Stanford University Press Blog

Boom: A Photo Essay

Construction and destruction in Shatila and Gaza.

by DIANA ALLAN

All photos courtesy of Hisham Ghuzlan

When I visited Shatila last week two topics dominated conversation: the carnage in Gaza and the deleterious effects of the construction boom underway in the camp. I’ll take them in turn, though Shatilans usually don’t; for them, each topic seems the underbelly of the other.

Building in Shatila has long been described by residents as a kind of cancer, its growth both irregular and hazardous. The waves of Syrians and Palestinians fleeing Syria since 2011 have caused it to metastasize. Two years ago its population was estimated at 21,000, around 9000 of them Palestinian. Friends tell me the influx of refugees, alongside the steady flow of Lebanese and labor migrants seeking cheap housing in Beirut, has brought the number closer to 35,000. Shatila’s density rivals that of Gaza City.

The camp has spatially transformed since my last visit in 2012. For the first time I found myself unable to recognize certain streets. The building I lived in has grown by three floors­­; others have grown by four. The memory of natural light cools near windows now giving out onto cinderblocks. There is a pervasive sense of foreboding; miming the blind, hands outstretched, my former neighbor told me she now prayed for divine guidance when the electricity cut. Services already overextended are collapsing under the strain. Electricity cuts are now constant, the water has turned salty as the camp’s wells run dry­ (“even the earth is crying!” said one resident) and the overflow of sewage and garbage is now overwhelming. “Our blood is boiling over Gaza, but also over conditions here—we can barely move or breathe,” explained Abu Hasan, who has lived in Shatila for forty years. “We’re dying everywhere.”

Views on Gaza: A Blog Series

Scholars reflect on the recent intensification of Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

After three weeks of bloodshed and failed cease-fires, the violence in Gaza shows few signs of letting up. This week, the Stanford Press blog presents a 10-part series, featuring essays from noteworthy scholars on the ongoing crisis in Gaza, as well as reflections on the Arab-Israeli conflict writ large. See the full list of posts in the Gaza series below.

A CITY-SIZED PRISON-HOUSE

With Israeli forces besieging Gaza again, Western ambivalence is inexcusable.
by LORI ALLEN

ISOLATING GAZA

The restriction of Palestinian movement in Gaza and elsewhere has long been a central tactic of the Israeli occupation.
by ILANA FELDMAN

SEAM ZONES, SECURITY ZONES, DEATH ZONES, AND WALLS

How Israel controls and contains the Palestinians within its borders.
by LALEH KHALILI

Watching the Occupation at a Close Distance

Surveillance cameras capture the violence as it unfolds in Gaza and the West Bank.

by AMAHL BISHARA

On May 15, 2014, Nakba Day—a day on which Palestinians commemorate the mass dispossession caused by the formation of the state of Israel—Israeli army snipers shot and killed teenagers Nadeem Siam Nawara and Mohammad Mahmoud Odeh Abu Daher during a protest outside of the Ofer prison, where Palestinian political prisoners are held near Ramallah. A few days after their deaths, Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI) issued a video, “Unlawful Killing of Two Palestinians Outside Ofer,” featuring surveillance camera footage of the shootings from a nearby business, as well as an interview with the business owner.

In measured Arabic, the business owner explains that the area had been calm at the moment of the shooting. We see that at 13:45:08, according to the time code of the surveillance camera, one boy walks calmly toward a building on the right side of the frame. Suddenly he stumbles, sticking his arms out straight for an instant. By the time his body hits the ground he is limp, and then still. Just over an hour later, as black smoke likely from a fire in a dumpster clouds the left corner of the video, a boy walks slowly away from the building. He, too, suddenly crumples to the ground. By the time the time code reads 14:58:55, it is all over.

The Other Israelis

The radical Jewish left in Israel and Gaza is lending its voice to the outcry on behalf of Gazans.

by ORIT BASHKIN

This image was created by political satirist, Amir Schiby, following the deaths of Ahed Atef Bakr, Zakaria Ahed Bakr, Mohamed Ramez Bakr, and Ismael Mohamed Bakr in Gaza while playing on the beach.

Following Operation Protective Edge, many cities around the world have witnessed demonstrations sympathizing with the people of Gaza. Tel Aviv had a few as well. Haggai Matar, a leftist activist, participated in one on July 12:

The right-wingers announced in advance that they would be coming to physically assault us in the protest. However, police paid no heed to the warnings, nor to the threats made on the scene when the protest began, nor to our requests that the very few police officers present would call for backup and try to physically separate the two demonstrations.

