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."
Wednesday, October 15
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.
Wednesday, September 17
MCC Palestine Update #84
MCC Palestine Update #84
September 17, 2003
Travel in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip these days, and the recurring refrain is one of apprehension for what the future will hold. Israel has escalated its “targeted killings” (assassinations) against Hamas leaders, Palestinian militants carried out two suicide bombings, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) resigned from being Palestinian prime minister, a new prime minister—Ahmed Quriea, or Abu ‘Ala—was set to take his place, and, finally, the Israeli cabinet announced that its new policy was to “remove” Yasser Arafat from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (whether by imprisonment, exile, or assassination was left unclear). While international pressure has caused Israel to put this policy of removing the elected Palestinian leader on-hold for the time being, the threat of Arafat’s expulsion remains—at least in the minds of most Palestinians—very real.
One can discuss at length the details of what led to Mahmoud Abbas’ resignation, of the power struggles within the Palestinian leadership, of whether or not Ahmed Quriea’s appointment will give new life to the roadmap, of Arafat’s probable fate. While pressing, these issues, many Palestinians suggest to us, are peripheral to the geographical/political/military realities being dictated on the ground, particularly in the form of ongoing Israeli colonization of the occupied territories and the construction of fences and walls in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip that are putting the nails in the coffin of the two-state solution. While the world’s attention is diverted to the question of whether or not the Israelis will expel Arafat, the walls and fences continue to be built. When the attention of U.S. politicians is diverted in winter 2004 by presidential and congressional elections, the walls and fences will continue to be built. Meter by meter it will be built until Palestinian population centers are surrounded by walls and fences that will leave Palestinians confined into discontiguous cantons (disconnected from Jerusalem). Israeli commentator Akiva Eldar quoted one Israeli analyst as describing the emerging reality in the occupied territories as one of “Spartaheid”—apartheid via the means of Sparta. Mainstream US commentator Thomas Friedman, meanwhile, offered the following analysis: “Rather than create the outlines of a two-state solution, this wall will kill that idea for Palestinians, and drive them, over time, to demand instead a one-state solution—where they and the Jews would have equal rights in one state,” suggested Friedman in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. “As Palestinians find themselves isolated in pockets next to Jewish settlers—who have the rule of law, the right to vote, welfare, jobs, etc.—and as hope for a contiguous Palestinian state fades, it’s inevitable that many of them will throw in the towel and ask for the right to vote in Israel.” A one-binational state model, however, will take years, even decades, to emerge, however. In the meantime, Palestinians and increasing numbers of Israelis are fearful of what the coming days will bring.
Below you will find three pieces. In the first, former Jerusalem deputy mayor Meron Benvenisti looks at how the State of Israel is able to keep the occupation while having the international community finance it in practice. In the second, Israeli journalist Amira Hass examines the stories behind fatility statistics. And finally, Ha’aretz journalist Gideon Levy spends a day at the Abu Dis wall separating one part of Jerusalem from the other.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. International community supports a deluxe occupation
Meron Benvenisti
Ha’aretz, September 11, 2003
The publication of Amnesty International's report on the humanitarian crisis in the territories this week would not have attracted attention even without the latest bloody events. The fact that about 60 percent of West Bank residents live below the poverty line, and the conclusion that the economic and humanitarian crisis was caused by the blockades and the sieges, would not have shocked anyone, even less so when the headlines scream, "We'll smash them." Indeed, the lack of drama in the situation is reflected in the report's own title: "Surviving under siege." If they're "surviving," apparently the crisis isn't so bad and the fluid and violent - but stable - status quo can continue and nobody will have to take some dramatic step to break the endless, bloody cycle. According to the Amnesty report, most Palestinians in the occupied territories depend on contributions of food and other basic products, at least to a certain extent. The World Bank report published in May 2003 describes the huge volume of international aid to the territories, which is "on an unprecedented level of international financial commitment." From the outset of the present intifada, external bodies have contributed more than a billion dollars to finance the Palestinian Authority's budget, thus providing a living to many households (whose breadwinners were employed by the PA), consisting of almost half a million people. A record sum of more than a billion dollars contributed to the territories since the Defensive Shield Operation, excluding the UNWRA budget, was the main cause preventing a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic consequences. "The donors had no choice, if they wanted to keep alive the hope of reconciliation, since a collapse of the PA service structure and the further radical impoverishment of the population would have vitiated," the World Bank establishes. The Palestinians managed to survive thanks to the international aid, but as usual in these cases, the beneficiary of the international community's rallying to the rescue was their Israeli enemy. Moreover, the contributing states' humanitarian enlistment became a safety net, enabling Israel to impose a deluxe occupation in the West Bank - total military domination with no responsibility for running the life of the occupied population, and no price tag attached. Had Israel been required to fulfill its commitment as an occupying power, it would have had to pay NIS 5-6 billion a year just to maintain basic services for a population of more than three million people. But it created an international precedent - an occupation fully financed by the international community. The harsher the Israeli measures with "closures, blockades and safety fences," the larger the international aid "to prevent a humanitarian crisis," and Israel is not held accountable. Israel isn't even required to display minimal politeness and gratitude to the donor states for their generosity in providing the economic safety net. Indeed, the greatest contributor - the European Union as a body and European states individually - are treated with contempt and condescension: pay up and shut up, or we'll accuse you of anti-Semitism. President Bush should be envious of Ariel Sharon for his cunning in setting up the deluxe occupation regime. In Iraq, the Americans are trying to get the UN and the states of Europe, which objected to the war, to partake in the burden of the occupation, but they are raising all kinds of demands and conditions. Sharon is exempt from all this, even though with one decision - removing internal roadblocks that have nothing to do with security, and are intended entirely to serve the settlers - he could, according to the World Bank, "improve the West Bank's domestic product by 21 percent." Israel will not pay for its actions, but the international community will, because according to the Israeli concept there is no connection between humiliation, poverty and loss of hope to violence and terror, and any attempt to link them "justifies the murders." Only the international community must worry about the loss of the chance of reconciliation and pay for it dearly. Israel does not believe in reconciliation "because there is no partner to peace." The government of Israel is totally opposed to "internationalizing the conflict" and to posting international observers in the territories, but it has no objection at all to internationalizing the financing of the occupation. And what if the donor states demand a similar status to the one they have in Bosnia? One can imagine a situation in which they say to Israel - when it takes a radical step like deporting Yasser Arafat - "we're fed up with giving in to your extortion. Cope with the humanitarian situation you've created yourselves" - and transfer the contributions to the rehabilitation of Iraq. Doubtlessly masses of Palestinians will pay for such a move, so it had better remain in the realms of wild imagination. But it will do no harm if someone dares play the devil's advocate.
2. What the fatality statistics tell us
Amira Hass
Ha'aretz, September 2, 2003
Against the background of shock and disgust at the mass terror attack on the Jerusalem bus on August 19, and the fear of advanced Qassam rocket attacks, the government of Israel energetically renewed its policy of targeted killings. From August 21 through yesterday, September 1, Air Force fighters killed 11 Hamas activists in six targeted assassinations in crowded central locations. Four other Palestinians were killed in those actions, among them a young girl and an old man, and dozens were injured. The threatened revenge attack has not occurred. Is this not proof that targeted killings are the way to go?
That might have been the conclusion in December 2000 as well, after the first three targeted killings that Israel carried out the previous month. At the end of September and October 2000, the Palestinians killed 11 Israelis in the territories, five of whom were security personnel, according to B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights. In November, 22 Israelis were killed, 18 in the territories, 11 of whom were security personnel, and four in Israel proper. In December, the Palestinians killed eight Israelis in the territories, five of whom were civilians and three were security personnel. No Israelis were killed in Israel proper in December. This could be seen as a direct result of the pressure brought to bear by the series of six targeted killings that same month.
However in February 2001 the ratio between those killed in the territories and those killed in Israel changed: four Israelis were killed in the territories, among them one soldier, and eight in Israel, run down by a bus driver from Gaza. In March 2001, two Israelis were killed in the territories and eight in Israel, among them three in the first deadly suicide bombing, which took place on March 4.
From that point on, the Hamas and the Islamic Jihad have been competing with each other to see who could carry out the most deadly suicide attack in Israel. In October 2001, Fatah, which until that time had concentrated mostly on shooting attacks in the territories, joined the competition. The more Israel pursued its policy of targeted killings, the more the members of all the terror organizations competed with each other in attacks on Israel.
