MCC Palestine Update #87
October 30, 2003
Expulsion and Destruction
What many had feared would happened when Israel began constructing its “security fence” (or, more accurately, its “segregation” or “apartheid” barrier) in the West Bank has started to happen: those Palestinians trapped between the barrier and the “Green Line” separating Israel and the West Bank are having their presence on their land delegitimized by the Israeli military authorities. Major General Moshe Kaplinski this month issued a military order declaring the areas between the barrier and the Green Line to be closed military areas.
Closed, that is, to Palestinians: Israeli Jews are still allowed to move freely in these areas. Those who happen to live in these areas, however, will have to obtain permits simply to maintain the right to live in their homes and on their land. If precedents in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem hold true, residents of affected villages will find these permits revoked for reasons such as going to a nearby West Bank village to study, and will discover that they cannot marry someone without such a permit and bring him/her to live with them.
Ran HaCohen, an Israeli commentator, describes this new reality thus: “So if your mother happened to be Jewish, and you live in Montreal, in Mexico City or in Johannesburg, you need no permit at all to go to the small West Bank village of Salim. But if you are a Palestinian, even if you and your family have been living in Salim for centuries, you cannot stay there without a written permit from Major General Moshe Kaplinski "or someone acting on his behalf", as the order goes.”
Despite sotto voce objections from the U.S. administration, and despite an economic crisis at home, the Israeli government’s building of the walls and fences continues unabated. For the village of Akaba near Tubas in the northern West Bank, this means that 12 out of 18 homes, along with the village mosque and kindergarten, will be demolished to make way for the barrier. Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz may claim that the barrier does not disrupt the “normal fabric of life” for Palestinians, but USAID, the United Nations, the European Union, and anyone who visits a village like Jayyous or Azzoun, speaking with farmers as they are denied access to their lands, can attest to the falsity of this claim.
In the Gaza Strip, meanwhile, Israeli invasions and bombardment over the past three years have left over 7000 Palestinians (most of them refugees to begin with) homeless. In October alone, at least 1250 Palestinians in Rafah lost their homes to Israeli tanks and bulldozers. According to the Israeli military, its actions were solely for the purpose of uncovering and sealing up tunnels between Rafah and Egypt through which weapons, cigarettes, etc. were being smuggled. The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, however, recently published comments made by the former head of the Israeli military’s southern command, Yom Tov Samya, one and two years ago, which indicate that the destructions were carried out not primarily to uncover tunnels used for smuggling but to carve out an empty area on the border with Egypt.
In an interview on July 10, 2001, Samya said: "The border is not natural, it is not defendable ... This area is in one of the contingency plans. We did similar things along the roads in Gush Katif [the bloc of Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip] - every building, every house, every tree ... That was the answer. Things there have to be removed [word incomprehensible] and systematically. As many buildings as possible, in order to stop the contact ... We have to keep doing it. There will be a clear and absolute area in which no one wanders about by day or by night. This is an area that has to be defended. The border with Egypt has to be based on looking 100 years ahead." From a second interview, broadcast on September 10, 2002: "The IDF has to knock down all the houses along a strip of 300 to 400 meters ... It doesn't matter what the future settlement will be, this will be the border with Egypt ... Arafat has to be punished, and after every terrorist attack another two-three rows of houses on the Palestinian side of the border have to be knocked down ... This is a long-term policy. We simply have to take a very extreme step. It is doable and I am happy it is being done, but it's being carried out in doses that are too small, I regret to say. It has to be done in one big operation." The big operation came this October. The residents of Rafah fear more “big operations” could be in their future. Rafah and other refugee camps in the Gaza Strip aren’t strangers to house demolitions by the Israeli military; in the 1970s, Ariel Sharon ordered scores of homes in the camps demolished in order to widen the roads in order to facilitate military patrols.
MCC Project Updates
*Through the Culture and Free Thought Association in the Gaza Strip, MCC will be providing blankets and basic foodstuffs to 200 families in Rafah who lost their homes this month.
*MCC has just agreed to support an innovative new project initiated by MCC partner Zochrot, an Israeli organization dedicated to exploring how justice for Palestinian refugees is an integral part of durable peace and reconciliation in Palestine/Israel. Zochrot will hold a series of meetings between internally displaced Palestinians living inside Israel (people who lost their lands in 1948 but who, because they live inside Israel, are not considered official refugees) and Israeli Jews from communities now using those lands; the meetings and workshops will provide places where internally displaced Palestinians can tell the history of their villages and the circumstances under which they were expelled. The meetings will then address sensitive issues such as the role of property restitution in sustainable peacebuilding. Eytan Bronstein, director of Zochrot and youth dialogue coordinator at the School for Peace at Neve Shalom/Wahat el-Salam, anticipates that the meetings will be tense, but strongly believes that any lasting peace and reconciliation between Palestinians and Israeli Jews cannot shy away form such difficult subjects.
Book Recommendations:
Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah (New York: Anchor Books, 2003). A moving account of exile and tentative return by a Palestinian poet from the West Bank who lived in forced exile from 1967 to 1995.
Ronit Chacham, ed. Breaking Ranks: Refusing to Serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (New York: The Other Press, 2003). Chacham offers portraits of and interviews with several Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied territories.
Below you will find three pieces. The first, by Amira Hass, looks at the “drop by drop” expulsion of Palestinians from their lands via military orders and closures. In the second, Menahem Klein of the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, looks at the ways in which Israel is using the methods of Sparta to create an apartheid reality in and around the city of Jerusalem. In the third and final piece, Palestinian commentator Ali Abu Nimah offers a critical look at the so-called “Geneva Accord” drafted by unofficial Palestinian and Israeli figures.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. Expulsion, Little by Little
Amira Hass
Haaretz, October 22, 2003
The fears and suspicions, as usual, came true - and very quickly. Hiding behind security rationales and the seemingly neutral bureaucratic language of military orders is the gateway for expulsion. Not massive expulsion, heaven forbid, not on trucks, and not far. Drop by drop, unseen, not so many that it would be noticed internationally and shock public opinion; with the proper measure so the Israelis can continue saying it's justified for security reasons, with the appropriate modesty in the media so the information doesn't reach the consciousness of even those who are dealing with the details of a permanent agreement, with their love of peace, while a wave of anti-Semitism sweeps the world. A little more than a week has gone by since the Palestinians whose villages are trapped between the separation fence and the State of Israel received new instructions from the army and the Civil Administration for "arranging" their presence on their own land. Civil Administration officers hurried to tell the residents that the permits were ready: permits for "permanent residents," according to a new category of Palestinians, invented by the legal minds in the army for the areas the army declared a closed military zone (though only for Palestinians. It's open to Israelis and Jews). The permits will enable the "permanent residents" to move "out of the area" and back to it. The Israel Defense Forces says it wants those residents who live "next to the fence" to maintain "as normal a fabric of life as possible." The village of Jabara, south of Tul Karm, is trapped between the Green Line and the fence, which has been adjusted eastward to include the expanding settlement of Salit. Out of the 200 adults in the village, six found out they don't have permits. One served a sentence in an Israeli jail; another has a different address on his ID card. The village of Ras a Tira is trapped in a "salient" created when the fence was drawn to include the frequently expanding settlement of Alfei Menashe. Some 60 out of the few hundreds residents of the village have found out they don't have permits. Those who want "to maintain the fabric of normal life," therefore, must decide between giving up their work in a neighboring city, visiting their family in the village on the other side of the fence, etc., or leaving home and land. That's the information so far available about two of 15 villages trapped inside the fence area. The more fence that is built, the greater the number of residents whose fates will be determined by anonymous clerks in the Civil Administration: "permanent" or not, allowed to have "a normal life" on their land or not. All those who did not get a permit have a family: they'll have to decide whether to adjust to the new lifestyle, in which the father is in exile on the other side of the fence, and the family is only allowed to see him with permission from the army, or to leave the land. And another suspicion came true very quickly. Every village will have to decide on its own, separately, about its position regarding the policy of permits and the new status invented for them by the Israeli occupation authorities. Various Palestinian officials condemned the new instructions, as expected. It's a recipe for "depopulation," said Saeb Erekat, recommending that people don't accept the permits. In Jabara, they decided to reject the permits. Agreeing to accept them would be legitimizing Israel's de facto annexation of the Palestinian land, recognition of the Israeli authority to decide whether or not a Palestinian is allowed to live on their land. If the residents agree to the permits today, they say in Jabara, tomorrow an anonymous Civil Administration officer or a Shin Bet man might prevent the marriage of a person to someone from another village outside the "seam area," or allow or prevent a joint agriculture project with a farmer from another village. Needing a permit from the occupation authorities for the most basic activities that make up a "normal fabric of life" creates an intolerable dependence that is a natural extension of the effort to enlist collaborators. And, in general, they say in Jabara, this is the Palestinian Authority's position. But, at the beginning of the week, the residents of Ras a Tira said they received the green light from PA representatives to accept the permits, at least for an interim period. After all, without the permits, they can't even think of normal life. In other words, there is no coordination between the villages, because there's nobody in the PA who is trying to translate "opposition in principle" and "condemnations" to the media into an active effort to establish, along with the main victims of the Israeli policy, a national Palestinian policy and an overall plan to deal with the decrees, while examining the special needs of each village on its merits. Is that a characteristic failure of the Palestinian leadership or just the feeling of helplessness when faced with Israeli determination to implement slogans like "as much territory as possible with as few Arabs as possible?"
2. Israel’s Jerusalem policy, Sparta and apartheid
Menachem Klein
The Daily Star, Beirut, Oct 25, 03
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/opinion/25_10_03_e.asp
In July 2003, Israel began to build systems of physical and electronic separation in Jerusalem. If and when the plan is implemented, it will constitute the most dramatic change effected by Israel in East Jerusalem since it was conquered and annexed in 1967. In many places the new line extends into the West Bank beyond the 1967 annexation, but without officially annexing the area. Israel is working to include Rachel’s Tomb and the settlement Har Giloh in southern Jerusalem in the area of Israel, at the expense of areas belonging to Bethlehem and Beit Jalla.
Moreover, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon wants to include several settlements on the Israeli side of the fence, principally Maaleh Adumim and Givat Zeev, which would increase the number of Palestinians on the Israeli side. The World Bank estimates that in addition to the 220,000 residents of East Jerusalem, about 60,000 Palestinians will be trapped between the border system separating them from the West Bank and the walls separating them from East and West Jerusalem. Israel does not intend to grant them residency or the status and rights possessed by East Jerusalemites. It certainly does not intend to offer them the Israeli citizenship that was rejected by almost all the residents of East Jerusalem areas it annexed in 1967.
Over and above extending the area annexed, Israel wants to destroy Arab metropolitan Jerusalem and control it without annexing it. The Israeli undeclared hope is that the conditions of life in these besieged areas will be so hard that most of the residents will prefer to leave. It aspires to achieve this through a wall enveloping all the following suburbs of East Jerusalem: Anata, Hizma, Al-Zaim, Al-Ram, and Dahiat Al-Barid, leaving them only a narrow link with the Palestinian hinterland in the form of a cramped road or tunnel under Israeli control. Only in a limited number of places did Israel agree to relinquish suburbs which it included in “united Jerusalem” in 1967: Kafr Aqab in the north, Arab Al-Sawahara and Sheikh Saad in the East. By that, about 20,000 East Jerusalem Palestinians will be left on the West Bank side of the wall, cut off from their families on the eastern side of the wall.
In densely populated areas where there is no possibility of erecting a broad complex of walls and obstacles, the concrete wall that Israel intends to build will rise to a height of eight meters. In the center of Abu-Dis Israel has already built a concrete wall about two meters high on the 1967 annexation line, dividing in two the neighborhood’s main road. This wall divides the section officially annexed to Israel from the section which in the near future will be cut off from the West Bank and from Israel alike.
In order to control entry and exit through this new wall, Israel has also built four permanent points of passage at the entrances to East Jerusalem from the West Bank. Thus the ground is ready to the next stage in the Israeli plan: divided autonomous neighborhoods.
On the neighborhood level there will be Palestinian autonomy for each separate neighborhood or suburb. Contact with the central Palestinian government will be carried out through the local Palestinian resident’s coming to the central Palestinian governmental meeting point, and not through agents of the Palestinian central government coming to the neighborhood. Israeli supervision will be carried out through its control over the road which is the main artery of the besieged suburb.
If the Israeli plan will be completed, about a quarter of a million Palestinian Arab residents of East Jerusalem will be cut off from their social, political, economic, cultural and language hinterland. This is about 10 percent of the total Palestinian population in the West Bank. The metropolitan connections of East Jerusalem had been hard hit by Israeli measures since the early 1990s. Now it can be expected that they will be destroyed.
On the other hand, the accessibility to West Jerusalem of those Palestinians who are today permanent residents in Israel is already not easy nowadays. Israel has blocked many roads that connect East Jerusalem to the West Bank by digging trenches, destroying roads, and constructing walls and piles of earth. Israel erected concrete and earth barriers at the entrance to East Jerusalem neighborhoods looking West, in order to control traffic to the few exit roads which Israel can supervise. From time to time Israel places checkpoints on these roads. A mobile and rapidly changing line of checkpoints and inspections is also occasionally set up close to the old international border or the “demographic border.”
The intifada, the swelling unemployment, the militarization of life in the city, the lack of a centralized and institutionalized authority which can impose the law in most areas of East Jerusalem all had grave consequences in places like Al-Tur, Silwan, and Ras Al-Amud and they found themselves on the way to becoming slums.
Israel argues that her plan to “envelop Jerusalem” will upgrade the status of the Palestinians in East Jerusalem. They prefer to disconnect their relationship with the corrupted Palestinian regime in order to enjoy many economic benefits that the Israeli regime offers them, the Israeli argument goes. Thirty six years of Israeli annexation disprove this argument and show the classical colonial approach behind it.
Using security purposes as a pretext the rightist Israeli government is now attempting to achieve by means of destructive walls what it was unable to achieve since 1967 through a belt of new construction: the building of new Jewish neighborhoods around the East Jerusalem Palestinian neighborhoods. In this way Israel forced demographic Jewish-Arab equality in the area annexed in 1967. In the talks in the year 2000 on a permanent settlement, discussions took place on models of dividing both territory and control between Israel and the planned Palestinian state. The rightist Israeli government was not satisfied with this and strives for exclusive Israeli control over all the area annexed in 1967. What the Barak government’s proposed with the start of negotiations on permanent arrangements for the urban and historical heart of East Jerusalem, the Sharon government proposes to the Palestinians only in distant suburbs scraped off the body of Jerusalem. In such policies the Sharon government is also marking the borders of the authority of that sort of Palestinian state to which it can agree. The authority of the Palestinian state will be weak in East Jerusalem suburbs and non-existent in its center.
