Fra Le Monde Diplomatique
(Les også
Israel Shahak & Norton Mezvinsky: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. Pluto
Press)
http://mondediplo.com/2002/06/05israel
Knut Rognes
*************************
Israel's empire state building
As Israel makes more incursions into the Palestinian cities, it has placed
new restrictions on the movement of their people and goods, stifling the
economy. Oslo has ended. And still Israeli settlements increase and expand,
in violation of all international resolutions.
by MARWAN BISHARA *
Why is it so hard to make peace in the Middle East? The greatest barrier is
the Israeli settlements - these are both the motivation and engine of the
Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Three decades of
objections from the United States and Europe have achieved nothing. The
rapid expansion of Israeli settlements - all illegal - has undermined
Palestinian attempts at nation building. If they continue to spread, they
will end the Israel that its founders envisioned.
The settlement drive and its ideology has become a cornerstone of modern
Israeli national identity. The policy of settlements and the current
violence they are breeding have transcended the country's ethnic and
religious divides to create a new Israelism based on a new Jewish
nationalism. The setters and their allies are recreating Israel in their
own image: as a theocracy in permanent conflict. Under the government of
Ariel Sharon and with the explicit support of President George W Bush, this
process is becoming a destructive self- fulfilling prophecy.
These new settlers are nothing like their predecessors of the pre-1948
generation, who founded Zionism and formed the state as a secular,
socialist and mainly European enterprise. The post 1967 settlers are
predominantly religious, conservative, Reagan style neo-liberals. And
unlike their predecessors, their settlement activity is state-sponsored by
Israel.
The new Zionists (or post Zionists) believe that for their Greater Israel
nationalism project to succeed, another campaign of ethnic cleansing will
be necessary. Many members of Sharon's cabinet are already speaking about
"transfer" - the collective expulsion of the Palestinians.
Worse, former general Efi Eitam, a newly appointed minister and leader of
the National Religious Party, is a supporter of settlements. Though Eitam
was once a Labour supporter, he has now said that transfer is politically
"enticing", though not realistic without war. In that case, he says: "Not
many Arabs would remain." And Eitam has in fact called for war on Iraq and
Iran through Israeli pre-emptive strikes (1).
Sharon has admitted that without the settlements the army would have left
long ago. But the settlements have a great advantage: they enable Israeli
leaders to convince ordinary people that "their military is not a foreign
army ruling a foreign population." In 1977, when Sharon chaired the
ministerial committee for settlement affairs, he oversaw the establishment
of new Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. He planned to settle
2m Jews there. A quarter of a century later Sharon remains adamant that
Israel has a "moral right" to transform the demography of these
territories. Since his election in January 2001, Sharon has built 35 new
settlements (2).
In the second half of the 1970s, during the transition from Labour to Likud
government, Sharon emerged as a leader capable of realising the dream of a
Greater Israel beyond Israel's internationally recognised borders. Shimon
Peres's encouragement to Israelis to settle everywhere in the occupied
territories strengthened Sharon's drive to implement the programme of the
influential bipartisan (Likud/Labour) Greater Land of Israel movement,
which foresaw an Israel spreading from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean.
The number of settlers in the occupied territories outside East Jerusalem
has increased from 7,000 in 1977 to over 200,000 in 2002 - plus 200,000
others in East Jerusalem. Their 200 settlements take up 1.7% of the West
Bank, but they control 41.9% of it (3). Many of these settlers are armed
and dangerous fanatics with a shoot-to-kill license from the Israeli army.
Over the years settlers' death squads have attacked unarmed civilians,
gunned down elected officials and tortured and killed many other Palestinians.
During the Oslo peace process Israel doubled its settlements, tripled its
settlers and connected them with a network of by-pass roads and industrial
parks, ensuring their domination over the Palestinian territories. As
minister of infrastructure in the Netanyahu government, Sharon concentrated
Israel's investment programmes in the occupied Palestinian lands. The Rabin
and Barak governments were no less active. There was an orgy of settlement
building during the Barak government under the supervision of Yitzhak Levy,
then leader the National Religious Party and minister for the settlements (4).
When the time came to end this, at the Camp David summit in July 2000, the
negotiations stumbled and eventually failed because of Israel's insistence
of holding onto the settlements and 9% of the West Bank. The Palestinians
were asked to sign a final agreement based on a promise of a quasi-state
divided into four separate regions, surrounded by Israeli settlement blocs.
Determination to retain the settlements has undermined attempts to end the
occupation and compromised peace efforts.
After the Camp David summit failed and the intifada broke out, the
internationally commissioned Mitchell Report insisted that the settlements
issue should go hand in hand with a peace accord. The commission
recommended a freeze on Israeli settlements as a requirement for a
ceasefire and a resumption of peace talks. Instead, Sharon's cabinet
approved an extra $400m for the settlements.
Today 7,000 settlers remain in control of 30% of the 224 sq km of the Gaza
Strip - home to 1.2m Palestinians, most of them refugees. They cannot
travel without passing fortified settlements with their swimming pools and
basketball courts, built in the heart of this sandy, overpopulated land
where water is scarce and land precious. Israel demolished 400 Palestinian
homes in the Gaza Strip during the first year of the intifada, to protect
the nearby settlements.
