Following the recent
swearing in of Ehud Olmert as Israel’s new prime minister, no time has been wasted by his new office in vigorously setting forth its vision for the region. Last month one of Olmert’s senior aides
said they would complete their plan to impose a border in the West Bank by the end of US President George W Bush's term in 2008.
Since the recent democratic Palestinian Authority (PA) elections it has long become a triteness to say the Palestinians returned Hamas to power in protest at the lack of progress on any substantive issues affecting ordinary Palestinians during the previous years under the rule of Fatah. Arafat went as PLO chairman, Abbas arrived yet still there was no substantive engagement from the Israelis. This was despite a willingness on the Palestinian side both at the PA and the PLO to discuss a two state solution recognising Israel.
The stalemate in which Hamas’ recent victory gestated was at least as much down to Israeli intransigence as Palestinian militancy. It is hard to believe that the SharonOlmert entity (which we can from now on refer to by just the successor’s name) and powerbase were not content to see the stalemate prolonged. It was secure in the knowledge that the Palestinian people's likely and realistic option for alternative government was Hamas. It is surely not difficult, particularly for Irish readers, to appreciate how political stagnation, poverty and daily hardship foment skewed support for political extremes.
The travail of occupation on the majority of the decent Palestinian population in the West Bank is something suffered quite distinctly from the blood shed by both Israeli and Palestinians civilians due to the extreme violence perpetrated by both sides. It is no surprise that moderate Palestinians in large numbers voted for a change, however extreme the ideology behind the new visage of authority.
Whether you are prepared to accept a Machiavellian hand by Israeli policy in the election of Hamas or not, one thing cannot be denied. The assumption of power by Hamas has in many ways played right into Olmert’s hands. On the twin caterpillar tracks of ‘No Palestinian Partner for Peace’ and a sympathetic coterie in Washington (until 2008 at least) the time was ripe to bulldoze international political consensus (broad enough to even include
lip service from President Bush) the
UN,
The International Committee of The Red Cross,
Amnesty International and the
International Court of Justice and erect their unilateral solution in concrete and razor wire.
Firstly, to try to portray Olmert in some context I would like to go back no further than 2003. In an interview with Nahum Barnea, senior political editor of the leading Israeli newspaper
Yediot Aharonot Olmert had his Kairotic moment (please excuse my obscure
pun). This
interview marked Olmert’s public unveiling of his political masterplan.
"Above all hovers the cloud of demographics… It will come down on us not in the end of days, but in just another few years".
"We are approaching a point where more and more Palestinians will say: 'There is no place for two states between the Jordan and the sea. All we want is the right to vote.' The day they get it, we will lose everything."
"I shudder to think that liberal Jewish organizations that shouldered the burden of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa will lead the struggle against us."
"Disengagement is a response to certain demographic realities... Within a few years, due to the higher Arab birth rate, Jews will become a minority in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. I don't want [Israel] to be South Africa because we don't believe in apartheid. We simply have to separate from the Palestinians so that we can control our own destinies."A few days before this interview, Sharon was due to give the annual speech at the grave site of Israel's founder, David Ben-Gurion. Sharon had to pull out due to illness, so the opportunity fell to Olmert to fill the vacancy. Speaking in the Negev's Sde Boker kibbutz, Olmert said of Ben-Gurion "the greatness of Ben-Gurion was not just his capability to lift a vision of generations to the sky, but also to limit what was possible to the circumstances of time." Olmert went on to quote Ben-Gurion: "'When it was a question of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land.'"
In an attempt to pre-empt the
shocking revelations of his personal intentions for giving up, at least temporarily, on the moderate Zionist ideal of a Jewish state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean he sought to emphasise Ben-Gurion’s "pragmatism".
The situation could not have been more grave in Olmert’s eyes and he was now prepared to articulate his fears in public. Olmert’s analysis is hard to argue with. Israel had to choose between being a democractic state and a Jewish state in the not too distant future. The demographic trends would, in short order, have left Jews a minority in a combined Israel and occupied territories. It was only a matter of time before Palestinian policy would
revert to demanding a secular one state solution where every person had an equal vote, regardless of race, ethnicity or religion. This would mean the death of Ben Gurion’s dream and with it The Jewish state of Israel before it reached its sixtieth birthday.
