This piece from the latest issue I think is of interest. I think there are parallels with Daniel Gutwein's (Professor in the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa) article "Some Comments on the Class Foundations of the Occupation" from the april issue (http://alternativenews.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=434&Itemid=70#Danny%20Gutwein)
THE OCCUPATION DOESN’T STOP AT THE CHECKPOINT
by Yehouda Shenhav
in News from Within Vol. XXII, No. 5, May 2006
Yehouda Shenhav is a professor of sociology at Tel Aviv University and the editor of the journal Theory and Criticism (in Hebrew). He is the author of "The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity" recently published by Stanford University Press
(I read much of the hebrew version which was published a couple years ago, and it is a very interesting read).
It is a longer piece, so I only put the first three of fifteen sections below...the rest is at the link.
I. The New Israeli Left
The new Israeli Left—Zionist and liberal—reinvented itself immediately following the 1967 war.1 During the 1948 war and its aftermath, the Zionist Left had difficulty in working out the contradiction between its socialist obligations to social and political justice, and being an inseparable part of the Zionist national occupation of Palestinian lands, upon which the new state of Israel was established. The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, provided, first and foremost, a partial solution to this schizophrenia. With the opening of new expanses over the Green Line, the Zionist Left gained some breathing room and could now elegantly separate the “here” from the “there,” to create for itself an identity and new agenda which separated the “external” (outside the 1967 borders) from the “internal” (within the 1967 borders). The first deals with Palestinians in the occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The second deals with the different groups within the jurisdiction of the state of Israel, mainly with Mizrahi Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel. “There,” the definitions are based on nationality; “here,” they are based on social class (including Israeli Palestinians). Thus, the Left created and instituted two political discourses, which supposedly do not meet. The fact that the two establish themselves as separate discourses prevents us from seeing how they create each other, and how the distinction between them actually erases three important facts. First, that the bifurcation between there (the occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza Strip) and here (normal society) is artificial and false. Second, and not without any connection to the previous fact, that the occupation regime does not stop at the checkpoint nor at the Green Line. It is woven into the internal fabric of society in Israel, at all levels and is created within it. Third, that the Israeli occupation regime is directed not only outward but also inward, into the society in Israel.
II. The Israeli Border Regime
Israel has never recognized clear-cut external boundaries. It has never reconciled itself to ceasefire borders. The border served as a one-way valve. It was meant to seal movement from “there” to “here,” but all the while allowing free movement from “here” to “there.” In other words, it was meant to hermetically stop the movement of “infiltrators” in the 1950s, those that came to visit their assets, which were confiscated by the absentee landlord law (any property owner who left Israel between 29 November 1947 and 1 September 1948 and went to an enemy country). But a sealed border does not prevent Israelis from crossing the border. After all, how could we conduct retaliation operations and revenge? How could we hike to exotic and desirable places like the ancient city of Petra in Jordan? It is customary here to say that the long arm of the security forces would catch up with them anywhere. These border crossings were always the object of desire for “the best of our boys,” many of whom were sons of the cooperative settlement movement (the moshavim and kibbutzim), the cradle of the Zionist Left. The border not only served as a one-way valve or thin line. It became a site, a space of its own. It is enough to take notice of the cultural terms used to define this space: “no man’s land,” “the frontier,” “the border zone.”3 After it became clear to the Left that the occupation did not pay off for the Jews (corruption of the youth, the demographic phantom) the Green Line became a symbolic Maginot Line (“with some changes in the border”). The Green Line became a fetish.
III. Fetishism of the Green Line
The fetishism of the Green Line has a dialectical dynamics. It purifies the occupation, reorganizes and elevates it to channels that deny the intensity and injustices of the Israeli occupation machinery. This fetishism allows the artificial separation between the “good guys” and the “bad guys”; it creates a moral indifference and hides the fact that the Israeli colonial occupation is found everywhere, not only over the Green Line. I will give two examples for the political and ethical mistakes which this approach creates. The first one exemplifies how the ethical indifference of Israeli sociologists reproduces the fetish of the Green Line. The second one exemplifies how the symbolism of the Green Line effaces the fact that the occupation regime is turned inward, to within Israeli society as a whole.
[...]
http://alternativenews.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=436&Itemid=70#Shenhav