When the army asked Sharon to remove a number of distant settlements and
regroup them within closer, better defended settlement blocs, he refused;
he vowed not to dismantle a single settlement while in office. He then
brought in two new ministers from the National Religious Party, which forms
the hard core of the settlements leadership, and made them members of his
security cabinet, which deals with the occupied territories.
The new geography of the settlements is like carving a map of the West Bank
out of Swiss cheese. The small black holes, disconnected and empty, are the
Palestinian cantons, called autonomous regions, and the surrounding
continuous rich yellow parts are the Jewish settlements.
There are two laws in Palestine: one for Jewish settlers and another for
Palestinians. The settlers have the freedom to move around, build and
expand; the Palestinians are cooped up in 200 encircled cantons. Israelis
have access to the land and expropriate more of it; Palestinians have less
and less.
In recent years Israel has increased its closures of the Palestinian areas,
hermetically imposed either locally or throughout the territories, to allow
easy travel for the settlers. According to the International Monetary Fund
and World Bank these closures have caused more damage to the Palestinian
economy and its nation building than any other factor (5). They have made
Palestinians' lives impossible.
Friends of Israel in the West like the journalist, Thomas Friedman, say
that if the logic of the settlers wins, Israel will become an apartheid
state. The former Israeli Attorney-General, Michael Ben- Yair, thinks the
logic of the fundamentalist settlers has already won since Israel has
already "established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories" (6).
The settlers do not see it this way. General Eitam, the rising star of the
religious right, sees a Greater Israel as "the state of God; the Jews are
the soul of the world; the Jewish people has a mission to reveal the image
of God on earth." He sees himself as standing "in the same place that Moses
and King David stood" where "a world without Jews is a world of robots, a
dead world; and the State of Israel is the Noah's Ark of the future of the
world and its task is to uncover God's image" (7).
Low and middle income families and new immigrants have been enticed to the
settlements by offers of cheap housing and financial rewards, at times
using US aid money. But as the promise of better living turned into
colonial nightmare, the pragmatic settlers have tilted towards the right.
More than 94% voted for Binyamin Netanyahu, and then Sharon in the last
elections.
Today the fundamentalist settlers dominate the council that oversees the
settlements, and they exercise a formidable influence over decision- making
in the Israel government. Almost one out of 10 members of the Israeli
Knesset are settlers. Three settlers have served as ministers in Sharon's
cabinet and two are now serving as deputy ministers.
Although they are extra-territorial entities in the judgment of the
international community, the settlements are the hotbed of pan-Israel
nationalism. Unlike those Israelis who seek an internationally recognised
Jewish state within sovereign borders, the new zealots insist that their
homeland is the Land of Israel and not the State of Israel: they will
therefore not allow the emergence of another state between the Jordan and
the Mediterranean.
The power of the settlers goes beyond their electoral influence. Over the
last quarter of a century, with the exception of the short-lived Rabin and
Barak governments, the religious settlers' influence increased rapidly as
the hard political core of the Likud-led coalitions. They are a threat not
only to Palestine and the normalisation of Israel, but to whole region.
Think-tanks in the settlements show a war-driven thinking that taps on new
US concepts such as the war on terror and the axis of evil, as well as new
missile systems and the worst, most sensationalist literature produced by
the Pentagon. As they dream of US-style wars, the settlers do not think
about such things as coexistence with their next- door neighbours. This is
not surprising since they believe that "Israel is the hope of the world"
and "Palestinian moral savagery is organised to prevent this."
Paradoxically, the latest wave of Palestinian suicide bombings has played
into the settlers' hands. Their erroneous claim that the Palestinians want
not only removal of the settlements, but that of Israel, has relieved the
pressure on the settlements - seen until then as an obstacle to peace - and
radicalised ordinary Israelis.
Israel's settlement policy, continued regardless of signed agreements, has
created a new geography of conflict. Millions of Palestinians and Israelis
live in fear on account of illegal settlers who are plunging the area in
communal and colonial war. If Israel continues the expansion of its
settlement activity at the rate it did during the peace process, the
settlers will soon reach a million. If that happens, separating
Palestinians from Israel and its settlers will be impossible without ethnic
cleansing.
That would compromise the future of a Palestinian state and also the
chances for maintaining a Jewish state over the long term, since the Jewish
majority will diminish in mandatory Palestine (Israel, the West Bank and
Gaza). In 10 years the Palestinians will become the majority - one that
will grow. And the millions of Jews and Arabs will become increasingly
inseparable.
Sharon and his settlers will continue to sustain a state of permanent
conflict and war in Palestine and the Middle East. Unless the international
community intervenes, the settlements' logic will eventually lead to the
same stand-off as on the eve of the 1948 war: either accept a bi-national
state or attempt another ethnic cleansing. That would be a dramatic
strategic error for Israel.
* Author of Palestine/Israël: la paix ou l'apartheid, La Découverte, Paris
2002
(1) Ha'aretz, Tel Aviv, 12 April 2002.
(2) New York Times, 27 April 2002
(3) See B'tselem, "Israel's settlement policy in the West Bank", Tel Aviv,
13 May 2002.
(4) The Fourth Geneva convention, which Israel and the US signed,
stipulates that: "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of
its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." The convention
is legally binding on member states.
(5) Conversation with Osama Kina'an, coordinator of the West Bank and Gaza
desk at the IMF.
(6) Ha'aretz, 3 March 2002.
(7) Ha'aretz, 28 April 2002.
Original text in English
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