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Abstract

This article examines Israel’s policies of deliberate disablement and debilitation during the Great March of Return in Gaza between March 2018 and December 2019. The orchestrated attacks on Palestinians during the Great March of Return were the latest incidents on a trajectory of premeditatively produced mass injuries and impairments in the Israeli settler-colonial context. The disabling of Palestinians and the debilitation of Palestinian health and rehabilitative infrastructures should be seen as part of Israel’s settler-colonial ‘logic of elimination’. Disabling the Palestinian body politic is a way to systematically erase indigenous people from the land, in this case from Gaza which has, in the words of Rashid Khalidi, refused to be a ‘docile ghetto’. Injuries should therefore not be seen as mere by-products of war, categorised as collateral damage, or even as a ‘humanitarian’ alternative to death.

Keywords

critical disability studies Gaza Great March of Return Israeli Army Palestine settler colonialism

Introduction

‘I saw my leg, and my dreams vanished . . . I said to myself: This wasn’t a bullet. This was like a mini-grenade.’ Alaa al-Daly, 21, Palestinian cyclist.¹

‘The deployment of snipers, careful planning and significant number of injuries to the lower limbs does reflect an apparent policy to target [those] limbs.’ Omar Shakir, Israel-Palestine director at Human Rights Watch.²

‘MSF medical staff report receiving patients with devastating injuries of an unusual severity . . . the injuries . . . will leave most with serious, long-term physical disabilities.’ Doctors Without Borders.³

‘Nothing was carried out uncontrolled; everything was accurate and measured, and we know where every bullet landed’. Israeli Army’s Twitter Account (tweet deleted by the Israeli Army, 2018).⁴

From March 2018 to the end of 2019, thousands of Palestinians in Gaza protested every Friday at the separation fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel. In what came to be known as ‘The Great March of Return’, Palestinians called for the right to return to their ancestors’ homes within the 1948 borders and for an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza. 2018 had marked the eleventh year since Israel imposed its unilateral (and illegal) land, air and sea blockade on the Gaza Strip, a blockade that the United Nations refers to as ‘collective punishment’.⁵ Abu Artema, one of the key figures of the Great March of Return, attributed the ‘grim situation’ in Gaza, a direct result of the blockade, as the prime factor that led Palestinians to participate in the demonstrations.⁶ In the context of the Great March of Return, it is also important to understand that about 70 per cent of all Gazans are registered refugees from areas that now make up the State of Israel.⁷ As they were made refugees during the Nakba, when Zionist militias expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, their right to return is enshrined in international law.⁸ The Israeli Army quickly responded with excessive use of force to the demonstrations, killing 212 Palestinians and injuring 34,450 until October 2019.⁹ Within the first weeks, statements from Amnesty International,¹⁰ Human Rights Watch¹¹ and the Israeli human rights organisation B’tselem¹² emerging during and after the demonstrations suggested a calculated targeting of non-threatening subjects during the demonstrations, including attacks on visibly marked medical staff and journalists. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lauded the Israeli Army’s conduct stating that it protected Israel’s ‘sovereignty and the security of its citizens’.¹³ This was underlined by Israel’s insistence that the Great March of Return was organised and led by Hamas, who called for violence and were intent on ‘bringing about a mass infiltration by the Gazan population into Israel’.¹⁴ Nearly a year later, the United Nations Human Rights Council’s special inquiry of March 2019 rendered its own verdict: Israeli security forces engaged in widespread violations of international human rights law, international humanitarian law and in actions possibly amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity.¹⁵

