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Chapter 9
ENGAGING EVIL AND EXCESS IN
PALESTINE/ISRAEL
Julie Peteet
Evil, a term both perplexing and expansive, and often assumed to be
a universal, is a transcendent category and a hotbed of ambiguity.
Rhetorically, we are familiar with the “axis of evil,” the “evil empire,”
and quotidian comparisons to those icons of sadistic evil: Hitler,
Charles Mason, the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein,
the Iranian regime, al-Qaeda, communists, and more recently ISIS,
among others. TV crime shows relentlessly traffic in profiles of the
evil lurking among us typically in the form of the grotesque: brutal
rapes, murders, child abuse, and torture. With our heightened sense
of American exceptionalism, we prefer “to picture the evil that was
there” (Sontag 2003, 88) rather than that closer to home, unless it
unfolds at the individual level (hence the TV mania for dramatizing
evil). As Susan Sontag astutely notes, there is a Holocaust Museum in
Washington, DC, but not a museum of slavery.
This chapter probes how evil becomes legitimized and normalized
and thus attains a level of acceptability. In the contemporary era,
invocations of “security,” “self-defense,” and “terrorism” are recast
as legitimate acts that might otherwise be considered evil. In the
case of Palestinians, their imputed evil actions are justification for
the evil done to them, echoing former Vice-President Dick Cheney’s
“dark side” where imputed evil allows for disproportionate responses.
Slavery and genocide are widely accepted as evil practices. Evil may
encompass acts of extraordinary violence but can equally be constituted by the mundane quotidian acts of subjugation, degradation,
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and petty violence that characterize life under Israeli occupation
and colonialism, or, closer to home, Jim Crow and its contemporary
iteration in the “new Jim Crow” (Alexander 2012).
As a polysemic term, what David Parkin has called an “odd-job
word” (1985, 1), evil can take on a multiplicity of meanings. In this
chapter, using ethnographic material from Palestine, I will position
it as cruel and rationally calculated excess beyond the boundaries of
particular moral and ethical codes of conduct. It is the intentional,
calibrated infliction of suffering and pain, often accompanied by selfcongratulation, celebration, and a well-honed apparatus of denial.
Israel can be classified as a settler-colonialism state and society of
the sort once common in South Africa and Algeria, among others.
In honing in on daily life under a settler-colonial occupation, this
chapter takes heed of Malinowski’s self-critique of his Trobriand
Islands ethnographies that he was “lured by the dramatic, exceptional
and sensational” to the neglect of the “every day, inconspicuous, drab
and small-scale” (2002 [1935], 462). With this in mind, from ethnographic research in Palestine over the course of the past decade,
I explore how evil, or violent excess, is calculated and built into the
structures and patterns of everyday life under occupation from the
micro or daily small-scale indignities to the macro-scale of military
assault.
This chapter explores evil as calibrated excess through the overlapping registers of military assault, suffering and indifference to it,
visibility and the violent spectacle, and abandonment and expulsion in Palestine/Israel. The infliction of suffering is a means to end
Palestinian national aspirations and compel obedience. I probe the
calculated-ness of excess using science and technology by the state
and the Palestinian experience of dwelling in such an environment
as daily fare. The violence experienced by Palestinians under occupation operates on a spectrum: from the structural bureaucraticadministrative violence of the permit system and the segregated road
system to the physical violence of torture, imprisonment, random
beatings, and murder, to siege and military assaults. Where structural
violence seems to prevail, it is always backed by the visible threat of
violence in the armed colonist or the ubiquitous military/police or
private security personnel.
