Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 24(3), 2003, 307-326 Copyright 2003 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishers Ltd

Can defiled cities bethe outcome of our struggle?Have years of suffering,long days of vigilancein trenches, on hillsand in tattered tentsled to this?

(Harun Hashim Rasheed, 2000)

PALESTINE AND THECOLONIAL PRESENT

One of the ironies of postcolonialism is theway in which many of its practitionersrecognise Edward Said’s crucial role in layingsome of the foundation stones for its politico-intellectual project, only to pass over in silencethe dispossession of the Palestinian peoplethat is the animating spirit of his ownexamination of the sutures between “culture”and “imperialism” (cf. Hassan, 2001; Kandiyoti,

2002). Now that Orientalism is abroad again,revivified and hideously emboldened, there aregood reasons to revisit the site of Said’spreoccupations. Before he assumed office (themot juste), George Bush announced withcharacteristic insight that “the past is over”.On the contrary: as the American novelistWilliam Faulkner reminds us in Requiem for aNun, “[t]he past is not dead. It is not evenpast”. In this essay I try to show how theproduction of what Said called “imaginativegeographies” continues to articulate thecolonial present.

In Said’s (1978:54-59) original discussion,imaginative geographies fold distance intodifference through a series of spatialisations.They multiply partitions and enclosures thatdemarcate “the same” from “the other”, at onceconstructing and calibrating a gap betweenthe two by “designating in one’s mind a familiarspace which is ‘ours’ and an unfamiliar space

DEFILED CITIES1

Derek GregoryDepartment of Geography, University of British Columbia,

Vancouver B.C., Canada

ABSTRACT

Edward Said laid some of the foundation stones for postcolonialism, but this project has – for themost part – ignored the pressing question of Palestine that has been the goad for so much ofSaid’s own work. This essay discusses some of the ways in which, in the wake of September 11,the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon took advantage of the so-called “war on terrorism” toratchet up the dispossession of the Palestinian people. It also seeks to show that imaginativegeographies are never merely representations – they are also performances of space – and that, inthis case (as in others), they have served to rationalise and radicalise colonial aggression, ultimatelythrough the prosecution of a necropolitics.

Keywords: colonialism, imaginative geographies, Palestine, postcolonialism, September 11, necropolitics

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beyond ‘ours’ which is ‘theirs’” (p. 54). Said’sprimary concern was with the ways in whichEuropean and American imaginativegeographies of “the Orient” combine over timeto produce an archive in which things come tobe seen as neither completely novel northoroughly familiar. Instead, a median categoryemerges that “allows one to see new things,things seen for the first time, as versions of apreviously known thing” (p. 58). This Proteanpower of Orientalism is immensely importantbecause the citationary structure that isauthorised by these accretions is also in somesubstantial sense performative: it producesthe effects that it names. Its categories, codesand conventions shape the practices of thosewho draw upon it, actively constituting itsobject (most obviously, “the Orient”) in sucha way that this structure is as much arepertoire as it is an archive. This matters fortwo reasons. In the first place, as the repertoryfigure implies, imaginative geographies are notonly accumulations of time, sedimentations ofsuccessive histories; they are alsoperformances of space (Rose, 1999). In thesecond place, performances may be scripted(they usually are), but this does not make theiroutcomes fully determined; rather,performance creates a space in which it ispossible for “newness” to enter the world.This space of potential is always conditional,always precarious, but every performance ofthe colonial present carries within it thepossibilities of reaffirming and evenradicalising the hold of the past on the presentor of undoing its enclosures and approachingcloser to the horizon of the postcolonial (cf.Bhabha, 1994: 219).2

In what follows I work with these ideas toexpose the ways in which, in the wake ofSeptember 11, the Israeli government of ArielSharon has taken advantage of the so-called“war on terrorism” to ratchet up the colonialdispossession of the Palestinian people (seeMansour, 2002). What is novel about this, Iargue, is that it has taken place (literally so)through what Achille Mbembe (2003:14) callsa “necropolitics” – “a generalized instru-

mentalization of human existence and thematerial destruction of human bodies andpopulations” – whose performances of spaceseek to rationalise and radicalise colonialaggression. These performances assault notonly “politically qualified life” – the spacewithin which a Palestinian state is possible –but also “bare life” itself (see Agamben, 1998).3

GROUND ZEROS

When the Bush administration took power on20 January 2001, its foreign policy was one ofglobal disengagement. Palestine was noexception; the White House closed its doorsand elected for minimal involvement. Withindays of the terrorist attacks on New York Cityand Washington on 11 September, theintensity of Israeli military attacks on the WestBank stepped up. Palestinians claimed thatSharon was using the attacks on America as apretext “to enter the endgame” against them(Goldberg, 2001a). “He thinks that the dust inNew York and Washington will cover up Israeliactions here”, one Palestinian official explained(Jacobson, 2001). “He is taking advantage ofthe fact that no one is watching” (Goldenberg,2001a). But constructing such a space ofinvisibility required the substitution of anothercarefully constructed space of visibility so thatthe attacks on the World Trade Center and thePentagon would serve not only as a distractionfrom, but also as a justification for, Israeliactions. And so, a political offensive waslaunched alongside the military one. “Acts ofterror against Israeli citizens are no differentfrom bin Laden’s terror against Americancitizens”, Sharon insisted. “The fight againstterror is an international struggle of the freeworld against the forces of darkness who seekto destroy our liberty and our way of life” (dePréneuf, 2001).

Said, himself a New Yorker and deeplyaffected by the attack on his city, protestedthat Israel was “cynically exploiting theAmerican catastrophe by intensifying itsmilitary occupation and oppression of thePalestinians” and justifying its actions by

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representing “the connection between theWorld Trade Center and Pentagon bombingsand Palestinian attacks on Israel [as] anabsolute conjunction of ‘world terrorism’ inwhich bin Laden and Arafat areinterchangeable entities” (Said, 2001a; 2001b).The White House also rejected Sharon’sdiversionary tactic, and dismissed hissubstitution of Arafat for bin Laden asinaccurate and unhelpful. If America were tosecure the support of Islamic states like SaudiArabia and Pakistan for its military responseto September 11 – both of them accomplicesin its interventions in Afghanistan during theSoviet occupation – the Bush administrationunderstood that it would have to re-engagewith the Palestinian question on terms thatwere markedly less partisan than those of thepast. Sharon knew very well what the WhiteHouse was about. Furious, he compared itsattempt to include the Arab world in the US-led coalition to British and Frenchappeasement of the Nazis in 1938 – acomparison that was as odious to the Arabsas it was to the Americans – and he warnedthe White House: “Do not try to placate theArabs at Israel’s expense... Israel will not beCzechoslovakia” (Goldenberg & Borger, 2001).Bush, equally angry, denounced thecomparison as unacceptable, and whenSharon renewed the military offensive, theWhite House repeatedly criticised the Israelicampaign of intimidation and incursion(Borger, 2001; Perlez & Seelye, 2001).