The Palestinians also counted their dead: 115 in September-October 2000 (the majority of whom were killed during demonstrations, and among whom were 32 children killed by IDF fire), 109 in November 2000, 48 in December 2000, 18 in January 2001, and 20 in February. It is convenient to think that most of those killed were armed terrorists, and that Israel's policy, a strong preemptive strike to prevent deterioration, had proven itself.
But it turned out that according to calculations of the Shin Bet and by its own definitions, of the 2,341 Palestinians who were killed up to the beginning of August this year, 551 were terrorists, "that is, bearing arms and explosives" (Ze'ev Schiff, Haaretz, August 8, 2003). To those who wonder who the other victims were, whether they were suspects, or civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time - here is a partial answer: Until the end of August this year, IDF soldiers killed 391 minors, according to B'Tselem. According to the Red Crescent, the IDF killed 141 women. B'Tselem determined that 291 Palestinian security personnel were killed, some of whom were participating in the fighting, whether during an IDF incursion or during attacks they initiated in the settlements or against soldiers.
However many did not take part in the fighting, and were killed while they were standing at their posts as defined in the Oslo Accords. Many others were killed in bombardments, in invasions of cities, or in attempts to detour roadblocks. In addition to some 120 Palestinians who were targets of assassination, 82 Palestinian civilians were killed "by mistake." They, it is to be assumed, are not included in the 551 terrorists as defined above.
Here are the disastrous proportions, in the hope that someone in Israel will take notice: 80 percent of the Palestinians killed were not connected to armed actions.
Like the Israelis, who experience the horror of bus bombings, the Palestinians too are all exposed to the terror of missiles and bombs exploding in the heart of the civilian population centers. This terror, and the tribal need for vengeance (which is not foreign to Israelis) have become a true "terror infrastructure." The bottomless pit of its ammunition is the pointlessness and hopelessness of the lives of tens of thousands of young people. The targeted killings may sabotage technical capabilities for a time. But they do not deter more and more young people from seeking the means to act.
An educational counselor met regularly last year with the children of the Qalandiyah refugee camp. When she asked them how they see themselves in 20 years, most answered "buried." Those same children or their friends were seen, on Sunday of this week, climbing the separation fence that encloses their refugee camp. They bent back the fence, broke the sensors and the floodlights, and took every piece of metal from the fence that was not nailed down, and it all happened no more than 300 meters from the nearest soldiers. When asked if they cared that they might be shot and killed, they responded with a snicker. What targeted killing can overcome that kind of serenity in the face of death?
3. There's a wall in the way
Gideon Levy
Ha’aretz, Sept. 5, 2003
A little girl in her school uniform, her hair carefully combed, was walking to her first day of school on Monday. Walking to school? Not precisely. There's a wall in the way.
A little girl in her school uniform, her hair carefully combed, was walking to her first day of school on Monday. Walking to school? Not precisely. There's a wall in the way. Trying to squeeze between the big cement blocks of this wall besieging her home, she nearly manages to get her little body through, but not her new school bag. Backing off, she tries a different spot where people climb over instead of squeezing through. She ducks her head under the barbed wire, puts one foot across, then the book bag, jumps, lands with a thud and runs - in fear of the Border Police who could show up momentarily. Eventually she arrives at school, still in one piece. Welcome to the first grade! No need to travel far to see this evil. Fifteen minutes from downtown Jerusalem, you can see what cruelty for its own sake looks like: collective abuse bearing no relation to its declared purpose. The little town of Abu Dis, once was nearly the temporary capital of Palestine, with an imposing parliament building to prove it, is just a dusty village nowadays, scarred and abandoned, with a wall that bisects everything. For over a year now, an ugly concrete wall has divided the good people from the bad there, the prisoners from the free, the blue (Israeli identity cards) from the orange (West Bank ID cards). Officially, Palestinians who live west of the wall are okay; Israel leaves them alone, they're deemed residents of Jerusalem. Those to the east of the wall are caged like animals. The division is not absolute. Despite the absence of a gate, an evil decision in and of itself, infiltration occurs under the noses of the Border Police patrols swarming all over the village. People climb over or squeeze through. Meanwhile, they're humiliated. Bullied. Battered. Made to sweat. Covered in dust. An entire town scales the wall to get to school, to the grocery store, to work - day after day, evening after evening: old folks, young folks, women and children. "Am Yisrael chai" ("The people of Israel lives") and swastikas repose side by side - graffiti on the occupation wall. "Go over by the mosque, it's easier to climb there," suggests a Border Policeman. Indeed, some old women are climbing over. It's easier here because you don't have to spread your legs too far. Just hike up your skirt a bit, immodestly exposing your leg (forbidden to the religious); grab the smooth concrete and heave upward with all your might. Embarrassing, not easy, but there's no choice. Someone is always there to lend a hand. Then just swing your legs over and jump down. But make sure the barbed wire doesn't catch your head scarf. There's no old woman in Abu Dis who has not scaled this wall. Even disabled people are handed across like a sack from one side to the other. Some students from the Jerusalem side appear, en route to Al-Quds University, carrying their books and notebooks in their arms. A spacious campus, with stone buildings scattered around, it's the only university in the world whose students have to scale a wall en route to a lecture. Higher education. Dressed to a T, gel on their hair, the young men easily navigate the smooth concrete wall. An agile hop, they're in the territories; a hop the other way, in Israel. Women - ashamed of their shame, which is actually our shame - ask not to be photographed. Seeing the older women, the heart recoils. A Border Police Jeep lies in wait in someone's yard. "What are you looking for here? It's so banal," says a senior officer, Amitai Levy, relaxing in his armored vehicle. "Go to Sowahra al-Sharqiyya [Jabal Mukkaber], you'll see some nice things there." A boy appears on a bicycle, with his mother, laden with shopping baskets. Now what? First the baskets, then the bicycle, then the people. Be careful, the worried mother cautions. There are various vignettes. One woman gets stuck between two slabs of concrete, her head in the territories and the rest of her in Israel; her daughters howl with laughter until she's sprung free. Three judo novices, white belts, climb the wall in their martial arts garb: warming up for the lesson. A courier on a Vespa receives a plastic window blind from the other side, hurriedly clamps it to his scooter and is gone. A white Formica wardrobe crosses over. Some pinkish laundry softener crosses in the other direction. Now we cross, too. Inexpertly, a foothold here, a handhold there, trembling a little, nothing to hang on to; just jump. A tray of pastries makes its way over the wall from a bakery on the west to a party on the east. "Ramallah, Ramallah," holler the cabbies from the other side, selling rides only as far as the Qalandiyah checkpoint, the end of their world, through two permanent checkpoints and maybe a few more temporary ones. A Border Police Jeep arrives on the scene. Five policemen get out, three in helmets and flak jackets. They're drinking cola, one of them spits, the shift begins. Go see Jabal Mukkaber, enthused officer Levy. The old car huffs up the hill on the other side of the wall. The bulldozers have been here for a week. "The Jerusalem envelope," the local term for the Jerusalem-area apartheid wall, threatens to connect with the Abu Dis wall at any time now. On the ground, the sight is frightening: Already familiar up north, the snake is slithering southward around Jerusalem. Broad, intimidating, unrelenting: an olive grove uprooted, a house about to undergo surgery. The distant rhythm of jackhammers; hillside and valley, savaged. The residents' lawyer said maybe he could get them a gate in the wall. The bottom line: There's maybe a 20 percent chance of that happening. Al-Quds University students congregate in a protest tent they set up by their athletic fields, soon to face the bulldozer's advance. From atop the hills of Jabal Mukkaber, the view is amazing: The dirt-colored snake that winds over the hillsides and through the valleys is closing in from both directions, threatening the campus soccer field. A new settlers' road is being paved on the left, linking Kedar with Ma'aleh Adumim. So much traffic these days from Kedar. "We'll smash their cameras, the barbarians," growl the machine-gun-toting Shahaf company guards protecting the Zalman Barashi & Sons bulldozers, as a rental car with a few activists and foreign journalists pulls up. Recently, the digging exposed some ancient pillars here: They lie haphazardly on the hillside. Rumor has it that the wall will now be relocated farther west, or east, of here. Only archaeological artifacts can change the route. Not homes. Not live people. Not pastures. Not a soccer field. Back at Abu Dis, a Border Policeman orders that there can be no cameras. "It's a closed military zone." A closed military zone? The police and the armed guards share a blatant aversion to photographs. Perhaps they're ashamed of what they're doing? Three construction workers, one tall and two short, with an electric saw and a grindstone, are returning from their day's work in Jerusalem. Stand to one side! ID cards! Bingo! (They were in Israel without permits.) Now they'll be bullied, and by the book. M., 47, resident of Azzariyeh, 12 children. "They're my detainees," says a policeman. "Don't talk to them." Not just a military zone; also military property. "You can talk to them, but only with my permission," explains commander David Azoulay. "Everyone there by that wall is my detainee." At a flick of the policeman's hand, one of the workmen standing in the hot sun approaches submissively. Another gesture, signifying "Bring that sack you were carrying." Brushes, tattered clothing, electrical extension cords, worn shoes, some torn goggles are dumped out on the road by the exhausted workman; his face says it all. The policeman's eyes are hidden behind sleek, dark sunglasses - a kid of 19 or 20 bullying a father of 12 who wants to go home: Come here, go there. Finally, at Azoulay's command, surrounded by three policemen, the frightened workmen are hustled away, beyond a grove of cypress trees, out of sight
September 17, 2003
Travel in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip these days, and the recurring refrain is one of apprehension for what the future will hold. Israel has escalated its “targeted killings” (assassinations) against Hamas leaders, Palestinian militants carried out two suicide bombings, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) resigned from being Palestinian prime minister, a new prime minister—Ahmed Quriea, or Abu ‘Ala—was set to take his place, and, finally, the Israeli cabinet announced that its new policy was to “remove” Yasser Arafat from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (whether by imprisonment, exile, or assassination was left unclear). While international pressure has caused Israel to put this policy of removing the elected Palestinian leader on-hold for the time being, the threat of Arafat’s expulsion remains—at least in the minds of most Palestinians—very real.
