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

8/14/2019 Colored Identity, The Politics and Materiality of ID Cards in Palestine/Israel / Helga Tawil-Souri

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6 7Social Text 107 Vol. 29, No. 2 Summer 2011

DOI 10.1215/01642472- 1259488 2011 Duke University Press

I jealously watched Dr. Tamar lling in Nuras . . . Jerusalem passport .Neither Nura [my dog] nor Dr. Tamar [the veterinarian] realized howdamn ser ious I was about replacing Nuras photograph with mine. I dontthink either of them knew how difcult or impossible it is for Palestiniansto 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 thecar or go to Jerusalem all by herself.

Suad Amiry, Sharon and My Mother- in- Law: Ramallah Diaries

Hani, Sana, and I are waiting at a checkpoint in the West Bank hopingto cross into East Jerusalem. In 2002, this is still the good old dayswhen passing checkpoints hasnt yet turned into a mechanical sifting ofsubstandard beings through concrete barricades and remote- controlledturnstiles. Men, women, children, locals, internationals, and sometimesanimals, too, stand together chaotically. I wonder if others who are wait-ing are eyeing my American passport with envy, distrust, or perhaps evenhatred; I will likely pass without much hassle and faster than most aroundme. Hani, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, is shoving the corners of his

Colored IdentityThe Politics and Materiality

of ID Cards in Palestine/Israel

Helga Tawil- Souri


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6 8 Tawil-Souri Politics and Materiality of ID Cards in Palestine/Israel

blue ID card between his teeth like an oversize toothpick; and I imaginehis 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 IDcard nervously. In her case, suspicious gazes would be radiating from thesoldiers. Our friend Mazen, born in Gaza and living in the West Banksince the early 1990s, doesnt dare come with us he avoids a ll check-points, whether those to enter Israel or the hundreds that separate onePalestinian area from another for fear of being evicted to Gaza withhis orange ID card in hand. Sana, Hani, and Mazens ID colors do notdenote a fashion preference, but a color- coded bureaucracy which issuesPalestinians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem, and Israel dif-ferent cards. The cards themselves, issued by Israeli authorities, are alloff- white but referred to in Arabic as colored, denoting the plastic sleevethey 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 militar ily unti l they accept their subordina-tion. This is not a chimerical claim of ethnic cleansing 1 but a reality thatcan be analyzed as a technical problem of the geopolitical conditions ofPalestinians status. The Israeli state practices, and arguably perfects, alogic of territorial and population control and monitoring. One form ishigh- tech: unmanned aerial drones, X- ray machines, remote- controlledcameras, radars, and surveillance techniques that instill fear and awe; 2 another form is physically and geographically violent: wal ls, fences, check-points, turnstiles, set tlements, bypass roads, ghter jets, bulldozers, andmachine guns. 3 Moreover, it is no secret that, as Nils A. Butenschon, UriDavis, and Manuel Hassassian state, the mere existence of the Palestin-ian people is a major strategic impediment to the realization of classicalZionist ambitions; and thus, exclusion forms the logical background ofa segregational policy that erects defensive walls of legal, institutional, andphysical kinds to prevent Palestinians access to land, inst itutions, or otherrights that could threaten Jewish hegemony. 4

These realities seem to form a cognit ive dissonance: the Israeli state

is accused of trying to eradicate Palestinians, and yet the state institutesan impressive infrastructure of control based on Palestinians continuedpresence in Palestine/Israel. Against the background of transfer, fragmen-tation, and erasure exists a bureaucratic system of keeping Palestinianswhere they are: subjects of sustained, if changing, forms of colonialism,occupation, and oppression. In other words, there may very well be apractice of fragmenting, isolating, transferring, and erasing Palestinians,but they need to be counted, documented, monitored, and controlled rst.The clearest way to grapple with th is disconnect is to consider the peculiar


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6 9Social Text 107 Summer 2011

experience of passing a checkpoint, which has everything to do with a not- so- insignicant piece of paper. The checkpoint as a site of uneven powerrelations serving to fragment Palestinians has been analyzed in depth. 5 Akey feature that is most evident at checkpoints yet more fundamental inbordering Palestinians remains under theorized: the low- tech, visible,and tactile means of power that is the ID card (see gs. 1 and 2). Prosaic tothose subjected to its regime, the ID card remains obscure to those outsidewho discuss Israeli occupation and Palestinian resistance.

The identication card (by which I mean specically the physicalcard, referred to by Palestinians as hawiya ) is the space in which Palestin-

ians meet, confront, tolerate, and sometimes challenge the Israeli state.6

In fact, for Palestinians, ID cards are mundane things that ultimatelydetermine much of their political, economic, and social li fe, and not onlyat checkpoints.

In what follows, I trace the development of the modern- day bureau-cracy of the Palestinian ID card since the establishment of Israel. As theyare around much of the world, ID cards in Palestine/ Israel are physical andvisible instruments of a widespread low- tech surveillance mechanism anda principal means for discriminating (positively and negatively) subjects

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


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privileges and basic rights. I approach ID cards as mundane manifesta-tions of state processes that do not operate as a separate reality behind apiece of paper but as symbolic and material resources on which ID cardsdraw and that permeate everyday life in powerful and paradoxical ways.Vital in the control and differentiation of Palestinian populations acrossthe territory of Palestine/ Israel, ID cards discipline subjects based in largepart on the Israeli states logic of securitization. I further suggest that IDcards function as a form of media: mediating social and political relation-ships, contradictory, interpreted in various ways. What further makes IDcards unique and an important site of study in the Palestinian/ Israeli

case is that they matter. The materiality of Palestinians ID cards is theirmost important and resonant aspect, whether in their different colors,in simultaneously including and excluding Palestinians from the Israelistate, or in interpretations and representations they have engendered. Asspecial kinds of material objects, they allow us to rethink Israeli colonialmechanisms and Palestinian negotiations of these, and they bring intofocus questions of citizenship, borders, and the institut ional materialityof the state apparatus in everyday life. 7

Figure 2. Palestinian women not permitted to enter East Jerusalem for Ramadan prayer at the

Qalandia Checkpoint near Ramallah. Photograph courtesy of the author


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Colored Distinctions

ID cards have played a central role in Palestinian life since the begin-ning of the twentieth century. Palestinians were subjects of the OttomanEmpire, which issued Palestinians travel documents. Under the BritishMandate 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- Israeli war, Palestinians inside thenew Israeli state were issued ID cards, while those in the West Bankand the Gaza Strip were given temporary documents from Jordanianand Egyptian authorities, respectively. After Israels occupation in 1967,Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip wereissued different cards by Israel. Today, all adults in Palestine/Israel areissued ID cards required to be carried at all times. But not all cards arecreated equal.