When the air raid sirens wailed in Tel Aviv that evening, we knew one thing for sure: The thugs in front of us were more dangerous than the rapidly approaching Hamas-fired rockets. While the Iron Dome intercepted the rockets, by the evening’s end one leftist activist was injured and hospitalized, an independent journalist had his video camera stolen and dozens of others were hit, pushed, thrown to the ground or had eggs thrown at them. Two local coffee shops were vandalized as the right-wingers suspected that demonstrators were hiding inside.

Now, I’ve been shot at, beaten, arrested and spent two years in prison for conscientious objection, but this brutal attack by dozens of bullies chanting, “Death to Arabs” and “Burn the leftists” — just two weeks after a young Palestinian boy was torched to death — was one of the most frightening experiences I’ve ever encountered.

Matar captures the sense of terror and isolation that many Israeli radical leftists have felt in recent weeks. The brutality of the right-wing was condemned in mainstream media, but the event itself marks a dangerous trend in Israeli society.

Racism is the Foundation of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge

How pervasive anti-Arabism has paved the way for Israel's latest assault on Gaza.

by JOEL BEININ

On June 30 Ayelet Shaked, chairwoman of the Knesset faction of the ultra-right wing ha-Bayit ha-Yehudi (Jewish Home) Party, a key member of the coalition government led by Prime Minister Netanyahu, posted on her Facebook page a previously unpublished article written by the late Uri Elitzur. Elitzur, a pro-settler journalist and former chief-of-staff to Netanyahu, wrote

Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism… They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now, this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They must follow their sons. Nothing would be more just. They should go, as well as the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.

 

Shaked’s post appeared the day the bodies of three abducted settler teens­—Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaar, and Eyal Yifrach—were discovered. It has since received more than 5,200 “likes.”

For over two weeks, Netanyahu and the media whipped the country into a hysterical state, accusing Hamas of responsibility for abducting the teens without providing evidence to support the claim and promoting hopes that they would be found alive, although the government knew that the boys were likely murdered within minutes of their abduction. Their deaths provided a pretext for more violent expressions of Israeli anti-Arab racism than ever before.

The international community typically sees the manifestations of Israel’s violent racism only when they erupt as assaults on the Gaza Strip, the West Bank,
or Lebanon.

The viciousness of Mordechai Kedar, lecturer in Arabic literature at Bar Ilan University, was even more creative than Shaked and Elitzur’s merely genocidal proposal. “The only thing that can deter terrorists like those who kidnapped the children and killed them,” he said, “is the knowledge that their sister or their mother will be raped.” As a university-based “expert,” Kedar’s heinous suggestion is based on his “understanding” of Arab culture. “It sounds very bad, but that’s the Middle East,” he explained, hastening to add, “I’m not talking about what we should or shouldn’t do. I’m talking about the facts.”

Racism has become a legitimate, indeed an integral, component of Israeli public culture, making assertions like these seem “normal.” The public devaluation of Arab life enables a society that sees itself as “enlightened” and “democratic” to repeatedly send its army to slaughter the largely defenseless population of the Gaza Strip—1.8 million people, mostly descendants of refugees who arrived during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and have been, to a greater or lesser extent, imprisoned since 1994.

Does the Green Line Exist?

Largely invisible to Israelis, the pre-1967 borders profoundly shape the lives and hopes of Palestinians.

by TAMIR SOREK

"Israel Green Lines" from Wikipedia user, Ynhockey (licensed under Creative Commons).

In 1949 the lines on the map of the Armistice Agreements between newly-established Israel and its Arab neighbors were demarcated in green ink. The Green Line, as these lines became known, was later recognized internationally as the borders of the State of Israel. After Israel occupied more territories in 1967, the Green Line became synonymous with the term “pre-1967 borders,” usually in reference to the distinction between pre-67 Israel and other parts of Mandatory Palestine.

Over the past forty-seven years, the political relevance of the Green Line has become a controversial issue in both intra-Israeli and intra-Palestinian politics. The most enthusiastic supporters for keeping the Green Line alive have been Israelis and Palestinians advocating the two-state solution. While the feasibility of this solution seems to be fading away, it is worth examining whether the Green Line still exists—not as a legal entity but as a sociological reality.