One can discuss at length the details of what led to Mahmoud Abbas’ resignation, of the power struggles within the Palestinian leadership, of whether or not Ahmed Quriea’s appointment will give new life to the roadmap, of Arafat’s probable fate. While pressing, these issues, many Palestinians suggest to us, are peripheral to the geographical/political/military realities being dictated on the ground, particularly in the form of ongoing Israeli colonization of the occupied territories and the construction of fences and walls in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip that are putting the nails in the coffin of the two-state solution. While the world’s attention is diverted to the question of whether or not the Israelis will expel Arafat, the walls and fences continue to be built. When the attention of U.S. politicians is diverted in winter 2004 by presidential and congressional elections, the walls and fences will continue to be built. Meter by meter it will be built until Palestinian population centers are surrounded by walls and fences that will leave Palestinians confined into discontiguous cantons (disconnected from Jerusalem). Israeli commentator Akiva Eldar quoted one Israeli analyst as describing the emerging reality in the occupied territories as one of “Spartaheid”—apartheid via the means of Sparta. Mainstream US commentator Thomas Friedman, meanwhile, offered the following analysis: “Rather than create the outlines of a two-state solution, this wall will kill that idea for Palestinians, and drive them, over time, to demand instead a one-state solution—where they and the Jews would have equal rights in one state,” suggested Friedman in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. “As Palestinians find themselves isolated in pockets next to Jewish settlers—who have the rule of law, the right to vote, welfare, jobs, etc.—and as hope for a contiguous Palestinian state fades, it’s inevitable that many of them will throw in the towel and ask for the right to vote in Israel.” A one-binational state model, however, will take years, even decades, to emerge, however. In the meantime, Palestinians and increasing numbers of Israelis are fearful of what the coming days will bring.
Below you will find three pieces. In the first, former Jerusalem deputy mayor Meron Benvenisti looks at how the State of Israel is able to keep the occupation while having the international community finance it in practice. In the second, Israeli journalist Amira Hass examines the stories behind fatility statistics. And finally, Ha’aretz journalist Gideon Levy spends a day at the Abu Dis wall separating one part of Jerusalem from the other.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. International community supports a deluxe occupation
Meron Benvenisti
Ha’aretz, September 11, 2003
The publication of Amnesty International's report on the humanitarian crisis in the territories this week would not have attracted attention even without the latest bloody events. The fact that about 60 percent of West Bank residents live below the poverty line, and the conclusion that the economic and humanitarian crisis was caused by the blockades and the sieges, would not have shocked anyone, even less so when the headlines scream, "We'll smash them." Indeed, the lack of drama in the situation is reflected in the report's own title: "Surviving under siege." If they're "surviving," apparently the crisis isn't so bad and the fluid and violent - but stable - status quo can continue and nobody will have to take some dramatic step to break the endless, bloody cycle. According to the Amnesty report, most Palestinians in the occupied territories depend on contributions of food and other basic products, at least to a certain extent. The World Bank report published in May 2003 describes the huge volume of international aid to the territories, which is "on an unprecedented level of international financial commitment." From the outset of the present intifada, external bodies have contributed more than a billion dollars to finance the Palestinian Authority's budget, thus providing a living to many households (whose breadwinners were employed by the PA), consisting of almost half a million people. A record sum of more than a billion dollars contributed to the territories since the Defensive Shield Operation, excluding the UNWRA budget, was the main cause preventing a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic consequences. "The donors had no choice, if they wanted to keep alive the hope of reconciliation, since a collapse of the PA service structure and the further radical impoverishment of the population would have vitiated," the World Bank establishes. The Palestinians managed to survive thanks to the international aid, but as usual in these cases, the beneficiary of the international community's rallying to the rescue was their Israeli enemy. Moreover, the contributing states' humanitarian enlistment became a safety net, enabling Israel to impose a deluxe occupation in the West Bank - total military domination with no responsibility for running the life of the occupied population, and no price tag attached. Had Israel been required to fulfill its commitment as an occupying power, it would have had to pay NIS 5-6 billion a year just to maintain basic services for a population of more than three million people. But it created an international precedent - an occupation fully financed by the international community. The harsher the Israeli measures with "closures, blockades and safety fences," the larger the international aid "to prevent a humanitarian crisis," and Israel is not held accountable. Israel isn't even required to display minimal politeness and gratitude to the donor states for their generosity in providing the economic safety net. Indeed, the greatest contributor - the European Union as a body and European states individually - are treated with contempt and condescension: pay up and shut up, or we'll accuse you of anti-Semitism. President Bush should be envious of Ariel Sharon for his cunning in setting up the deluxe occupation regime. In Iraq, the Americans are trying to get the UN and the states of Europe, which objected to the war, to partake in the burden of the occupation, but they are raising all kinds of demands and conditions. Sharon is exempt from all this, even though with one decision - removing internal roadblocks that have nothing to do with security, and are intended entirely to serve the settlers - he could, according to the World Bank, "improve the West Bank's domestic product by 21 percent." Israel will not pay for its actions, but the international community will, because according to the Israeli concept there is no connection between humiliation, poverty and loss of hope to violence and terror, and any attempt to link them "justifies the murders." Only the international community must worry about the loss of the chance of reconciliation and pay for it dearly. Israel does not believe in reconciliation "because there is no partner to peace." The government of Israel is totally opposed to "internationalizing the conflict" and to posting international observers in the territories, but it has no objection at all to internationalizing the financing of the occupation. And what if the donor states demand a similar status to the one they have in Bosnia? One can imagine a situation in which they say to Israel - when it takes a radical step like deporting Yasser Arafat - "we're fed up with giving in to your extortion. Cope with the humanitarian situation you've created yourselves" - and transfer the contributions to the rehabilitation of Iraq. Doubtlessly masses of Palestinians will pay for such a move, so it had better remain in the realms of wild imagination. But it will do no harm if someone dares play the devil's advocate.
2. What the fatality statistics tell us
Amira Hass
Ha'aretz, September 2, 2003
Against the background of shock and disgust at the mass terror attack on the Jerusalem bus on August 19, and the fear of advanced Qassam rocket attacks, the government of Israel energetically renewed its policy of targeted killings. From August 21 through yesterday, September 1, Air Force fighters killed 11 Hamas activists in six targeted assassinations in crowded central locations. Four other Palestinians were killed in those actions, among them a young girl and an old man, and dozens were injured. The threatened revenge attack has not occurred. Is this not proof that targeted killings are the way to go?
