Bound in by red tape
Israeli bureaucracy seems designed to cow the Palestinian population into docility, but mostly has the opposite effect, writes Brian Whitaker in the Guardian of Monday May 20, 2002.
The following is a part from that article about the office of the Interior Ministry in East Jerusalem.
In the next street there is a grim, fortress-like building with security cameras, floodlights, iron bars on all the windows and a 7ft-high revolving cage for a door.
It is what the Israelis call the "population administration" office - the place where Palestinians from east Jerusalem go to get birth certificates, renew their identity cards and collect all the other bureaucratic necessities. Needless to say, when the office opens in the morning the queues are interminably long.
The noise I had heard came from a dozen or so Palestinian youths in front of the building who were smashing up wooden planks. Since they would be queuing all night and the weather was chilly, they were making a fire in the street to keep warm.
The intriguing twist to this tale is that the youths were not themselves in need of new ID cards or any other paperwork. They queue for a living.
Other Palestinians who want to avoid the wait and can afford the privilege, pay them to stay up all night outside the office and reserve a place at the front of the queue.
By seven in the morning, other little enterprises swing into action outside the office. Three men with clunky typewriters arrive and set up tables on the opposite pavement. They already have stacks of application forms, which they fill in for people and save time by making sure the questions have been answered correctly.
This sort of thing is part of the normal, daily grind for Palestinians. Foreigners may hear about it and read about it, but that is not the same as actually experiencing it. Sometimes I get a feeling that the real purpose of Israeli occupation is to turn the West Bank into a theme park where tourists will flock from around the world to discover what life was like in the old Soviet Union.
In Blairite Britain we have gone to the opposite extreme. All branches of government are now required, on pain of punishment, to deliver service with a smile. Even the social security offices try to lay on a friendly ambiance and government employees spend millions of hours on performance reviews, quality control and efficiency measurement.
But the whole point about Israeli bureaucracy, at least where Palestinians are concerned, is that it is designed to be inefficient, with the rules changing frequently, so that nobody can ever be quite sure where they stand. That way, the Israelis show who is boss. The theory, I suppose, is that eventually this will produce a cowed, docile population who are willing to do whatever they are told. But a lot of the time it just makes them more angry. Click here to go back to JCSER's main page.
Designed By: Mutasem A.Hamoudeh