The Wall is the facilitator for overcoming this unthinkable nightmare for Zionists. It re-draws the borders of a two state solution in the optimum manner for Israel, annexing strategic assets and colonies in the West Bank behind the internationally recognized Green Line which is the border of the West Bank and fragmenting any future Palestinian State beyond real viability.
The side effects of The Wall on ordinary Palestinians was summarized in The UN’s latest
report on the issue:
…it is difficult to overstate the humanitarian impact of the Barrier. The route inside the West Bank severs communities, people’s access to services, livelihoods and religious and cultural amenitiesAs of May 2004, the footprint of The Wall and its concomitant exclusion area has razed 102,320 Palestinian olive and citrus trees, 75 acres of greenhouses and miles of irrigation network. The Wall’s footprint also
claimed an important market in the village of Nazlat Issa which was destroyed by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in 2003, including more than 150 shops/stalls and some houses. This market was a vibrant centre for commerce for the whole of the Northern West Bank and supported the livelihood of hundreds of Palestinian families.
The third group affected by The Wall after those on the East of it and those who were in the footprint of it, are those now isolated on the western, Israeli side of the wall, but still within the West Bank/Green line. This group is estimated to consist of up to 280,000 people by a
report to the UN Commission on Human Rights undertaken by John Dugard a South African Law Professor, which also concluded "This is likely to lead to a new generation of refugees or internally displaced people".
In October 2003, this region between The Wall and the Green Line was declared a
special military area by Israel. Although Israelis and all Jews regardless of nationality can enter the region unhindered, Palestinians can enter only with special permits even if they are residents of Arab villages in the region. Many living in this no-man’s land who tried to obtain permits were refused them, their houses then became eligible for demolition and many were forced to become refugees for a
second or third time. This issue of permits is a tool used with particular zeal in the
ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem and its suburbs which are now, by some distance, in the no-man’s land between the proposed route of The Wall and internationally accepted borders for a Palestinian State, that is, the Green Line.
The creation of this no-man’s land has aided Israel in its
policy of moving highly polluting industry, including
chemical processing, to the West Bank. Here it is free from Labor, Environmental and Health and Safety laws and has access to a captive supply of labor. This means the industries can pollute the West Bank land at will, endanger the workers health as they choose, and grant the workers minimal recompense as the Palestinians have little other option for a livelihood. Palestinians’ traditional industry of agriculture is made unviable by fertile land and water source annexation and restricted movement from their urban areas to their agricultural land, as can be
demonstrated unambiguously in Qalqilya an urban centre of 40,000 plus inhabitants surrounded by (but now separated from) some of the West Bank’s most fertile land.
Despite all this, The Wall is marketed as a passive, benign defensive structure, built along internationally accepted borders of a future Israeli and Palestinian State. This is one of many ethereal yet generally accepted idioms created by Israel and its supporters in this conflict. When most people in Europe or The US conceive of this in their minds eye, they see something like this:
Unfortunately, the reality of what Israel has already put in place and plans to put in place in the near future is radically different from the easy to comprehend line on a map we see above. Alarmingly, the immediate humanitarian impact of the construction of the wall I have spoken about above may not be the most sinister or lasting result of its realisation. The most striking impact of the wall over the medium to long term will be its role in Israel’s demographic solution to Zionism’s unthinkable nightmare which Olmert elucidated with such nationalistic fervor in his watershed interview with Yedioth Aharonot.
As imposing and brutally crude an instrument as The Wall is, it is only a piece of the jigsaw when it comes to the enforced fragmentation of Palestinian land. Extensive Israeli colonies built on West Bank land which is internationally recognized as the land for a future Palestinian State must be taken into account. Even considering these, a clear picture does not emerge until you also factor in the ‘Settler’ highways which have been built all over the West Bank. These roads connect Israeli colonies in the West Bank and are exclusively for the use of Israelis living in these colonies. It is as if a lattice of highways was constructed somewhere else and superimposed on top of the West Bank. These highways are walled on each side and the network they make up is completely separated from Palestinian roads. The Palestinian roads run below the network connecting the colonies, beneath tunnels and flyovers that make effective conduits in which the Israelis can niggardly control Palestinian movement via checkpoints.