Israel’s disablement of Palestinians and debilitation of Palestinian health care infrastructures during the Great March of Return fall within the settler-colonial ‘logic of elimination’. The ‘logic of elimination’ was first theorised by Patrick Wolfe¹⁶ and argues that a settler-colonial project is ‘inherently eliminatory’;¹⁷ the settler state will always want to displace or replace the indigenous population to get full control of the land. Unlike any other Palestinian territory, there has been no physical presence of settlers inside Gaza since Israel’s unilateral disengagement from the Strip in 2005. And yet, Wolfe’s concept is still very much appropriate because, ultimately, there is not just one model of a settler-colonial state. Instead, settler colonies employ a variety of strategies which can also morph into one another as challenges arise, indigenous resistance persists and new necessities evolve.¹⁸ Indeed, Veracini outlines many different ways in which Israel tries to make Palestinians progressively disappear in an effort to eliminate the Palestinian population. Specifically regarding Gaza, he shows how Israel maintains its ‘logic of elimination’ by keeping absolute control while ostensibly having given up all responsibility since 2005.¹⁹ Gaza, challenging traditional settler-colonial discussions, ‘illustrates a case in which settler colonial violence is mediated through the exercise of power from a “safe” distance, mainly through the use of warfare technologies’.²⁰ In the same manner in which Israel enacts one apartheid regime in every territory it controls under one organising principle (i.e. to advance and perpetuate the supremacy of Jews over Palestinians), it implements one settler-colonial state with different modi operandi to succeed in the ‘logic of elimination’.²¹ Israel as a settler-colonial state and Zionism as a settler-colonial project are not unique: just like settler societies in Australia, the United States, or Canada, Zionist settlers require the elimination of the natives to establish themselves on their territory.²² Unlike Australia, the United States or Canada, however, Zionism has not yet managed to gain full control of the land – the occupation remains ‘unfinished business’.²³ To understand the mass injuries in Gaza between 2018−2019 as part of Israel’s ‘logic of elimination’ and ‘maiming’ as another method of transfer is to understand two key arguments: first, because of the institutional tendency of a settler-colonial state to eliminate the indigenous population, the deliberate maimings during the Great March of Return should not be seen as a one-off event. It was not the first time Israel has deliberately maimed Palestinians, nor is it likely to be the last time. Thus, Israel strategically deprives Gazans ‘of possibilities of being’.²⁴ Second, those injuries were neither accidental, a ‘humanitarian alternative’ to death, nor ‘defensive’ as the Israeli Army has claimed. They are the product of a dehumanisation of Palestinians, the rendering of Palestinians as dispensable, which is part and parcel of settler colonialism. By maiming rather than killing, Israel can defend itself ‘against accusations of disproportionate killing and as ostensible proof that it was not only abiding by international law but also acting morally’.²⁵

Academia has mostly turned a blind eye to practices of disablement in Palestine and other colonised places. Few authors²⁶ have examined colonial-settler states through the lens of deliberate disablement in Canada, the United States or Australia. Even fewer²⁷ have written on it in the context of the global South, despite the vast majority of people with disabilities (80 per cent) residing there.²⁸ The numbers are similarly distressing in Gaza, where about 7 per cent of the people live with some kind of disability.²⁹ The most notable scholarly exceptions to date on Palestine are the works by Laura Jordan Jaffee³⁰ and Jasbir Puar.³¹ Puar writes that Israel essentially uses maiming as a tool for settler-colonial violence, while Jordan Jaffee contends that psychological disablement is part of an attempt ‘to subdue resistance, to eliminate a culture, and to erase a people’.³² Their arguments build on critical disability studies (CDS) which first called attention to the role of race, colonialism, imperialism and capitalism in disability production in the global South. Meekosha³³ writes that ‘the experience of colonization and colonialism in the global South was both disabling and devastating for the inhabitants’ and that ‘the production of impaired peoples continues’. By treating indigenous people like savages, colonisers killed, stole land, destroyed the indigenous people’s culture and disabled them. Even the appropriation of land can be seen as an essential part of the process of maiming. Ultimately, ‘disabling the indigenous population was then, as now, specifically related to colonial power’. It is only with the help of the disability-(settler) colonial nexus that we can make sense of the disproportionately high number of injuries during the Great March of Return. From the tactics of the Israeli Army and the weapons used to the targeting of post-injury recovery infrastructures such as hospitals, Israel consciously seeks to maim the Palestinian body both as a physical structure and a collective group hovering between life and death. Thus, I aim to add an academic framework of analysis to already existing, albeit scarce, reports that suggest that Israel follows a tactical, as Puar termed it, ‘right to maim’.³⁴ There is a clear lack of lifting disablement and debilitation out of their existence as ancillary outcomes of war, perpetually second to fatalities, and of viewing them as productive rather than accidental.

