Colored Identity, The Politics and Materiality of ID Cards in Palestine/Israel / Helga Tawil-Souri

Colored Identity
The Politics and Materiality of ID Cards in Palestine/Israel

Helga Tawil- Souri
I jealously watched Dr. Tamar lling in Nuras . . . Jerusalem passport. Neither Nura [my dog] nor Dr. Tamar [the veterinarian] realized how damn serious I was about replacing Nuras photograph with mine. I dont think either of them knew how difcult or impossible it is for Palestinians to acquire a Jerusalem ID, let alone a Jerusalem passport . It was not long before I decided to make use of Nuras passport. Can I see your permit and the cars? requested the soldier standing at the Jerusalem checkpoint. I dont have one, but I am the driver of this Jerusalem dog, I replied, handing the soldier Nuras passport. . . . I am the dogs driver. As you can see, she is from Jerusalem, and she cannot possibly drive the car or go to Jerusalem all by herself. Suad Amiry, Sharon and My Mother- in- L aw: Ramallah Diaries
Hani, Sana, and I are waiting at a checkpoint in the West Bank hoping to cross into East Jerusalem. In 2002, this is still the good old days when passing checkpoints hasnt yet turned into a mechanical sifting of substandard beings through concrete barricades and remote- controlled turnstiles. Men, women, children, locals, internationals, and sometimes animals, too, stand together chaotically. I wonder if others who are waiting are eyeing my American passport with envy, distrust, or perhaps even hatred; I will likely pass without much hassle and faster than most around me. Hani, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, is shoving the corners of his
Social Text 107 Vol. 29, No. 2 Summer 2011

