- Israel's occupation of the Palestinian Territories passed
through a profound transformation during the last several months. Through
a series of policy changes and military orders, the West Bank "security
fence" has gradually revealed itself to be the backbone of a comprehensive
new system of land theft, imprisonment, collective punishment...and worse.
The question is not whether it is a "political fence" or a "security
fence", but whether it is an engine of ethnic cleansing.
-
- In the past ninety days Israel has established a clear
pattern of using its "security fence" to deny Palestinian farmers
access to their own lands. Much of the olive harvest in the northern West
Bank hangs dead on the trees because farmers have been 'caged' for weeks
at a time. Entire villages have been issued permits to farm that give them
as little as two days outside the barrier - for the entire year. Even if
you have a permit, you must hope the soldiers open the gate for a few minutes
on your appointed day, and open it again when you return from your labors.
-
- In the past sixty days, Israel revealed its willingness
to use deadly force to protect its "fence". It relaxed its rules
of engagement, and shot an unarmed Palestinian dead for disobeying orders;
he touched the wall.
-
- In the past thirty days, Israel issued new military orders
that obliterate the rights of Palestinians left outside the barriers to
live in their own homes. The orders expropriate their land, and all Palestinian
land west of the "security fence", to create a "closed zone"
open only to Jews and citizens of Israel. All others, including the people
who live there, must apply for a permit from the Israeli army. By the end
of next year, at least 210,000 Palestinians are expected to be subject
to similar orders.
-
- No longer content to chop away at Palestine until it
eventually disappears, Israel is now using the "security fence"
as a vehicle for the more rapid and overt methods of large-scale ethnic
cleansing. This grave step ushers in the terminal stage of the cleansing
process, in which years of organized persecution, brutality, bigotry and
theft, all the patriotic acts required in the effort to dehumanize another
people, finally succeed in radically dehumanizing the perpetrators. At
this point, it is simple to use the bureaucracy of the state to erase a
people's very existence. With the stroke a pen, an entire region can be
"Judaized", with assurance that the necessary consequences will
follow in time.
-
- They wouldn't actually do this, right? They wouldn't
push another quarter of a million Palestinians right off their land, not
now. The people will get their permits. Right?
-
- Let's put it in perspective.
-
- By the end of this summer, Israel's occupation had reduced
the Palestinian people to the poverty and malnutrition levels of sub-Saharan
Africa, according to studies by the UN, the World Bank, and CARE International.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food said in mid-October, "The
occupied Palestinian territories are on the verge of humanitarian catastrophe
as a result of extremely harsh military measures...There can be no justification
for harsh internal closures that prevent people from having access to food
and water; otherwise the imposition of such military measures amount[s]
to what has been called a 'policy of starvation'.."
-
- Israel's incredibly dense network of army checkpoints,
"flying" checkpoints, roadblocks and barriers has made travel
for Palestinians in the West Bank almost impossible. A five-mile trip can
take all day, waiting at checkpoints for hours on end out in the open,
no shelter provided. It often doesn't matter if you're having a baby or
bleeding to death from an Israeli-inflicted wound - you wait. So far, thirty-one
"checkpoint babies" have perished. (On the other hand, any Jew
can use the bypass roads and get from one side of the West Bank to the
other in minutes.)
-
- Since Israel signed the Oslo Accords, the settler population
has doubled to 390,000, strewn over a thick web of at least 145 settlements
and their interconnecting Jewish-only roads, blanketing the Palestinian
West Bank. Since the beginning of the Second Intifada three years ago,
the Israeli army has been systematically wrecking Palestinian infrastructure
throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Water mains, wells, and pumping stations,
sewage systems, telephone and internet hubs, markets, airports, police
stations, roads, civic buildings, mosques and churches, all have felt the
special attentions of Israel's bulldozers, bomb teams, helicopter gunships,
and F-16s. It's a slow-motion version of what Gulf War I did to Iraq.