Of bodies – the settler colonial/disability nexus

To understand the state-sponsored production of disability in Palestine, it is necessary to look at the intersection between settler colonialism and ableism. In recent years, the (still nascent) field of critical disability studies has tried to contextualise disability within settler colonialism. Meekosha³⁵ writes that colonialism, exacerbated by the immense power difference between the colonial state and its subjects, produced and continues to produce disabilities. Because colonialism ‘imposed impossible regimes and expectations of self-regulation its subjects would not be able to perform . . . the colonised were always already figured and constituted as disabled’.³⁶ The key perpetrators of the production of disabilities are ‘the processes of colonisation, colonialism, and neo-colonial power’.³⁷ But settler colonialism does not only produce disablement through violence, it also associates colonial populations with bodily inferiority through eugenic discourses.³⁸ This, in turn, is the legacy of Zionist leaders’ perceptions of the inferiority of Palestinians.³⁹ While ‘normalcy’ becomes a desirable trait for the settler society, the colonised are dismissed as ‘disabled’ or ‘mad’.⁴⁰ Achille Mbembe describes the power to produce disablement as necropower, where ‘the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who may die’.⁴¹ In exercising sovereignty over the entire Gaza Strip, Israel is unilaterally exercising control over the mortality of Palestinians.⁴² The natural outcome of colonial wars, Mbembe writes, is not peace but ‘the expression of an absolute hostility that sets the conqueror against an absolute enemy’.⁴³ Mass impairment can therefore be observed as a result of imperial ventures since their very outset, from the spectacle of pain on the bodies of African slaves in the United States⁴⁴ to the ‘barely human’ stereotyping of Australian Aborigines.⁴⁵ This connection is especially important when situating Palestine in the context of other civil rights movements, as for instance Black Lives Matter in the United States or the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.⁴⁶

Palestine in general, and Gaza more specifically, is merely the latest, and perhaps even one of the most sophisticated and most destructive on a trajectory of premeditatively produced colonial impairments. Mbembe⁴⁷ goes so far as to describe the current settler-occupation of Palestine as the most extensive and complete form of necropower, where an entire people have become the ultimate target of the sovereign. A case in point is Majadli and Ziv’s⁴⁸ work on the Great March of Return, which argues that Israel deliberately amputates the Palestinian body to fragment the Palestinian land and nation. As Laura Jordan Jaffee points out, conventional disability studies scholarship has for the most part disregarded the production of disabilities in Palestine as a result of Israel’s state-sanctioned violence. She argues that disabling Palestinians ‘has been foundational to the settlement of the Israeli state’.⁴⁹ Jasbir Puar⁵⁰ formulates Israel’s policy as a ‘right to maim’, which results in absolute biopolitical control over its Palestinian subjects. Majadli and Ziv come to a similar conclusion: ‘Israel’s attempt to maim the Palestinian body reflects its larger desire to disable the Palestinian medical system and nation, part of the same intentional scheme of control.’⁵¹ Palestinian scholars frequently apply Foucault’s concept of biopower to criticise Israel’s paramount control of Palestinian life.⁵² Shalhoub-Kevorkian argues that it is the settler’s ‘logic of fear of dispossession’ that otherises the Palestinians and holds them in a state of ‘must disappear’.⁵³ Puar purposefully challenges the idea that ‘let live’, i.e. injuring as the ‘lesser evil’, can be synonymous with humanitarianism. This approach tends to dichotomise and ‘rate’ the human as either alive or dead. It thus negates the existence of Palestinians with permanent injuries or disabilities outside of a side sentence or annotation to either of the two. As a result, Palestinians with disabilities are further manifested in a place of passive objecthood rather than human subjectivity emanated from an ableist ontology.⁵⁴ This overlaps with Fanon’s understanding of violence, which is, according to Homi Bhabha,⁵⁵ searching ‘for human agency in the midst of the agony of oppression’ as it ‘confronts the colonial condition of life-in-death’. Moreover, ignoring deliberate disablement and debilitation deflects attention away from other, non-lethal forms of colonial violence and their place in the narrative of pain and martyrdom. Collateral damage implies, as the word suggests, secondary or ancillary harm to the actual objective. However, there is very little that is collateral and much more that is deliberate about civilian damage. Injuries and infrastructural collapse are for the most part calculated central components of Israel’s attempt to discipline and coerce Gaza’s population. This is, as Zureik points out, to attain the ultimate objective of the Zionist project: ‘to control and stifle Palestinian life from attaining any sense of normalcy’.⁵⁶ The number of wounded cannot continue to exist as a mere by-product of war or as a manageable sequel to more visible and conspicuous outcomes of settler colonialism. In the end, the intentionality behind Israel’s strategy of incapacitation may be obscure, questionable, shocking or ‘absolutely transparently obvious’.⁵⁷