Throughout October, Sharon defiedAmerican demands to retreat from nominallyPalestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank.In fact, Israel repeatedly identified its attackson the occupied territories with America’sassault on Afghanistan, and Sharon instructedthe actions of the Israeli military – the “IsraeliDefense Forces” (IDF) – to be “packaged” sothat “the elimination of the Taliban and theelimination of the Palestinian Authority” wouldbe seen as “two parallel goals” (Reinhart,2002a:105). Outwardly, at least, the Bushadministration remained sceptical. As tanksdrove into the heart of West Bank cities, the

State Department was moved to “deeply regretand deplore Israeli army actions that have killednumerous Palestinian civilians” (Goldenberg,2001b; 2001c). Washington was hardly on theside of the Palestinian Authority, but relationswith Tel Aviv were so close to collapse that,by 30 October 2001, one commentatorsuggested the sea change in superpowersensibilities meant that “the cruel calculationsof geopolitics [would] continue to makeAfghanistan’s loss into Palestine’s gain”(Hammami, 2001).

But the world began to turn in the dyingweeks of November. By then, under the coverof pulverising coalition air strikes, the NorthernAlliance was sweeping southwards throughAfghanistan, and the Taliban forces were infull retreat. On 23 November, the IDFassassinated Mahmoud Abu Hanoud,Hamas’s military leader in the West Bank, andseveral Israeli commentators claimed that themilitary and political apparatus recognised thatthis was sure to provoke a violent retaliation(Reinhart, 2002a:139-41). On 29 NovemberSharon arrived in New York City and made whathe called a “solidarity visit” to Ground Zero.Over that weekend, as the Jewish Sabbath wascoming to an end on the night of 1-2December, two suicide bombs and a car bombexploded in the heart of West Jerusalem. TenIsraelis were murdered and over 170 injured.Soon after, another suicide bomb exploded inHaifa, murdering 15 Israelis and injuring 40others. Sharon cut short his visit but, beforehe returned to Israel, reminded Bush that thedeaths of 25 Israelis were equivalent to thedeaths of 2,000 Americans. The significanceof the comparison was lost on nobody. Sharoninsisted that the weekend’s events had madeit clear that America and Israel were engagedin “the same war” on terrorism, and if Americahad been justified in its military retaliationagainst al-Qaeda and the Taliban, then Israelwas justified in launching its helicoptergunships against Hamas, Islamic Jihad and thePalestinian Authority in Gaza and the WestBank (Goldenberg, 2001d; 2001e; Milne, 2001;Watson, 2001; Younge, 2001).

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Israeli attacks on the occupied territoriesintensified. Missiles were launched againstGaza and the West Bank, helicopter gunshipsstruck at the Palestinian Authority’scompound in Ramallah, tanks moved into thescattered districts of “Area A” (which wassupposedly under full Palestinian control), andthe IDF blockaded Palestinian towns andvillages. But Bush now firmly resisted calls torestrain Sharon. The onus was repeatedlyplaced on the Palestinian Authority to “endterror”, even as its own security apparatus wasdestroyed so that it was now virtuallyimpossible for it to act against the militantorganisations (Hamas and Islamic Jihad inparticular) that had claimed responsibility forthe bombings. Senior United States (US)officials, speaking off the record, now freelycompared Palestinian attacks in Israel to al-Qaeda’s attacks on America.

As the New Year wore on, the militarisationof the Israeli occupation and of the al-AqsaIntifada reached new heights. On 17 January2002, a Palestinian gunman murdered sixIsraelis in Hadera; in response, Israeli jetsdestroyed the Palestinian Authority’s policestation in Tulkarm and its tanks and troopsentered the city, imposing a curfew andconducting house-to-house searches. Thiswas the first time that the IDF had occupiedan entire Palestinian city, but it would not bethe last. Bush accused Arafat of “enhancing”terrorism and the White House granted Israelits widest freedom of military action since theReagan administration had turned a blind eyeto Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982:“Israel is seen as the equivalent of New Yorkand the Pentagon” (quoted in Hanley, 2002;La Guardia, 2002). In February, following moresuicide bombings and the launch of twohomemade missiles from Gaza, the IDFlaunched a massive air-and-ground operationagainst Palestinian towns and refugee camps.The scope of the incursions steadily widenedas the IDF mounted a series of ferociousassaults in both Gaza and the West Bank.Tanks rolled into Jabalya refugee camp northof Gaza City, and into Jenin refugee camp and

Balata refugee camp southeast of Nablus, thelargest in the West Bank. Alleys andcinderblock houses were shelled from the airand from the surrounding hills; tanks patrolledthe main streets; and holes were blown in thewalls of houses as the army swept throughthe camps. In the middle of March, 20,000troops reinvaded camps in Gaza andreoccupied Ramallah in what was claimed tobe the largest Israeli offensive since itsinvasion of Lebanon (Goldenberg, 2002a;2002b; Myre, 2002; Usher & Whitaker, 2002).

By the end of the month even thatbenchmark was passed. On 27 March, 28Israelis were murdered and 140 injured by asuicide bombing in Netanya. Within 24 hoursthe IDF had called up 20,000 reservists, itslargest mobilisation since 1967, and whatTanya Reinhart (2002a:148) describes as its“long-awaited and carefully plannedoffensive”, “Operation Defensive Shield”,was underway. Tanks smashed into Arafat’scompound and troops stormed into theoffices of the Palestinian Authority inRamallah. In another calculated echo ofBush’s rhetoric, Sharon hailed this as the firststage of a “long and complicated war thatknows no borders” and vowed to eliminatethe “terror and its infrastructure” that he saidthe Palestinian Authority had put in place(Goldenberg, 2002c). Whatever Sharonunderstood “terror and its infrastructure” tomean, the IDF had previously concentratedits efforts on destroying the PalestinianAuthority’s police and paramilitary securityinstallations. With Sharon’s encouragement,however, the IDF now targeted thePalestinian Authority’s civilian in-frastructure, the institutions and the record– the very archive – of Palestinian civilsociety. In spite of this new and malignantfocus – Amnesty International (AI, 2002a)concluded that the military offensive aimedat the collective punishment of allPalestinians, which is illegal underinternational law – the White House stillrefused to condemn the Israeli attacks andincursions.

