Miki Kratsman. Palestinian behind me: ‘Zooz! Zooz!’ Passport Control at Allenby (Move! Move! in Hebrew). Bridge border terminal, 1999. Only then did I realize that Kratsman describes the con- there were Israeli soldiers text of this photograph thus: behind the mirror. When I “When I positioned myself tried to take another photo- over the shoulder of the graph of the mirror I was Palestinian border policeman angrily removed from the to take this photograph, I terminal by the Palestinian suddenly heard voices calling policeman.”

88

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2006.1.24.88 by guest on 24 September 2021 Seeing through Walls: The Split Sovereign and the One-Way Mirror

EYAL WEIZMAN

Without drawing a single line, the Israeli and Palestinian peace bureaucrats meeting in Oslo in 1993 conceived one of the most complex architectural products of the occupation. Article X of the first Annex to the Gaza-Jericho Agreement (also known as Oslo I) is titled “Passages” and is concerned with the interfaces between a variety of differently defined territories, especially the connections between the “outside” world and the areas handed over to limited Palestinian control.1 The architecture of the ter- minals by which these connections were made sought to resolve the structural paradox that resulted from the seemingly contradictory desire to enable the performance of Palestinian sovereignty while maintaining Israeli security-control. For the Palestinians, the border terminals were to embody an emergent self-government, whereas, for Israel, they were to articulate a new security concept that delegated direct, on-the-ground control of the Palestinian population to the nascent Palestinian Authority. The architecture agreed upon reflected a last-minute compromise achieved shortly before the planned signing ceremony at the White House. Israel would keep “the responsibility for security throughout the passage, including for the terminal” (which was described as a large military camp), as well as the right to decide on who would pass through it, but Palestinians would run it, and Palestinian national signs would be the only ones visible on the ground.2 Article X describes in exhaustive detail a flow chart that separates the crossing into different color-coded lanes and sublanes, making up a complex choreography of trajectories and points of security checks that separate passengers according to the territorial definitions made in the Oslo Accords between different classifications of Palestinians separated by their place of registration: Gaza, East-Jerusalem, the West Bank under Israeli control (area C), the West Bank self-rule (areas A and B), and, finally, VIPs. According to Article X, incoming Palestinians would not see the Israeli security personnel who exercise overall control. Although present throughout the terminal/camp, that article provides that Israeli security agents would be “separated” from the passengers “by tinted

Grey Room 24, Summer 2006, pp. 86–99. © 2006 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 89

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2006.1.24.88 by guest on 24 September 2021 glass.”3 The travel documents of Palestinians crossing through the terminal/ camp were themselves to “be checked by an Israeli officer who [would] also check their identity indirectly in an invisible manner.”4 The Allenby Bridge spanning the Jordan River is the main connection between the West Bank and Jordan. There, Article X was implemented in the following manner: several interconnected rooms, partly glazed with one-way mirrors, were positioned at different intersections of the termi- nal’s various pathways. Access to these rooms was provided by a back door. According to the article, incoming Palestinians would see only “a Palestinian policeman and a raised Palestinian flag” (also—as I saw at the terminal in 1999—an official framed portrait of Yassir Arafat against the background of the Dome of the Rock). A police counter stands in front of one of several one-way mirrors facing the “incoming passengers” hall. The mirrors are positioned so that Israeli security can observe not only the Palestinian travelers but also, significantly, the Palestinian police. The Israeli journalist Gideon Levy described the ritual of passage in 1999.5 The Palestinian border police officer, standing behind a large counter, receives the passport of an incoming passenger, examines it, and then slips it into a drawer hidden behind the counter. The drawer is pulled from the other side into the Israeli control room. There, the infor- mation of the passport is processed, a decision regarding entry is made, and the passport is returned with one of two colored paper slips. The Palestinian police officer subsequently welcomes the passenger or denies him or her entry and stamps the passport. Palestinian police officers may conduct some security checks, but Article X allows Israeli security personnel to emerge into the main hall from behind the one-way mirror when they perceive an emergency situation. They may even use their firearms as a “last resort.”6 The architecture of the terminal is a diagram of the political transfor- mation of the Oslo era and the new power relations that it created. Unlike the mechanisms of discipline and control that called for power to be visible but unverifiable,7 the architecture of the terminal/camp is designed to hide from the passengers the mechanism of power and control altogether. Here, power should be neither visible nor verifiable (or unverifiable). The aim of the architecture/process of the terminal/passage is not to discipline the Palestinian passengers but to mislead them regarding the effective source of power and make them believe that they are under the control of one authority whereas they are in fact under the control of another. Significantly, it is not the Palestinian subject but the agent of the Palestinian Authority that must internalize the disciplinary power of surveillance. This hierarchy could be understood in relation to the almost maternal rhetoric with which Israel used to argue the Oslo agreement as an attempt

