Palestine and the "War on Terror"

Palestine, the "war on terror" and the colonial present

One of the ironies of postcolonialism is the way in which many of its practitioners recognize Edward Said's crucial role in laying the foundation stones for its politico-intellectual project, only to pass over in silence the dispossession of the Palestinian people that animates the spirit of his examination of the sutures between "culture" and "imperialism."² Said's work has been immensely consequential. It has accentuated the ways in which power is inscribed in and through our representations of the world - which are thus never merely "mirrors" - and it has invited an interrogation of the multiple discourses through which difference and disjuncture are constituted within the modern geographical imaginary: including, crucially, primitivism and tropicality. But now that Orientalism is abroad again, revivified and hideously emboldened by the so-called "war on terror" following September 11, there are good reasons to revisit the site of Said's own preoccupations. Before he assumed office (the mot juste), George Bush announced with characteristic insight that "the past is over." On the contrary: as William Faulkner reminds us in Requiem for a Nun, "[T]he past is not dead. It is not even past." In this essay, I will show how the production of what Said called "imaginative geographies" continues to articulate the colonial present.

In Said's original discussion, imaginative geographies fold distance into difference through a series of spatializations. They multiply partitions and enclosures that demarcate "the same" from "the other," at once constructing and calibrating a gap between the two by designating in one's mind a familiar space which is "ours" and an unfamiliar space beyond "ours" which is "theirs." Said's primary concern was with the ways in which European and American imaginative geographies of "the Orient" combine over time to produce an archive in which things come to be seen as neither completely novel nor thoroughly familiar. Instead, a median category emerges that "allows one to see new things, things seen for the first time, as versions of a previously known thing."³ This Protean power of Orientalism is immensely important because the citationary structure that is authorized by these accretions is also in some substantial sense performative: it produces the effects that it names. Its categories, codes and conventions shape the practices of those who draw upon it, actively constituting its object (most obviously, "the Orient") in such a way that this structure is as much a repertoire as it is an archive. This matters for two reasons. In the first place, as the repertory figure implies, imaginative geographies are not only accumulations of time, sedimentations of successive histories; they are also performances of space.⁴ In the second place, performances may be scripted (they usually are) but this does not make their outcomes fully determined; rather, performance creates a space in which it is possible for "newness" to enter the world. This space of potential is always conditional, always precarious, but every performance of the colonial present carries within it the possibilities of reaffirming and even radicalizing the hold of the past on the present or of undoing its enclosures and approaching closer to the horizon of the postcolonial.⁵

In what follows, I work with these ideas to expose the ways in which, in the wake of September 11, the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon has taken advantage of the so-called "war on terror" to ratchet up the colonial dispossession of the Palestinian people.⁶ What is novel about this, I argue, is that it has taken place (literally so) through what Achille Mbembe calls a "necropolitics" - "a generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations" - whose performances of space seek to rationalize and radicalize colonial aggression. These performances assault not only politically qualified life - the space within which a Palestinian state is possible - but also "bare life" itself. ⁷

Ground Zeros

When the Bush administration took power on 20 January 2001, its foreign policy was one of global disengagement. Palestine was no exception; the White House closed its doors and elected for minimal involvement. Within days of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington on September 11, the intensity of Israeli military attacks on the West Bank stepped up. Palestinians claimed that Sharon was using the attacks on America as a pretext "to enter the endgame" against them. "He thinks that the dust in New York and Washington will cover up Israeli actions here," one Palestinian official explained. "He is taking advantage of the fact that no one is watching."⁸ But constructing such a space of invisibility required the substitution of another, carefully constructed space of visibility so that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon would serve not only as a distraction from but also as a justification for Israeli actions. And so a political offensive was launched alongside the military one. "Acts of terror against Israeli citizens are no different from bin Laden's terror against American citizens," Sharon insisted. "The fight against terror is an international struggle of the free world against the forces of darkness who seek to destroy our liberty and our way of life."⁹

Said, himself a New Yorker and deeply affected by the attack on his city, protested that Israel was "cynically exploiting the American catastrophe by intensifying its military occupation and oppression of the Palestinians" and justifying its actions by representing "the connection between the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings and Palestinian attacks on Israel [as] an absolute conjunction of 'world terrorism' in which bin Laden and Arafat are interchangeable entities."¹⁰ The White House also rejected Sharon's diversionary tactic, and dismissed his substitution of Arafat for bin Laden as inaccurate and unhelpful. If America were to secure the support of Islamic states like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan for its military response to 9/11 - both of them accomplices in its interventions in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation - the Bush administration understood that it would have to re-engage with the Palestinian question on terms that were markedly less partisan than those of the past. Sharon knew very well what the White House was doing. Furious, he compared its attempt to include the Arab world in the U. S.-led coalition to British and French appeasement of the Nazis in 1938 - a comparison that was as odious to the Arabs as it was to the Americans - and he warned the White House: "Do not try to placate the Arabs at Israel's expense. We are not Czechoslovakia." Bush, equally angry, denounced the comparison as unacceptable, and when Sharon renewed the military offensive the White House repeatedly criticized the Israeli campaign of intimidation and incursion.¹¹