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The military campaign escalatedthroughout April. With Israel in oppressivecontrol of six out of eight Palestinian cities,the White House Press Secretary (Fleischer,2002) could still announce, “the Presidentbelieves that Ariel Sharon is a man of peace”(Beaumont, 2002; Left, 2002). Meanwhile, theIDF was busily demolishing houses in Jeninrefugee camp and clearing paths for tanks andtroops with giant Caterpillar D-9 bulldozers.When 13 Israeli soldiers died in a booby-trapped building on 9 April, the scale ofdestruction intensified and the centre of thecamp was painstakingly reduced to rubble.International aid agencies, human rightsworkers and reporters were denied access tothe camp for nearly a week after the fightinghad ended. When they were finally allowedin, they found “a silent wasteland, permeatedwith the stench of rotting corpses andcordite… The scale is almost beyondimagination”, wrote Suzanne Goldenberg((2002d), gazing out over “a vast expanse ofrubble and mangled iron rods, surrounded bythe carcasses of shattered homes” thatbecame known locally as “Ground Zero”.Thousands of houses had been destroyed;scores of bodies were buried beneath theruins; 16,000 people had fled in terror, and thosewho remained were left to survive withoutrunning water or electricity (Hass, 2002a;McGreal & Whitaker, 2002). The InternationalCommittee of the Red Cross, Human RightsWatch (HRW, 2002) and AI (2002a; 2002b) allaccused Israel of breaching the GenevaConvention by recklessly endangering civilianlives and property during its assault on thecamp.4 Israel was undeterred, insisting that itsoperations were necessary, professional andsurgical, and that no massacre had taken place.The US first supported, then moved to disrupt,and finally blocked any attempt at an inquiryby the United Nations.

IMAGINATIVE GEOGRAPHIESAND PERFORMANCES OF SPACE

There were, of course, compelling geopoliticalreasons to reaffirm American support for Israel:

most immediately, the fall of the Taliban hadterminated the necessity for an internationalmilitary coalition; more generally, the territorialdesigns for American Empire mapped out bythe influential Project for a New AmericanCentury (Donnelly, 2000) had returned theMiddle East to the centre of theneoconservative stage. But what gave thisreaffirmation its teeth – what gave it both voiceand bite – was a series of parallels betweenthe imaginative geographies deployed byAmerica in its military assault on Afghanistanand those deployed by Israel in its militaryoperations in the occupied territories ofPalestine. These enacted three performancesof space: locating, opposing and casting out.“Locating” mobilised a largely technicalregister, in which opponents were reduced toobjects in a purely visual field – co-ordinateson a grid, letters on a map – that effected botha localisation and an abstraction of “theother”. “Opposing” mobilised a largelycultural register, in which antagonism wasreduced to a teleological conflict between“Civilisation” and barbarism. “Casting out”mobilised a largely political-juridical register,in which not only armed opponents but alsoordinary civilians were reduced to the statusof outcasts placed beyond the privileges andprotections of the law so that their lives (anddeaths) were rendered of no account.

The IDF’s “besieging cartography”, asCamille Mansour (2001:86-7) calls it, wasinstalled through an intricate system ofmonitoring that involved passive sensors,observation towers equipped with day/nightand radar surveillance capabilities, electroniccommunications, computerised data banks,satellite images and photographs fromreconnaissance planes. But as the assault onthe occupied territories intensified, StephenGraham (2003) shows that the conflict wastransformed into “an urban war in which thedistance between enemies [was] measured inmetres” (p. 71, quoting Arnon Sofer).Orientalist tropes were invoked to renderPalestinian towns and cities as “impenetrable,unknowable spaces” (p. 71) whose close

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quarters were beyond the long-distance gazeof these high-technology surveillancesystems. Accordingly, “a new family ofUnattended Aerial Vehicles and camera-carrying balloons was deployed to permit real-time monitoring of the complex battles withinthe cities, and to track the movements of keyPalestinian fighters and officials so thatmissiles could target and kill them” (p. 73). Allof this was a strategically vital arm in therealisation of what Eyal Weizman (2002) callsIsrael’s “politics of verticality”: “Every floorin every house, every car, every telephone callor radio transmission… can be monitored…These eyes in the sky, completing the networkof observation that is woven throughout theground, finally iron out the folded surface andflatten the terrain”. The opacity of “other”,alien spaces is rendered transparent, and theircomplexities reduced to a series of objects in apurely visual plane.

But the disembodied abstractionsproduced within this enhanced technoculturalsphere have been perforated by imaginativegeographies that activate other, intenselycorporeal registers. Although Israel deployedaircraft and missiles against Palestinian“targets”, for example, some pilots found itdifficult to sustain such optical detachment.One fighter pilot urged those who flew Israel’sdeadly F-16s “to think about what a bombingoperation would be like in the city they livein”, and he explained what he meant withunflinching clarity: “I am talking aboutbombing a densely populated city. I am talkingabout liquidating people on the main street”(Shochat, 2002:127-8).

The ground war involved the performanceof highly abstract spacings too, in which everyPalestinian was reduced to a threat and atarget. One reporter described how, at theheight of Operation Defensive Shield inTulkarm, a reserve detachment of ParatrooperReconnaissance Commandos operated in “apeculiar state of sensory deprivation”.Occupying a house seized from its Palestinianowners, the soldiers lived “in a kind of

perpetual shadow”, he wrote, “behind drawncurtains and under dim lighting, rarelyventuring out except at night and then only intanks or the windowless A[rmoured]P[ersonnel] C[arriers]. Their knowledge of thebattlefield [sic] is largely limited to the mapsthey study or the tiny corner of land they viewwhen the [APC] door opens, and so anyonewho crosses their path is viewed as a potentiallife-and-death threat” (Anderson, 2002).