90 Grey Room 24

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2006.1.24.88 by guest on 24 September 2021 of inaugurating the Palestinian Authority into a differentiated world in which they should function in due course separately from Israeli power.8 Embodied in the spatial logic and process of passage through the ter- minal/camp was an attempt to split the unified concept of sovereignty— here the sovereignty of a belligerent occupier—into the functions of security-control and a day-to-day civilian government. Israel used the Palestinian desire for self-determination to make the Palestinians carry out their own control, making them accept these fragments of sovereignty as the lesser evil that would thereof free Israel of the duties demanded of it as an occupying power by international law.9 In the Oslo years, Israeli security-control retreated into the interfaces and interstices between Palestinian population centers and into the enve- lope of the populated areas. From these new locations it ruled by modu- lating flows of various kinds: money, labor, people, goods, water, energy, and waste. The terminal/camp at Allenby Bridge was merely a node in the complex legal-spatial-ideological apparatus of Oslo by which Palestinians were both governed and “produced” as subjects of the Palestinian Authority. The entire governing apparatus was composed not only of a network made up of civilian structures (the number of build- ings in the settlements doubled during the 1990s), new roads, and the military presence throughout them but also, significantly, of an array of “legal” and bureaucratic procedures that attempted to manage the Israeli settlers and the Palestinian inhabitants of the Occupied Territories as two territorially overlapping but increasingly insular, autarkic networks. The aim of this process was to reduce “friction” between the groups and avoid, as much as possible, the application of military force. Within this larger system the architecture of the terminal operated both as a valve regulating the flow of Palestinian passengers and goods under Israel’s volatile regime of security, and simultaneously, to those who passed through it, it became an ideological apparatus that aimed to naturalize the authorities of the Palestinian Authority. Unlike the one-way mirrors we have become accustomed to seeing in almost every police station, detention facility, and control room, the one- way mirror system of the terminal/camp of Allenby Bridge functioned as an international border of sorts. In fact, the mirror was not only to become an international border, but in its positioning and function it redrew as well the border to the concept of sovereignty. It is in this pre- cise context that one-way mirrors have become important components in the redesign of sovereignty across the frontiers of the “war on terror,” enabling, as in one set of situations, the United States’ “politics of deni- ability” (almost Clintonian in style) that allows U.S. agents to engage in torture without resorting to physical contact. The process the Bush

Weizman | Seeing through Walls: The Split Sovereign and the One-Way Mirror 91

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2006.1.24.88 by guest on 24 September 2021 administration calls “extraordinary rendition” was conceived to bypass the outlawing of “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners in US custody” by turning “terrorist suspects” over to foreign govern- ments that do engage in torture.10 The one-way mirror behind which U.S. agents and behavioral science consultants observe and perhaps even guide the process of torture in Saudi Arabian, Moroccan, or Syrian pris- ons, for example, becomes an effective extension of U.S. borders,11 and acts as the medium across which a previously unified sovereignty has now been split. A similar, if more complex, prosthetic power relation is established through the one-way mirror of the Allenby Bridge terminal/camp. Although Article X renders the Palestinian Authority mere performance, the nature of this performance is in itself significant.12 If Israeli security-control always aimed directly at the occupied Palestinian population, the Israeli ideological project never did. The attempt to “produce” and discipline a political subject remained distinct from the security-control that affects the individual via threats and violence.13 Palestinians under Oslo were still subjugated to Israeli security-domination, in that they were exposed to the treats of its military actions, but were not subjects of it. The Oslo process was designed so that Palestinians would no longer identify them-