What actions have come to fall under the category of evil? The
Iraqi Ba’athist regime deploying chemical weapons against Kurds in
Halabja is commonly accepted as an evil act, but less so the US assaults
on Iraq that resulted in a death toll in the hundreds of thousands
(Atwan 2015, 33), or intermittent and deadly Israeli assaults on an
Engaging Evil and Excess in Palestine/Israel
201
already besieged and sanctioned Gaza. Apartheid in South Africa was
widely understood as a form of evil, yet apartheid in Palestine, within
the parameters of the accepted definition of apartheid, is vigorously
denied (Peteet 2016a). Here and there, us and them, now and then
point to a differentiated conception of evil and malefactors. In other
words, it is the violence of others that is malevolent. The term began to
appear in political rhetoric with US President Ronald Reagan and the
Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini—with the axis of evil and the great Satan
respectively—and the worldwide rise of religion as an animating political force in the mid-to-late twentieth century. As the Cold War ended,
Islamists have supplanted Communists as the face of the evil other.
With roots in religion, ethics,1 moral codes, and folk traditions,
attributions of evil have renewed currency in the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries and, in many instances, they have been
largely secularized. Evil’s religious underpinnings and continuing
reverberations can make it appear a retrograde concept, one social
scientists can find discomforting. Over time, evil has come to refer
less to the supernatural and more to both individual psychological
states and the pathologies of specific political and economic regimes
that routinely inflict pain, violence, and suffering; these often
intersect—hence the framing of some individuals or regimes, usually
non-Western, as the epitome of evil.
An indeterminate somewhat opaque category of actions, evil’s
ambiguity and incertitude rather than stability of meaning, however,
does open a wide berth in which to explore it. The term “evil” may be
a way of capturing conduct and actions for which speech and legal
categories fail us. As an appellation, evil creates meaning, however
expansive, where other sorts of language fail to capture the magnitude
of cruelty, suffering, and pain. Those who rather routinely impute
evil to others, particularly in the “War on Terror” (WoT), use it with
a Manichean certitude to package action: military incursions and
assaults, torture, sanctions, and the suspension of the laws governing
warfare. The “clash of civilization” and WoT discourses provided a
rhetorical framework for casting some violence as evil and others as a
necessity and hence the “lesser of evils” (Weizman 2011). As a term
of reference, evil, like terrorism—those twinned rhetorical devices—is
not a self-appellation and its imputation lends itself to the suspension
of normative codes of conduct, which may themselves rank as evil.
Both terms are seductive as their invocation justifies violence in the
name of security, another magical and murky term. The WoT slotted
whole communities into binaries of good/evil, terrorists/innocents,
and Islamists and the West. In armed conflict, spaces can become
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morally ranked, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine. In these
battlespaces, life can be taken with near impunity. In these spaces of
ostensible evil, where people are outside the boundaries of the fully
human, the dead are not grievable (see Butler 1997).
Does the term “evil” help move us beyond the more concrete
term “unethical”? Steve Caton (2010, 166–67) makes this point in
his discussion of the abuses committed at the Abu Ghraib prison in
Iraq and offers an alternative to locating the concept in either the
domain of the universal or that of cultural relativism. He proposes
“situational evil” or “evil of singularity” (2010, 175), a conceptual
framework that allows use of the concept in contingent circumstance.
This leads to questions of the systemic. What if excess is built into a
particular structure of governance, an excess that is often improvised
and culturally acceptable? Think Gaza. What if inhumane acts are not
merely or always the obeying of orders but are willfully and cheerfully
engaged in in an atmosphere of a colonial occupation, racialized difference, routine petty cruelty and violation of rights, punctuated by
intermittent full-scale military assaults that inflict massive damage
and incur a substantial death toll, and impunity for perpetrators? The
question becomes: What is excess and what is standard, acceptable
behavior during conflict?