Trails of maiming – from the First Intifada to the Great March of Return

Sara Roy once wrote that ‘Gaza’s present debilitation seems antithetic and paradoxical when viewed against its remarkable history of resilience and growth’.⁵⁸ The Gaza Strip, a coastal area on the eastern Mediterranean lodged between Egypt and Israel, is home to 2.1 million Palestinians, most of them refugees.⁵⁹ Data trying to encompass the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, from skyrocketing unemployment levels and water levels unfit for human consumption to the UN’s infamous statement that Gaza would be ‘unliveable by 2020’ speak volumes of Gaza as a site where Palestinian life has been made dispensable. After nearly forty years of military occupation, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Strip in 2005. Israel’s disengagement, according to one of its main strategists Dov Weisglass, ‘supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians’.⁶⁰ Essentially, it turned Gaza ‘into a mega-prison that could be guarded and monitored from the outside’.⁶¹ Ever since, Israel’s remote-control occupation of the Gaza Strip has manifested in an unending siege, frequent aerial bombardments, sanctions and ‘a regulated humanitarian collapse’.⁶² Soon after Hamas won the general elections in 2006, Israel, with the backing of the US and the European Union, declared the entire Gaza Strip a ‘hostile territory’.⁶³ Yet, Israel’s policies with respect to Palestine are ‘not really about Hamas’ but about Israel’s permanent control over Palestinian lives and land.⁶⁴ Pappé⁶⁵ and Salamanca⁶⁶ show how Hamas’s victory and Israel’s declaration of Gaza as a terrorist space triggered a series of Islamophobic reactions in Israel and fabricated Gaza as an ‘alien space devoid of humanity’.⁶⁷ The Gaza Strip as it is today is therefore not a natural geographical unit but an artificial strip of land, the outcome of Israel’s colonial frontier expansion. Ostensibly as a safety precaution, Israel restricts access to areas that are deep inside the Gaza Strip: the land controlled by Israel along the perimeter fence within the Strip is called the ‘buffer zone’, covering about 17 per cent of Gaza’s total land and even 35 per cent of its best farm land.⁶⁸ Most recently, Israel has doubled down on its vision for Gaza by completing the construction of a 65 kilometre-long sensor-equipped underground wall at the end of 2021.⁶⁹

The wholesale dehumanisation of Palestinian life is by no means limited to the Gaza Strip, but reflective of Israeli settler colonialism at large. Bruneau and Kteily⁷⁰ found in their study of dehumanisation that Israelis expressed some of the highest levels of dehumanisation towards an outgroup (i.e. the Palestinians) observed to date using the same method. According to Sayegh, racism is not an accidental or acquired trait of Israeli settler colonialism but inherent to Israel and the basic motivation behind Israel’s colonisation and statehood.⁷¹ The racialisation of ‘the other’ and the rendering of Palestinians as dispensable was the prerequisite to Israel’s policy of maiming in the decades prior and during the Great March of Return. Maiming, instead of killing, allows Israel to avoid ‘shocking’ numbers of fatalities. Puar notes that during Operation Protective Edge the number of injuries was rarely reported while the number of civilian casualties was commented on daily.⁷² Except for Operation Protective Edge, maiming seems to increase relative to killing during Israel’s military assaults on Gaza.⁷³ Already in 1990, Yehuda Meir, a colonel in the Israeli military who admitted to ordering the breaking of limbs of Palestinians during the First Intifada, stated in his testimony that it was ‘part of the accepted norm in that period’. Meir accused then Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was later hailed for his peace-making process with the PLO, of using a ‘break the bones’ policy on Palestinians as a form of punishment.⁷⁴ For the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, West Bank correspondent Amira Hass writes in 2005:

When Palestinians were asked about Rabin, this is what they remember: One thinks of his hands, scarred by soldiers’ beatings; another remembers a friend who flitted between life and death in the hospital for 12 days, after he was beaten by soldiers who caught him drawing a slogan on a wall during a curfew. Yet another remembers the Al-Am‘ari refugee camp; during the first intifada, all its young men were hopping on crutches or were in casts because they had thrown stones at soldiers, who in turn chased after them and carried out Rabin's order.⁷⁵

As a result of disabilities incurred during that time, rehabilitation centres dealing with spinal cord injuries, head injuries, and limb gunshot wounds were established. One of the centres is the Abu Rayah Spinal Injuries Centre which opened its doors in Ramallah in 1990, specialising in the treatment of spinal cord injuries and various other motor disabilities. Surprisingly little has changed over the decades, making descriptions from then appear like a blueprint for the Great March of Return between 2018−2019. In its extensive report titled Punishing a Nation (1988), the Palestinian human rights organisation al-Haq documented drastic increases in injuries as a deliberate strategy during the First Intifada. Rabin stated that ‘[Israel’s] purpose is to increase the number of [wounded] among those who take part in violent activities but not to kill them’.⁷⁶ The army radio later confirmed his plan, reporting that ‘special bullets intended to injure while reducing the risk of killing’ were used by the Israeli Army.⁷⁷ B’tselem estimates that more than 130,000 Palestinians were injured during the First Intifada.⁷⁸ According to Rita Giacaman,⁷⁹ founder of the Institute of Community and Public Health at Birzeit University, almost 30,000 minors were in need of medical treatment for injuries resulting from beatings by Israeli soldiers. Similar practices were documented during the Second Intifada. From high-velocity fragmented bullets, which left a ‘lead snowstorm’ causing multiple cases of disabilities following internal injuries, to speculations whether the Israeli Army used butterfly bullets, which mushroom inside the body and make their targets ‘suffer for life’, Israeli soldiers ‘were not even trying to conceal their shooting [to injure] policy’.⁸⁰ In her book, the late Israeli linguist Tanya Reinhart dedicates an entire chapter titled ‘Israel’s slow ethnic cleansing’ to the disablement of Palestinians during that time. Perhaps the first non-scholarly work in English on the subject matter, Reinhart⁸¹ urges her readers to ‘look at personal injuries, not just at the rapidly growing number of dead’ to understand the extent of Israel’s crimes in suppressing the uprisings. She argues that the types of debilitating injuries inflicted at the hands of the Israeli army ‘cannot be accidental’.⁸²

