Amira Hass
How to describe one’s average day under settler colonialism in slow motion, which, in fact, is accelerating by the day? We are still talking about military occupation — one does not exclude the other — only that the military orders and the military’s violent presence are in the service of perpetual land grab and dispossession.
The personal experience may differ from place to place, from a village and shepherd community in Area C to a village in Area B to a city or town. Take Masafer Yatta, an area that was declared a “military training zone” in the 1980s, and since the late ’90s — yes, during the Oslo [Accords] negotiations! — the authorities have been engaged in actively, directly or indirectly expelling — en masse or drop by drop — the indigenous inhabitants.
There the exposure to the monster is happening at every moment, and so is the resistance to it: namely, people’s insistence on remaining where they and their grandmothers were born. You wake up and go to sleep with the danger of being attacked by settlers or having the army destroy your tent or shack or your very basic water system, which — in a typical example of popular unarmed resistance — the local councils have installed, defying Israeli prohibition on Palestinians connecting to the grid. All the time you live in fear and with the knowledge that something may happen that day that will shatter your life again. Then you get up on your feet and start anew. It’s every moment. No rest.
In most villages, three Israeli practices occupy the physical and mental space: One, settlers’ violence against villagers (and shepherds), which has been steadily on the rise since the mid-’90s and nowadays is carried out with open — not just tacit and indirect — official endorsement; two, military house raids (very often in order to arrest and intimidate people…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Amira Hass
