Occupression. No, it is not a spelling mistake. Rather it is an attempt to get past the all too frequent rhetorical discussions that go nowhere. The Occupation, more than 43 years in the making of a grotesque state of oppressive violations of human rights and humanitarian law needs reconceptualization.
Occupation points to a legal structure that is governed by a regime of protection for those under military control. Israel has and continues to violate every principle of military occupation and with impunity. The point that we have reached is one of irreparable destruction of any resemblance that this political space may once have had to democratic society. When the occupation continues to mushroom and when civilians – Palestinians – who by law and morality are supposed to be protected by the occupier – Israel – are disinvested of their basic rights and humanity, the greatest anger from the “pro-Israel” world is directed at those “radical” (read illegitimate) left wingers who would dare to even entertain the notion that it is OK for actors to refuse to play the theatre of the absurd in the so called “Cultural Center” in Ariel.
No it is not those of us on Israel’s left wing that has regressed. We have not become virulent haters of the place in which we live. Rather, the place in which we live has demonstrated its distaste for the basic values of democracy, human rights and social justice, which, in a State of Occupression, have become foreign to the government that would prefer their expulsion from the social lexicon, much like it would prefer to expel Israeli children for lack of their proper Jewish pedigree.
There are those who say that the Occupation has become so cancerous that its malignancy has spread into the otherwise healthy tissues of Israeli society inside the Green Line. I would argue a different point. The political space that gives rise to an illegal and immoral colonization of Palestinian territory has at its core a political theory that allows for disregard of the humanity and rights of certain persons while privileging other persons by virtue of their belonging to the powerful group. What we have left is a paradigmatic shift towards the abyss. The Occupation is not a disease but a part of the pathology of Occupression. Rights are reversed. The oppressor is privileged, the oppressed condemned to an ongoing prison like situation in which freedom is regularly yanked from their grips by a calculated system that keeps the oppressed in a state of permanent and arbitrary limbo.
The Occupation, where the daily niceties of life proceed unimpeded for Israeli settlers while normal life for Palestinians is impossible, is but the most visible and visceral manifestation of occupression. Daily activities taken for granted by most of us – going to the doctor, the market, visiting friends and families, attending school or university – are criminalized for the entire Palestinian population because of the occupation regime.
The irony of the occupation is that Israeli settlements are “legal”, or they are merely “illegal outposts” usually on their way to de facto or de jure legalization, while the entirety of the Palestinian population is treated at best as illegal aliens in their own land with no rights, living under a regime of absolute discrimination and abject inequality. This is a classic example of the situation, described by Hannah Arendt in ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ in which individuals endowed with human rights are denied access to these rights precisely because of the fact that they are disenfranchised and made to be homeless, deprived of their “place in the world.”
On top of the regular events of the occupation – expulsion of families, judicial racism and state organized violence against the Occupied Other – even human rights advocacy and peaceful resistance to the occupation is being effectively criminalized by Israel through selective enforcement of law, promotion of racist and undemocratic law proposals and the suppression of dissent, both through physical violence and institutional violence.
Yes for many Israelis life stays the same. We continue to recognize ourselves as kindle in the conflagration our leadership is conjuring up as it runs head first into the concrete wall of its own construction. We find our lives to be more expensive and worth less than the social life of the settlements. The values of a public society in Israel is far less than the upkeep of immorality and illegality of occupation, racist policy and social exclusion according to Israel’s leadership. The preference is clear. Settlements are more important than fire trucks and East Jerusalem is far more important than any school, hospital or university. Our ministers cry foul when moral thespians refuse to play the Occupation yet they sit in silence while Palestinian children continue to face violence, ill treatment and even torture when they are arrested.
It is clear then that Israel is in a position of moral and political de-development. The longer it maintains the very ill occupation the more that we understand that fluidity of oppression and we live, therefore, in a state of Occupression.