Trapped between the separation barrier and the Green Line, Palestinians living in the ‘Seam Zone’ are forced to reckon with a Kafkaesque permit regime that appears designed to do one thing and one thing only: make them give up and leave.
By Idan Landau, translated by Jordan Michaeli
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| A Palestinian woman takes part in a demonstration against the Israeli army’s permit regime, Bidu, West Bank, August 30, 2009. (Photo: Activestills.org) |
Israeli NGO Hamoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual published “The Permit Regime” earlier this year, a report amazing in its discoveries and the level it details the parallel universe Israel has created in the “Seam Zone,” the area between the separation barrier and the Green Line. The bulk of the information in the report was collected from UN reports (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA) and the State of Israel’s responses to 76 Supreme Court petitions filed by Hamoked over the years. As expected, the report gained zero media coverage.
The following 25 stations, on the journey to the land of permits, were drawn from the report. Refreshment stations, scattered along the way, were taken from sources that will be named.
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1. “The Seam Zone” – Territories of the West Bank that were de facto annexed to Israel by the separation wall. Today 7,500 Palestinians live in the Seam Zone, trapped between the wall and the Green Line. With the completion of the wall their number will increase to 30,000. Overall, the Seam Zone will expropriate 9.4 percent of the West Bank’s territory.
2. More than half of the land in the Seam Zone is private Palestinian land, expropriated from residents living east of the wall.
3. Palestinians must apply for special permits to enter the Seam Zone. Moreover, permanent residents of the villages in the Seam Zone must also apply for a permit that will allow them to live on lands that have been theirs since time immemorial. In contrast to the judicial principal according to which a person is entitled to be on any part of his land except for in exceptional circumstances, wherein the burden of proof lays on the authorities, in the Seam Zone, the situation is completely reversed: no person is entitled to be on their land except under exceptional circumstances, wherein the burden is on the person to justify his or her presence.
4. Correction: The burden of proof lays on the Palestinian, not on the person. The permit regime in the Seam Zone is operated on the basis of ethnicity. Israelis and tourists may move freely within and into the Seam Zone.
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The state of Israel sees the permit regime as a regime of privilege… contrary to a rights-base regime, which obligates the state to avoid infringing individual rights and even to actively work toward their realization. In a regime of privilege the sovereign can grant services to a certain population (or deny them) as part of an administrative decision that is the prerogative of the state. (Phantom Sovereign: The Bureaucracy of the Occupation in the West Bank, Yael Berda, Van Leer Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing, 2012, pg 89)
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5. The “exceptional circumstances” that allow one’s presence within the Seam Zone are divided into 13 categories, resulting in 13 kinds of permits: a proof of permanent residency document, a permanent farmer permit, a temporary farmer permit, a business permit, an employment permit, a personal needs permit, an education worker permit, an international organization employee permit, a Palestinian Authority employee permit, an infrastructure worker permit, a medical personnel permit, a student permit and a minor child permit.6. The words “permanent resident” and “permanent farmer” are deceiving: all permits in the Seam Zone are temporary. Most of them are granted for three months and the longest permit is granted for two years. As a Palestinian, your status in the Seam Zone is always temporary, even if you were born and have worked there your entire life. Additionally, Civil Administration inspectors are likely to follow you around and may add you to the “Suspected of losing connection to the Seam Zone” list – the code name for a transfer list used to revoke his residency.
7. A permit granted for one purpose may not be used for another. A person who received a farming permit in the Seam Zone cannot use it to travel to a family gathering; they must apply for a special “personal needs permit.” A person who received an “infrastructure worker” permit cannot use the same permit to conduct business, and so on and so forth. Moreover, the army does not handle more than one application per person at any given time. The result is that there’s no real possibility to live an organic, multi-dimensional life in the Seam Zone, only, at best, to divide it into a stream of events, disconnected from each other in time.
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From the perspective of the colonial model, the merging of the security and civilian mechanisms is actually a desirable one, because it allows administrative flexibility and the manufacturing of exceptions on an ongoing, daily basis, thanks to the recurring states of security emergency – until even civilian considerations become reactive and operate in emergency mode. (Phantom Sovereign: The Bureaucracy of the Occupation in the West Bank, pg 90)
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8. The army does not issue farming permits to joint owners of land. One owner will receive a permit, the other won’t. The only way for the other owners to access their land is by applying for a permit as a “temporary worker,” employed by the owner holding the permit. For this they must present a work contract. Palestinians are forced to sign work contracts with their parents, children and siblings.9. The number of Palestinians holding permits is steadily decreasing, while the number of permits issued remains identical. The reason is that the time period for the permits are valid is becoming ever shorter. Between 2007 and 2010 the number of permits granted for two years decreased from 23 to 7 percent of all permits.