Throughout October, Sharon defied American demands to retreat from nominally Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank. In fact, Israel repeatedly identified its attacks on the occupied territories with America's assault on Afghanistan, and Sharon instructed the actions of the Israeli military - the "Israeli Defense Forces" (IDF) - to be "packaged" so that "the elimination of the Taliban and the elimination of the Palestinian Authority" would be seen as "two parallel goals." Outwardly at least, the Bush administration remained skeptical. As tanks drove into the heart of West Bank cities, the State Department was moved to "deeply regret and deplore Israeli army actions that have killed numerous Palestinian civilians."¹² Washington was hardly on the side of the Palestinian Authority, but relations with Tel Aviv were so close to collapse that, by 30 October, one commentator suggested that the sea-change in superpower sensibilities meant that "the cruel calculations of geopolitics [would] continue to make Afghanistan's loss into Palestine's gain."¹³

But the world began to turn in the dying weeks of November. By then, under the cover of pulverizing coalition air-strikes, the Northern Alliance was sweeping southwards through Afghanistan, and the Taliban forces were in full retreat. On 23 November, the IDF assassinated Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, Hamas's military leader in the West Bank, and several Israeli commentators claimed that the military and political apparatus recognized that this was sure to provoke a violent retaliation.¹⁴ On 29 November, Sharon arrived in New York City and made what he called a "solidarity visit" to Ground Zero. Over that weekend, as the Jewish Sabbath was coming to an end on the night of 1-2 December, two suicide bombs and a car bomb exploded in the heart of West Jerusalem. Ten Israelis were murdered and over 170 injured. Soon after, another suicide bomb exploded in Haifa, murdering fifteen Israelis and injuring forty others. Sharon cut short his visit, but before he returned to Israel he reminded Bush that the deaths of twenty-five Israelis were equivalent to the deaths of 2,000 Americans.¹⁵ The significance of the comparison was lost on nobody. Sharon insisted that the weekend's events had made it clear that America and Israel were engaged in "the same war" on terrorism, and if America had been justified in its military retaliation against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, then Israel was justified in launching its helicopter gunships against Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and the West Bank.¹⁶

Israeli attacks on the occupied territories intensified. Missiles were launched against Gaza and the West Bank, helicopter gunships struck at the Palestinian Authority's compound in Ramallah, tanks moved into the scattered districts of "Area A" (which was supposedly under full Palestinian control), and the IDF blockaded Palestinian towns and villages. But Bush now firmly resisted calls to restrain Sharon. The onus was repeatedly placed on the Palestinian Authority to "end terror," even as its own security apparatus was destroyed so that it was now virtually impossible for it to act against the militant organizations (Hamas and Islamic Jihad in particular) that had claimed responsibility for the bombings. Senior U. S. officials, speaking off the record, now freely compared Palestinian attacks in Israel to al-Qaeda's attacks on America.¹⁷ As the New Year wore on, the militarization of the Israeli occupation and of the al-AqsaIntifada reached new heights. On 17 January 2002, a Palestinian gunman murdered six Israelis in Hadera; in response, Israeli jets destroyed the Palestinian Authority's police station in Tulkarm and its tanks and troops entered the city, imposing a curfew and conducting house-to-house searches. This was the first time that the IDF had occupied an entire Palestinian city, but it would not be the last. Bush accused Arafat of "enhancing" terrorism and the White House granted Israel its widest freedom of military action since the Reagan administration had turned a blind eye to Sharon's invasion of Lebanon in 1982: "Israel is seen as the equivalent of New York and the Pentagon."¹⁸ In February, following more suicide bombs and the launch of two home-made missiles from Gaza, the IDF launched a massive air-and-ground operation against Palestinian towns and refugee camps. The scope of the incursions steadily widened as the IDF mounted a series of ferocious assaults in both Gaza and the West Bank. Tanks rolled into Jabalya refugee camp north of Gaza City, and into Jenin refugee camp and Balata refugee camp southeast of Nablus, the largest in the West Bank. Alleys and cinderblock houses were shelled from the air and from the surrounding hills; tanks patrolled the main streets; and holes were blown in the walls of houses as the army swept through the camps. In the middle of March, 20,000 troops reinvaded camps in Gaza and reoccupied Ramallah in what was claimed to be the largest Israeli offensive since its invasion of Lebanon.¹⁹

By the end of the month, even that bench-mark was passed. On 27 March, twenty-eight Israelis were murdered and 140 injured by a suicide bomb in Netanya. Within twenty-four hours, the IDF had called up 20,000 reservists, its largest mobilization since 1967, and what Tanya Reinhart describes as its "long-awaited and carefully planned offensive," "Operation Defensive Shield," was under way. Tanks smashed into Arafat's compound and troops stormed into the offices of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. In another calculated echo of Bush's rhetoric, Sharon hailed this as the first stage of a "long and complicated war that knows no borders." He vowed to eliminate the "terrorist infrastructure" that he said the Palestinian Authority had put in place.²⁰ Whatever Sharon understood "terrorist infrastructure" to mean, the IDF had previously concentrated its efforts on destroying the Palestinian Authority's police and paramilitary security installations. With Sharon's encouragement, however, the IDF now targeted the Palestinian Authority's civilian infrastructure, the institutions and the record - the very archive - of Palestinian civil society. In spite of this new and malignant focus - Amnesty International concluded that the military offensive aimed at the collective punishment of all Palestinians, which is illegal under international law ²¹ — the White House still refused to condemn the Israeli attacks and incursions.