That might have been the conclusion in December 2000 as well, after the first three targeted killings that Israel carried out the previous month. At the end of September and October 2000, the Palestinians killed 11 Israelis in the territories, five of whom were security personnel, according to B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights. In November, 22 Israelis were killed, 18 in the territories, 11 of whom were security personnel, and four in Israel proper. In December, the Palestinians killed eight Israelis in the territories, five of whom were civilians and three were security personnel. No Israelis were killed in Israel proper in December. This could be seen as a direct result of the pressure brought to bear by the series of six targeted killings that same month.
However in February 2001 the ratio between those killed in the territories and those killed in Israel changed: four Israelis were killed in the territories, among them one soldier, and eight in Israel, run down by a bus driver from Gaza. In March 2001, two Israelis were killed in the territories and eight in Israel, among them three in the first deadly suicide bombing, which took place on March 4.
From that point on, the Hamas and the Islamic Jihad have been competing with each other to see who could carry out the most deadly suicide attack in Israel. In October 2001, Fatah, which until that time had concentrated mostly on shooting attacks in the territories, joined the competition. The more Israel pursued its policy of targeted killings, the more the members of all the terror organizations competed with each other in attacks on Israel.
The Palestinians also counted their dead: 115 in September-October 2000 (the majority of whom were killed during demonstrations, and among whom were 32 children killed by IDF fire), 109 in November 2000, 48 in December 2000, 18 in January 2001, and 20 in February. It is convenient to think that most of those killed were armed terrorists, and that Israel's policy, a strong preemptive strike to prevent deterioration, had proven itself.
But it turned out that according to calculations of the Shin Bet and by its own definitions, of the 2,341 Palestinians who were killed up to the beginning of August this year, 551 were terrorists, "that is, bearing arms and explosives" (Ze'ev Schiff, Haaretz, August 8, 2003). To those who wonder who the other victims were, whether they were suspects, or civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time - here is a partial answer: Until the end of August this year, IDF soldiers killed 391 minors, according to B'Tselem. According to the Red Crescent, the IDF killed 141 women. B'Tselem determined that 291 Palestinian security personnel were killed, some of whom were participating in the fighting, whether during an IDF incursion or during attacks they initiated in the settlements or against soldiers.
However many did not take part in the fighting, and were killed while they were standing at their posts as defined in the Oslo Accords. Many others were killed in bombardments, in invasions of cities, or in attempts to detour roadblocks. In addition to some 120 Palestinians who were targets of assassination, 82 Palestinian civilians were killed "by mistake." They, it is to be assumed, are not included in the 551 terrorists as defined above.
Here are the disastrous proportions, in the hope that someone in Israel will take notice: 80 percent of the Palestinians killed were not connected to armed actions.
Like the Israelis, who experience the horror of bus bombings, the Palestinians too are all exposed to the terror of missiles and bombs exploding in the heart of the civilian population centers. This terror, and the tribal need for vengeance (which is not foreign to Israelis) have become a true "terror infrastructure." The bottomless pit of its ammunition is the pointlessness and hopelessness of the lives of tens of thousands of young people. The targeted killings may sabotage technical capabilities for a time. But they do not deter more and more young people from seeking the means to act.
An educational counselor met regularly last year with the children of the Qalandiyah refugee camp. When she asked them how they see themselves in 20 years, most answered "buried." Those same children or their friends were seen, on Sunday of this week, climbing the separation fence that encloses their refugee camp. They bent back the fence, broke the sensors and the floodlights, and took every piece of metal from the fence that was not nailed down, and it all happened no more than 300 meters from the nearest soldiers. When asked if they cared that they might be shot and killed, they responded with a snicker. What targeted killing can overcome that kind of serenity in the face of death?
3. There's a wall in the way
Gideon Levy
Ha’aretz, Sept. 5, 2003
A little girl in her school uniform, her hair carefully combed, was walking to her first day of school on Monday. Walking to school? Not precisely. There's a wall in the way.
A little girl in her school uniform, her hair carefully combed, was walking to her first day of school on Monday. Walking to school? Not precisely. There's a wall in the way. Trying to squeeze between the big cement blocks of this wall besieging her home, she nearly manages to get her little body through, but not her new school bag. Backing off, she tries a different spot where people climb over instead of squeezing through. She ducks her head under the barbed wire, puts one foot across, then the book bag, jumps, lands with a thud and runs - in fear of the Border Police who could show up momentarily. Eventually she arrives at school, still in one piece. Welcome to the first grade! No need to travel far to see this evil. Fifteen minutes from downtown Jerusalem, you can see what cruelty for its own sake looks like: collective abuse bearing no relation to its declared purpose. The little town of Abu Dis, once was nearly the temporary capital of Palestine, with an imposing parliament building to prove it, is just a dusty village nowadays, scarred and abandoned, with a wall that bisects everything. For over a year now, an ugly concrete wall has divided the good people from the bad there, the prisoners from the free, the blue (Israeli identity cards) from the orange (West Bank ID cards). Officially, Palestinians who live west of the wall are okay; Israel leaves them alone, they're deemed residents of Jerusalem. Those to the east of the wall are caged like animals. The division is not absolute. Despite the absence of a gate, an evil decision in and of itself, infiltration occurs under the noses of the Border Police patrols swarming all over the village. People climb over or squeeze through. Meanwhile, they're humiliated. Bullied. Battered. Made to sweat. Covered in dust. An entire town scales the wall to get to school, to the grocery store, to work - day after day, evening after evening: old folks, young folks, women and children. "Am Yisrael chai" ("The people of Israel lives") and swastikas repose side by side - graffiti on the occupation wall. "Go over by the mosque, it's easier to climb there," suggests a Border Policeman. Indeed, some old women are climbing over. It's easier here because you don't have to spread your legs too far. Just hike up your skirt a bit, immodestly exposing your leg (forbidden to the religious); grab the smooth concrete and heave upward with all your might. Embarrassing, not easy, but there's no choice. Someone is always there to lend a hand. Then just swing your legs over and jump down. But make sure the barbed wire doesn't catch your head scarf. There's no old woman in Abu Dis who has not scaled this wall. Even disabled people are handed across like a sack from one side to the other. Some students from the Jerusalem side appear, en route to Al-Quds University, carrying their books and notebooks in their arms. A spacious campus, with stone buildings scattered around, it's the only university in the world whose students have to scale a wall en route to a lecture. Higher education. Dressed to a T, gel on their hair, the young men easily navigate the smooth concrete wall. An agile hop, they're in the territories; a hop the other way, in Israel. Women - ashamed of their shame, which is actually our shame - ask not to be photographed. Seeing the older women, the heart recoils. A Border Police Jeep lies in wait in someone's yard. "What are you looking for here? It's so banal," says a senior officer, Amitai Levy, relaxing in his armored vehicle. "Go to Sowahra al-Sharqiyya [Jabal Mukkaber], you'll see some nice things there." A boy appears on a bicycle, with his mother, laden with shopping baskets. Now what? First the baskets, then the bicycle, then the people. Be careful, the worried mother cautions. There are various vignettes. One woman gets stuck between two slabs of concrete, her head in the territories and the rest of her in Israel; her daughters howl with laughter until she's sprung free. Three judo novices, white belts, climb the wall in their martial arts garb: warming up for the lesson. A courier on a Vespa receives a plastic window blind from the other side, hurriedly clamps it to his scooter and is gone. A white Formica wardrobe crosses over. Some pinkish laundry softener crosses in the other direction. Now we cross, too. Inexpertly, a foothold here, a handhold there, trembling a little, nothing to hang on to; just jump. A tray of pastries makes its way over the wall from a bakery on the west to a party on the east. "Ramallah, Ramallah," holler the cabbies from the other side, selling rides only as far as the Qalandiyah checkpoint, the end of their world, through two permanent checkpoints and maybe a few more temporary ones. A Border Police Jeep arrives on the scene. Five policemen get out, three in helmets and flak jackets. They're drinking cola, one of them spits, the shift begins. Go see Jabal Mukkaber, enthused officer Levy. The old car huffs up the hill on the other side of the wall. The bulldozers have been here for a week. "The Jerusalem envelope," the local term for the Jerusalem-area apartheid wall, threatens to connect with the Abu Dis wall at any time now. On the ground, the sight is frightening: Already familiar up north, the snake is slithering southward around Jerusalem. Broad, intimidating, unrelenting: an olive grove uprooted, a house about to undergo surgery. The distant rhythm of jackhammers; hillside and