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  • Palestinians Perpetually Participating
  • Hagai El-Ad (bio)

When israelis vote, Palestinians do not. But they do get to participate: they can watch. Like the residents of the Palestinian village of Beit Ur al-Fauqa in the occupied West Bank who get to watch as the ballots cast by their Israeli settler neighbors from Beit Horon are shipped to election headquarters—to the Knesset that Palestinians do not get to vote for (but whose decisions control their lives) on a highway they cannot use (but built on land confiscated from them).

Palestinians also get to participate in the legal proceedings of Israeli courts: they get to be convicted. Not much of a surprise, given the clear division of roles in the theater of injustice of military courts. Israelis are always cast as judges, prosecutors and issuers of the military orders under which Palestinians get to play their humble roles as objects for detention, interrogation, prosecution, and conviction.

Even when Israelis regulate relative minutiae such as fishing, Palestinians get to participate. Israel recently revised fishing regulations in the Mediterranean, prohibiting fishing near the coastline in order to prevent harm to vulnerable marine habitats. However, along the Gaza coast, Israel imposes restrictions that are the very reverse: Gaza's fishermen are not allowed to go more than a few miles from the coastline. We regulate, they participate.

The population registry also has Palestinians participating. While the population registries for Israelis and Palestinians are separate, they are both administered by Israel, which registers not only its own citizens, but also Palestinians (be it in Gaza, the West Bank or East Jerusalem). For some politicians the statistics derived from these registries may make for dreadful demographic scenarios, but nevertheless Palestinians do participate: being born, getting married, from one generation to the next.

Israel's planning and building bureaucracy also has Palestinian participation. As far back as 1971—very near the beginning of those infamous fifty years of occupation—Israel cancelled the local planning committees in the West Bank, transferring all such powers to its own hands. Consequently, while Palestinians are not represented in the planning process of their lands, they do get to participate in the outcomes. Their villages are like black holes, places where virtually no new planning can reach, thus rendering their homes and construction illegal. A legally-approved master plan is needed for a hookup to running water. But the masters have other plans. So Palestinians get to participate in the planning process not by getting running water, but rather by getting bulldozed.

Indeed, representative democracy has been recently declining globally. But lack of representation does not preclude participation. For fifty years, we have lived separately-together under one rule: our rule. And yet, Palestinians do participate. They have never ceased—and they never will. One day, participation as unwilling subjects will morph into a different form of existence in Palestine. Under a small patch of sky, separately-together or otherwise, we are all here—and we all remain here—on this small patch of land, at the Mediterranean's edge.

Hagai El-Ad

hagai el-ad, an Israeli human rights activist, is the executive director of B'Tselem. Prior to joining B'Tselem, El-Ad was the director (2008–2014) of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and the first executive director (2000–2006) of the Jerusalem Open House for Pride and Tolerance. Born in Haifa, El-Ad completed his B.Sc. and M.Sc. (Astrophysics) at the Hebrew University; he was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge (1997–2000). In 2014, El-Ad was named among Foreign Policy magazine's "100 Leading Global Thinkers." In 2016, El-Ad spoke before the United Nations Security Council and called for international action to bring an end to the Occupation. He lives in Jerusalem.

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