DOI 10.1215/01642472- 1259488 2011 Duke University Press
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blue ID card between his teeth like an oversize toothpick; and I imagine his ID, too, is eyed with some jealousy or suspicion by those around us. Sana, who is from Jenin and lives in Ramallah, is thumbing her green ID card nervously. In her case, suspicious gazes would be radiating from the soldiers. Our friend Mazen, born in Gaza and living in the West Bank since the early 1990s, doesnt dare come with us he avoids all checkpoints, whether those to enter Israel or the hundreds that separate one Palestinian area from another for fear of being evicted to Gaza with his orange ID card in hand. Sana, Hani, and Mazens ID colors do not denote a fashion preference, but a color- coded bureaucracy which issues Palestinians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem, and Israel different cards. The cards themselves, issued by Israeli authorities, are all off- white but referred to in Arabic as colored, denoting the plastic sleeve they are obliged to be carried in. Palestinians claim that the state of Israel simultaneously attempts to thwart, isolate, fragment, transfer, and erase them. Slowly kill them; send them to neighboring Arab countries; strangle them geographically, politically, economically, and militarily until they accept their subordination. This is not a chimerical claim of ethnic cleansing1 but a reality that can be analyzed as a technical problem of the geopolitical conditions of Palestinians status. The Israeli state practices, and arguably perfects, a logic of territorial and population control and monitoring. One form is high- tech: unmanned aerial drones, X- ray machines, remote- controlled cameras, radars, and surveillance techniques that instill fear and awe; 2 another form is physically and geographically violent: walls, fences, checkpoints, turnstiles, settlements, bypass roads, ghter jets, bulldozers, and machine guns. 3 Moreover, it is no secret that, as Nils A. Butenschon, Uri Davis, and Manuel Hassassian state, the mere existence of the Palestinian people is a major strategic impediment to the realization of classical Zionist ambitions; and thus, exclusion forms the logical background of a segregational policy that erects defensive walls of legal, institutional, and physical kinds to prevent Palestinians access to land, institutions, or other rights that could threaten Jewish hegemony.4 These realities seem to form a cognitive dissonance: the Israeli state is accused of trying to eradicate Palestinians, and yet the state institutes an impressive infrastructure of control based on Palestinians continued presence in Palestine/Israel. Against the background of transfer, fragmentation, and erasure exists a bureaucratic system of keeping Palestinians where they are: subjects of sustained, if changing, forms of colonialism, occupation, and oppression. In other words, there may very well be a practice of fragmenting, isolating, transferring, and erasing Palestinians, but they need to be counted, documented, monitored, and controlled rst. The clearest way to grapple with this disconnect is to consider the peculiar
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Tawil- S ouri Politics and Materiality of ID Cards in Palestine / Israel
Figure 1. A Palestinian woman hands her orange ID card to an Israeli soldier at the Huwwara Checkpoint near Nablus. Photograph courtesy of the author
experience of passing a checkpoint, which has everything to do with a notso- i nsignicant piece of paper. The checkpoint as a site of uneven power relations serving to fragment Palestinians has been analyzed in depth.5 A key feature that is most evident at checkpoints yet more fundamental in bordering Palestinians remains under t heorized: the low- tech, visible, and tactile means of power that is the ID card (see gs. 1 and 2). Prosaic to those subjected to its regime, the ID card remains obscure to those outside who discuss Israeli occupation and Palestinian resistance. The identication card (by which I mean specically the physical card, referred to by Palestinians as hawiya) is the space in which Palestinians meet, confront, tolerate, and sometimes challenge the Israeli state.6 In fact, for Palestinians, ID cards are mundane things that ultimately determine much of their political, economic, and social life, and not only at checkpoints. In what follows, I trace the development of the modern- day bureaucracy of the Palestinian ID card since the establishment of Israel. As they are around much of the world, ID cards in Palestine/Israel are physical and visible instruments of a widespread low- tech surveillance mechanism and a principal means for discriminating (positively and negatively) subjects
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Figure 2. Palestinian women not permitted to enter East Jerusalem for Ramadan prayer at the Qalandia Checkpoint near Ramallah. Photograph courtesy of the author
privileges and basic rights. I approach ID cards as mundane manifestations of state processes that do not operate as a separate reality behind a piece of paper but as symbolic and material resources on which ID cards draw and that permeate everyday life in powerful and paradoxical ways. Vital in the control and differentiation of Palestinian populations across the territory of Palestine/Israel, ID cards discipline subjects based in large part on the Israeli states logic of securitization. I further suggest that ID cards function as a form of media: mediating social and political relationships, contradictory, interpreted in various ways. What further makes ID cards unique a nd an important site of study i n the Palestinian/Israeli case is that they matter. The materiality of Palestinians ID cards is their most important and resonant aspect, whether in their different colors, in simultaneously including and excluding Palestinians from the Israeli state, or in interpretations and representations they have engendered. As special kinds of material objects, they allow us to rethink Israeli colonial mechanisms and Palestinian negotiations of these, and they bring into focus questions of citizenship, borders, and the institutional materiality of the state apparatus in everyday life.7
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Colored Distinctions
ID cards have played a central role in Palestinian life since the beginning of the twentieth century. Palestinians were subjects of the Ottoman Empire, which issued Palestinians travel documents. Under the British Mandate of Palestine, Palestinians became Turkish subject[s] habitually resident in the territory of Palestine, holding Mandate identity cards. 8 In the aftermath of the 1948 Arab- I sraeli war, Palestinians inside the new Israeli state were issued ID cards, while those in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were given temporary documents from Jordanian and Egyptian authorities, respectively. After Israels occupation in 1967, Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip were issued different cards by Israel. Today, all adults in Palestine/Israel are issued ID cards required to be carried at all times. But not all cards are created equal. Mandatory state- issued ID cards were introduced in Israel in 1949 after the November 1948 census.9 All Jews born or residing in Palestine prior to the establishment of the state of Israel or arriving from elsewhere were given Israeli citizenship and national ID cards in 1949. This is still the case. Today, all Jewish- Israeli citizens hold blue ID cards whether they live in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, a settlement, or an outpost in the West Bank. The granting of ID cards for Palestinians is more complicated. Palestinian residents of Israel had to prove continuous residence in Israel between 1949 and 1952 in order to qualify for Israeli citizenship, granted, in theory at least, in 1952.10 As Ilan Pappe notes, the worst offence [for Palestinians inside Israel during the late 1940s and early 1950s] was not being in possession of one of the newly- issued identity cards,11 as that would be terms for loss of property ownership and in some cases expulsion. Israeli ID cards were issued to the 165,000 or so Palestinians not expelled from within Israel t he population that comes to be referred to by the Israeli state as Arab- Israelis, by themselves as Palestinians from the inside or 1948 Palestinians. They were granted ID cards and citizenship not to incorporate them into Israeli civic and political life, but to prevent the return of the 750,000-plus Palestinian refugees who had been expelled or who had ed, then considered absentees and thus denied Israeli citizenship and any possibility of return. Between 1952 and 1967, the only Palestinians mandated ID cards were those inside Israel. Today, like those of their Jewish counterparts, these citizens cards are blue. Between 1948 and 1967, Palestinians residing in East Jerusalem and the West Bank were issued temporary Jordanian passports, downgraded to travel documents in 1988 after Jordan relinquished its claim to the West Bank.12 Those in the Gaza Strip were issued Egyptian laissez- passer documents.13 After Israels occupation in 1967, all Palestinians in the Occupied
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Palestinian Territories (OPTs), but not East Jerusalem, were issued orange ID cards. Any Palestinian from the OPTs barred from entry into Israel (usually, but not always, a person with a previous arrest record) was issued a green card. Orange or green, these did not serve as travel documents, nor did they grant Palestinians any political rights, nor, of course, Israeli citizenship. Rather, they would render Palestinians legible, to borrow James Scotts term, to Israeli military forces primarily for purposes of control and surveillance.14 After the Oslo Accords, the responsibility of issuing ID cards to Palestinian residents in the OPTs was handed over to the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 1994, but with approval and enforcement solely the decision of the Israeli state apparatus one of many examples of the charade of prosthetic sovereignty obtained by the PA.15 The new carrying cases were green, with Arabic script and PA insignia. This is the kind of card Sana carries.16 Hani and his Palestinian counterparts in East Jerusalem remain exceptional cases. Although Israel annexed Jerusalem in 1967 and continues to expand the citys municipal boundaries, it did not, and still does not, incorporate the citys Palestinians as Israeli citizens, granting them instead temporary residency (a small number have been granted Israeli citizenship over the past four decades). To travel abroad they use temporary Jordanian passports or Israeli- issued travel permits. Since the status of Jerusalem was postponed pending nal status negotiations, which are yet to happen, and since it was not included as part of any Palestinian sovereign area in the Oslo peace process, the PA is not permitted to grant Palestinian Jerusalemites Palestinian citizenship or ID cards.17 Most Palestinian Jerusalemites thus remain citizenship- less.18 As residents of Israel, they are also issued blue ID cards that look identical on the outside to those mandated to Israeli citizens. But one should not judge an ID card purely on the basis of its cover. All cards contain the usual information one might expect: name, date of birth, place of residence, religion, marital status, and so on. There are some differentiating details, however. Present- d ay blue ID cards are in Hebrew and imprinted with the seal of the State of Israel, whereas orange and green cards are in Hebrew and Arabic and have the PA emblem. Most important, however, is the unique Israeli label of nationality, particularly as a means of distinguishing between blue ID cardholders since by virtue of holding a different color, OPT Palestinians are already distinguished. Under nationality, Israeli citizens are listed as Jewish, Arab, Druze, Bedouin, or from the country of origin if a non- Jew who is also a nonPalestinian (for all orange and green cardholders, nationality is Arab).19 In the case of Palestinian Jerusalemites, nationality is Arab with the further distinction of citizenship: until 2002 this was listed as Jordanian; thereafter