valley, savaged. The residents' lawyer said maybe he could get them a gate in the wall. The bottom line: There's maybe a 20 percent chance of that happening. Al-Quds University students congregate in a protest tent they set up by their athletic fields, soon to face the bulldozer's advance. From atop the hills of Jabal Mukkaber, the view is amazing: The dirt-colored snake that winds over the hillsides and through the valleys is closing in from both directions, threatening the campus soccer field. A new settlers' road is being paved on the left, linking Kedar with Ma'aleh Adumim. So much traffic these days from Kedar. "We'll smash their cameras, the barbarians," growl the machine-gun-toting Shahaf company guards protecting the Zalman Barashi & Sons bulldozers, as a rental car with a few activists and foreign journalists pulls up. Recently, the digging exposed some ancient pillars here: They lie haphazardly on the hillside. Rumor has it that the wall will now be relocated farther west, or east, of here. Only archaeological artifacts can change the route. Not homes. Not live people. Not pastures. Not a soccer field. Back at Abu Dis, a Border Policeman orders that there can be no cameras. "It's a closed military zone." A closed military zone? The police and the armed guards share a blatant aversion to photographs. Perhaps they're ashamed of what they're doing? Three construction workers, one tall and two short, with an electric saw and a grindstone, are returning from their day's work in Jerusalem. Stand to one side! ID cards! Bingo! (They were in Israel without permits.) Now they'll be bullied, and by the book. M., 47, resident of Azzariyeh, 12 children. "They're my detainees," says a policeman. "Don't talk to them." Not just a military zone; also military property. "You can talk to them, but only with my permission," explains commander David Azoulay. "Everyone there by that wall is my detainee." At a flick of the policeman's hand, one of the workmen standing in the hot sun approaches submissively. Another gesture, signifying "Bring that sack you were carrying." Brushes, tattered clothing, electrical extension cords, worn shoes, some torn goggles are dumped out on the road by the exhausted workman; his face says it all. The policeman's eyes are hidden behind sleek, dark sunglasses - a kid of 19 or 20 bullying a father of 12 who wants to go home: Come here, go there. Finally, at Azoulay's command, surrounded by three policemen, the frightened workmen are hustled away, beyond a grove of cypress trees, out of sight
Wednesday, September 3
MCC Palestine Update #83
MCC Palestine Update #83
September 3, 2003
This past week Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) and Catholic Relief Services (CRS) staff visited the village of Jayyous near the city of Qalqilyah in the northern West Bank. Jayyous village is one of scores of Palestinian communities whose economic, social, and political futures are being devastated by the construction of what Israel calls a “separation fence” and what Palestinians call an “apartheid wall.” Jayyous village has been cut off from most of its farmland and wells by the wall; the only way they can access those lands is through a gate in the fence that is open only haphazardly. MCC and CRS, together with the Palestinian Hydrology Group, are assisting in the renovation of eight water networks in the northern West Bank that were damaged by Israeli armored vehicles in the course of the wall’s construction; it is our hope that this project will help Palestinian farmers in their attempt to continue to farm their lands from which they are separated by the wall. The Palestinian Hydrology Group provides the following facts about the wall’s impact on Jayyous:
*40 families currently live and sleep “behind” the wall, so that they can guarantee access tot heir farm land;
*The wall’s “footprint” in Jayyous meant the confiscation and destruction of 500 dunums (1 dunum=approx. ¼ acre) of farmland;
*9,000 dunums of Jayyous land are “behind” the wall, land containing over 120 greenhouses (1 dunum of land in a greenhouse brings in income for 1 whole family); over 15,00 olive trees, 50,000 citrus trees, 6 ground water wells (the town’s main source of water), and livestock pasture. This land supports 550 families in the village and provides produce to 60,000 inhabitants of the West Bank.
The first of September was also the first day back to school for Palestinian children. Unfortunately, for children in cities such as Jenin and Nablus, back-to-school meant the uncertainty of whether or not there would be a curfew imposed by the military. Moreover, the Palestinian Ministry of Education worries that thousands of children will be kept home from school by their parents, who would rather keep their children home than admit the shame of not being able to pay the annual school fees of 50 shekels (ca. US$11). Mennonite Central Committee and Lutheran World Federation are joining together to distribute thousands of school kits through Palestinian Christian and charity organizations in order to help ensure that as many Palestinian children as possible can continue their studies.
Below you will find two pieces. In the first, Ha’aretz journalist Amira Hass reports on Palestinian children’s back-to-school preparations. In the second piece, Member of Knesset (MK) Avraham Burg provides an incisive analysis of how the ongoing Israeli colonization of the occupied territories is leading to an apartheid reality. [The original version of the piece appeared in the mass Israeli daily, Yediot Aharonot; the translation below is from the US Jewish weekly, The Forward.] If Israelis wish to be democratic and want to hold on to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, he suggests, then they must give citizenship to the over 3 million Palestinians in the occupied territories, in which case Israel who cease to have a Jewish majority. If Israelis want all the land without giving Palestinians citizenship, then this means apartheid, or as Burg has it, “Qalqilyah Ghetto and Gulag Jenin.” If Israelis want democracy and a Jewish majority, then a real two-state solution is required, with a withdrawal to the 1967 borders and with Jerusalem as a shared capital. One can question Burg’s claim that, in the past, the Zionist “revolution” rested on the twin pillars of a “just path and an ethical leadership”: the mainstream of the Zionist movement pre-1948 saw the creation of a Jewish majority in Palestine, whatever the cost (including expulsion, or “transfer,” of the native Palestinian Arab inhabitants), as imperative. Burg’s essay is, nevertheless, an important example of the concerns of an increasing number of Israelis.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. With curfews and closures, the schools suffer
Amira Hass
Ha’aretz, August 28, 2003
This coming Sunday, 1,085,000 students are supposed to attend 2,098 elementary and secondary schools in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, with the opening of the school year. About 48,000 teachers will be waiting for them at 8 A.M. This will happen where there is no curfew, and where military blockades and checkpoints won't prevent or delay the arrival of the students and the teachers. Will there be a curfew in Jenin, preventing many of the 35,000 students in the area from starting on Sunday? Will the continuation of the Israel Defense Forces assassination policy in the Gaza Strip interfere with the first day of school of about 210,000 students? These are the immediate concerns of the Palestinian Education Ministry, which during the past three years has seen the orderly functioning of the education system and the prevention of dropouts as its most important task, despite the huge logistical, economic and psychological difficulties. The outbreak of the bloody conflict, the curfew and the closure, the economic deterioration and the military attacks, have all forced the ministry to postpone the implementation of the Five-Year Plan for education in the Palestinian Authority, which was completed in 2000, and to postpone the measures for improvement and development. Now maintaining the educational framework (in which education is mandatory only from the ages of 6-16) has become a kind of struggle. Last year the Palestinian Education Ministry was forced to change the original placement of almost one-third of the 35,000 teachers in the public school system (the rest work in 272 UNRWA schools and 256 private schools). These teachers were sent to schools not according to their area of expertise and the needs of the schools, but according to their access to the school. Since October 2000, hundreds of stationary and mobile military blockades and checkpoints all over the West Bank have prevented passage between cities, villages and districts. Teachers who live 10 kilometers away from their school couldn't promise to arrive on time, if at all. That is why teachers of Arabic teach physical education and math teachers teach Arabic, just so there's a teacher in the classroom. This year the ministry will have to reallocate 4,000 teachers, with changes in the location of the checkpoints. Hundreds of teachers have rented apartments in the city where they teach, so that they won't be forced to waste hours at the checkpoints every day. The deputy Palestinian education minister, Jihad Zakarneh, says that about half of the 200 education ministry employees in Ramallah, who live outside the city, remain in the city during the week. About 40 of them even sleep at the ministry. Since the establishment of the PA in 1994, the Palestinian Education Ministry has been working to reduce the number of school dropouts. From 1995-1996, about 2.5 percent of the students dropped out of school, Since then, the number of dropouts has slowly declined and in 2002 the rate was 1.17 percent of all students (higher in the later school years). The ministry raised donations These statistics belie the image among the Palestinians of widespread dropping out, mainly because of financial problems. Zakarneh says that families that can't afford the annual fee of NIS 50 per student prefer to stop sending their children to school, rather than admit poverty. Therefore, the ministry has instructed principals not to collect the fee from very poor families. The ministry even exceeded its obligations and began collecting donations from wealthy families in order to buy schoolbags and basic supplies for needy students. Last