The governments of the United States and Israel share a common religious-political tradition, rooted in the story of the Family of Abraham. It undergirds their relations with the peoples who were there first. In the U.S., the Indians; in Israel, the Palestinians. We can explore how one government echoes the other.
A recent article by David Shulman in the New York Review of Books reviews what he calls “the finest Israeli documentary ever made about the occupation, ‘The Law in These Parts.'” Shulman holds the Renee Lang Professorship of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and participates in Ta’ayush, an activist Arab-Jewish Partnership organization. Ta’ayush works with Palestinian farmers and landowners to defend their homes, fields, and grazing grounds.
The documentary focuses on a group of jurists, legal advisers, and judges who sat in the military courts in the occupied Palestinian territories. In Shulman’s words, the film shows that “the legality of torture, mass arrests, prolonged administrative detention without trial, the violent suppression of civilian demonstrations, punitive house demolitions, severe restrictions on freedom of movement, and other practices … have become commonplace under Israeli rule.”
These themes and events—”the general, remorseless processes of dispossession and expulsion”— echo the history of violent dispossession of Native Peoples in the Americas, where destruction of Native communities were the hallmark of colonial invasion and ‘westward expansion.’
As Shulman explains, the appropriation of Palestinian land for Israeli “settlements” started with “ideologically motivated, religious settlers, who fairly quickly won government backing.” He points out, “Initially, when the question of the legality of this procedure came up before the Israeli Supreme Court [in 1979], the court … declared [it] illegal and forced the government to move the projected settlement to a nearby hill.”
The court’s ruling, however, was short-lived. As recounted by Eyal Press in another review of the Israeli documentary, “Just hours after the ruling was handed down,” the government began plotting how to get around the law.
The plot provided another echo of American colonialism. Where the American colonizers relied on 15th century Christian imperialism—the “doctrine of Christian discovery”—the Israelis borrowed a doctrine from the 19th century Ottoman Empire.
Ottoman law identified a category called “mawat”—”dead” land. It applied to lands outside a village that had not been cultivated for a period of years. The Israeli government argued that this law was still in force in Palestinian territories, and that such “dead” land could be appropriated by Israel.
The terminology of “dead land” again echoes Christian colonialism against Native Peoples in America, where the invaders who wanted to ‘legally’ appropriate land declared it “terra nullius”—Latin for “no one’s land.”
As soon as the Israeli government determined to use this old Ottoman doctrine, the military began flying helicopters over Palestinian lands, looking for areas that could be labeled “mawat” and seized by the state. Israeli occupiers streamed into these areas, building a string of new “settlements.”
When the new occupations were challenged by lawsuits, the Israeli Supreme Court changed its tune. It ruled that the Israeli state, as an occupying power, had discretion to dispose of the lands as it saw fit. Under this rule, the court regarded the Israeli state as the “custodian of enemy property,” with the implication—however far-fetched—that the Israelis were taking care of the land until it could be restored to its owners.
Here again, we find an echo of the American colonial invasion: the notion that the United States government is the “guardian” of the property of the Native Peoples. This doctrine supports the power of the government to do what it decides is best with the property, even where the original Peoples are still living on the land.
As Shulman says, “In the end, the law is only one delimited dimension of a pervasive political program.” But one important political consideration distinguishes the Israeli from the American colonial program: the question of citizenship. Whereas the United States government has frequently attempted to “assimilate” Native Peoples and has unilaterally declared them to be “citizens” of the U.S., the Israeli government has resisted citizenship status for Palestinians.
This means that the nature of Israeli citizenship presents serious obstacles to the “assimilation” of Palestinians. The issue boiled up in early May 2014, at an Israeli government cabinet meeting: Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu pushed for a change to Israel’s constitution—to affirm that Israel is “the nation state of one people only – the Jewish people – and of no other people.”
As reported in The Guardian, Netanyahu added that the civil rights of minorities, including Arabs, would be guaranteed. Civil rights are also recognized in the U.S., but, unlike Israel, the U.S. Constitution mandates a separation of state and religion. Despite this major difference between Israeli and American colonial programs, the fact remains that the foundations of the two systems are mirror images: state power rooted in religious and imperial colonial doctrines.
To add one more echo: In January 2012, Israel’s High Court rejected a challenge to Israeli mines in Palestinian territory, ruling that the occupation has gone on for so long that its legal status has “unique characteristics.” Compare this to the 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of N.Y., which held that the “longstanding, distinctly non-Indian character of central New York” made it impossible to enforce Oneida ownership of the lands.
In Israel as in the U.S., a colonial occupation of lands belonging to others has developed its own special rules to justify itself. This “justification,” however, is not the same as “justice.”