Mandatory state- issued ID cards were introduced in Israel in 1949after the November 1948 census. 9 All Jews born or residing in Palestineprior to the establishment of the state of Israel or arriving from elsewherewere given Israeli citizenship and national ID cards in 1949. This is stillthe case. Today, all Jewish- Israeli citizens hold blue ID cards whether theylive 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 Israelbetween 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 notbeing in possession of one of the newly- issued identity cards, 11 as thatwould be terms for loss of property ownership and in some cases expul-sion. Israeli ID cards were issued to the 165,000 or so Palestinians notexpelled from within Israel the population that comes to be referred toby the Israeli state as Arab- Israelis, by themselves as Palestin ians fromthe inside or 1948 Palestin ians. They were granted ID cards and citi-zenship not to incorporate them into Israeli civic and polit ical life, but to

prevent the return of the 750,000-plus Palestinian refugees who had beenexpelled or who had ed, then considered absentees and thus deniedIsraeli 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 andthe West Bank were issued temporary Jordanian passports, downgraded totravel documents in 1988 after Jordan relinquished its claim to the WestBank. 12 Those in the Gaza Strip were issued Egyptian laissez- passer docu-ments. 13 After Israels occupation in 1967, al l Palestin ians in the Occupied


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Palestinian Terr itories (OPTs), but not East Jerusalem, were issued orangeID cards. Any Palestinian from the OPTs barred from entry into Israel(usual ly, but not always, a person with a previous ar rest record) was issueda green card. Orange or green, these did not serve as travel documents,nor did they grant Palestinians any political r ights, nor, of course, Israelicitizenship. Rather, they would render Palestinians legible, to borrow

James Scot ts term, to Israeli military forces primarily for purposes ofcontrol and surveillance. 14

After the Oslo Accords, the responsibility of issuing ID cards toPalestinian residents in the OPTs was handed over to the PalestinianAuthority (PA) in 1994, but with approval and enforcement solely the deci-sion of the Israeli state apparatus one of many examples of the charadeof prosthetic sovereignty obtained by the PA. 15 The new carrying caseswere green, with Arabic script and PA insignia. This is the kind of cardSana carries. 16

Hani and his Palestinian counterparts in East Jerusalem remainexceptional cases. Although Israel annexed Jerusalem in 1967 and con-tinues to expand the citys municipal boundaries, it did not, and still doesnot, incorporate the citys Palestinians as Israeli citizens, granting theminstead temporary residency (a small number have been granted Israelicitizenship over the past four decades). To travel abroad they use tempo-rary Jordanian passports or Israeli- issued travel permits. Since the statusof Jerusalem was postponed pending nal status negotiations, which areyet to happen, and since it was not included as part of any Palestiniansovereign area in the Oslo peace process, the PA is not permitted togrant Palestinian Jerusalemites Palestinian citizenship or ID cards. 17 MostPalestinian Jerusalemites thus remain citizenship- less. 18 As residents ofIsrael, they are also issued blue ID cards that look identical on the outsideto those mandated to Israeli citizens. But one should not judge an ID cardpurely 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. Thereare some differentiating details, however. Present- day blue ID cards are inHebrew 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. Mostimportant, however, is the unique Israeli label of national ity, particu larlyas a means of distinguishing between blue ID cardholders since by virtueof holding a different color, OPT Palestinians are al ready 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 non- Palestinian (for all orange and green cardholders, nationality is Arab). 19 In the case of Palestinian Jerusalemites, nationality is Arab with the furtherdistinction 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 Israelipolitical and national identity, it might help to metaphorically think of blueID cards in different hues (see table 1). 21 From the beginning, Israel wasestablished through an inborn distinction between country, statehood, andcitizenship whereby the national identity of Israels citizens and the stateitself were determined by religious identity. 22 Orange, green, or blue; inIsrael, Jerusalem, the West Bank, or the Gaza Strip; with a PA or Israeliseal all 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 ter-ritorial management whose roots stem from a longer tradition of a keycomponent of state power and control. 23 ID cards share a common historywith other systems of identity registration, such as censuses and pass-ports, as modernist instruments of control connected to a states desire forsurveillance, itself couched in a universal, nondiscriminatory language ofsecurity, safety, and technological/bureaucratic advancement. Identica-tion documents reect a states need to supervise growth, supervise thespatial distribution and social composition of its population, automatethe deprivation of and/or entitlement to privileges and rights to circuitsof civility ranging from suffrage to education, and control movement intoand out of its territory. 24

In Israel, the issuing of differentiating ID cards stems from a largerstrategy of accounting for and controlling different populations differently

and unevenly . As Anis Kassim notes of the larger project of the state ofIsrael, so it is for the practice of issuing differentiating ID cards: If thecreation of a Jewish state was intended to normalize the status of Jews, italso ironical ly 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 tox identity to their subjects generally, States must embrace societies inorder to penetrate them effectively. Individuals who remain beyond theembrace of the state necessarily represent a limit on its penetration. Thereach of the state, in other words, cannot exceed its grasp . 26 If Israel isgoing to penetrate and embrace Palestinians, whether as a means ofsurveilling or eradicating them, they need to be within Israels grasp rst.Adriana Kemp describes this contradict ion as follows: While the ethnona-tional drive is to exclude and segregate the Other, the governmentalitylogic strives toward an ever more total incorporation of the minorities assubjects of the bureaucratic, disciplinary, and administrative mechanismsof the state. 27 ID cards provide Israel the means to render Palestiniansmore legible, accessible, embraceable, for the security interests of the


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74 Tawil-Souri Politics and Materiality of ID Cards in Palestine/Israel

Table 1 ID card differences for Jews and Arabs (not including Druze, Bedouin,

and other citizens of Israel)

Nationali ty noted Citizenship noted

ID color on card on card Citizenship status

Blue Jewish t rue- blue Jewish Israeli No terms or

limitations

Arab Arab- blue Arab Israeli No terms orlimitations *

Increasing threat

of having to proveones loyalty tothe state

Jerusalem green- Arab Blank None * blue; issued toArab resident of Listed as Jordanian Small % haveEast Jerusalem only until 2002 Israeli citizensh ip;

none permitted

Palestiniancitizenship

GreenWest Bank Arab None listed Palestin ian *

Only for thoseresiding in the WestBank prior to 1993or born to parentswho are alreadycitizens

OrangeGaza Strip Arab None listed Palestin ian *

Only for those residing in theGaza Strip prior to1993 or born toparents who arealready citizens

* There are too many exceptions and/or special cases to provide full details here. See note 40 for thepermit regime; note 17 for citizenship status of OPT Palestinians and Palestinian Jerusalemites.


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Permit required

to visit, travel

Permitted to Permitted to through, work, and/or

reside in travel to Travel document live in East Jerusalem?

Israel, settlements Israel, settlements Israeli passport No(and illega l (and illegaloutposts) outposts), majority

of the West Bank

Israel Israel Israeli passport No *

Impossible for Arab

citizens to relocateto/live in East

Jerusalem; nolimitations onvisiting or working

East Jerusalem only Israel Israeli travel permit No * or temporary

Increasingly subject Jordanian passport/ Must have exitto eviction travel permit permit renewed if leaving city for

prolonged time

Parts of the West Parts of the West PA passport, Yes *Bank only Bank only Jordanian temporary

passport or travel Under no circum-document stances is a West

Banker permit tedto (legally) live inEast Jerusalem

Gaza Strip only Gaza Strip only PA passport, Yes * Egyptian laissez-

passer Travel in/out ofGaza closed since2005; open only toexceptional cases(e.g., medicalcondition)


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state, while simultaneously discriminating Palestinians from Jews, thusensuring that the former remain unequal citizens. In Israel, citizenshipdoes not serve as an inclusionary mechanism but embodies the st ructureof social and political inequal ity. 28 Moreover, since not all Palestinians areIsraeli citizens, differentiated ID cards of all colors further illustrate Israelsethnic and territorial segregation of Palestinians.