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What characterizes the administrative flexibility of the permit regime is, in fact, that the squandering of resources and the frequent administrative friction involved in providing work permits brings about two results desired by the governmental system: creating a dependency of the population on the administrative system in order to preserve ample space for monitoring and control; and preventing the entry of Palestinians from the West Bank into Israel. (Phantom Sovereign: The Bureaucracy of the Occupation in the West Bank, pg 88)
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10. As a result of the permits’ short validity, the difficulty of renewing them on time and delays faced at Israeli check points, farmlands in the Seam Zone are not regularly cultivated. Greenhouses have been taken down, crops such as citrus and almonds were abandoned, and for the most part, only olive trees, which provide less revenue, remain. Due to difficulties in reaching the land, the yields from olive harvest also decreased 60 percent, compared to yields on the eastern side of the fence. In short, the permit regime transformed the Seam Zone into an area of economic impoverishment. 11. The circle of life and death of a ‘permit’: File an application at the Palestinian District Coordination and Liaison (DCO) Office → forward it to the Israeli DCO → permit is granted, outright procedural rejection or refusal → in case of refusal, file an appeal at the Israeli DCO → be summoned to a committee hearing → the permit is granted or it is refused → in case of refusal, appeal to the High Court of Justice.
12. There is potential for trouble at every step in the process. Many times, the same application will be filed again and again since the Israeli DCO claims that an application “was not transferred” to it. The length of the delay between the Palestinian DCO (which only acts as an intermediary) and the Israeli DCO is unknown. A Palestinian has no way of knowing the status of his or her application, whether it reached its destination, whether documents are missing, and so on. Applications are often rejected without informing the applicant. The delay is crucial, since those who don’t file an appeal within a set period of time after being rejected must wait another six months before filing a new appeal. Filing an appeal also involves a risk: the military does not issue written confirmations when receiving appeals, thus making it difficult to prove that an appeal was ever made. Even if you are summoned to appear in front a committee hearing following an appeal, there is no guarantee that the subpoena will arrive on time. Many Palestinians have missed their hearings simply because they were not informed of them. Of course, not appearing at a hearing is the equivalent of not submitting an appeal at all. The refusal is then automatically extended for six months.
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In the Castle the telephone works beautifully of course, I’ve been told it’s going there all the time, that naturally speeds up the work a great deal. We can hear this continual telephoning in our telephones down here as a humming and singing, you must have heard it too. Now this humming and singing transmitted by our telephones is the only real and reliable thing you’ll hear, everything else is deceptive. There’s no fixed connexion with the Castle, no central exchange transmits our calls further. When anybody calls up the Castle from here the instruments in all the subordinate departments ring, or rather they would all ring if practically all the departments – I know it for a certainty – didn’t leave their receivers off. Now and then, however, a fatigued official may feel the need of a little distraction, especially in the evenings and at night and may hang the receiver on. Then we get an answer, but an answer of course that’s merely a practical joke. And that’s very understandable too. For who would take the responsibility of interrupting, in the middle of the night, the extremely important work up there that goes on furiously the whole time, with a message about his own little private troubles? (Franz Kafka, The Castle)
13. Thirty percent of all applications are rejected. Either the army denies the application was ever transferred to it, or the applicant, according to the army, didn’t “prove a need” to enter or be in the Seam Zone, or the army has security related information on the applicant. In any case – the rejection is not explained, or even handed down in writing.
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13. Thirty percent of all applications are rejected. Either the army denies the application was ever transferred to it, or the applicant, according to the army, didn’t “prove a need” to enter or be in the Seam Zone, or the army has security related information on the applicant. In any case – the rejection is not explained, or even handed down in writing.
14. The army requires applicants to present documents that already appear in its database (land ownership, payments of fees and so forth). Often the documents are kept at the Civil Administration’s office. A Palestinian resident is thus forced to make their way to the office (a procedure that is made difficult by travel limitations – the same limitations that the permit is meant to remove), make a copy of the sought-after document and take it to the Palestinian DCO, only for the latter to return the copy to the Civil Administration office.
15. In principle, there is no need for documents when renewing a permit. In practice, an application made once an old permit expires is labeled a “new request” and all of the documents must be attached to it.
16. The problem is, that for a long period of time the Israeli DCO refused to accept applications for permits before the old permit expired. That created lengthy interim periods between permits, during which entrance to the Seam Zone was denied (fields were neglected, family gatherings postponed). Two years ago the army agreed to accept applications for extension starting three weeks before a permit expires – an awfully short time in the DCO’s bureaucracy, in practice not allowing for consecutiveness in between permits.
read more on how israel makes life very difficult for the palestinians in an israeli publication @
http://972mag.com/a-journey-into-the-dark-heart-of-israels-permit-regime
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