Cultural relativism has been trumped to some extent by midtwentieth century human rights law and discourse. International
Humanitarian Law (IHL), which regulates conduct in war, established a framework for understanding evil as excess beyond internationally accepted norms of behavior in armed conflict; in essence, IHL
legitimizes conflict by defining the boundaries of unacceptable and
acceptable behavior. “Disproportionality” and “war crimes” came to
stand in for what had once been considered evil. Excess is a key term
in IHL and a key tenet of proportionality, what Israeli architect Eyal
Weizman notes is a “manifestation of the lesser evil principle” (2011,
11). Proportionality is “not about clear lines of prohibitions but rather
about calculation and determining balances and degrees.” Thus, calculation and quantification stand out. What distinguish state violence
are its assumed legality and its style—its war machinery, the discursive apparatus accompanying it, and the degree of suffering inflicted
and on whom. Abu Ghraib and Bagram prisons come to mind, as does
Gaza, a fenced ghetto, besieged for over a decade, and periodically
assaulted by Israel. Imputations of evil may be associated with the
exceeding of the doctrine of proportionality and when perpetrators
are absolved of responsibility. Equally, evil may reside in the day-today willfully inflicted microcruelties.
Engaging Evil and Excess in Palestine/Israel
203
As enacted in the colonization of Palestine, Zionism, a nationalist
settler-colonial movement and ideology with messianic overtones,
works within territory it considers sovereign space to delineate
boundaries between Arab and Jew, between those who belong and
those who are excluded from the polity. The categories of them and
us have been spatialized, institutionalized in law, are well patrolled for
transgression, and endowed with a rhetorical and discursive life. The
categories have a rhetorical and experiential valence—of superiority
and full humanity on the one hand and a lesser sort of humanity on
the other.2
Israelis and Palestinians attribute evil to each other. Juxtaposing
acts of violence need not imply symmetry—indeed, to the contrary, it
can highlight disparity. Palestinians throw stones and once engaged
in suicide bombings, those iconic acts of “terrorism”; the Israeli
state launches massive military assaults, expropriates Palestinian
resources, and Jewish-Israeli colonists in the West Bank engage in
attacks on the indigenous Palestinian population and their property
with impunity. Death ratios, those blunt, cold quantifications of
violence and suffering, part of the “economy of violence” (Weizman
2011, 4), are barometers of the capacity to act on one side and a register of vulnerability and diminished military capacity on the other;
they are also a means of assessing proportionality. A subtext to death
tolls in armed conflict is “proportionality.” Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine
(named after the southern suburbs of Beirut), details disproportionality
as a strategy and raises serious questions about excess, the rule of law,
and impunity. The Dahiya doctrine refers to the overwhelming use of
air power to destroy infrastructure (electricity, water and sanitation,
telecommunications, roads, and transportation hubs, etc.) and compel
Palestinians (and Lebanese) to refocus energies and resources on
immediate survival and endless reconstruction. Implemented extensively in the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, it has been pursued in
Gaza several times since, most notably in 2008–09, 2012, 2014, and
2018. In the occupied West Bank, immiseration characterizes daily
life. Immiseration works beyond the use of overwhelming military
force; structural violence is always backed by the threat of military/
police assault. The imposition of policies (closure)3 and structures (the
separation wall and checkpoints) are designed to immiserate through
immobilization, confinement, and a steady diet of humiliation in
which the ordinariness of daily life—from children going to school,
to adults seeking to reach work, to Palestinians simply desirous of visiting family and friends—is the target. Intermittent military assaults
punctuate the daily-ness of immiseration.
