KK-Forum,
mer av Amira Hass.
Knut Rognes
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Ha'aretz, Wednesday, November 1, 2000
The mirror does not lie
By Amira Hass
How perfectly natural that 40,000 persons should be subject to a total
curfew for more than a month in the Old City of Hebron in order to protect
the lives and well-being of 500 Jews. How perfectly natural that almost no
Israeli mentions this fact or, for that matter, even knows about it. How
perfectly natural that 34 schools attended by thousands of Palestinian
children should be closed down for more than a month and their pupils
imprisoned and suffocating day and night in their crowded homes, while the
children of their neighbors - their Jewish neighbors, that is - are free to
frolic as usual in the street among and with the Israeli soldiers stationed
there.How perfectly natural that a Palestinian mother must beg and plead so
that an Israeli soldier will allow her to sneak through the alleyways of
the open-stall marketplace and obtain medication for her asthmatic
children, or bread for her family. (Sometimes Israeli soldiers do have the
guts to disobey orders, although, generally speaking, when encountering
such situations, they order the woman to return to her home.)
How perfectly understandable that the Israel Defense Forces is seizing
control of an ever-increasing number of rooftops atop the homes of
Palestinians in the Old City of Hebron and that Israeli soldiers positioned
on those rooftops from time to time open fire on other Palestinians, while,
down below, at street level, the Jewish settlers are free to show over and
over again - at the expense of the windshields, windows and tires of the
parked cars of Palestinians - who's really the boss. How perfectly natural
that a Muslim house of prayer like the Ibrahim mosque should be shut down
and declared "off limits" to thousands of Muslim worshipers.
The ease with which a curfew has now been imposed on Hebron and the
perception of that curfew as a completely natural occurrence are not the
products of the past few weeks. (Incidentally, the residents of the village
of Hawara, in whose vicinity and on whose lands the Jewish settlement of
Yitzhar was built, have also been placed under curfew; their curfew was
imposed more than three weeks ago.)
After the massacre carried out by Baruch Goldstein in the Ibrahim mosque,
also known as the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the ones who were punished were
the Palestinians, with the punishment taking the form of curfews, closures,
"disengagement," the shutting-down of entire streets and the continual,
hostile supervision by Israeli soldiers and police officers. And there was
an additional punishment that was meted out to the Palestinians: economic
disaster.
However, Hebron is only a microcosm, an illustration of the general
picture. The protracted curfew imposed on Hebron and the way that this
curfew has been accepted in Israeli eyes as such a natural event convey, in
a nutshell, both the entire story of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian
land in general and the essence of the kind of Israeli thinking that has
developed in the shadow of obvious military superiority. The curfew in
Hebron and the ease with which it has been imposed only illustrate the
entire story of discrimination and uprooting that the Palestinians have
suffered at the hands of the Israelis - a never-ending story that unfolded
as far back as the Oslo era and the period of the so-called "peace process."
Jews live in Hebron today either because of "ancestral rights" or because
they can show proof of Jewish ownership of a given property in the
not-too-distant past. It is so perfectly natural that Jews should be able
to live wherever they want in the Land of Israel - on both sides of the
Green Line. It is so perfectly natural that a Jew who was born in Tel Aviv
should be able to move to Hebron or to Yitzhar. And it is so perfectly
natural that Palestinians cannot enjoy that right and cannot move to Tel
Aviv or to Haifa - even if their families own lands and houses there.
It is so perfectly natural that, to this very day, Israel is developing and
expanding the Jewish community in Hebron, just as Israel is developing all
the Jewish settlements in the territories. And it is so perfectly natural
that, to this very day, the Palestinians must deal with various limitations
imposed on any planned development for their own communities, because most
of the lands on the West Bank - which is their primary land reserve - are
under Israeli administrative control. No, the Palestinians do not need the
kind of legroom that Israelis do.
It is so perfectly natural that Palestinians have to obtain a travel permit
from the Israeli authorities (only a minority of the applicants are granted
the permit) in order to enter East Jerusalem or the Gaza Strip, within the
context of Israel's closure policy, which was launched in 1991 and which
continues until this very day. On the other hand, Jews are free to travel
from the West Bank to Israel and back, using well-built highways that have
been constructed on lands that have been expropriated from Palestinian
villages.
During the summers in Hebron, sometimes days, even weeks go by without
running water in the faucets of Palestinian homes. On the other hand, the
Jewish neighbors of Palestinian Hebronites - in the Old City of Hebron or
in the nearby Jewish quarter of Kiryat Arba - experience no problems or
shortages as far as their water supply is concerned.
The same situation prevails in many Palestinian communities throughout the
West Bank: Whereas the Palestinians have no water, the residents of the
Jewish settlements enjoy green lawns. The reason is that Israel has, in
effect, imposed a quota on the water that the Palestinians are allowed to
consume - that is, on the right to use water resources that are supposed to
be jointly accessible for both Israelis and Palestinians in the single land
they share.
This is a tale that must be recounted over and over again - almost to the
point of exhaustion - because it depicts a situation that is so
self-understood in the eyes of Israelis that they cannot even see that
there is any problem whatsoever. How perfectly easy to regard the
Palestinians as a violent and cruel people and to ignore the cruelty that
has accumulated day after day for 33 long years and which has been directed
during that long period toward an entire community. This is the kind of
cruelty that is characteristic of every occupation regime. This is a
cruelty that intensified during the Oslo years because of the gap between
the fine talk about a "peace process" and the reality.
The curfew in Hebron and the fact that this curfew is regarded as a
completely natural phenomenon in the eyes of Israeli society reflects the
twisted sort of thinking that developed in the minds of Israelis during the
Oslo years. According to this warped thinking, the Palestinians would
accept a situation of coexistence in which they were on an unequal footing
vis-a-vis the Israelis and in which they were ranked as persons who were
entitled to less, much less, than the Jews. However, in the end, the
Palestinians were not willing to live with this arrangement.
The new Intifada, which displays the characteristics of both a popular
uprising and a quasi-military one, is a final attempt to thrust a mirror in
the face of Israelis and to tell them: "Take a good look at yourselves and
see how racist you have become.
Copyright 2000 Ha'aretz. All Rights Reserved
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