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it has been made blank. 20 Since Judaism continues to be the basis of Israeli political and national identity, it might help to metaphorically think of blue ID cards in different hues (see table 1). 21 From the beginning, Israel was established through an inborn distinction between country, statehood, and citizenship whereby the national identity of Israels citizens and the state itself were determined by religious identity. 22 Orange, green, or blue; in Israel, Jerusalem, the West Bank, or the Gaza Strip; with a PA or Israeli seal a ll cards are mandated by the Israeli state apparatus.
Im/mobile Subjects of the Israeli State and the Palestinian Proto- state
Behind a confusing colored history lies a system of population and territorial management whose roots stem from a longer tradition of a key component of state power and control.23 ID cards share a common history with other systems of identity registration, such as censuses and passports, as modernist instruments of control connected to a states desire for surveillance, itself couched in a universal, nondiscriminatory language of security, safety, and technological/bureaucratic advancement. Identication documents reect a states need to supervise growth, supervise the spatial distribution and social composition of its population, automate the deprivation of and/or entitlement to privileges and rights to circuits of civility ranging from suffrage to education, and control movement into and out of its territory. 24 In Israel, the issuing of differentiating ID cards stems from a larger strategy of accounting for and controlling different populations differently and unevenly. As Anis Kassim notes of the larger project of the state of Israel, so it is for the practice of issuing differentiating ID cards: If the creation of a Jewish state was intended to normalize the status of Jews, it also ironically resulted in abnormalizing the status of the Palestinians.25 That does not mean that Palestinians fall through bureaucratic cracks; quite the opposite. As John Torpey explains of modernist states need to x identity to their subjects generally, States must embrace societies in order to penetrate them effectively. Individuals who remain beyond the embrace of the state necessarily represent a limit on its penetration. The reach of the state, in other words, cannot exceed its grasp.26 If Israel is going to penetrate and embrace Palestinians, whether as a means of surveilling or eradicating them, they need to be within Israels grasp rst. Adriana Kemp describes this contradiction as follows: While the ethnonational drive is to exclude and segregate the Other, the governmentality logic strives toward an ever more total incorporation of the minorities as subjects of the bureaucratic, disciplinary, and administrative mechanisms of the state.27 ID cards provide Israel the means to render Palestinians more legible, accessible, embraceable, for the security interests of the
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Table 1 ID card differences for Jews and Arabs (not including Druze, Bedouin, and other citizens of Israel)
ID color
Nationality noted on card
Citizenship noted on card Citizenship status
Blue Jewish true- blue Jewish Israeli No terms or limitations Arab Arab- blue Arab Israeli No terms or limitations*
Increasing threat of having to prove ones loyalty to the state
Jerusalem green- Arab Blank None* blue; issued to Arab resident of Listed as Jordanian Small % have East Jerusalem only until 2002 Israeli citizenship; none permitted Palestinian citizenship Green West Bank Arab None listed Palestinian* Only for those residing in the West Bank prior to 1993 or born to parents who are already citizens Orange Gaza Strip Arab None listed Palestinian*
Only for those residing in the Gaza Strip prior to 1993 or born to parents who are already citizens
*There are too many exceptions and/or special cases to provide full details here. See note 40 for the
permit regime; note 17 for citizenship status of OPT Palestinians and Palestinian Jerusalemites.
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Permit required to visit, travel Permitted to reside in Permitted to travel to Travel document through, work, and/or live in East Jerusalem?
Israel, settlements (and illegal outposts) Israel
Israel, settlements (and illegal outposts), majority of the West Bank Israel
Israeli passport
No
Israeli passport
No*
Impossible for Arab citizens to relocate to/live in East Jerusalem; no limitations on visiting or working No* Must have exit permit renewed if leaving city for prolonged time
East Jerusalem only Israel Israeli travel permit or temporary Increasingly subject Jordanian passport/ to eviction travel permit
Parts of the West Parts of the West PA passport, Bank only Bank only Jordanian temporary passport or travel document Gaza Strip only Gaza Strip only
Yes* Under no circumstances is a West Banker permitted to (legally) live in East Jerusalem
PA passport, Egyptian laissez- passer
Yes* Travel in/out of Gaza closed since 2005; open only to exceptional cases (e.g., medical condition)
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state, while simultaneously discriminating Palestinians from Jews, thus ensuring that the former remain unequal citizens. In Israel, citizenship does not serve as an inclusionary mechanism but embodies the structure of social and political inequality. 28 Moreover, since not all Palestinians are Israeli citizens, differentiated ID cards of all colors further illustrate Israels ethnic and territorial segregation of Palestinians. This double process of inclusion and exclusion is the case for all Palestinians, albeit in different forms and colors, across Palestine/Israel. That Israel issues differentiating ID cards to all Palestinians brings to question the very nature of the state, its territorial boundaries, its supposed democratic ethos, and its role and responsibility as occupier. Torpey maintains that the contemporary use of internal passports (which function in the same manner as green and orange cards here) to control movement within state boundaries bespeaks illegitimate, authoritarian governments lording it over subdued or terrorized populations. Internal passports and passes constitute a reversion to practices generally abandoned by democratic nation- states by the twentieth century.29 When administrative controls on movement operate within a state, and especially when this is done to the detriment of a particular negatively privileged group t he Palestinians here we can reliably expect to nd an authoritarian state (or worse).30 While the Israeli regime is not classically authoritarian, there is ongoing debate as to what kind of oppressive regime it is: apartheid, ethnocratic, racist, or colonial. 31 One may object that these processes are not happening within Israel but in the Palestinian territories. This point is moot. First, Israeli state authorities issue all cards, whether in Israel proper or the depths of Palestinian territories, whether directly through the Israeli Ministry of Interior or behind the masquerade of an autonomous PA apparatus (see note 15). Second, occupation should not be understood as a temporary project external to the Israeli state and thus by any means over, but as essential to Israels continued system of control. The Oslo peace agreements helped normalize the occupation, resulting in a Palestinian landscape that has experienced a shift in the method of Israeli control, but not its withdrawal . 32 Third, neither Israels external borders with neighboring countries nor any internal borders with an independent Palestinian state, if ever there was one, have ever been stated, dened, or agreed on. A border is erected; but it is not between Israeli and Palestinian territory it is between Jewish and Arab people. Green, orange, or not true- blue, ID cards embrace Palestinians everywhere and anywhere in Palestine/Israel. Once ID cards become mandatory (in Israel, between 1949 and 1952; in the OPTs, since 1967), they become, in the rst order, markers of subjects citizenship/citizenship- lessness, and by extension, the
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means of access to or exclusion from social benets such as health care, education, and welfare. This is the case within both the Israeli state and the Palestinian proto- state. As much as ID cards have been necessary for the Israeli state to control and surveil Palestinian populations, they also have become necessary since the Oslo agreements for the operation of PA bureaucracy (again, this dynamic has not decreased Israeli controls; rather, Palestinians must now contend with two oppressive regimes33). Within the post- Oslo OPTs, ID cards are necessary not just for crossing checkpoints or trespassing within Palestinian areas, but for all necessities of life and internal bureaucracy. For example, ID cards are mandatory for nancial needs: opening a bank account, withdrawing money from a teller, applying for a credit card, applying for a job. Any governmental and/or civil trans action requires an ID: registering a marriage, a death, or a birth; accessing health care benets; high school matriculation; paying taxes; obtaining a permit for private construction needs. In order to vote in parliamentary or presidential elections, Palestinian citizens must submit their ID cards to PA election authorities. Refugees who need to make any formal request to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) whether food supplies or school registration w ill be asked for their hawiya, above and beyond their UNRWA- issued cards.34 In short, life without an ID for any Palestinian adult would be impossible, for it provides a citizen the necessary access to circuits of civility (no different from those in other modern states).35 The second order, more important here, is the issue of mobility. Green/orange cards are issued only to Palestinians in the OPTs, thereby containing them within specic boundaries and rendering them dependent on the Israeli state apparatus for the authorization to move across certain spaces inside and between the OPTs. 36 Moreover, green and orange card holders are required to apply for a permit to enter East Jerusalem and Israel (discussed briey below). Jewish Israelis are given blue cards no matter where they reside and do not require permits; thus they have different laws that apply to them and that are not infringed by the same territorial boundaries. 37 Jewish Israeli settlers and out- posters especially enjoy a kind of mobile sovereignty accompanying them wherever they go or reside in Palestine/Israel. Put another way, the truer blue an ID card is, the more its holder is granted free mobility (and rights and protection by the Israeli state). One might better understand now why Suad Amiry, holder of a green ID and living in Ramallah, was green with envy as her dog was granted a Jerusalem passport and why she tried to deploy her dog and her dogs documents to cross into East Jerusalem. Amiry, like all holders of green and orange ID cards, is ghettoized, while those with blue are not (or the equivalent of blue in the case of her dog).38 In other words, orange
