Occupation’s daily violence: Rubber bullets as colonial control in West Bank’s fragmented landscapes
Original framing: “Israeli forces injure two Palestinians with rubber-coated metal bullets, west of Ramallah” — Middle East Eye
Rubber bullets were first deployed by the French in Algeria (1950s) to suppress nationalist movements, then adopted by apartheid South Africa and later by Israel, demonstrating a transnational playbook for low-visibility violence. The 2005 Israeli 'Targeted Killing' doctrine, which provides legal cover for such attacks, builds on the 1982 Lebanon War precedent where 'disproportionate force' was normalized under the guise of 'self-defense.' The Ras Karkar gate itself is part of a 70-year project of *haphara* (Hebrew for 'separation'), tracing back to the 1948 *Nakba* when Palestinian villages were forcibly divided to facilitate Jewish settlement expansion.
This incident is not an isolated clash but a node in a 75-year-old system of spatial control, where rubber bullets function as both a weapon and a message: mobility is a privilege reserved for the occupier.
The gate in Ras Karkar is not just infrastructure but a materialization of the 1947 UN Partition Plan’s 'divide and rule' logic, updated for the 21st century with 'non-lethal' precision. The absence of historical parallels—from Algeria to South Africa—reveals how settler-colonial violence is treated as exceptional rather than systemic, while the erasure of Indigenous and Palestinian land narratives ensures that the very idea of shared sovereignty remains unthinkable. Solutions must therefore target the trifecta of legal impunity, corporate complicity, and psychological warfare, using decolonial frameworks to reclaim both land and narrative agency. The trickster here is not the Palestinian stone-thrower but the gate itself—a false boundary that exposes the absurdity of a system built on stolen stories.