The Green Line is like an object in a hologram: we can see it from certain angles, but it disappears if we look at it from other directions. The policy of consecutive Israeli governments since 1967 has been affected by the contradictory forces of the Greater Israel ideology, pulling toward de facto if not de jure annexation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the anxiety over losing a Jewish majority in the State of Israel, which this annexation would potentially lead to. The result is a series of inconsistencies in policy and rhetoric.

Seam Zones, Security Zones, Death Zones, and Walls

How Israel controls and contains the Palestinians within its borders.

by LALEH KHALILI

I wrote Time in the Shadows in order to puzzle out why the counterinsurgency practices of enormously powerful state militaries—the US and Israel at the time I was writing the book—so often invoked law and humanitarianism, rather than naked force. And why so much of their war-fighting pivoted around the mass confinement not only of combatants but civilians. I was also struck by the similarities in the practices of confinement not only between Israel and the US but with historical accounts of colonial confinement effected by Britain and France.

Time in the Shadows investigates the two major liberal counterinsurgencies of our day: Israeli occupation of Palestine and the U.S. War on Terror.

For me, what was striking, insidious, devastating, was the less flashy, less visible, practices that were foundational to detention of suspected combatants and incarceration—whether in situ or through resettlement—of troublesome civilians. These practices—law, administration, demographic and anthropological mapping, offshoring—all sounded so dry, so rational, and yet they were grist to the mill of liberal counterinsurgents in so many ways. And the other similarity across a century and several continents seemed to be the repetition ad nauseam of the language of “protection” and of “security” to frame or rename or euphemise atrocities.

Among the technologies that best embody this language of protection used to violently pacify a population in counterinsurgencies are the separation wall and the various “protective” zones invented by the Israeli military to fragment the Palestinian territories and ensure panopticon-like surveillance and monitoring capability over these fragmented zones. These technologies have specific histories and are mirrored in so many different contexts. The following excerpt is an attempt at situating the wall and the various zones in both a longer historical continuum with colonial practices, while also reflecting on the settler-colonial specificities of their present form.

The following is excerpted from Laleh Khalili's Time in the Shadows:

Walls

Someone who lives in Khan Yunis or Rafah and wants to
enter Israel to work has to go through all the circles of hell in
order to reach the Erez crossing point. He has to leave home
at six-seven in the evening, after supper, in order to get to
Erez at two-three the next morning and stand in line to wait
for the foreman.
Brigadier General Zvika Fogel, 2007

 

Isolating Gaza

The restriction of Palestinian movement in Gaza and elsewhere has long been a central tactic of the Israeli occupation.

by ILANA FELDMAN

During the latest Israeli assault on Gaza considerable media coverage has been given to the Israeli tactic of calling people a few minutes before their homes are bombed. Some observers appear to accept the Israeli contention that this is a humanitarian gesture. Others raise the question of where, in this landscape of violence, in a tiny, densely populated strip of land with no free points of egress, the inhabitants are supposed to go. As Jon Stewart put it, “Evacuate to where? Have you seen Gaza?”

...."and go where? Into the sea? " They are trapped, can't the world see this or they turning a blind eye. #Gaza pic.twitter.com/Px0l6fmtse

— ‎﷽ Vitamin Deen (@Vitamin__Deen) July 25, 2014

Palestinians living in Gaza’s “open air prison” are not only targeted for attack, but also victimized by enforced immobility. Through years of policies of increasing control, closure, and blockade, Israel has created this vulnerability and is now deploying immobility as a lethal weapon. There is frequent reference in the media to the blockade imposed on Gaza in 2006 after Hamas won parliamentary elections, but the process of isolating Gaza began long before that. Understanding how immobility was imposed and then weaponized requires looking at the history of borders, movements, and constraints on motion that have defined this place since 1948.

A City-Sized Prison-House

With Israeli forces besieging Gaza again, Western ambivalence is inexcusable.

by LORI ALLEN

A fence encircling Gaza, taken in 2005.

The no-man’s-land that surrounds the entrance to the Gaza Strip from Israel is a surreal space. Most of the time, it is a hot, flat, quiet place. Tumbleweeds might appear if there was movement in the air and it existed in the Midwest of the United States 200 years ago. But in the Mediterranean of today, the air is still. Only the exposed walk from where the taxi must leave its foreign passenger to the Israeli security point produces a disturbance in the torpor that surrounds this zone.