92 Grey Room 24

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2006.1.24.88 by guest on 24 September 2021 selves merely as the individual objects exposed to military power but also as political subjects of another. This separation between the functions of discipline and control escapes thus the narrative that suggested the evolution of “disciplinary societies” to “control societies”14 but rather makes these coexistent as two manifestations of a vertically layered sovereignty, here horizontally separated across the two sides of the one-way mirror. Throughout the second intifada, the exception clause that allowed Israelis to break into the terminal was permanently in effect. In the rare occasions that the terminal was open to traffic, Palestinians needed to appeal to Israeli border police directly and without the performative mediation of Palestinian police.15 Although the terror of the second intifada inaugurated a security situation of “permanent emergency,” led to the total breakdown of political negotiations and further to the current Israeli policy of unilateral actions, the most important aspect of the Oslo Accord remained in place: a Palestinian government is still in charge of all civil matters under Israel’s effective overall security domination and control. Whether the Palestinian Authority is in a conflictual relation with Israel, whether Israel is at all willing to negotiate with this authority, are secondary questions to the situation created and daily confirmed by its very existence. The construction of the West Bank separation barrier further reiterates some of the built physiognomies of the terminal/camp. The opaque concrete walls of the barrier carry a variety of sensitive vision and radar sensors directed at Palestinian towns and villages on the other side. The path of those sections of the barrier made of fencing systems is laid out according to the principle of “topographical command and control,” which allows armed patrols to excercise “visual domination” from a higher terrain without allowing Palestinians to see “over the hill” into the “Israeli” side.16 The biometric passes that would allow Palestinians to travel through the barrier would effectively make Israel’s demographic data on Palestine more complete than the data Palestinians could ever hope to compile. In another direct resemblance to the security procedures in the terminal/camp, an exception clause signed by the Palestinians in Oslo guarantees Israel’s right of “hot pursuit” in emergency security circumstances that Israeli forces could themselves declare and by which they could cross the wall into Palestinian areas, enter neighborhoods and homes in search of suspects, and take these suspects to Israel for interrogation and

Miki Kratsman. Palestinians waiting to cross at Allenby Bridge border terminal, 1999.

Weizman | Seeing through Walls: The Split Sovereign and the One-Way Mirror 93

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2006.1.24.88 by guest on 24 September 2021 detention.17 In fact the precondition for Israel’s policy of partial evacua- tions is that, as a special Israeli security think-tank has recently conceded, is to maintain security domination in the area evacuated by other means. “Whether we are physically present in the territories or not, we should still be able to demonstrate our ability to control and affect it . . . re-enter when necessary”18 The security doctrine that puts up walls and concep- tually “un-walls” them (to borrow a term from Gordon Matta-Clark), that conceives walls as transparent and permeable from one side (but not from the other), embodies the same logic that have put up the one-way mirrors in the terminal camp and extends it further. However, the archi- tecture of the terminal/camp should not be understood as a metaphor for the occupation, its geography, or apparatuses it conceived, but rather as a part of its repetitive, fractalized logic. Why should effective security control seek to appear invisible? The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which defines the international laws of belligerent occupation, demands that an occupying power assume responsibility over the management of the institutions—welfare, health care, judiciary, and education, among others—that govern the life of the occupied population.19 However, considering the rising costs of govern- ing three-and-a-half million Palestinians and the violent resistance during the two intifadas (1987 to 1993 and 2000 to the present), Israel wanted to absolve itself of the costs and responsibilities it had as an occupying power. If Israel’s excessive security actions were previously moderated, however lightly, by considerations of economic and functional nature, security-control could now be assumed without the duties of governance and could freely penetrate every aspect of Palestinian life, consequently exasperating the Palestinian economic situation without having to pay the price in adverse effects on its own economy.20 After Oslo, the Palestinian economy and the mobility of its labor force were completely dominated and governed by Israeli security considera- tions.21 These led to a temporary/permanent closure that effectively disconnected the Occupied Territories from the rest of the world—and, most significant, from the labor market in Israel. In the second intifada, attempting to isolate and fragment Palestinian resistance effort and further limit the possibility of suicide bombers arriving in Israeli cities, the Israeli Defense Force split the internal matrix of the Palestinian society by means of a complex, ever-present system of closures and traffic restric- tions that brought Palestinian economy to a virtual standstill.22 By being imposed from “above” and infused from “within,” Israel’s application of its security conception has completely devastated the Palestinian economy and any possibility of effective local government. Governing the West Bank and Gaza was reduced to constant Palestinian and international