This double process of inclusion and exclusion is the case for all Pal-estinians, albeit in di fferent forms and colors, across Palestine/Israel. ThatIsrael issues differentiating ID cards to all Palestinians brings to questionthe very nature of the state, its territorial boundaries, its supposed demo-cratic ethos, and its role and responsibility as occupier. Torpey maintainsthat the contemporary use of internal passports (which function in thesame manner as green and orange cards here) to control movement withinstate boundaries bespeaks illegitimate, authoritar ian governments lordingit over subdued or terrorized populations. Internal passports and passes

constitute a reversion to practices generally abandoned by democraticnation- states by the twentieth century. 29 When administrative controlson movement operate within a state, and especially when this is done to thedetriment of a par ticular negatively privileged group the Palestinianshere we can rel iably expect to nd an authoritarian state (or worse). 30 While the Israeli regime is not classically authoritarian, there is ongoingdebate as to what kind of oppressive regime it is: apartheid, ethnocratic,racist, or colonial. 31

One may object that these processes are not happening withinIsrael but in the Palestinian terr itories. This point is moot. First, Israeli stateauthorities issue all cards, whether in Israel proper or the depths of Pal-estinian territories, whether directly through the Israeli Minist ry of Inte-rior or behind the masquerade of an autonomous PA apparatus (see note15). Second, occupation should not be understood as a temporary projectexternal to the Israeli state and thus by any means over, but as essential toIsraels continued system of control. The Oslo peace agreements helpednormalize the occupation, resulting in a Palestin ian landscape that hasexperienced 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 wasone, have ever been stated, dened, or agreed on. A border is erected;but it is not between Israeli and Palestinian territory it is between Jewishand Arab people . Green, orange, or not true- blue, ID cards embracePalestinians everywhere and anywhere in Palestine/Israel.

Once ID cards become mandatory (in Israel, between 1949 and1952; in the OPTs, since 1967), they become, in the rst order, mark-ers 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 andthe Palestinian proto- state. As much as ID cards have been necessary forthe Israeli state to control and surveil Palestinian populations, they alsohave become necessary since the Oslo agreements for the operation of PAbureaucracy (again, th is dynamic has not decreased Israeli controls ; rather,Palestinians must now contend with two oppressive regimes 33 ). Within thepost- Oslo OPTs, ID cards are necessary not just for crossing checkpointsor trespassing within Palestinian areas, but for all necessities of life andinternal bureaucracy. For example, ID cards are mandatory for nancialneeds: opening a bank account, withdrawing money from a teller, applyingfor a credit card, applying for a job. Any governmental and/or civi l trans-action requires an ID: registering a marr iage, a death, or a birth; accessinghealth care benets; high school matriculation; paying taxes; obtaining apermit for private construct ion needs. In order to vote in parliamentary or

presidential elections, Palestinian citizens must submit their ID cards toPA election authorities. Refugees who need to make any formal request tothe United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palest ine Refugees in theNear East (UNRWA) whether food supplies or school regist ration wil lbe asked for their hawiya, above and beyond their UNRWA- issued cards. 34 In short, l ife without an ID for any Palestinian adult would be impossible,for it provides a citizen the necessary access to circuits of civility (nodifferent 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, therebycontaining them within specic boundaries and rendering them depen-dent on the Israeli state apparatus for the authorization to move acrosscertain spaces inside and between the OPTs. 36 Moreover, green and orangecard holders are requi red to apply for a permit to enter East Jerusalem andIsrael (discussed briey below). Jewish Israelis are given blue cards no mat-ter where they reside and do not require permits; thus they have differentlaws that apply to them and that are not infringed by the same territorialboundaries. 37 Jewish Israeli settlers and out- posters especially enjoy akind of mobile sovereignty accompanying them wherever they go or reside

in Palestine/Israel. Put another way, the truer blue an ID card is, themore its holder is granted free mobility (and rights and protection by theIsraeli state). One might better understand now why Suad Amiry, holderof a green ID and living in Ramal lah, was green with envy as her dog wasgranted a Jerusalem passport and why she tried to deploy her dog andher dogs documents to cross into East Jerusalem. Amiry, like all holdersof 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 andindividuals, the encasing mechanisms that determine the perimeters ofPalestinians open- air prisons.

The way to understand the cognitive dissonance between Israelsplans to erase or stultify Palestinians and simultaneously to mandate cardsis to recognize the practice as a colonial one. Whether in North America,Australia, or South Africa, conquered inhabitants have been crowdedinto reservations, their political communities destroyed, their economicpractices rendered dependent and/or peripheralized, and their activitiesmanaged through bureaucratic mechanisms similar to current- day Israelsin order to facilitate the exploitation of their natural resources, land, andlabor. The issuance of separate ID cards and permit passes, which alsofunctioned as labor cards, was key to South Africas apartheid regime, forexample. 39 Unfortunately, human history is r ich with such examples; how-ever, in Palestine/Israel this practice has not vanished into history books but

continues in fu ll force. In fact, over the years, increasing levels of bureau-cracy that restrain Palestinians have been added to the ID regime.

Back in 2002, as we waited at the checkpoint, Sana was holdingher green ID card. I have not mentioned that she was also holding atassrih (Arabic for permit). Not long after the 1967 occupation, Israelordered implementation of a collective permit to enter Israel, mandatoryfor all Palestinians, which metamorphosed into the current individualpermit regime after the rst intifada. In 1989, the army demanded thatworkers from Gaza carry a magnetic card as a prerequisite to obtainingpermission to enter Israel or settlements where a substantial number ofGazans used to be employed, the magnetic cards indicating that the sub-ject 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 th rough. Since t hen, magneticcards have become required for all OPT Palestin ians as a precondition toapply for a tassrih. 40 Today, to get to East Jerusalem, Sana packs her pursethick with documents: her green hawiya, her tassrih, and her magneticcard which does not guarantee that t he soldier at the checkpoint wil l let

her through, however.There exists a paradox in that the ID card may provide a Pales-

tinian the means of mobility, but also, often, im mobility. Suad Amirysanecdote demonstrates the mobil ity afforded to those holding the rightpapers and here to her dog ! but also the cruel arbitrariness of a systemwhose power often seems to lie with low- level actors, from teen age soldiersto Israeli veterinarians who issue Israeli papers to Palestinian pets. ForPalestinians, the implications of holding a hawiya (and a magnetic card and


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tassrih for those who need to enter Israel) are centra l to their li fe chances,as these items enable them to move around and gain access to resources andrights. Yet, as Tobias Kelly argues: The implications of holding identitydocuments are always partial and unstable . . . [and] the result is that evenas people try to gain a measure of security through holding the right docu-ments, these same documents also mean that their l ives are shot throughwith fear and uncertainty. 41 In other words, here differentiated ID cardsfunction both as necessities for bare life and as a means of condemn-ing Palestin ians to their lesser status in a perpetual state of exception.On one hand, Palestinians need ID cards for every aspect of life, frommovement (in their own areas, not simply into East Jerusalem and Israel)to health care and retr ieval of income; on the other hand, once mandatedIDs, Palestin ians become subjects of Israeli bureaucratic domination thatalready serves the purpose of segregating them and may very well resultin transferring them.

