# PALESTINE /// The Ordinary Violence of the Colonial Apparatuses in the West Bank
Published
Abu Dis, Judith s., December 2003
The Israeli women of MachsomWatch who struggle against the colonial apparatuses of movement control in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, have monitored in photos and videos the physicality of their government/army’s politics and thus assembled an important data base. Their Israeli citizenship allows them indeed to observe more closely the actions of the military as well as the implementation of various obstacles that have been conceived in the unique goal to administrate and disturb the Palestinian daily lives. Their presence is also used as a regulator to monitor and report the disrespectful if not violent behaviors of soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The apparatuses monitored below are all common in their design that filters, controls or simply prevents Palestinians’ movement by imposing a physical violence on their bodies. The wall, in all its forms is paradigmatic of such violence but so are the various turnstiles that must be experienced several times at every pedestrian checkpoints. Those could be easily confused with torture machines and the Israeli soldiers in charge of those same checkpoints often us them as a sort of prison threshold. In fact, they would regularly lock their turning characteristics in such a way that a person remains prisoner for few seconds or few minutes from their metal bars before being able to pass the checkpoint.
I am aware of my own redundancy; however it remains difficult to ignore the force of architecture in those photos (see below) when designed and used in a military and colonial administrative purpose, thus providing what we could in a tragic oxymoron: the ordinary violence.
The following links refers to two different galleries of photos of those apparatuses on the MachsomWatch website:
FlickR gallery
Powerpoint presentation
Huwwara CP, Nur B.O., March 2006
Huwwara CP, Nur B.O., April 2006
Qalandiya, Hava B., December 2004
Bruqin, Shosh Z., November 2006
Qalandiya, Idit N., February 2006
Hebron, Mira B., November 2005
Huwwara CP, Vera R., April 2004
Beit Ur A Tahta to Route 443, Idit N. & Neta E., February 2008