-
- The army goes virtually everywhere, usually raiding two
or three cities or villages every day and night, leaving a string of casualties
and appalling human rights abuses rarely reported by the American media.
The death toll of innocent civilians, children, mothers, grandfathers,
mounts daily, in ones and twos and fours that slip through the cracks of
the wire services, or are entombed as eleventh-paragraph filler in policy-and-politics
stories.
-
- Over 41,000 Palestinian civilians have been wounded by
Israeli fire in the last three years. Americans don't understand how constant
it is, how the occupation teems round-the-clock, 24/7, month in, month
out, leaving an ever-larger trail of both indiscriminate and calculated
destruction. Even when they say they've withdrawn, or relaxed the curfews
and closures, they haven't. In Palestine, falling for those old lies can
get you killed.
-
- Do you think this is an army that likes to issue permits
to civilians? No, this is an army that likes to demand permits, especially
permits the "subject" cannot produce. And that is precisely the
game they play.
-
- A Palestinian must always have her ID card ready, to
indicate her "Bantustan" assignment. If she has a West Bank ID,
she cannot go to Jerusalem or Israel except for rare medical care. If she
lives in Jerusalem, she may be issued a West Bank ID instead. That will
be used later to prove that she is illegally residing in the Holy City,
which is cause to demolish her home and seize her land for Israeli "military
purposes". It is policy to give her five minutes to retrieve her belongings.
-
- Wherever she lives, she almost certainly will not receive
a permit to build or change her home. If she does so anyway, that is cause
for the Israeli army to demolish it. Even houses hundreds of years old
require permits in some areas, which the army almost never issues. These
homes are also subject to demolition at Israel's convenience. And if a
Palestinian's home lies in the path of a new Israeli road, settlement expansion,
or the massive "security fence" project, that is cause to demolish
the home and seize the land outright, sometimes with no pretext at all.
This has been going on steadily for many years, as part of a larger accelerating
project of land theft and dispossession that Israelis call "Judaization".
-
- Now the "security fence" is carving out broad
new areas of dispossession, invisibly creating tens of thousands of new
permits that will never be issued. It is transforming the landscape of
Israel's aggression from a study in many miniatures into a work of more
sweeping scope, perhaps ultimately worthy of Delacroix, or, since this
is not art, but real, death-worshipping life, Speer. Israel is on course
to render almost 15,000 Palestinians homeless this year. Why not 200,000
next?
-
- US politicians from Howard Dean to Dick Cheney support
the "fence" as part of Israel's "right to defend herself".
But most would "prefer" it built along the Green Line, the recognized
Palestinian boundary since 1967. Meanwhile, "it is imperative"
that America continue to pay Israel billions of dollars a year to wage
war on civilians inside that same Green Line. Denial is the seat of hypocrisy.
-
- Perhaps you'you've read that the "fence" deviates
from the Green Line by "a few miles in places", and imagined
that Israel was just taking a little land again. Israel is taking a lot
of land again. A projected 45% of the West Bank will be in Israeli hands
when the project is complete. Bush and Powell find that "troublesome".
-
- On October 28, an official from the Israeli Defence Ministry
announced that the barrier will now extend 450 miles, nearly five times
longer than the Berlin Wall. And that's not including the 'eastern fence'
beginning to amputate the Jordan Valley into Israel's waiting slop bucket.
When it's all done, perhaps by the end of next year, there will be three
walled Palestinian islands controlled by the Israeli army; one north, one
south, and a tiny enclave around Jericho, marooned inside the Zionists'
dream; a Greater Israel reaching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River
- at least.
-
- The Israeli official offered an estimate of $1.6 billion
for the cost of the "fence", but, according to Israel's Business
Arena (Globes), he also explained that this figure does not include the
cost of the 'eastern fence', or the barrier's terminals, or anything else
involved in making the damn thing operational. At the end of the briefing,
the official said that "the fence, including the east and west fences,
the terminals, and maintenance" would cost 15 billion shekels ($3.3
billion), "which Israel would have trouble meeting." But of course
the US media immediately agreed that the price tag is $1.6 billion. Perhaps
it "looks better".
