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.12/9/04 The Slow Creep of Israel's annexation of Palestineby John
12/3/04 Jhon from b2p arrested by the IDF
11/28/04 Internationals Block Army Jeeps at Balata Refugee Campby John
11/19/04 John in Balata refugee campby John
11/11/04 East Jerusalem mourns Arafat by John
11/10/04 Israeli Maps, or the Hertz rental car forecast of future Israeli borders. by John inJerusalem,
11/11/04 East Jerusalem mourns Arafat by John in Jerusalem.
11/10/04 Israeli Maps, or the Hertz rental car forecast of future Israeli borders. by John inJerusalem,

Nov 11th, 2004
East Jerusalem mourns Arafat by John

Greetings from East Jerusalem!

East Jerusalem, the capital of Palestine and the commercial center for
Palestinians living in the city, is extraordinarily quiet today. On the
day of Arafat's death, the city is, as I have never seen it --- quiet,
calm, and almost every shop closed. The old city, usually bustling and
chaotic with hordes of crowds, shoppers and vendors, is almost
completely shut down as well.

Residents have said that the city will remain quiet and shops closed for 3 to 7 days in honor and to mourn the passing of Arafat ("until we see the moon" I was told by one shop owner when I asked exactly how long). I later found out that the Palestinian Authority issued a statement asking that the private sector remain closed for 3 days and requiring that Palestinian government offices be closed for 7 days.

By mid afternoon, pictures of Arafat were being posted all over the old
city and East Jerusalem. Children placed the pictures on their bicycles
as they rode through the streets. The occasional shop owner stands in
the street and offers tourists to open the store for them to look in.
Although one vendor told us that Arafat's death was natural, "he was
taken by God", another vendor told me that Arafat was poisoned (which
was unfortunately the position that Hamas is putting out). Without an
official cause of death, many theories surrounding his death in Paris
will surface.

Although there was some concern among foreigners and tourists that
protests and other spontaneous outbursts might erupt in the city, none
have appeared to occur so far. There is an extremely heavy police and
military presence in the city ­ much greater than I had witnessed in the
past and the word on the streets is that it will get even more intense
tomorrow.

The West Bank was completely closed to travel for non-Jewish travelers.
The Israeli military, by late afternoon, had completely shut down travel
in and out of the town of Ramallah (the Palestinian Authorities
headquarters). Elsewhere in the West Bank, reports of thousands of
people marching on the streets - including Bethlehem - in memory of
Arafat has been filtering to us.

Though East Jerusalem has been (illegally) annexed into the state of
Israel, the vendors, in an act of solidarity decided to join the request
by the Palestinian Authority for the closing of shops with those in the
Occupied West Bank.

In West Jerusalem the city goes on as nothing has changed. The shops are
open and filled with consumers, cafes and restaurants packed, and little
mention of Arafat, even from my trying to get them to speak about it.
But for the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, Arafat can be
viewed as one man put it to me: "the father, the mother, and leader of
our people".

---------------
photo attached:
Palestinian children hold posters of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat
during a rally following the announcement of his death, in east
Jerusalem November 11, 2004. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who rose
from guerrilla icon to Nobel peace prize-winner but ended up isolated
and locked in conflict with Israel, died in a French hospital.
REUTERS/Mahfouz Abu Turk

photo 2:
Supporters of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat hold candles in his honor as
one of them waves a Palestinian flag next
to the walls of Jerusalem's Old City Thursday Nov. 11, 2004. Arafat
died in a hospital in Paris early Thursday, he was 75.(AP Photo/Oded
Balilty)

--------------------------------
Israeli Maps, or the Hertz rental car forecast of future Israeli borders.
by John
Jerusalem, November, 2004