year 77 new schools opened, despite the difficulties: 42 in new buildings and the rest in rented buildings. Each year 40,000 new students enter the system, which requires the addition of at least 40 schools annually. Matriculation exams, which usually are stretched over a period of 17 days, continued for 42 days all over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip: Curfews and closures prevented the students from getting to the test on time. In places where the exams were held days or weeks late, new questionnaires were written. This Monday was the second exam period: They were held only in the Gaza Strip and postponed in the West Bank, because of curfews and closures. Now the ministry has to compose new questionnaires for all the exams, to administer them in the West Bank. The Education Ministry is the first to admit that while they are maintaining the framework, the quality is suffering. All the teacher training programs have been frozen because of access problems. Tens of thousand of teachers and students come to school exhausted after a night of shelling and exchanges of fire, or after long and humiliating detainment at a checkpoint. According to the Education Ministry, 390 students were killed by Israel Defense Force fire during the past three years, and about another 3,000 were injured. That also affects concentration. Every student suffers from traumas and fears, because every student has experienced months of curfew, and exposure to firing from tanks and helicopters. Tens of thousand of students have seen with their own eyes how people were killed and wounded, and houses destroyed. The Palestinian Education Ministry has established a psychological consultation center, with about 600 psychological consultants and therapists scattered among the various schools. This week there was a training workshop for consultants, but those who were supposed to come from Jenin and Nablus were absent;they were unable to pass the checkpoints. Zakarneh says that 44 percent of literature students failed the matriculation exams, as did 20 percent of those studying sciences. This number, he says, is only 2 percent higher than the results for 2000, before the intifada. Four to five percent finished with honors. The names of those receiving honors are published in congratulatory notices in the press, but what is not said openly in the media is said in incidental conversations on the street. Parents, teachers and Education Ministry employees are convinced that the matriculation grades of all the students are systematically raised, with the low grades upped more than the high grades. One teacher said that because of his connections with the exam checkers, he knew that his daughter had received an average of 94, but on the official form her final grade was 95. Parents have the impression that in areas that have suffered more from IDF actions, the examiners are more generous. Zakaraneh denies the claims of deliberate slanting of the grades upwards. Many of those who pass, he says, have grades lower than the minimum necessary for university acceptance: an average of 65 out of 100. Zakaraneh didn't know the percentage of those receiving low grades, and the Palestinian Education Ministry couldn't supply, at the request of Haaretz, an analysis of the distribution of the matriculation grades (according to regions as well). The grades are on the Internet as raw material, but the final analysis, if there is one, wasn't publicized. A veteran teacher said that raising the grades was done before the intifada as well, and was meant to cover up for the basic weakness of the Palestinian school system. Part of this weakness is the result of cumulative neglect during the years of Israeli occupation, part an inheritance from the interruption of studies during the years of the first intifada, and part a result of neglect and a mistaken order of priorities on the part of the PA. The monthly salary of a Palestinian teacher in the public school system ranges from $270 to $500 (and somewhat higher for more veteran teachers). With such a salary, most of the teachers are forced to find a second job. They work at gas stations, as drivers and as cooks. "When they have to concentrate on providing basic needs for their children, they can't concentrate on developing their children's spiritual needs, not to mention those of other children," he explains.
2. A Failed Israeli Society Collapses While Its Leaders Remain Silent
By AVRAHAM BURG
The Forward, August 29, 2003
The Zionist revolution has always rested on two pillars: a just path and an ethical leadership. Neither of these is operative any longer. The Israeli nation today rests on a scaffolding of corruption, and on foundations of oppression and injustice. As such, the end of the Zionist enterprise is already on our doorstep. There is a real chance that ours will be the last Zionist generation. There may yet be a Jewish state here, but it will be a different sort, strange and ugly.
There is time to change course, but not much. What is needed is a new vision of a just society and the political will to implement it. Nor is this merely an internal Israeli affair. Diaspora Jews for whom Israel is a central pillar of their identity must pay heed and speak out. If the pillar collapses, the upper floors will come crashing down.
The opposition does not exist, and the coalition, with Arik Sharon at its head, claims the right to remain silent. In a nation of chatterboxes, everyone has suddenly fallen dumb, because there's nothing left to say. We live in a thunderously failed reality. Yes, we have revived the Hebrew language, created a marvelous theater and a strong national currency. Our Jewish minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or anti-missile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed.
It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun.
It is very comfortable to be a Zionist in West Bank settlements such as Beit El and Ofra. The biblical landscape is charming. From the window you can gaze through the geraniums and bougainvilleas and not see the occupation. Traveling on the fast highway ›hat takes you from Ramot on Jerusalem's northern edge to Gilo on the southern edge, a 12-minute trip that skirts barely a half-mile west of the Palestinian roadblocks, it's hard to comprehend the humiliating experience of the despised Arab who must creep for hours along the pocked, blockaded roads assigned to him. One road for the occupier, one road for the occupied.
This cannot work. Even if the Arabs lower their heads and swallow their shame and anger forever, it won't work. A structure built on human callousness will inevitably collapse in on itself. Note this moment well: Zionism's superstructure is already collapsing like a cheap Jerusalem wedding hall. Only madmen continue dancing on the top floor while the pillars below are collapsing.
We have grown accustomed to ignoring the suffering of the women at the roadblocks. No wonder we don't hear the cries of the abused woman living next door or the single mother struggling to support her children in dignity. We don't even bother to count the women murdered by their husbands.
Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated.
We could kill a thousand ringleaders and engineers a day and nothing will be solved, because the leaders come up from below — from the wells of hatred and anger, from the "infrastructures" of injustice and moral corruption.
If all this were inevitable, divinely ordained and immutable, I would be silent. But things could be different, and so crying out is a moral imperative.
Here is what the prime minister should say to the people:
The time for illusions is over. The time for decisions has arrived. We love the entire land of our forefathers and in some other time we would have wanted to live here alone. But that will not happen. The Arabs, too, have dreams and needs.
Between the Jordan and the Mediterranean there is no longer a clear Jewish majority. And so, fellow citizens, it is not possible to keep the whole thing without paying a price. We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew. We cannot keep the territories and preserve a Jewish majority in the world's only Jewish state — not by means that are humane and moral and Jewish.
Do you want the greater Land of Israel? No problem. Abandon democracy. Let's institute an efficient system of racial separation here, with prison camps and detention villages. Qalqilya Ghetto and Gulag Jenin.
Do you want a Jewish majority? No problem. Either put the Arabs on railway cars, buses, camels and donkeys and expel them en masse — or separate ourselves from them absolutely, without tricks and gimmicks. There is no middle path. We must remove all the settlements — all of them — and draw an internationally recognized border between the Jewish national home and the Palestinian national home. The Jewish Law of Return will apply only within our national home, and their right of return will apply only within the borders of the Palestinian state.
Do you want democracy? No problem. Either abandon the greater Land of Israel, to the last settlement and outpost, or give full citizenship and voting rights to everyone, including Arabs. The result, of course, will be that those who did not want a Palestinian state alongside us will have one in our midst, via the ballot box.
That's what the prime minister should say to the people. He should present the choices forthrightly: Jewish racialism or democracy. Settlements or hope for both peoples. False visions of barbed wire, roadblocks and suicide bombers, or a recognized international border between two states and a shared capital in Jerusalem.
But there is no prime minister in Jerusalem. The disease eating away at the body of Zionism has already attacked the head. David Ben-Gurion sometimes erred, but he remained straight as an arrow. When Menachem Begin was wrong, nobody impugned his motives. No longer. Polls published last weekend showed that a majority of Israelis do not believe in the personal integrity of the prime minister — yet they trust his political leadership. In other words, Israel's current prime minister personally embodies both halves of the curse: suspect personal morals and open disregard for the law — combined with the brutality of occupation and the trampling of any chance for peace. This is our nation, these its leaders. The inescapable conclusion is that the Zionist revolution is dead.
