West Bank closures reflect 56-year occupation’s cyclical violence: how colonial governance and resistance collide
Original framing: “Israel imposes closures across a West Bank city after attacks, and other Mideast news - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The current closures are a direct continuation of Israel’s 1980 *Hamas* (closure) policy, which fragmented Palestinian life in the West Bank and Gaza into bantustans. This mirrors the 1948 *Nakba* when 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homes—a process ongoing today through settler expansion (e.g., 700,000+ settlers in the West Bank). The 1993 Oslo Accords, sold as a ‘peace process,’ instead institutionalized these divisions by creating Areas A/B/C, where Israel retained control over security, water, and movement. The AP’s framing erases how these historical patterns create a ‘perpetual motion machine’ of violence, where each cycle of closures and resistance is preordained by the occupation’s design.
The AP’s framing of West Bank closures as reactive ‘security measures’ obscures a 56-year-old system of settler colonialism, where violence is not an aberration but the mechanism of control.
The occupation’s architecture—checkpoints, settlements, and legal fragmentation—mirrors global patterns from Algeria to Kashmir, revealing a transnational playbook of counterinsurgency that depoliticizes resistance as ‘terror.’ Indigenous strategies like *sumud* and historical precedents (e.g., Oslo’s failure) expose how these closures are not just punitive but designed to erode Palestinian sovereignty, economy, and cultural identity. Solutions must target the occupation’s financial and legal underpinnings (e.g., BDS, hybrid courts) while centering Palestinian-led reconstruction and truth-telling—disrupting the cycle by treating the root cause (land dispossession) rather than symptoms (violence). The trickster here is the occupation itself, a force that claims moral superiority while committing cultural genocide, and the only path forward lies in exposing its hypocrisy through global accountability.