On many occasions over the past couple of years, while giving a talk about
the Occupation of the West Bank, I have been confronted by someone from the
audience asking why, if Palestinians want peace, their textbooks do not show
Israel on the national map? They would often times press their point by
saying that, by not giving geographic representation to Israel, the
Palestinians, in fact, denied its existence and would continue with their
"terrorist" attacks. While I expect that such maps do exist, I have never
seen one personally. The tourist maps that one finds in the West Bank always
demarcate the infamous green line - the internationally recognized border
between Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Over the past few days, I have been traveling through Israel by car and my
experience of maps, representation, and driving have given me a useful
counterpoint to the above allegations. I have come to realize that everyday
road maps - such as those that are produced by gasoline companies, rental
car companies, and travel bureaus - guilty of the same thing that critics of
Palestinian maps point to. Not only is the green line not represented, but
the entire Israeli road system is represented as it extends from the
Mediterranean sea to the Jordan river, swallowing up the entire West Bank
without the slightest indication that it is an occupied territory or - as
Israel refers to it - an "administered" territory. The Israeli cities of Tel
Aviv and Haifa are connected to the same road systems as Nablus and Hebron
in a continuous territorial expansion. The Israeli highway system travels
throughout the territories and one would get the impression that it is all
Israel and that the Palestinian towns and cities are merely parts of that
whole. Some wall maps indicate all the Israeli settlements in the West Bank
but conveniently leaves out major urban Palestinian centers (those which do
not have significance as religious or historical sites to Israelís). Many of
the cities, like Nablus, are renamed as the ancient Israel name, in this
case, Shekkhem. Cities such as Qalqilya are missing from these maps. The
city of some 40,000 people is missing while small Israeli settlements that
stand next to it and have only tiny populations are included. Of course, if
one drove down the highway past Qalqilya, one would likely not even realize
it existed anyway since the separating wall surrounds the city on all four
sides by 25 foot concrete walls and fences.

While these maps are clearly misrepresentative and ideological, they have
also been instructive to me as to how Israelis perceive the West Bank in
both an every day, as well as territorial-representative sense. They
represent, in many ways, the ways in which material representations of
reality become reality and vice-versa. Simply put, they seem to view the
West Bank as part of Israel. Incorporated into the state, the language then
becomes one of "danger" "violence" or, reminiscent of the ways people in the
US talk about cities (and the racial topographies within them), a
ghettoization of certain areas as places "to be avoided". In Israel, these
are clearly areas of high Palestinian presence, both in the West Bank as
well as in Israel proper. Within these ghettoized areas, the Israeli
military is seen not as "occupiers" but as keepers of the peace in places in
which lawlessness reins. Indeed, when I have asked many Israelis for
directions, they have told me that the drive from the Dead Sea to Jerusalem
is on route 90 - a road that travels north of the sea along the border with
Jordan then continuing west on Route 1 to Jerusalem. There was no question
that driving these routes would be bringing me through the occupied
Territories or a land whose legal status was up in the air. Instead, what
was used was the language of common criminality and robber barons: driving
these routes can be dangerous, best to travel during daylight hours, and so
on and so forth. Has Palestine become nothing more than unruly neighborhoods
(ghettos) that require special policing?

Looking at these maps, one would never assume that an autonomous Palestinian
occupied territory exists. Instead, one would perceive all of Israel and the
occupied territories as a continuous whole dotted, like all modern nation -
states, with pockets of poverty, ethnic minorities, and economic and
political marginalization. Indeed, the Hertz rental car map, which is titled
"touring map of Israel", makes no mention of "autonomous areas" (areas
officially controlled by the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo
agreements). Nor does it mention that, while traveling these territories,
one is less likely to encounter indiscriminate violence and more likely to
run across any number of military check points and road closures, surely
annoying to any tourist.

The revelation that Israelis don't view the West Bank as a separate entity
that another people lay claim to has been incredibly distressing for me. I
feel that, for the first time, that for most Israeli's, their understanding
of the borders of the country do not include the West bank. They have come
to understand the borders of their country as something very different from
what even the international community recognizes. For them, it appears that
giving up the West Bank would be like giving up part of Israel - not just in
a religious sense but in the modern cartographic sense of how boundaries
around states and territories are drawn. Could it be that Israel, founded as
a frontier society without fixed borders, will never be able to recognize
other modern borders? Israel is unlike most other nations in the world in
that they do not seek strict borders and, at the same time, do not recognize
their current war as one with external enemies defined by their own
territorial markers but, rather, an internal presence. How have Israeli's
come to internalize such spatial understandings of their country? Is it that
after 36 years of occupation, they have simply accepted it as reality?

John