Yet here too the abstractions were qualified,their imaginative geographies perforated bymuch more intimate engagements, and many ofthe soldiers interviewed saw the militaryoccupation as unsustainable on humanitarianrather than narrowly logistical grounds. In fact,over 500 reserve soldiers have refused to servein the occupied territories since February 2002.Eight of them petitioned the Israeli SupremeCourt to have their action recognised as a matterof conscience. Their submission also chargedthe IDF with systematically violating the mostfundamental human rights of the Palestinianpeople, and argued that the Israeli occupationis itself illegal (see <www.refusersolidarity.net>;<www.seruv. org>). Significantly, the Courtdeclined to rule on the legality of theoccupation. While it accepted that thereservists’ objections were moral ones, itnevertheless upheld the prison sentences thathad been imposed upon them for refusing toserve in the occupied territories. This decisiontacitly recognised that the reservists’ refusal tofight what they call “the War of the Settlements”presents a much more serious threat to thelegitimacy of Israel’s politico-military strategythan conscientious objectors who refuse toserve in the IDF at all. For theirs is a selectiverefusal that exposes the territorial underbellyof Israel’s aggressions (Yiftah’el, n.d.; Mariner,2002). As Susan Sontag (2003) observed, “thesoldiers are not refusing a particular order. Theyare refusing to enter the space where illegalorders are bound to be given” (emphasisadded).

The so-called “clash of civilisations” thatswirled around in the dust and debris of

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September 11 was rarely invoked directly. Itsprincipal architect, Samuel Huntington(1996:256, 264), had said remarkably little aboutPalestine, apart from the monstrous perversionthat the “fault-line war” in Gaza and the WestBank showed that “Muslims have problemsliving peacefully with their neighbours”. Heacknowledged, in passing, the role of theEuropean powers in originally setting the stagefor the conflict, but said nothing at all aboutIsrael’s predatory actions. Robert Wistrich(2001), a professor of modern Europeanhistory at the Hebrew University, was moreforthright: “It is a clash of civilisations”(emphasis added), he wrote in the JerusalemPost soon after September 11. Not only hadradical Islam devastated New York City – “thelargest Jewish city on the planet” (Wistrich,2001) – but it continued to threaten the survivalof the state of Israel. Columnist ThomasFriedman (2002), writing in the New York Timessix months later, invoked Huntington too, butdrew a markedly different conclusion: “WhatOsama bin Laden failed to achieve onSeptember 11 is now being unleashed by theIsraeli-Palestinian war in the West Bank: aclash of civilizations”. But this had to end, sohe insisted, in an Israeli withdrawal from theoccupied territories.

These straws in the wind were blowing indifferent directions, but the imaginativegeography that dominated Israeli policydispensed with their dualisms altogether.Instead, it resurrected the opposition betweenCivilisation and barbarism that had been afoundational weapon of Zionism, and that theWhite House had also deployed in its war onterrorism. Palestinians were represented asdenizens of a barbarian space lying beyondthe pale of civilisation. When Sharon’spredecessor Ehud Barak (quoted in Slater,2001:180) described Israel as “a villa in themiddle of the jungle” and as “a vanguard ofculture against barbarism”, he was not onlydegrading and brutalising Palestinian cultureand civil society: he was also rendering itsspaces inchoate, outside the space of Reason.What Sharon sought to do was to establish

these linguistic claims in acutely physicalterms. As Lena Jayyusi (2002:52) wrote fromRamallah: “There is no constative any longer:only the pure performative”. This is the heartof the matter because representations are notmere mirrors of the world. They enter directlyinto its fabrication. Israel’s offensiveoperations were designed to turn thePalestinian people not only into enemies butinto aliens, and in placing them outside themodern, figuratively and physically, they wereconstructed as what Giorgio Agamben (1998)calls homines sacri. Homo sacer was a subject-position established under Roman law toidentify those whose death had no sacrificialvalue but whose killing did not constitute acrime: they inhabited a zone of abandonmentwithin which sovereign power had suspendedits own law. The prosecution of thisnecropolitics, as Mbembe (2003) calls it, was aradicalisation of existing Israeli policies thatrequired the performance of two spacings. Onone side, a strategy of consolidation andcontainment continued to bind Israel to itsillegal settlements in Gaza and the West Bankand to separate both from the remainder of theoccupied territories; on the other side, astrategy of cantonisation institutionalised thesiege of Palestinian towns and villages.

The first objective had already beensecured in Gaza during the first Intifada.“Surrounded by electronic fences and armyposts”, Reinhart (2002b) reported, “completelysealed off from the outside world, Gaza hasbecome a huge prison” (see also 2002a:18-19).In June 2002 a similar barrier network wasannounced for the West Bank. For most of itslength, this will be an electronic fence, but inplaces, it will solidify into a concrete or steelwall eight metres high. The line will be flankedby a 50 to100-metre security zone, edged withconcertina wire, trenches and patrol roads,and monitored by watchtowers, floodlights,electronic sensors and surveillance cameras.Much of the barrier runs east of the GreenLine, so that thousands of hectares of someof the most highly productive Palestinianfarmland will be on the Israeli side, with

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implications not only for the beleagueredPalestinian economy but also for thesubsistence of the Palestinian population. Atleast 15 Palestinian villages will be on the Israeliside, while others will be cut off from their fieldsand wells, so that Israel will extend its controlover the aquifer. This first barrier will alsoconsolidate Israel’s stranglehold over EastJerusalem, where it runs deep into Palestinianterritory and cuts off hundreds of thousandsof Palestinians from the West Bank. In March2003, Sharon announced plans for a secondbarrier around the eastern foothills along theJordan Valley to connect with the first and soencircle the occupied territories there as inGaza. The Israeli Defence Minister haspersistently represented the barrier as asecurity measure whose sole objective is todeny suicide bombers access to Israel fromthe West Bank. The second barrier makes anonsense of these claims, and when theminister adds that “this not a border betweenpolitical entities or sovereign territories”(Cook, 2002), it becomes clear that the onlysovereign power to be recognised is the stateof Israel. What lies beyond the line is not the(future) state of Palestine but what Agamben(1998) would call the (present) state of theexception (Humphries, 2002; LAW, 2002;Pappe, 2002; Segal, 2002; B’Tselem, 2003a;Cook, 2003).