This demands the destruction of the demographic, urban and metropolitan reality which developed since 1967 in Arab Jerusalem. All these measures are intended to perpetuate the control and the superiority of Jewish over Arab Jerusalem. The most appropriate name for this policy is “Spartheid,” Apartheid through the arguments and means employed by Greek Sparta.
Menachem Klein is a board member of B’etselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, and participated in the recent Geneva Agreement talks. This commentary is from a presentation he recently gave to Americans for Peace Now in Washington
3. A disastrous dead end: the Geneva Accord
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 28 October 2003
Because of the Oslo process, the basis for a viable and minimally fair two-state solution has been completely destroyed. The Israeli "peace camp" and the Palestinian leadership ought to have learned from the calamities they helped bring about and changed their ways. The so-called "Geneva Accord," an informal agreement prepared by Israelis, led by former Labor Justice Minister Yossi Beilin and other Oslo-era luminaries, and Palestinians close to Yasser Arafat, demonstrates a determination to repeat the tragic errors of the past.
Oslo allowed Israel to double the number of colonists on occupied Palestinian land, while the PLO transformed itself into a Palestinian Authority whose mandate was to protect Israel from the victims of the ongoing colonization. There is no better account of the bad faith with which Israel's leaders approached the peace process than Tanya Reinhart's book Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how Palestinians and Israelis reached the bloody impasse they are in today.While its creators have tried to sell the Geneva Accord as some sort of breakthrough, it is nothing of the sort. The document recycles the unworkable arrangements that Israel and the United States tried to impose at Camp David in July 2000. A Palestinian "state" would be established in the West Bank and Gaza, but without sovereignty or control of its own borders or airspace. Israel would be permitted to keep military forces in it forever, while the Palestinian "state" would not be allowed to defend itself. The Palestinian state would be occupied by a "Multinational Force" that could only be withdrawn with Israeli agreement, and so on.Israel would annex most of its West Bank settlements, including vast swathes of territory in and around Jerusalem and other major cities, a simple endorsement of most of the illegal territorial conquests Israel made since 1967. Crucially, the document completely cancels the basic rights of Palestinian refugees by giving Israel an absolute veto on the return of even a single person to his or her home.That the Geneva "negotiators," freed from any real accountability, could not come up with anything better than they did, underscores the utter bankruptcy of the glacial "step-by-step" approach toward a two-state solution, while that two-state-solution has galloped away because of Israeli colonization. The authors seem to believe that the Palestinian people are like a donkey that will forever chase after a carrot dangling from a stick attached to its own head. They fail to recognize that the intifada was foremost a rejection of such manipulation.Should anyone feel that this presentation is overly negative, just look at how Amram Mitzna, the "dovish" former general who led the Labor Party to massive defeat at the last Israeli election, and one of the authors of the document, presents it to Israelis. In an October 16 Ha'aretz commentary, Mitzna claimed that: "For the first time in history, the Palestinians explicitly and officially recognized the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish people forever. They gave up the right of return to the state of Israel and a solid, stable Jewish majority was guaranteed. The Western Wall, the Jewish Quarter (of Jerusalem) and David's Tower will all remain in our hands. The suffocating ring was lifted from over Jerusalem and the entire ring of settlements around it -- Givat Zeev, old and new Givon, Maale Adumim, Gush Etzion, Neve Yaacov, Pisgat Zeev, French Hill, Ramot, Gilo and Armon Hanatziv will be part of the expanded city, forever. None of the settlers in those areas will have to leave their homes." Since these settlements account for the largest land expropriations in the most dense Palestinian areas, and for a majority of the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, Mitzna is simply following the Labor Party tradition of assuring Israelis that they can enjoy peace, international legitimacy and the spoils of conquest all at the same time. They cannot.Perhaps the most dishonest claim is Mitzna's assertion that the Palestinian side in the Geneva project "was represented by an authentic, broad Palestinian leadership that enjoys the support both from the official Palestinian Authority leadership and from the activist leaders at street level." Who is this "authentic" leadership? The Palestinians who went to Geneva did so in secret, and had no mandate whatsoever, except from themselves and the Israelis who anointed them. They certainly do not speak for the refugees whose fundamental rights they so blithely offered up, or for the Palestinians whose land was stolen for colonies that will remain intact. The Palestinian Authority, which apparently backed them, has itself lost all legitimacy as a representive body, because it is unaccountable.As for the Israeli delegation, one would do well to remember that the Labor Party in opposition speaks with a different voice than Labor in government. The former has always appeared more dovish than the latter. As independent agents, the Israeli negotiators can renege on any commitments they made. Yet, judging from history, the concessions they extracted from the "authentic Palestinian leadership" will become a new bottom line from which any future negotiations would proceed. Any new Israeli government, even one headed by Labor, would come to the table with ever more demands, and new facts on the ground that would have to be accommodated.If the Geneva authors were serious about a two-state solution, they would recognize that if it still has a remote chance, that can only be if Israel were at a minimum willing to withdraw every soldier and settler, without exception, behind the lines of June 4, 1967, including in Jerusalem, and allow the Palestinians to establish a state no less independent and sovereign than Israel. As the Geneva document demonstrates, not even Israel's most "dovish" figures are willing to contemplate that. So instead, they push a hopeless and unjust formula, claiming that this is the "only alternative" to the bloodthirsty way of Sharon, and pretend that the Palestinian people have agreed to it.In fact, since Israel can't or won't allow a real two-state solution, there is an alternative -- the creation of a single, democratic state that will allow all Israelis and Palestinians to peacefully cohabit the entirety of their common homeland as equals. To dismiss this possibility, and to refuse even to explore it as a serious way out of the deepening crisis is immoral.
Ali Abunimah is one of the co-founders of The Electronic Intifada. This article was first published in The Daily Star on 28 October 2003.
Thursday, October 30
Wednesday, October 15
MCC Palestine Update #86
MCC Palestine Update #86
October 15, 2003
Bill Janzen, the director of Mennonite Central Committee’s Ottawa office, was in the occupied Palestinian territories for a work visit October 1-3. Bill and I spent most of our time visiting MCC partner organizations whose work is threatened by the continuing construction of what Israel calls a security fence and what Palestinians call an apartheid wall, or segregation barrier. In Bethlehem, we met with the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem, an MCC partner organization working with farmers to introduce seed varieties adapted to rain fed farming conditions.
Many of these farmers have had their lands confiscated for the construction of the barrier—a network of electronic fences, with trenches, patrol roads, and dirt roads. ARIJ director Jad Ishaq, using satellite imaging and mapping, showed how us how the barrier, coupled with ongoing construction of illegal Israeli colonies, is encircling the Bethlehem area, cutting it off from Jerusalem and leaving no room for growth.
The families in the Greek Orthodox Housing Project in Beit Sahour, meanwhile, are finding themselves slowly encircled by the fence—they will need special passes to leave and return to their homes.
A trip to the Qalqilyah area reinforced the damage being done by the segregation barrier: in Jayyous village north of Qalqilyah, farmers had been waiting all morning for Israeli soldiers to open the gate in the fence so that they could access their fields; the soldiers had told the villagers that only persons over 38 would be allowed to cross once the gate opened; one elderly man said to us, “Why can’t my sons enter? How can I farm the land myself?”
In Azzoun village, residents had recently broken open the lock on the gate which Israeli soldiers had installed in order to close off the village; in retaliation, the Israeli military had just come with bulldozers and made large dirt mounds to shut off the road once more.
Finally, in Qalqilyah itself, a city of 40,000 people surrounded by a 25-foot concrete wall on one side and a network of electronic fences on the other, left with only one entrance, we heard from farmers who have been cut off from their lands and water sources by the fence. MCC and Catholic Relief Services are joining with the Palestinian Hydrology Group to help these farmers maximize the use of those wells to which they still have access.
Good fences may make good neighbors, according to Robert Frost’s poem, but the Palestinians with whom we met did not view the fence as a good fence: rather, by dispossessing tens of thousands of Palestinians, the fence/wall/barrier is increasing Palestinian despair and thwarting short- and long-term attempts at reconciliation.
The Palestinian Environmental NGO Network (PENGON), an MCC partner, has just launched a new website with information, personal stories, and responses to frequently asked questions about the wall: http://www.stopthewall.org/
The World Council of Churches recently released a report entitled, “Security or Segregation? The Humanitarian Consequences of Israel’s Wall of Separation.” It can be viewed at: http://www.wcc-coe.org/wcc/what/international/palestine/securityorsegregation.html/
The World Vision-Jerusalem/West Bank/Gaza office has just issued a moving report entitled “Who Will Wipe Away Their Tears? A Call to End Violence Against Children in Israel and Palestine?” World Vision Jerusalem director writes, “No child should ever have reason to fear—let alone die from—a suicide bomber. No child should ever fear a violent death from an occupying military. No child should experience the trauma of bombings, tanks, and undercover death squads. No children should die for the sins of adults.” Copies of this powerful report can be obtained by e-mailing Allyn Dhynes (allyn_dhynes@wvi.org) or Holly Dhynes (holly_dhynes@wvi.org).
Below you will find three pieces. The first, by Palestinian Christian leader Bernard Sabella, offers a poignant reflection on the pressing need for moral leadership. In the second piece, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy looks at the ever-smaller prisons to which Palestinians are being confined. In the final piece, from the New York Review of Books, Tony Judt argues that, with Israeli colonization of the occupied territories having undermined a viable two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the time has come for alternative thinking. Judt’s proposal of one, binational state in which Palestinians and Israeli Jews might like in equality is a provocative mix of realism and utopian thinking.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. "Of Pilots, Suicide Bombings and Leadership"
By Dr. Bernard Sabella, Executive Secretary Department of Service to Palestinian Refugees, Middle East Council of Churches
Jerusalem - October 6th, 2003
I usually try to detach myself from what goes on around me in this Holy Land in order to concentrate on my work and maybe also to keep my sanity. But there are events, developments, happenings and non-happenings that force themselves into one's space and one's life. Such events and developments highlight choices and commitments that people make. Of Israeli pilots who refuse on principle to carry out bombing raids that could kill innocent Palestinian civilians, I cannot but respect their courage. Whether the debate raging in Israel over their letter of refusal would widen the choices open to other Israelis, this remains to be seen. But the commitment and the choice made by these pilots are to be acknowledged in the quest towards a more humane relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. The suicide bombing in Maxim Restaurant in Haifa is a very painful event. Not simply the human cost paid by everyone but especially the devastation that befell families of those working and dining in the restaurant make the heart ache. There is no excuse for anyone carrying out a suicide bombing. Justifications for suicide bombings could range from personal to political and ideological reasons but these justifications fail to see the human face of the other. If I argue that all Israelis are alike and they all carry the ugly face of military occupation, am I better than those Israelis who argue that all Palestinians are terrorists and hence without a human face? Suicide bombings, like indiscriminate air strikes, hurt all of us as they rob us of our humanity and narrow the possibilities for peace-making and eventual reconciliation. Leaders, on both sides, have not yet made the needed choices and commitments for peace. Military retaliation, on the Israeli side, not only reflects the superiority of the military machine and air force but also the moral bankruptcy of Israeli politicians. They fail to understand that peace with their neighbors necessitates ending the occupation of Palestinian and Arab lands. It takes great leaders to initiate the process of ending a military occupation. Instead, the Israeli government decides to strike at Syria in retaliation for the Maxim Restaurant bombing. If Syria is to be impressed then it has to be gained to a peace process and not attacked. Desperate politicians, like those presently at the helm of the government in Israel, need to ask themselves why they feel so desperate, at present? Palestinian leaders are also challenged to put their house in order. In the first Intifada (1988 - 1993) Palestinian children with stones in their hands gained world wide sympathy for the Palestinian cause. We have more arms and gun power today in the second Intifada but we do not have the vision and we definitely have lost the moral edge of the first Intifada. Our leaders, of all factions and groups, need to work on the vision for the society and its future. It is not a question of checking the Islamist groups and disarming their members, it is a question of whether we are all together onto working for the vision of Palestinian society? If we are, then our response to continued Israeli occupation should have a framework that would ensure the moral and humane dimensions of our struggle. Our cause is a clear one: occupation should end and a Palestinian state should rise! But not at any cost. It may take us longer time to achieve our goal if we adopt a clear framework with moral and humane dimensions of struggle. Such a framework would not only gain us the support of the world but more important it would reaffirm what is best in our Palestinian culture and heritage. In the final analysis, there is no other way.
