Life Contained in Gaza

Protest against the Israeli siege over the Gaza Strip, September 10, 2018. Photo: Mohammed Zaanoun/Activestills.org Protest against the Israeli siege over the Gaza Strip, September 10, 2018. Photo: Mohammed Zaanoun/Activestills.org

Life Contained in Gaza

By : Francesco Sebregondi

The MB1215DE is a state-of-the-art mobile container scanner manufactured by the Chinese company Nuctech. It uses high-energy imaging technology to detect contraband goods concealed within shipping containers. Due to its rapid throughput—up to twenty-five containers per hour—it is now part of the standard equipment of the world’s busiest ports, including those in Dubai, Taipei, Tangiers, and Rotterdam. It is also in operation at a lesser-known logistical hub: the Kerem Shalom terminal, on the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip.

Through this particular piece of infrastructure, an uncanny symmetry appears between zones of maximum circulation (that support global trade) and zones of maximum confinement (of which Gaza might be the world’s most infamous example). In the first instance, the container scanner functions within a security apparatus that is tasked with maximizing the flow of goods while preventing threats to the trade order itself. In the second instance, it contributes to a different security operation: minimizing the flow of goods while preventing the complete collapse of the “hostile territory” under blockade. High-resolution, real-time monitoring, and control are essential to both operations. 

The Gaza Strip’s land, sea, and air blockade has been in force since 2007 and Israel is unlikely to lift it anytime soon. Unlike a medieval siege, the blockade does not aim to bring about the final capitulation of the citadel of Gaza by completely cutting off its supply lines. Almost every day, some goods and—to a lesser extent—some people do cross the border in both directions. However, Israel maintains these cross-border flows at the minimum level it deems necessary to avoid mass starvation and all-out unrest among the two million Palestinians crammed into Gaza’s 365 square kilometers. For this reason, the blockade could, at least in principle, last indefinitely.

With the blockade’s establishment, Israeli authorities acquired the ability to monitor, channel, and modulate the circulation of everything and everyone going in and out of Gaza. Rather than simply eliminating all movement, the closure has enabled a form of centralized command over Gaza’s vital circulatory system. As diplomatic, political, and juridical processes remain suspended indefinitely, logistics has effectively turned into a mode of government. 

Not a single export product left Gaza in the first six years of the blockade. In 2013, the Dutch government donated an MB1215DE scanner to Israel for the specific purpose of installing at Kerem Shalom—the only functioning crossing into and out of Gaza. As stated in the joint declaration prepared for the occasion, one of the donation’s key objectives was to ease “the transport of goods . . . between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,” while “safeguarding the security of Israel.” 

The scanner soon found itself at the center of a diplomatic row between Israel and the Netherlands. Shortly before the inauguration ceremony, meant to feature the Dutch Prime Minister himself, Israel announced that it would continue to ban exports from Gaza to the West Bank. It justified this decision on the basis of alleged high-level security concerns. In response, the Dutch government abruptly cancelled the ceremony. The scanner remained idle at the terminal for months, ready to inspect a nonexistent flow of goods.

In 2014, Israel launched the largest and deadliest of its three military operations in Gaza since 2007. Never before had the built environment of the Palestinian enclave been so extensively destroyed. In spite of the critical need for reconstruction in the aftermath of the war, the blockade remained in force. As a consequence, life after the cease-fire threatened to turn into an uncontrollable humanitarian crisis. In order to avoid this outcome, Israel finally put the container scanner to work at Kerem Shalom. A second scanner was also installed at the same crossing—this one funded by the European Union. As part of the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism established shortly after the war, Israel allowed an increased number of trucks to enter Gaza, and even permitted a few to exit the enclave. Nonetheless, such flows represent a small fraction of the pre-2007 volume of trade. What is more, Israel persistently keeps the flows far below the crossing’s logistical capacity.[1] 

Israeli authorities modulate the tightness of the blockade based on the level of tension they perceive with the various armed resistance groups in Gaza. Whether in response to Palestinian actions or as a preemptive measure, Israel always has the option to suddenly cut off all circulation in and out of Gaza. The policy extends beyond the flow of goods: the delivery of individual permits to exit Gaza through the Erez Crossing reflects this same logic, while the limits of the authorized fishing zone off the coast of Gaza ebbs and flows according to Israel’s own assessment of the security situation. With its erratic oscillations, the curve describing the volume of cross-border circulations over time reads as a political seismograph of the enduring conflict. 