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Language
The interaction between utterance and action, language and behavior, is a point of departure for a conversation on evil. As Judith
Butler contends, “We do things with language, produce effects with
language” (1997, 8). Language serves as both an early warning
system of impending violence and a diagnostic tool for grappling with
conceptualizations of the other. Linguistic anthropology understands
“speech not only within the context of action but as action” (Lambek
2010, 5). The ability to act on imputations of evil and perceived threat
is distributed unevenly, as evidenced when state officials voice racist
invective and possess the means to act on it. Talal Asad encapsulated
the distinction between the liberal democratic state and terrorist violence as one of “capability” (2007, 4) and unpacked the “ingenuity of
liberal discourse in rendering inhumane acts human. This is certainly
something that savage discourse cannot achieve” (2007, 38). That
is why ISIS’s murderous and inhumane actions arouse the epithet
“evil,” but the vastly larger death toll and destruction from the US
invasion and occupation of Iraq are not similarly cast; the excess of
one is evil but not the other. Attribution of evil hinders exploration
of the context in which it occurs; it becomes its own explanation,
unique and incomparable. Casting state violence as a response to
the imputed irrational violence of evilness facilitates the disavowal of
responsibility by blaming the victim. Unarmed Gazans are shot dead
because they demonstrated near the fence that imprisons them. They
are the demon other. In this worldview, Palestinian behavior compels
the Israeli response. A sort of “they made me do it,” the ruse of domestic abusers, can be detected. Casting the fence as a “necessary evil”
(Luntz 2009, 70) works in a similar fashion. The most illustrative
example of this sort of victim blaming occurred when Israeli Prime
Minister Netanyahu, now widely circulated and commented upon,
stated during the 2014 assault on Gaza that dead Palestinians were
telegenically dead (Erekat 2014; Feldman 2014; Peteet 2016b; Puar
2015). Referring to Hamas, he said, “They want to pile up as many
civilian dead as they can. They use telegenically dead Palestinians for
their cause. They want the dead, the more the better” (Winer 2014).
In other words, Palestinians themselves, as a collective body, compel
the suffering Israeli inflicts on them and exploit piles of dead bodies as
a telegenic moment. Israel is therefore relieved of accountability.
Can a sequencing of language, action, and impunity be discerned?
A mantra-like reiteration of certain terms or phrases constructs the
Engaging Evil and Excess in Palestine/Israel
205
scaffolding upon which is built a narrative and imagery of Palestinians
as hate-filled, irrational aggressors (Peteet 2016b) and Israel as acting
in self-defense. For example, the verb “to rain,” in reference to rockets
fired from Gaza, is repeated ad naseum in the media. Rain implies an
infinite number of things, conjuring up an innumerable quantity and
conveying the impression of a massive military assault. “Thousands
of missiles have already rained down on our cities,” Israeli PM
Netanyahu claimed in a September 23, 2013, speech to the UN. Rain
implies a steady deluge of unlimited and uncountable things, hardly
appropriate descriptions of this small number of technologically crude
rockets. Palestinian rockets are consistently quantified: “Hamas
launched [insert number] rockets today.” Quantification is assumed
to speak for itself. The starkness of numbers overstates Hamas’ military capacity, putting it on a par with that of a state. In this unevenly
matched arena, Israeli air and artillery strikes are rarely subject to
quantification in the media. Disproportionate actions, then, are swallowed up by the security mantra and claims of existential threat.
The threat of unbounded violence, its looming potential, has
become part of the state’s arsenal. Israeli Knesset member Ayelet
Shaked posted a threat on Facebook during the 2014 war on Gaza
reminiscent of the Rwandan Interhamwe’s pronouncements about
Tutsis as cockroaches in the run-up to the 1994 genocide:
Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom
he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants,
and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the
mothers of the martyrs. . . . They should follow their sons, nothing
would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes
in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be
raised there. (“‘Mothers of all’” 2014)
On the academic side, Professor Mordechai Kedar of Ben Gurion
University seemed to advocate rape as a deterrent to Palestinian violence, such as the 2014 kidnapping and killing of three settler youths,
when he baldly stated: “The only thing that can deter terrorists, like
those who kidnapped the children and killed them, is the knowledge
that their sister or their mother will be raped. It sounds very bad, but
that’s the Middle East.”4
While the US Embassy was moving to Jerusalem on 14 May 2018,
amid joyous celebrations with US President Trump’s daughter Ivanka
Trump and her husband Jared Kushner in attendance, Israeli forces
were mowing down and maiming unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza. As is usually the case, Likud Party foreign affairs
director Eli Hazan uttered that “all 30,000 [protestors] are legitimate
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targets” (quoted in Makdisi 2018). Words and actions are important
here. Israel refers to its intermittent assaults on Gaza as “mowing the
lawn.” Mowing is a form of maintenance; what is being maintained
here is Palestinian subjugation and suffering and Israel’s dominance.