2. A prison that keeps getting smaller
Gideon Levy
Haaretz, October 12, 2003
Last Wednesday, Hoda Shadub, a woman of about 50, wanted to go home after having eye surgery at an East Jerusalem hospital. She waited for hours at the Hawara checkpoint, which blocks access to her city, Nablus, but the soldiers refused to let her through. According to the new orders, they said, only ambulances could pass. The Physicians for Human Rights association had to intervene to get an ambulance for Shadub, who finally got home - exhausted and embittered. No one can seriously claim that security reasons are behind the decision to keep an ailing Palestinian woman from getting home. Nor can anyone find a connection between a murderous terrorist attack in Haifa and the return of an innocent resident to her hometown. Last week, following the suicide bombing at the Maxim Restaurant in Haifa, the Israel Defense Forces again imposed harsh new restrictions on movement in the territories. In the West Bank, the ban on the use of Palestinian cars was expanded, and farmers were forbidden to work their fields across the separation barrier. The Gaza Strip was sliced into four sections, in the course of which several roads south of Gaza City were destroyed, according to a report on the weekend by the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. Not one suicide bombing in Israel has originated in the Gaza Strip, but that makes no difference when Israel decides to impose collective punishments on the Palestinians. Whenever the Palestinians start to think the worst is behind them, they get a rude jolt from reality. Since 1991, when the first closure was imposed on the territories, their prison has been getting smaller. The imprisonment of the Palestinian people, which has been ongoing for more than a decade, is perpetrated with varying degrees of severity, not all of which have been related to security for Israelis. Even the few "relaxations of the closure" that were occasionally declared in the media did not meet the test of reality in the field. When Israel finally declared a "goodwill gesture" - opening a road to traffic - tanks deployed on the road and prevented anyone from getting through, as occurred, for example, a few months ago on the Jenin-Yabad road or on the Tancher road in the Gaza Strip. From the moment the decision was made to imprison the Palestinian people, the only changes have been in the size of the prison and the prison cells. They are continually becoming smaller and narrower: from the big prison of the occupied territories, to the solitary confinement cell, in which residents are not allowed to leave their towns or villages, sometimes even their homes, and even rooms within the home when the IDF seizes control of it. At first, they were all allowed to enter Israel, apart from those on a list who were denied access. In short order, the situation was reversed: everyone was denied access, apart from those on a list who were allowed in. The latter number was constantly reduced, and, in parallel, Israel began systematically to narrow the detention cells that were alloted to the Palestinians. First, the Gaza Strip was cut off from the West Bank, and East Jerusalem from the rest of the Palestinian territories. Then, with the eruption of the current intifada, Israel added the siege to the closure: in order to get from town to town, a special permit - which was difficult to obtain - was needed, and the living area was made smaller and smaller. The measures utilized were also aggravated and their cruelty intensified: from manned roadblocks - where it was still perhaps possible to rely on the humanity of the soldiers to allow women in labor or dying people to pass - to locked iron gates, earth ramparts, trenches and concrete blocks that make passage totally impossible. These means have now been bolstered by the separation barrier, which severs farmers from their land, students from their schools and workers from their place of employment. It was obvious from the outset that the gates in the separation fence, which initially were open, would quickly be closed after every attack or warning of an attack. And that is exactly what happened last week. Security considerations can no longer be cited as an excuse for this array of edicts and decrees. It has long since been shown that the mass imprisonment, far from preventing terrorism, only encourages it. The IDF prevented the terminally ill father of the woman who blew herself up in the Haifa restaurant from entering Israel for medical treatment, as MK Ahmed Tibi (Hadash) related last week. (Tibi was involved in the attempt to get him the entry permit.) A few days after Tibi's secretary informed the family that, for security reasons, the father would not be able to get to Rambam Medical Center in Haifa for treatment, his daughter carried out the suicide bombing. It's hard to understand what went through the mind of the woman, whose brother and cousin were killed by the IDF, but isn't it possible that if her father had been taken for medical treatment in Israel, the monstrous deed she committed might have been avoided? Nor can anyone seriously claim that preventing passage from Beit Fouriq to Nablus, preventing the olive harvest at Jeyus or preventing the harvest in the hothouses at Zeita, or building gigantic earth ramparts at Azoun last week, after the residents destroyed the lock on their cage/village, have anything to do with security. This week, while the Jewish people celebrate Sukkot in trips throughout Israel and trips abroad, it's worth remembering that living alongside us is a nation in a narrow prison, which is constantly closing in on them, almost to the limits of human endurance.
3.Israel: The Alternative
Tony Judt
The New York Review of Books,
Volume 50, Number 16 · October 23, 2003
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16671
The Middle East peace process is finished. It did not die: it was killed. Mahmoud Abbas was undermined by the President of the Palestinian Authority and humiliated by the Prime Minister of Israel. His successor awaits a similar fate. Israel continues to mock its American patron, building illegal settlements in cynical disregard of the "road map." The President of the United States of America has been reduced to a ventriloquist's dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line: "It's all Arafat's fault." Israelis themselves grimly await the next bomber. Palestinian Arabs, corralled into shrinking Bantustans, subsist on EU handouts. On the corpse-strewn landscape of the Fertile Crescent, Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, and a handful of terrorists can all claim victory, and they do. Have we reached the end of the road? What is to be done?
At the dawn of the twentieth century, in the twilight of the continental empires, Europe's subject peoples dreamed of forming "nation-states," territorial homelands where Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Armenians, and others might live free, masters of their own fate. When the Habsburg and Romanov empires collapsed after World War I, their leaders seized the opportunity. A flurry of new states emerged; and the first thing they did was set about privileging their national, "ethnic" majority—defined by language, or religion, or antiquity, or all three—at the expense of inconvenient local minorities, who were consigned to second-class status: permanently resident strangers in their own home.
But one nationalist movement, Zionism, was frustrated in its ambitions. The dream of an appropriately sited Jewish national home in the middle of the defunct Turkish Empire had to wait upon the retreat of imperial Britain: a process that took three more decades and a second world war. And thus it was only in 1948 that a Jewish nation-state was established in formerly Ottoman Palestine. But the founders of the Jewish state had been influenced by the same concepts and categories as their fin-de-siècle contemporaries back in Warsaw, or Odessa, or Bucharest; not surprisingly, Israel's ethno-religious self-definition, and its discrimination against internal "foreigners," has always had more in common with, say, the practices of post-Habsburg Romania than either party might care to acknowledge.
The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European "enclave" in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a "Jewish state"—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded— is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.
In one vital attribute, however, Israel is quite different from previous insecure, defensive microstates born of imperial collapse: it is a democracy. Hence its present dilemma. Thanks to its occupation of the lands conquered in 1967, Israel today faces three unattractive choices. It can dismantle the Jewish settlements in the territories, return to the 1967 state borders within which Jews constitute a clear majority, and thus remain both a Jewish state and a democracy, albeit one with a constitutionally anomalous community of second-class Arab citizens.
Alternatively, Israel can continue to occupy "Samaria," "Judea," and Gaza, whose Arab population—added to that of present-day Israel—will become the demographic majority within five to eight years: in which case Israel will be either a Jewish state (with an ever-larger majority of unenfranchised non-Jews) or it will be a democracy. But logically it cannot be both.
Or else Israel can keep control of the Occupied Territories but get rid of the overwhelming majority of the Arab population: either by forcible expulsion or else by starving them of land and livelihood, leaving them no option but to go into exile. In this way Israel could indeed remain both Jewish and at least formally democratic: but at the cost of becoming the first modern democracy to conduct full-scale ethnic cleansing as a state project, something which would condemn Israel forever to the status of an outlaw state, an international pariah.
Anyone who supposes that this third option is unthinkable above all for a Jewish state has not been watching the steady accretion of settlements and land seizures in the West Bank over the past quarter-century, or listening to generals and politicians on the Israeli right, some of them currently in government. The middle ground of Israeli politics today is occupied by the Likud. Its major component is the late Menachem Begin's Herut Party. Herut is the successor to Vladimir Jabotinsky's interwar Revisionist Zionists, whose uncompromising indifference to legal and territorial niceties once attracted from left-leaning Zionists the epithet "fascist." When one hears Israel's deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert, proudly insist that his country has not excluded the option of assassinating the elected president of the Palestinian Authority, it is clear that the label fits better than ever. Political murder is what fascists do.
The situation of Israel is not desperate, but it may be close to hopeless. Suicide bombers will never bring down the Israeli state, and the Palestinians have no other weapons. There are indeed Arab radicals who will not rest until every Jew is pushed into the Mediterranean, but they represent no strategic threat to Israel, and the Israeli military knows it. What sensible Israelis fear much more than Hamas or the al-Aqsa Brigade is the steady emergence of an Arab majority in "Greater Israel," and above all the erosion of the political culture and civic morale of their society. As the prominent Labor politician Avraham Burg recently wrote, "After two thousand years of struggle for survival, the reality of Israel is a colonial state, run by a corrupt clique which scorns and mocks law and civic morality."[1] Unless something changes, Israel in half a decade will be neither Jewish nor democratic.
This is where the US enters the picture. Israel's behavior has been a disaster for American foreign policy. With American support, Jerusalem has consistently and blatantly flouted UN resolutions requiring it to withdraw from land seized and occupied in war. Israel is the only Middle Eastern state known to possess genuine and lethal weapons of mass destruction. By turning a blind eye, the US has effectively scuttled its own increasingly frantic efforts to prevent such weapons from falling into the hands of other small and potentially belligerent states. Washington's unconditional support for Israel even in spite of (silent) misgivings is the main reason why most of the rest of the world no longer credits our good faith.
It is now tacitly conceded by those in a position to know that America's reasons for going to war in Iraq were not necessarily those advertised at the time.[2] For many in the current US administration, a major strategic consideration was the need to destabilize and then reconfigure the Middle East in a manner thought favorable to Israel. This story continues. We are now making belligerent noises toward Syria because Israeli intelligence has assured us that Iraqi weapons have been moved there—a claim for which there is no corroborating evidence from any other source. Syria backs Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad: sworn foes of Israel, to be sure, but hardly a significant international threat. However, Damascus has hitherto been providing the US with critical data on al-Qaeda. Like Iran, another longstanding target of Israeli wrath whom we are actively alienating, Syria is more use to the United States as a friend than an enemy. Which war are we fighting?
On September 16, 2003, the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution asking Israel to desist from its threat to deport Yasser Arafat. Even American officials themselves recognize, off the record, that the resolution was reasonable and prudent, and that the increasingly wild pronouncements of Israel's present leadership, by restoring Arafat's standing in the Arab world, are a major impediment to peace. But the US blocked the resolution all the same, further undermining our credibility as an honest broker in the region. America's friends and allies around the world are no longer surprised at such actions, but they are saddened and disappointed all the same.
Israeli politicians have been actively contributing to their own difficulties for many years; why do we continue to aid and abet them in their mistakes? The US has tentatively sought in the past to pressure Israel by threatening to withhold from its annual aid package some of the money that goes to subsidizing West Bank settlers. But the last time this was attempted, during the Clinton administration, Jerusalem got around it by taking the money as "security expenditure." Washington went along with the subterfuge, and of $10 billion of American aid over four years, between 1993 and 1997, less than $775 million was kept back. The settlement program went ahead unimpeded. Now we don't even try to stop it.
This reluctance to speak or act does no one any favors. It has also corroded American domestic debate. Rather than think straight about the Middle East, American politicians and pundits slander our European allies when they dissent, speak glibly and irresponsibly of resurgent anti-Semitism when Israel is criticized, and censoriously rebuke any public figure at home who tries to break from the consensus.
But the crisis in the Middle East won't go away. President Bush will probably be conspicuous by his absence from the fray for the coming year, having said just enough about the "road map" in June to placate Tony Blair. But sooner or later an American statesman is going to have to tell the truth to an Israeli prime minister and find a way to make him listen. Israeli liberals and moderate Palestinians have for two decades been thanklessly insisting that the only hope was for Israel to dismantle nearly all the settlements and return to the 1967 borders, in exchange for real Arab recognition of those frontiers and a stable, terrorist-free Palestinian state underwritten (and constrained) by Western and international agencies. This is still the conventional consensus, and it was once a just and possible solution.
But I suspect that we are already too late for that. There are too many settlements, too many Jewish settlers, and too many Palestinians, and they all live together, albeit separated by barbed wire and pass laws. Whatever the "road map" says, the real map is the one on the ground, and that, as Israelis say, reflects facts. It may be that over a quarter of a million heavily armed and subsidized Jewish settlers would leave Arab Palestine voluntarily; but no one I know believes it will happen. Many of those settlers will die—and kill— rather than move. The last Israeli politician to shoot Jews in pursuit of state policy was David Ben-Gurion, who forcibly disarmed Begin's illegal Irgun militia in 1948 and integrated it into the new Israel Defense Forces. Ariel Sharon is not Ben-Gurion.[3]
The time has come to think the unthinkable. The two-state solution— the core of the Oslo process and the present "road map"—is probably already doomed. With every passing year we are postponing an inevitable, harder choice that only the far right and far left have so far acknowledged, each for its own reasons. The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years will be between an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. That is indeed how the hard-liners in Sharon's cabinet see the choice; and that is why they anticipate the removal of the Arabs as the ineluctable condition for the survival of a Jewish state.
But what if there were no place in the world today for a "Jewish state"? What if the binational solution were not just increasingly likely, but actually a desirable outcome? It is not such a very odd thought. Most of the readers of this essay live in pluralist states which have long since become multiethnic and multicultural. "Christian Europe," pace M. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, is a dead letter; Western civilization today is a patchwork of colors and religions and languages, of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Indians, and many others—as any visitor to London or Paris or Geneva will know.[4]
Israel itself is a multicultural society in all but name; yet it remains distinctive among democratic states in its resort to ethnoreligious criteria with which to denominate and rank its citizens. It is an oddity among modern nations not—as its more paranoid supporters assert—because it is a Jewish state and no one wants the Jews to have a state; but because it is a Jewish state in which one community—Jews —is set above others, in an age when that sort of state has no place.
For many years, Israel had a special meaning for the Jewish people. After 1948 it took in hundreds of thousands of helpless survivors who had nowhere else to go; without Israel their condition would have been desperate in the extreme. Israel needed Jews, and Jews needed Israel. The circumstances of its birth have thus bound Israel's identity inextricably to the Shoah, the German project to exterminate the Jews of Europe. As a result, all criticism of Israel is drawn ineluctably back to the memory of that project, something that Israel's American apologists are shamefully quick to exploit. To find fault with the Jewish state is to think ill of Jews; even to imagine an alternative configuration in the Middle East is to indulge the moral equivalent of genocide.
In the years after World War II, those many millions of Jews who did not live in Israel were often reassured by its very existence—whether they thought of it as an insurance policy against renascent anti-Semitism or simply a reminder to the world that Jews could and would fight back. Before there was a Jewish state, Jewish minorities in Christian societies would peer anxiously over their shoulders and keep a low profile; since 1948, they could walk tall. But in recent years, the situation has tragically reversed.
Today, non-Israeli Jews feel themselves once again exposed to criticism and vulnerable to attack for things they didn't do. But this time it is a Jewish state, not a Christian one, which is holding them hostage for its own actions. Diaspora Jews cannot influence Israeli policies, but they are implicitly identified with them, not least by Israel's own insistent claims upon their allegiance. The behavior of a self-described Jewish state affects the way everyone else looks at Jews. The increased incidence of attacks on Jews in Europe and elsewhere is primarily attributable to misdirected efforts, often by young Muslims, to get back at Israel. The depressing truth is that Israel's current behavior is not just bad for America, though it surely is. It is not even just bad for Israel itself, as many Israelis silently acknowledge. The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews.
In a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry at will; where cultural and national impediments to communication have all but collapsed; where more and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to answer to just one of them; in such a world Israel is truly an anachronism. And not just an anachronism but a dysfunctional one. In today's "clash of cultures" between open, pluralist democracies and belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-states, Israel actually risks falling into the wrong camp.
To convert Israel from a Jewish state to a binational one would not be easy, though not quite as impossible as it sounds: the process has already begun de facto. But it would cause far less disruption to most Jews and Arabs than its religious and nationalist foes will claim. In any case, no one I know of has a better idea: anyone who genuinely supposes that the controversial electronic fence now being built will resolve matters has missed the last fifty years of history. The "fence"—actually an armored zone of ditches, fences, sensors, dirt roads (for tracking footprints), and a wall up to twenty-eight feet tall in places—occupies, divides, and steals Arab farmland; it will destroy villages, livelihoods, and whatever remains of Arab-Jewish community. It costs approximately $1 million per mile and will bring nothing but humiliation and discomfort to both sides. Like the Berlin Wall, it confirms the moral and institutional bankruptcy of the regime it is intended to protect.