On that other side of the line Israel has setabout the proliferation of zones ofindistinction (Agamben’s term) in which, asthe reservists who refuse to serve in theoccupied territories claim, “the legal and thelawful can no longer be distinguished fromthe illegal and unlawful” (Supreme Court: para5). The baroque geography of the Osloprocess has been swept away; the quasi-sovereignty of “Area A” has been terminated,and all that remains is another Escher-likesystem of exclusion and inclusion in whichPalestinian towns and villages are severed fromone another and placed under constant siegefrom a military force that has now twisted thetopologies of occupation into new and evenmore grotesque forms. In his original

discussion of homo sacer, Agamben (1998:19)suggested that the state of the exception –and here we need to remind ourselves that hewas arguing in general terms because theconcordance with the occupied territories isagonisingly close – traces a threshold throughwhich “outside and inside, the normal situationand chaos, enter into those topologicalrelations that make the validity of the juridicalorder possible”. A delegation from theInternational Parliament of Writers (IPW)visited the West Bank in March 2002 and theirreports described the installation of these newtopologies – the performance of their collectivedanse macabre – with shivering immediacy.

The landscape of the West Bank andGaza Strip has been ripped and tornlike cloth made from strips of differentmaterials. Barbed wire surroundsIsraeli settlements and military postsand the areas theoretically controlledby the Palestinian Authority: itprotects and excludes, unitesseparated zones and separatesadjacent territories, weaves inbetween a labyrinth of islands thatare mutually repelled and attracted.A complex circulatory system ofcapillary veins demonstrates theoccupier’s desire to split the territoryinto slices, remnants, tracts thatseemingly impact on each other andyet remain mutually unaware... Thelandscape of settlements, frequentlyconstructed on the ruins of Palestinianvillages, evokes yet again the chess-board of reciprocal exclusion betweenthe former and what remains of theautonomous areas, to the point ofconfusing the inexpert visitor as towhat they encompass and limit, the“interior” and the “exterior”(Goytisolo, 2002; emphasis added).

More prosaically, in April, the militarycorrespondent for Ha’aretz Amir Orenreported, “there is [now] only one area andthat area is controlled by the IDF without

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Palestinian intermediaries”. As far as themilitary was concerned, Oren explained, therewas no longer any difference between AreasA, B and C: “The IDF is doing as it pleases inall of them” (quoted in FMEP, 2002). Israel hadestablished a series of “security zones”throughout the West Bank, so that Palestinianswere now confined and corralled, subject toendless curfew and closure, whereas the IDFhad complete freedom of movement andaction. As the Israeli Minister of Internal (sic)Security put it, “They are there, but we arehere and there as well” (FMEP, 2002, emphasisadded; Hammami, 2002).

The occupied territories have been turnedinto twilight zones, caught in a frenziedcartography of mobile frontiers rather thanfixed boundaries. These enforce a violentfragmentation and recombination of time andspace, which is nothing less than a concertedattempt to disturb and derange the normalrhythms of everyday Palestinian life. Duringthe first Intifada many Palestinians elected to“suspend” everyday life as a political strategy.This was a way of reminding one another thatthese were not normal times, a way ofreasserting their collective power and, bycalling attention to their actions, also a way ofnarrativising the occupation: all of whichactively sustained the process of Palestiniannationalism (Jean-Klein, 2001). What I amdescribing here, in contrast, is the violentannulment of everyday life by the IDF througha series of military operations that are intendedto paralyse Palestinian agency and – throughits physical assaults on the Palestinian archive– to erase Palestinian memory.

These deformations involve deliberatetwistings – torsions – of both time and space.

Temporariness is now the law of theoccupation… temporary takeover ofArea A, temporary withdrawal from AreaA, temporary encirclement andtemporary closures, temporary transitpermits, temporary revocation of transitpermits, temporary enforcement of an

elimination policy, temporary change inthe open-fire orders… When theoccupier plays with time like this,everything – everything that moves,everything that lives – becomesdependent on the arbitrariness of theoccupier’s decisions. The occupier isfully aware that he is always playingon borrowed time, in fact on stolen time,other people’s time. This occupier isan unrestrained, almost boundlesssovereign, because when everything istemporary almost anything – anycrime, any form of violence – isacceptable, because the temporarinessseemingly grants it a license, thelicense of the state of emergency (Ophir,2002:60; emphasis added).

This, too, mimics Agamben’s (1998) nightmarescenario with precision: a world in whichnothing is fixed, nothing is clear, and the spacesof the exception constantly move and multiply.Here is another IPW delegate, ChristianSalmon (2002a; see also 2002b), describing itsborders as they roll in with the night and thefog:

the border shifts like a swarm of locustsin the wake of another suicide attack,like the onset of a sudden storm. Itmight arrive at your doorstep like adelivery in the night, as quickly as thetanks can roll in; or it may slip in slowly,like a shadow. The border keepscreeping along, surrounding villagesand watering places… The border isfurtive as well: like the rocket launchers,it crushes and disintegrates space,transforming it into a frontier, into bitsof territory. This frontier paralyses theebb and flow of transit instead ofregulating it. It no longer serves toprotect, instead transforming all pointsinto danger zones, all persons intoliving targets or suicide bombers…. Theborder here is meant to repress,displace and disorganise. In Israel andPalestine alike the very concept of

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territory has become hostile, devoid ofcontent or contours, making insecuritythe norm. In the words of the Frenchpoet Reni Char, “To stifle distance is tokill”.

Within these zones of indistinction theprovisions of the Geneva Conventions thatprohibit Israel from transferring its civilianpopulation to the occupied territories continueto be disregarded. The same protocols thatare supposed to protect Palestinians fromtorture, illegal detention, house demolition,deportation, and degradation, remainsuspended. And still this is not enough. InJune 2002, the Knesset passed theImprisonment of Illegal Combatants Law,which allows for indefinite detention withoutcharge or trial of anyone believed to take partin hostile activity against Israel, directly orindirectly (B’Tselem, 2002). The symmetry withAmerica’s designation of captives from its warin Afghanistan as “unlawful combatants” wasdeliberate. These new measures considerablywidened the scope of existing provisions foradministrative detention, which by the end ofthe year were being used to hold over 1,000Palestinians in custody. And in another showof contempt for the law, Israel continues tocarry out what it calls “extra-judicial killings”.Since the start of the al-Aqsa Intifada, Israelisecurity forces have assassinated at least 60,and probably more than 80 Palestinian“targets” (AI, 2001; LAW, 2001; Toensing &Urbina, 2003).