The military campaign escalated throughout April. With Israel in oppressive control of six out of eight Palestinian cities, the White House Press Secretary could still announce that "the President believes that Ariel Sharon is a man of peace."²² Meanwhile, the IDF was busily demolishing houses in Jenin refugee camp and clearing paths for tanks and troops with giant Caterpillar D-9 bulldozers. When thirteen Israeli soldiers died in a booby-trapped building on 9 April, the scale of destruction intensified, and the center of the camp was painstakingly reduced to rubble. International aid agencies, human rights workers, and reporters were denied access to the camp for nearly a week after the fighting had ended. When they were finally allowed in, they found "a silent wasteland, permeated with the stench of rotting corpses and cordite." "The scale is almost beyond imagination," wrote British reporter Suzanne Goldenberg, gazing out over "a vast expanse of rubble and mangled iron rods, surrounded by the carcasses of shattered homes" that became known locally as "Ground Zero." Thousands of houses had been destroyed; scores of bodies were buried beneath the ruins; 16,000 people had fled in terror, and those who remained were left to survive without running water or electricity.²³ The International Committee of the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International all accused Israel of breaching the Geneva Convention by recklessly endangering civilian lives and property during its assault on the camp. Israel was undeterred, insisting that its operations were necessary, professional, surgical, and that no massacre had taken place. The U. S. first supported, then moved to disrupt, and finally blocked any attempt at an inquiry by the United Nations.²⁴

Imaginative geographies and performances of space

There were, of course, compelling geopolitical reasons to reaffirm American support for Israel: most immediately, the fall of the Taliban had terminated the necessity for an international military coalition; more generally, the territorial designs for American Empire mapped out by the influential Project for a New American Century had returned the Middle East to the center of the neoconservative stage.²⁵ But what gave this reaffirmation its teeth - what gave it both voice and bite - was a series of parallels between the imaginative geographies deployed by America in its military assault on Afghanistan and those deployed by Israel in its military operations in the occupied territories of Palestine. These enacted three performances of space: locating, opposing and casting out. "Locating" mobilized a largely technical register, in which opponents were reduced to objects in a purely visual field — coordinates on a grid, letters on a map — that effected both a localization and an abstraction of "the other." "Opposing" mobilized a largely cultural register, in which antagonism was reduced to a teleological conflict between "Civilization" and "barbarism." "Casting out" mobilized a largely political-juridical register, in which not only armed opponents but also ordinary civilians were reduced to the status of outcasts placed beyond the privileges and protections of the law so that their lives (and deaths) were rendered of no account.

The IDF's "besieging cartography," as Camille Mansour calls it, was installed through an intricate system of monitoring that involved passive sensors, observation towers equipped with day/night and radar surveillance capabilities, electronic communications, computerized data banks, satellite images, and photographs from reconnaissance planes.²⁶ But as the assault on the occupied territories intensified, Stephen Graham shows that the conflict was transformed into "an urban war in which the distance between enemies [was] measured in meters."²⁷ Orientalist tropes were invoked to render Palestinian towns and cities as "impenetrable, unknowable spaces" whose close quarters were beyond the long-distance gaze of these high-technology surveillance systems. Accordingly, "a new family of Unattended Aerial Vehicles and camera-carrying balloons was deployed to permit real-time monitoring of the complex battles within the cities, and to track the movements of key Palestinian fighters and officials so that missiles could target and kill them."²⁸ All of this was a strategically vital arm in the realization of what Eyal Weizman calls Israel's "politics of verticality." "Every floor in every house, every car, every telephone call or radio transmission can be monitored," he explained. "These eyes in the sky, completing the network of observation that is woven throughout the ground, finally iron out the folded surface and flatten the terrain." The opacity of "other," alien spaces is rendered transparent, and their complexities reduced to a series of objects in a purely visual plane.²⁹

But the disembodied abstractions produced within this enhanced technocultural sphere have been perforated by imaginative geographies that activate other, intensely corporeal registers. Although Israel deployed aircraft and missiles against Palestinian "targets," for example, some pilots found it difficult to sustain such optical detachment. One fighter pilot urged those who flew Israel's deadly F-16s to "think about what a bombing operation would be like in the city they live in." He explained what he meant with unflinching clarity: "I am talking about bombing a densely populated city. I am talking about liquidating people on the main street."³⁰