Recall Mazen, who was born in Gaza but conned to Ramallah since1993. His fear of being evicted to Gaza has taken on heightened saliencesince Israel passed a military order in April 2010 dening anyone in theWest Bank without a permit as an inltrator, rendering Mazen a criminaloffender liable to eviction and seven years incarceration. 42 Meanwhile, asAmiry insinuates in hiding her dogs passport from her friend, shouldHani decide to marry his green ID cardholding West Bank girlfriendand have kids with her, neither her, nor their kids, would be permitted toobtain Jerusalem ID cards, let alone visit. Their kids would not qualifyfor a green hawiya either not because the PA doesnt acknowledge thatPalestinians are born to Jerusalemites with Israeli papers, but becausethe Israel i state apparatus doesnt permit it. Should Hani choose to move tothe West Bank to live with his future wife and kids, his privileged JerusalemID would be revoked and he would be expelled from Jerusalem and Israel.Even if evicted, as a Palestinian Jerusalemite Hani would qualify neitherfor a green ID card nor for Palestinian citizenship (see note 17). The veryreal threats hanging over Mazen, Hani, his girlfriend, and their unbornchildren symbolize the difculty and often impossibility of Palestiniansto move, live, work, and/or love across Palestinian territories, the enforced

fragmentation of Palestinians from each other, the menacing prospect ofeviction from Palestine/ Israel altogether, and the determinative importanceof an ID card.

The ID card regime, especially postpeace process, is a contactpoint through which Palestinians encounter the Israeli state, a mechanismthrough which Palestinian spatiality, territoriality, and corporeality aremore penetrable, and penetrated, by the Israeli colonial regime. ID cardshave become one of the most tactile, everyday, mundane, yet fundamental


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Palestinian experiences of carrying Israels terms of dominat ion in onesback pocket or purse. It should come as no surprise, then, that ID cardsare also matters of negotiation, interpretation, and resistance.

Media and Material Artifacts

Write it down!I am an ArabMy identity card number is fty thousand. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Write it down!I am an ArabI have a name without a titlePatient in a countryWhere people are enraged

My rootsWere entrenched before the birth of timeAnd before the opening of the erasBefore the pines, and the olive treesAnd before the grass grew. . . . . . . . . . .

Are you satised with my status?I have a name without a title!

Write it down!I am an ArabYou have stolen the orchardsOf my ancestorsAnd the landWhich I cultivatedAlong with my childrenAnd you left nothing for usExcept for these rocks. . . . . . . . .

Write it down on the top of the rst page:I do not hate peopleNor do I encroachBut if I become hungryThe usurpers esh will be my foodBeware . . .Beware . . .Of my hungerAnd my anger!

Mahmoud Darwish, Identity Card


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81Social Text 107 Summer 2011

ID cards and cases are supplied by the Israeli state apparatus; thus onecannot, in any easy manner, and certainly not legally, carry an ID in asleeve of a different color. Passing through Ramot Allon checkpoint in2005 on a Palestinian- run bus, I was sitting next to an OPT-Palestinianwho had borrowed a friends blue card case. As this particular checkpointis within Israel- dened Jerusalem municipal boundaries, soldiers do notalways 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 caseclosed on his lap. The soldier strode through the bus, eyed everyone (whohad dutifully, without being asked, taken out their IDs), strutted out, andlet us th rough. When I asked my neighbor what would have happened hadthe soldier asked to see inside the case, he grinned and gestured havinghis throat slit. 44 Knowing t hat the cards color- case matters, my neighborwas attempting to erase his green marking perhaps an understandablegamble for gaining mobil ity.

In the words of Michel Foucault, an ID card, as a modern system ofidentication, xes identity to a bureaucratic need, places individuals ina eld of surveillance . . . [and] situates them in a network of writing: itengages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and x them. 45

There is a difference between Foucaults notion of governmental ity, whichdraws attention to the objects, logics, rationalities, and technologies ofrule and which tends to be analyzed largely as monological 46 (the wayI have described the ID card in the previous section e.g., the powerattributed to it is that it is issued by Israeli authorities), and a dialogicalapproach, which stresses nonsystematic, indeterminate, unintended, andalternative readings of those objects. These two perspectives convergein the mundane practices of ID cards. As Nadia Abu- Zahra puts it inreference to Palestine/Israel, IDs are par t of the materiality of coercionand control. 47 It is this network of writing that Foucault mentions the materiality that both he and Abu- Zahra speak of that I draw on inthis section.

ID cards matter . To begin with, I am arguing that in Palestine /Israelthe hawiyas cardness is extremely signicant. Second, I am suggestingthat we think of ID cards as material objects that are mediated and thus

interpreted. The former is largely monological, the latter dia logical.First, the materiality of ID cards determines that is, gives meaning

to, provides a l imit on, xes conclusively the identity of and bordersaround Palestinians and determines their ensuing rights and privileges orlack thereof. ID cards in Palestine/ Israel are not incidental to actual expe-rience, as they may be elsewhere (I certainly do not fear for my life whena policeman pulls me over for speeding in New York, where I now live,and I hand him my expired California dr ivers 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 decidewhether one is gui lty, should be taken to prison, or should be evicted. APalestinian can shout at, plead, or even ir t with a soldier; or, like Amiry,hope that the soldier is a dog- lover and will let one through. But there isno recourse to appeal or intervene in the decision of the soldier, who doesnot have to explain or substant iate the decision and 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 toIsraeli soldiers, police ofcers, border patrols, or other ofcials, the cardsbecome the physical substance through which their relationship, as well asthe relationship between the invisible apparatus and Palestinians, is medi-ated. The ID serves as a point of physical and tangible contact betweenPalestinians and the Israeli state, the space where the Israeli logic andbureaucracy of population control, state securitization, and surveillance

meets Palestinians. In some cases the physical contact is humiliating: whenPalestinians are taken away in a raid from their homes at night, they areoften escorted in nothing but their underwear, in which their ID cards aresafely tucked (see g. 3). This is not simply a forceful revelation of the IDas the space where the Israeli state apparatus touches the Palestinian bodyas an ar tifact that matters, but of the IDs material centrality as a markerof all Palestinians bare life. Here, the differentiation within and betweencolored IDs is the persons ascribed status, which cannot be establishedwithout reference to a piece of paper that constructs and sustains thesubjects identity for administrative purposes the soldier escorting thetwo men certainly recognizes this as he permits the men little other thantheir IDs. As one Palestinian woman tells me: Unlike mothers elsewhere,when my sons leave the house, I dont make sure they are wearing jack-ets or have cash on them. The most important thing is to have their IDcards. 48 The mother, the soldier, and the two men taken away all graspthat identity is xed to a person but also xed on a piece of paper withoutwhich one cannot exist, neither l iterally nor metaphorically. The ID cardis a material art ifact of utmost importance. It is also a mediated sphere inwhich the card itself is the locus of negotiation.