A binational state in the Middle East would require a brave and relentlessly engaged American leadership. The security of Jews and Arabs alike would need to be guaranteed by international force—though a legitimately constituted binational state would find it much easier policing militants of all kinds inside its borders than when they are free to infiltrate them from outside and can appeal to an angry, excluded constituency on both sides of the border.[5] A binational state in the Middle East would require the emergence, among Jews and Arabs alike, of a new political class. The very idea is an unpromising mix of realism and utopia, hardly an auspicious place to begin. But the alternatives are far, far worse.
—September 25, 2003
Notes
[1] See Burg's essay, "La révolution sioniste est morte," Le Monde, September 11, 2003. A former head of the Jewish Agency, the writer was speaker of the Knesset, Israel's Parliament, between 1999 and 2003 and is currently a Labor Party member of the Knesset. His essay first appeared in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot; it has been widely republished, notably in the Forward (August 29, 2003) and the London Guardian (September 15, 2003).
[2] See the interview with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in the July 2003 issue of Vanity Fair.
[3] In 1979, following the peace agreement with Anwar Sadat, Prime Minister Begin and Defense Minister Sharon did indeed instruct the army to close down Jewish settlements in the territory belonging to Egypt. The angry resistance of some of the settlers was overcome with force, though no one was killed. But then the army was facing three thousand extremists, not a quarter of a million, and the land in question was the Sinai Desert, not "biblical Samaria and Judea."
[4] Albanians in Italy, Arabs and black Africans in France, Asians in England all continue to encounter hostility. A minority of voters in France, or Belgium, or even Denmark and Norway, support political parties whose hostility to "immigration" is sometimes their only platform. But compared with thirty years ago, Europe is a multicolored patchwork of equal citizens, and that, without question, is the shape of its future.
[5] As Burg notes, Israel's current policies are the terrorists' best recruiting tool: "We are indifferent to the fate of Palestinian children, hungry and humiliated; so why are we surprised when they blow us up in our restaurants? Even if we killed 1000 terrorists a day it would change nothing." See Burg, "La révolution sioniste est morte."
October 15, 2003
Bill Janzen, the director of Mennonite Central Committee’s Ottawa office, was in the occupied Palestinian territories for a work visit October 1-3. Bill and I spent most of our time visiting MCC partner organizations whose work is threatened by the continuing construction of what Israel calls a security fence and what Palestinians call an apartheid wall, or segregation barrier. In Bethlehem, we met with the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem, an MCC partner organization working with farmers to introduce seed varieties adapted to rain fed farming conditions.
Many of these farmers have had their lands confiscated for the construction of the barrier—a network of electronic fences, with trenches, patrol roads, and dirt roads. ARIJ director Jad Ishaq, using satellite imaging and mapping, showed how us how the barrier, coupled with ongoing construction of illegal Israeli colonies, is encircling the Bethlehem area, cutting it off from Jerusalem and leaving no room for growth.
The families in the Greek Orthodox Housing Project in Beit Sahour, meanwhile, are finding themselves slowly encircled by the fence—they will need special passes to leave and return to their homes.
A trip to the Qalqilyah area reinforced the damage being done by the segregation barrier: in Jayyous village north of Qalqilyah, farmers had been waiting all morning for Israeli soldiers to open the gate in the fence so that they could access their fields; the soldiers had told the villagers that only persons over 38 would be allowed to cross once the gate opened; one elderly man said to us, “Why can’t my sons enter? How can I farm the land myself?”
In Azzoun village, residents had recently broken open the lock on the gate which Israeli soldiers had installed in order to close off the village; in retaliation, the Israeli military had just come with bulldozers and made large dirt mounds to shut off the road once more.
Finally, in Qalqilyah itself, a city of 40,000 people surrounded by a 25-foot concrete wall on one side and a network of electronic fences on the other, left with only one entrance, we heard from farmers who have been cut off from their lands and water sources by the fence. MCC and Catholic Relief Services are joining with the Palestinian Hydrology Group to help these farmers maximize the use of those wells to which they still have access.
Good fences may make good neighbors, according to Robert Frost’s poem, but the Palestinians with whom we met did not view the fence as a good fence: rather, by dispossessing tens of thousands of Palestinians, the fence/wall/barrier is increasing Palestinian despair and thwarting short- and long-term attempts at reconciliation.
The Palestinian Environmental NGO Network (PENGON), an MCC partner, has just launched a new website with information, personal stories, and responses to frequently asked questions about the wall: http://www.stopthewall.org/
The World Council of Churches recently released a report entitled, “Security or Segregation? The Humanitarian Consequences of Israel’s Wall of Separation.” It can be viewed at: http://www.wcc-coe.org/wcc/what/international/palestine/securityorsegregation.html/
The World Vision-Jerusalem/West Bank/Gaza office has just issued a moving report entitled “Who Will Wipe Away Their Tears? A Call to End Violence Against Children in Israel and Palestine?” World Vision Jerusalem director writes, “No child should ever have reason to fear—let alone die from—a suicide bomber. No child should ever fear a violent death from an occupying military. No child should experience the trauma of bombings, tanks, and undercover death squads. No children should die for the sins of adults.” Copies of this powerful report can be obtained by e-mailing Allyn Dhynes (allyn_dhynes@wvi.org) or Holly Dhynes (holly_dhynes@wvi.org).
Below you will find three pieces. The first, by Palestinian Christian leader Bernard Sabella, offers a poignant reflection on the pressing need for moral leadership. In the second piece, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy looks at the ever-smaller prisons to which Palestinians are being confined. In the final piece, from the New York Review of Books, Tony Judt argues that, with Israeli colonization of the occupied territories having undermined a viable two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the time has come for alternative thinking. Judt’s proposal of one, binational state in which Palestinians and Israeli Jews might like in equality is a provocative mix of realism and utopian thinking.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. "Of Pilots, Suicide Bombings and Leadership"
By Dr. Bernard Sabella, Executive Secretary Department of Service to Palestinian Refugees, Middle East Council of Churches
Jerusalem - October 6th, 2003
I usually try to detach myself from what goes on around me in this Holy Land in order to concentrate on my work and maybe also to keep my sanity. But there are events, developments, happenings and non-happenings that force themselves into one's space and one's life. Such events and developments highlight choices and commitments that people make. Of Israeli pilots who refuse on principle to carry out bombing raids that could kill innocent Palestinian civilians, I cannot but respect their courage. Whether the debate raging in Israel over their letter of refusal would widen the choices open to other Israelis, this remains to be seen. But the commitment and the choice made by these pilots are to be acknowledged in the quest towards a more humane relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. The suicide bombing in Maxim Restaurant in Haifa is a very painful event. Not simply the human cost paid by everyone but especially the devastation that befell families of those working and dining in the restaurant make the heart ache. There is no excuse for anyone carrying out a suicide bombing. Justifications for suicide bombings could range from personal to political and ideological reasons but these justifications fail to see the human face of the other. If I argue that all Israelis are alike and they all carry the ugly face of military occupation, am I better than those Israelis who argue that all Palestinians are terrorists and hence without a human face? Suicide bombings, like indiscriminate air strikes, hurt all of us as they rob us of our humanity and narrow the possibilities for peace-making and eventual reconciliation. Leaders, on both sides, have not yet made the needed choices and commitments for peace. Military retaliation, on the Israeli side, not only reflects the superiority of the military machine and air force but also the moral bankruptcy of Israeli politicians. They fail to understand that peace with their neighbors necessitates ending the occupation of Palestinian and Arab lands. It takes great leaders to initiate the process of ending a military occupation. Instead, the Israeli government decides to strike at Syria in retaliation for the Maxim Restaurant bombing. If Syria is to be impressed then it has to be gained to a peace process and not attacked. Desperate politicians, like those presently at the helm of the government in Israel, need to ask themselves why they feel so desperate, at present? Palestinian leaders are also challenged to put their house in order. In the first Intifada (1988 - 1993) Palestinian children with stones in their hands gained world wide sympathy for the Palestinian cause. We have more arms and gun power today in the second Intifada but we do not have the vision and we definitely have lost the moral edge of the first Intifada. Our leaders, of all factions and groups, need to work on the vision for the society and its future. It is not a question of checking the Islamist groups and disarming their members, it is a question of whether we are all together onto working for the vision of Palestinian society? If we are, then our response to continued Israeli occupation should have a framework that would ensure the moral and humane dimensions of our struggle. Our cause is a clear one: occupation should end and a Palestinian state should rise! But not at any cost. It may take us longer time to achieve our goal if we adopt a clear framework with moral and humane dimensions of struggle. Such a framework would not only gain us the support of the world but more important it would reaffirm what is best in our Palestinian culture and heritage. In the final analysis, there is no other way.
2. A prison that keeps getting smaller
Gideon Levy
Haaretz, October 12, 2003
Last Wednesday, Hoda Shadub, a woman of about 50, wanted to go home after having eye surgery at an East Jerusalem hospital. She waited for hours at the Hawara checkpoint, which blocks access to her city, Nablus, but the soldiers refused to let her through. According to the new orders, they said, only ambulances could pass. The Physicians for Human Rights association had to intervene to get an ambulance for Shadub, who finally got home - exhausted and embittered. No one can seriously claim that security reasons are behind the decision to keep an ailing Palestinian woman from getting home. Nor can anyone find a connection between a murderous terrorist attack in Haifa and the return of an innocent resident to her hometown. Last week, following the suicide bombing at the Maxim Restaurant in Haifa, the Israel Defense Forces again imposed harsh new restrictions on movement in the territories. In the West Bank, the ban on the use of Palestinian cars was expanded, and farmers were forbidden to work their fields across the separation barrier. The Gaza Strip was sliced into four sections, in the course of which several roads south of Gaza City were destroyed, according to a report on the weekend by the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. Not one suicide bombing in Israel has originated in the Gaza Strip, but that makes no difference when Israel decides to impose collective punishments on the Palestinians. Whenever the Palestinians start to think the worst is behind them, they get a rude jolt from reality. Since 1991, when the first closure was imposed on the territories, their prison has been getting smaller. The imprisonment of the Palestinian people, which has been ongoing for more than a decade, is perpetrated with varying degrees of severity, not all of which have been related to security for Israelis. Even the few "relaxations of the closure" that were occasionally declared in the media did not meet the test of reality in the field. When Israel finally declared a "goodwill gesture" - opening a road to traffic - tanks deployed on the road and prevented anyone from getting through, as occurred, for example, a few months ago on the Jenin-Yabad road or on the Tancher road in the Gaza Strip. From the moment the decision was made to imprison the Palestinian people, the only changes have been in the size of the prison and the prison cells. They are continually becoming smaller and narrower: from the big prison of the occupied territories, to the solitary confinement cell, in which residents are not allowed to leave their towns or villages, sometimes even their homes, and even rooms within the home when the IDF seizes control of it. At first, they were all allowed to enter Israel, apart from those on a list who were denied access. In short order, the situation was reversed: everyone was denied access, apart from those on a list who were allowed in. The latter number was constantly reduced, and, in parallel, Israel began systematically to narrow the detention cells that were alloted to the Palestinians. First, the Gaza Strip was cut off from the West Bank, and East Jerusalem from the rest of the Palestinian territories. Then, with the eruption of the current intifada, Israel added the siege to the closure: in order to get from town to town, a special permit - which was difficult to obtain - was needed, and the living area was made smaller and smaller. The measures utilized were also aggravated and their cruelty intensified: from manned roadblocks - where it was still perhaps possible to rely on the humanity of the soldiers to allow women in labor or dying people to pass - to locked iron gates, earth ramparts, trenches and concrete blocks that make passage totally impossible. These means have now been bolstered by the separation barrier, which severs farmers from their land, students from their schools and workers from their place of employment. It was obvious from the outset that the gates in the separation fence, which initially were open, would quickly be closed after every attack or warning of an attack. And that is exactly what happened last week. Security considerations can no longer be cited as an excuse for this array of edicts and decrees. It has long since been shown that the mass imprisonment, far from preventing terrorism, only encourages it. The IDF prevented the terminally ill father of the woman who blew herself up in the Haifa restaurant from entering Israel for medical treatment, as MK Ahmed Tibi (Hadash) related last week. (Tibi was involved in the attempt to get him the entry permit.) A few days after Tibi's secretary informed the family that, for security reasons, the father would not be able to get to Rambam Medical Center in Haifa for treatment, his daughter carried out the suicide bombing. It's hard to understand what went through the mind of the woman, whose brother and cousin were killed by the IDF, but isn't it possible that if her father had been taken for medical treatment in Israel, the monstrous deed she committed might have been avoided? Nor can anyone seriously claim that preventing passage from Beit Fouriq to Nablus, preventing the olive harvest at Jeyus or preventing the harvest in the hothouses at Zeita, or building gigantic earth ramparts at Azoun last week, after the residents destroyed the lock on their cage/village, have anything to do with security. This week, while the Jewish people celebrate Sukkot in trips throughout Israel and trips abroad, it's worth remembering that living alongside us is a nation in a narrow prison, which is constantly closing in on them, almost to the limits of human endurance.
3.Israel: The Alternative
Tony Judt
The New York Review of Books,
Volume 50, Number 16 · October 23, 2003
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16671
The Middle East peace process is finished. It did not die: it was killed. Mahmoud Abbas was undermined by the President of the Palestinian Authority and humiliated by the Prime Minister of Israel. His successor awaits a similar fate. Israel continues to mock its American patron, building illegal settlements in cynical disregard of the "road map." The President of the United States of America has been reduced to a ventriloquist's dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line: "It's all Arafat's fault." Israelis themselves grimly await the next bomber. Palestinian Arabs, corralled into shrinking Bantustans, subsist on EU handouts. On the corpse-strewn landscape of the Fertile Crescent, Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, and a handful of terrorists can all claim victory, and they do. Have we reached the end of the road? What is to be done?
At the dawn of the twentieth century, in the twilight of the continental empires, Europe's subject peoples dreamed of forming "nation-states," territorial homelands where Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Armenians, and others might live free, masters of their own fate. When the Habsburg and Romanov empires collapsed after World War I, their leaders seized the opportunity. A flurry of new states emerged; and the first thing they did was set about privileging their national, "ethnic" majority—defined by language, or religion, or antiquity, or all three—at the expense of inconvenient local minorities, who were consigned to second-class status: permanently resident strangers in their own home.