In the zones of indistinction established byIsrael’s sovereign power, which asserts amonopoly of legitimate violence even as itsuspends the law and abandons anyresponsibility for civil society,

[t]he Palestinians are expected to obeymilitary orders from the State of Israel,as if they were the laws of a Palestinianstate. But the state that imposes thoseorders and whose army controls theterritories, the land, the waterresources, is not responsible for the

welfare of the Palestinians living inthose territories. It need not behavelike a normal state (Hass, 2002b).5

In this world wrenched upside down, Israelsuspends international law in the occupiedterritories while it criminalises any act ofPalestinian resistance to its illegal operationsthere. What can this be other than the spaceof the exception? These torsions show thatnot all “third spaces” or “paradoxical spaces”are zones of emancipation. The space of theexception is not so much punctuated by crisesas produced through them, and theseeverpresent assaults force a mutation in theposition of those made subject to them. AdnanAbu Audah (2002) has argued that long beforethe Oslo process, but intensified during itsaccommodations, Israel sought “to transformthe Palestinian people into inhabitants”. Thedifference, he explained, “is that people havenational rights of sovereignty over their land,identity, independence, and freedom, whileinhabitants constitute a group of people withinterests not exceeding garbage collection andearning a daily living”. But now even theelemental forms of bare life are under acutethreat.

In the countryside, Palestinian villages andfields have been pulverised by the military:houses demolished, reservoirs destroyed, olivegroves uprooted. The IPW delegation visiteda village razed to the ground by the IDF andwalked among the rubble of bulldozed homes.

Exercise books, kitchen utensils and atoothbrush were strewn about, signsof life reduced to pieces. One womantold us that residents were given fiveminutes to leave their homes in themiddle of the night. The bulldozersreturned several times to “finish thejob”… Mounted high atop the watch-towers, infrared machine guns watchover the wasteland. There are nosoldiers about. At night, the guns fireautomatically as soon as any lights areturned on (Salmon, 2002a).

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This is a bleak reversal of the Zionist imaginaryof the tower and stockade settlements. Theland that they believed they would transformfrom “wilderness” into “civilisation” has beenlaid waste by their own (armoured) bulldozers.It is as though the very earth has been turnedinto an enemy.

Palestinian towns and cities have fared nobetter. They have been smashed by Israelimissiles and bombs, by tanks and armouredbulldozers. The objective is to suppress whatHenri Lefebvre (1968) called “the right to thecity” through a campaign of coerced de-modernisation. “Urbicide is Sharon’s warstrategy”, argues Graham (2002a). “His mainpurpose is to deny the Palestinian people theircollective, individual and cultural rights to thecity-based modernity long enjoyed by Israelis”(see also 2002b; 2003; Smith, 2001). In the past,this process had proceeded by stealth, througha series of discriminatory planning and buildingregulations that prevented Palestinianconstruction and authorised demolition ofPalestinian homes. Under this asymmetricsystem of law enforcement, Palestinian “factson the ground” were erased with almostmachine-like efficiency: coolly, dispassionatelyand ruthlessly. But since the spring of 2002,the legal fictions that permitted these erasureshave increasingly been dispensed with. In thespace of the exception, the law – evendiscriminatory law – suspends itself. SergeSchlemann (2002) reported that the IDF’s spasmof destruction had created a landscape ofdevastation from Bethlehem to Jenin. “Thereis no way to assess the full extent of the latestdamage to the cities and towns – Ramallah,Bethlehem, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Nablus and Jenin– while they remain under a tight siege”, hecontinued, “but it is safe to say that theinfrastructure of life itself and of any futurePalestinian state – roads, schools, electricitypylons, water pipes, telephone lines – has beendevastated” (emphasis added) (see also Hass,2002c; Matar, 2002).

Taken together, these are collective assaultsin city and in countryside not only on what

Agamben (1998) calls politically qualified life,on the integrity of Palestinian civil society andon the formation of a Palestinian state, but onwhat he calls “bare life” itself. As MahmoudDarwish (2002) declared, “the occupation doesnot content itself with depriving us of theprimary conditions of freedom, but goes on todeprive us of the bare essentials of a dignifiedhuman life, by declaring constant war on ourbodies, and our dreams, on the people and thehomes and the trees, and by committing crimesof war” (emphasis added). The hideousobjective of Sharon’s government, which itscarcely bothers to hide any longer, is toreduce homo sacer to the abject despair ofder Muselman. This is truly shocking. DerMuselman is a figure from the Nazi concen-tration camps – it means, with deeplydepressing significance, “The Muslim” – whowas reduced to mere survival. Following PrimoLevi’s horrifying memorial of Auschwitz,Agamben (1998:184-85; see also 1999) writesthat der Muselman:

no longer belongs to the world of men inany way; he does not even belong to thethreatened and precarious world of thecamp inhabitants… Mute and absolutelyalone, he has passed into another worldwithout memory and without grief. Hemoves in an absolute indistinction of factand law, of life and juridical rule.

The Sharon regime would understandably notinvoke this figure by name: and yet it isexceptionally difficult to avoid seeing itshaunted, hollowed-out shadows flickering inthe darkness of the zones of indistinction thathave been so deliberately, systematically andcruelly produced in the occupied territories.To say this is not to collapse one world intothe other. There are, as Sara Roy (2002:32)insists, “very real differences in volume, scaleand horror between the Holocaust and theoccupation”. But, as she goes on to urge, it isnecessary to recognise “the parallels wherethey exist”. To acknowledge them is not to beanti-Semitic; instead, it is to try to honour thelives of all those who perished in the Holocaust

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and whose legacy is sullied by thesestatements and these actions. The parallelsinclude the systematic campaign of violence,humiliation and degradation that I havedescribed here, which works towards thedeliberate dehumanisation of its victims. Andthere are other, even more awful parallels.Some of those most closely identified with theSharon regime have used biomedicalmetaphors that would have been only toofamiliar to the Nazis (and their victims) tocharacterise Palestinians as a “canceroustumour” that is “destroying the ordered host”,and to prescribe aggressive “chemotherapy”to “cleanse” the body politic, while the IDFhas not hesitated to draw lessons for its ownurban operations from the Wehrmacht’sghastly assault on the Warsaw Ghetto(Blecher, 2002; Eldar, 2002; Graham, 2003:75;Oren, 2002; Shavit, 2002).

It is in the Palestinian refugee camps, thenomos of Israel’s colonial present, that thisproject finds the purest expression of itsviolence.6 In one of her letters from Ramallah,written as she waited for the next Israeli attack,suspended in the silence that terrifies by thecertainty that it will be shattered, Jayyusi(2002:49-50) anticipated the even greater terrorthat awaited those in the refugee camps:

Down there in the refugee camps theywill receive the fury that inhabits the fear– and animates the will to crush – thatthe coloniser always vents. They willreceive the depleted uranium, the heavymissiles, the columns of tanks smashingthrough the small alleys, the army whichwill bore through the walls of the closebordered houses; down there the realbattle, the big toll will be had.