The ground war involved the performance of highly abstract spacings too, in which every Palestinian was reduced to a threat and a target. One reporter described how, at the height of Operation Defensive Shield in Tulkarm, a reserve detachment of Paratrooper Reconnaissance Commandos operated in "a peculiar state of sensory deprivation." Occupying a house seized from its Palestinian owners, the soldiers lived "in a kind of perpetual shadow," he wrote, "behind drawn curtains and under dim lighting, rarely venturing out except at night and then only in tanks or the windowless APCs (Armored Personnel Carriers). Their knowledge of the battlefield [sic] is largely limited to the maps they study or the tiny corner of land they view when the [APC] door opens, and so anyone who crosses their path is viewed as a potential life-and-death threat."³¹

Yet here too the abstractions were qualified, their imaginative geographies perforated by much more intimate engagements, and many of the soldiers interviewed saw the military occupation as unsustainable on humanitarian rather than narrowly logistical grounds. In fact, over 500 reserve soldiers have refused to serve in the occupied territories since February 2002. Eight of them petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to have their action recognized as a matter of conscience. They claimed that the aim of IDF operations in Gaza and the West Bank had been to damage "the entire civil fabric" of Palestinian society and "to dominate, starve and humiliate an entire people." Their submission charged the IDF with systematically violating the most fundamental human rights of the Palestinian people, and argued that the Israeli occupation is itself illegal.³² Significantly, the Court declined to rule on the legality of the occupation. While it accepted that the reservists' objections were moral ones, it nevertheless upheld the prison sentences that had been imposed upon them for refusing to serve in the occupied territories. This decision tacitly recognized that the reservists' refusal to fight what they call "the War of the Settlements" presents a much more serious threat to the legitimacy of Israel's politico-military strategy than conscientious objectors who refuse to serve in the IDF at all ... for theirs is a selective refusal that exposes the territorial underbelly of Israel's aggressions. As Susan Sontag observed, "The soldiers are not refusing a particular order. They are refusing to enter the space where illegal orders are bound to be given."³³

The so-called "clash of civilizations" that swirled around in the dust and debris of 9/11 was rarely invoked directly. The principal architect of this thesis, political scientist and former Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council Samuel Huntington, had said remarkably little about Palestine, apart from the monstrous perversion that the "fault-line war" in Gaza and the West Bank showed that "Muslims have problems living peacefully with their neighbors." He acknowledged in passing the role of the European powers in originally setting the stage for the conflict, but said nothing at all about Israel's predatory actions. Robert Wistrich, a professor of modern European history at the Hebrew University, was more forthright. "It is a clash of civilizations," he wrote in the Jerusalem Post soon after the 9/11 attacks. Not only had radical Islam devastated New York City ("the largest Jewish city on the planet") but it continued to threaten the survival of the state of Israel. Columnist Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times six months later, invoked Huntington too, but drew a markedly different conclusion: "What Osama bin Laden failed to achieve on September 11 is now being unleashed by the Israeli-Palestinian war in the West Bank: a clash of civilizations." But this had to end, so he insisted, in an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories.³⁴

These straws in the wind were blowing in different directions, but the imaginative geography that dominated Israeli policy dispensed with their dualisms altogether. Instead, it resurrected the opposition between "civilization" and "barbarism" that had been a foundational weapon of Zionism and which the White House had also deployed in its "war on terror." Palestinians were represented as denizens of a barbarian space lying beyond the pale of civilization. When Sharon's predecessor Ehud Barak described Israel as "a villa in the middle of the jungle" and as "a vanguard of culture against barbarism," he was not only degrading and brutalizing Palestinian culture and civil society: he was also rendering its spaces inchoate, outside the space of Reason.³⁵ What Sharon sought to do was to establish these linguistic claims in acutely physical terms. As Lena Jayyusi, Director of the Oral History Program at the Shaml Diaspora and Refugee Center, wrote from Ramallah, "There is no constative any longer: only the pure performative."³⁶ This is the heart of the matter because representations are not mere mirrors of the world. They enter directly into its fabrication. Israel's offensive operations were designed to turn the Palestinian people not only into enemies but into aliens, and in placing them outside the modern, figuratively and physically, they were constructed as what Giorgio Agamben calls homines sacri. Homo sacer was a subject-position established under Roman law to identify those whose death had no sacrificial value but whose killing did not constitute a crime: they inhabited a zone of abandonment within which sovereign power had suspended its own law.³⁷ The prosecution of this necropolitics, as Mbembe calls it, was a radicalization of existing Israeli policies that required the performance of two spacings. On one side, a strategy of consolidation and containment continued to bind Israel to its illegal settlements in Gaza and the West Bank and to separate both from the remainder of the occupied territories; on the other side, a strategy of cantonization institutionalized the siege of Palestinian towns and villages.