In a secondary meaning of materiality, I am positing ID cards as aform of media. In doing so, I am not suggesting we gaze at them as colorfulwritten documents and nothing more. Media and material arti facts are notabstract things but a signicant part of the wider institutional and politicalcontext in which they are produced, take effect, and evoke meaning. Inother words, an ID card is a space and moment of remediation.

Contradictory, polysemic, mediating different social and politi-cal relationships, material objects of a particular culture at a particulartime . . . there are numerous ways in which ID cards function as media. I


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am using the term media in a fundamental and broad manner to mean a toolused to store and deliver information or data, a mode of communicationthat incorporates multiple forms of information content and processing. I

also intend media as a mechanism by which we learn and internalize val-ues, beliefs, and norms of (our) culture and as a material device in whichare encoded the dominant beliefs and norms of society. Media are alsobound up with the process of social relations, mediating our relationshipwith var ious institutions, affecting how we relate to the world of politics,serving as powerful socializing/politicizing agents. Approached in thisway, the inuence of media, in content and in process , on contemporarylife 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 communicat ion keeping inmind that the state apparatus determines their meaning. In some instances,this can serve to increase the frustration and alienation of the subalterngroup: the interaction between Palestinians and the Israeli state apparatustakes place mostly through an inst rumental and tacti le form of color andpaper rather than through human interchange. Conversely, ID cards canbecome afrmative symbols, for example in serving ritual needs of thestate: the Israeli state holds ceremonies in which new Jewish immigrantsare bestowed their blue ID cards by a leading government ofcial. 49 Simi-

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


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larly, those aboard the Freedom Flotilla in summer 2010, who attemptedto break the Gaza siege but were captured by Israeli commandos, wereoffered Palestinian passports and honorary cit izenship by the PA. 50

Cultural, ideological, political, and economic all at once, the produc-tion and verication of identity documents open up spaces for contestationand disruption. As discursive constructs, ID cards are subject to interpreta-tion by government ofcials, police ofcers, border ofcials, and soldierson behalf of the state. But that also means that ID cards are contested textsopen to differing interpretations on the part of their bearers (in this casebarers, too). Their materiality takes on different emotional and polit icalmeaning for Palestinians.

The clearest fashion in which alternative, and sometimes anti-hegemonic, readings are manifested is through forms of art that IDs haveinspired. The most famous of these is Mahmoud Darwishs 1964 poemBatiqat Hawiya (Identity Card), regrettably translated into English

as I am an Arab.51

In it, the poet/hero deantly demands that an Israelisoldier record the formers facts, star ting with his ID card number: Writeit down! / I am an Arab / My identity card number is fty t housand. Inwhat ensues, the poet/hero accuses the state, th rough the soldier, for Pal-estinian losses: You have stolen the orchards / . . . / And you left nothingfor us; and he ends with a threat: Beware . . . / Of my hunger / And myanger! The prosaic object of the ID card is transformed into the subjectof poetry as well as a political statement. Batiqat Hawiya has come tosymbolize Palestinian poetry of resistance, becoming a rallying cry ofrebellion and a protest song (and eventually resulting in Darwishs housearrest and subsequent exile). In highl ighting the very material ar tifact thatproves Palestin ians existence, the poem chal lenges the Zionist account ofPalestine as a land without people and Golda Meirs famous edict, statedin 1969 when she was the Israeli prime minister: There is no such thing asa Palestinian people. One can read all art forms that IDs have inspired asnegating both claims that Palestinians do not exist or have not existed onPalestinian land. That it is the Israeli state that mandates these ID cardsmakes the poem an even more poignant confrontation to the Zionist nar-rative. 52 The gesture of the poet/heros demand that an Israeli soldier wr ite

down the bearers ID number is i tself a challenge to the soldiers and byextension, t he mi litarys and the states authority.

In December 2007, the British graftist Banksy, whose work hasadorned some of the security wall in the West Bank, stenciled a graf-to on a Bethlehem building of an Israeli soldier checking a Christmasdonkeys ID card (g. 4). Situated next to Manger Square, the piece wasa sardonic take on the politics surrounding the city of Jesus birth andis part of a series titled Santas Ghetto. The grafto has been paintedover after some residents found it offensive, construing it to suggest that


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Palestinians are equal to donkeys. Banksys mural gets to the heart of theissue no matter how it is interpreted (Palestinians are donkeys; Palestiniansare underappreciated hardworking mules; Israeli soldiers are asses thatcant tell a human being from an animal; no creature can move withoutIsraeli permission; and so forth.). In Palestine/Israel, the ID card regimeis signicant and capricious; the grafto also highlights its simultaneouspervasiveness, arbitrariness, and absurdity. Maybe Banksys grafto isnta joke at all, since an imals, too, are subjects of the state. One only needsto remember Amirys envy of her dogs passport. Her story is absurdlycomical, but is no laughing matter.

A more serious example of ID card art lies outside the Aida refugeecamp in the West Bank in a Palestinian- painted mural (g. 5). The muraldraws on important facets of Palestinian identity: the birth date is 1948 ; thefather is a prisoner ; the mother is listed as murdered ; the grandfather simplyas Palestinian ; and the registration status is UN Resolution 194 , referringto refugees right of return. Historical elements that have shaped Palestin-ian collect ive identity are reformulated on the imagined hawiya, one thatis more appropriate in what it chooses to include than is an Israeli- issuedcard. Rather than denoting the bearers nationality, citizenship, and reli-

Figure 4. Banksy grafto of a donkeys ID card being checked by an Israeli soldier, Bethlehem.

Photograph courtesy of the author


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gion, the imagined card simply states Palestinian a word that doesntappear anywhere on any mandated card. That it is in Engl ish and Arabicfurther suggests that as a form of representational politics the mural isaimed at a global audience; moreover, unl ike a real card, the mural cardincludes no Hebrew, and thus furt her challenges the Israeli regime. Themural implies that despite being imprisoned, murdered, and abandoned bythe international community, Palestinians continue to exist. Conversely,the mural incorporates the historical realities that have erased Palestin-ians: theyre incarcerated, theyre murdered, they have no internationalrights, they were born when their state was not created. But notice that thebearers age is left open as a question mark, suggesting both the continuedstate of limbo in which Palestinians exist and continued resistance againstPalestinians erasure.

The mural and Darwishs poem are Palestinian assert ions of identityand expressions of challenge that are attempting to establish a Palestinianpresence, however limited, in the face of an Israeli bureaucracy premised

Figure 5. Mural of an imaginary ID card outside Aida refugee camp near Bethlehem.

