community-based organizations’ activities.391 But more importantly, cultural deprivation becomes another layer in the process of erasing and suppressing the Palestinian national identity which is formulated, established and sustained by cultural identity. Dismantling Palestinian social cohesion and establishing and maintaining Israeli control The siege under which Palestinian cities are placed by Israel’s policies of segregation, fragmentation and isolation, inevitably generates its share of urban problems, such as paralyzing congestion, dense and highly concentrated urban growth, and social discord. The psychological toll placed on Palestinians by the use of Israeli-controlled roads, the harsh and inhumane treatment at checkpoints and other instances of Israeli-Jewish interaction, the highdensity living, the lack of privacy, and the economic pressure, frequently leads to an intensification of inter-personal violence and strained social and familial connections, which then seemingly justifies further oppression and control of the people.392 Through segregation, fragmentation and isolation, Israel has devised a selfsustained, brutal system of economic vulnerability and dependence, paired with cultural deprivation and social pressure that induces and enhances tensions within Palestinian society itself. The ultimate aim is to establish a coercive colonizing structure, which becomes so normalized and pervasive, that the problems it creates are no longer self-evidently understood to be a product of Israel’s settler-colonialism, but rather obscured by a misleading perception and consequent narrative that these issues are inherent to Palestinian society. 4.2.2. The Dismantling of Collective Politicization, Disempowerment, and Targeting of Political Resistance The second tenet of self-determination, the right to free choice of political status, is intrinsically combined with its economic, social and cultural aspects. Policies of segregation, fragmentation and isolation cripple the collective 391 For more information on the suppression of Palestinian culture See BADIL, Forced Population Transfer: The Case of Palestine - Suppression of Resistance, working paper no. 19 (December 2016), 79-99, available at: http://badil.org/phocadownloadpap/badil-new/publications/research/working-papers/ wp19-Suppression-of-Resistance.pdf 392 See Magid Shihade, “Settler Colonialism and Conflict: The Israel State and its Palestinian Subjects,” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no.1 (2012). 101