Restricting Movement

In Palestine, one of the most brutal symptoms of settler colonialism and apartheid is the restriction of Palestinian movement throughout their land.  There are nearly 600 checkpoints in the West Bank that Palestinians must travel through either by car or foot to move from one town to another, go to work, or to school.  These checkpoints are completely controlled by the Israeli military.  While settlers are able to move freely throughout the West Bank, native Palestinians must carry and present ID cards to soldiers.  A trip that would normally take minutes could take several hours. Several people have died at overcrowded checkpoints, and countless others denied passage for no apparent reason.  These checkpoints are dehumanizing and humiliating.  In 2005, Palestinian woman Nivin was forced to give birth to her child at a checkpoint after being denied passage to the Al-Quds hospital by Israeli soldiers.  Countless others have been through the same experience.  Since 2001, the UNFPA has recorded more than 70 cases of women who were forced to give birth at checkpoints either because of delays or being denied passage, which resulted in several maternal and newborn deaths.  Everyday, nearly 70,000 Palestinians who work outside of the West Bank arrive at the checkpoints before they open between 3 and 6 AM in order to reach their workplace on time.  These checkpoints aim to regulate and restrict Palestinian movement and access to their land, as well as attempt to quell resistance to the occupation.  

Checkpoints are the only entry points to move throughout the West Bank. The Wall has sealed off the Occupied Territory, with an integrated gate system, while dirt mounds have closed off existing roads. Israel has also established an Apartheid road system; tunnel roads are for Palestinians, keeping them under the bypass road system, which only Israeli cars with yellow plates are able to drive. 

Mass incarceration and administrative detention are other strategies by which Israel attempts to silence and restrict Palestinians. Palestinian communities are over-policed and surveilled by Israeli soldiers, and several Palestinians are arrested daily based on false claims or suspected attempts at resistance.  One of Israel’s carceral tactics against Palestinians is the policy of administrative detention, which it has long employed in order to detain Palestinians at any given time and indefinitely without charge or trial.  This policy allows the settler-colonial regime to criminalize Palestinian social and political mobilization, and to suppress resistance against colonialism. 

Palestinians undergo similar policing and surveillance tactics as communities of color in the US, not only because the structures of oppression and settler colonialism manifest similarly across the world, but also because of the Deadly Exchange: exchange programs between US police, ICE, border patrol, and FBI with Israeli soldiers, police, and border agents. In these programs, discriminatory and brutal policing tactics like racial profiling, surveillance, deportation and detention, and physical violence are exchanged and promoted.  The knee-to-neck technique which killed George Floyd was originally developed in Israel to detain Palestinians and was exchanged with US Police in one of these programs.  Communities of color in Philadelphia suffer from the same structures of oppressive policing and mass incarceration which regulate movement and also serve as a strategy to suppress resistance.  Black people are disproportionately targeted by racist police, and are often falsely convicted and criminalized.  One such example is political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal, a former member of the Black Panther Party and revolutionary writer who was falsely convicted of murdering a Philadelphia police officer and sentenced to life in prison.  The Philly DA is strategically withholding evidence of Mumia’s innocence to keep him in prison.  Cases like Mumia Abu Jamal’s are obvious attempts at silencing black revolutionaries and repressing any form of resistance to the state.  

Detention strategies in Palestine serve a similar purpose.  During the first and second Intifadas, prisons were overflowing with Palestinians; yet despite this, prisons became some of the strongest sites of resistance.  Prison cells became classes, and whole wards became universities of political education.  Palestinians developed a ‘philosophy for confronting prisons’ which theorized that one must cultivate joys and go about life as usual in order to spite the structure of the prison which is designed to break one’s spirit.  Palestinian prisoners have resisted the carceral system since the beginning of the occupation in several different ways.  Detainees have organized protests inside prisons, both collective and individual hunger strikes, boycotts of military courts, refusing to take orders from prison authorities, and rejecting the structure of the prison by destroying its property.  

In Philadelphia, resistance against the carceral system comes from organizations like the Human Rights Coalition, which is a grassroots group of currently and formerly incarcerated individuals, their families, and supporters.  This organization challenges the violent nature of the prison system and works toward abolition.  They organize several campaigns to support incarcerated individuals and their families, such as the campaign to end solitary confinement, releasing aging and elderly individuals, advocating for incarcerated people’s right to vote, and writing letters to those in prison and their families.  From Philadelphia to Palestine, resistance to these violent systems of oppression which regulate the body is an important facet of collective liberation.