An Everyday Occupation, [8] described how, although the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank is ultimately enforced by the armed forces, it is an “occupation by bureaucracy”: its primary forms are application forms, title deeds, residency papers and other permits. It is this micro-management of the daily life which does the job of securing the slow but steadfast Israeli expansion: one has to ask for a permit in order to leave with one’s family, to farm one’s own land, to dig a well, to go to work, to school, to a hospital… One by one, Palestinians born in Jerusalem are thus stripped of the right to live there, prevented to earn a living, denied housing permits, etc. Palestinians often use the problematic cliché of the Gaza strip as “the greatest concentration camp in the world” – however, in the last year, this designation has come dangerously close to truth. This is the fundamental reality which makes all abstract “prayers for peace” obscene and hypocritical. The State of Israel is clearly engaged in a slow process, invisible, ignored by the media, a kind of underground digging of the mole, so that, one day, the world will awaken and realize that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, that the land is Palestinian-free, and that we can only accept the fact.

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