Frontiers and Ghettos "ss3.34"

1988: The PLO's Unsuccessful Plea for Statehood

After almost a year of rebellion in the West Bank and Gaza, the PLO proclaimed Palestinian statehood on November 15, 1988, accepted Israel's right to exist, endorsed the 1947 UN partition plan, renounced terrorism, and accepted UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338. Yasser Arafat repeated the move on December 14, 1988, at the UN General Assembly, earning recognition from 104 states and support from 150 for PLO participation in negotiations with Israel. After additional wrangling, the U.S. government finally agreed to open a political dialogue with the PLO.^[59]

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These diplomatic achievements, however, were not coupled with serious international pressure on Israel to withdraw its forces. Western powers and the UN Security Council were at best willing to push Israel toward negotiations while applying human rights oversight to Israeli actions. The United States and its West European allies refused, however, to threaten Israel the same way they would threaten Serbia four years later. The PLO's international prominence ensured that Palestinian demands could not be ignored, but Israel's alliance with the United States prevented the PLO from winning recognition of Palestinian sovereignty where it counted, that is, in Washington, NATO headquarters, and in the UN Security Council. Unlike Bosnia, which was saved from a formal Serbian (or Federal Yugoslav) military occupation in 1992, Palestine remained firmly under Israeli control.

To be sure, Palestinian global prominence did translate into international scrutiny of Israeli behavior in the occupied lands. Newspapers, human rights groups, and international politicians all called on Israel to respect Palestinian human rights, with important effect. Israeli actions against Palestinians were intensely debated in the international media and diplomatic arenas. Still, the PLO could not leverage those discussions into effective international pressure on Israel to withdraw. The world applied the international norm of human rights, not sovereignty, to the West Bank and Gaza, with dramatic implications for Israeli repertoires of violence.

By the late 1980s, scholars recognized that Israel and Palestine had developed a hybrid relationship defying easy conceptualization. Portraying Israel as "military occupier" and Palestine as "occupied land" did not capture the nuanced nature of Israel's relations with Palestine, since the latter had become deeply embedded within the fabric of the Israeli state. Analysts describing Jewish-Palestinian relations as an instance of "international conflict," however, were also wrong, since it was unclear where the state of "Israel" ended and "Palestine" began. Scholars developed a range of terms to explain the relations, invoking different intellectual and theoretical traditions. Some, for example, preferred the sense of parity implied by the notion of a Jewish-Palestinian "inter-communal struggle."^[60] Others spoke of an Israeli "Herrenvolk" democracy in which Jews ruled over Palestinians in an outright system of national domination. Israeli scholar Meron Benvinisti, for example, wrote that "the Palestinian problem has now been internalized" within Israel, and Palestinians "have become a permanent minority" within Israeli-ruled

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territory.^[61] This joint Jewish-Arab space had a "rigid, hierarchical social structure based on ethnicity," and Jews "hold total monopoly over governmental resources, control the economy, form the upper social stratum and determine the education and national values and objectives of the republic."^[62] Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling concurred, writing in the late 1980s that Jewish domination had been "routinized" in an unequal "control system" that contained an "inferior caste" of Palestinians with few economic, political, or social rights.^[63] Some believed Israel's "creeping annexation" of Palestine had progressed so far as to make true separation impossible.^[64] Those hoping the West Bank and Gaza might still escape Israeli control, by contrast, used terms borrowed from anti-colonial discourse, suggesting that like other colonial regimes, Israeli rule in Palestine would eventually crumble.^[65] A third terminology was employed by sociologists such as Gershon Shafir, who argued the West Bank and Gaza were "settlement frontiers" for Jewish colonizers.^[66]

In this book, by contrast, I use the term "ghetto" to describe Palestine's post-1967 status in order to capture the region's ambiguous, neither-in-nor-out position. "Frontier" implies externalization, but "ghetto" implies subordination and incorporation, helping us to better understand Israel's non-use of ethnic cleansing when the Palestinian uprising began. As Baruch Kimmerling and others warned in the late 1980s, "large scale expulsions" of Palestinians by Israel "might become a real option under certain conditions."^[67] This prediction was plausible, however, only if Palestine's institutional setting resembled a frontier. If Palestine was a ghetto, by contrast, Israel's non-use of ethnic cleansing is easier to comprehend. Ghettos, after all, are policed, not destroyed.

The next chapter analyzes Israel's repertoire of ethnic policing in some detail. Drawing on interviews with Israeli military veterans, I probe tactics used by Israeli security forces to discipline, disperse, imprison, and monitor Palestinian ghetto rebels.