94 Grey Room 24

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2006.1.24.88 by guest on 24 September 2021 efforts at crisis management. The ensuing crisis has been regarded (in both Israel and the international community) as “humanitarian,” as if its cause was some mysterious natural phenomena, although its reasons were clearly embedded in the political-military situation described above. Recasting the crisis in “humanitarian” terms was an eminently political choice on behalf of the donor countries, releasing Israel from its respon- sibilities and effectively undermining their own potential political influence on the situation. The costs of managing the crisis were thus conveniently subcontracted to the international community, which felt obliged to help the struggling, nascent Palestinian Authority.23 Most of the 800 million dollars annually donated to the Palestinian Authority by the international community is spent on crisis management, some of it, amazingly, designated for repairing the damage caused by periodic and ongoing Israeli military incursions.24 The international organizations and NGOs engaged with humanitarian relief efforts must furthermore obtain “security clearance” from Israel in order to enter, move, or act in the Occupied Territories, and it is via this regulation of international aid— under the guise of security—that Israel still controls Palestinian economy and in effect—life in Gaza and the West Bank. Although bringing the occupied territories to the verge of large-scale hunger, as Ariella Azoulay noted, the Israeli government tries to modulate the flow of traffic, money, and aid in such a way as to prevent the situation from bringing about this eventuality, and the international intervention, possibly a UN mandate, that may ensue.25 The occupation has been thus conceptualized as “cata- strophe management” and the modulation of levels of crisis. The success of Hamas in the 2005 Palestinian elections demonstrates not the collapse of the system of prosthetic sovereignty but, paradoxi- cally, its culmination. An existing Palestinian Authority with a “govern- ment” and “parliament” (whose “resistance-ideology” confirms more than anything else its degree of independent agency) disguises a reality of social and political fragmentation and chaos. Control has been lost to local gangs on the one hand and humanitarian agents on the other. The attempt at the “production” of the Palestinian as a sovereign subject has paradoxically led to his or her becoming an object of humanitarian assis- tance. Moreover, the Palestinian could be said to have been constituted as a political subject only inasmuch as he or she has become an object of humanitarian assistance. From the perspective of this subject/object, it is precisely when he or she perceives him- or herself to be most liberated from repressive occupation that he or she has become most exposed to it. This analysis has tried to raise the issue of Palestinians willingly dis- mantling the Palestinian Authority until conditions for full sovereignty are met, while in the meantime placing responsibility for government in

Weizman | Seeing through Walls: The Split Sovereign and the One-Way Mirror 95

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2006.1.24.88 by guest on 24 September 2021 Israeli hands. From the Palestinian perspective, accepting a walled off, aerially policed, infrastructurally dependant, and security-controlled territory as a “state” is bound to perpetuate the logic analyzed above rather than make an effective stage in its resolution. A call to reconnect the concepts of security-control and government and amend this split in sovereignty, is not a call for a return to nineteenth-century-type imperi- alism, with its technologies of governing and production of colonial sub- jects, but rather a call for power either to assume full responsibility when it assumes security-control or to avoid “security” action when it cannot or is unable or unwilling to do so. The Palestinian sociologist Elia Zureik, who has written about the Allenby Bridge terminal, has mentioned that the Palestinians he talked to were actually fully aware of its actual architecture. The last perspec- tive in this essay will therefore be theirs: Late in the afternoons, when sunlight fell through the outside window of the Israeli control room fac- ing west, the light level between the control room and the now darkened hall, rendered almost equal by the setting sun, made the one-way mirror just transparent enough to expose the silhouette of the Israeli security agents and with it the designed charade of prosthetic sovereignty.