But one nationalist movement, Zionism, was frustrated in its ambitions. The dream of an appropriately sited Jewish national home in the middle of the defunct Turkish Empire had to wait upon the retreat of imperial Britain: a process that took three more decades and a second world war. And thus it was only in 1948 that a Jewish nation-state was established in formerly Ottoman Palestine. But the founders of the Jewish state had been influenced by the same concepts and categories as their fin-de-siècle contemporaries back in Warsaw, or Odessa, or Bucharest; not surprisingly, Israel's ethno-religious self-definition, and its discrimination against internal "foreigners," has always had more in common with, say, the practices of post-Habsburg Romania than either party might care to acknowledge.
The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European "enclave" in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a "Jewish state"—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded— is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.
In one vital attribute, however, Israel is quite different from previous insecure, defensive microstates born of imperial collapse: it is a democracy. Hence its present dilemma. Thanks to its occupation of the lands conquered in 1967, Israel today faces three unattractive choices. It can dismantle the Jewish settlements in the territories, return to the 1967 state borders within which Jews constitute a clear majority, and thus remain both a Jewish state and a democracy, albeit one with a constitutionally anomalous community of second-class Arab citizens.
Alternatively, Israel can continue to occupy "Samaria," "Judea," and Gaza, whose Arab population—added to that of present-day Israel—will become the demographic majority within five to eight years: in which case Israel will be either a Jewish state (with an ever-larger majority of unenfranchised non-Jews) or it will be a democracy. But logically it cannot be both.
Or else Israel can keep control of the Occupied Territories but get rid of the overwhelming majority of the Arab population: either by forcible expulsion or else by starving them of land and livelihood, leaving them no option but to go into exile. In this way Israel could indeed remain both Jewish and at least formally democratic: but at the cost of becoming the first modern democracy to conduct full-scale ethnic cleansing as a state project, something which would condemn Israel forever to the status of an outlaw state, an international pariah.
Anyone who supposes that this third option is unthinkable above all for a Jewish state has not been watching the steady accretion of settlements and land seizures in the West Bank over the past quarter-century, or listening to generals and politicians on the Israeli right, some of them currently in government. The middle ground of Israeli politics today is occupied by the Likud. Its major component is the late Menachem Begin's Herut Party. Herut is the successor to Vladimir Jabotinsky's interwar Revisionist Zionists, whose uncompromising indifference to legal and territorial niceties once attracted from left-leaning Zionists the epithet "fascist." When one hears Israel's deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert, proudly insist that his country has not excluded the option of assassinating the elected president of the Palestinian Authority, it is clear that the label fits better than ever. Political murder is what fascists do.
The situation of Israel is not desperate, but it may be close to hopeless. Suicide bombers will never bring down the Israeli state, and the Palestinians have no other weapons. There are indeed Arab radicals who will not rest until every Jew is pushed into the Mediterranean, but they represent no strategic threat to Israel, and the Israeli military knows it. What sensible Israelis fear much more than Hamas or the al-Aqsa Brigade is the steady emergence of an Arab majority in "Greater Israel," and above all the erosion of the political culture and civic morale of their society. As the prominent Labor politician Avraham Burg recently wrote, "After two thousand years of struggle for survival, the reality of Israel is a colonial state, run by a corrupt clique which scorns and mocks law and civic morality."[1] Unless something changes, Israel in half a decade will be neither Jewish nor democratic.
This is where the US enters the picture. Israel's behavior has been a disaster for American foreign policy. With American support, Jerusalem has consistently and blatantly flouted UN resolutions requiring it to withdraw from land seized and occupied in war. Israel is the only Middle Eastern state known to possess genuine and lethal weapons of mass destruction. By turning a blind eye, the US has effectively scuttled its own increasingly frantic efforts to prevent such weapons from falling into the hands of other small and potentially belligerent states. Washington's unconditional support for Israel even in spite of (silent) misgivings is the main reason why most of the rest of the world no longer credits our good faith.
It is now tacitly conceded by those in a position to know that America's reasons for going to war in Iraq were not necessarily those advertised at the time.[2] For many in the current US administration, a major strategic consideration was the need to destabilize and then reconfigure the Middle East in a manner thought favorable to Israel. This story continues. We are now making belligerent noises toward Syria because Israeli intelligence has assured us that Iraqi weapons have been moved there—a claim for which there is no corroborating evidence from any other source. Syria backs Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad: sworn foes of Israel, to be sure, but hardly a significant international threat. However, Damascus has hitherto been providing the US with critical data on al-Qaeda. Like Iran, another longstanding target of Israeli wrath whom we are actively alienating, Syria is more use to the United States as a friend than an enemy. Which war are we fighting?
On September 16, 2003, the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution asking Israel to desist from its threat to deport Yasser Arafat. Even American officials themselves recognize, off the record, that the resolution was reasonable and prudent, and that the increasingly wild pronouncements of Israel's present leadership, by restoring Arafat's standing in the Arab world, are a major impediment to peace. But the US blocked the resolution all the same, further undermining our credibility as an honest broker in the region. America's friends and allies around the world are no longer surprised at such actions, but they are saddened and disappointed all the same.
Israeli politicians have been actively contributing to their own difficulties for many years; why do we continue to aid and abet them in their mistakes? The US has tentatively sought in the past to pressure Israel by threatening to withhold from its annual aid package some of the money that goes to subsidizing West Bank settlers. But the last time this was attempted, during the Clinton administration, Jerusalem got around it by taking the money as "security expenditure." Washington went along with the subterfuge, and of $10 billion of American aid over four years, between 1993 and 1997, less than $775 million was kept back. The settlement program went ahead unimpeded. Now we don't even try to stop it.
This reluctance to speak or act does no one any favors. It has also corroded American domestic debate. Rather than think straight about the Middle East, American politicians and pundits slander our European allies when they dissent, speak glibly and irresponsibly of resurgent anti-Semitism when Israel is criticized, and censoriously rebuke any public figure at home who tries to break from the consensus.
But the crisis in the Middle East won't go away. President Bush will probably be conspicuous by his absence from the fray for the coming year, having said just enough about the "road map" in June to placate Tony Blair. But sooner or later an American statesman is going to have to tell the truth to an Israeli prime minister and find a way to make him listen. Israeli liberals and moderate Palestinians have for two decades been thanklessly insisting that the only hope was for Israel to dismantle nearly all the settlements and return to the 1967 borders, in exchange for real Arab recognition of those frontiers and a stable, terrorist-free Palestinian state underwritten (and constrained) by Western and international agencies. This is still the conventional consensus, and it was once a just and possible solution.
But I suspect that we are already too late for that. There are too many settlements, too many Jewish settlers, and too many Palestinians, and they all live together, albeit separated by barbed wire and pass laws. Whatever the "road map" says, the real map is the one on the ground, and that, as Israelis say, reflects facts. It may be that over a quarter of a million heavily armed and subsidized Jewish settlers would leave Arab Palestine voluntarily; but no one I know believes it will happen. Many of those settlers will die—and kill— rather than move. The last Israeli politician to shoot Jews in pursuit of state policy was David Ben-Gurion, who forcibly disarmed Begin's illegal Irgun militia in 1948 and integrated it into the new Israel Defense Forces. Ariel Sharon is not Ben-Gurion.[3]
The time has come to think the unthinkable. The two-state solution— the core of the Oslo process and the present "road map"—is probably already doomed. With every passing year we are postponing an inevitable, harder choice that only the far right and far left have so far acknowledged, each for its own reasons. The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years will be between an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. That is indeed how the hard-liners in Sharon's cabinet see the choice; and that is why they anticipate the removal of the Arabs as the ineluctable condition for the survival of a Jewish state.
But what if there were no place in the world today for a "Jewish state"? What if the binational solution were not just increasingly likely, but actually a desirable outcome? It is not such a very odd thought. Most of the readers of this essay live in pluralist states which have long since become multiethnic and multicultural. "Christian Europe," pace M. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, is a dead letter; Western civilization today is a patchwork of colors and religions and languages, of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Indians, and many others—as any visitor to London or Paris or Geneva will know.[4]
Israel itself is a multicultural society in all but name; yet it remains distinctive among democratic states in its resort to ethnoreligious criteria with which to denominate and rank its citizens. It is an oddity among modern nations not—as its more paranoid supporters assert—because it is a Jewish state and no one wants the Jews to have a state; but because it is a Jewish state in which one community—Jews —is set above others, in an age when that sort of state has no place.
For many years, Israel had a special meaning for the Jewish people. After 1948 it took in hundreds of thousands of helpless survivors who had nowhere else to go; without Israel their condition would have been desperate in the extreme. Israel needed Jews, and Jews needed Israel. The circumstances of its birth have thus bound Israel's identity inextricably to the Shoah, the German project to exterminate the Jews of Europe. As a result, all criticism of Israel is drawn ineluctably back to the memory of that project, something that Israel's American apologists are shamefully quick to exploit. To find fault with the Jewish state is to think ill of Jews; even to imagine an alternative configuration in the Middle East is to indulge the moral equivalent of genocide.
In the years after World War II, those many millions of Jews who did not live in Israel were often reassured by its very existence—whether they thought of it as an insurance policy against renascent anti-Semitism or simply a reminder to the world that Jews could and would fight back. Before there was a Jewish state, Jewish minorities in Christian societies would peer anxiously over their shoulders and keep a low profile; since 1948, they could walk tall. But in recent years, the situation has tragically reversed.
Today, non-Israeli Jews feel themselves once again exposed to criticism and vulnerable to attack for things they didn't do. But this time it is a Jewish state, not a Christian one, which is holding them hostage for its own actions. Diaspora Jews cannot influence Israeli policies, but they are implicitly identified with them, not least by Israel's own insistent claims upon their allegiance. The behavior of a self-described Jewish state affects the way everyone else looks at Jews. The increased incidence of attacks on Jews in Europe and elsewhere is primarily attributable to misdirected efforts, often by young Muslims, to get back at Israel. The depressing truth is that Israel's current behavior is not just bad for America, though it surely is. It is not even just bad for Israel itself, as many Israelis silently acknowledge. The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews.
In a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry at will; where cultural and national impediments to communication have all but collapsed; where more and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to answer to just one of them; in such a world Israel is truly an anachronism. And not just an anachronism but a dysfunctional one. In today's "clash of cultures" between open, pluralist democracies and belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-states, Israel actually risks falling into the wrong camp.
To convert Israel from a Jewish state to a binational one would not be easy, though not quite as impossible as it sounds: the process has already begun de facto. But it would cause far less disruption to most Jews and Arabs than its religious and nationalist foes will claim. In any case, no one I know of has a better idea: anyone who genuinely supposes that the controversial electronic fence now being built will resolve matters has missed the last fifty years of history. The "fence"—actually an armored zone of ditches, fences, sensors, dirt roads (for tracking footprints), and a wall up to twenty-eight feet tall in places—occupies, divides, and steals Arab farmland; it will destroy villages, livelihoods, and whatever remains of Arab-Jewish community. It costs approximately $1 million per mile and will bring nothing but humiliation and discomfort to both sides. Like the Berlin Wall, it confirms the moral and institutional bankruptcy of the regime it is intended to protect.
A binational state in the Middle East would require a brave and relentlessly engaged American leadership. The security of Jews and Arabs alike would need to be guaranteed by international force—though a legitimately constituted binational state would find it much easier policing militants of all kinds inside its borders than when they are free to infiltrate them from outside and can appeal to an angry, excluded constituency on both sides of the border.[5] A binational state in the Middle East would require the emergence, among Jews and Arabs alike, of a new political class. The very idea is an unpromising mix of realism and utopia, hardly an auspicious place to begin. But the alternatives are far, far worse.
—September 25, 2003
Notes
[1] See Burg's essay, "La révolution sioniste est morte," Le Monde, September 11, 2003. A former head of the Jewish Agency, the writer was speaker of the Knesset, Israel's Parliament, between 1999 and 2003 and is currently a Labor Party member of the Knesset. His essay first appeared in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot; it has been widely republished, notably in the Forward (August 29, 2003) and the London Guardian (September 15, 2003).
[2] See the interview with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in the July 2003 issue of Vanity Fair.
[3] In 1979, following the peace agreement with Anwar Sadat, Prime Minister Begin and Defense Minister Sharon did indeed instruct the army to close down Jewish settlements in the territory belonging to Egypt. The angry resistance of some of the settlers was overcome with force, though no one was killed. But then the army was facing three thousand extremists, not a quarter of a million, and the land in question was the Sinai Desert, not "biblical Samaria and Judea."
[4] Albanians in Italy, Arabs and black Africans in France, Asians in England all continue to encounter hostility. A minority of voters in France, or Belgium, or even Denmark and Norway, support political parties whose hostility to "immigration" is sometimes their only platform. But compared with thirty years ago, Europe is a multicolored patchwork of equal citizens, and that, without question, is the shape of its future.
[5] As Burg notes, Israel's current policies are the terrorists' best recruiting tool: "We are indifferent to the fate of Palestinian children, hungry and humiliated; so why are we surprised when they blow us up in our restaurants? Even if we killed 1000 terrorists a day it would change nothing." See Burg, "La révolution sioniste est morte."
Wednesday, October 1
MCC Palestine Update #85
MCC Palestine Update #85
October 1, 2003
At the end of September, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Michel Sabbah offered the following prayer: "We need peacemakers in our country, we need the beautiful sight of 'the messenger announcing peace, of the messenger of good news who proclaim salvation.' 'If you want peace prepare war,' said the old Latin adage. We need peace, new men and women with a new vision of peace, based on the respect of human dignity in oneself and in the others, able to transform the cries of the poor in real freedom and equality. And so they will be able to reach the real and definitive peace. Instead of the old proverb, we say: If you want peace, listen to the cries of the poor, put an end to the oppression of your neighbour."
Patriarch Sabbah's words are timely, as Palestinians mark three years from the beginning of the current uprising, or intifada, against the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. The defining reality for millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories over the past three years has been one of restricted movement. Checkpoints, roadblocks, gates, walls, fences, and trenches separate millions of Palestinians from work, field, school, family, and medical care. Mennonite Central Committee has joined over 20 other international aid agencies to call upon the Government of Israel to allow free and unrestricted movement for Palestinians within the occupied territory, as occupying powers are obliged to do under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Without free and unrestricted movement, there cannot be a healthy Palestinian economy, and social, familial, and political ties are strained to the breaking point.