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and green sleeves are the frames around Palestinian communities and individuals, the encasing mechanisms that determine the perimeters of Palestinians open- a ir prisons. The way to understand the cognitive dissonance between Israels plans to erase or stultify Palestinians and simultaneously to mandate cards is to recognize the practice as a colonial one. Whether in North America, Australia, or South Africa, conquered inhabitants have been crowded into reservations, their political communities destroyed, their economic practices rendered dependent and/or peripheralized, and their activities managed through bureaucratic mechanisms similar to current- day Israels in order to facilitate the exploitation of their natural resources, land, and labor. The issuance of separate ID cards and permit passes, which also functioned as labor cards, was key to South Africas apartheid regime, for example.39 Unfortunately, human history is rich with such examples; however, in Palestine/Israel this practice has not vanished into history books but continues in full force. In fact, over the years, increasing levels of bureaucracy that restrain Palestinians have been added to the ID regime. Back in 2002, as we waited at the checkpoint, Sana was holding her green ID card. I have not mentioned that she was also holding a tassrih (Arabic for permit). Not long after the 1967 occupation, Israel ordered implementation of a collective permit to enter Israel, mandatory for all Palestinians, which metamorphosed into the current individual permit regime after the rst intifada. In 1989, the army demanded that workers from Gaza carry a magnetic card as a prerequisite to obtaining permission to enter Israel or settlements where a substantial number of Gazans used to be employed, the magnetic cards indicating that the subject was not classied as a security threat by the Israeli state apparatus. In 1991, closure became enforced on the entirety of the OPTs, and all OPT- Palestinians had to obtain individual permits to enter Israel and East Jerusalem, whether to work, visit, or pass through. Since then, magnetic cards have become required for all OPT Palestinians as a precondition to apply for a tassrih.40 Today, to get to East Jerusalem, Sana packs her purse thick with documents: her green hawiya, her tassrih, and her magnetic card which does not guarantee that the soldier at the checkpoint will let her through, however. There exists a paradox in that the ID card may provide a Palestinian the means of mobility, but also, often, im mobility. Suad Amirys anecdote demonstrates the mobility afforded to those holding the right papers a nd here to her dog ! but also the cruel arbitrariness of a system whose power often seems to lie with low- level actors, from teen age soldiers to Israeli veterinarians who issue Israeli papers to Palestinian pets. For Palestinians, the implications of holding a hawiya (and a magnetic card and
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tassrih for those who need to enter Israel) are central to their life chances, as these items enable them to move around and gain access to resources and rights. Yet, as Tobias Kelly argues: The implications of holding identity documents are always partial and unstable . . . [and] the result is that even as people try to gain a measure of security through holding the right documents, these same documents also mean that their lives are shot through with fear and uncertainty.41 In other words, here differentiated ID cards function both as necessities for bare life and as a means of condemning Palestinians to their lesser status in a perpetual state of exception. On one hand, Palestinians need ID cards for every aspect of life, from movement (in their own areas, not simply into East Jerusalem and Israel) to health care and retrieval of income; on the other hand, once mandated IDs, Palestinians become subjects of Israeli bureaucratic domination that already serves the purpose of segregating them and may very well result in transferring them. Recall Mazen, who was born in Gaza but conned to Ramallah since 1993. His fear of being evicted to Gaza has taken on heightened salience since Israel passed a military order in April 2010 dening anyone in the West Bank without a permit as an inltrator, rendering Mazen a criminal offender liable to eviction and seven years incarceration.42 Meanwhile, as Amiry insinuates in hiding her dogs passport from her friend, should Hani decide to marry his green ID cardholding West Bank girlfriend and have kids with her, neither her, nor their kids, would be permitted to obtain Jerusalem ID cards, let alone visit. Their kids would not qualify for a green hawiya either not because the PA doesnt acknowledge that Palestinians are born to Jerusalemites with Israeli papers, but because the Israeli state apparatus doesnt permit it. Should Hani choose to move to the West Bank to live with his future wife and kids, his privileged Jerusalem ID would be revoked and he would be expelled from Jerusalem and Israel. Even if evicted, as a Palestinian Jerusalemite Hani would qualify neither for a green ID card nor for Palestinian citizenship (see note 17). The very real threats hanging over Mazen, Hani, his girlfriend, and their unborn children symbolize the difculty and often impossibility of Palestinians to move, live, work, and/or love across Palestinian territories, the enforced fragmentation of Palestinians from each other, the menacing prospect of eviction from Palestine/Israel altogether, and the determinative importance of an ID card. The ID card regime, especially postpeace process, is a contact point through which Palestinians encounter the Israeli state, a mechanism through which Palestinian spatiality, territoriality, and corporeality are more penetrable, and penetrated, by the Israeli colonial regime. ID cards have become one of the most tactile, everyday, mundane, yet fundamental
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Palestinian experiences of carrying Israels terms of domination in ones back pocket or purse. It should come as no surprise, then, that ID cards are also matters of negotiation, interpretation, and resistance.
Media and Material Artifacts
Write it down! I am an Arab My identity card number is fty thousand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Write it down! I am an Arab I have a name without a title Patient in a country Where people are enraged My roots Were entrenched before the birth of time And before the opening of the eras Before the pines, and the olive trees And before the grass grew . . . . . . . . . . . Are you satised with my status? I have a name without a title! Write it down! I am an Arab You have stolen the orchards Of my ancestors And the land Which I cultivated Along with my children And you left nothing for us Except for these rocks . . . . . . . . . Write it down on the top of the rst page: I do not hate people Nor do I encroach But if I become hungry The usurpers esh will be my food Beware . . . Beware . . . Of my hunger And my anger! M ahmoud Darwish, Identity Card
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ID cards and cases are supplied by the Israeli state apparatus; thus one cannot, in any easy manner, and certainly not legally, carry an ID in a sleeve of a different color. Passing through Ramot Allon checkpoint in 2005 on a Palestinian- r un bus, I was sitting next to an OPT-Palestinian who had borrowed a friends blue card case. As this particular checkpoint is within Israel- dened Jerusalem municipal boundaries, soldiers do not always stop passing trafc.43 We were stopped. A soldier boarded the bus. I was paralyzed in fear while my neighbor coolly sat with his blue case closed on his lap. The soldier strode through the bus, eyed everyone (who had dutifully, without being asked, taken out their IDs), strutted out, and let us through. When I asked my neighbor what would have happened had the soldier asked to see inside the case, he grinned and gestured having his throat slit.44 Knowing that the cards color- case matters, my neighbor was attempting to erase his green marking perhaps an understandable gamble for gaining mobility. In the words of Michel Foucault, an ID card, as a modern system of identication, xes identity to a bureaucratic need, places individuals in a eld of surveillance . . . [and] situates them in a network of writing: it engages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and x them.45 There is a difference between Foucaults notion of governmentality, which draws attention to the objects, logics, rationalities, and technologies of rule and which tends to be analyzed largely as monological46 (the way I have described the ID card in the previous section e.g., the power attributed to it is that it is issued by Israeli authorities), and a dialogical approach, which stresses nonsystematic, indeterminate, unintended, and alternative readings of those objects. These two perspectives converge in the mundane practices of ID cards. As Nadia Abu- Z ahra puts it in reference to Palestine/Israel, IDs are part of the materiality of coercion and control.47 It is this network of writing that Foucault mentions the materiality that both he and Abu- Zahra speak of t hat I draw on in this section. ID cards matter. To begin with, I am arguing that in Palestine/Israel the hawiyas cardness is extremely signicant. Second, I am suggesting that we think of ID cards as material objects that are mediated and thus interpreted. The former is largely monological, the latter dialogical. First, the materiality of ID cards determines t hat is, gives meaning to, provides a limit on, xes conclusively t he identity of and borders around Palestinians and determines their ensuing rights and privileges or lack thereof. ID cards in Palestine/Israel are not incidental to actual experience, as they may be elsewhere (I certainly do not fear for my life when a policeman pulls me over for speeding in New York, where I now live, and I hand him my expired California drivers license). For Palestinians, ID cards are decisive, and sometimes prove fatal, since the Israeli state
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apparatus has the unique power to determine ones identity and decide whether one is guilty, should be taken to prison, or should be evicted. A Palestinian can shout at, plead, or even irt with a soldier; or, like Amiry, hope that the soldier is a dog- lover and will let one through. But there is no recourse to appeal or intervene in the decision of the soldier, who does not have to explain or substantiate the decision a nd very often does not. In fact, a Palestinian has no means to hold the largely faceless, nameless, and invisible regime accountable. Whenever and wherever Palestinians hand over their ID cards to Israeli soldiers, police ofcers, border patrols, or other ofcials, the cards become the physical substance through which their relationship, as well as the relationship between the invisible apparatus and Palestinians, is mediated. The ID serves as a point of physical and tangible contact between Palestinians and the Israeli state, the space where the Israeli logic and bureaucracy of population control, state securitization, and surveillance meets Palestinians. In some cases the physical contact is humiliating: when Palestinians are taken away in a raid from their homes at night, they are often escorted in nothing but their underwear, in which their ID cards are safely tucked (see g. 3). This is not simply a forceful revelation of the ID as the space where the Israeli state apparatus touches the Palestinian body as an artifact that matters, but of the IDs material centrality as a marker of all Palestinians bare life. Here, the differentiation within and between colored IDs is the persons ascribed status, which cannot be established without reference to a piece of paper that constructs and sustains the subjects identity for administrative purposes t he soldier escorting the two men certainly recognizes this as he permits the men little other than their IDs. As one Palestinian woman tells me: Unlike mothers elsewhere, when my sons leave the house, I dont make sure they are wearing jackets or have cash on them. The most important thing is to have their ID cards.48 The mother, the soldier, and the two men taken away all grasp that identity is xed to a person but also xed on a piece of paper without which one cannot exist, neither literally nor metaphorically. The ID card is a material artifact of utmost importance. It is also a mediated sphere in which the card itself is the locus of negotiation. In a secondary meaning of materiality, I am positing ID cards as a form of media. In doing so, I am not suggesting we gaze at them as colorful written documents and nothing more. Media and material artifacts are not abstract things but a signicant part of the wider institutional and political context in which they are produced, take effect, and evoke meaning. In other words, an ID card is a space and moment of remediation. Contradictory, polysemic, mediating different social and political relationships, material objects of a particular culture at a particular time . . . there are numerous ways in which ID cards function as media. I