-
- It's possible the US will make good on its threats to
deduct costs of the "fence" from the $9 billion in loan guarantees
it pledged to Israel this summer. Apparently the deductions will be only
for certain short sections that cause greatest US "concern".
One of the few points of sharp disagreement is the wall around Ben-Gurion
Airport. The US says the wall is not necessary to protect planes from shoulder-fired
missiles. Israel says it is.
-
- Following the pattern of similar "adjustments"
for settlement construction, the modest deductions will probably be arranged
entirely for Israel's convenience. Finance Minister Netanyahu has said
that he is unlikely to use much more than a third of the three billion
dollars in loan guarantees available this year. So the US could deduct
even the "whole" cost of the project ("$1.6 billion")
from this year's loan guarantees, and Israel wouldn't miss a red cent.
-
- I recommend the reader study some maps of the "security
fence" to get a stronger feel for the shape of the very near future.
For a good picture of what it will look like when completed, see Gush Shalom's
general map (1) or Foundation for a Middle East Peace's highly detailed
projection (2). B'tselem just published some updated maps that are very
good (3). And now we finally have one from the Israeli Defence Ministry
itself (4).
-
- Unlike the smooth and coherent lines of devastation portrayed
by Gush Shalom's general maps, the details of the IDM map reveal the shaky,
recursive scratchings of an obsessed old man, soon to be superimposed upon
the Holy Land as a 300-meter wide security zone, complete with trenches,
electronic sensors, motion detectors, infra-red cameras, razor wire, and
the actual barrier, be it fence, electric fence, or a 10- to 26-foot tall
concrete wall, replete with guard towers.
-
- The IDM map is a little out of date, and it coyly shows
only half the plan, but it is revealing nonetheless. It projects the western
side of the West Bank cracking apart with interior barriers, leaving thirteen
areas totally walled in by the back-tracking scrawl, further separating
Jews from Palestinians, and Palestinians from other Palestinians.
-
- Of course, every kilometer of "fence" will
have to be maintained by the Israeli army. So the fence will permanently
insert the army within the West Bank. If a more forward base is required,
Israel need only build another wall to encircle it. Soon we will be hearing
about the "natural growth of the security fence".
-
- It is not a "fence", nor a "wall",
nor a "barrier" at all, but a machine of war, a forward basing
system for the Israeli army and the geographical superstructure for an
accelerated campaign of starvation, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing.
-
- As one stares at the maps, absorbing the hideous geography,
two fat fists begin to emerge, one north, one south, clutching the innards
of the West Bank in a death-grip. Now the fists begin to sprout fingers,
worming through the flesh, ripping apart the tissue of the people.
-
- If you imagine that some new "peace initiative"
or act of Congress or the UN or the silly ditherings of Bush are going
to halt this US-sponsored nightmare before the end of next year, you simply
haven't been paying attention. In today's world, only one force possesses
both the potential morality and the power required to stop this monumental
crime. And it is something you should already have: outraged public opinion.
You must rain it down upon the heads of this blind government like a torrent,
or else surrender to the shame, and the consequences.
-
- Sources
- 1. http://gush-shalom.org/thewall/index.html
- 2. www.fmep.org/reports/2003/v13n4.html#map
- 3.www.btselem.org/English/Separation_Barrier/Map.asp
- 4. www.seamzone.mod.gov.il/Pages/ENG/map_eng.htm
-
- James Brooks is a writer, activist, webmaster, and former
business owner. Articles have been published by several web sites covering
the Middle East, investigative journalism and alternative politics. Currently
Brooks serves as webmaster for Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel
and publishes News Links, a free, once-daily (Mon-Sat) e-mail digest of
in-depth Middle East news and commentary. To subscribe, contact jamiedb@attglobal.net
-
- Courtesy Ronald and Israel Shamir's togethernet
|