On September 20, MCC partner organization, Zochrot, an Israeli group dedicated to raising awareness about the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948 within Israeli society, organized a visit for over 100 people, mostly Israeli Jews, to the destroyed Palestinian city of al-Majdal, today's Ashkelon. After hearing about the history of al-Majdal from internally displaced Palestinians now living in the mixed Israeli cities of Ramle and Lod and learning about how al-Majdal's Palestinians inhabitants were expelled from 1948 to 1950, members of Zochrot placed street signs, in Hebrew and in Arabic at key intersections: thus the street sign in Ashkelon reading Herzl Street was supplemented with another sign bearing the original name, "School Street." Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and Israeli Jews in attendance stressed that any lasting reconciliation and peace between Palestinians and Israeli Jews must include justice for the Palestinian refugees of 1948. To learn more about Zochrot's activities, you can visit the group's website. While most of the pages are in Hebrew, some are in English:
http://www.nakbainhebrew.org/
Below you will find three pieces. The first is the statement by over 20 international aid agencies, including MCC, calling on free and unrestricted movement for Palestinians in the occupied territories. The second, by Israeli journalist Amira Hass, looks at military dimensions of the segregation barrier that Israel is building in the occupied territories. The final piece is part of a special supplement published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that looks at the cost of Israeli colonies in the occupied territories. The full supplement can be accessed at:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=344415&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. INTERNATIONAL AID AGENCIES CALL FOR FREE AND UNRESTRICTED MOVEMENT FOR ALL
September 28, 2003 will mark three years of the "Al Aqsa" Intifada. In that time several political initiatives have failed to stop the cycle of violence and destruction. Even today, closure and curfew continue to prevent millions of Palestinians from moving freely within the West Bank and Gaza strip.
The latest political initiative, the "Road Map to Peace", has not improved the situation despite the fact that it calls on Israel to "take all necessary steps to help normalize Palestinian life." There are still more than 450 barriers in the West Bank(1) that severely limit Palestinian access to health, education and other basic services. Ambulances still face unacceptable delays at these barriers. Education has been disrupted and students and teachers waste hours crossing checkpoints.
The situation for the 1.2 million Gazans is desperate as well. External closure has sealed Gaza off; the average Gazan has very little hope of ever leaving Gaza. Internal closure also affects local residents. In places like the Mawasi enclave where 5000 Palestinians live, access restrictions have led to shortages of medication and patients are being denied access at checkpoints. Teachers and students have also been unable to reach schools.
Armed checkpoints, gates, earth mounds, ditches and concrete roadblocks daily obstruct and humiliate West Bank Palestinians in their normal lives. Rather than building the foundations of peace, this situation is increasing the frustration of Palestinians. In addition, the building of the Wall, is confiscating Palestinian land and barring Palestinians from basic services. Because of its routing, some 120,000 Palestinians in the West Bank will be trapped on the Israeli side of the Wall, and some 200,000 Jerusalem Arab residents will also be cut off from any access to the rest of the West Bank once the barrier is completed(2).
The restrictions of movement and access seen in places in the West Bank and Gaza contravene key international laws and conventions, in particular articles 53, 55, 147 and 59 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 11 of the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights.
The undersigned organizations find this situation unacceptable and call on the Government of Israel to respect applicable International Law. We also call on the international community to uphold the laws and regulations agreed upon, and to increase their efforts to ensure the full application of international law by signatory members.
Academy for Educational Development (AED)
American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA)
CARE International
Comitato Internazionale per lo Sviluppo dei Popoli (CISP)
Cooperation for Development
Near East Foundation
DIAKONIA
Japan International Volunteer Centre (JVC)
Lutheran World Federation
Medical Aid For Palestinians - UK
Medcins Du Monde - France
Medcins Du Monde - Greece
Medcins Sans Frontiers - Greece
Mennonite Central Committee
Movimiento Por La Paz, El Desarme Y La Libertad (MPDL)
Norwegian People's Aid
Paz Y Tercer Mundo (PTM)
Premier Urgence (PU)
Save the Children - Sweden
Solidaridad Internacional
Solidarite Socialiste (FCD)
Swedish Organization for Individual Relief (SOIR)
Terres Des Hommes
UNA International Services
World Vision Jerusalem - West Bank - Gaza
1. OCHA estimates.
2. PENGON estimates.
2. That well-developed military creativity
Amira Hass, Ha'aretz, September 24, 2003
The degree to which the Israel Defense Forces think ahead can be seen from two reports by Felix Frisch published on the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth's Web site, Ynet. The first, from September 21, relates that "the separation fence to be built in the Gilboa region will include remote-control machine guns that will be operated by female soldiers from their command posts and will shoot at those suspected of being terrorists." The second, from September 22, relates that the IDF is already thinking about how to cope with the possibility that the Palestinians will dig tunnels under the separation fence, or cross over it by means of ropes or bridges stretched between the roofs on either side of the concrete wall, which, in built-up areas, divides buildings and streets.According to Frisch, the new firing system will apparently be installed in the coming months in the mountainous regions through which the separation fence will run, on the eastern slopes of Mount Gilboa. Its purpose is to compensate for the small number of troops and the difficulties of movement in that area, "and to shoot at terrorists who try to cross the fence." The IDF is aware of the danger that innocents will be hurt. A senior officer told the reporter that in order to prevent mistakes, the guns will not fire automatically, but will be fired "by the female soldier who manages the lookout post and has been trained for this." The report did not say how she would be trained to tell whether the figure who appears on her video screen is a terrorist or an innocent man.This is a reasonable division of labor: The political echelon deals with the political fallout from construction of the fence/wall - whether from the American government, the National Religious Party or the settlers' lobby. The military echelon deals with scenarios for attempts to sabotage the fence/wall or to infiltrate across it. The sweeping Israeli support for the separation fence, which isviewed as virtually the ultimate remedy for the security ills of the era of suicide attacks, dwarfs the Ynet reports.This military-technological creativity is destroying the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians, injuring their livelihoods and their property and dealing mortal blows to the view and the environment. But in Israel, it is considered a solution, because we think that everything is the fault of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians - that terror runs in their blood, rather than being the fruit of political circumstances, namely the lengthy occupation.This creativity is defended by the carefully nurtured political status quo. According to this status quo, as it is rooted in the Israeli consciousness, there have been two equal political entities engaged in peace negotiations since 1994: Israel and the Palestinian Authority.The Palestinian entity that has existed for the past nine years is post-modern: It is not dependent on territory or on sovereignty over territory. Sovereignty has been in the IDF's hands since 1967, and remained there throughout the Oslo years. The PA's status of near-equality to the State of Israel in the Israeli consciousness stems from the fact that various civilian powers - such as policing, the courts, tax collection, education, health and the payment of civil servants' salaries - were transferred to the Palestinian Authority in 1994. For the same reason, most Israelis are convinced that "the occupation has ended."Because, according to the accepted wisdom, it was the Palestinian Authority that attacked Israel in September 2000, and Israel has since been fighting a defensive war. There is only one condition for unfreezing the diplomatic process: a battle by the Palestinian political entity against the terrorist organizations in its midst. And since that entity is not doing everything in its power, the IDF is obliged to attack - in self-defense - and to build separation and security fences the length of the West Bank and around the settlements, on top of the ban on Palestinian traffic that is in force on most West Bank roads.The growth of the settlements, and the near doubling of the number of settlers, over the last decade are an integral part of that same status quo. The status of the Palestinian political entity, in the Israeli view, does not depend on territory, sovereignty over territory or control of resources, but on the end of Israel's civil responsibility for the Palestinians. Since the occupation ended with the transfer of civilian responsibility to the Palestinian leadership, the land, which until 1993 was defined as "occupied," has become "disputed territory," or "Area C" (land over which Israel retains both civilian and security control), or "state land." The entire land is open to Jews - for movement, settlement and residence. The Palestinians have the right to live in enclaves, and a very limited right of movement between these enclaves.This military creativity teaches us that the political echelon does not intend to change the status quo. The separation fence does not alter the status quo. It makes things more difficult for Palestinians who think that suicide bombings inside Israel are the answer to the occupation, just as the fences and the flexible rules of engagement around the settlements have made things harder for those who wanted to attack the settlers. But this humiliating, strangulating status quo increases the number of Palestinians who dream about suicide attacks.Our military creativity is so well-developed because Israel does not intend to achieve the reasonable political solution, the essence of which is the evacuation of all the settlements and a return to the June 1967 borders.
3. The extra civilian price tag: at least NIS 2.5 billion a year
By Moti Bassok and Haaretz Staff
Ha'aretz, September 26, 2003
One of the most closely guarded secrets in Israel is the amount of funding that is channeled to the settlements. Budget items were built to conceal this information and no government report has ever been published on the subject. Now, for the first time, Haaretz is presenting a nearly complete picture of the additional cost of the settlements, which totals more than NIS 45 billion since 1967
The extra civilian expenditure in the territories
In the month between mid-July 2003 and mid-August 2003, during the period of the hudna (cease-fire), information was leaked to the media about non-military investments in the territories of about NIS 800 million. Some of the reports were denied, but experience has shown that this type of denial should be treated with a fair measure of skepticism.The investments include: NIS 400 million for those willing to live in settlements in the Jordan Valley; the prime minister's approval for paving three roads in the West Bank at a cost of over NIS 150 million (the Keidar-Ma'aleh Adumim road, the Nili-Ofarim road, and the Yabed bypass road); a Housing Ministry decision to provide generous benefits (totaling some NIS 200 million) to those (mostly settlers) purchasing homes in areas designated as National Priority Areas A and B; and income tax breaks of 13 percent for 60 settlements (to be selected by the Defense Ministry).The arrangement for the tax breaks, which the Finance Ministry negotiated with Minister Avigdor Lieberman, MK Zvi Hendel and others, will cost the state some NIS 100 million in lost tax revenues and provide the recipients of these tax breaks an additional NIS 1,333 in monthly take-home pay.But aside from all these figures and the huge sums involved, there is still no clear answer to the question of how many extra billions the State of Israel spends in the territories each year. Is it NIS 1 billion? NIS 2 billion? NIS 5 billion? More? In other words, the question is how much less the state would spend if the 231,000 settlers resided within the Green Line. And how much money has Israel allocated for Jewish settlement in the territories since they were conquered over 36 years ago: NIS 20 billion? NIS 30 billion? NIS 50 billion - or more? The Haaretz investigation, conducted during the past three months, attempts to answer these questions for the first time.
Transparent budgets
No prime minister or finance minister, from either the Likud or Labor parties, has ever answered these questions. Most, or all, of them do not know the answers. There is a story at the treasury about a new finance minister, a friend of the settlements, who received the portfolio not that many years ago and invited the head of the Budgets Division for a confidential talk. When the door was closed, the minister implored, "Now tell me, finally, how many billions is the government spending in the territories each year?" The head of the division responded by giving the minister a two-hour lecture on government spending in the territories. During the entire lecture, he did not mention even a single number.No economic institution, governmental or non-governmental, has made an attempt to answer these questions, with the exception of the Adva Center (Information on Equality and Social Justice in Israel). The research department at the Bank of Israel has never published a study on the economy of the territories. None of the economic conferences, with all of the top movers and shakers in the Israeli economy, has provided answers either. This includes the prestigious Caesarea conference, sponsored by the Israel Democracy Institute. This issue is like a hot potato no one wants to handle.To put together this report, Haaretz requested information from the Defense Ministry and treasury, the Jewish Agency (which invests a lot of money in the territories, both directly and via the World Zionist Organization), and other governmental and public organizations. All of these bodies are funded by taxpayers and are obliged to provide information to the public. But all of them refused to hand over all or part of the data. This refusal was sometimes explicit and sometimes accompanied by various and peculiar excuses.Why is it so difficult to find in the treasury's books an answer to the question of how much money is transferred to the territories? The difficulty derives from the fact that the treasury's books do not stipulate which portion of the funds is channeled to the territories. On the contrary, every effort is made to conceal or camouflage these funds. For example, money earmarked for constructing fences in the territories will appear under the "Fences" category and the Defense Ministry will explain that this pertains to fencing for all of the border and periphery communities. The Labor coalition governments of the 1970s initiated this policy of hiding the settlement budgets from the scrutiny of critical Israeli and foreign observers, and the subsequent Likud governments adopted the same policy.In researching this report, Haaretz reporters spoke with dozens of senior treasury officials and key political and economic leaders, and collected many relevant documents, in an attempt to bring together the complete picture. All of the Haaretz reporters responsible for covering government ministries that fund the settlements gathered information - officially or unofficially - from the top ministry officials.The Haaretz project was able to draw on some earlier efforts to decipher the issue of government investments in the territories. Peace Now published a study in December 2002 by the economist Dror Tsaban on government budgets channeled to the settlements. In 2001, the Adva Center began to issue information on government investments in the territories (including the Golan Heights) - in local authorities, and on housing and road construction. Haaretz also gleaned information from a pamphlet published by the Accountant General's Division of the Finance Ministry, which summarizes the amount of funding by various government ministries to local authorities - including those in the territories - in 2001. Only a very small number of copies of this pamphlet were distributed, and not every senior treasury official even knows that it exists.
