Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948-2012

6. Appropriate Places

180 6 Appropriate Places Terrorism, Fear, and the Policing of Palestinian Men And if charity does not move those who have everything to spare, fear will. All the residents of the suburb wanted was for the animal to be confined in its appropriate place, that’s all, zoo or even circus. They were prepared to pay for this to be done. —Nadine Gordimer, Something Out There In Nadine Gordimer’s novella Something Out There, a mysterious scourge terrorizes the white South African suburbs of Johannesburg. Residents live in fear as a spate of sightings of a nebulous creature are reported across apartheid’s landscape of disquiet. The “security services” are marshaled to hunt the beast down but it eludes them. Though a few white citizens had fleetingly encountered it, all that could be said for certain was that no one had caught more than “a glimpse of something dark” (1984, 182). The society Gordimer depicts is one in which racially subordinate communities are defined as different and dangerous, and on that basis consigned to their “appropriate places” within a profoundly segregated and violent social order. However, apartheid South Africa was also a country where oppressed groups thrust to the margins, to the squalor of Bantustans and shantytowns, so often journeyed back to locales of racial privilege to sell their labor power cheaply and occasionally to engage in acts of militant resistance. The former South Africa and contemporary Palestine/Israel are far from identical places. Yet, many of the tales of terror and trepidation that Gordimer poignantly weaves together have analogous realities in Jerusalem and across the broader colonial landscape in which this fractured Terror, Fear, and Policing of Palestinian Men ◆ 181 city is embedded. In fact, several prominent South African writers and activists (beginning with Gordimer, herself) have compared Israeli policies toward the Palestinians to the racism and state terrorism of apartheid in South Africa.1 In this chapter I examine the politics of fear that has defined in crucial ways the experiences of both Palestinians and Israelis in Jerusalem. I detail a range of spatial practices among both national communities that arise from being governed by trepidation, whether one is the occupier or the occupied, the colonizer or the colonized. For as Bertolt Brecht reminds us, “Fear rules not only those who are ruled, but the rulers, too” (1987, 297). Fright and terror impact dominant and subordinate communities differently, to be sure. And one runs the risk of effacing the inequalities constitutive of colonialism by not sufficiently detailing the power differential present in Palestine/Israel. These disparities include not only the capacity to use violence but also the power to project particular understandings of violent practices and those who deploy them. Here, I focus on the gendered racialization of Palestinian boys and men in Jerusalem’s public places, at military checkpoints that regulate movement into and out of the city, and aboard Israeli buses. I concentrate on the period between the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 through the years of the Second Intifada (2000–2005). The majority of the roughly three dozen interviews I conducted with Arab men about these concerns were done between 1997 and 2012. This was a time when disillusionment pervaded Palestinian society as Israel swiftly 1. Echoing other South African progressives’ critiques of Israeli human rights abuses, such as those of Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu, Gordimer has pointed out similarities between Israel and the former South Africa. In May 2008 she stated, “There is a similarity, alas, in the way Palestinians are being treated in the occupied territories, the brutal methods. The humiliation of people, moving people out of their homes, keeping them on one side of the wall while their sustenance, their crops and grain, are on the other. It is indeed comparable to what happened in South Africa” (quoted in the Jerusalem Post, May 22, 2008, 4). See also the statement by Bishop Desmond Tutu (2002) in support of the movement for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions and that of Nelson Mandela (1997): http://www.e-tools .co.za/anc/mandela/1997/sp971204b.html, accessed November 29, 2013. 182 ◆ Colonial Jerusalem put into place an ever more rigid regime of separation (hafrada) between Arabs and Jews. This was also an era when hopes for an end to Israeli military occupation, a sentiment that arguably peaked in the wake of the signing of the Oslo Accords, began to diminish...