Photograph courtesy of the author


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on its denial. There are plenty of similar expressions, such as roadblocklms, which highlight the sal ience of ID cards in everyday Palestinian l ife.The feature lms Divine Intervention (dir. Elia Suleiman, 2002) and RanasWedding: Another Day in Jerusalem (dir. Hany Abu- Assad, 2002) portraylovers who have to negotiate their possession of differing IDs and who thusare forced to meet or to hold their wedding at a checkpoint. The cinemaverit lm Like Twenty Impossibles (dir. Annemarie Jacir, 2003) depicts thedisintegration of a lm crew and the lm itself after being stopped byIsraeli soldiers who treat each crew member differently based on differ-ent identication documents (green: beaten, blindfolded, and detained;

Jerusalem: yel led at and registered on a security l ist; t rue- blue: released;American passport: ignored). 53 These representations stress how ID cardshave been renegotiated and reappropriated by their subjects, conjuring upcomplex 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 mediatechnology, this is often termed unintended consequences, suggestingthat technologies are not simply determined by their creators or theirarchitecture, but by end users, too. For example, in June 2006 a Jewishsettler was abducted in Gaza. Short ly after his disappearance, the PopularResistance Committees (PRC) held a press conference to claim respon-sibility for the settlers abduction and execution, at which it distributedphotocopies of the settlers ID card. 54 The PRC also printed posters inwhich the photocopy of the settlers ID was placed over a backgroundof blue sky, with camouaged armed resistance ghters oating on eachside of it and a Palestinian ag and the PRC logo atop the page. 55 ThePRCs photocopies and posters present unintended interpretations of theID card as a mediated form and, from the powerful agents perspective,an example of failure. Here, a straightforward play on identity is turnedinto political challenge using the dominant groups own tools (and body).The materiality of the ID card, even if simply photocopied, becomes itsmost evocative aspect.

Whi le ID cards give rise to a range of representations Banksyssatirical grafto of a donkey being checked, the PRC photocopying an

abducted and executed Jewish Israelis card, Darwishs poem they stil lmaintain within their materiality the meaning attributed to them by theIsraeli state at a particular political moment: the practice of controlling,surveilling, and subjugating Palestinians. As such, using them, and notsimply interpreting or drawing t hem, in alternative ways, also challengesthe state. This again evokes Darwishs poem: that it is the Israeli state appa-ratus that grants ID cards is used to challenge the state. Thus what mayseem to be a rather t rivial aspect an ID is legal proof of bir th becomes


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signicantly symbolic and political. Palestinians in the OPTs who wereborn within 1948 Palestine proudly show their ID cards to substantiate thatthey are from Haifa, Jaffa, or Ramleh (cities inside Israel) and thus but-tress their claims to those cities. This becomes even more meaningfu l forPalestinians born in towns and vil lages that no longer exist. An older manin the Gaza Str ip once showed me identity documents that were records ofhis individual life but that were also emblematic of Palestinians historicalexperience: a British Mandate passport whose cover simply stated Pal-estine; an early Israeli- issued ID card that listed him as born in Majdal,a Palestinian village near todays Ashqelon in Israel that was destroyedand depopulated in November 1948. 56 In the same way that the settlersabduction was conrmed by the photocopying of his ID, the old mans IDcard demonstrated that he was from a place that no longer is. As the oldman 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 acountry, 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 sufcehere, one by Palestinian citizens of Israel, another by Palestinians in theOPTs. First, the Bedouin population, unequally incorporated into Israelas citizens, continues to have a strained relationship with t he state somuch so that some among the community have refused to be mandatedIsraeli ID cards, in essence refusing to become Israels subjects. 58 Second,at the height of the rst intifada, one form of civil disobedience that wasadopted en masse by residents of the West Bank town of Beit Sahour wascollectively refusing to carry ID cards. Refusing to carry or be issued anID does not preclude one from being denied passage, from being arrested,or from being simultaneously embraced and excluded by the state; but itis 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 Minist ryof Defense, advanced technological systems that will minimize humanfriction 59 lies one of the most systematic means of corporeal ly xingidentity to and erecting boundaries around Palestinians. Orange, green,and blue ID cards remain a most effective and low- tech means of surveil-lance and di fferentiation and an important nexus of Israeli power.

What this suggests is that even in the high- tech age of societies ofcontrol, to evoke Gi lles Deleuzes term of f ree- oating controls, dis-


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persed and ubiquitous systems of people- tracking, roaming surveillance,xing identities through biometric means, and computer databases low- tech forms of control are still important. 60 In fact, theyre quite effec-tive. Scholars today increasingly posit means of identity documentation asforms of techno- politics, demonstrating how, and the extent to which,the pragmatics and enactment of politics and governmentality take placethrough technological means. 61 Certainly, as Bruno Latour, Andrew Barry,and others argue, there can be no understanding of technology withoutpolitics, and no understanding of politics without technology. 62 But inexamining technologies of control, it is important not to simply considerthese as high- tech, electronic, digital, or indeed entirely new mechanisms,but to recognize that a much older and more ubiquitous low techno- politicscontinues to function powerfully. 63 ID cards in Palestine/Israel are unques-tionably (low) technologies of administration and control, but they alsoserve to contrast high- tech means that seek to achieve the same or similar

goals. Israel draws and secures its borders; it surveils, controls, and ghet-toizes its non- Jewish cit izens and noncitizen subjects; it segregates, frag-ments, and evicts Palestinians. It does so primarily through the mundaneand low- tech form of the ID card.

ID cards further demonstrate the institutional materiality of thestate apparatuss constitution in subjects everyday life. The bureaucracyembedded in the ID card institutions such as the Ministry of Interior andthe military apparatus, the national and global discourse about securityand modernity, the cards colors and what kind of information is encodedon them exemplies a particula r political logic of modern- day Israel:to count, document, control, and limit Palestinians. Once instituted, theID regimes potency is methodical, expansive, and prosaic, remindingPalestinians of their subjective and substandard position vis- - vis Israelipower no matter the source of its emanation: low- level actors that makedecisions about Palestinians identity, mobility, and rights on the spot, orthe invisible apparatus itself. The regimes expanse as Banksys grafto,Amirys anecdote, and Darwishs poem h ighlight is decidedly what alsomakes it, and makes it feel, arbitrary, absurd, capricious, capacious.

It is tempting to try to nd that spot from which Israeli control ema-

nates, tempting to focus on the web of checkpoints/terminals, sett lements,bypass roads, and walls /fences as the multitiered centers that fragmentand border Palestinians. Im not suggesting that these regimes be thoughtof independently; an ID card is requi red to pass a checkpoint, determineswhich side of the wall a Palestinian may trespass over, and permits one kindof person to drive on a bypass road and live in a settlement or not. But IDcards are much more pervasive in their fragmentation and segregation ofPalestinians, for they determine how a Palestinian can live, in every cornerof Palestine/Israel. Prosaic materials for li fe in order to survive and unti l


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one dies ID cards enforce controls over mult iple aspects of Palestinianim/mobility: economic, social, political, geographic; and they enable/denyaccess to circuits of civility. ID cards are both a means of control and ameans of exclusion.

While Palestinians may be in the process of being silenced anderased, they are well documented (and it seems their pets, too); of thatthere is no doubt. As is typical in colonial situations, the documentation isinstituted, managed, and mandated by the oppressors. ID cards are mani-festations of power, representing a technical and tact ile response to Israelsgeopolitical problem of Palestinian presence in Palestine/ Israel, creatingparticular kinds of citizenship- less, stateless, and subjected identities. IDcards banality is politically sal ient. As such, the hawiya has also becomea 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, how-ever feeble.

