“Crossing the Green Line Between the West Bank and Israel” by Avram S. Bornstein is one of the best books dealing with the subject of the borderline between the West Bank and Israel, as well as with its impact on the lives of Israeli and Palestinian citizens. Avram S. Bornstein is the Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology in John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the City University of New York. He published several studies dedicated to ethnography and anthropology, but “Crossing the Green Line” is without any doubt one of his most impressive books. The book presents Bornstein’s anthropological approach to Israeli-Palestinian society which exists despite all the physical and mental borders.
The author visited “Palestine-Israel” eight times and, in total, spent three years of his life there. (Bornstein, 2002) During his visit in 1994, he spent most of his time in the Tulkarm District of the West Bank living in the family of a Palestinian worker; in his book, he presents different aspects of the life of Palestinians starting from the family’s farm labor and construction work in Israel and ending with Palestinian weddings and their social rules. Bornstein also explores complex relations between Jews, Israeli Arabs, and West Bank Palestinians depicting how “tens of thousands of workers who built, picked, cleaned, and manufactured every day in Israel had to sneak across the Green Line without military permission in order to get to work.” (Bornstein, 2002) In his book Bornstein tries to define the cause of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians; for this, he studies history, customs, and traditions of both the nations using conversing with his Palestinian peers and participating in their daily activities; the results of his study support his argument revealing the conflict raised by the Green Line.
Bornstein’s investigation aims to define the central factor of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. According to him, the conflict can hardly consist of an ancient dispute between Jewish and Muslim religions; it is political and economic inequality that serves as the origin of this conflict. The matter is that for Palestine, the border is the means for governing separation: “State powers have drawn and redrawn the shape and practice of borders in Palestine, carving it into increasingly smaller pieces, but this form of administrative violence has remained a central factor in the conflict.” (Bornstein, 2002) The border shapes cultural affiliations and enforces differences between the citizens of Israel and Palestine; it breeds violence making the life of people unbearable:
Acute forms of violence that inflict or threaten to inflict physical pain in a punctuated way to the body (by abrasion, rupture, temperature, pressure, electric shock, etc.), are often woven closely together with economic and “structural” violence in which pain is inflicted slowly and chronically, by keeping people in poverty, depriving them of the ability to reproduce themselves, forcing them into hunger, or systematically preventing them from pursuing their chosen life on an equal playing field. (Bornstein, 2002)
What’s more, the border made it legal to infringe people’s rights and freedoms using administrative detention the law about which was adopted by the Israeli parliament in 1988. According to this law, any person who authorities regarded as dangerous for public order can be detained for ninety-six hours by a soldier or a policeman, “after which time the detention had to be authorized by an officer, who could continue it for up to eighteen days, after which time a military commander or judge could issue a renewable six-month period of administrative detention.” (Bornstein, 2002) At this, Israeli forces were allowed to use any kind of violence when interrogating detainees, especially when the latter was political. “Crossing the Green Line” abounds with examples of how the rights of Palestinian people were violated, which testifies to the fact that namely the border played a key role in the strained relations between Israeli and Palestinian citizens.
The methodology which Bornstein used for his studies was quite consistent. It was all about observations and interviews with his Palestinian friends. The main weakness of such methodology is that the obtained data might be biased, especially taking into account the existing conflict between Palestinian and Israeli people. The main strength of the methodology was that Bornstein compared the obtained information with what he could observe: “My primary method was participant observation: working in construction, agriculture, light industry, and government sector, living with a family, and spending all my social time with my Palestinian peers.” (Bornstein, 2002) This is the strength of his methodology because he could analyze the obtained data, as well as compare and verify them with what he learned from other participants of his study. He also chose statistical research instead of the broad survey, which gave him extra advantages because he could “examine individual cases in details.” (Bornstein, 2002) The fact that Bornstein was a Jew brought him certain benefits. Dealing with Jews was uncommon to the Palestinians and they were eager to converse with Bornstein because they had several questions to ask him:
Sometimes being Jewish produced interesting theological and historical discussions. I was always being asked about Jewish texts, traditions, philosophers, and history, and, in turn, told about the Muslim parallels. Being Jewish was always a topic, merely because it was so odd and had to be explained to every person I met. (Bornstein, 2002)
During these conversations, Bornstein was able to find the connections between the violence of the border and the daily life of Palestinians. In general, his methods included direct participation in “work and household reproduction, joining public celebrations and ceremonies, and, most important, participating in the conversations and decisions that come only from living with people for moths and years.” (Bornstein, 2002) These methods helped him to get the desired results.