96 Grey Room 24

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2006.1.24.88 by guest on 24 September 2021 Notes 1. Gaza-Jericho Agreement, Annex I: Protocol Concerning Withdrawal of Israeli Military Forces and Security Arrangements, Article X: Passages, http://telaviv.usem- bassy.gov/publish/peace/gjannex1.htm. During a period the agreement defined as “interim,” Israel was to be responsible for land passages between the Palestinian Territories and Egypt and Jordan, as well as (with some adjustments) to the terminal at the Gaza seaport (which was never built) and in all Palestinian airports (the only Palestinian airport—the Dahanieh airport in Gaza was closed and then bombed during the early days of the intifada in 2000). 2. Gaza-Jericho Agreement, Annex I, Article X, clause 2.b.1. 3. Gaza-Jericho Agreement, Annex I, Article X, clause 3.d.2. Clause 1.d further states that “(t)he two sides are determined to do their utmost to maintain the dignity of persons passing through the border crossings. To this end, the mechanism created will rely heav- ily on brief and modern procedures.” 4. Gaza-Jericho Agreement, Annex I, Article X, clause 3.d.1. 5. Gideon Levy, “Twilight Zone: More Than Meets the Eye,” Ha’aretz, 3 September 1999. See also a description of the terminal in an excellent article about Israeli surveil- lance technologies in Israel and the Occupied Territories: Elia Zureik, “Constructing Palestine through Surveillance Practices,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 28 (2001): 205–227. 6. Gaza-Jericho Agreement, Annex I, Article X, clauses 3.e, 9.c. 7. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977). 8. These articles in Oslo were argued in this way to the Palestinians and to foreign gov- ernments. Domestically they were obviously presented as harsh security measures. 9. The Fourth Geneva Convention (12 August 1949), Part III/Section III: Occupied Territories, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/lawofwar/geneva07.htm. 10. An amendment to a 2005 Pentagon spending bill sponsored by Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) bars “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” of prisoners in U.S. custody, but still allow such treatment when the prisoners are not in U.S. custody. This bill was rendered unenforceable by a specially tailored counter-Amendment, the Graham- Levin Amendment that seeks to limit judicial review. 11. A major U.S. project to create a “virtual border” seeks to extend American sur- veillance networks and compile and share vast amounts of biometric and other data so that “terrorists” can be identified and intercepted while still nominally “abroad.” See Eric Lichtblau and John Markoff, “Accenture Is Awarded U.S. Contract for Borders,” New York Times, 2 June 2004. 12.Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Zˇ izˇek (London: Verso, 2000), 105–137. 13. Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, “The Monster’s Tail,” in Against the Wall, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: The New Press, 2005), 3–4. 14. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3–7. 15. Recent transformations in several of the terminals/camps throughout the Occupied Territories included the replacement of Israeli border police with Israeli civilian employees contracted to run the terminal. They are installed in cabins made of bulletproof protective

Weizman | Seeing through Walls: The Split Sovereign and the One-Way Mirror 97

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2006.1.24.88 by guest on 24 September 2021 glass that is not meant to hide their presence but is so thick that it inadvertently func- tions as a one-way mirror. 16. General tactical consideration in positioning fortification lines is latitude. Against common perception, a defensible line should not run along the top of a mountain ridge but about three quarters up the slope in the direction facing the threat. The reason is that the silhouettes of vehicles and infantry would not appear against the background sky. Because fortifications and barriers include roads running their length (the West Bank bar- rier has three parallel roads along it), their path must also conform to the limitations of vehicular movement, one of which is a maximum ascent and descent angle no greater than 9 percent. Another issue that will concern surveillance, police, and control of Palestinian Territories after the next stage of settlement evacuations is the translation and translocation of ground-territorial mechanisms of control to aerial ones and thus the relo- cation of Israeli military platforms into Palestinian airspace. 17. The Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (“Oslo II”—9/28/95) Annex I, Article XI, Par. (a)–(b), http://www.jewishvirtualli- brary.org/jsource/Peace/interimtoc.html. This is further reinforced by new technologies based on ultrasound developed in Israel that would allow soldiers to see and even shoot through solid concrete and brick walls. See Eyal Weizman, “Lethal Theory,” LOG Magazine, April 2005, 74. 18. Yedidia Ya’ari and Haim Assa, Diffused Warfare: War in the 21st Century (Tel Aviv: Miskal–Yediot Aharonot Books and Chemed Books, 2005), 146; my translation. 19. Fourth Geneva Convention. Of special relevance are articles 55 (“To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate”) and 56 (“the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring and maintaining . . . the medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory”). For an in-depth analysis, see Eyal Benvenisti, The International Law of Occupation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 7–25 and 107–148. Although the position of Israeli governments since 1967 has been to reject the applicability of the Geneva Convention to the West Bank and Gaza (claiming that no internationally recog- nized sovereignty existed there prior to the occupation), it has however taken upon itself to abide by what it called the “humanitarian” clauses of the convention and has accord- ingly undertaken government of these areas. 20. The umbrella term security includes in this context a variety of concepts, many differing from the common use of the term (as protection from bodily harm or damage to property) and veering into political and ideological concepts directed at preserving polit- ical stability. However, maintaining a clear distinction between security concerns and political considerations is never straightforward in the context of this conflict. Israel would like to regard actions taken to further its strategy as connected to an idea of collective security. Often actions that are overtly political may provoke a reaction that leads to further adaptation of measures argued on security grounds. 21. Leila Farsakh, “The Economics of Israeli Occupation: What Is Colonial about It?” (presented at “Comparative Occupations: Chechnya, Iraq, Palestine, Governing Zones of Emergency” Workshop, Middle East Institute, Harvard University, 25–26 February 2006). After Oslo Israel started replacing its low-wage Palestinian labor force with guest workers mainly from Africa and southeast Europe.

