Ghazi-Walid Falah

Dynamics and patterns of the shrinking of Arab lands in Palestine

Abstract This paper seeks to sketch a number of geographical patterns pertaining to the ongoing process of confiscation of Palestinian-Arab land in Israel and the 1967 occupied territories. It points out a geographical pattern and process of “enclaving” and “exclaving”, a form of spatial apartheid and exclusionary zoning which was adopted during the pre-state period of Jewish settlement and has continued down to the present day. The centrality of land possession and its transfer to Jewish national and state ownership is shared by almost all political classes in Israel. Even during key points in peace negotiations over the past several years, land confiscation never ceased nor was interrupted. The present paper employs the term “shrinking” to underscore that land confiscation is a continuous process in Palestine/Israel. This of course has both political and social ramifications for the type of state Israel seeks to be, declaring its desire to live in peace and harmony with its own Palestinian citizens and Palestinians elsewhere once a peace deal has been reached. Seen from the perspective of land, its control and use, this paper argues that there is no other alternative in achieving peaceful resolution between Jews in Israel and Palestinians except a return to square one: redefining a new geography for Palestinian villages and towns in Israel and for those many hundreds of villages which were demolished and have since been obliterated.

The geopolitics of ‘Enclavisation’and the demise of a two-stateSolution to the Israeli – Palestinian conflict

Abstract This paper argues that Israels military strategy since the outbreak of the second Intifada, in September 2000, has been one not merely of ‘security’ or ‘counter-terror’ but part of a longer-term strategy of spatial demolition and strangulation. This strategy seems predicated on two aims: unilateral separation from the Palestinian population, and its concomitant territorial dismemberment. Withdrawal from a totally controlled and isolated Gaza, in effect the latters enclavisation, is part of this strategy. Such an enclave will in effect be functionally and spatially sundered from another chain of Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank. From an Israeli perspective, driven by its own distinctive territorial imperative, such separation will ensure Israeli control of and sovereignty over the best land and water resources, and control of all borders and border areas. It is further argued that the policy of unilateral separation and strangulation, the destruction and planned enclavisation of Gaza, and covert and overt settlement expansion in the West Bank—its dismemberment through exclavization, has in effect shattered the spatial basis of a two-state solution.

Just War and Extraterritoriality: The Popular Geopolitics of the United States' War on Iraq as Reflected in Newspapers of the Arab World

Abstract As with all wars, the U.S. military invasion of Iraq in 2003 needed to be portrayed as a just war in an attempt to garner support and legitimacy, domestically and internationally. The United States was acting as hegemonic power in the international state-system and, in light of this role, had imperatives and tools in creating the argument for a just war that differed from those used by nonhegemonic states. The United States acted extraterritorially by diffusing a message of moral right. Arab resistance to the war was evident in the construction of the United States and its leadership as immoral, precluding its ability to wage a just war. This article focuses on the Arab response by analyzing the portrayal in Arab newspapers of the imminent war on Iraq. Sixty-five newspapers of the Arabic language (plus the Iraqi news agency), published in seventeen Arab countries, of which four were Iraqi newspapers, were consulted for the purpose of this study. Interpretation of the geopolitical rhetoric within newspaper reports and political cartoons published in Arab newspapers highlights the way that arguments of morality and immorality were connected to understandings of territorial sovereignty and hegemonic extraterritorial influence into territorial sovereign spaces.

How the United States justified its war on terrorism: prime morality and the construction of a ‘just war’

Just war theory has a long established reputation in the social sciences for evaluating the morality of the military actions of states. However, this analysis has rested upon assumptions of territorial sovereignty and the equal rights of states. The actions of hegemonic powers violate these twin assumptions through their expression of extra‐territorial reach. To avoid charges of immoral behaviour hegemonic powers must use the just war rhetoric of territoriality to justify their extra‐territorial acts. A world‐systems theory conceptualisation of hegemony allows for an interpretation of hegemonic military actions as the defence of a universal prime modernity. Prime modernity refers to an ideal organization of society projected by the hegemonic power as a form of integrative power. For the hegemonic power, threat is perceived as a rejection of the prime modernity anywhere rather than the language of border violations that dominates the foundations of just war theory. Using the language embedded in government and non‐government documents justifying the War on Terrorism, the manner in which a hegemonic power constructed military extra‐territoriality in a system of sovereign states as just is examined. The development of a ‘prime morality’ allowed the hegemonic power to claim that it was operating at the scales of the individual and ‘humankind’ rather than inter‐state power politics. The analysis challenges the implicit geographic assumptions of just war theory and extends our understanding of the imperatives underlying the hegemonic powers construction of its military actions as morally right.