The Great March of Return (2018−2019)

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) 35,450 Palestinians were injured between 30 March 2018 and 31 October 2019.⁸³ By comparison, 11,000 Palestinians were wounded during the seven-week long Operation Protective Edge in 2014, 10 per cent of whom face permanent disabilities.⁸⁴ The Great March of Return produced an unexpected number of amputees. Amnesty International, which also submitted a written statement to the UNHRC Special Commission, already claimed as early as August 2018 that the Israeli military’s conduct reflects ‘deliberate attempts to kill and maim’. 8,500 of those injured during the Great March of Return were under age. In 2019, OCHA Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Andrew Gilmour pointed out that ‘thousands of Palestinian children [are being] hit and on a far too frequent basis . . . by snipers who know exactly what they are doing and that aim with immense accuracy. Sometimes to kill, more often to injure.’⁸⁵ The UNHRC special inquiry similarly believes that Israeli Army snipers shot several minors intentionally, ‘knowing that they were children’.⁸⁶ One example of many, on 14 May 2018 Israeli forces shot a 16-year-old schoolboy from Shuja’iya, Gaza City in his leg, with live ammunition, making him undergo three amputations as a result.⁸⁷ The World Health Organisation (WHO) also aggregated data on affected body parts caused by live ammunition, which show that lower limbs were hit by far the most. In total, limb injuries made up 87 per cent of all gunshot injuries.⁸⁸ More than a thousand of Palestinians injured in the lower extremities required limb reconstruction. In addition, the WHO reports 149 amputations (including on thirty children) and twenty-four cases of paralysis due to spinal cord injuries (two of whom have since passed away).⁸⁹ The UN special inquiry documented multiple cases of Palestinians being shot despite being ‘hundreds of metres away from Israeli forces and visibly engaged in civilian activities’, posing no imminent lethal threat.⁹⁰ Examples of killings and disablements stretch over several pages in the report. 300 metres off the armistice line, 17-year-old Mohammed Ajouri who gave onions to demonstrators to assist with tear-gas symptoms was shot in the leg, resulting in its amputation. 24-year-old Mohammed Obeid’s injuries from being shot in both legs while walking on his own about 150 metres from the fence brought an end to his football career. Apart from leg amputations, injuries also resulted in permanent hearing impairment, organ loss and the inability to have children.⁹¹ Especially noteworthy is the targeted killing of persons with disabilities. Paradoxically, Israel, as a signatory to the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), vowed to be ‘concerned about the difficult conditions faced by persons with disabilities who are subject to multiple or aggravated forms of discrimination on the basis of race . . . political or other opinion, national, ethnic, indigenous or social origin’.⁹² Several of the demonstrators had visible impairments at the time of their killing. Both Fadi Abu Salmi and Ibrahim Abu Thuraya have been double amputees since the Israeli army permanently disabled them in separate attacks in 2008. Abu Salmi was shot in the chest when sitting in his wheelchair about 300 metres from the separation fence, and Abu Thuraya was fatally shot while trying to fight the effects of tear gas.⁹³