On this day, Israeli forces killed fifty-eight and injured twenty-four
hundred Palestinians; the simultaneity with the opening of the US
Embassy was not lost on most observers. Amnesty International
noted: “Victims were shot in the upper body, including the head and
chest—some from behind . . . many were deliberately killed or injured
while posing no immediate threat.”As Puar (2015, 2017) argues,
Israel has arrogated to itself the right not just to kill but also to maim,
which debilitates the population and diminishes the capacity to resist.
An elaborate linguistic strategy of obfuscation and denial operates alongside outright violence against Palestinians. In reference
to Nazism, Hannah Arendt (1963) called “language rules” a “code
name” to refer to “what in ordinary language would be called a lie.”
The effect “was not to keep these people ignorant of what they [Nazis]
were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old,
‘normal’ knowledge of murder and lies.” Modern Hebrew “employs
word laundering to mask an arrogant, violent and even racist attitude toward the Arab enemy,” which “allows a state to wash itself
clean of any responsibility” for violent actions (Burg 2008, 59, 61).
“Language rules” now have public relations personnel, such as wellknown Republican strategist Frank Luntz, to draft documents such
as The Israel Project’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary, which at 116
pages is chock-full of talking points for responding to any question
about Israel and Palestine from what works to what does not. Israel’s
dualistic “us and them” view of the world, with deep roots in a history
of European persecution and anti-Semitism, is apparent in its discourse on the “Arab” or the “Palestinian.” In this worldview, Israeli
writer and former Knesset member Avraham Burg writes: “When
every enemy is absolute evil and every conflict is a war to the death,
all is justified in our eyes. We do not distinguish between levels of
hostility nor do we view our enemies as rivals with possibly legitimate
needs: they are all against us all the time, and all we can do is defend
ourselves” (2008, 56). The concept of “moral panic” captures the
atmosphere when a particular group (Iran and Palestinians) is “negatively framed and labeled as the enemy of society’s cosmological order
of things and as threat to its interests” (Ram 2009, 17).
By transposing evilness to Arabs/Muslims/Palestinians, Zionism
depoliticizes and dehistoricizes conflict and Palestinian grievances
and suggests that Palestinian actions are irrational, pathological, and
Engaging Evil and Excess in Palestine/Israel
207
beyond the pale of lawful response. Thus, its own actions, often exceeding the doctrine of proportionality, are seen as legitimate responses to
the evil and violence nearby. Paired with irrationality, this attribution
of evil suggests dwelling in an alternate temporal zone—the premodern, in contrast to the alleged modern rationality of the Zionist state.
Palestinians tend to argue based on international law and the depravations of colonialism in keeping with their understanding of Zionism
as a political ideology and colonial endeavor. Evil lies not just in the
colonial system but also in its deeply rooted ideological apparatus of
denial of Palestinian grievances and colonial culpability.
Indifference and Calibrated Deprivation
I met Munira, a twenty-seven year old Palestinian nurse, a few days
after a distressing checkpoint experience. Over coffee in her office, she
bitterly expressed her understanding of the occupation’s interventions
into everyday life with a consciously calculated infliction of suffering
and a generalized indifference to the suffering of others:
They have what I call a “misery committee.” I envision a group of
Israelis sitting around and devising well-organized forms of misery to
inflict on us. We are either killed or we rise above the misery. The
situation is so bad, I don’t know how we don’t all go crazy. For example,
I have to pass through the Bethlehem checkpoint every day to go to
work. Last week they wanted to strip search me, and I refused. Do you
know, they made me wait at that checkpoint for twelve hours without
food or drink or anyone knowing where I was. They were waiting for
me to submit to a strip search. They finally let me go after twelve hours.
The genius of the misery committee is to operate through the smallest
details that then obscure the larger picture. It is amazing the way they
think up ways to humiliate us and make our daily lives miserable.