The first objective had already been secured in Gaza during the first Intifada. "Surrounded by electronic fences and army posts," Reinhart reported, "completely sealed off from the outside world, Gaza has become a huge prison."³⁸ In June 2002, a similar barrier network was announced for the West Bank. For most of its length, this will be an electronic fence, but, in places, it will solidify into a concrete or steel wall eight meters high. The line will be flanked by a 50-100 meter security zone, edged with concertina wire, trenches and patrol roads, and monitored by watchtowers, floodlights, electronic sensors and surveillance cameras. Much of the barrier runs east of the Green Line, so that thousands of hectares of some of the most highly productive Palestinian farmland will be on the Israeli side, with implications not only for the beleaguered Palestinian economy but also for the subsistence of the Palestinian population. At least fifteen Palestinian villages will be on the Israeli side, while others will be cut off from their fields and wells, so that Israel will extend its control over the aquifer. The barrier will also consolidate Israel's stranglehold over East Jerusalem, where it runs deep into Palestinian territory and cuts off hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank. In March 2003, Sharon announced plans for a second barrier to be built around the eastern foothills along the Jordan Valley, to connect with the first and so encircle the occupied territories there as in Gaza. The Israeli Defense Minister has persistently represented the barrier as a security measure whose sole objective is to deny suicide bombers access to Israel from the West Bank. The second barrier makes a nonsense of these claims, and when the minister adds that "this not a border between political entities or sovereign territories," it becomes clear that the only sovereign power to be recognized is the state of Israel. What lies beyond the line is not the (future) state of Palestine but what Agamben would call the (present) state of the exception.³⁹

This is the point at which the analogy between occupied Palestine and the prison breaks down, for this carceral archipelago limns the dispersed site of the camp. "While prison law only constitutes a particular sphere of penal law and is not outside the juridical order, the juridical constellation that guides the camp is martial law and the state of siege ... As the absolute space of the exception, the camp is topologically different from a single space of confinement."⁴⁰

On that other side of the line, therefore, Israel has set about the proliferation of zones of indistinction in which, as the reservists who refuse to serve in the occupied territories claim, "the legal and the lawful can no longer be distinguished from the illegal and unlawful."⁴¹ The baroque geography of the Oslo process has been swept away; the quasi-sovereignty of "Area A" has been terminated, and all that remains is another Escher-like system of exclusion and inclusion in which Palestinian towns and villages are severed from one another and placed under constant siege from a military force that has now twisted the topologies of occupation into new and even more grotesque forms. In his original discussion of homo sacer, Agamben suggested that the state of the exception - and here we need to remind ourselves that he was arguing in general terms because the concordance with the occupied territories is agonizingly close - traces a threshold through which "outside and inside, the normal situation and chaos, enter into those topological relations that make the validity of the juridical order possible."⁴² A delegation from the International Writers Parliament visited the West Bank in March and their reports described the installation of these new topologies - the performance of their collective danse macabre - with shivering immediacy:

The landscape of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has been ripped and torn like cloth made from strips of different materials. Barbed wire surrounds Israeli settlements and military posts and the areas theoretically controlled by the Palestinian Authority: it protects and excludes, unites separated zones and separates adjacent territories, weaves in between a labyrinth of islands that are mutually repelled and attracted. A complex circulatory system of capillary veins demonstrates the occupier's desire to split the territory into slices, remnants, tracts that seemingly impact on each other and yet remain mutually unaware ... The landscape of settlements, frequently constructed on the ruins of Palestinian villages, evokes yet again the chessboard of reciprocal exclusion between the former and what remains of the autonomous areas, to the point of confusing the inexpert visitor as to what they encompass and limit, the "interior" and the "exterior."⁴³

More prosaically, the Military Correspondent for Ha'aretz reported in April that "there is [now] only one area and that area is controlled by the IDF without Palestinian intermediaries." "As far as the military was concerned," Amir Oren explained, "there was no longer any difference between Areas A, B and C: The IDF is doing as it pleases in all of them." Israel had established a series of "security zones" throughout the West Bank, so that Palestinians were now confined and corralled, subject to endless curfew and closure, whereas the IDF had complete freedom of movement and action. As the Israeli Minister of Internal (sic) Security put it, "They are there, but we are here and there as well."⁴⁴

The occupied territories have been turned into twilight zones, caught in a frenzied cartography of mobile frontiers rather than fixed boundaries. These enforce a violent fragmentation and recombination of time and space, which is nothing less than a concerted attempt to disturb and derange the normal rhythms of everyday Palestinian life. During the first Intifada, many Palestinians elected to "suspend" everyday life as a political strategy. This was a way of reminding one another that these were not normal times, a way of reasserting their collective power and, by calling attention to their actions, also a way of narrativizing the occupation: all of which actively sustained the process of Palestinian nationalism.⁴⁵ What I am describing here, in contrast, is the violent annulment of everyday life by the IDF through a series of military operations that is intended to paralyze Palestinian agency and - through its physical assaults on the Palestinian archive - to erase Palestinian memory.

These deformations involve deliberate twistings - torsions - of both time and space.

This too mimics Agamben's nightmare scenario with precision: a world in which nothing is fixed, nothing is clear, and the spaces of the exception constantly move and multiply. Here is another of the writers, Christian Salmon, describing its borders as they roll in with the night and the fog:

[The] border shifts like a swarm of locusts in the wake of another suicide attack, like the onset of a sudden storm. It might arrive at your doorstep like a delivery in the night, as quickly as the tanks can roll in; or it may slip in slowly, like a shadow. The border keeps creeping along, surrounding villages and watering places....