Through its administration of the blockade, Israel rigorously implements the latest principles of global logistical management. These “elastic logistics” consist of maintaining the flexibility to expand or shrink delivery capabilities, so as to align quickly with the ever-shifting demands and operational conditions of a supply chain. This principle is originally designed to optimize commercial profits by reducing an operator’s exposure to friction. In Gaza, the Israeli security apparatus applies it as a means to minimize the supplies to its perceived enemy without fueling its determination to resist.   

The standardized, modular steel shipping container—developed from US military technology—inaugurated the development of modern logistics in the second half of the twentieth century. In Gaza, the technical and economic rationality of the container expanded into a containment strategy applied to an entire polity. To handle the inconvenient burden of Gaza, Israel has chosen to confine the former’s population to the tightest possible space for the smallest economic, political, and moral cost. Suspended by a calculation machine that reduces all human needs to minimum quantities, the lives of two million people are thereby contained.

If, as Clausewitz affirmed, war is the extension of politics by other means, and if politics in Gaza has been reduced to logistics, then war has also turned into an extension of logistics. Aptly code-named “Protective Edge,” the 2014 Israeli military operation in Gaza declared as its objective the destruction of the network of tunnels that resistance groups had dug in response to the blockade. By opening up channels of unmonitored communication and trade across the border, these tunnels indeed posed a fundamental—one may say, topological—threat to the exercise of a mode of power based on the meticulous control of all forms of circulation. The Israeli army thus attempted to remodel a contested terrain, to fill the dangerous cavities through which Gaza was quite literally undercutting Israel’s authority.

The current framing of Israel’s strategic policy further confirms the essential instrumentality of war to maintain and naturalize the Gaza blockade as a durable regime of power. Israel’s top-ranking military staff officially refer to their recurrent operations in Gaza as a process of “mowing the grass.” In this chilling metaphor, Israel perceives the capacity for Gazans to resist as naturally and perpetually growing. From the colonizer’s perspective, this wild overgrowth requires regular interventions to contain it.

The current framing of Israel’s strategic policy further confirms the essential instrumentality of war to maintain and naturalize the Gaza blockade as a durable regime of power.

While the MB1215DE scanner is but one component of a far-reaching, distributed architecture, it encapsulates the key operational logic of the blockade as a project of urban containment. From logistics to surveillance, administration, energy supply, and environmental management, all operations that sustain the blockade of Gaza ought to be optimized—constantly readjusted to a set of varying parameters, so as to maximize the blockade’s effects while minimizing its costs. In Gaza, the rising governmental paradigm of optimization reveals its fundamentally oppositional disposition, whereby the gains for one camp are always to be measured against the losses for the opposite one. For Israel, optimizing this cybernetic system primarily means debilitating the enemy while maximizing its own capacities in the process. In terms of its management as an urban territory, Gaza is undeniably smart—as smart as the bombs that keep raining down on it.

While it is the product of a unique history of struggle, the blockaded Gaza Strip also forms a radical diagram of a global phenomenon. In contrast to the cheerful discourse of their corporate providers, smart urban technologies today are mainly applied to the reinforcement and cost-reduction of existing mechanisms of urban exclusion. Digital redlining, data-driven access portals, predictive policing, and facial recognition systems that are biased by design are all cases in point. Smart urbanism has set out to optimize the city’s milieu, yet the targeted capacitation of already-privileged urban users is only one of the modes by which optimization is currently pursued. Another mode, still largely overlooked, consists of the targeted debilitation of all of those who do not belong. On the one hand, we find processes of release and enhancement; on the other, practices of maiming and containment. At stake in this dialectic may be nothing less than the urban question of the twenty-first century.