To convey something of the wrongness of this space, you have to imagine the quiet indolence that attends this entrance to a human cage. Nobody outside shouts. Nobody objects. Nobody notices. Instead, Israeli bureaucrats in uniforms ask their routine questions, examine passports, scroll through computer files, and peer down at visitors with suspicion and disregard, disdain, haughtiness, and boredom—a combination of attitudes difficult to manage but perfected by the Israeli security official. Perhaps not so unlike state officials anywhere. But these are not people being surly as they slowly process drivers’ licenses or grudgingly issue passports. They are maintaining a blockade on a population of 1.8 million people—a crime under international law.

The Education Revolution

A century ago the average person was illiterate. Advances in education since then have wrought drastic changes the world over.

by DAVID P. BAKER

When most people discuss education, they talk about reforming it. At the primary level, people want to save failing schools (the current debates around the Common Core State Standards comes to mind). At the higher education level, many worry that Americans are becoming overeducated—that the bachelor’s degree is the new high school diploma; some have even argued that too much education stifles creativity. Yet these discussions don’t situate education in its broader context: if we recall that just about 100 years ago the average person was illiterate, we may think of education differently.

Because of education about 80 percent of the world’s population can now read and write a short essay about their lives. Beyond primary education, approximately 20% of the world’s youth enrolls in higher education. In the early 20^th century we thought nothing of a student dropping out of high school; in many ways it was the norm. But by the end of the century (infamously marked through the 1983 government report A Nation at Risk) the idea of dropping out of high school was tantamount to failure. Education has changed the concept of youth, adulthood, and the life course.

In the 1960s and 1970s, several scholars started writing about an impending crisis; they warned that mass education at all levels (primarily through university) would lead to an overeducated population. These scholars warned that providing access to higher education en masse would lead to whole societies of overeducated and underemployed citizens and, ultimately, social unrest. However, rather than overeducation, we see that economies and labor markets change to adapt to the changes in education levels and skills.

The Origin Story of the Muslim Brotherhood

Author Beth Baron describes how one of today's most notorious and polarizing organizations first came to be.

Q:

You describe the Muslim Brotherhood as emerging from a battle “for the bodies and souls of Egypt’s children”—can you elaborate on that? What motivated the formation of this group?

A:

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded by Hasan al-Banna in 1928 as an Islamic reform organization to combat British colonialism and Westernization as well as the inroads of missionaries. American and other missionaries had started a network of social welfare institutions—hospitals, clinics, schools, and orphanages—as sites where they could spread the message of the gospel. Orphanages became particularly contentious sites, for missionaries had discovered that children who were not under parental care were relatively easy targets for conversion.

An Egyptian orphanage established by Christian missionaries

 

New Flashpoint, Old Conflict: Understanding the Israeli-Palestinian Divide

6 books that offer insightful context for the Israreli-Palestinian conflict.

by KATE WAHL

Over the course of the past few weeks, the murders of four teenagers—three Israeli, and one Palestinian—have sparked a firestorm of upheaval and violence, redoubling ethnic antagonisms in the already fractious region. In the interest of providing context and insight for both the acute and chronic tensions shaping the intractable Israeli-Palestinian schism, our Middle East Studies Editor, Kate Wahl, has compiled a handful of select titles to shed light on the escalating conflict. 

Considering the occupation

Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine

Even as we’re decades into the occupation—since 1967—most people speak of this rule, both in everyday political discussion and in legal and academic debates, as temporary, as a state of affairs incidental and external to the Israeli regime. Many Israelis, on both the political right and left, agree that the occupation constitutes a problem for Israeli democracy, but few would ultimately question the very structure of the Israeli regime itself and whether Israel is a democracy. 

Too frequently ignored in debates about occupation are considerations of how the events of 1948 and 1967 have reinforced the sweeping militarization and recent racialization of Israeli society. Looking closely at the history and contemporary formation of the ruling apparatus—the technologies and operations of the Israeli army, the General Security Services, and the legal system imposed in the Occupied Territories—one can see the “one-state condition” of Israel/Palestine: the grounding principle of Israeli governance is the perpetuation of differential rule over populations of differing status.