Bornstein learned several facts about Israeli and Palestinian history, life, and traditions. These facts gave him a perfect idea about the real purpose and meaning of the Green Line. He discovered that apart from the distinctions drawn by the geopolitical borders, Palestinians and Israelis could be connected and divided by their customs. From the stories told by his Palestinian peers, he learned customs of housework, cooking, and wedding traditions and noticed that “Arab-Israelis and West Bank Palestinians distinguished themselves from each other, as moderns or preservers of tradition, even as they were intimately, but unequally, bound together by custom.” (Bornstein, 2002) The characters of the stories which were told to him by his Palestinian peers confronted the borders in different ways and it was uneasy to draw many parallels between them. Bornstein presents Palestinian customs as a mixture of household activities, leisure, and celebration stating that
These customs show how Palestinians shaped communities within and against the borders imposed on them. This does not exhaust the many possible meanings of these customs, but it does shed additional light on the problems of the border and the informal solutions to overcome them. (Bornstein, 2002)
These are the results he got from the stories told by Palestinians about work, entrepreneurship, and customs in Israel and the West Bank. All the stories prove that since 1917 when the first border between Israel and Palestine was established, people had to get permission to cross it. Not all of them succeeded in getting the permission, which often resulted in strong resistance on the part of Israeli militaries. According to Bornstein, this is where the origin of the conflict between these two nations lies. Like any other two different nations, these had different customs and traditions, but unlike other nations, they were not allowed to cross the line between their countries.
The results which Bornstein obtained from his studies support his argument. He kept to an idea that namely the border between Israeli and the West Bank which entails administrative violence is the reason for conflict between these two nations. He discovered that the roots of this conflict might be in cultural differences between the nations, but it is namely the border that makes these nations hostile. The border serves as a mechanism of inequality and separates not only territory but people who live on it:
Citizenship affords certain rights and responsibilities to members in a territorially based state, but some states determine membership according to racialist concepts of a national community that overlap with concepts like shared customs, language, and religion … National identity has become the absolute geopolitical and social boundaries inscribed on territory and persons, demarcating space and those who are members from those who are not. (Bornstein, 2002)
Bornstein proved that the border only enforced differences between Palestinians and Israelis because it raised the notion of national citizenship which became “a modern version of racism that continues to organize, dominate, and exploit inequality and the conflicts it creates.” (Bornstein, 2002) In other words, he confirmed, that it is namely the borderline, not the cultural and religious differences, that constitutes the central factor of the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
In sum, in “Crossing the Green Line between the West bank and Israel” Avram S. Bornstein presents a study the objective of which is to define the central factor of hostility between Israelis and Palestinians. In his conclusion, Bornstein expresses the idea that the antecedent of the Green Line was the fear of invasion and desire to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks: “Fear of terrorism is a very real threat to any government that can be elected out of office, so it must have some highly visible response. The border closures have surely served at least this purpose, if no other.” (Bornstein, 2002) Generalizing his ideas, Bornstein finally concludes that all this time the border existed not because of the fear of terrorism “but because the Palestinians were a political threat to Israel.” (Bornstein, 2002) Bornstein proved that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians does not root in cultural and religious differences; it exists because of the Green Line which separated the territory and the people of two different nations resulting in administrative violence, shaped cultural affiliations, and enforced differences between the citizens of Israel and Palestine.
References
Bornstein, Avram S. (2002). Crossing the Green Line Between the West Bank and Israel. NetLibrary, Incorporated, 2002.