Within these zones of indistinction the provisions of the Geneva Conventions that prohibit Israel from transferring its civilian population to the occupied territories continue to be disregarded. The same protocols that are supposed to protect Palestinians from torture, illegal detention, house demolition, deportation, and degradation, remain suspended. And still this is not enough. In June 2002, the Knesset passed the Imprisonment of Illegal Combatants Law, which allows for indefinite detention without charge or trial of anyone believed to take part in hostile activity against Israel, directly or indirectly. The symmetry, with America's designation of captives from its war in Afghanistan as "unlawful combatants," was deliberate. These new measures considerably widened the scope of existing provisions for administrative detention, which by the end of the year were being used to hold over 1,000 Palestinians in custody.⁴⁸ And in another show of contempt for the law, Israel continues to carry out what it calls "extra-judicial killings." Since the start of the al-AqsaIntifada, Israeli security forces have assassinated at least sixty and probably more than eighty Palestinian "targets."⁴⁹

In the zones of indistinction established by Israel's sovereign power, which asserts a monopoly of legitimate violence even as it suspends the law and abandons any responsibility for civil society,

The Palestinians are expected to obey military orders from the State of Israel, as if they were the laws of a Palestinian state. But the state that imposes those orders and whose army controls the territories, the land, the water resources, is not responsible for the welfare of the Palestinians living in those territories. It need not behave like a normal state ...⁵⁰

In this world wrenched upside down, Israel suspends international law in the occupied territories while it criminalizes any act of Palestinian resistance to its illegal operations there. What can this be other than the space of the exception? These torsions show that not all "third spaces" or "paradoxical spaces" are zones of emancipation. The space of the exception is not so much punctuated by crises as produced through them, and these ever-present assaults force a mutation in the position of those made subject to them. Abu Audah has argued that long before the Oslo process, but intensified during its accommodations, Israel sought "to transform the Palestinian people into inhabitants. The difference," he explained, "is that people have national rights of sovereignty over their land, identity, independence, and freedom, while inhabitants constitute a group of people with interests not exceeding garbage collection and earning a daily living."⁵¹ But now even the elemental forms of bare life are under acute threat.

In the countryside, Palestinian villages and fields have been pulverized by the military: houses demolished, reservoirs destroyed, olive groves uprooted. The writers' delegation visited a village razed to the ground by the IDF and walked among the rubble of bulldozed homes:

Exercise books, kitchen utensils, and a toothbrush were strewn about, signs of life reduced to pieces. One woman told us that residents were given five minutes to leave their homes in the middle of the night. The bulldozers returned several times to 'finish the job'... Mounted high atop the watchtowers, infrared machine guns watch over the wasteland. There are no soldiers about. At night, the guns fire automatically as soon as any lights are turned on.⁵²

This is a bleak reversal of the Zionist imaginary of the tower and stockade settlements. The land that they believed they would transform from "wilderness" into "civilization" has been laid waste by their own (armored) bulldozers. It is as though the very earth has been turned into an enemy.

Palestinian towns and cities have fared no better. They have been smashed by Israeli missiles and bombs, by tanks and armored bulldozers. The objective is to suppress what Henri Lefebvre called "the right to the city" through a campaign of coerced de-modernization. "Urbicide is Sharon's war strategy," argues Firstname Stephen Graham. "His main purpose is to deny the Palestinian people their collective, individual, and cultural rights to the city-based modernity long enjoyed by Israelis."⁵³ In the past, this process had proceeded by stealth, through a series of discriminatory planning and building regulations that prevented Palestinian construction and authorized demolition of Palestinian homes. Under this asymmetric system of law enforcement, Palestinian "facts on the ground" were erased with almost machine-like efficiency: coolly, dispassionately, ruthlessly. But, since the spring of 2002, the legal fictions that permitted these erasures have increasingly been dispensed with. In the space of the exception the law - even discriminatory law - suspends itself. Serge Schlemann reported that the IDF's spasm of destruction had created a landscape of devastation from Bethlehem to Jenin. "There is no way to assess the full extent of the latest damage to the cities and towns - Ramallah, Bethlehem, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Nablus and Jenin - while they remain under a tight siege," he continued, "but it is safe to say that the infrastructure of life itself and of any future Palestinian state - roads, schools, electricity pylons, water pipes, telephone lines - has been devastated."⁵⁴

Taken together, these are collective assaults in city and in countryside not only on what Agamben calls politically qualified life, on the integrity of Palestinian civil society and on the formation of a Palestinian state, but on what he calls "bare life" itself. As Mahmoud Darwish declared, "The occupation does not content itself with depriving us of the primary conditions of freedom, but goes on to deprive us of the bare essentials of a dignified human life, by declaring constant war on our bodies, and our dreams, on the people and the homes and the trees, and by committing crimes of war ..."⁵⁵ The hideous objective of Sharon's government, which it scarcely bothers to hide any longer, is to reduce homo sacer to the abject despair of der Muselman. This is truly shocking. Der Muselman is a figure from the Nazi concentration camps - it means, with deeply depressing significance, "The Muslim" - who was reduced to mere survival. Following Primo Levi's horrifying memorial of Auschwitz, Agamben writes that der Muselman "no longer belongs to the world of men in any way; he does not even belong to the threatened and precarious world of the camp inhabitants ... Mute and absolutely alone, he has passed into another world without memory and without grief. He moves in an absolute indistinction of fact and law, of life and juridical rule."⁵⁶

