#AntiOccupation Delegation to Israel/Palestine Day 4: Separation
Imagine an everyday suburb.
Rows of uniform houses line the streets, manicured trees placed at every other crack in the sidewalk. There are schools, libraries, tennis courts, a strip mall, and anything else you could possibly want within this community.
Now, imagine that directly across from that ordinary suburb are villages of Palestinian families that had once occupied that very same land. Displaced, they are now without regular access to water, electricity, or any of the daily services available to those that live in the homes only a few hundred yards away.
In the West Bank, this isn’t something hard to imagine because it’s the daily reality of Palestinians living near settlements that are constantly creeping closer and closer. This reality, and the complicity of society in this reality, was has been created by Israel as a tactic to maintain control through the separation and fragmentation of Palestinian society.
The stark differences between these neighboring communities are not only created through ideological differences, but through strategically systematic infrastructures of separation. After the Second Intifada, systems of bypass roads were created as a way to connect the large cities to the settlements, and to ease movement of people between the settlements. These roads are evenly paved and expansive, stretching high above Palestinian villages and roads, ensuring that those traveling on the roads don’t have to bear the burden of the reminder that they are in Palestine, and allow them to maintain the illusion that they are living in this country on their own.
In addition to infrastructure, land is also used as a tool to create physical separation. Buffer zones enforced by Israel are sections of land, sometimes more than ten times the size of the settlements, between the settlements and Palestinian homes that restrict Palestinian access to their own private farms and orchards.
The assertion of Israel’s control on Palestinian society is not only evident around the settlement areas, but it encapsulates the entire country. Check points, sterilized roads, restriction of movement through the permit system, and the imposing separation barrier are all components of Israel’s strategic systematic separation to not only maintain control of Palestinian society, but also control of the narrative of the occupation. As the occupation continues the separation magnified the fissures between Israelis and Palestinians. The concept of “out of sight, out of mind” becomes the daily reality on Israeli society, allowing the oblivion of occupation to steepen.