The spike in permanent injuries sustained by live ammunition, tear gas canisters, rubber bullets and shrapnel is not accidental. At times, tear gas was reportedly fired directly at the body of demonstrators, leading to fatal injuries. In addition, rubber bullets deployed at close range have also resulted in the killing of several demonstrators.⁹⁴ Almost since the very outset of the Great March of Return, Palestinian civilians and medical experts in Gaza reported ‘unusually large and destructive bullet wounds’.⁹⁵ In its written statement to the UNHRC, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) described them as ‘characterised by small entry wounds and large, devastating exit wounds, with significant damage to bone and destruction of soft tissue’.⁹⁶ Amnesty International, B’tselem, Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders are only a few of many national and international organisations which highlight the unusual trauma inflicted on limbs. In The Washington Post, cyclist Alaa al-Daly likened the bullet ripping through his knee to a mini-grenade.⁹⁷ Palestinian doctor Adnan al-Bosh, whose post-surgery picture of him covered in a patient’s blood went viral, believes that the Israeli Army strategically creates ‘a disabled generation by using destructive types of bullets and deliberately shooting protesters in their joints’.⁹⁸ Almost two years later, Haaretz interviewed Israeli army snipers who recount targeting Palestinians in the knees. One of them says that ‘the regular scenario is supposed to be that you hit, break a bone – in the best case, break the kneecap – within a minute an ambulance comes to evacuate him, and after a week he gets a disability pension’.⁹⁹ Disabling Palestinians in such a severe manner ties in with Israel’s concern for gradual, remote and structural violence.¹⁰⁰ Injuring thousands of protesters over months without any direct physical contact could either indicate inconceivable arbitrariness or, as Laleh Khalili argues, ‘the very object of settler-colonial counterinsurgency’.¹⁰¹ Jordan Jaffee describes a similar tactic of knee-capping during the Second Intifada which, together with Colonel Meir’s testimony, strengthens the picture of disablement as a continuous Israeli military practice.¹⁰²

The sheer scale of severe injuries during the Great March of Return despite the absence of direct clashes between the Israeli Army and Palestinians is most likely the product of a deployment of high-velocity ammunition. According to early Amnesty International reports, Israel uses military equipment in a way that is ‘deeply disturbing, not to mention completely illegal’.¹⁰³ High-velocity bullets used at a much shorter range than intended are able to cause immense bone and tissue destruction.¹⁰⁴ Israeli snipers, usually working in teams of two with one observer/spotter, were armed with a wide set of weapons, stretching from Israeli Tavor rifles, Remington’s M24 to Knight’s Armament Company’s SR25.¹⁰⁵ The Tavor rifles were using 5.56x45mm ammunition while the much more powerful and therefore devastating 7.62x51mm is used for the M24 as well as the SR25.¹⁰⁶ The deployment of the latter two caused exit wounds the size of fists ‘or even of an open hand . . . turning bones into dust’, underlining Israel’s necropolitical policies of rendering the Palestinian population ‘displaceable and erasable’.¹⁰⁷ As one doctor told the UNHRC Commission: ‘using high velocity bullets on a population that are 100 metres away doesn’t make sense, it is like using a tank to kill a fly’.¹⁰⁸ It is no secret that an operation in the Gaza Strip can be economically profitable for the Israeli military industry. Gaza is, as Li argues, a space where Israel can test and refine various methods of management by optimising the balance between ‘maximum control’ over the territory and ‘minimum responsibility’ for Gaza’s Palestinian population.¹⁰⁹ Economic researcher Shir Hever, among others, has repeatedly argued that Israel has turned the Gaza Strip into a weapons laboratory.¹¹⁰ Due to the ongoing siege on Gaza, the containment of its population allows for a debilitated body unable to move, spatially bound people with little room to escape or manoeuvre; a unilateral management of life and death for the sake of political and liberal capitalist ambitions.¹¹¹ This is directly reflected in Israel’s annual balance of trade, where arms exports regularly reach new highs after military escalations. Directly after the end of Israel’s second large-scale military operation in Gaza in 2009, for instance, the country set a new high in exports worth $7 billion.¹¹² In its report A Lab and a Showroom, the Israeli activist group Hamushim documents new Israeli-made weaponry and equipment that was field-tested during the Great March of Return. Advertised as an efficient crowd control device which can ‘reach places [the army] had yet to reach’, a new tear-gas-carrying drone (morbidly called ‘Sea of Tears’) was eventually also used against journalists and a tent with women and children inside.¹¹³ A similar narrative also applies to the operation of ‘smart fences’ and other types of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that are able to carry skunk water, shoot down incendiary kites, balloons and even people. Israeli-made weapons and ammunition are indirectly advertised to potential customers by deploying them in Gaza. Only weeks before the start of the Great March of Return, for example, the latest Tavor 7 was showcased by Israel Weapon Industries (IWI) in India.¹¹⁴ Over the next year, the Tavor 7 would make reappearances at arms fairs in France, Colombia, Thailand and most notably at the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI), the world’s largest arms fair in London. Unlike earlier models, the Tavor 7 is not chambered for 5.56mm ammunition. Instead, ‘the world’s most battle-proven bullpup rifle’ so happens to use 7.62x51mm bullets, the very same ammunition that caused fist-sized wounds during the Great March of Return.¹¹⁵

