Fréderike Geerdink
A Dutch friend of mine who has been going to Gaza for three decades, just wrote a book about the current situation in the enclave and I assisted her with editing the manuscript. Educational of course, not in the least because of the comparisons that can be made between the situation in Israel and Palestine and the situation in Turkey and Kurdistan. One of the issues is: how does occupation end? And what does the term ‘warehousing’ mean in this context?
The book will be published in Dutch, under the title ‘Never again is now’. Author is Anja Meulenbelt, a well-known intersectional feminist and author in the Netherlands who has been a senator too. She has been going to Gaza since the early 1990s and knows the local situation very well.
Annexation
Occupations, Meulenbelt writes, are usually temporary. They either end by giving the territory back to the other party, usually after a war, or by the annexation of the land. For Israel, both are impossible when it comes to Palestine. Giving land back to Palestinians, big and unified enough to build a state, is what Israel has never considered: in their birth myth, there was no nation on the land they occupied to begin with so whom to give land back to? But annexation is also impossible, because that would include the people. If Israel annexes Gaza and the Westbank, Jews would no longer be the majority and that poses problems for the Jewish state.
This is where the term ‘warehousing’ comes in, coined by anthropologist Jeff Halper.It is explained as the permanent storage of an excess and unwanted population, keeping them under control for a minimum of costs. That’s what Israel has been doing in Gaza. Israel has been fully controlling what goes into Gaza and what comes out since its military presence on the ground ended in 2005, allowing, for example, just about enough food in so the population doesn’t starve. The costs are also kept low by putting UNRWA in charge of public services.
Bombing campaign
The warehousing can only end and change into annexation if the number of Palestinians is significantly reduced, Meulenbelt explains. That’s what’s been going on since 7 October. An intense bombing campaign, combined with starving the population and forcing them south to the border with Egypt. If they manage to eventually push enough Palestinians over the border, the warehousing can end and annexation can happen without increasing the Palestinian population of Israel too much – or at all.
Warehousing. Let it sink in
Turkey’s occupation of Kurdistan is different. If what Meulenbelt says is true, it must end by either giving the land back to Kurds, or by annexing the land. Annexation doesn’t pose a threat to Turkey the same way it does to Israel. Both occupying states were, after all, built on different premises: Israel for Jews, Turkey for Turks. Israel pushes Palestinians off the land or ‘warehouses’ them for the time being, because Palestinians can’t become Jews. Turkey tried for decades to solve the presence of Kurds differently: by denying their existence all together and forcibly assimilating them into Turks. Unfortunately for Turkey and luckily for the Kurds, a resistance started. That Kurds exist, can no longer be denied, but the foundational myth of the state that Turkey is the country of Turks, can’t be rubbish binned either. The Palestinians resist too. They refuse to leave, they refuse to be ethnically cleansed.
Anti-Semitism
Both Turkey and Israel call the resistance ‘terrorism’. With that label, and with decades long propaganda, you can get away with it and not get serious objections from your international friends, for example Europe. They’ll even support you. It’s extra practical if you can silence potential criticism by weaponising Europe’s deepest fears. Israel says “anti-Semitism!” if you dare to criticize it. Turkey says: “Shut up or we’ll open the borders and send Syrian refugees to Europe!” Turkey’s arsenal is a bit bigger, it can also manipulate NATO for example.
But legitimate resistance isn’t terrorism. Resistance against occupation is legitimate, although targeting civilians is always outright wrong and illegal. Trying to crush the resistance by mass killing, bombing, suppressing, starving, incarcerating, prosecuting and displacing civilians and making their lives impossible by destroying their cities, villages and infrastructure, is terrorism – state terrorism, to be precise. It doesn’t stop the resistance. It only intensifies it.
Humanity and equality
What needs to be done, is to stop the occupation, both of Palestine and of Kurdistan. Israel’s and Turkey’s foundational myths make it impossible, which makes the necessity of resistance even more urgent. Resistance not only against daily state violence, but against those foundational myths. To make it explicit: not against Jews, not against Turks, but against the deeply rooted conviction that the land can’t be shared with humanity and equality. It can. And it must be. Because the alternative is permanent annexation and the oblivion of Palestinians and Kurds. We can never allow that to be the end of the occupation.
- Fréderike Geerdink is an independent journalist. Follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her acclaimed weekly newsletter Expert Kurdistan.
