Tag Archives: South Hebron hill

Wrecking the world together

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Children watching Hyundai demolition machine: Demolition in south Hebron hills by IOF 6.11.2012, photo 50 of 96 by Operation Dove.

Images can have strange and strained relations with each other. In this case, the strained relation is between the corporate image of the Hyundai corporation and activists’ image of the Israeli occupation. The South Korean corporation is now best known for making Hyundai and Kia cars. As is the case with other global corporations, it is very conscious of its brand image. According to Hyundai’s Chairman and CEO Mong-Koo Chung’s corporate message of May 2012, its “brand value rose to over USD 6 billion, ranking 61st among the world’s top 100 brands.” Branding isn’t only about marketing; it’s not only about sales figures. The corporate message states that: “our goal is not to be the worlds’ biggest automaker, but to be the worlds’ most-loved automaker.” One of the ways in which Hyundai makes itself more lovable is by fulfilling “its duties as a global corporate citizen through its widespread corporate social responsibility programs.” So, on the corporation’s worldwide website one of the five heading options draws attention to Hyundai’s collaboration with UNICEF in its Global Endpoverty campaign, trumpeted under the slogan “Moving the World Together.”

Hyundai demolition monster: Demolition in south Hebron hills by IOF 6.11.2012, , photo 83 of 96 by Operation Dove

But Hyundai doesn’t only make cars. A photograph credited to “Operation Dove” displays the Hyundai brand name in a rather less lovable context, as a piece of its building equipment is put to use by the Israeli army to demolish a stone wall built by Palestinians in the south Hebron Hills area to pen in sheep. The Hyundai machine looks like a monstrous single-toothed dinosaur that has come not to move the world forward but to wreck it.

Another of the current five heading options on the corporate website leads visitors to Hyundai’s “live brilliant” branding campaign, one of the video advertisements for which features laughing children amazed at the world that they see during car journeys. The caption for the campaign is: “Hyundai makes every moment brilliant”. But in another photo of the same event, Palestinian children are pictured looking on in seemingly bored resignation as the Hyundai and other machines demolish another building. They may well remember this moment their whole lives, but not as a brilliant one.

The pictures (along with a description of the demolition operation, and a video posted by Operation Dove) will not only remind the children of this violent incident. They also threaten to damage Hyundai’s corporate image, which has been crafted as carefully as the dry stone wall. Like the flocks that can no longer be penned in by the wall, Hyundai’s brand value is in danger of becoming scattered. And if the brand value is lost, the corporation’s value could collapse like the house attacked by its machine.

The Israeli army is demolishing these structures in the South Hebron Hills region in Area C of the West Bank, which remains under full Israeli control following the 1993 Oslo agreement, on the pretext that it needs the land for live firing zone 918.  According to the Israeli military, the 1,800 or so Palestinians living in the area do so illegally, because the military law forbids residence in a live fire zone. And hence the army periodically demolishes buildings in the area that it also considers to be illegal. But a brief glance at a map of the area drawn by Israeli human rights organization B’tzelem suggests that the alleged military necessity for more training ground is underwritten by an Israeli political strategy of effective, creeping annexation of Area C, which comprises about 60% of the West Bank.

The photographs posted by Ta’ayush activists following this particular incident on November 6, 2012 are peace images that undermine Hyundai’s, and other corporations’, brand images. Ta’ayush is an Israeli-Palestinian grass-roots movement that engages in non-violent direct action to resist the occupation. It has been particularly active in the South Hebron Hills area in recent years, along with other Israeli peace groups such as Rabbis for Human Rights. These are peace images in that they vividly portray that the Israeli occupation is violent and oppressive, a state of affairs that must be ended to bring peace. They are also peace images in that they reflect Ta’ayush’s aim to “to break down the walls of racism, segregation, and apartheid by constructing a true Arab-Jewish partnership”. Building the partnership is peace-making.