The major budget items: local authorities, housing, roads
Funding for the settlements includes fixed budgets and supplementary allocations, as well as benefits that settlers receive as individuals. The fixed budgets include the sums each locality receives in Israel, plus the extra money the settlements receive. This report only focuses on this surplus funding. Thus, for example, if the average pupil at schools within the Green Line receives five hours of instruction a day and the average child in the territories has a longer school day, Haaretz calculated the additional hours of instruction as an extra cost.In the case of benefits available to home buyers, the personal benefits derived from family status were not factored into the calculations. Only the benefits that are not offered to families living in central Israel entered into the calculations.Spending on infrastructure was considered an extra expenditure for three reasons. First, much of the money spent on the settlements - in construction, roads and other infrastructure - is money down the drain because, according to agreements Israel is a party to, this infrastructure will sooner or later be handed over to the Palestinians. Second, there are extra benefits provided for financing infrastructure in the territories that are not offered within the Green Line. Third, the assumption is that most of this infrastructure would not be essential if the settlers were living within the Green Line, even in small communities in peripheral areas.According to Tsaban's research, the state transferred NIS 2.23 billion to the settlements from non-military budgets in 2001. (He did not calculate military spending related to the settlements.) Of this total, he defines NIS 1.85 billion as surplus costs. Haaretz verified and updated Tsaban's calculations. The main budget items in this extra spending during the past years include: transfers to local authorities (according to the accountant general's report) - about NIS 700 million; Housing Ministry - NIS 440 million (the estimate for 2003 is NIS 500 million); roads - about NIS 400 million. The cost of income tax benefits provided to settlers was about NIS 130 million, though this benefit was canceled this summer. (An arrangement was made, however, to extend and increase this benefit for 60 settlements.)The Haaretz study found that the state invests about NIS 80 million each year on electricity infrastructure, NIS 50 million on water infrastructure, NIS 40 million on industry and NIS 30 million via the Mifal Hapayis national lottery. In the area of education, the extra funding totals at least NIS 100 million annually and another NIS 75 million in extra costs is incurred in the health system.The Interior Ministry transferred to local authorities - in addition to the sums cited above - two types of special budgets for the settlements: an Oslo grant (about NIS 35 million per year) and an intifada grant (another NIS 35 million). These sums were significantly reduced this year. Another few million are provided by the Tourism Ministry, Religious Affairs Ministry and Welfare Ministry. In recent years, this has all added up to about NIS 2.25 billion annually in extra costs.Two significant budget items whose scope is unknown are land acquisition, which has been conducted on a very large scale in the territories, and allocations for many hundreds of non-profit organizations. In 2002, there were no major budget revisions. The economic plan for 2003 brought cutbacks of more than NIS 150 million, but it is still not clear whether they will ultimately be implemented. Thus, a very conservative calculation of extra non-military spending for the settlements in recent years would be NIS 2.5 billion. However, the real figure is apparently much higher.Haaretz calculated spending on the settlements over the years in two ways, based on existing data and approximate estimates. In both cases, Haaretz based its calculations on current appropriations and the relatively abundant information on past spending. Both methods of calculation led to the conclusion that the amount of extra spending over the years totaled some NIS 50 billion. One of the methods of calculations is shown in the accompanying table. It is based on data showing that the state spent NIS 10.3 billion on housing and NIS 10 billion on roads. The other amounts were calculated according to the number of inhabitants (personal benefits and services) or number of settlements (infrastructure). All together, this works out to more than NIS 45 billion, not including the large, unknown sums spent on acquiring lands and allocations to non-profit organizations.The second method of calculation is based on the fact that budgets for the settlements during the last 14 years have remained quite constant. There were years when these budgets grew, like during the narrow right-wing government headed by Yitzhak Shamir (1990-92), and there were years in which they shrank, like during the term of the Rabin government. It can be assumed, therefore, that the extra spending in the aforementioned budget areas averaged NIS 2.5 billion a year during 1990-2003 in current shekel values, or NIS 35 billion over these 14 years.There are only estimates for the 1970s and 1980s, and the Haaretz study was careful to calculate these in a conservative direction. There were fewer Jews living in the territories during the 1980s. According to the number of settlers and settlements, Haaretz estimated that an extra NIS 1 billion was spent each year on the settlements in the 1980s, or NIS 10 billion over the decade. The estimate for the 1970s is NIS 500 million per year, or NIS 5 billion during this 10-year period. This all adds up to NIS 50 billion in extra non-military spending in the territories. It is important to reiterate that Haaretz regards this as a conservative estimate and that the real figure is probably considerably higher.
NIS 4 billion for defense
The extra security expenses in investments and military operations (protecting settlements - including air defense, guarding performed by reserve and regular army units, evacuation of settlers, fortifying settlements, etc.) increased considerably during the past three years of the intifada. It is difficult to isolate the costs of protecting settlements from the rest of the intifada-related expenditures, especially because the defense establishment does its utmost to keep the two types of expenditures secret. One of the difficult problems is to assess which part of the defense array will still need to be deployed after a withdrawal from the territories.The Haaretz investigation found that the cost of maintaining about 10,000 troops in the territories prior to the intifada was NIS 2 billion per year. Senior officials in the Defense Ministry and other government ministries set the additional cost of the intifada at NIS 2.0-2.5 billion a year. This makes a total of about NIS 4 billion. If peace is achieved, Israel could count on this amount of savings each year in the long run. During the initial years after a withdrawal, the savings would be lower, as much of the intifada-related spending would be transferred to fund security activities along the border.One possible model for assessing the savings that would result from an IDF pullout from the territories is the IDF withdrawal from Lebanon in June 2000. After the IDF redeployed along the northern border, the Northern Command was able to reduce by 50 percent the number of troops it deploys on this front. Assuming that about half of the defense spending in the territories would be saved after a withdrawal, the extra military-related spending for holding on to the settlements comes to about NIS 2 billion a year.For example, based on the Lebanon model, it can be estimated that in the event of withdrawal only three or four regional brigades would need to be deployed, instead of the seven now deployed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This would enable an armored division to be dismantled. The cost of maintaining an IDF armored division is estimated to be about NIS 1 billion a year.Practically speaking, however, it is doubtful whether the Lebanon model is applicable to central Israel, and it is only one possible assumption. The savings could be greater than 50 percent in a situation of true peace, or less than this amount in the event of a unilateral withdrawal. In any case, there is no way to unequivocally cite a specific number.
National priority
"Since the beginning of the settlements in the West Bank, Israel has carried out a vigorous and systematic policy aimed at encouraging Israeli citizens to move to the settlements," writes the researcher Yehezkel Lein in a report for the B'Tselem organization. "One of the main tools serving this policy is the granting of benefits and significant financial incentives to settlers. There are two types of incentives - those provided directly to the citizen by defining the settlements as `national priority areas,' and those provided to local authorities in the West Bank under preferred conditions in comparison with localities within Israel."Up until the beginning of the 1990s, the benefits were provided to the settlements by virtue of their definition as development areas. Yitzhak Shamir's government changed the name to "national priority areas." The revisions made over the years to the list of settlements and scope of the benefits did not significantly change the picture. The settlements, during all of the governments, maintained their status.The aim of national priority areas (according to the pamphlet "National Priority Areas," Prime Minister's Office, April 26, 1998) is "to encourage the next generation to remain in these areas, to encourage new immigrants to settle there, and also to encourage Israelis to move to the priority areas."Here again, the same scheme was used that succeeded so well in the state budget: The settlements were bundled in a package of benefits together with border communities in northern Israel and struggling communities in the Negev in an effort to blunt opposition and make it harder to identify and quantify the benefits provided to the settlements.The benefits and incentives awarded under the framework of national priority areas (according to the National Priority Areas pamphlet) are provided by six government ministries: Housing and Construction, National Infrastructure, Education, Industry and Trade, Labor and Welfare, and the Income Tax Division of the Finance Ministry.Here are several examples of what it means to be designated National Priority area A. Up until this year, settlers enjoyed a 7 percent deduction in income tax - which translates into an increase in net wages of up to NIS 720 per month - just by virtue of living on the other side of the Green Line. Teachers working in National Priority Area A receive an automatic bonus of four years seniority, an exemption from paying into training funds (keren hishtalmut), an 80-percent housing subsidy, 100-percent reimbursement for travel expenses, and more. Very large grants and loans of about NIS 90,000 are offered to anyone who purchases a home in a settlement. Industrial plants located in National Priority Area A are entitled to larger grants for R&D, up to as much as 60 percent of the cost of each project.
October 1, 2003
At the end of September, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Michel Sabbah offered the following prayer: "We need peacemakers in our country, we need the beautiful sight of 'the messenger announcing peace, of the messenger of good news who proclaim salvation.' 'If you want peace prepare war,' said the old Latin adage. We need peace, new men and women with a new vision of peace, based on the respect of human dignity in oneself and in the others, able to transform the cries of the poor in real freedom and equality. And so they will be able to reach the real and definitive peace. Instead of the old proverb, we say: If you want peace, listen to the cries of the poor, put an end to the oppression of your neighbour."
Patriarch Sabbah's words are timely, as Palestinians mark three years from the beginning of the current uprising, or intifada, against the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. The defining reality for millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories over the past three years has been one of restricted movement. Checkpoints, roadblocks, gates, walls, fences, and trenches separate millions of Palestinians from work, field, school, family, and medical care. Mennonite Central Committee has joined over 20 other international aid agencies to call upon the Government of Israel to allow free and unrestricted movement for Palestinians within the occupied territory, as occupying powers are obliged to do under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Without free and unrestricted movement, there cannot be a healthy Palestinian economy, and social, familial, and political ties are strained to the breaking point.
On September 20, MCC partner organization, Zochrot, an Israeli group dedicated to raising awareness about the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948 within Israeli society, organized a visit for over 100 people, mostly Israeli Jews, to the destroyed Palestinian city of al-Majdal, today's Ashkelon. After hearing about the history of al-Majdal from internally displaced Palestinians now living in the mixed Israeli cities of Ramle and Lod and learning about how al-Majdal's Palestinians inhabitants were expelled from 1948 to 1950, members of Zochrot placed street signs, in Hebrew and in Arabic at key intersections: thus the street sign in Ashkelon reading Herzl Street was supplemented with another sign bearing the original name, "School Street." Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and Israeli Jews in attendance stressed that any lasting reconciliation and peace between Palestinians and Israeli Jews must include justice for the Palestinian refugees of 1948. To learn more about Zochrot's activities, you can visit the group's website. While most of the pages are in Hebrew, some are in English:
http://www.nakbainhebrew.org/
Below you will find three pieces. The first is the statement by over 20 international aid agencies, including MCC, calling on free and unrestricted movement for Palestinians in the occupied territories. The second, by Israeli journalist Amira Hass, looks at military dimensions of the segregation barrier that Israel is building in the occupied territories. The final piece is part of a special supplement published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that looks at the cost of Israeli colonies in the occupied territories. The full supplement can be accessed at:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=344415&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. INTERNATIONAL AID AGENCIES CALL FOR FREE AND UNRESTRICTED MOVEMENT FOR ALL
September 28, 2003 will mark three years of the "Al Aqsa" Intifada. In that time several political initiatives have failed to stop the cycle of violence and destruction. Even today, closure and curfew continue to prevent millions of Palestinians from moving freely within the West Bank and Gaza strip.
The latest political initiative, the "Road Map to Peace", has not improved the situation despite the fact that it calls on Israel to "take all necessary steps to help normalize Palestinian life." There are still more than 450 barriers in the West Bank(1) that severely limit Palestinian access to health, education and other basic services. Ambulances still face unacceptable delays at these barriers. Education has been disrupted and students and teachers waste hours crossing checkpoints.
The situation for the 1.2 million Gazans is desperate as well. External closure has sealed Gaza off; the average Gazan has very little hope of ever leaving Gaza. Internal closure also affects local residents. In places like the Mawasi enclave where 5000 Palestinians live, access restrictions have led to shortages of medication and patients are being denied access at checkpoints. Teachers and students have also been unable to reach schools.
Armed checkpoints, gates, earth mounds, ditches and concrete roadblocks daily obstruct and humiliate West Bank Palestinians in their normal lives. Rather than building the foundations of peace, this situation is increasing the frustration of Palestinians. In addition, the building of the Wall, is confiscating Palestinian land and barring Palestinians from basic services. Because of its routing, some 120,000 Palestinians in the West Bank will be trapped on the Israeli side of the Wall, and some 200,000 Jerusalem Arab residents will also be cut off from any access to the rest of the West Bank once the barrier is completed(2).
The restrictions of movement and access seen in places in the West Bank and Gaza contravene key international laws and conventions, in particular articles 53, 55, 147 and 59 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 11 of the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights.
The undersigned organizations find this situation unacceptable and call on the Government of Israel to respect applicable International Law. We also call on the international community to uphold the laws and regulations agreed upon, and to increase their efforts to ensure the full application of international law by signatory members.
Academy for Educational Development (AED)
American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA)
CARE International
Comitato Internazionale per lo Sviluppo dei Popoli (CISP)
Cooperation for Development
Near East Foundation
DIAKONIA
Japan International Volunteer Centre (JVC)
Lutheran World Federation
Medical Aid For Palestinians - UK
Medcins Du Monde - France
Medcins Du Monde - Greece
Medcins Sans Frontiers - Greece
Mennonite Central Committee
Movimiento Por La Paz, El Desarme Y La Libertad (MPDL)
Norwegian People's Aid
Paz Y Tercer Mundo (PTM)
Premier Urgence (PU)
Save the Children - Sweden
Solidaridad Internacional
Solidarite Socialiste (FCD)
Swedish Organization for Individual Relief (SOIR)
Terres Des Hommes
UNA International Services
World Vision Jerusalem - West Bank - Gaza
1. OCHA estimates.
2. PENGON estimates.
2. That well-developed military creativity
Amira Hass, Ha'aretz, September 24, 2003
The degree to which the Israel Defense Forces think ahead can be seen from two reports by Felix Frisch published on the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth's Web site, Ynet. The first, from September 21, relates that "the separation fence to be built in the Gilboa region will include remote-control machine guns that will be operated by female soldiers from their command posts and will shoot at those suspected of being terrorists." The second, from September 22, relates that the IDF is already thinking about how to cope with the possibility that the Palestinians will dig tunnels under the separation fence, or cross over it by means of ropes or bridges stretched between the roofs on either side of the concrete wall, which, in built-up areas, divides buildings and streets.According to Frisch, the new firing system will apparently be installed in the coming months in the mountainous regions through which the separation fence will run, on the eastern slopes of Mount Gilboa. Its purpose is to compensate for the small number of troops and the difficulties of movement in that area, "and to shoot at terrorists who try to cross the fence." The IDF is aware of the danger that innocents will be hurt. A senior officer told the reporter that in order to prevent mistakes, the guns will not fire automatically, but will be fired "by the female soldier who manages the lookout post and has been trained for this." The report did not say how she would be trained to tell whether the figure who appears on her video screen is a terrorist or an innocent man.This is a reasonable division of labor: The political echelon deals with the political fallout from construction of the fence/wall - whether from the American government, the National Religious Party or the settlers' lobby. The military echelon deals with scenarios for attempts to sabotage the fence/wall or to infiltrate across it. The sweeping Israeli support for the separation fence, which isviewed as virtually the ultimate remedy for the security ills of the era of suicide attacks, dwarfs the Ynet reports.This military-technological creativity is destroying the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians, injuring their livelihoods and their property and dealing mortal blows to the view and the environment. But in Israel, it is considered a solution, because we think that everything is the fault of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians - that terror runs in their blood, rather than being the fruit of political circumstances, namely the lengthy occupation.This creativity is defended by the carefully nurtured political status quo. According to this status quo, as it is rooted in the Israeli consciousness, there have been two equal political entities engaged in peace negotiations since 1994: Israel and the Palestinian Authority.The Palestinian entity that has existed for the past nine years is post-modern: It is not dependent on territory or on sovereignty over territory. Sovereignty has been in the IDF's hands since 1967, and remained there throughout the Oslo years. The PA's status of near-equality to the State of Israel in the Israeli consciousness stems from the fact that various civilian powers - such as policing, the courts, tax collection, education, health and the payment of civil servants' salaries - were transferred to the Palestinian Authority in 1994. For the same reason, most Israelis are convinced that "the occupation has ended."Because, according to the accepted wisdom, it was the Palestinian Authority that attacked Israel in September 2000, and Israel has since been fighting a defensive war. There is only one condition for unfreezing the diplomatic process: a battle by the Palestinian political entity against the terrorist organizations in its midst. And since that entity is not doing everything in its power, the IDF is obliged to attack - in self-defense - and to build separation and security fences the length of the West Bank and around the settlements, on top of the ban on Palestinian traffic that is in force on most West Bank roads.The growth of the settlements, and the near doubling of the number of settlers, over the last decade are an integral part of that same status quo. The status of the Palestinian political entity, in the Israeli view, does not depend on territory, sovereignty over territory or control of resources, but on the end of Israel's civil responsibility for the Palestinians. Since the occupation ended with the transfer of civilian responsibility to the Palestinian leadership, the land, which until 1993 was defined as "occupied," has become "disputed territory," or "Area C" (land over which Israel retains both civilian and security control), or "state land." The entire land is open to Jews - for movement, settlement and residence. The Palestinians have the right to live in enclaves, and a very limited right of movement between these enclaves.This military creativity teaches us that the political echelon does not intend to change the status quo. The separation fence does not alter the status quo. It makes things more difficult for Palestinians who think that suicide bombings inside Israel are the answer to the occupation, just as the fences and the flexible rules of engagement around the settlements have made things harder for those who wanted to attack the settlers. But this humiliating, strangulating status quo increases the number of Palestinians who dream about suicide attacks.Our military creativity is so well-developed because Israel does not intend to achieve the reasonable political solution, the essence of which is the evacuation of all the settlements and a return to the June 1967 borders.