Geography in Ominous Intersection with Interrogation and Torture: reflections on detention in Israel

Abstract This paper describes and reflects on the authors detention as a prominent Palestinian geographer in an Israeli prison for 23 days by the Israeli Security Police (Shin Bet) in July 2006, and the nightmare of abuse, debasement and physical coercion, amounting to torture, he was subjected to during this ordeal. The author argues that the detention was political, punishment for the way he has ‘done the geography of Palestine’ and has documented Israeli erasure of the Palestinians from the land. It was centred on extracting imagined ‘usable’ information from him about his contacts, especially in the field of geography in the Middle East. The paper develops a geographic analysis of the micro-space of detention, and places reflections in a framework that looks at the use of torture as a means to extract ‘intelligence’, at the current mounting intimidation of academics in the wake of 9/11, and at McCarthyism redux and the ‘“disciplining” of the disciplines’. It also looks at recent material describing analogous practices by the US army in interrogating detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The paper provides rich empirical first-hand documentation in the form of a thick description of abuse practices suffered by the author inside an Israel prison near Haifa (known as Al Jalama), such as sleep deprivation, environmental manipulation and mortification of the body by handcuffing, chaining and other practices.

War, peace and land seizure in Palestine's border area

This paper describes a key aspect of the Israeli seizure and incorporation of Palestinian Arab lands that has been little examined to date, namely the dynamics of the Judaisation of Palestinian land as a result of circumstances of war, peace and conjunct agreements. I argue that this process has capitalised on a dynamics of disorder concomitant with armed hostilities. And, during peace negotiations, a policy of land takeover was pursued grounded in the power disparity between the two partners. I further emphasise that this policy has been in keeping with an ethnocratic state ideology and the perceived need to control ever more area within the Land of Israel for settlement and absorption of immigrants. The Israeli political class has repeatedly expropriated borderland space when such a window of opportunity for implementing its ethnocratic territorial imperative has arisen. This ideological imperative predated the formation of the state and has been central to the broader political enterprise of which the Israeli state was and remains the expression. The paper examines cases of land ‘expropriation’ in the early years of the state and specifically after the immediate termination of military hostilities, focusing on case studies in the northern demilitarised area, the Latrun area and in East Jerusalem. This fundamental state policy continues down into the present, evident in the land being seized from Palestinian territory for the building of the Separation Wall, an instrument of a significant new ‘grab’ of land.

Growing up in rural Galilee, Palestine: memories of childhood geographies:

This paper reconstructs the author’s geographies of childhood growing up as a Palestinian in a small village in the Galilee in the early 1950s. It seeks to narrate his experience as a ‘shepherd boy and a schoolboy’ at a certain phase of his life. This type of duality in performance of tasks in everyday life – being a schoolboy but also a shepherd/goatherd contributing to the family’s work, and the maintenance of the household and home from a young age – is presented as a revealing experiential autoethnographic window. It becomes a prism for exploring spatial memory and attachment, and for reading a place and understanding what such places mean to their indigenous inhabitants and occupiers (i.e. people are not ‘thrown’ into places but they make them). The paper further demonstrates that indigenous attachment by individuals to their home place can be a catalyst for political resistance and directly challenge forces emanating from state ideology, as illustrated here in the case of Palestine. Today, as 60 years ago, Palestinian ‘homes’ are seen by Palestinians who are challenging Israeli policies of uprooting on a daily basis as sites impregnated with distinctive existential qualities and a high level of resistance. Such places and spaces acquire substantial new meaning for their indigenous owners who are compelled to dare to protect and guard them.

Walking on the Razor’s Edge: Religious Groups and the 2011 Arab Spring

One of the many demands for the youth who initiated the so-called “Arab Spring” of December 18th 2010 (first in Tunisia) was the establishment and consolidation of a true democracy, however defined. Our chapter focuses on, surprisingly, the non-participation by a few Islamic groups and their spreading ideas and distributing flyers saying the values of democracy violate the law of God, thereby rejecting all voices advocating for a civil state as well as condemning protestors who were causing fitna (strife). These groups demanded that Muslims should oppose all attempts at toppling the legitimate rulers of their countries. Our purpose is to examine the reaction of those key religious scholars, or ‘Ulam? in the Arab world and certain religious groups (for example, the Salafis in Egypt) in the region and beyond (Salafis exist in many Arab countries). We discuss how mainstream Islamists perceive democracy, look at two cases of how Arab regimes have treated religious movements and groups and then examine responses of key religious scholars or ‘Ulam? to the “Arab Spring,” especially two groups: the Muslim brotherhood and Salafi group. Lastly, we provide some thoughts on the future impacts of these developments.