The refugee camps are the very mark ofour condition. They are the sign of theoriginal deed which catapulted us all intothis unending journey, the embodimentof what might have been, what was, whatcould be, the body which must bedismembered for so many to breathe

lightly, rest back in comfort. This bodywithin our body is the representation ofour memory… Who will lie bleedingtonight while ambulances are preventedfrom reaching them? How many will diehere? How many will be led away, likethey were yesterday in Qalqilya; allmales between the ages of fifteen andfifty rounded up, blindfolded, their armsmarked with numbers. Always themarking. Stripped, interrogated andbeaten, led away for more to the place ofconcentration.

Still, the detentions and demolitions, thecollective punishments and individualhumiliations, grind on. Still the killingcontinues. Between September 2000 andJanuary 2003, B’Tselem (2003b) estimated thatmore than 1,700 Palestinians had been killedby the IDF in the occupied territories, and afurther 25 by illegal Israeli settlers.7 And yet,despite these enormities, and despite thefailures and frustrations of the Intifada itself,Palestinians have refused to be cowed,disciplined, dehumanised; they have refusedto surrender their collective memories or tosilence their collective grief; they have refusedto collaborate with or consent to their ownerasure (Usher, 2003). And, as Darwish (2002)affirmed, they are – somehow – still animatedby hope, which is itself a form of resistance:

Hope in a normal life where we areneither heroes nor victims. Hope thatour children will go safely to theirschools. Hope that a pregnant womanwill give birth to a living baby, at thehospital, and not a dead child in frontof a military checkpoint; hope that ourpoets will see the beauty of the colourred in roses rather than in blood; hopethat this land will take up its originalname: the land of love and peace.

IDENTITIES AND OPPOSITIONS

It is hard to imagine how any people canwithstand such atrocities, but it beggars belief

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that, in the face of these multiple horrors andhumiliations, American support for Israelshould have continued to grow. “How can wecredibly continue to search for and destroythe remaining al-Qaeda terrorists inAfghanistan and throughout the world”,Senator Joseph Lieberman asked a Democraticconvention in Florida, “while demanding thatthe Israelis stop doing exactly that?”(Lieberman, 2002). “On September 11”, DeputySecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz(Prothero, 2002) told a pro-Israel rally inWashington, “every American understoodwhat it is like to live in Jerusalem or Netanyaor Haifa”. But when he added that “Israelisare not the only victims of the violence in theMiddle East”, that “innocent Palestinians aresuffering and dying in great numbers as well”,he was booed and jeered. Finally, on 2 May2002, both the Senate and the House ofRepresentatives passed motions expressingsolidarity with Israel (by 94-2 and 352-21respectively). The then Democrat-led Senateaffirmed that the USA and Israel “are nowengaged in a common struggle againstterrorism” (CBS News, 2002); condemnedPalestinian suicide bombings; supportedIsraeli incursions into Palestinian towns andrefugee camps as “necessary steps to providesecurity to its people by dismantling theterrorist infrastructure in the Palestinianareas”, and called upon the PalestinianAuthority to fulfil its commitment to do thesame; and declared that the US would“continue to assist Israel in strengthening itshomeland defenses”. Lieberman was explicit:“Israel has been under siege from a systematicand deliberate campaign of suicide andhomicide attacks by terrorists. Their essenceis identical to the attacks on our country of11 September” (CBS News, 2002; emphasisadded).

The claim to an identity has hadexceptionally grave consequences. There arefundamental differences between al-Qaedaand Hamas, between the Taliban and thePalestinian Authority, but the rhetorical fusionof America’s “September 11” and Israel’s

“December 2” has given Bush and Sharoncarte blanche to erase them. As a result,“terrorism” has been made polymorphous.Without defined shape or determinate roots,its mantle can be cast over any form ofresistance to sovereign power. This hasallowed the Sharon regime to advance itscolonial project not through appeals toZionism alone, to the Messianic mission of“redeeming” the biblical heartlands of Judeaand Samaria (though this has by no meanslost its ideological force), but also – cruciallyfor its international constituency – as anotherfront in a generalised, rationalised “war onterrorism”. This has in turn sustained thedeception, so assiduously fostered by right-wing ideologues, that terrorism can besuppressed without reference to the historico-geographical conditions that frame it.Netanyahu’s (1986a:204) repeated insistencethat “the root cause of terrorism lies not ingrievance but in a disposition towardunbridled violence” has been endorsed byboth the Bush and Sharon administrations. Itconveniently exempts their own actions fromscrutiny and absolves them of anything otherthan a restless, roving military response.8

It is as though, by virtue of the de-realisation of Palestine, a project reaching backover 50 years, the roots of Palestinian violence– the dispossession of the Palestinian people,the dispersal of refugees, and the horrors ofmilitary occupation – have been torn up withtheir olive groves. Violence must be lodged intheir genes not the geographies to which theyhave been so brutally subjected. Themisadventures of American foreign policy;Israel’s continuing colonial dispossession ofthe Palestinians; and most of all theconnections between the two: none of thesehave a place in the calculated abstractions ofrighteousness. The Bush and Sharon adminis-trations continue to perform their own “God-trick” of seeing the face of Evil everywhereexcept in their own looking-glasses.

This not only mirrors bin Laden’s ideology.It also ultimately serves the interests of al-

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Qaeda. Neither September 11 nor December 2marked the end of transnational terrorism. InOctober 2002, a discotheque and a nightclubwere bombed in Bali, murdering over 180 peopleand injuring 300 more. Reports suggested thatthe attack was the work of Jemaah Islamiyah,a militant group with links to al-Qaeda thatseeks to establish a pan-Islamic state inSoutheast Asia. Less than two weeks later,Chechen guerillas took hundreds of hostagesin a Moscow theatre, demanding thewithdrawal of Russian troops from theirhomeland: special forces stormed the building,killing all 41 guerillas and leaving more than120 hostages dead from the effects of narcoticgas. At the end of November in Mombasa, anIsraeli-owned hotel was bombed, murdering18 people, and two missiles were fired at anIsraeli charter jet as it took off for Tel Aviv. Itwas widely reported that the attacks were thework of al-Qaeda affiliates in East Africa. Onthe same day, at Beit She’an in northern Israel,two Palestinian gunmen murdered six Israelisand wounded many more as they waited tovote in a Likud primary. After these atrocities,an Israeli government spokesman affirmed:“Whether in New York or Washington, Bali orMoscow, Mombasa or Beit She’an, terrorismis indivisible, and all attempts to understand itwill only ensure its continuation” (Freedland,2002a; Bennet, 2002b).

