Neve Gordon [Unknown] - Israel’s Occupation

Map i. Areas occupied by Israel during the 1967 War. Source: Peace Now.

This book could not have been written without the insights and support of numerous people. Yinon Cohen, Ariel Handel, Niels Hooper, Adi Ophir, Catherine Rottenberg, and Eyal Weizman read the whole manuscript and offered useful comments, as did the anonymous reviewers from the University of California Press. Lynne Alvarez, Efrat Ben-Ze'ev, Nitza Berkovitch, Robert Blecher, Wendy Brown, Roane Carey, Hillel Cohen, Dani Filc, Shira Robinson, James Ron, Gina Rucavado, Jacinda Swanson, and Yuval Yonay read different chapters, and their insightful suggestions helped me reshape my ideas as I revised the book. Yehezkel Lien from B'Tselem was an invaluable resource as I was writing, Hagit Ofran from Peace Now helped prepare the maps, and my research assistants, Dan Gurfinkel, Ohad Ivri, and Erela Portugaly, gathered useful material.

The idea for the book emerged as a result of my participation in the "Humanitarian Action in Catastrophe" group at Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, where Tal Arbel, Sari Hanafi, Ariel Handel, Michal Givoni, Shir Hever, Ruthie Ginsburg, Adi Ophir, and several others underscored the urgent need to theorize Israel's occupation and helped me to formulate some of my thoughts about the operation of power in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Conversations with Gadi Al Gazi, Yigal Bronner, Fred Dallmayr, Salomka Dunievitz, Irit Esher, Farid Ghanem, Haim Gordon, Rivca Gordon, Ruchama Marton, Yoram Meital, Ann Pettifer, Uri Rosenwaks, Amnon Sadovsky, Peter Walshe, Oren Yiftachel, as well as many of those mentioned above, forced me to think critically about the occupation. Others have simply been there over the years, supporting me and my work. Among them are Muhammad Abu Humus, Amnon Agmi, Barak Atzmon, Mordechai Gordon, Nitsan Gordon, Galila Spharim, Tal Yagil, Niza Yanay, Ariel Van Straten, and Gil Winraob. Members of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University have always stood by me, even in times of fierce attacks, and I would like to use this venue to express my deep gratitude to Lauren Basson, Dani Filc, Fred Lazin, Becky Kook, David Newman, Sharon Pardo, Renee Poznanski, Ahmad Sa'di, and Haim Yacobi, as well as to Nurit Klein and Anat Segal.

I began writing the book in 2004 during a sabbatical at the University of California, Berkeley, where Nezar AlSayyad from the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Eric Stover from the Human Rights Center welcomed me and provided me with the necessary resources to write. I also want to take this opportunity to thank Wendy Brown and Judith Butler for making Berkeley a home away from home, and to express my gratitude to Beshara Doumani and Salim Tamari, who wittingly or unwittingly helped me gain a better perspective about the occupation's history. The Herzog Center for Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University provided me with the necessary resources to complete the work once I returned to Israel.

Finally, this book would not have been written without Catherine, Ariel, and Aviv, the three most important people in my life.

It took me a moment before I understood why my story about a few relatively inconsequential incidents, which occurred years ago at my high school, had such an effect on the undergraduates taking my course in the fall semester of zoo6.One of the anecdotes was about my classmates who lived in the Jewish settlements located in the northern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. It was i98i, and the following year they would be forced to leave their homes as part of Israel's peace agreement with Egypt, but at the time, I told my students, the evacuation did not seem imminent, at least not in the minds of many teenagers for whom each year stretches without end. A particular issue that did occupy us, I continued, was learning to drive. I described to my students how my friends from the farming communities located in the Sinai and the small town ofYamit took their lessons in the Palestinian town of Rafah and were among the first to pass their driving tests.

My students found this story incomprehensible. They simply could not imagine Israeli teenagers taking driving lessons in the middle of Rafah, which, in their minds, is no more than a terrorist nest riddled with tunnels used to smuggle weapons from Egypt-weapons that are subsequently used against Israeli targets. The average age difference between me and my students is only 15 years, but our perspectives are radically different. Most of my students have never talked with Palestinians from the Occupied Territories (OT), except perhaps as soldiers during their military service. Their acquaintance with Palestinians is consequently limited to three-minute news bites that almost always report on Palestinian attacks on Israeli targets or Israeli military assaults on Palestinian towns.