TOWARD A SECOND PARTITION: RE-THINKING FORTY YEARS OF ISRAELI RULE

Rema Hammami with Salim Tamari

The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies (MIT-EJMES)

In 1967 the West Bank and Gaza were re-united by Israeli military rule.
Two separate economies, legal systems and the varied ability for political expression that had evolved over 19 years, between 1948 and 1967, were now subsumed under
a unitary set of Israeli control strategies and territorial policies. While gesturing to the existent legal systems in force in each area, these were overlain with a shared policy composed of three main tenets: severe political repression of Palestinian nationalism; subordinated integration of the two economies into Israel’s; and more positively, the free movement of the occupied population throughout Israel and the newly conquered territories. West Banker’s, Gazan’s and their brethren inside Israel, were for the first time since 1948, able to collectively interact on home ground.
Work in Israel, though unprotected and exploitive compensated in part for the limitations put on the economic development of the occupied territories. While mobility into the West Bank and Gaza from the diaspora was severely contained, mobility within and between the two areas allowed for the re-unification of families, the access of Gazan’s to higher education in the West Bank, and access for all to Jerusalem whose special status provided a space to develop a thriving nationalist culture and identity.
Forty years later the West Bank and Gaza are once again two separate territorial entities segregated from each other, while East Jerusalem is now a third. Severe movement restrictions have meant that most Palestinians under the age of twenty have never even visited the other two territories of Palestine, let alone Israel. Most dramatic is the fragmentation of the West Bank into an archipelago of villages and towns– cantonized from each other and the surrounding landscape through a vast matrix of settlements, by-pass roads, checkpoints and the separation wall.

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