3. The extra civilian price tag: at least NIS 2.5 billion a year
By Moti Bassok and Haaretz Staff
Ha'aretz, September 26, 2003
One of the most closely guarded secrets in Israel is the amount of funding that is channeled to the settlements. Budget items were built to conceal this information and no government report has ever been published on the subject. Now, for the first time, Haaretz is presenting a nearly complete picture of the additional cost of the settlements, which totals more than NIS 45 billion since 1967
The extra civilian expenditure in the territories
In the month between mid-July 2003 and mid-August 2003, during the period of the hudna (cease-fire), information was leaked to the media about non-military investments in the territories of about NIS 800 million. Some of the reports were denied, but experience has shown that this type of denial should be treated with a fair measure of skepticism.The investments include: NIS 400 million for those willing to live in settlements in the Jordan Valley; the prime minister's approval for paving three roads in the West Bank at a cost of over NIS 150 million (the Keidar-Ma'aleh Adumim road, the Nili-Ofarim road, and the Yabed bypass road); a Housing Ministry decision to provide generous benefits (totaling some NIS 200 million) to those (mostly settlers) purchasing homes in areas designated as National Priority Areas A and B; and income tax breaks of 13 percent for 60 settlements (to be selected by the Defense Ministry).The arrangement for the tax breaks, which the Finance Ministry negotiated with Minister Avigdor Lieberman, MK Zvi Hendel and others, will cost the state some NIS 100 million in lost tax revenues and provide the recipients of these tax breaks an additional NIS 1,333 in monthly take-home pay.But aside from all these figures and the huge sums involved, there is still no clear answer to the question of how many extra billions the State of Israel spends in the territories each year. Is it NIS 1 billion? NIS 2 billion? NIS 5 billion? More? In other words, the question is how much less the state would spend if the 231,000 settlers resided within the Green Line. And how much money has Israel allocated for Jewish settlement in the territories since they were conquered over 36 years ago: NIS 20 billion? NIS 30 billion? NIS 50 billion - or more? The Haaretz investigation, conducted during the past three months, attempts to answer these questions for the first time.
Transparent budgets
No prime minister or finance minister, from either the Likud or Labor parties, has ever answered these questions. Most, or all, of them do not know the answers. There is a story at the treasury about a new finance minister, a friend of the settlements, who received the portfolio not that many years ago and invited the head of the Budgets Division for a confidential talk. When the door was closed, the minister implored, "Now tell me, finally, how many billions is the government spending in the territories each year?" The head of the division responded by giving the minister a two-hour lecture on government spending in the territories. During the entire lecture, he did not mention even a single number.No economic institution, governmental or non-governmental, has made an attempt to answer these questions, with the exception of the Adva Center (Information on Equality and Social Justice in Israel). The research department at the Bank of Israel has never published a study on the economy of the territories. None of the economic conferences, with all of the top movers and shakers in the Israeli economy, has provided answers either. This includes the prestigious Caesarea conference, sponsored by the Israel Democracy Institute. This issue is like a hot potato no one wants to handle.To put together this report, Haaretz requested information from the Defense Ministry and treasury, the Jewish Agency (which invests a lot of money in the territories, both directly and via the World Zionist Organization), and other governmental and public organizations. All of these bodies are funded by taxpayers and are obliged to provide information to the public. But all of them refused to hand over all or part of the data. This refusal was sometimes explicit and sometimes accompanied by various and peculiar excuses.Why is it so difficult to find in the treasury's books an answer to the question of how much money is transferred to the territories? The difficulty derives from the fact that the treasury's books do not stipulate which portion of the funds is channeled to the territories. On the contrary, every effort is made to conceal or camouflage these funds. For example, money earmarked for constructing fences in the territories will appear under the "Fences" category and the Defense Ministry will explain that this pertains to fencing for all of the border and periphery communities. The Labor coalition governments of the 1970s initiated this policy of hiding the settlement budgets from the scrutiny of critical Israeli and foreign observers, and the subsequent Likud governments adopted the same policy.In researching this report, Haaretz reporters spoke with dozens of senior treasury officials and key political and economic leaders, and collected many relevant documents, in an attempt to bring together the complete picture. All of the Haaretz reporters responsible for covering government ministries that fund the settlements gathered information - officially or unofficially - from the top ministry officials.The Haaretz project was able to draw on some earlier efforts to decipher the issue of government investments in the territories. Peace Now published a study in December 2002 by the economist Dror Tsaban on government budgets channeled to the settlements. In 2001, the Adva Center began to issue information on government investments in the territories (including the Golan Heights) - in local authorities, and on housing and road construction. Haaretz also gleaned information from a pamphlet published by the Accountant General's Division of the Finance Ministry, which summarizes the amount of funding by various government ministries to local authorities - including those in the territories - in 2001. Only a very small number of copies of this pamphlet were distributed, and not every senior treasury official even knows that it exists.
The major budget items: local authorities, housing, roads
Funding for the settlements includes fixed budgets and supplementary allocations, as well as benefits that settlers receive as individuals. The fixed budgets include the sums each locality receives in Israel, plus the extra money the settlements receive. This report only focuses on this surplus funding. Thus, for example, if the average pupil at schools within the Green Line receives five hours of instruction a day and the average child in the territories has a longer school day, Haaretz calculated the additional hours of instruction as an extra cost.In the case of benefits available to home buyers, the personal benefits derived from family status were not factored into the calculations. Only the benefits that are not offered to families living in central Israel entered into the calculations.Spending on infrastructure was considered an extra expenditure for three reasons. First, much of the money spent on the settlements - in construction, roads and other infrastructure - is money down the drain because, according to agreements Israel is a party to, this infrastructure will sooner or later be handed over to the Palestinians. Second, there are extra benefits provided for financing infrastructure in the territories that are not offered within the Green Line. Third, the assumption is that most of this infrastructure would not be essential if the settlers were living within the Green Line, even in small communities in peripheral areas.According to Tsaban's research, the state transferred NIS 2.23 billion to the settlements from non-military budgets in 2001. (He did not calculate military spending related to the settlements.) Of this total, he defines NIS 1.85 billion as surplus costs. Haaretz verified and updated Tsaban's calculations. The main budget items in this extra spending during the past years include: transfers to local authorities (according to the accountant general's report) - about NIS 700 million; Housing Ministry - NIS 440 million (the estimate for 2003 is NIS 500 million); roads - about NIS 400 million. The cost of income tax benefits provided to settlers was about NIS 130 million, though this benefit was canceled this summer. (An arrangement was made, however, to extend and increase this benefit for 60 settlements.)The Haaretz study found that the state invests about NIS 80 million each year on electricity infrastructure, NIS 50 million on water infrastructure, NIS 40 million on industry and NIS 30 million via the Mifal Hapayis national lottery. In the area of education, the extra funding totals at least NIS 100 million annually and another NIS 75 million in extra costs is incurred in the health system.The Interior Ministry transferred to local authorities - in addition to the sums cited above - two types of special budgets for the settlements: an Oslo grant (about NIS 35 million per year) and an intifada grant (another NIS 35 million). These sums were significantly reduced this year. Another few million are provided by the Tourism Ministry, Religious Affairs Ministry and Welfare Ministry. In recent years, this has all added up to about NIS 2.25 billion annually in extra costs.Two significant budget items whose scope is unknown are land acquisition, which has been conducted on a very large scale in the territories, and allocations for many hundreds of non-profit organizations. In 2002, there were no major budget revisions. The economic plan for 2003 brought cutbacks of more than NIS 150 million, but it is still not clear whether they will ultimately be implemented. Thus, a very conservative calculation of extra non-military spending for the settlements in recent years would be NIS 2.5 billion. However, the real figure is apparently much higher.Haaretz calculated spending on the settlements over the years in two ways, based on existing data and approximate estimates. In both cases, Haaretz based its calculations on current appropriations and the relatively abundant information on past spending. Both methods of calculation led to the conclusion that the amount of extra spending over the years totaled some NIS 50 billion. One of the methods of calculations is shown in the accompanying table. It is based on data showing that the state spent NIS 10.3 billion on housing and NIS 10 billion on roads. The other amounts were calculated according to the number of inhabitants (personal benefits and services) or number of settlements (infrastructure). All together, this works out to more than NIS 45 billion, not including the large, unknown sums spent on acquiring lands and allocations to non-profit organizations.The second method of calculation is based on the fact that budgets for the settlements during the last 14 years have remained quite constant. There were years when these budgets grew, like during the narrow right-wing government headed by Yitzhak Shamir (1990-92), and there were years in which they shrank, like during the term of the Rabin government. It can be assumed, therefore, that the extra spending in the aforementioned budget areas averaged NIS 2.5 billion a year during 1990-2003 in current shekel values, or NIS 35 billion over these 14 years.There are only estimates for the 1970s and 1980s, and the Haaretz study was careful to calculate these in a conservative direction. There were fewer Jews living in the territories during the 1980s. According to the number of settlers and settlements, Haaretz estimated that an extra NIS 1 billion was spent each year on the settlements in the 1980s, or NIS 10 billion over the decade. The estimate for the 1970s is NIS 500 million per year, or NIS 5 billion during this 10-year period. This all adds up to NIS 50 billion in extra non-military spending in the territories. It is important to reiterate that Haaretz regards this as a conservative estimate and that the real figure is probably considerably higher.
NIS 4 billion for defense
The extra security expenses in investments and military operations (protecting settlements - including air defense, guarding performed by reserve and regular army units, evacuation of settlers, fortifying settlements, etc.) increased considerably during the past three years of the intifada. It is difficult to isolate the costs of protecting settlements from the rest of the intifada-related expenditures, especially because the defense establishment does its utmost to keep the two types of expenditures secret. One of the difficult problems is to assess which part of the defense array will still need to be deployed after a withdrawal from the territories.The Haaretz investigation found that the cost of maintaining about 10,000 troops in the territories prior to the intifada was NIS 2 billion per year. Senior officials in the Defense Ministry and other government ministries set the additional cost of the intifada at NIS 2.0-2.5 billion a year. This makes a total of about NIS 4 billion. If peace is achieved, Israel could count on this amount of savings each year in the long run. During the initial years after a withdrawal, the savings would be lower, as much of the intifada-related spending would be transferred to fund security activities along the border.One possible model for assessing the savings that would result from an IDF pullout from the territories is the IDF withdrawal from Lebanon in June 2000. After the IDF redeployed along the northern border, the Northern Command was able to reduce by 50 percent the number of troops it deploys on this front. Assuming that about half of the defense spending in the territories would be saved after a withdrawal, the extra military-related spending for holding on to the settlements comes to about NIS 2 billion a year.For example, based on the Lebanon model, it can be estimated that in the event of withdrawal only three or four regional brigades would need to be deployed, instead of the seven now deployed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This would enable an armored division to be dismantled. The cost of maintaining an IDF armored division is estimated to be about NIS 1 billion a year.Practically speaking, however, it is doubtful whether the Lebanon model is applicable to central Israel, and it is only one possible assumption. The savings could be greater than 50 percent in a situation of true peace, or less than this amount in the event of a unilateral withdrawal. In any case, there is no way to unequivocally cite a specific number.
National priority
"Since the beginning of the settlements in the West Bank, Israel has carried out a vigorous and systematic policy aimed at encouraging Israeli citizens to move to the settlements," writes the researcher Yehezkel Lein in a report for the B'Tselem organization. "One of the main tools serving this policy is the granting of benefits and significant financial incentives to settlers. There are two types of incentives - those provided directly to the citizen by defining the settlements as `national priority areas,' and those provided to local authorities in the West Bank under preferred conditions in comparison with localities within Israel."Up until the beginning of the 1990s, the benefits were provided to the settlements by virtue of their definition as development areas. Yitzhak Shamir's government changed the name to "national priority areas." The revisions made over the years to the list of settlements and scope of the benefits did not significantly change the picture. The settlements, during all of the governments, maintained their status.The aim of national priority areas (according to the pamphlet "National Priority Areas," Prime Minister's Office, April 26, 1998) is "to encourage the next generation to remain in these areas, to encourage new immigrants to settle there, and also to encourage Israelis to move to the priority areas."Here again, the same scheme was used that succeeded so well in the state budget: The settlements were bundled in a package of benefits together with border communities in northern Israel and struggling communities in the Negev in an effort to blunt opposition and make it harder to identify and quantify the benefits provided to the settlements.The benefits and incentives awarded under the framework of national priority areas (according to the National Priority Areas pamphlet) are provided by six government ministries: Housing and Construction, National Infrastructure, Education, Industry and Trade, Labor and Welfare, and the Income Tax Division of the Finance Ministry.Here are several examples of what it means to be designated National Priority area A. Up until this year, settlers enjoyed a 7 percent deduction in income tax - which translates into an increase in net wages of up to NIS 720 per month - just by virtue of living on the other side of the Green Line. Teachers working in National Priority Area A receive an automatic bonus of four years seniority, an exemption from paying into training funds (keren hishtalmut), an 80-percent housing subsidy, 100-percent reimbursement for travel expenses, and more. Very large grants and loans of about NIS 90,000 are offered to anyone who purchases a home in a settlement. Industrial plants located in National Priority Area A are entitled to larger grants for R&D, up to as much as 60 percent of the cost of each project.
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