On the contrary. It is precisely the failureto discriminate, the refusal to understand –worse, the determination to discredit anddisable any attempt to understand – that willensure the continuation of terrorism. Terrorismcannot be reduced to circumstances; butneither can it be severed from them. Andunderstanding does not move in the Euclideanspace of the hermeneutic circle. It has to movein the folds and torsions of the power-topologies that I have described here.Jonathan Freedland (2002b) once describedthe Israelis and Palestinians as inhabiting“parallel universes, where the same set of factshas two entirely different meanings dependingwhere you stand”. But this assumes that“different meanings” are somehow separable

from the differential elaborations of power inwhich they are involved. It substitutes anequivalence (“parallel universes”) for thepalpable asymmetry between the military andeconomic might of Israel, supported by USaid and armaments, and the broken-backed,rag-tag resources left for the Palestinians. Untilthese differences are recognised, Bush andSharon will continue to fight their mirror-warswith impunity, believing – like bin Laden andothers like him – in the indiscriminatecategorisation of whole populations and in theindiscriminate use of violence against them.This is the colonial present, whose awfulterminus was evoked with chilling economyby the crazed Kurtz at the end of Conrad’sHeart of Darkness: “Exterminate the brutes!”

There is a further twist: these powertopologies fold in as well as out. Through the“war on terrorism”, what Ghassan Hage(2003:86) calls a “phobic culture” has beenenlarged to the point where:

everything and everywhere is perceivedas a border from which a potentiallythreatening other can leap… It is acombination of a warring and a siegementality, which by necessityemphasises the eradication of apotentially menacing other. In a war/siege culture the understanding of theother is a luxury that cannot beafforded; on the contrary, the divisionsbetween Us and Them are furtheremphasised. War emphasises theotherness of the other and divides theworld between friends and enemies andgood and evil.

Agamben (2002) was right to worry that the“war on terrorism” would be invoked soroutinely that the exception would become therule, that the law would be forever suspendingitself. Since September 11, the Bush adminis-tration has curtailed democratic freedoms in atleast three domestic arenas: circumventingfederal and international law; suppressingpublic information; and discriminating against

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visible minorities. Even the conservative CatoInstitute has objected to the proliferation of“secretive subpoenas, secretive arrests,secretive trials, and secretive deportations”(quoted in Economist, 2002; Cole, 2002). Butthis series of exceptions is consistent with –and legitimised by – the imaginativegeographies of “civilisation” and “barbarism”that were mobilised by the White House. Theyarticulated “a constant and mutual productionof the civilised and the savage throughout thesocial circuitry” and produced “a constantscrutiny of those who bear the sign of ‘dormant’terrorist and activate[d] a policing of points ofvulnerability against an enemy who inhereswithin the space of the US” (Passavant & Dean,2002). The “securitisation” of civil society hasspread beyond America as other states haveinvoked the generalised “war on terrorism” tolegitimise their own suppressions, suspensionsand exceptions (Diken & Laustsen, 2002;Jasuriya, 2002). This too is the colonial present,because these spacings are all mirror images ofthe “wild zones” of the colonial imagination.“The national security state”, Susan Buck-Morss (2002:14) notes, “is called into existencewith the sovereign pronouncement of a ‘stateof emergency’ and generates a wild zone ofpower, barbaric and violent, operating withoutdemocratic oversight, in order to combat an‘enemy’ that threatens the existence not merelyand not mainly of its citizens, but of itssovereignty”. After September 11, manycommentators proclaimed, “we are all NewYorkers”. Perhaps – in this sense at least – weare all potentially Palestinians too.

ENDNOTES1 This essay is an abbreviated version of an argumentI develop in relation to Afghanistan, Palestine andIraq in The Colonial Present (Gregory, in press).

2 Judith Butler (1993:241) describes the conditional,creative possibilities of performance as “a relationof being implicated in that which one opposes, [yet]turning power against itself to produce alternativepolitical modalities, to establish a kind of politicalcontestation that is not a ‘pure opposition’ but adifficult labour of forging a future from resourcesinevitably impure”.

3 I accept many of Mbembe’s formulations, buthis discussion passes over the voices and actions ofthe Palestinians themselves; though the spaceswithin which and through which they speak and acthave indeed been compromised – shattered andsplintered – they have not been erased. The relationbetween “politically qualified life” and “bare life”is discussed in Agamben (1998). I return to his ideasthroughout this essay.

4 HRW (2002) estimated that at least 52Palestinians had been killed during the incursions,22 of them civilians, many of who were killedwilfully and unlawfully: “Palestinians were used ashuman shields and the IDF employed indiscriminateand excessive force”. There are plausible reasonsfor treating these casualty figures as minima: see,for instance, Reinhart (2002a:152-70); her doubtshave been reinforced by analyses of satellite imagery(Global Security, 2002) and eyewitness reports(Audeh, 2002; Baroud, 2003).

5 In wor(l)ds such as this, the abuse of languagemarks – and masks – other abuses (see de Rooij,2002).

6 Cf. Agamben (1998:174): “If the essence of thecamp consists in the materialization of the state ofexception and in the subsequent creation of a spacein which bare life and the juridical rule enter into athreshold of indistinction, then we must admit thatwe find ourselves virtually in the presence of a campevery time such a structure is created”. The gapbetween life in Palestinian cities (most of all inEast Jerusalem) and life in the cramped alleywaysand cinder-block homes of the camps has narroweddramatically (see Bennet, 2002a; Hass, 2002d).

7 Over the same per iod , B’Tse lem (2003b)estimated 171 Israeli civilians had been killed byPalestinians in the occupied territories and a further272 within Israel; 141 members of the IDF hadbeen killed in the occupied territories and a further63 within Israel.

8 In “Defining terrorism”, Netanyahu (1986b)also attributes terrorism to “the political ambitionsand designs of expansionist states”, and notes thatterrorists erode “the crucial distinction betweencombatant and non-combatant” and “often engagein assassination of a society’s leaders”: he does not,of course, recognise that these three claims apply afortiori to Israel’s attacks on the occupiedterritories.

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