GETTING BY THE OCCUPATION: How Violence Became Normal during the Second Palestinian Intifada

Abstract

The second Palestinian intifada against Israeli occupation, which began in September 2000, saw Palestinian areas repeatedly invaded and shelled by Israeli forces. A long history of war and targeted cities is told along the thoroughfares of Palestinian towns; memories of past battles and defeats inscribed in street signs recall massacres in places like Tel Al‐Za'atar and Deir Yasin. But recent events were more important than any official marker and formed the most relevant base by which Palestinians organized their lives. Commemorative cultural production and basic acts of physically getting around that became central to the spatial and social practices by which reorientation and adaptation to violence occurred in the occupied Palestinian territories. This article analyzes the spaciotemporal, embodied, and symbolic aspects of the experience of violence, and the political significance of cultural practices whereby violence is routinized. Such an approach provides a lens onto the power of violence in Israel's colonial project in the occupied territories that neither necessitates an assumption that violence is all determining of Palestinian experience, nor a championing of every act of Palestinian survival as heroic resistance. Memorialization that occurs in storytelling, in visual culture, in the naming of places and moving through spaces is one way in which this happens. The concept of “getting by” captures the many spatial and commemorative forms by which Palestinians manage everyday survival. The kind of agency that is entailed in practices whereby people manage, get by, adapt, and the social significance of getting used to it may be somewhat nebulous and unobtrusive as it develops in the shadow of spectacular battles and bloodshed. I demonstrate that this routinization of violence in and of itself, the fact of getting by, just existing in an everyday way, is socially and politically significant in Palestine.

Associations between mental health symptoms in Palestinian captives' wives and in their children

“…More than one fifth of the Palestinian population (700,000-800,000 habitants) experienced detention for different periods, ranging from 18 days until everlasting, since 1967, the starting point of Israeli occupation [33,34]. The highestlevel of Palestinians affected by and suffering from the occupation and arresting was reached during the first (1987)(1988)(1989)(1990)(1991) and the second (2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005) Palestinian Intifada [30,[33][34][35][36]; in the nineties and the years of the second intifada, the annual detention rates have peaked at 20,000 to 30,000. Palestine can be considered as the most imprisonment society in the world [30,37].…”

Geopolitics and family in Palestine

“…Crucially, these studies don"t ignore the violence of occupation, but rather seek to foreground more prosaic practices of dealing with it or simply "getting by" (Allen 2008, Hammami 2004. In this paper I seek to contribute to and develop these alternative approaches by drawing on eleven months of ethnographic research in the village of Birzeit.…”

Uneasy Settlements: Reparation Politics and the Meanings of Money in the Israeli Withdrawal from Gaza

“…While this literature has been particularly important in examining the pernicious effects of the Israeli occupation on the Palestinian people and on the complicity of state institutions with the settlement project (Allen 2008, Kimmerling 1992, Swedenburg 1990, Zertal and Eldar 2007, Shenhav and Berda 2009, Li 2006, it has had less to say about the settlers' collective identity and about their experience of the socio-political processes underway in the region. Indeed, no discussion of the settlers can ignore the repercussions their project has had on the Middle East, as the devastating effects of the Israeli occupation have been well documented (Allen 2008). The current study seeks neither to convince the reader that the evicted settlers are as much a victim as the Palestinians nor to endorse the settlers' worldview.…”