ID cards speak directly to that cognitive dissonance with whichPalestinians live: fearing that the Israeli state wants them disappeared, yetsimultaneously being rendered subjects of the states bureaucratic machine.But there is no dissonance. There is rather a low techno- political meansof control and surveillance that serves the Israeli states dual purpose ofmanaging territory and subjecting (parts of) the population. In order tocontrol and penetrate a subaltern group, the state must embrace it rst;what the state chooses to do afterward becomes almost ancil lary. Palestin-ians and their supporters have incorporated and reappropriated the hawiyain so many di ffering ways, for they recognize that there exists no contra-diction between being documented and being erased: the practice liesat the heart of Israels colonial regime. The little matters of green, orange,and blue ultimately determine everything; they are spectacular preciselybecause 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 Governmentalityin the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Geopolitics 13 (2008): 70123.

3. One of the best critiques of Israels multilayered spatial conguration ofoccupation is presented in Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israels Architecture of Occu-

pation (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: SyracuseUniversity Press, 2000), 2021.

5. For analyses of Palestinians everyday experiences in and around check-


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91Social Text 107 Summer 2011

points, see Rema Hammami, On the Importance of Thugs: The Moral Economyof a Checkpoint, Middle East Report 231 (2004): 2634; and Helga Tawil- Souri,New Palestin ian Centers : An Et hnography of the Checkpoint Economy, Inter-national Journal of Cultural Studies 12 (2009): 21735. On the checkpoint as a spaceof economic inequality, see Rema Hammami, Qalandya: Jerusalems Tora Boraand the Frontiers of Global Inequality, Jerusalem Quarterly 41 (2010): 2951; asa space of temporal inequality, see Ariel Handel, Where, Where to, and When inthe Occupied Territories: An Introduction to Geography of Disaster, in The Powerof 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 Quar-terly 42 (2010): 2648. Finally, for an analysis of the checkpoint in relation to otherincarcerating mechanisms, see Avram Bornstein, Military Occupation as CarceralSociety, 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 denoteID 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. YaelBerda offers an insightful critique on permits as central to Israels administration ofcolonial bureaucracy and argues that the permit regime creates a procedural barelife where bureaucracy denies individuals and collectives on the basis of race. Myview is that IDs are of greater importance for daily life in both the Palestinian Ter-ritories and Israel. Moreover, permits are required only for those who wish/needto enter Israel, and in order to obtain a tassrih a Palestinian must be issued an IDcard in the rst place. See Yael Berda, The Bureaucracy of the Occupation: AnIntroduction to the Permit Regime (paper presented at the Breaking the Wall IIworkshop, 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 andRepression, 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 thathave been instrumental in inclusively excluding Palestinian populations; see EliaZureik, Constructing Palestine through Sur veillance Practices, British Journal of

Middle Eastern Studies 28 (2001): 20527, for a discussion of the collect ion of popu-lation 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 CitizenshipLegislation in Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon (Reading, UK: IthacaPress, 1997), 44.

9. Although cards have been mandatory since 1949 in Israel, it was not untilpassage of the Population Registrat ion Law of 1962 that every person over the age ofsixteen had to be registered in the Population Registry, admin istered by the Ministryof Interior, and carry an ID card at all times.

10. Davis, Conceptions of Citi zenship in the Middle East, in Citizenship andthe State . There are numerous ways, beyond the issue of ID cards, in which ArabIsraelis are not equal citizens of Israel; see Elia Zureik, Palestinians in Israel: A Studyin Internal Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1979); Ian Lustick, ed., Palestinians underIsraeli Rule (New York: Garland, 1994); and Adriana Kemp, Dangerous Popula-tions: State Territoriality and the Constitution of National Minorities, in Boundaries


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1995, the Ministry of Interior changed the regulations, neither announcing its poli-cies nor warning Palestinian Jerusalemites of the possibility of losing their status andtheir homes, and applied the regulations retroactively. The onus falls on Palestin-ian Jerusalemites to prove that their center of life is in Israel and that they resideinside Jerusalem municipal boundaries, requiring a burden of documents that arenot easy for many to obtain. In 2006, more than 1,360 Palestinian Jerusalemites hadtheir cards revoked, a 600 percent jump from the previous year; in 2008, more than4,500 Jerusalem IDs were revoked. See BTselem, Revocation of Residency in East

Jerusalem, www.btselem.org /english /Jerusa lem/ Revocation_ Stat istics.asp (accessed11 August 2010). For more on the status of Palestinian Jerusalemites, see UsamaHalabi, 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 Lega l Review of Israeli Policy, Jerusalem Quar-terly 9 (2000): 40 47.

18. Other Palestinians are also citizenship- less, most painfully the refugeepopulation in Lebanon and those born or residing in countries that do not grantcitizenship jus soli (as is the case with the majority of Arab countries where largenumbers 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 theworld that denotes nationality on ID cards, and one of only two to issue differentcards based on territorial distinct ion, in the case of Palestinian Jerusalemites (Spainissues 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 Arabnationality, religion is listed as either Muslim or Christian. For Jewish and Druzenationalities, the religion is Jewish and Druze, respectively. In noting religion, Israelis in company only with Afghanistan, Brunei, Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey. A handfulof 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 authori-ties 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 tothe naked eye, such as the date of bir th, which follows the Hebrew calendar for Jews,and a numbering system denoting whether the cardholder is Jewish or other. Thenumerical 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 ModernWorld (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); John Torpey, Comingand Going: On the State Monopolization of the Legitimate Means of Movement, Sociological Theory 16 (1998): 23959; and Migdal, Boundaries and Belonging . Foranalyses 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, andIdentication in Global Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2008).

25. Anis Kassim, The Palestinians: From Hyphenated to Integrated Citizen-ship, in Butenschon, Davis, and Hassassian, Citizenship and the State in the MiddleEast, 202.

26. Torpey, Coming and Going, 244; emphases in original.27. Kemp, Dangerous Populations, in Migdal, Boundaries and Belong-

ing , 80. Kemps remark about the limits imposed on Palestinians in Israel bears onthe context of IDs: At once included via the mechanism of formal citizenship andexcluded from the community of fate . . . Palestinians stand at the center of the statedesire for control, discipline, and regulation of the most minute levels of conduct ofthose 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, 26729. 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 anethnocratic state, see Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/ Palestine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); as a racist state, seeRonit Lentin, ed., Thinking Palestine (New York: Zed Books, 2008); as a colonialstate, see Rafael Reuveny, The Last Colonialist: Israel in the Occupied Territoriessince 1967, Independent Review 12 (2008): 32574.

32. A similar argument is made in Ophir, Givoni, and Hana, Power of Inclu-sive Exclusion.

33. In the case of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, one can make the argumentthat 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 Jeru-

salemites precarious status even more problematic (see note 17). In the case of manyPA governmental and civil issues, such as registering ones residency, the Israel i stateapparatus ultimately decides on/approves the status (see note 15).