Inducing failure: Gaza’s health infrastructure

Lastly, the long-term erosion of Gaza’s rehabilitative infrastructure is an essential part in Israel’s exercise of sovereignty. By debilitating lifesaving and life-maintaining infrastructures, Israel has the power to define life after the event of injuring and/or disablement. It is here that ‘let live’ de-masquerades and presents itself as ‘will not let die’.¹¹⁶ Within a resource-deprived system, the cripple cannot transform into the disabled.¹¹⁷ And without a functioning rehabilitative infrastructure, Palestinians are forever subjected to the status of what Mbembe calls ‘living dead’¹¹⁸ and Berlant describes as ‘slow death’¹¹⁹: the ‘physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence.’ Israel has frequently been accused of breaching the neutrality of medical space.¹²⁰ Attacks and destruction of hospitals and ambulances dating back from Operation Protective Edge and previous military interventions continue to affect Palestinians in the Strip as reconstruction proves difficult under siege. In 2014, seventeen hospitals, fifty-six primary healthcare facilities, and forty-five ambulances were either damaged or destroyed. Medical workers were also targeted, leaving sixteen dead and eighty-three injured.¹²¹ Khalidi argues that these attacks were part of Israel’s collective punishment ‘for Gaza’s refusal to be a docile ghetto’.¹²² The influx of the permanently wounded is not only a strain on the health infrastructure, but also on Gaza’s crumbling economy. Even besides Gaza’s high unemployment rate, around 90 per cent of people with disabilities were unemployed, making them dependent on assistance from the Palestine Ministry of Social Development.¹²³ In Unplug and Play, Omar Jabary Salamanca argues that Israel’s suppression of life is part of its method to test new strategies of control and repression in the post-disengagement environment. He concludes that decades of settler-colonial policies testify to one general tendency, which is the ‘manufacturing of a regulated humanitarian collapse’ in Gaza.¹²⁴ Manufacturing health infrastructural disintegration works in three ways: through the deliberate killing or injuring of paramedics and doctors; through the debilitation of health facilities which impose situations of near-collapse; and by expanding the blockade on items necessary for recovery. All three stand in complete opposition to the concept of medical neutrality, which is part and parcel of international humanitarian law.¹²⁵

During the Great March of Return, three clearly marked health workers were killed, more than 800 injured and dozens of ambulances attacked, which includes the direct targeting of paramedics with tear gas and live ammunition.¹²⁶ Twice as many health workers have been targeted during the Great March of Return as during all three previous military offensives combined. One of them was 21-year-old volunteer paramedic Razan Al-Najjar, who was shot in the chest by a live bullet while she was tending to injured Palestinians east of Khan Younis.¹²⁷ Targeting paramedics as ever-present life support services and constant reminders of restoration is a way to induce failure and death, while sparing them creates possibilities of life. At the UNHRC in Geneva, Canadian-Palestinian doctor Tarek Loubani recounted how he had to sew his own legs after being shot in both legs as the Palestinian healthcare system became overwhelmed due to the number of wounded. His friend Dr Musa Abuhassanin, who had rescued Loubani just before, was later shot himself and would not survive the day.¹²⁸ A colleague of Dr Abuhassanin’s added that ‘from the moment Musa was hit, I knew [healthcare workers] had become a target’.¹²⁹ The visibility of their profession due to the white medical vest, the first aid kit bag and the execution of their profession by attending to the wounded, carrying stretchers or driving ambulances leaves little room for confusion about the intentionality behind their targeting.¹³⁰ It demonstrates Israel’s necropower of keeping Palestinians in a ‘permanent experience of “being in pain”’ by making the injured dependent on medical staff which may or may not be subjugated to Israel’s power of materially destroying bodies.¹³¹ Thus, Israel also creates a situation where vital emergency assistance in order to prevent long-term consequences from injuries is obstructed.¹³² Focusing on keeping Palestinian protesters at the armistice line at bay, the Israeli military forces left hospitals inside the Strip during the Great March of Return for the most part untouched – if, of course, one discounts Gaza’s blockade-induced continued shortage of equipment, fuel and medicine from antibiotics and saline solution to syringes.¹³³ However, Israel also did not need to destroy Gaza’s hospitals and clinics any further as it had already done so during the last decade. Since 2008, almost 150 medical facilities were destroyed or damaged during military offensives.¹³⁴ Today, thirteen hospitals are left, with al-Shifa Hospital as the main healthcare facility. The combination of a debilitated health infrastructure with the influx of thousands of injured patients during the Great March of Return confronted Gaza with a situation, says International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) director Robert Mardini, ‘it simply can’t handle’.¹³⁵ Ultimately, nobody had anticipated the amount of injured that turned the Great March of Return into ‘bloodbaths’.¹³⁶ Mardini further states that the Great March of Return ‘triggered a health crisis of unprecedented magnitude in this part of the world’, which ‘would overwhelm any health system in the world’.¹³⁷ Thus, Gaza’s rehabilitative system depended on Israel granting permits for patient referrals to the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Israel proper. However, because Israel sees the granting of such permits not as an obligation but as a humanitarian gesture, always subordinated to ‘security concerns’, most permits have been denied and delayed.¹³⁸ The very infrastructure that ought to sustain life is transformed into a system threatening life itself as its ‘infrastructural oxygen’ is being suffocated. The concept, which Salamanca refers to as ‘infrastructural violence’ is manifested in the harnessing of Gaza’s health infrastructure as a site of debilitation and, eventually, collapse.¹³⁹ The earlier discussion on ‘slow death’ becomes particularly poignant in light of a surge in bone infections among the injured. Gunshot wounds are always at a high risk of infection because a bullet, a foreign body, breaks through the skin barrier. In Gaza, however, high-velocity bullets have left about half of all Palestinians injured by live ammunition with open fractures of massive wounds and splintered bones. In combination with a severe shortage of available treatments, more than one thousand Palestinians developed bone infections, some of which seem to be antibiotic resistant.¹⁴⁰