98 Grey Room 24

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2006.1.24.88 by guest on 24 September 2021 22. Per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in the West Bank and Gaza has dipped by about 30 percent between 1999 and 2005. In 2005, unemployment in the Palestinian Authority was 23 percent (20 percent in Gaza and 29 percent in the West Bank), with 56 percent of the population currently below the poverty line (75 percent are estimated to be below this line in two years), more than double the rate before the second intifada (22 percent). According to the World Bank, the foremost reason is restrictions on the move- ment of people and goods. See: World Bank, West Bank and Gaza Economic Update and Potential Outlook, 15 March 2006, http://www.worldbank.org/we. A recent report by United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) warns of a lack of basic food supplies due to frequent closures of the border crossings that prevent goods from reaching Gaza from Egypt. See http://www.un.org/unrwa/news/index.html. 23. Ariella Azoulay, “Hunger in Palestine: The Event That Never Was,” in Territories, Islands, Camps and Other States of Utopia, ed. Anselm Franke, Rafi Segal, and Eyal Weizman (Cologne, Germany: Walter Koening, 2003), 154–157. 24. This situation is at the heart of what Rony Brauman, David Rieff, and others called the “humanitarian paradox,” the dilemma faced by humanitarian organizations and NGOs operating in war zones, which implies that while operating on a purely humanitarian level (the humanitarian hopes to gain better access to places of crisis by presenting the humanitarian space as an apolitical, neutral one), they will not be able to avoid political instrumentalization and thus may play to the hands of power itself. Furthermore, by attempting to pull out from situations where they may be instrumentalized and by acting as a “witnesses” (Brauman’s position), humanitarians are in danger of themselves politicizing relief work (Rieff). See Rony Brauman, “From Philanthropy to Humanitarianism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 2/3 (Spring 2004): 397–417; and David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002). 25. A demonstration of Israel’s control over humanitarian action was provided in April 2006 when local Palestinian employees of UNRWA dealing with food and health aid refrained from coordinating with Hamas officials because they feared being black- listed by Israel and the United States. This lack of cooperation has been mentioned as one of the likely reason for the rapid spread of the avian flu in Gaza. Akiva Eldar, “Coming Soon: Kosovo in Gaza? Aid Organizations in Gaza Paralyzed Fearing Ties with Hamas-led Government,” Ha’aretz 4 April 2006. See also Azoulay, “Hunger in Palestine.” David Shearer, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), claims that the situation in Gaza is becoming similar and will demand similar measures to those undertaken following the Kosovo crisis in 1999; that is, an interna- tional U.N. mandate on the area. OCHA, Gaza Strip Situation Report, 29 March 2006, http://www.humanitarianinfo.org/opt/docs/UN/OCHA/ochaSR_Gaza290306.pdf.

Weizman | Seeing through Walls: The Split Sovereign and the One-Way Mirror 99

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2006.1.24.88 by guest on 24 September 2021