Thus with the triumvirate of the The Wall, the "settler’s" highway network and the Israeli colonies which are not to be dismantled under Olmert’s plan, the Israeli policy of fragmentation of the West bank is achieved comprehensively and with a degree of obfuscation. The Wall by its gross vulgarity manages to mask the equal role the “settler” highway network and colonies themselves play in bluntly dismembering the West Bank. These three instruments of geographical demarcation together form a systematic and tightly coupled web which carves up the West Bank into ghettos. Because of the three separate instruments employed and the fact that two of them enjoy a cloak of normalcy and benevolent functionality (the colonies as housing and the highway network as transport infrastructure) the true vista of ghettoisation on the ground for Palestinians is quite opaque to the general public in Europe or The US.
Freedom, never mind ease, of
movement within the West Bank is one of the most marked and socially debilitating casualties of this ghettoisation. "Terminals" in Israeli speak have to be negotiated several times daily by ordinary Palestinians going about their lives at huge inconvenience and humiliation, as you can
see for yourself. You can photograph a tank, a wall, razor wire or any other implement of occupation, you can count injuries and death, you can measure economic impact in GDP, but how do you quantify incessant daily subjugation and humiliation of an entire people?
We have seen similar means used to achieve the end of a demographic solution in the recent past. Bantustans were enclaves or ghettos created in apartheid South Africa under the National Party. Their aim was similar to the aims of the Zionists in Israel today. This aim is to re-constitute the demographic make up of the land so that a certain ethnic background is a majority in the principal state by creating ghettos independent of the principal State where people of the other ethnic background are forced or coerced to live. The fragmented nature of the Bantustans in South Africa made them unviable as a sovereign State as they were completely dependant on the principal state for their existence. This left the Bantustans in the hands of a corrupt ruling elite drawn from its own people.
Please see the maps below which are a good effort at depicting the labyrinthine logistic elements within which these contemporary Bantustans manifest themselves, the "settler" road network first and below, The Wall. Both maps show the third element, Israeli colonies in the West Bank:
To conclude, I’d like to adduce more Israeli government thinking to answer a common viewpoint adopted by supporters of The Wall. Namely, that the ‘facts on the ground’ don’t prejudice the outcome of a possible two state solution at any time in the future.
Israeli Minister of Defence Sha’ul again interviewed in Yedioth Aharonot newspaper in 2004, when asked what will the borders of a Palestinian State be.
"It is more apt to ask what the borders of the State of Israel will be…It is The Settlement Blocs, including the Jordan Valley and the Gav ha Har Settlements. Jerusalem will be the Capital of Israel and not divided…Israel is taking a step to shape a new reality. Disengagement will continue after Gaza. Together with the fence in Judea and Samaria (The West Bank) it will bring a strategic achievement, enforce real negotiations and coexistence in defensible borders…A Palestinian State is essential for us. Today there are 10 million people between the (Meditteranean) Sea and the (Jordan) River, half of them Jews. In 2020 there will be 16 million, only 40% of them Jews."
This Bantustanisation of the Palestinian people is a solution to a nightmare for Zionists which would persist if there wasn’t an ounce of bomb making know how, or a single bullet in the hands of a Palestinian. It is the wombs of Palestinian women which have threatened the inherently prejudicial state of Israel to the point where it is prepared to grossly debase itself in its treatment of the Palestinian people and leave this open wound on humanity.
This haunting reflection of history can be seen in every window on Palestinian life today if you look intently enough:
tags:
Palestine Israel
Published by Paul.
Indifferent as I am to the meteoric rise of the Arctic Monkeys, it has been noted that the recently released Whatever You Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not has become the fastest selling debut of all time. Their catchy blend of pop rock neither intrigues me nor induces the nauseating effects of the Coldplay X and Y variety. However, as I occasionally like to torture myself with utterly futile and insoluble conundrums I ask myself the following: ‘What is the greatest debut album of them all?'