The slow wearing down of the health sector continues in a third area: medical supplies. Israel limits the entry of so-called ‘dual use’ goods, which could potentially be used for military and civilian purposes. However, this has led to a severe shortage in essential medical equipment such as X-ray scanners as well as the production of prosthetic limbs which contain carbon fibre and epoxy resins, both considered ‘dual use’.¹⁴¹ If a patient suffers from a serious limb injury, for example, an external fixator can assist with the recovery of the damaged bone structure. While doctors in the United Kingdom can use fixators made with lightweight and at the same time strong carbon fibre components, the alternative in Gaza is restricted to heavier, less convenient metal frames.¹⁴² Ultimately, by debilitating Gaza’s rehabilitative infrastructure, Israel does not need to rely on ‘the event of becoming disabled’. ¹⁴³

Conclusion

Paraphrasing Fanon, Homi Bhabha writes that ‘the colonised are . . . in a process of continued agony [rather] than a total disappearance’.¹⁴⁴ It was one of the aims of this article to challenge the normalisation of the injured as a by-product or even humanitarian option in military offensives and frame ‘continued agony’ as an end in itself. The conclusions drawn as outcomes of this project are manifold and, since the topic is spectacularly understudied, not limited to these findings. The drastic increase in the amount of injured Palestinians with each military escalation is a striking testimony to Israel’s ‘right to maim’. This also raises questions about the near and distant future in which permanently disabled Palestinians face the socio-economic challenges of an ableist environment. To counter ableist thinking, it is also important to challenge the idea of Palestinians with disabilities as ‘passive’ actors: there are numerous examples of Palestinian-led spaces inside and outside of Gaza which are founded by and cater to Palestinians with disabilities. This includes the Nuseirat Rehabilitation and Social Training Association (NRSTA), the Palestinian Union of Wheelchair Basketball, or the Palestine Amputee Football Association, founded in 2019.

Producing subsequent generations of maimed Palestinians is both a visible marker of Israel’s military prowess and, in combination with Israel’s debilitation of Palestine’s rehabilitative infrastructure, a sentence to ‘slow death’. Even outside of military assaults, Israel has started to manufacture a crippled population in the Gaza Strip: 60 to 70 per cent of children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, food insecurity is leading to high numbers of cases of anaemia, stunting, and underweight, and more than a quarter of all reported diseases are the result of poor water access and quality.¹⁴⁵ Thus, Israel has sentenced thousands of Gazans to a premature death in an unknown future, very much tying in to its ‘logic of elimination’. This article has used the Great March of Return as a case study, but disablement and debilitation as part of the settler-colonial ‘logic of elimination’ is not just limited to Palestine. Scholars of settler colonialism should revisit the history of other settler-colonial projects through the lens of disablement to render the ‘right to maim’ as a less visible form of elimination visible.

Footnotes

Lena Obermaier is a PhD candidate in Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter and previously taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

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Disabling Palestine: the case of Gaza’s Great March of Return

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Of bodies – the settler colonial/disability nexus

Trails of maiming – from the First Intifada to the Great March of Return

The Great March of Return (2018−2019)

Inducing failure: Gaza’s health infrastructure

Conclusion

Footnotes

References