Thus far, Hyundai has attracted less negative attention from the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement than other corporations whose equipment is used by the Israeli military in the occupied Palestinian territories, such as Caterpillar. Documentation of the incident shows the Israeli military deployed Caterpillar and JCB machines as well as the Hyundai monster, and the Electronic Intifada blog puts them in the same basket.  Hyundai’s brand managers should be aware that Hyundai will know no peace if the brand is associated with occupation and war.

Museum of Occupation

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Blocked well in Susiya

Demolished cave dwelling in Susiya

It’s difficult to picture peace, and so more often than not the Israeli peace movement is working against the current situation – most easily summed up through the expression “occupation” – rather than for the desired outcome of peace activity. The Hebrew term for occupation – kibbush – also means conquest, so it makes sense that “peace” can’t be the “quiet” that follows conquest. At present, such relative quiet is the sort of peace that many Israelis (mis)take for peace, and so various peace groups are busy trying to get the public to see that there is no quiet in the Palestinian occupied territories and that the conquest is still going on there, every day and in their name. One such group is Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence), “an organization of veteran combatants who have served in the Israeli military since the start of the Second Intifada and have taken it upon themselves to expose the Israeli public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories.” The core of their activity is their testimony, recorded on video and in text, available on their web site, but they “also conduct tours in Hebron and the South Hebron Hills region, with the aim of giving the Israeli public access to the reality which exists minutes from their own homes, yet is rarely portrayed in the media.” And so having read about the current situation in this southern area of the West Bank sometimes on the pages of the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz and more often on more often the various blogs such as +972 and peace group web-sites, such as Ta’ayush (an Arab-Jewish partnership group), I joined one of the tours to see with my own eyes.

The highlight of the tour was a visit to the Palestinian village of Susiya, whose plight – facing demolition and elimination by the occupation – has been covered elsewhere, including on a campaign blog that is mostly in English. On the day of our visit, the first day of the intermediate, hol hamo’ed period of the week-long Succot festival, the busy part of Susiya was not the village but the archaeological site of the ancient synagogue into which buses and cars full of Israelis were streaming. Symptomatic of the cynical legalism by means of which the Israeli military occupation is conducted, the Palestinian residents of Susiya who had been living on what was discovered (by a military archaeology unit!) to be an historical site had been displaced – as it’s forbidden to live on an archaeological site.  But sure enough, the site soon included a few residencies for the Israeli staff of the site. It was a quiet day for Palestinian Susiya. There were no demonstrations, no military presence, no settlers, just a small group of sympathetic and curious Israelis and a sun insisting on it being late summer rather than early autumn. The conflict seemed a long way away, and one person on the tour said as we left, there seemed to be plenty of room for everyone. Why should Palestinian Susiya have to go even if the Jewish settlements were there to stay?

But as he led us around the village, accompanied by a couple of its residents, our guide Ayal described the place as a “museum of the occupation”. And indeed, juxtaposed to the archaeological site on the other side of the road, were the archaeological remains of the destruction of Palestinian Susiya. The photographs I took are hardly the most dramatic images of recent events at Susiya, many of which can be found at the ActiveStills site, showing clashes between military and settlers on the one side, and residents and activists on the other.  Nor are they the best photographs for showing what daily life is now like in Susiya, of which there are many taken by its women residents, which can be seen on the Susiya Forever blog. What they do show is what is left after the destruction by military bulldozers: a blocked well which now can’t be used for drinking water, but from which a thin pipe leads, providing some water for animals and irrigation; a cave dwelling with its stone roof torn off, being reused as an animal pen. The residents of Palestinian Susiya thus all live in an archaeological site that is a testament not only to the destructive power of the military occupation but also to their determination to remain. Their stubborn attachment to their land – where else can we go, they say, when asked why they don’t give up – obstructs the construction of a false image of peace, of peace after the conquest when the land has been cleared of Palestinians. The picture of peace in this scene is not only in the negation of the ruin wreaked by armed force, but also in the presence of the Palestinians on the land, living among ruins, so that one day they won’t have to.