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Figure 3. An Israeli soldier escorts through a checkpoint two Palestinian men with their ID cards, and one with his eyeglasses, tucked into their underwear. Photograph by David Buimovitch, Agence France- Presse, Getty Images
am using the term media in a fundamental and broad manner to mean a tool used to store and deliver information or data, a mode of communication that incorporates multiple forms of information content and processing. I also intend media as a mechanism by which we learn and internalize values, beliefs, and norms of (our) culture and as a material device in which are encoded the dominant beliefs and norms of society. Media are also bound up with the process of social relations, mediating our relationship with various institutions, affecting how we relate to the world of politics, serving as powerful socializing/politicizing agents. Approached in this way, the inuence of media, in content and in process, on contemporary life is undeniable, as is the substance of the hawiya in the social, political, economic, and geographic life of a Palestinian. ID cards are also a mode of one- way communication keeping in mind that the state apparatus determines their meaning. In some instances, this can serve to increase the frustration and alienation of the subaltern group: the interaction between Palestinians and the Israeli state apparatus takes place mostly through an instrumental and tactile form of color and paper rather than through human interchange. Conversely, ID cards can become afrmative symbols, for example in serving ritual needs of the state: the Israeli state holds ceremonies in which new Jewish immigrants are bestowed their blue ID cards by a leading government ofcial.49 SimiSocial Text 107
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larly, those aboard the Freedom Flotilla in summer 2010, who attempted to break the Gaza siege but were captured by Israeli commandos, were offered Palestinian passports and honorary citizenship by the PA.50 Cultural, ideological, political, and economic all at once, the production and verication of identity documents open up spaces for contestation and disruption. As discursive constructs, ID cards are subject to interpretation by government ofcials, police ofcers, border ofcials, and soldiers on behalf of the state. But that also means that ID cards are contested texts open to differing interpretations on the part of their bearers (in this case barers, too). Their materiality takes on different emotional and political meaning for Palestinians. The clearest fashion in which alternative, and sometimes anti hegemonic, readings are manifested is through forms of art that IDs have inspired. The most famous of these is Mahmoud Darwishs 1964 poem Batiqat Hawiya (Identity Card), regrettably translated into English as I am an Arab.51 In it, the poet/hero deantly demands that an Israeli soldier record the formers facts, starting with his ID card number: Write it down! / I am an Arab / My identity card number is fty thousand. In what ensues, the poet/hero accuses the state, through the soldier, for Palestinian losses: You have stolen the orchards / . . . / And you left nothing for us; and he ends with a threat: Beware . . . / Of my hunger / And my anger! The prosaic object of the ID card is transformed into the subject of poetry as well as a political statement. Batiqat Hawiya has come to symbolize Palestinian poetry of resistance, becoming a rallying cry of rebellion and a protest song (and eventually resulting in Darwishs house arrest and subsequent exile). In highlighting the very material artifact that proves Palestinians existence, the poem challenges the Zionist account of Palestine as a land without people and Golda Meirs famous edict, stated in 1969 when she was the Israeli prime minister: There is no such thing as a Palestinian people. One can read all art forms that IDs have inspired as negating both claims that Palestinians do not exist or have not existed on Palestinian land. That it is the Israeli state that mandates these ID cards makes the poem an even more poignant confrontation to the Zionist narrative.52 The gesture of the poet/heros demand that an Israeli soldier write down the bearers ID number is itself a challenge to the soldiers a nd by extension, the militarys and the states authority. In December 2007, the British graftist Banksy, whose work has adorned some of the security wall in the West Bank, stenciled a grafto on a Bethlehem building of an Israeli soldier checking a Christmas donkeys ID card (g. 4). Situated next to Manger Square, the piece was a sardonic take on the politics surrounding the city of Jesus birth and is part of a series titled Santas Ghetto. The grafto has been painted over after some residents found it offensive, construing it to suggest that
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Figure 4. Banksy graffito of a donkeys ID card being checked by an Israeli soldier, Bethlehem. Photograph courtesy of the author
Palestinians are equal to donkeys. Banksys mural gets to the heart of the issue no matter how it is interpreted (Palestinians are donkeys; Palestinians are underappreciated hardworking mules; Israeli soldiers are asses that cant tell a human being from an animal; no creature can move without Israeli permission; and so forth.). In Palestine/Israel, the ID card regime is signicant and capricious; the grafto also highlights its simultaneous pervasiveness, arbitrariness, and absurdity. Maybe Banksys grafto isnt a joke at all, since animals, too, are subjects of the state. One only needs to remember Amirys envy of her dogs passport. Her story is absurdly comical, but is no laughing matter. A more serious example of ID card art lies outside the Aida refugee camp in the West Bank in a Palestinian- painted mural (g. 5). The mural draws on important facets of Palestinian identity: the birth date is 1948 ; the father is a prisoner ; the mother is listed as murdered ; the grandfather simply as Palestinian ; and the registration status is UN Resolution 194 , referring to refugees right of return. Historical elements that have shaped Palestinian collective identity are reformulated on the imagined hawiya, one that is more appropriate in what it chooses to include than is an Israeli- issued card. Rather than denoting the bearers nationality, citizenship, and reliSocial Text 107
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Figure 5. Mural of an imaginary ID card outside Aida refugee camp near Bethlehem. Photograph courtesy of the author
gion, the imagined card simply states Palestinian a word that doesnt appear anywhere on any mandated card. That it is in English and Arabic further suggests that as a form of representational politics the mural is aimed at a global audience; moreover, unlike a real card, the mural card includes no Hebrew, and thus further challenges the Israeli regime. The mural implies that despite being imprisoned, murdered, and abandoned by the international community, Palestinians continue to exist. Conversely, the mural incorporates the historical realities that have erased Palestinians: theyre incarcerated, theyre murdered, they have no international rights, they were born when their state was not created. But notice that the bearers age is left open as a question mark, suggesting both the continued state of limbo in which Palestinians exist and continued resistance against Palestinians erasure. The mural and Darwishs poem are Palestinian assertions of identity and expressions of challenge that are attempting to establish a Palestinian presence, however limited, in the face of an Israeli bureaucracy premised
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on its denial. There are plenty of similar expressions, such as roadblock lms, which highlight the salience of ID cards in everyday Palestinian life. The feature lms Divine Intervention (dir. Elia Suleiman, 2002) and Ranas Wedding: Another Day in Jerusalem (dir. Hany Abu- A ssad, 2002) portray lovers who have to negotiate their possession of differing IDs and who thus are forced to meet or to hold their wedding at a checkpoint. The cinema verit lm Like Twenty Impossibles (dir. Annemarie Jacir, 2003) depicts the disintegration of a lm crew a nd the lm itself a fter being stopped by Israeli soldiers who treat each crew member differently based on different identication documents (green: beaten, blindfolded, and detained; Jerusalem: yelled at and registered on a security list; true- blue: released; 53 American passport: ignored). These representations stress how ID cards have been renegotiated and reappropriated by their subjects, conjuring up complex social and political experiences. Furthermore, as with all media, ID cards hold within them the possibility of failure, or of a reverse control. In the language of media technology, this is often termed unintended consequences, suggesting that technologies are not simply determined by their creators or their architecture, but by end users, too. For example, in June 2006 a Jewish settler was abducted in Gaza. Shortly after his disappearance, the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) held a press conference to claim responsibility for the settlers abduction and execution, at which it distributed photocopies of the settlers ID card.54 The PRC also printed posters in which the photocopy of the settlers ID was placed over a background of blue sky, with camouaged armed resistance ghters oating on each side of it and a Palestinian ag and the PRC logo atop the page.55 The PRCs photocopies and posters present unintended interpretations of the ID card as a mediated form and, from the powerful agents perspective, an example of failure. Here, a straightforward play on identity is turned into political challenge using the dominant groups own tools (and body). The materiality of the ID card, even if simply photocopied, becomes its most evocative aspect. While ID cards give rise to a range of representations Banksys satirical grafto of a donkey being checked, the PRC photocopying an abducted and executed Jewish Israelis card, Darwishs poem t hey still maintain within their materiality the meaning attributed to them by the Israeli state at a particular political moment: the practice of controlling, surveilling, and subjugating Palestinians. As such, using them, and not simply interpreting or drawing them, in alternative ways, also challenges the state. This again evokes Darwishs poem: that it is the Israeli state apparatus that grants ID cards is used to challenge the state. Thus what may seem to be a rather trivial aspect a n ID is legal proof of birth becomes
