Israel responds to lone attacks with collective punishment
By Natasha Roth
The Defense Ministry cancels travel permits for 500 Palestinians, and work permits for an entire West Bank village.
An
Israeli soldier checks a Palestinian man’s documents at a checkpoint
outside the West Bank city of Hebron on June 17, 2014, as the hunt for
three Israeli teenagers believed kidnapped by militants entered its
fifth day. (Photo: Tess Scheflan/Activestills.org)
Israeli
authorities responded on Monday with collective punishment to two
attacks in the West Bank and Jerusalem that left one Israeli dead and
two injured in recent days. The Defense Ministry canceled special travel
permits for 500 West Bank Palestinians, who had been granted permission
to use Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport. (Palestinians are normally
forbidden from using the airport, and must cross by land into Jordan in
order to fly from Amman to their destination.) Authorities also canceled
entry permits (effectively work permits) for all of the residents of
the village of Sa’ir, home to a Palestinian man who attacked the Border
Police officer in Jerusalem.
Authorities
did not draw any connection between the Palestinian attackers and the
people who had their travel and entry permits revoked.
Over
the past week, Israel’s various government and military PR organs have
been hammering away furiously to promote the authorities’ goodwill
toward Muslims during Ramadan and their compassion in allowing
Palestinians to do radical things such as pray, travel to different
towns to visit their relatives [Ar] and fly abroad. Now, some of those
“treats” have been canceled. And the defense minister threatened to
enact even more collective punishment measures
For
the residents of Sa’ir, the cancelation of their entry permits into
Israel has two ramifications. The move does not “just” prevent
Palestinians from entering Jerusalem to pray, B’Tselem spokesperson
Sarit Michaeli explained in a statement on Monday, it also means that
those who are employed in settlements and in Israel proper are now
unable to reach their places of work. Many residents of Sa’ir were
turned away at entrances of settlements in which they are employed
Monday morning, according to B’Tselem.
In
this, and in the cancelation of permits to fly abroad, the Israeli
government is meting out collective punishment, which is illegal under
international law.
The
use of collective punishment is routine in both East Jerusalem and the
West Bank (not to mention Gaza, whose siege is collective punishment on a
massive scale). Whether it is enclosing thousands of Palestinians
inside a village; dousing entire neighborhoods with rancid-smelling
“skunk” water; closing roads or demolishing houses, Israel has a loose,
unofficial policy of punishing the collective for the actions of a few.
Punishment
is, at its core, an exercise of power. And it is the exercise of power
that links the provision of Ramadan “perks” to Palestinians and the
collective retribution involved in taking those perks away. They are two
sides of the same coin: on the one face, paternalism; on the other,
domination. This is the occupation at its soft and sharp ends.
Inescapable, too, is the fact that such collective rewards and
punishment are distributed on ethnic grounds.
In
the eyes of the Israeli government, Palestinians in the occupied
territories are a homogenous entity, and what applies to the individual
applies to the many. When even the most basic human rights of the
occupied — by nature of the power structure, a collective group — depend
on the benevolence and largesse of the occupier, it is small wonder
that any supposed “perks” (which are, in reality, also basic human
rights) are taken away so easily. It is also small wonder that
collective punishment is such a regular feature of life under
occupation. After all, what the occupier giveth, the occupier taketh
away.
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