WHEN ISRAELIS VOTE, Palestinians do not. But they do get to participate: they can watch. Like the residents of the Palestinian village of Beit Ur al-Fauqa in the occupied West Bank who get to watch as the ballots cast by their Israeli settler neighbors from Beit Horon are shipped to election headquarters—to the Knesset that Palestinians do not get to vote for (but whose decisions control their lives) on a highway they can-not use (but built on land confiscated from them).
Palestinians also get to participate in the legal proceedings of Israeli courts: they get to be convicted. Not much of a surprise, given the clear division of roles in the theater of injustice of military courts. Israelis are always cast as judges, prosecutors and issuers of the military orders under which Palestinians get to play their humble roles as objects for detention, interrogation, prosecution, and conviction.
Even when Israelis regulate relative minutiae such as fishing, Palestinians get to participate. Israel recently revised fishing regulations in the Mediterranean, prohibiting fishing near the coastline in order to prevent harm to vulnerable marine habitats. However, along the Gaza coast, Israel imposes restrictions that are the very reverse: Gaza’s fishermen are not allowed to go more than a few miles from the coastline. We regulate, they participate.
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Source Citation
Tikkun 2017 Volume 32, Number 2:38