Why, then, is the opposition so quiet? Perhaps because it's summer, or because they are tired, or because some would like to join the government at any price, even the price of participating in the sickness. But while they dither, the forces of good lose hope.
This is the time for clear alternatives. Anyone who declines to present a clear-cut position — black or white — is in effect collaborating in the decline. It is not a matter of Labor versus Likud or right versus left, but of right versus wrong, acceptable versus unacceptable. The law-abiding versus the lawbreakers. What's needed is not a political replacement for the Sharon government but a vision of hope, an alternative to the destruction of Zionism and its values by the deaf, dumb and callous.
Israel's friends abroad — Jewish and non-Jewish alike, presidents and prime ministers, rabbis and lay people — should choose as well. They must reach out and help Israel to navigate the road map toward our national destiny as a light unto the nations and a society of peace, justice and equality.
Translated by J.J. Goldberg.
Avraham Burg was speaker of Israel's Knesset from 1999 to 2003 and is a former chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel. He is currently a Labor Party Knesset member. This essay is adapted by the author from an article that appeared in Yediot Aharonot.
September 3, 2003
This past week Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) and Catholic Relief Services (CRS) staff visited the village of Jayyous near the city of Qalqilyah in the northern West Bank. Jayyous village is one of scores of Palestinian communities whose economic, social, and political futures are being devastated by the construction of what Israel calls a “separation fence” and what Palestinians call an “apartheid wall.” Jayyous village has been cut off from most of its farmland and wells by the wall; the only way they can access those lands is through a gate in the fence that is open only haphazardly. MCC and CRS, together with the Palestinian Hydrology Group, are assisting in the renovation of eight water networks in the northern West Bank that were damaged by Israeli armored vehicles in the course of the wall’s construction; it is our hope that this project will help Palestinian farmers in their attempt to continue to farm their lands from which they are separated by the wall. The Palestinian Hydrology Group provides the following facts about the wall’s impact on Jayyous:
*40 families currently live and sleep “behind” the wall, so that they can guarantee access tot heir farm land;
*The wall’s “footprint” in Jayyous meant the confiscation and destruction of 500 dunums (1 dunum=approx. ¼ acre) of farmland;
*9,000 dunums of Jayyous land are “behind” the wall, land containing over 120 greenhouses (1 dunum of land in a greenhouse brings in income for 1 whole family); over 15,00 olive trees, 50,000 citrus trees, 6 ground water wells (the town’s main source of water), and livestock pasture. This land supports 550 families in the village and provides produce to 60,000 inhabitants of the West Bank.
The first of September was also the first day back to school for Palestinian children. Unfortunately, for children in cities such as Jenin and Nablus, back-to-school meant the uncertainty of whether or not there would be a curfew imposed by the military. Moreover, the Palestinian Ministry of Education worries that thousands of children will be kept home from school by their parents, who would rather keep their children home than admit the shame of not being able to pay the annual school fees of 50 shekels (ca. US$11). Mennonite Central Committee and Lutheran World Federation are joining together to distribute thousands of school kits through Palestinian Christian and charity organizations in order to help ensure that as many Palestinian children as possible can continue their studies.
Below you will find two pieces. In the first, Ha’aretz journalist Amira Hass reports on Palestinian children’s back-to-school preparations. In the second piece, Member of Knesset (MK) Avraham Burg provides an incisive analysis of how the ongoing Israeli colonization of the occupied territories is leading to an apartheid reality. [The original version of the piece appeared in the mass Israeli daily, Yediot Aharonot; the translation below is from the US Jewish weekly, The Forward.] If Israelis wish to be democratic and want to hold on to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, he suggests, then they must give citizenship to the over 3 million Palestinians in the occupied territories, in which case Israel who cease to have a Jewish majority. If Israelis want all the land without giving Palestinians citizenship, then this means apartheid, or as Burg has it, “Qalqilyah Ghetto and Gulag Jenin.” If Israelis want democracy and a Jewish majority, then a real two-state solution is required, with a withdrawal to the 1967 borders and with Jerusalem as a shared capital. One can question Burg’s claim that, in the past, the Zionist “revolution” rested on the twin pillars of a “just path and an ethical leadership”: the mainstream of the Zionist movement pre-1948 saw the creation of a Jewish majority in Palestine, whatever the cost (including expulsion, or “transfer,” of the native Palestinian Arab inhabitants), as imperative. Burg’s essay is, nevertheless, an important example of the concerns of an increasing number of Israelis.
--Alain Epp Weaver
1. With curfews and closures, the schools suffer
Amira Hass
Ha’aretz, August 28, 2003
This coming Sunday, 1,085,000 students are supposed to attend 2,098 elementary and secondary schools in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, with the opening of the school year. About 48,000 teachers will be waiting for them at 8 A.M. This will happen where there is no curfew, and where military blockades and checkpoints won't prevent or delay the arrival of the students and the teachers. Will there be a curfew in Jenin, preventing many of the 35,000 students in the area from starting on Sunday? Will the continuation of the Israel Defense Forces assassination policy in the Gaza Strip interfere with the first day of school of about 210,000 students? These are the immediate concerns of the Palestinian Education Ministry, which during the past three years has seen the orderly functioning of the education system and the prevention of dropouts as its most important task, despite the huge logistical, economic and psychological difficulties. The outbreak of the bloody conflict, the curfew and the closure, the economic deterioration and the military attacks, have all forced the ministry to postpone the implementation of the Five-Year Plan for education in the Palestinian Authority, which was completed in 2000, and to postpone the measures for improvement and development. Now maintaining the educational framework (in which education is mandatory only from the ages of 6-16) has become a kind of struggle. Last year the Palestinian Education Ministry was forced to change the original placement of almost one-third of the 35,000 teachers in the public school system (the rest work in 272 UNRWA schools and 256 private schools). These teachers were sent to schools not according to their area of expertise and the needs of the schools, but according to their access to the school. Since October 2000, hundreds of stationary and mobile military blockades and checkpoints all over the West Bank have prevented passage between cities, villages and districts. Teachers who live 10 kilometers away from their school couldn't promise to arrive on time, if at all. That is why teachers of Arabic teach physical education and math teachers teach Arabic, just so there's a teacher in the classroom. This year the ministry will have to reallocate 4,000 teachers, with changes in the location of the checkpoints. Hundreds of teachers have rented apartments in the city where they teach, so that they won't be forced to waste hours at the checkpoints every day. The deputy Palestinian education minister, Jihad Zakarneh, says that about half of the 200 education ministry employees in Ramallah, who live outside the city, remain in the city during the week. About 40 of them even sleep at the ministry. Since the establishment of the PA in 1994, the Palestinian Education Ministry has been working to reduce the number of school dropouts. From 1995-1996, about 2.5 percent of the students dropped out of school, Since then, the number of dropouts has slowly declined and in 2002 the rate was 1.17 percent of all students (higher in the later school years). The ministry raised donations These statistics belie the image among the Palestinians of widespread dropping out, mainly because of financial problems. Zakarneh says that families that can't afford the annual fee of NIS 50 per student prefer to stop sending their children to school, rather than admit poverty. Therefore, the ministry has instructed principals not to collect the fee from very poor families. The ministry even exceeded its obligations and began collecting donations from wealthy families in order to buy schoolbags and basic supplies for needy students. Last year 77 new schools opened, despite the difficulties: 42 in new buildings and the rest in rented buildings. Each year 40,000 new students enter the system, which requires the addition of at least 40 schools annually. Matriculation exams, which usually are stretched over a period of 17 days, continued for 42 days all over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip: Curfews and closures prevented the students from getting to the test on time. In places where the exams were held days or weeks late, new questionnaires were written. This Monday was the second exam period: They were held only in the Gaza Strip and postponed in the West Bank, because of curfews and closures. Now the ministry has to compose new questionnaires for all the exams, to administer them in the West Bank. The Education Ministry is the first to admit that while they are maintaining the framework, the quality is suffering. All the teacher training programs have been frozen because of access problems. Tens of thousand of teachers and students come to school exhausted after a night of shelling and exchanges of fire, or after long and humiliating detainment at a checkpoint. According to the Education Ministry, 390 students were killed by Israel Defense Force fire during the past three years, and about another 3,000 were injured. That also affects