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signicantly symbolic and political. Palestinians in the OPTs who were born within 1948 Palestine proudly show their ID cards to substantiate that they are from Haifa, Jaffa, or Ramleh (cities inside Israel) and thus buttress their claims to those cities. This becomes even more meaningful for Palestinians born in towns and villages that no longer exist. An older man in the Gaza Strip once showed me identity documents that were records of his individual life but that were also emblematic of Palestinians historical experience: a British Mandate passport whose cover simply stated Palestine; an early Israeli- issued ID card that listed him as born in Majdal, a Palestinian village near todays Ashqelon in Israel that was destroyed and depopulated in November 1948.56 In the same way that the settlers abduction was conrmed by the photocopying of his ID, the old mans ID card demonstrated that he was from a place that no longer is. As the old man himself told me, Nobody can tell me that Im not from Majdal . . . nobody can tell me that Majdal doesnt exist!57 In the case of Palestinians, ID cards tactically symbolize and prove their continued existence, in a country, as Darwish states in his poem, in which Palestinians roots / Were entrenched before the birth of time. Finally, ID cards are also used as the material artifacts without which to defy, resist, and challenge the Israeli state. Two examples sufce here, one by Palestinian citizens of Israel, another by Palestinians in the OPTs. First, the Bedouin population, unequally incorporated into Israel as citizens, continues to have a strained relationship with the state so much so that some among the community have refused to be mandated Israeli ID cards, in essence refusing to become Israels subjects.58 Second, at the height of the rst intifada, one form of civil disobedience that was adopted en masse by residents of the West Bank town of Beit Sahour was collectively refusing to carry ID cards. Refusing to carry or be issued an ID does not preclude one from being denied passage, from being arrested, or from being simultaneously embraced and excluded by the state; but it is a practice that gnaws at the states power.
Low Techno- politics
Against the high- tech fantasy and development of Israeli surveillance and against the states desire to deploy, in the words of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, advanced technological systems that will minimize human friction59 l ies one of the most systematic means of corporeally xing identity to and erecting boundaries around Palestinians. Orange, green, and blue ID cards remain a most effective and low- tech means of surveillance and differentiation and an important nexus of Israeli power. What this suggests is that even in the high- tech age of societies of control, to evoke Gilles Deleuzes term of free- oating controls, dis88
persed and ubiquitous systems of people- t racking, roaming surveillance, xing identities through biometric means, and computer databases 60 low- tech forms of control are still important. In fact, theyre quite effective. Scholars today increasingly posit means of identity documentation as forms of techno- politics, demonstrating how, and the extent to which, the pragmatics and enactment of politics and governmentality take place through technological means.61 Certainly, as Bruno Latour, Andrew Barry, and others argue, there can be no understanding of technology without politics, and no understanding of politics without technology.62 But in examining technologies of control, it is important not to simply consider these as high- tech, electronic, digital, or indeed entirely new mechanisms, but to recognize that a much older and more ubiquitous low techno- politics continues to function powerfully.63 ID cards in Palestine/Israel are unquestionably (low) technologies of administration and control, but they also serve to contrast high- tech means that seek to achieve the same or similar goals. Israel draws and secures its borders; it surveils, controls, and ghettoizes its non- Jewish citizens and noncitizen subjects; it segregates, fragments, and evicts Palestinians. It does so primarily through the mundane and low- tech form of the ID card. ID cards further demonstrate the institutional materiality of the state apparatuss constitution in subjects everyday life. The bureaucracy embedded in the ID card i nstitutions such as the Ministry of Interior and the military apparatus, the national and global discourse about security and modernity, the cards colors and what kind of information is encoded on them exemplies a particular political logic of modern- day Israel: to count, document, control, and limit Palestinians. Once instituted, the ID regimes potency is methodical, expansive, and prosaic, reminding Palestinians of their subjective and substandard position vis- - v is Israeli power no matter the source of its emanation: low- level actors that make decisions about Palestinians identity, mobility, and rights on the spot, or the invisible apparatus itself. The regimes expanse as Banksys grafto, Amirys anecdote, and Darwishs poem highlight is decidedly what also makes it, and makes it feel, arbitrary, absurd, capricious, capacious. It is tempting to try to nd that spot from which Israeli control emanates, tempting to focus on the web of checkpoints/terminals, settlements, bypass roads, and walls/fences as the multitiered centers that fragment and border Palestinians. Im not suggesting that these regimes be thought of independently; an ID card is required to pass a checkpoint, determines which side of the wall a Palestinian may trespass over, and permits one kind of person to drive on a bypass road and live in a settlement or not. But ID cards are much more pervasive in their fragmentation and segregation of Palestinians, for they determine how a Palestinian can live, in every corner of Palestine/Israel. Prosaic materials for life i n order to survive and until
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one dies I D cards enforce controls over multiple aspects of Palestinian im/mobility: economic, social, political, geographic; and they enable/deny access to circuits of civility. ID cards are both a means of control and a means of exclusion. While Palestinians may be in the process of being silenced and erased, they are well documented (and it seems their pets, too); of that there is no doubt. As is typical in colonial situations, the documentation is instituted, managed, and mandated by the oppressors. ID cards are manifestations of power, representing a technical and tactile response to Israels geopolitical problem of Palestinian presence in Palestine/Israel, creating particular kinds of citizenship- less, stateless, and subjected identities. ID cards banality is politically salient. As such, the hawiya has also become a site of remediation: a space and moment of renegotiation for its bearer, subject to counter- hegemonic representations, interpretations, and uses. ID cards have become important not only because they are for everyday life but also because they allow for a poetics of political resistance, however feeble. ID cards speak directly to that cognitive dissonance with which Palestinians live: fearing that the Israeli state wants them disappeared, yet simultaneously being rendered subjects of the states bureaucratic machine. But there is no dissonance. There is rather a low techno- political means of control and surveillance that serves the Israeli states dual purpose of managing territory and subjecting (parts of) the population. In order to control and penetrate a subaltern group, the state must embrace it rst; what the state chooses to do afterward becomes almost ancillary. Palestinians and their supporters have incorporated and reappropriated the hawiya in so many differing ways, for they recognize that there exists no contradiction between being documented and being erased: the practice lies at the heart of Israels colonial regime. The little matters of green, orange, and blue ultimately determine everything; they are spectacular precisely because they are mundane.
Notes
1. Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006). 2. For an analysis of Israels surveillance mechanisms, see Nigel Parsons and Mark B. Salter, Israeli Biopolitics: Closure, Territorialisation, and Governmentality in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Geopolitics 13 (2008): 70123. 3. One of the best critiques of Israels multilayered spatial conguration of occupation is presented in Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israels Architecture of Occupation (New York: Verso, 2007). 4. Nils A. Butenschon, Uri Davis, and Manuel Hassassian, eds., Citizenship and the State in the Middle East: Approaches and Applications (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 2021. 5. For analyses of Palestinians everyday experiences in and around check90
points, see Rema Hammami, On the Importance of Thugs: The Moral Economy of a Checkpoint, Middle East Report 231 (2004): 2634; and Helga Tawil- Souri, New Palestinian Centers: An Ethnography of the Checkpoint Economy, International Journal of Cultural Studies 12 (2009): 21735. On the checkpoint as a space of economic inequality, see Rema Hammami, Qalandya: Jerusalems Tora Bora and the Frontiers of Global Inequality, Jerusalem Quarterly 41 (2010): 2951; as a space of temporal inequality, see Ariel Handel, Where, Where to, and When in the Occupied Territories: An Introduction to Geography of Disaster, in The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, ed. Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni, and Sari Hana (New York: Zone, 2009), 179222; and as a simultaneous non- place and anthropological space, see Helga Tawil- Souri, Qalandia Checkpoint: The Historical Geography of a Non- Place, Jerusalem Quarterly 42 (2010): 2648. Finally, for an analysis of the checkpoint in relation to other incarcerating mechanisms, see Avram Bornstein, Military Occupation as Carceral Society, Social Analysis 52 (2008): 10630. 6. Bitaqat hawiya is the accurate translation of identication card; however, the Arabic term hawiya (identity/identication) is usually used on its own to denote ID cards. Over the years, Palestinians have had to obtain a paper permit, known as tassrih (permit) in the Arabic singular form, to enter and/or work in Israel. Yael Berda offers an insightful critique on permits as central to Israels administration of colonial bureaucracy and argues that the permit regime creates a procedural bare life where bureaucracy denies individuals and collectives on the basis of race. My view is that IDs are of greater importance for daily life in both the Palestinian Territories and Israel. Moreover, permits are required only for those who wish/need to enter Israel, and in order to obtain a tassrih a Palestinian must be issued an ID card in the rst place. See Yael Berda, The Bureaucracy of the Occupation: An Introduction to the Permit Regime (paper presented at the Breaking the Wall II workshop, Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, 1013 February 2006, www.cccb.org/rcs_gene/yael_berda.pdf. For more on the permit regime, also see Amira Hass, Israels Closure Policy: An Ineffective Strategy of Containment and Repression, Journal of Palestine Studies 31 (2002): 520. 7. I am borrowing the phrase from Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (New York: Verso, 1980), 189. There are other forms of paper- bureaucracy that have been instrumental in inclusively excluding Palestinian populations; see Elia Zureik, Constructing Palestine through Surveillance Practices, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 28 (2001): 20527, for a discussion of the collection of population statistics and land ownership registration. Also see Ophir, Givoni, and Hana, Power of Inclusive Exclusion. 8. Uri Davis, Citizenship and the State: A Comparative Study of Citizenship Legislation in Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1997), 44. 9. Although cards have been mandatory since 1949 in Israel, it was not until passage of the Population Registration Law of 1962 that every person over the age of sixteen had to be registered in the Population Registry, administered by the Ministry of Interior, and carry an ID card at all times. 10. Davis, Conceptions of Citizenship in the Middle East, in Citizenship and the State. There are numerous ways, beyond the issue of ID cards, in which Arab Israelis are not equal citizens of Israel; see Elia Zureik, Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1979); Ian Lustick, ed., Palestinians under Israeli Rule (New York: Garland, 1994); and Adriana Kemp, Dangerous Populations: State Territoriality and the Constitution of National Minorities, in Boundaries