The Sharon regime would understandably not invoke this figure by name: and yet it is exceptionally difficult to avoid seeing its haunted, hollowed-out shadows flickering in the darkness of the zones of indistinction that have been so deliberately, systematically and cruelly produced in the occupied territories. It is in the Palestinian refugee camps, the nomos of Israel's colonial present, that this project finds the purest expression of its violence. In one of her letters from Ramallah, written as she waited for the next Israeli attack, suspended in the silence that terrifies by the certainty that it will be shattered, Jayyusi anticipated the even greater terror that awaited those in the refugee camps:

Down there in the refugee camps, they will receive the fury that inhabits the fear - and animates the will to crush - that the colonizer always vents. They will receive the depleted uranium, the heavy missiles, the columns of tanks smashing through the small alleys; the army which will bore through the walls of the close bordered houses; down there the real battle, the big toll, will be had.

Still the detentions and demolitions, the collective punishments and individual humiliations, grind on. Still the killing continues. Between September 2000 and January 2003 B'Tselem, the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, estimated that more than 1,700 Palestinians had been killed by the IDF in the occupied territories, and a further twenty-five by illegal Israeli settlers.⁵⁸ And yet, despite these enormities, and despite the failures and frustrations of the Intifada itself, Palestinians have refused to be cowed, disciplined, dehumanized; they have refused to surrender their collective memories or to silence their collective grief; they have refused to collaborate with or consent to their own erasure. And, as Darwish affirmed, they are - somehow - still animated by hope, which is itself a form of resistance:

Hope in a normal life where we are neither heroes nor victims. Hope that our children will go safely to their schools. Hope that a pregnant woman will give birth to a living baby, at the hospital, and not a dead child in front of a military checkpoint; hope that our poets will see the beauty of the color red in roses rather than in blood; hope that this land will take up its original name: the land of love and peace.⁵⁹

Identities and oppositions

It is hard to imagine how any people can withstand such atrocities, but it beggars belief that, in the face of these multiple horrors and humiliations, American support for Israel should have continued to grow. "How can we credibly continue to search for and destroy the remaining al-Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan and throughout the world," Senator Joseph Lieberman asked a Democratic convention in Florida, "while demanding that the Israelis stop doing exactly that?"⁶⁰ "On September 11," Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told a pro-Israel rally in Washington, "every American understood what it is like to live in Jerusalem or Netanya or Haifa." But when he added that "Israelis are not the only victims of the violence in the Middle East, innocent Palestinians are suffering and dying in great numbers as well," he was booed and jeered.⁶¹ Finally, on 2 May 2002, both the Senate and the House of Representatives passed motions expressing solidarity with Israel (by 94-2 and 352-21 respectively). The then Democrat-led Senate affirmed that the U. S. and Israel "are now engaged in a common struggle against terrorism"; condemned Palestinian suicide bombings; supported Israeli incursions into Palestinian towns and refugee camps as "necessary steps to provide security to its people by dismantling the terrorist infrastructure in the Palestinian areas," and called upon the Palestinian Authority to fulfill its commitment to do the same; and declared that the U. S. would "continue to assist Israel in strengthening its homeland defenses." Lieberman was explicit: "Israel has been under siege from a systematic and deliberate campaign of suicide and homicide attacks by terrorists. Their essence is identical to the attacks on our country of September 11."⁶²

The claim to an identity between attacks on the United States and attacks on Israel has had exceptionally grave consequences for any attempt to understand political violence. There are fundamental differences between al-Qaeda and Hamas, between the Taliban and the Palestinian Authority, but the rhetorical fusion of America's 9/11 and Israel's 2 December has given Bush and Sharon carte blanche to erase them. As a result, "terrorism" has been made polymorphous. Without defined shape or determinate roots, its mantle can be cast over any form of resistance to sovereign power. This has allowed the Sharon regime to advance its colonial project not through appeals to Zionism alone, to the Messianic mission of "redeeming" the biblical heartlands of Judea and Samaria (though this has by no means lost its ideological force), but also - crucially for its international constituency - as another front in a generalized, rationalized "war on terrorism." This has in turn sustained the deception, so assiduously fostered by right-wing ideologues, that terrorism can be suppressed without reference to the historico-geographical conditions that frame it. Benjamin Netanyahu's repeated insistence that "The root cause of terrorism lies not in grievance but in a disposition toward unbridled violence" has been endorsed by both the Bush and Sharon administrations. It conveniently exempts their own actions from scrutiny and absolves them of anything other than a restless, roving military response.⁶³

It is as though, by virtue of the de-realization of Palestine, a project reaching back over fifty years, the roots of Palestinian violence - the dispossession of the Palestinian people, the dispersal of refugees, and the horrors of military occupation - have been torn up with their olive-groves. Violence must be lodged in their genes, not in the geographies to which they have been so brutally subjected. The misadventures of American foreign policy; Israel's continuing colonial dispossession of the Palestinians; and most of all the connections between the two: none of these have a place in the calculated abstractions of righteousness. The Bush and Sharon administrations continue to perform their own "God-trick" of seeing the face of Evil everywhere except in their own looking-glasses.