Fútbol in Argentina: A Common Passion for a Country of Immigrants

Fútbol has provided a unique arena for immigrants to immerse themselves in Argentinian culture.

by RAANAN REIN

Colombia's President, Juan Manuel Santos, asked Colombia's soccer coach, the Jewish-Argentine Jose Pekerman, to stay on after leading the national squad to and through the most successful World Cup in history. Pekerman is the most recent example of Jewish Argentines' involvement in football since its early days in South America.

There was no Hank Greenberg, Red Auerbach, Moe Berg, or Mark Spitz in Argentina, although this does not mean that no Jews made names for themselves in Argentine sports. Prominent Jewish footballers have included, among others, Leopoldo Bard, the first team captain and president of River Plate; Ezra Sued, a striker on both the Racing and national teams; Aaron Werfiker, stopper on the River and national teams (his fellow players had trouble pronouncing his name, so they called him “Pérez”); Miguel Reznik, who played for Huracán; and, more recently, Juan Pablo Sorín, midfielder for River as well as a Spanish team. All these figures challenge the still very common myth that Jews did not participate in Argentine football.  At any rate, simply buying a ticket to a game, learning the names of all the members of a team, following the sport in the media, or rooting for your favorite team or player was enough to make you an active participant in Argentine popular culture.

Club Atlético Atlanta is a predominantly Jewish fútbol club, and still today a fan favorite for Argentina's Jewish fútbol fans; pictured here in 1936

Most books about Argentine football tend to claim that religious and ethnic differences have not been issues in Argentina's national sports. This claim is not confined to sports history. The fact is that many intellectuals in Latin America reject ethnicity as a significant analytical category (unless they are discussing the indigenous population or people of African descent), even if they themselves are part of an ethnic minority. Thus, football is presented as a channel of social mobility based on talent alone and as the sport that best represents some of the most cherished Argentine values and character traits, irrespective of the players’ ethnic origins.

A Harbinger for Hindu Hegemony

The recent election of the Hindu nationalist BJP seems likely to further erode cultural pluralism and minority rights in India.

by NARENDRA SUBRAMANIAN

In India’s recent national elections, a single party gained the majority of the seats in the lower house of parliament for the first time since 1984. That party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has consistently aimed to consolidate the Indian nation around certain elite Hindu cultures and marginalize religious minorities, gained its highest ever vote share (31.0%, compared to 18.8% in the last elections of 2009) and now rules the country on its own for the first time.

Its majoritarian goals contrast with the way the Congress Party, which preceded the BJP in power, presents itself.  The Congress party’s rhetoric upholds pluralism and the formation of India from diverse yet overlapping religious and ethnic cultures. The ascent of the BJP could seriously erode pluralism. Without the potentially moderating effect of operating in a coalition with other parties, the BJP seems likely to heighten the Hindu majoritarian tendencies that have existed since independence, and increase minority marginalization and religious violence.

Posters in support of Narendra Modi put up in Mumbai pic.twitter.com/Kwxfb9AhTI

— ANI (@ANI_news) July 18, 2013

4 Times The Simpsons Taught You Econ (Without You Realizing It)

Using The Simpsons to teach economics—how's that for a pedagogical tool?

by JOSHUA C. HALL

Economics is not an easy subject to learn. Students find it difficult for a variety of reasons. Some have an outright aversion to the numbers and graphs that are typically at the core of an economics curriculum; others—used to relying on introspection—find applying economics properly to be difficult when they would not make the same decision given the same incentives.

So how can economics professors make this area of study more intuitive for students? Here’s my pedagogical standby: I started using popular culture like The Simpsons to teach economics. I’ve found that students find it easier to apply economics to fictional characters they know well, especially when it involves preferences different than their own. For example, I doubt any of my students would try to gain excessive weight in order to qualify for disability and work from home as Homer does in “King-Size Homer.” Yet they almost all could understand that it made sense to Homer, given his own lethargic preferences and the incentives he faced.

New York Magazine ranked Homer Economicus as "Brilliant" and "Highbrow" in their weekly approval matrix.

In editing Homer Economicus: The Simpsons and Economics, my goal was to take this insight from my classes and reach a larger audience interested in learning economics. I contacted dozens of other economic instructors who I knew also used The Simpsons in the classroom and asked them to write up short essays on ideas and concepts that would be found in any basic economics course. In addition, there are chapters applying economics to health care, casinos, prohibition, and immigration.

Basically, the book is filled with examples from the show that illustrate economic concepts and the economic way of thinking. What follows are four examples of how The Simpsons might have been teaching you economics while making you laugh.