Ghettos: The Ambiguity of Unequal Inclusion

Experts generally view ghettos as impoverished neighborhoods segregated by religion, race, or ethnicity. One scholar defines African American ghettos as "excluded from economic and social privileges, deprived of social esteem, and unable to influence the … rules which define their participation within the wider society," and similar themes of segregation, marginalization, and disempowerment are invoked by others as well.^[21] Viewed from another perspective, however, the ghetto's fate is less clear-cut; the ghetto is incorporated into the dominant polity, albeit with ambivalence and disdain. Due to their halfway status, ghettos are segregated and repressed, but rarely liquidated outright. Ghettos are more

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heavily institutionalized settings than frontiers, and are therefore objections of policing, not ethnic cleansing or genocide. Ghetto critics are right to emphasize the ills of poverty, crime, and broken families, but this perspective obscures the ghetto's remarkable ability to survive and to receive some of the benefits available to more favored populations, including a minimum of legal protection. Despite marginalization, ghetto residents remain alive and in their homes, presenting a perpetual challenge to the dominant society. While sheer survival is indubitably cold comfort to ghetto victims, it remains an analytically crucial point. In other words, frontiers are precariously perched on the edge of the dominant polity, whereas ghettos are situated squarely within it. Frontier residents can be expelled or killed, but ghetto residents can only be harshly policed.

The ambivalent status of the ghetto was dramatized during U.S. urban unrest in the 1960s, when largely white police shot, detained, and beat largely black ghetto residents.^[22] Despite the crisis atmosphere, however, the authorities did not deploy their most awful methods. National Guardsmen were deployed against "organized agitators" and "revolutionaries," but physical liquidation was never on the agenda.^[23] The authorities might dispatch more police, adopt more aggressive policies, and imprison more people, but they could not expel or kill ghetto residents en masse.

The notion of the ghetto is relevant to our story because of the West Bank and Gaza's relationship with Israel, which never officially annexed these regions (except East Jerusalem) after 1967, but did tacitly incorporate them as subordinate parts of the Israeli polity. Western powers did not openly endorse Israel's tacit annexation, but did not firmly support Palestinian sovereignty either, merely pressing Israel to respect Palestinian human rights. When the Palestinian uprising began, consequently, Palestinians were harshly policed but not ethnically cleansed.