The Tangible and Intangible Barriers of Israeli Occupation
The End, The Beginning
On our last weekend in Ramallah, Reem and I decided to get matching watermelon tattoos, inspired by Khaled Hourani’s 2007 painting. The watermelon is a long-standing symbol of Palestinian resistance, used in place of the banned Palestinian flag because of its matching colors—red, white, green, and black. I placed mine behind my ear, Reem on her arm. Palestine would be with me wherever I went—Mariam, Khalil, Reem, Dr. Hussein, Bahaa, Ayaan, Maysa, the children of Al-Eizariya, Abu Dis, and Dheisheh. They were who taught me the meaning of resistance in all of its complexity.
“Resistance,” Dr. Hussein said to me, “takes many forms, many of which are cultural and intellectual, and usually those are not what interest journalists.”
She was right. In the early days of my research, I had fallen victim to that trap. Many of the stories that stood out to me on the other side of voice recordings, notebooks, and transcripts were the ones that fit into well-recognized narratives of resistance. The ones that highlighted physical violence or communal protest or tear gas and broken windows. This resistance was important to understand, and to report on, but what about the resistance in living? In carrying out your daily routine as a Palestinian under a regime that prays for your demise. Under a military occupation that manufactures countless visible and invisible barriers to stop you from living—from going to school, to work, to a wedding, to a funeral. To take away the innocence of childhood. To replace the anxieties of life with those of death. To traumatize you in so many ways that the word loses meaning. To destroy any guarantee of your day, week, month, or year. To make it impossible to plan, so that you can never plan for your freedom.
“Palestinians are often reduced to heroes or victims, and both of these, even if combined, are dehumanizing,” Dr. Hussein said. “We are human beings. We hate and we love and we make mistakes and we are stupid and we are awesome and we are just complex human beings like anybody else.”
This thesis is a web of stories of people who are human just because they were born human, in all of their flaws and strengths—people who don’t need to be “humanized” because “humanizing” implies an inherent inhumanity. These are stories of life under a brutal military occupation that assumes this inherent inhumanity. Stories of movement—successful, failed, and limited. Movement through, around, and impeded by barriers.
Mobility, as Mimi Sheller and John Urry discussed, is complex, like the people who move. The mobility these scholars focused on was the tangible, but how can you understand the tangible without the intangible? They exist together, inextricably intertwined. Where a barrier rests across a road, another lays upon one’s chest. The physical translates to the emotional, because freedom is as much a mindset as it is a reality.