Munira’s envisioned “misery committee” is actually a multistranded, but fairly cohesive, set of Israeli civilian and military units
wielding power over Palestinians and imposing suffering: the IDF,
border police, the General Security Services (Shin Bet), the Civilian
Administration, private security personnel, and over half a million
Jewish colonists. The “misery committee” articulates with a description of a “state of violence that is managed according to . . . [an]
economy of calculation” (Weizman 2011, 3). The occupation and
settler-colonialism, with its displacing imperative, craft policies and
engage in actions to maximize suffering and foster an environment
that cultivates violent excess and impunity. The occupation and the
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policy of closure are pronounced spatial expressions of bio-power that
target the fabric and rhythms of daily life; the “smallest details,” calculated for intent and effect, impose unpredictable delays and inflict
irreparable harm, suffering, and humiliation.
The five hundred or so checkpoints strategically scattered across
the landscape of Palestine, and the siege of Gaza, shed light on excess
and disproportionality. In intent and effect, calculated indifference
exceeds depraved indifference; however, both indicate a wanton
disregard for life. Depraved indifference usually refers to the risk or
danger to which indifference subjects its victims. However, calculated
indifference actually creates, through quantification, the conditions
of risk and danger, and mathematically anticipates harm and suffering, and their subjugating impact. “Intent” is a key term in the UN
Convention on Genocide.5 It is the intent to inflict excessive violence
and suffering, beyond that allowed by IHL.
The “misery committee” operates in the domain of security and
military technology and scientific knowledge. Janus-faced, science
and technology have been mobilized to dominate, punish, and compel
submission. Daily caloric in-take (DCI), along with electricity, water,
and medicine, is one such sort of knowledge subject to calibration
and quantification. Quantification of items necessary for life in the
most elemental sense guides determinations of aid in humanitarian
emergencies and provides a standard for human nutritional health
and well-being. Yet food and DCI requirements have become part of
military arsenals, or in the recent vernacular, weaponized. Israeliimposed food restrictions on Gaza provide a catalogue of excessively
calibrated punishment and deprivation (Gisha 2012). It is a violation
of IHL to use basic goods to apply pressure on or punish a civilian
population. In 2006, Dov Weisglass, an adviser to then Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert, quipped in reference to the siege of Gaza, “The
idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of
hunger.”6 In besieged Gaza, Israeli-imposed sanctions form a craftily
spun web of restrictions that keep Palestinians alive, but on a highly
restricted diet. The calculation of 2,290 calories per person requires
170 daily trucks of food, but often only a third of that number have
been allowed in, reducing DCI to 1,388. In other words, Palestinians
are suspended in a precarious web of minutely calibrated life.
What might render a calculated reduction of the caloric in-take of
a whole population to a bare minimum as a form of evil is its precise
calibration in terms of quantity, signaling the intent to manufacture
nutritional deprivation. Such deprivation has harmful effects on
reproductive potential and child development that have well-known
Engaging Evil and Excess in Palestine/Israel
209
long-term impacts on an aggregate population. Most significantly,
maintaining a population just below bare life keeps them alive but not
thriving and, it is anticipated, diminishes their potential for political
life. Excess and disproportionality are evident here and justified by
claims that siege and assault are self-defense tactics to compel the
population to disavow Hamas’ leadership in Gaza and protect Israel
from threat.