36. Torpey explains this in the case of internal passports/passes (Comingand Going, 239). Since 1967, travel between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip hasbecome increasingly impossible for Palestinians. For a summary of regulations thathave served to sever the Gaza Strip and the West Bank over the past four decades, seeAmira 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 bein some Palestinian areas (about 30 percent of the West Bank and, since the 2005disengagement, 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 aPalestinian with an orange or green ID who is caught without a permit in an Israeliarea. While this policy does segregate Jewish Israelis and Palestinians, it should alsobe understood as a means of fragmenting, separating, and segregating Palestiniansinside Israel and East Jerusalem from Palestinians in the West Bank and the GazaStrip 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 the same as is required for pets in many other countr ies. In Amiryscase, she took her dog to an Israeli veterinarian in East Jerusalem and thus obtainedIsraeli documents for her pet, as opposed to the PA- issued documents she wouldhave received had she gone to a veterinarian in Ramallah, where she lives. AlthoughAmiry alludes otherwise, the dogs passport is not equivalent to a humans, by virtueof its issuance by a veterinarian (albeit state- licensed) and not the Israeli Ministry ofInterior; let alone that the dog was able to obtain it because Amiry was willing to payapproximately $30 for the vaccination substant ially more than she would pay inRamallah for the same service. If it were that easy for Palestinian humans to obtainJerusalem passports, Im sure theyd be queuing for all kinds of vaccines!

39. More horrically, the Hutu/Tutsi ethnic differentiation marked onRwandans ID cards, legacies of Belgian colonialism, made genocide a lot easierto carry out a demarcat ion now erased on Rwandans ca rds. For a comparativeanalysis 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 SouthAfrica, see Hilla Dayan, Regimes of Separation: Israel/Palestine and the Shadowof 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 reg-istration, which restricted the movement of Soviet subjects, as a means of trying tokeep collective farmers from leaving the countryside. For an excellent analysis ofpassports, internal passports/passes, and identication cards, see Torpey, Comingand Going. See note 19 for states that currently differentiate populations accordingto religion, ethnicity, or race.

40. In 1972, exit orders were instit uted for OPT- Palestinians to go betweenEast Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and Israel (overnight stays were notpermitted for the latter). The permit regime dates back to 1981, when the Israelimilitary established the Civil Admin istration to separate the militar y actions of the

army in the OPTs from the management of Palestinian civilian life. Instituted in1991, full closure of the OPTs and the requirement of independent permits wereargued to prevent Palestinian suicide attacks in Israel; the rst suicide bombingattack inside Israel, however, did not occur until April 1994. Like ID cards, per-mits are not created equal, either some may be valid for one day only, for certainhours during a day, for certain areas, and so on. The permit regimes origin was aform of labor card, akin to the reference card doled out in apartheid- era SouthAfrica; thus it should be largely understood in its economic function of a colonialregime. All OPT- Palestinian workers who are legally employed in Israel and/or Israelisett lements dwindl ing as t hey are in number must have Israeli companies, orga-nizations, or individual patrons initiate the permit process. Here, the bureaucracyof ID cards, permits, and magnetic cards becomes tied to relations of economicdependency: ensuring lower wages to Palestinians individually, preserving a core- periphery relationship collectively, and curtailing Palestinian economic mobility.For more on the permit regime, see Berda, Bureaucracy of the Occupation; andHass, Israels Closure Policy. On the economic dimensions of the permit regimeand its impact on Palestinians, see Leila Farsakh, Palestinian Labour Migration toIsrael: Labour, Land, and Occupation (New York: Routledge, 2005); and Tobias Kelly,Documented Lives: Fear and the Uncertainties of Law during the Second Palestin-ian Intifada, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12 (2006): 89107.

41. Kelly, Documented L ives, 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 militaryorder has simply stated the terms more clearly, and like many such orders, it qualiesretroactively. Children born in the West Bank to Gaza- ID holding parents are alsosubject to this order. See Amira Hass, IDF Order Will Enable Mass Deportationfrom 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 wit h valid visas to Israel, and persons of Jew-ish descent entitled to the Israeli Law of Return. This checkpoint will be phased outwhen the wall/barrier is completed.

44. As far as I k now, no one has ever been executed for carr ying t he wrongID. Imprisonment, ID conscation, being beaten up by soldiers, being listed as asecurity threat, being forbidden from ever entering Israel again, or being altogetherexpelled from Israel and sometimes from the Palestinian Territories, too, are thecommon 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 Col-lge de France 19771978 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

47. Nadia Abu- Zahra, Identity Cards and Coercion in Palestine, in Fear:Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life , ed. Rachel Pain and Susan J. Smith (Burling-ton, 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 Immi-grants from North America Arrive in Israel on Nefesh BNefesh Flight, Haaretz , 2August 2010, www.haaretz.com/jewish- world/230-immigrants- from- north- america- arrive- in- israel- on- nefesh- b- nefesh- ight- 1.305570.

50. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas publicly declared the offer at hisopening speech at the Palest ine Investment Conference in June 2010; see PresidentGives Freedom Flotilla Activists Honorary Palestinian Citizenship, 2 June 2010 (inArabic), 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 dip-lomatic passports in a public ceremony to forty- seven peace activists from the FreeGaza Movement, who had successfully sailed from Cyprus to Gaza without Israelicircumvention, delivering humanitarian assistance materials such as hearing aids,thus breaking the siege on Gaza that was in effect; see Richard Silverstein, TheFree Gaza Movement, The Nation , 6 October 2008, www.thenation.com/article/freegaza- movement.

51. The phrase wr ite it down is also translated as record or register. Fora 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 Zion-ist in their perspectives and dealings with Palestinians. But whether hawkish ordovish, all governments have continued to enforce the differentiating ID regime.Certainly since 1967, the bureaucratic measures to keep Palestinians in checkhave become more formidable while the spread of Jewish settlers into the West


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Bank and t he Judaization of Jerusalem have been bolstered, no matter which partyhas been in power.

53. On roadblock lms, see Nurith Gertz and George Khlei, Palestinian Cin-ema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).

54. The Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) also claims responsibility forthe kidnapping of IDF corporal Gilad Shalit earlier in the same month, who, as ofthis 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 citizen-ship 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.ynetnews.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 othermaterial objects for Palestinian refugees, see Ilana Feldman, Refusing Invisibility:Documentation and Memorialization in Palestinian Refugee Claims, Journal ofRefugee 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 educa-

tion or health care. There is a further paradox here in that Israel largely construesthe Bedouin population as nonexistent, although the state goes to great lengthsto erase the Bedouins, such as continuously tearing down their unrecognizedvil lages, vil lages deemed illegal sometimes but not always because Bedouinsrefused to obtain the necessary paperwork to register their land. On the relationshipbetween Bedouin populations and the state of Israel, see Ghazi- Walid Falah, HowIsrael 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 Min-nesota 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 ofExperts: Egypt, Techno- polit ics, 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 ofScience Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and AndrewBarry, Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (New York: AthlonePress, 2001).

63. Timothy Mitchells work establishes the extent to which low- tech formshave been fundamentally powerful in colonial Egypt. See Timothy Mitchell, Colo-nising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); and Mitchell, Rule ofExperts . While not explicitly using the term techno- politics , Ophir, Givoni, and Hanademonstrate various facets of low- tech Israeli controls over Palestinian life ( Powerof 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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