concentration. Every student suffers from traumas and fears, because every student has experienced months of curfew, and exposure to firing from tanks and helicopters. Tens of thousand of students have seen with their own eyes how people were killed and wounded, and houses destroyed. The Palestinian Education Ministry has established a psychological consultation center, with about 600 psychological consultants and therapists scattered among the various schools. This week there was a training workshop for consultants, but those who were supposed to come from Jenin and Nablus were absent;they were unable to pass the checkpoints. Zakarneh says that 44 percent of literature students failed the matriculation exams, as did 20 percent of those studying sciences. This number, he says, is only 2 percent higher than the results for 2000, before the intifada. Four to five percent finished with honors. The names of those receiving honors are published in congratulatory notices in the press, but what is not said openly in the media is said in incidental conversations on the street. Parents, teachers and Education Ministry employees are convinced that the matriculation grades of all the students are systematically raised, with the low grades upped more than the high grades. One teacher said that because of his connections with the exam checkers, he knew that his daughter had received an average of 94, but on the official form her final grade was 95. Parents have the impression that in areas that have suffered more from IDF actions, the examiners are more generous. Zakaraneh denies the claims of deliberate slanting of the grades upwards. Many of those who pass, he says, have grades lower than the minimum necessary for university acceptance: an average of 65 out of 100. Zakaraneh didn't know the percentage of those receiving low grades, and the Palestinian Education Ministry couldn't supply, at the request of Haaretz, an analysis of the distribution of the matriculation grades (according to regions as well). The grades are on the Internet as raw material, but the final analysis, if there is one, wasn't publicized. A veteran teacher said that raising the grades was done before the intifada as well, and was meant to cover up for the basic weakness of the Palestinian school system. Part of this weakness is the result of cumulative neglect during the years of Israeli occupation, part an inheritance from the interruption of studies during the years of the first intifada, and part a result of neglect and a mistaken order of priorities on the part of the PA. The monthly salary of a Palestinian teacher in the public school system ranges from $270 to $500 (and somewhat higher for more veteran teachers). With such a salary, most of the teachers are forced to find a second job. They work at gas stations, as drivers and as cooks. "When they have to concentrate on providing basic needs for their children, they can't concentrate on developing their children's spiritual needs, not to mention those of other children," he explains.
2. A Failed Israeli Society Collapses While Its Leaders Remain Silent
By AVRAHAM BURG
The Forward, August 29, 2003
The Zionist revolution has always rested on two pillars: a just path and an ethical leadership. Neither of these is operative any longer. The Israeli nation today rests on a scaffolding of corruption, and on foundations of oppression and injustice. As such, the end of the Zionist enterprise is already on our doorstep. There is a real chance that ours will be the last Zionist generation. There may yet be a Jewish state here, but it will be a different sort, strange and ugly.
There is time to change course, but not much. What is needed is a new vision of a just society and the political will to implement it. Nor is this merely an internal Israeli affair. Diaspora Jews for whom Israel is a central pillar of their identity must pay heed and speak out. If the pillar collapses, the upper floors will come crashing down.
The opposition does not exist, and the coalition, with Arik Sharon at its head, claims the right to remain silent. In a nation of chatterboxes, everyone has suddenly fallen dumb, because there's nothing left to say. We live in a thunderously failed reality. Yes, we have revived the Hebrew language, created a marvelous theater and a strong national currency. Our Jewish minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or anti-missile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed.
It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun.
It is very comfortable to be a Zionist in West Bank settlements such as Beit El and Ofra. The biblical landscape is charming. From the window you can gaze through the geraniums and bougainvilleas and not see the occupation. Traveling on the fast highway ›hat takes you from Ramot on Jerusalem's northern edge to Gilo on the southern edge, a 12-minute trip that skirts barely a half-mile west of the Palestinian roadblocks, it's hard to comprehend the humiliating experience of the despised Arab who must creep for hours along the pocked, blockaded roads assigned to him. One road for the occupier, one road for the occupied.
This cannot work. Even if the Arabs lower their heads and swallow their shame and anger forever, it won't work. A structure built on human callousness will inevitably collapse in on itself. Note this moment well: Zionism's superstructure is already collapsing like a cheap Jerusalem wedding hall. Only madmen continue dancing on the top floor while the pillars below are collapsing.
We have grown accustomed to ignoring the suffering of the women at the roadblocks. No wonder we don't hear the cries of the abused woman living next door or the single mother struggling to support her children in dignity. We don't even bother to count the women murdered by their husbands.
Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated.
We could kill a thousand ringleaders and engineers a day and nothing will be solved, because the leaders come up from below — from the wells of hatred and anger, from the "infrastructures" of injustice and moral corruption.
If all this were inevitable, divinely ordained and immutable, I would be silent. But things could be different, and so crying out is a moral imperative.
Here is what the prime minister should say to the people:
The time for illusions is over. The time for decisions has arrived. We love the entire land of our forefathers and in some other time we would have wanted to live here alone. But that will not happen. The Arabs, too, have dreams and needs.
Between the Jordan and the Mediterranean there is no longer a clear Jewish majority. And so, fellow citizens, it is not possible to keep the whole thing without paying a price. We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew. We cannot keep the territories and preserve a Jewish majority in the world's only Jewish state — not by means that are humane and moral and Jewish.
Do you want the greater Land of Israel? No problem. Abandon democracy. Let's institute an efficient system of racial separation here, with prison camps and detention villages. Qalqilya Ghetto and Gulag Jenin.
Do you want a Jewish majority? No problem. Either put the Arabs on railway cars, buses, camels and donkeys and expel them en masse — or separate ourselves from them absolutely, without tricks and gimmicks. There is no middle path. We must remove all the settlements — all of them — and draw an internationally recognized border between the Jewish national home and the Palestinian national home. The Jewish Law of Return will apply only within our national home, and their right of return will apply only within the borders of the Palestinian state.
Do you want democracy? No problem. Either abandon the greater Land of Israel, to the last settlement and outpost, or give full citizenship and voting rights to everyone, including Arabs. The result, of course, will be that those who did not want a Palestinian state alongside us will have one in our midst, via the ballot box.
That's what the prime minister should say to the people. He should present the choices forthrightly: Jewish racialism or democracy. Settlements or hope for both peoples. False visions of barbed wire, roadblocks and suicide bombers, or a recognized international border between two states and a shared capital in Jerusalem.
But there is no prime minister in Jerusalem. The disease eating away at the body of Zionism has already attacked the head. David Ben-Gurion sometimes erred, but he remained straight as an arrow. When Menachem Begin was wrong, nobody impugned his motives. No longer. Polls published last weekend showed that a majority of Israelis do not believe in the personal integrity of the prime minister — yet they trust his political leadership. In other words, Israel's current prime minister personally embodies both halves of the curse: suspect personal morals and open disregard for the law — combined with the brutality of occupation and the trampling of any chance for peace. This is our nation, these its leaders. The inescapable conclusion is that the Zionist revolution is dead.
Why, then, is the opposition so quiet? Perhaps because it's summer, or because they are tired, or because some would like to join the government at any price, even the price of participating in the sickness. But while they dither, the forces of good lose hope.
This is the time for clear alternatives. Anyone who declines to present a clear-cut position — black or white — is in effect collaborating in the decline. It is not a matter of Labor versus Likud or right versus left, but of right versus wrong, acceptable versus unacceptable. The law-abiding versus the lawbreakers. What's needed is not a political replacement for the Sharon government but a vision of hope, an alternative to the destruction of Zionism and its values by the deaf, dumb and callous.
Israel's friends abroad — Jewish and non-Jewish alike, presidents and prime ministers, rabbis and lay people — should choose as well. They must reach out and help Israel to navigate the road map toward our national destiny as a light unto the nations and a society of peace, justice and equality.
Translated by J.J. Goldberg.
Avraham Burg was speaker of Israel's Knesset from 1999 to 2003 and is a former chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel. He is currently a Labor Party Knesset member. This essay is adapted by the author from an article that appeared in Yediot Aharonot.
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