Every Friday since March 30, 2018, mass demonstrations have taken place in Gaza along Israel’s separation fence. As a means of protesting the ongoing blockade, the people of Gaza are not gathering in public squares or in front of ministries, but along a thick, militarized border and its logistical nodes. Since the start of the Great March of Return, as the protests have been called, demonstrators have set the Kerem Shalom terminal on fire at least three times—and Israel has always promptly repaired it. Protestors also tore down several sections of the fence, only for Israel to repair it in the following weeks. As of August 2019, the response from Israel’s security forces has been to shoot more than 8,000 unarmed protesters with live ammunition. At least 1,200 of them are now crippled for life.

Yet every Friday, for more than a year now, protesters are back to refuse the status quo. Their obstinate return challenges the material infrastructure of the blockade regime, adds friction to the system of organized containment, tears apart the narrative of a humane blockade, and forces the colonial regime to reveal its sheer brutality. The steadfastness of Palestinians in the face of a seventy-one year-long colonial occupation is all the more laudable now Israel has utterly banalized the daily violence to which they are exposed. Today, even the most revolting of abuses—such as the killing of twenty-year-old volunteer medic Rouzan Al-Najjar, who was hit in the thorax by an Israeli sniper’s bullet as she was helping to evacuate the wounded—will not stir much more than a fleeting moment of indignation from the so-called “international community.” Through their struggles and perseverance, the protesters in Gaza are not only undoing the myth that resistance can be crippled or contained. They are also helping us, on the other side of the fence, to understand what true freedom might mean in the future.

[This article was commissioned for the inaugural Sharjah Architecture Triennial, titled "Rights of Future Generations." It is published as part of Conditions, an editorial collaboration between the Sharjah Architecture Triennial and Africa Is a Country, Ajam Media Collective, ArtReview, e-flux architecture, Jadaliyya, and Mada MasrConditions is a series of essays that are published first online and later as a book, available November 2019.]




[1]
For example, while the MB1215DE can technically handle truckloads up to two meters high, Israeli authorities impose that the total height of goods stacked on trucks for commercial shipments out of Gaza not exceed 1.2 meters—thereby considerably increasing the cost of transportation for traders in Gaza.

Imider vs. COP22: Understanding Climate Justice from Morocco’s Peripheries

All eyes are on Marrakesh where the 22nd Conference of the Parties on climate change takes place (COP22). The city has been cleaned up, Skype and Whatsapp are back online and the media pull out all the stops to put across a message of an environmentally friendly and politically moderate Morocco. COP22 has to become the next event contributing to the image of a Moroccan exception in the Arab region. But, if we scratch the surface of this façade and look away from the media circus in Marrakesh, we quickly find a reality of green grabbing, devastating mining pollution, and the violation of social rights, land expulsion in the name of “sustainable development,” and—ironically—increased plunder of non-renewable energy sources powered by green technology. In other words, a politics of “accumulation by dispossession” benefiting multinationals and powerful companies with close ties to the monarchy. These politics usually take place outside big Moroccan cities like Marrakesh and far away from media attention. These politics are also increasingly resisted. Already in 2004, sociologist and feminist Fatima Mernissi starts her book Les Sindbads marocains with a passionate plea to shed an enduring prejudice: if we want to understand what is really going on in contemporary Moroccan society, we shouldn’t be looking at its urban centers but rather at the peripheries, at villages in the High Atlas or the desert of Zagora and Figuig.  