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and Belonging: States and Societies in the Struggle to Shape Identities and Local Practices, ed. Joel Migdal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 7398. 11. Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing, 201. 12. This occurred in 1967 in the case of East Jerusalem. Until 1988, the Jordanian documents were also color- coded: yellow passports were issued to Palestinians living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and green to those residing in Jordan. Today, all Jordanian passports are green, although those issued to Palestinians from the West Bank or East Jerusalem are only valid for two years, compared to ve years for citizens within Jordan. 13. Unlike the Jordanian case in the West Bank, Palestinians from Gaza were not issued temporary citizenship by Egypt but only travel permits, known as a watheeqa . 14. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 15. Weizman, Hollow Land , 159. Palestinians must obtain ID cards (and any permits to enter Israel, and by extension to travel outside) through District Civil Liaison Ofces (DCL). DCLs are legacies from the days of ofcial occupation (196791) and the Civil Administration arm of the military, which governed Palestinian civilian life. The process is a bureaucratic nightmare, fraught with difculty (not least of which is the fact that to get to a DCL ofce one must usually pass a checkpoint with ID and permit already in hand) and an arbitrariness in decision making that is entirely hidden from Palestinians such that they can neither hold the source accountable nor appeal decisions. In the post- Oslo era, local DCLs have become nothing more than literal liaison centers that simply deliver ID and tassrih requests to respective Israeli authorities such as the Ministry of Interior, military, border patrol, police force, and secret service (known as Shabak) t he institutions that make up the ID regime apparatus. Blue ID cards are mandated directly by the Israeli Ministry of Interior. For more on the Civil Administration and DCLs, see Berda, Bureaucracy of the Occupation; and Yehouda Shenhav and Yael Berda, The Colonial Foundations of the State of Exception: Juxtaposing the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian Territories with Colonial Bureaucratic History, in Ophir, Givoni, and Hana, Power of Inclusive Exclusion , 33774. 16. Since the signing of the Oslo Accords (in 1991 and 1993), only Palestinians who were residing in the OPTs prior to the Accords qualify for Palestinian citizenship and passports, along with children born to them. Palestinians who arrived or returned to the OPTs after the Accords are not permitted, by Israel, to obtain Palestinian citizenship. Despite having Palestinian passports, many from the West Bank continue to use temporary Jordanian passports (see note 12), as those tend to be easier to use in travel abroad. 17. As residents of Israel, Palestinian Jerusalemites are subjected to Israeli laws but not all rights. For example, they pay taxes but cannot vote in national elections. Israeli travel documents given to Palestinian Jerusalemites misleadingly state nationality as Jordanian (see note 12). Only a few Palestinian Jerusalemites were given the privilege to become Israeli citizens in 1967. In the early 1990s, Israel offered some Jerusalem ID cardholders the possibility of obtaining full citizenship, contingent on the subjects speaking uent Hebrew and not having a security le, among other conditions; only a few were able to or chose to do so. Palestinian Jerusalemites are also not permitted, by Israel, to obtain Palestinian citizenship, even if they move to the OPTs. Israel has made it increasingly challenging for them to hold on to their Jerusalem ID cards. Originally, Israel revoked cards for Palestinians who left the city for seven years or more and who had not renewed their exit permits. In
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1995, the Ministry of Interior changed the regulations, neither announcing its policies nor warning Palestinian Jerusalemites of the possibility of losing their status and their homes, and applied the regulations retroactively. The onus falls on Palestinian Jerusalemites to prove that their center of life is in Israel and that they reside inside Jerusalem municipal boundaries, requiring a burden of documents that are not easy for many to obtain. In 2006, more than 1,360 Palestinian Jerusalemites had their cards revoked, a 600 percent jump from the previous year; in 2008, more than 4,500 Jerusalem IDs were revoked. See BTselem, Revocation of Residency in East Jerusalem, www.btselem.org/english/Jerusalem/Revocation_Statistics.asp (accessed 11 August 2010). For more on the status of Palestinian Jerusalemites, see Usama Halabi, The Legal Status of Palestinians in Jerusalem, Palestine- Israel Journal 4 (1997), www.pij.org/details.php?id=505 (accessed 15 December 2010); and Halabi, Revoking Permanent Residency: A Legal Review of Israeli Policy, Jerusalem Quarterly 9 (2000): 4047. 18. Other Palestinians are also citizenship- less, most painfully the refugee population in Lebanon and those born or residing in countries that do not grant citizenship jus soli (as is the case with the majority of Arab countries where large numbers of Palestinian refugees live). In all of these cases, they are not permitted by Israel to obtain Palestinian citizenship, either, let alone to enter Palestine/Israel. 19. There are about a hundred different variations of other, ranging from Bedouin (who are actually Arab) to Circassian. Israel is the only government in the world that denotes nationality on ID cards, and one of only two to issue different cards based on territorial distinction, in the case of Palestinian Jerusalemites (Spain issues distinct cards for citizens in its North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla). All cards in Palestine/Israel include the category of religion. For those with Arab nationality, religion is listed as either Muslim or Christian. For Jewish and Druze nationalities, the religion is Jewish and Druze, respectively. In noting religion, Israel is in company only with Afghanistan, Brunei, Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey. A handful of other countries still note ethnicity (Bhutan, China, Ethiopia, and Vietnam), race (Malaysia and Singapore), or color (Dominican Republic) on contemporary cards. 20. All blue ID cardholders who are citizens of Israel are listed as Israeli. Orange and green cards do not list citizenship, presumably because Israeli authorities who mandate the cards do not recognize Palestinian as a form of citizenship. 21. Blue cards issued since 2005 have nationality marked with eight asterisks, decipherable only by computer. Other details continue to mark differentiations to the naked eye, such as the date of birth, which follows the Hebrew calendar for Jews, and a numbering system denoting whether the cardholder is Jewish or other. The numerical code further denotes the district in which one resides. 22. Rebecca Kook, Citizenship and Its Discontents: Palestinians in Israel, in Butenschon, Davis, and Hassassian, Citizenship and the State in the Middle East , 267; emphasis in original. 23. See John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 24. For good analyses of identication documents and state power, see Scott, Seeing Like a State ; Torpey, Invention of the Passport ; Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds., Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); John Torpey, Coming and Going: On the State Monopolization of the Legitimate Means of Movement, Sociological Theory 16 (1998): 23959; and Migdal, Boundaries and Belonging. For analyses of ID cards in relation to surveillance, see David Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2001); and Colin J.
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Bennett and David Lyon, eds., Playing the Identity Card: Surveillance, Security, and Identication in Global Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2008). 25. Anis Kassim, The Palestinians: From Hyphenated to Integrated Citizenship, in Butenschon, Davis, and Hassassian, Citizenship and the State in the Middle East, 202. 26. Torpey, Coming and Going, 244; emphases in original. 27. Kemp, Dangerous Populations, in Migdal, Boundaries and Belonging, 80. Kemps remark about the limits imposed on Palestinians in Israel bears on the context of IDs: At once included via the mechanism of formal citizenship and excluded from the community of fate . . . Palestinians stand at the center of the state desire for control, discipline, and regulation of the most minute levels of conduct of those who are members of the society and polity yet do not belong to them (7374). See also Zureik, Constructing Palestine. 28. Kook, Citizenship and Its Discontents, 267 29. Torpey, Coming and Going, 25455. 30. Ibid., 243. Torpey draws on the cases of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa, and Communist China pre- 1980 for this generalization. 31. For a discussion of Israel as an apartheid state, see Uri Davis, Israel: An Apartheid State (New York: Zed Books, 1989), and Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing ; as an ethnocratic state, see Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/ Palestine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); as a racist state, see Ronit Lentin, ed., Thinking Palestine (New York: Zed Books, 2008); as a colonial state, see Rafael Reuveny, The Last Colonialist: Israel in the Occupied Territories since 1967, Independent Review 12 (2008): 32574. 32. A similar argument is made in Ophir, Givoni, and Hana, Power of Inclusive Exclusion. 33. In the case of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, one can make the argument that since 2007 the second oppressive regime is no longer the PA but Hamas. 34. UNRWA is the only agency dedicated to helping Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. 35. The same is obviously the case within Israel, thus making Palestinian Jerusalemites precarious status even more problematic (see note 17). In the case of many PA governmental and civil issues, such as registering ones residency, the Israeli state apparatus ultimately decides on/approves the status (see note 15). 36. Torpey explains this in the case of internal passports/passes (Coming and Going, 239). Since 1967, travel between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip has become increasingly impossible for Palestinians. For a summary of regulations that have served to sever the Gaza Strip and the West Bank over the past four decades, see Amira Hass, Otherwise Occupied/Access Denied, Haaretz, 22 April 2010, www .haaretz.com/weekend/weeks- end/otherwise- occupied- access- denied- 1.284725. 37. Only since the second intifada are holders of blue IDs advised not to be in some Palestinian areas (about 30 percent of the West Bank and, since the 2005 disengagement, the entirety of the Gaza Strip), purportedly for their own security; being caught in one does not result in the same forms of punishment that await a Palestinian with an orange or green ID who is caught without a permit in an Israeli area. While this policy does segregate Jewish Israelis and Palestinians, it should also be understood as a means of fragmenting, separating, and segregating Palestinians inside Israel and East Jerusalem from Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the latter two from one another. 38. Amiry calls her dogs document a passport, since it is required for the dog
