last word. When the PNA reopened the crossing for one day on 23 September (it had been closed over two weeks earlier by Israel), it did so only with Israel’s permission (3). As for the border as a whole, press reports about an Israel-Egypt agreement for Egypt to “take over” the border are misleading – the agreement allows Egypt to increase the number of policemen (beyond the limits imposed by the Camp David treaty) on its own side of the border while the Israeli military evacuates the Gaza side. It is highly unlikely that the agreement – whose text seems to not be public – restricts Israel’s ability to return to the Gazan side of the border at will, as that would conflict with the Disengagement Plan as passed by the Knesset and Cabinet.
In the meantime, Israel is building a new terminal at the point where Gaza, Israel, and Egypt meet. This location would require transit through Israeli territory, thus continuing Israel's control over Gaza's access to the outside world. During my visit earlier this month, there were new rumors every day about various compromises involving European border inspectors, or Israeli control over movement of goods but PNA control over movement of people, and so on. Whether the bag checkers at the border are Palestinians, Israelis, Europeans, or Martians, however, does not by itself settle the question of whether Gaza is occupied.
Under international law, a territory is considered occupied if it is under the “effective control” of a belligerent foreign power. Jurists have long agreed that an occupier can maintain “effective control” despite the absence of troops (4). This principle is even more relevant in a territory as small as Gaza (from a fifth-floor window in downtown Gaza City, you can still see factories inside Israel). Furthermore, “effective control” is compatible with handing off certain functions to local authorities; indeed, the law of occupation explicitly envisions, if not encourages, such cooperation (5). This particular occupation has always involved massive delegation of responsibility to third parties as well: until 1988, civil servants in the West Bank were paid by Jordan, and the international community has footed the bill for refugee health care and education through the UN. Yet none of these arrangements changed the underlying fact of occupation and ultimate Israeli control. Whether Gaza is occupied depends on whether Israel is transferring authority or merely subcontracting it: Is it holding on to the final veto or not?
The situation described above indicates that Gaza remains for the time being an occupied territory, albeit occupied by remote control. Thus, the notion that the Palestinians must build something like a normal state in Gaza before they can have any state at all, as articulated most prominently by George W. Bush, is an especially laughable case of reversing cart and horse. The PNA’s fortunes in Gaza are still very much determined by Israeli fiat and its legitimacy is further crippled by its inability to stop the relentless expansion of Israel’s West Bank colonies (the number of new settlers there in the past year alone exceeds the eight thousand evacuated from Gaza). The viability of any potential “Palestinian state” in the West Bank and Gaza, always a dubious notion, recedes further with each passing day. Yet we are constantly told that now the Palestinians must step up to the plate, now it's their move, the ball is in their court – it would be more apt to say, in the words of a British journalist I met in Gaza, that the ball is now in the Palestinians' cell. Nevertheless, this chain of absurd propositions continues to uncoil without regard for this reality on the ground, prologues in a chronicle of a failure foretold.
A pair of bad jokes at Erez crystallized for me the two disturbing realities that struck me during my brief visit: ongoing Israeli indirect control and worsening internal Palestinian violence. PNA “coordination” with Israel is back on for the first time in years, which means a Palestinian layer of bureaucracy insulating the Israeli one for people who leave through Erez. On the Palestinian side of Erez, I gave my papers to a PNA officer, who read my details over the phone in Hebrew to his Israeli counterparts. And then both of us waited for the Israelis to give the okay. After waiting for over an hour with nothing else going on, I tried to get the officer's attention by calling out to him: “Slicha, ya 'ammo.” I had unthinkingly mixed Arabic and Hebrew, somehow unsure if I was addressing occupier, occupied, or both (he grinned, perhaps because he shared the joke, perhaps because seeing a Chinese man speaking Semitic languages was the joke). Later, when I finally got to the area where the PNA check baggage before letting people go over to the Israeli side (they don't check on the way in), an officer pointed to my overstuffed backpack and asked with a smirk, “Who you got in there?” to which I replied, “Moussa 'Arafat's son.” Fortunately, he also had a good sense of humor, laughing heartily and slapping my back
Two days after I returned to the states, the Israeli military completed its redeployment outside of the Gaza Strip. The roadblocks that had divided the Gaza Strip into smaller Gaza "strips" for the past five years were gone. Thousands of Palestinians rushed into the one-third of the Strip that had previously been off-limits to them. Children who had spent their whole lives near the sea but had never visited it (the southern half of the Gaza coastline had been inside a settlement bloc) stormed the beaches and some drowned. Other people, some of whom had never been allowed to leave this tiny piece of land, tore down parts of the border wall and walked into Egypt. Families divided for decades were momentarily reunited.