This trick not only mirrors bin Laden's ideology, it also ultimately serves the interests of al-Qaeda. Neither 9/11 nor 2 December marked the end of transnational terrorism. In October 2002, a discotheque and a nightclub were bombed in Bali, murdering over 180 people and injuring 300 more. Reports suggested that the attack was the work of Jemaah Islamiyah, a militant group with links to al-Qaeda that seeks to establish a pan-Islamic state in South East Asia. Less than two weeks later, Chechen guerillas took hundreds of hostages in a Moscow theater, demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops from their homeland: special forces stormed the building, killing all forty-one guerillas and leaving more than 120 hostages dead from the effects of narcotic gas. At the end of November, an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa was bombed, murdering eighteen people, and two missiles were fired at an Israeli charter jet as it took off for Tel Aviv. It was widely reported that the attacks were the work of al-Qaeda affiliates in East Africa. On the same day, at Beit She'an in northern Israel, two Palestinian gunmen murdered six Israelis and wounded many more as they waited to vote in a Likud primary. After these atrocities an Israeli government spokesman affirmed: "Whether in New York or Washington, Bali or Moscow, Mombasa or Beit She'an, terrorism is indivisible, and all attempts to understand it will only ensure its continuation."⁶⁴

On the contrary, it is precisely the failure to discriminate, the refusal to understand - worse, the determination to discredit and disable any attempt to understand - that will ensure the continuation of terrorism. Terrorism cannot be reduced to circumstances; but neither can it be severed from them. And understanding does not move in the Euclidean space of the hermeneutic circle. It has to move in the folds and torsions of the power-topologies that I have described here. Jonathan Freedland once described the Israelis and Palestinians as inhabiting "parallel universes, where the same set of facts has two entirely different meanings depending where you stand."⁶⁵ But this assumes that "different meanings" are somehow separable from the differential elaborations of power in which they are involved. It substitutes an equivalence ("parallel universes") for the palpable asymmetry between the military and economic might of Israel, supported by U. S. aid and armaments, and the broken-backed, rag-tag resources left for the Palestinians. Until these differences are recognized, Bush and Sharon will continue to fight their mirror-wars with impunity, believing - like bin Laden and others like him - in the indiscriminate categorization of whole populations and in the indiscriminate use of violence against them. This is the colonial present, whose awful terminus was evoked with chilling economy by the crazed Kurtz at the end of Conrad's Heart of Darkness: "Exterminate the brutes!"

There is a further twist: these power-topologies fold in as well as out. Through the "war on terror," what Ghassan Hage calls a "phobic culture" has been enlarged to the point where:

Everything and everywhere is perceived as a border from which a potentially threatening other can leap ... It is a combination of a warring and a siege mentality, which by necessity emphasizes the eradication of a potentially menacing other. In a war/siege culture, the understanding of the other is a luxury that cannot be afforded; on the contrary, the divisions between Us and Them are further emphasized. War emphasizes the otherness of the other and divides the world between friends and enemies and good and evil.⁶⁶

Agamben was right to worry that the "war on terror" would be invoked so routinely that the exception would become the rule, that the law would be forever suspending itself.⁶⁷ Since the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration has curtailed democratic freedoms in at least three domestic arenas: circumventing federal and international law; suppressing public information; and discriminating against visible minorities. Even the conservative Cato Institute has objected to the proliferation of "secretive subpoenas, secretive arrests, secretive trials, and secretive deportations."⁶⁸ But this series of exceptions is consistent with - and legitimized by - the imaginative geographies of "civilization" and "barbarism" that were mobilized by the White House. They articulated "a constant and mutual production of the civilized and the savage throughout the social circuitry" and produced "a constant scrutiny of those who bear the sign of 'dormant' terrorist and activate[d] a policing of points of vulnerability against an enemy who [supposedly] inheres within the space of the U. S."⁶⁹ The "securitization" of civil society has spread beyond America as other states have invoked the generalized "war on terror" to legitimize their own suppressions, suspensions and exceptions.⁷⁰ This too is the colonial present, because these spacings are all mirror-images of the "wild zones" of the colonial imagination. "The national security state," Susan Buck-Morss notes, "is called into existence with the sovereign pronouncement of a 'state of emergency' and generates a wild zone of power, barbaric and violent, operating without democratic oversight, in order to combat an 'enemy' that threatens the existence not merely and not mainly of its citizens, but of its sovereignty."⁷¹ After 9/11, many commentators proclaimed that "we are all New Yorkers." Perhaps - in this sense at least - we are all potentially Palestinians too.