For those unacquainted with the Moroccan political context but eager to find out more, Imider, a small collection of seven villages three hundred kilometers south from Marrakesh might be good starting place (#300kmSouth). The people of Imider will receive you with open arms and heartwarming hospitality as I was privileged to experience recently. For more than five years now, residents of Imider occupy a water valve on Mount Albban. Confronted with economic marginalization, the dangerous pollution of their grazing lands, and a severe water shortage, the villagers collectively decided to hike up the mountain, and cut off the water supply to a nearby silvermine. They refused to leave ever since and continue to resist the mining company in what has become the longest sit-in in the modern history of Morocco. Since 20 August 2011, they established a permanent encampment on top of the hill to guard the valve and a water reservoir.

 

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[Figure 1: Mount Albban. Image by author.]

The mine is exploited by the Société Métallurgique d`Imiter (SMI), a subsidiary of Managem, a mining company with the royal family as its main shareholder. Since 1969, SMI exploits one of Africa’s most productive silver mines. It was originally located on the communal lands of Amazigh peasants living in Imider. In 2004, the mining company opened a new well close to Mount Albban, which has caused the village water supplies to drop significantly, affecting not only their daily household consumption but also their agricultural livelihoods in this arid region of Morocco. According to a report by the Global Amazigh Congress, the mine consumed 1,555 cubic meters of water per day, which is twelve times the village`s daily consumption. The report also condemsn the draining of toxic wastewaster of the land of the people of Imider.

 

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[Figure 2: The pipeline that used to provide SMI with water. Image by author.]

 

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[Figure 3: The water valve turned off by the people of Imider. Image by author.]


In their resistance, the villagers built several small cabins on top of the hill where they come together, cook, and keep watch day and night. Over the years, they have organized many collective marches from the villages to mount Albban and gathered in great numbers on the hilltop to demonstrate their willingness to continue the struggle and to come together as a community. They have established a general assembly according to a traditional indigenous model of decision-making (the Agraw), where concerns and future strategies are discussed. All decisions are made by consensus. The struggle in Imider incorporates principles such as radical democracy, decentralized decision-making, and gender equality. Moreover, some of their most active members in the camp have managed to attract international media attention through their connections and activities on social media. They have expressed their solidarity with other similar struggles like Standing Rock, and the protesters open up their camp to whomever wants to show solidarity and exchange ideas. When I arrived at the camp there were activists from Algeria, Tunisia, Kenya and the Navajo Nation.

 

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[Figure 4: Ground plan of the protest camp. Image by author.]

 
At first sight, especially given the specific timing of the protests in Imider, one might be inclined to believe that the sit-in on Mount Albban was a direct result or product of the region-wide uprisings, the so-called “Arab Spring,” and the rise of the 20 February Movement in Morocco. But, what if it was actually the other way around? What if the 20 February movement was actually a product of a broader historical process of social contestation in Morocco that has been developing for years, if not decades? And finally, what if the protests in Imider are actually the paradigmatic case here, pointing both to the continuity as well as the transformation of social protests in Morocco?

Visiting Imider is important for two reasons. First of all, the sit-in in Imider did not present some kind of new beginning but rather the continuation of a phenomenon that has been going on for a long time. The people of Imider call their struggle the “Movement On The Road 96,” referring to a sit-in in 1996 against the mining company that lasted for fourty-five days before it was violently dispersed by the police forces. Ever since, there have been continuous tensions and conflicts between the village and the company.

 

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[Figure 5: One of the cabins with the logo of the “Movement on The Road 96.” Image by author.]

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[Figure 6: Eco-feminist workshop at the protest camp. Image by author.]


But Imider also refers to a historical continuity on a wider scale. We have seen a consistent increase in socio-economic protest in Morocco over the past decade, especially in smaller towns and villages such as Beni Taydi (2001), Tamassint (2004), Al Hoceima (2005), Bouarfa (2006), Sefrou (2007), Sidi Ifni (2008), Beni Mellal (2009), Sidi Bouafif (2010), Gdeim Izik (2010), Khouribga (2011), and many others. A lot of these struggles fall under the radar, and tend to be overlooked because they are spontaneous, short-lived, and neglected by the mainstream media. This makes the growing “revolt of small towns” a difficult phenomenon to document. Yet, some of these “local” and “particularistic” struggles lasted for months, even years. Examples are the blockade of the local harbor in Sidi Ifni (2008), the boycott of the public water company in Bouarfa (2006-2009), the riots and strikes against the state-owned phosphate monopoly, Office Chérifien des Phosphates (OCP) in Khouribga (2011), and, of course, the occupation at Mount Albban.