When Palestinians respond to the mundane inquiry, “How are
you?” with “I am breathing but not alive,” they speak in the register of the living dead—“breathing” but not thriving. Rather than
resembling bio-politics and a clear-cut politics of life or death, the
siege holds life in calibrated and precarious suspension between life
and death, a state of being more aptly characterized as a remotely
controlled, violently managed life. A regime that works assiduously to
calculate the lives of a besieged, essentially captive population down
to the minimum DCI, and inflicts debilitating injuries in the thousands
by purposely shooting unarmed Palestinians protestors in the legs to
maim, represents a politics of calibrated misery and excess beyond
international law and ethics. Puar (2015, 2–3) argues that Israel has
claimed a right to maim and debilitate Palestinian bodies and their
environment (i.e., infra-structure); furthermore, she argues that this
is a productive policy that is part of a rehabilitative economy. This
resonates with Bauman and Donskis’s seminal work on liquid evil in
which “in terms of military campaigns, tends to disrupt the economy
and life in certain territories or societies by bringing there as much
chaos, fear, uncertainty, unsafety and insecurity as possible” (2016,
7). Israel, I would argue, sits on the cusp of evil under conditions of
solid modernity, where power and the means of violence is concentrated in the state, and liquid evil, which seeps or oozes through the
everyday lives of individuals under colonial occupation.
In Palestine, mobility, order, and a sense of security for one population are maintained through the imposition of a punishing immobility, anxiety-inducing unpredictability, and confinement on the other
(Peteet 2017). At the large Qalandia checkpoint, which controls
Palestinian movement into Jerusalem and between north and south
in the West Bank, the capriciousness of control as well as petty cruelty
are well established. When paramedics Nabil and Maher, on the front
lines of the world of emergency medical care for over a decade, were
driving an ambulance with a patient seeking cancer treatment:
Two soldiers come to check the identity card of the patient and they
made him get out of the ambulance. Luckily, it was sunny day, not too
cold. I hear the older say to the younger one, “Give them their cards
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and let them pass.” But the young one puts them in his pocket. So we
phoned the ICRC. They called the checkpoint but still this guy would
not give us the identity cards. So, we waited with an ill patient for a
couple of hours for no apparent reason other than this guy wants to
show who is the boss.
At checkpoints, the occupation authorities determine who
and what can move and at what speed; Israeli-issued permits, a
laborious process to acquire, determine the scope of Palestinian
mobility. Medical issues illustrate the cruel and excessive nature of
the controlling apparatus of closure. Palestinian conversations are
laced with stories of the ill and incapacitated trying to get through
checkpoints. With the land confiscation and the building of Jewish
colonies, the wall, checkpoints, the permit system, and the segregated
road network, Palestinians reside in shrinking spaces resembling an
archipelago of small islands or enclaves. Now patients face long and
arduous trips often over bumpy back roads to reach medical facilities in towns. Many villages are served by small primary health care
clinics and residents are routinely denied unimpeded and uncertain
access to other larger towns. If the wall divides a town and the hospital is on other side, Palestinians may have to drive for hours through
multiple checkpoints to reach a hospital that is otherwise a few miles
away. There are well-over 150 documented cases of denial of access
to medical care at checkpoints leading to death, including infants.
Moreover, Jerusalem’s six specialized hospitals are off-limits to West
Bank Palestinians without a permit to enter the city. Palestinians
requiring treatment in a Jerusalem medical facility must obtain a
permit that requires detailing their medical condition and ascertaining that they have an appointment at a particular hospital and can
only receive the appropriate treatment at that hospital.
Palestinian ambulances are not allowed to enter Jerusalem so at
Qalandia, patients must be transferred to an ambulance with Israel
license plates; at other checkpoints, patients must leave the ambulance and walk across crowded checkpoints with the usual lengthy
waits (see “West Bank” 2011). Nabil elaborated on passing through a
checkpoint in an ambulance ferrying the ill and injured:
First, we wait, always waiting. The soldiers open the doors—front
and back. They check everyone’s identities, including the patient’s.
They look at the equipment. At Qalandia—it is hard. They delay you
no matter what the condition of the patient and they call the District
Coordinating Office. There is a woman there, [an Israeli] Rachel—
everyone knows her. Sometime she refuses to let you pass. Once she
did not let me pass because the patient, although critically injured, did
not have a permit.
Engaging Evil and Excess in Palestine/Israel
211
Soldiers, nonmedically trained, step into ambulances and check
the wounded, often causing delays; they may compel patients to walk
or be carrie