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to travel in or out of the state as proof of having been vaccinated, not having rabies, and so on t he same as is required for pets in many other countries. In Amirys case, she took her dog to an Israeli veterinarian in East Jerusalem and thus obtained Israeli documents for her pet, as opposed to the PA- issued documents she would have received had she gone to a veterinarian in Ramallah, where she lives. Although Amiry alludes otherwise, the dogs passport is not equivalent to a humans, by virtue of its issuance by a veterinarian (albeit state- l icensed) and not the Israeli Ministry of Interior; let alone that the dog was able to obtain it because Amiry was willing to pay approximately $30 for the vaccination substantially more than she would pay in Ramallah for the same service. If it were that easy for Palestinian humans to obtain Jerusalem passports, Im sure theyd be queuing for all kinds of vaccines! 39. More horrically, the Hutu/Tutsi ethnic differentiation marked on Rwandans ID cards, legacies of Belgian colonialism, made genocide a lot easier to carry out a demarcation now erased on Rwandans cards. For a comparative analysis of the Israeli occupation as a form of colonialism, see Shenhav and Berda, The Colonial Foundations of the State of Exception. For a comparison with South Africa, see Hilla Dayan, Regimes of Separation: Israel/Palestine and the Shadow of Apartheid, in Ophir, Givoni, and Hana, Power of Inclusive Exclusion , 281322. Noncolonial regimes have also used the equivalent of internal passes; for example, the Soviet Union had a combined system of internal passports and housing registration, which restricted the movement of Soviet subjects, as a means of trying to keep collective farmers from leaving the countryside. For an excellent analysis of passports, internal passports/passes, and identication cards, see Torpey, Coming and Going. See note 19 for states that currently differentiate populations according to religion, ethnicity, or race. 40. In 1972, exit orders were instituted for OPT- Palestinians to go between East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and Israel (overnight stays were not permitted for the latter). The permit regime dates back to 1981, when the Israeli military established the Civil Administration to separate the military actions of the army in the OPTs from the management of Palestinian civilian life. Instituted in 1991, full closure of the OPTs and the requirement of independent permits were argued to prevent Palestinian suicide attacks in Israel; the rst suicide bombing attack inside Israel, however, did not occur until April 1994. Like ID cards, permits are not created equal, either some may be valid for one day only, for certain hours during a day, for certain areas, and so on. The permit regimes origin was a form of labor card, akin to the reference card doled out in apartheid- era South Africa; thus it should be largely understood in its economic function of a colonial regime. All OPT- Palestinian workers who are legally employed in Israel and/or Israeli settlements dwindling as they are in number must have Israeli companies, organizations, or individual patrons initiate the permit process. Here, the bureaucracy of ID cards, permits, and magnetic cards becomes tied to relations of economic dependency: ensuring lower wages to Palestinians individually, preserving a coreperiphery relationship collectively, and curtailing Palestinian economic mobility. For more on the permit regime, see Berda, Bureaucracy of the Occupation; and Hass, Israels Closure Policy. On the economic dimensions of the permit regime and its impact on Palestinians, see Leila Farsakh, Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, Land, and Occupation (New York: Routledge, 2005); and Tobias Kelly, Documented Lives: Fear and the Uncertainties of Law during the Second Palestinian Intifada, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12 (2006): 89107. 41. Kelly, Documented Lives, 90.
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42. Back in 2002, the fear was present, too, as the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) had already evicted a number of Gazans from the West Bank. The 2010 military order has simply stated the terms more clearly, and like many such orders, it qualies retroactively. Children born in the West Bank to Gaza- I D holding parents are also subject to this order. See Amira Hass, IDF Order Will Enable Mass Deportation from West Bank, Haaretz, 11 April 2010, www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1162075 .html. See also Hass, Otherwise Occupied/Access Denied. 43. Since 2006, Ramot Allon is open only to Israeli citizens and settlers, Jerusalem ID cardholders, foreigners with valid visas to Israel, and persons of Jewish descent entitled to the Israeli Law of Return. This checkpoint will be phased out when the wall/barrier is completed. 44. As far as I know, no one has ever been executed for carrying the wrong ID. Imprisonment, ID conscation, being beaten up by soldiers, being listed as a security threat, being forbidden from ever entering Israel again, or being altogether expelled from Israel and sometimes from the Palestinian Territories, too, are the common consequences. 45. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979), 189. 46. Ibid.; Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collge de France 19771978 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 47. Nadia Abu- Z ahra, Identity Cards and Coercion in Palestine, in Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life , ed. Rachel Pain and Susan J. Smith (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 177. 48. Personal interview, 22 February 2010, London. 49. For a recent example, replete with photos, of a group of North American Jews being granted their blue IDs by Israeli president Shimon Peres, see 230 Immigrants from North America Arrive in Israel on Nefesh BNefesh Flight, Haaretz, 2 August 2010, www.haaretz.com/jewish- world/230-immigrants- f rom- north- a merica - a rrive- i n- israel- on- nefesh- b - nefesh- ight- 1.305570. 50. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas publicly declared the offer at his opening speech at the Palestine Investment Conference in June 2010; see President Gives Freedom Flotilla Activists Honorary Palestinian Citizenship, 2 June 2010 (in Arabic), Amel Road, www.amelroad.com/details- 122.html. See also Amira Hass, Palestinians Offer Gaza Flotilla Participants Honorary Citizenship, Haaretz, 29 July 2010, www.haaretz.com/print- edition/news/palestinians- offer- gaza- otilla - participants- honorary- citizenship- 1.304678. In August 2008, Hamas awarded diplomatic passports in a public ceremony to forty- seven peace activists from the Free Gaza Movement, who had successfully sailed from Cyprus to Gaza without Israeli circumvention, delivering humanitarian assistance materials such as hearing aids, thus breaking the siege on Gaza that was in effect; see Richard Silverstein, The Free Gaza Movement, The Nation , 6 October 2008, www.thenation.com/article/ free- gaza- movement. 51. The phrase write it down is also translated as record or register. For a complete English version of this poem, see Mahmoud Darwish, Identity Card, www.barghouti.com/poets/darwish/bitaqa.asp (accessed 1 December 2008). 52. I am not suggesting that all Israeli governments have been equally Zionist in their perspectives and dealings with Palestinians. But whether hawkish or dovish, all governments have continued to enforce the differentiating ID regime. Certainly since 1967, the bureaucratic measures to keep Palestinians in check have become more formidable while the spread of Jewish settlers into the West
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Bank and the Judaization of Jerusalem have been bolstered, no matter which party has been in power. 53. On roadblock lms, see Nurith Gertz and George Khlei, Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). 54. The Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) also claims responsibility for the kidnapping of IDF corporal Gilad Shalit earlier in the same month, who, as of this writing, has not been released. The longest- held Jewish- Israeli captive to date, Shalit has achieved iconic status both for Hamas and within Israel. An Israeli citizen, Shalit also holds French citizenship and has been awarded honorary Italian citizenship since his kidnapping. 55. For an account of the events and photographs of the poster, see Ali Waked, PRC: Kidnapping Settler Teen Was Easy, YNet News, 29 June 2006, www.ynet news.com/articles/0,7340,L- 3269003,00.html. 56. Not that these documents give Palestinians any legal or economic recourse; they are mostly symbolic. On the signicance of identication papers and other material objects for Palestinian refugees, see Ilana Feldman, Refusing Invisibility: Documentation and Memorialization in Palestinian Refugee Claims, Journal of Refugee Studies 21 (2008): 498516. 57. Personal interview, 22 April 2003, Al- Shati Refugee Camp, Gaza Strip. 58. Thus they also chose not to benet from state privileges such as education or health care. There is a further paradox here in that Israel largely construes the Bedouin population as nonexistent, although the state goes to great lengths to erase the Bedouins, such as continuously tearing down their unrecognized villages, villages deemed illegal sometimes but not always because Bedouins refused to obtain the necessary paperwork to register their land. On the relationship between Bedouin populations and the state of Israel, see Ghazi- Walid Falah, How Israel Controls the Bedouin in Israel, Journal of Palestine Studies 14 (1985): 3551; and Yiftachel, Ethnocracy. 59. Weizman, Hollow Land , 150. See Parsons and Salter, Israeli Biopolitics, on Israels high- tech surveillance mechanisms. 60. Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control, October 59 (1992): 37. See also Paul Virilio, Polar Inertia (London: Sage, 1999); Virilio, Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007); David Lyon, The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); and David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007). 61. For an excellent analysis of techno- politics, see Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno- politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 62. See Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Latour, Pandoras Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Andrew Barry, Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (New York: Athlone Press, 2001). 63. Timothy Mitchells work establishes the extent to which low- tech forms have been fundamentally powerful in colonial Egypt. See Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); and Mitchell, Rule of Experts. While not explicitly using the term techno- politics, Ophir, Givoni, and Hana demonstrate various facets of low- tech Israeli controls over Palestinian life (Power of Inclusive Exclusion).
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Colored Identity, The Politics and Materiality of ID Cards in Palestine/Israel / Helga Tawil-Souri

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Colored Identity, The Politics and Materiality of ID Cards in Palestine/Israel / Helga Tawil-Souri

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Colored Identity

The Politics and Materiality of ID Cards in Palestine/Israel

Social Text 107 Vol. 29, No. 2 Summer 2011

Tawil- S ouri Politics and Materiality of ID Cards in Palestine / Israel

Social Text 107

Nationality noted on card

Citizenship noted on card Citizenship status

Increasing threat of having to prove ones loyalty to the state

Tawil- S ouri Politics and Materiality of ID Cards in Palestine / Israel

Israel, settlements (and illegal outposts) Israel

PA passport, Egyptian laissez- passer

Social Text 107

Tawil- S ouri Politics and Materiality of ID Cards in Palestine / Israel

Social Text 107

Tawil- S ouri Politics and Materiality of ID Cards in Palestine / Israel

Social Text 107

Tawil- S ouri Politics and Materiality of ID Cards in Palestine / Israel

Social Text 107

Tawil- S ouri Politics and Materiality of ID Cards in Palestine / Israel

Social Text 107

Tawil- S ouri Politics and Materiality of ID Cards in Palestine / Israel

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