Prisoners of humanitarianism: Complicity and resistance in the Occupied Palestinian Territory

In 2017, as I carried out fieldwork in Israel-Palestine for a study of a humanitarian organisation that I will call World Relief, John -- an employee in its Jerusalem office -- shared his thoughts on the role of humanitarian aid in the region. Like many other humanitarian workers I met during my visit, John was cynical and disillusioned. He admitted that of all the places he had worked before, ILOT (Israel and the Occupied Territory, an acronym commonly used among humanitarian practitioners) was the most absurd he had ever witnessed. “Humanitarian aid is like therapeutic marijuana”, he said. “Palestinians have become like patients waiting for their daily joint. But the fact is you cannot treat Palestinians’ suffering with medicines because the root causes are political. You cannot solve problems linked to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land with humanitarian programs.”

 

Many scholars have argued that human rights and humanitarianism have become the two dominant paradigms for governing Palestine in the post-Oslo era. Indeed, the period that followed the first Intifada (or Palestinian uprising) in 1987 and the signature of interim agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, marked the start of a peace process and the simultaneous NGOization of the Palestinian struggle for rights and recognition. Lori Allen, for example, has shown how Western donors conditioned their support to state-building efforts to Palestinian’s commitment to human rights.  Yet the availability of funds for human rights, while increasing the competition between Human Rights Organizations and the Palestinian Authority (PA), did not end the occupation, its abuses and the constant degradation of living conditions (Allen 2013). The West-sponsored human rights industry tamed the Palestinian struggle for national sovereignty and redirected nationalist passions into ‘reasonable’ discussions that ultimately served the interests of those in power.  Simultaneously, by channeling their financial aid to human rights organisations, donors have been able to showcase their humanitarian concerns despite the obvious fact that only political solutions can deliver tangible results.  Ilana Feldman (2009) argues that humanitarianism in Gaza has often been deployed as a strategy for frustrating Palestinian aspirations. She contends that the framing of the situation in Gaza as one of ‘crisis’ has maintained Gaza in a state of exception and has reduced Palestinians’ political claims to mere humanitarian issues while portraying Israel’s occupation as primarily driven by ‘humanitarian compassion’. 

 

The unfolding genocide in Gaza places the limits and dangers of humanitarianism in a particularly stark light. Images of Palestinians drowning off the northern Gaza coast while trying to reach air-dropped parcels that landed into the sea or killed when the parcels fell on them are just two horrific illustrations of the ludicrousness of humanitarian responses to massacre and extermination. Another one is the temporary aid pier constructed by the US in central Gaza, supposedly to facilitate relief distribution. A cosmetic solution to the famine triggered by Israel’s blockade of the Strip and its deliberate obstruction of humanitarian convoys, the floating pier had to be dismantled after operating for less than twenty-five days as it became impassable during stormy weather.  

 

Humanitarianism as a cog in Israel’s apartheid infrastructure

 

However, these episodes are only the tip of the iceberg of a decades-long history of Palestinian oppression during which humanitarianism has gradually become the dominant means through which to ‘manage the undesirables’, to use the title of anthropologist Michel Agier (2011) provocative book. It has become clear that humanitarianism, despite its good intentions, functions as a cog in Israel’s apartheid infrastructure, yet the Palestinians, in spite of the many forms of surveillance, control, and domination to which they are subjected, challenge that infrastructure at every turn.  So let me demonstrate this strange power dynamic in which World Relief finds itself deeply immersed, rather than nobly above it.

 

World Relief’s program of family visits for Palestinian prisoners was launched short after the 1967 Six-Day War to facilitate family visits for prisoners detained in Israel. According to international law, and particularly to the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, the state of Israel as the ‘occupying power’ bears primary responsibility for maintaining family links between prisoners and their relatives. In spite of this, the program has suffered numerous interruptions over the years as well as the introduction of complicated procedures impacting on families’ ability to access prisons, notably a burdensome and lengthy process to issue permits. 

 

The Israeli government’s ‘separation’ (Hafrada in Hebrew) policy was gradually achieved through jurisdictional arrangements, identity cards, permits and checkpoints that have significantly impacted the daily life of people across the region. In 1991, in response to the first Intifada, Israel abolished the general exit permit established in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip since 1972 to control movements between the Occupied Territory, Jerusalem and Israel. Eager to tighten its matrix of control, this unique travel document was replaced by a system of individual exit permits that turned every Palestinian into “a target of surveillance and monitoring” (Berda 2017: 37). The bureaucratic labyrinth of this complex permit system is illustrative of the broader regime of ethnic segregation that governs over Palestinians’ life, controlling their movements through unpredictable, secretive and arbitrary decisions. The application process for permits can take between one and three months, while the permit itself is either valid for one year (normal ‘brown permit’) or sixty days only (Security Permit or ‘blue permit’). The categorization of someone as a ‘security risk’ leads to harassment and exclusion by border police. As a result of these bureaucratic obstacles, World Relief’s prisoners’ visit program has been institutionalised, bureaucratised and transformed into an instrument for containing Palestinians’ resistance to the occupation. Instead of providing a temporary short-term humanitarian solution meant to disappear with the end of the conflict, family visits have been integrated into the administrative apparatus of the Israeli occupation, replete with its constantly changing security criteria, unpublished rules and conflicting orders.

 

This unique form of “lawfare” (Comaroff 2001), managing “threatening” populations through legal and policy conditions, is supported by a carceral infrastructure designed to further atomize Palestinian society. Along with jails, the separation between Palestinians and Israelis is implemented through a network of checkpoints, fences and walls surrounding entire communities as well as roads exclusively reserved to settlers. These architectural devices are deployed as tactical tools to dominate, divide and control Palestinian communities (Weizman 2007). Bornstein (2008) considers that the transformation of Palestine into a ‘carceral society’ is a strategic component of the system of military occupation. It is also a central feature of Israel’s regime of racial segregation and discrimination, which many international human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch qualify as amounting to the “crime of apartheid”. 

 

According to Article 2 of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, the crime of apartheid includes policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination committed “for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them”.