This moment of something like freedom, in which many outside saw only a mob and nothing else, quickly passed. The PNA and Egypt resealed the border within days, dutifully leaving 1.4 million indefinitely trapped Palestinians as evidence of their ability to act as “responsible” players. In the meantime, Israeli drones still prowled Gaza’s skies, policing from the air and on 18 September, one week after the redeployment, the army was quietly back inside the northeastern Gaza Strip, leveling Palestinian land to create a new “buffer zone” along the border (6).
Within days, however, Gaza burst back in the headlines, bringing the same old decontextualized video wallpaper of strikes and counterstrikes. These stories may very well fade from the world’s attention in the coming days, or they may not; but this last visit to Gaza has left me as convinced as ever that upbeat assessments of new “opportunities” for peace are as hollow as ever. At most, we may see what Israelis refer to as “quiet” – the (near) absence of shooting coinciding with the absence of any political process, which means that land-grabbing and demographic engineering in the West Bank, the Negev, and elsewhere can happily march on until the next conflagration.
1. Disengagement Plan (revised), Art 1(6). As Iain Scobbie, professor of international law at SOAS has pointed out in a draft paper, however, any claim that the Plan ends Israeli responsibility over Gaza would make the plan self-contradicting. This is because Art 1(7) provides that previous agreements with the Palestinians will continue to apply. This would include the 1995 “Oslo II” Agreement, which prohibits either side from unilaterally changing the status of the West Bank or Gaza (Art. 31(7)). The revised Disengagement plan is available here.
2. “Israeli control over population registry means continued control over Gaza Strip,” Ha’aretz, 26 September 2005.
3. The Ministry of Defense told reporters: “Israel agreed to the request by the Palestinians and Egypt to open Rafah for two days for humanitarian reasons” (“Rafah crossing briefly reopened for humanitarian reasons,” Ha’aretz, 23 September 2005).
4. “Needless to say, it is not necessary that the invading forces occupy every locality in the hostile area in order to establish a state of effective occupation ... it might be theoretically possible to maintain necessary control through the occupant's air force alone” (G. Von Glahn, The Occupation of Enemy Territory: A Commentary on the Law and Practice of Belligerent Occupation, University of Minnesota Press, 1957: pp. 28-29). In the Hostages case (USA vs. Wilhelm List et al.), the U.S. military tribunal at Nürnberg found that an occupying power need not be physically present in every part of the territory, but is still an occupier in areas where it can assume physical control at will. For a thorough analysis of the issue, see “Legal Aspects of Israel's Disengagement Plan under International Humanitarian Law,” Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research, October 2004.
5. Fourth Geneva Convention (Arts. 47, 50, 54, 56).
6. "Humanitarian Briefing Notes, 14-20 September 2005," UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, p. 3; "Seven Days Following Their Redeployment from the Gaza Strip, IOF Plan to Create a Buffer Zone in the North," Palestinian Centre for Human Rights press release, 19 September 2005; "Israel: Palestinians, Egypt have sealed the border," Ha’aretz, 20 September 2005.
Darryl Li is a G-3 in Social Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies. He lived in Gaza during 2001-2002 and is co-author of Razing Rafah: Mass House Demolitions in the Gaza Strip (Human Rights Watch, 2004).
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