The significant increase of these protests in the peripheries cannot be understood separately from the uneven relationship between town and country within the context of Morocco’s neoliberal political economy. Over the last three decades, Morocco is boosting the industrialization of coastal areas, speculative real estate development in large cities, investments in the country’s most famous tourist attractions, and, of course, the intensive exploitation of natural resources, while many smaller villages lack public infrastructure, and services, employment opportunities, and are often confronted with the side-effects of Morocco’s capitalist accumulation strategies (e.g. pollution). The contemporary social and ecological crisis in Morocco is thus not about poverty, pollution or marginalization as such, but about contemporary form of global capitalism, class politics, and relations of power and exploitation that produce poverty, inequality and environmental catastrophe.

A second reason why it is important to visit Imider has to do with the new form of social protest it represents. After the repression and “pacification” of the massive urban riots of the 1980s, the struggle shifted to other forms of social mobilization, other forms of contestation and other geographical locations. Since the early 1990s, Morocco has witnessed an explosion of local and grassroots associations spread around the country. The new space—and limits—created by the so-called alternance process, Morocco’s political reform process initiated in the 1990s, allowed new actors (human rights movements, neighborhood associations, women’s movements, unemployed graduates, etc.) to mobilize outside party-politics, and militant trade-unionism.

 

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[Figure 7: The Agraw of 9 November 2016 just ended. Image by author.]\"\"
 

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[Figure 8: Film-night at the protest camp. Activists show, amongst others, a video with a message to COP22 
they made with the people of Imider, which can be accesed here. On the right, we can discern the picture of one
of the first political prisoners of Imider (Mustafa Ouchtoubane), who spent more than three years in prison.
In total, thirty people were arrested. Still three of them are in jail. Image by author.]


At the same time, Imider created its own space for different kinds of struggles to intersect: a struggle for social rights, indigenous rights, and environmental rights. What’s more, the people of Imider specifically emphasize that these different struggles are inseparable within the context of contemporary global capitalism, and authoritarian politics. They are a model, just like the struggle at Standing Rock, for the direction of social struggle today. As they stated in one of their pamphlets:

“To talk about sustainable development is no longer enough, it’s a word worn out and abused: from the great multinational-companies to the small factories, it’s used as an alibi. Today it’s necessary to point out that the limits of the so-called sustainability, in fact, can’t be imposed by external criteria to the social, cultural and environmental context in which this sustainability must, at the local level, be realized. Today [it] is necessary to create a direct and continual communication between the resources of the territory and the demands, at every level, of its inhabitants. (…) Our protest action strongly affirms that this is the direction we want to follow. (…), in our vision there is the space for the care and protection of those fundamental common goods like water, land, culture and local economies, basic rights: commons that must be accessible and shared in an equal way by everyone, because they are the basis of (…) life itself and of its continuity (…).”   

On my way back from the camp in Albban, I was listening to a talk show about the COP22, and the problem of climate change on the Moroccan radio. There was a broad consensus among the interviewer and the interviewees that main problem with regard to Morocco was the lack of education and awareness among ordinary people. The solution lied in teaching them to be “responsible” citizens. Not a word on the environmental and social violations of large mining companies, nothing about the daily politics of dispossession by large corporations. It was repugnant after what I witnessed at mount Allban.

The people of Imider, in contrast, taught me that they know best how to preserve their land and the environment, how sustainable development does not only include climate change, but also climate justice. They know very well that climate justice is about much more than just individual behavior. They are fighting for it every day, and they are an example for the rest of us.