| http://www.jkcook.net/DisappearingPalestine.htm JONATHAN COOK Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair Published by Zed Books in Britain and the United States in October 2008 For details about how to buy the book in the UK: from Zed Books, click here or from Amazon UK click here in the US: from Palgrave click here or Amazon US click here To purchase an e-book copy, click here  Advance praise: “This is an impressive and timely book written by one of the most knowledgeable writers on the Palestine-Israel conflict. Its insight into the devastating impact of Zionist settler colonialism and its account of the current reality on the ground are unique. A must read for those seeking peace and justice in the Middle East.” Nur Masalha, Director of the Holy Land Research Project, St Mary’s University College (UK), and author of The Bible and Zionism (2007) “No one is a keener observer of Zionism’s true goals, from its bald usurpation of land and resources to its bad faith about seeking real peace. The book provides an unusual depth of evidence and sharp analysis, and a devastating indictment of Zionism. It is a penetrating piece of scholarship and a gem of easy readability.” Kathleen Christison, former CIA analyst and author of Perceptions of Palestine (1999) Reviews: Extracts from the book: To look at the contents page click here On the rise of the Jewish state (in PDF) click here HERE DOWN THE PAGE On the settlement enterprise (in PDF) click here HERE DOWN THE PAGE From the back cover: Palestine is fast disappearing. Over many decades Israel has developed and refined policies to disperse, imprison and impoverish the Palestinian people in a relentless effort to destroy them as a nation. It has industrialized Palestinian despair through ever more sophisticated systems of curfews, checkpoints, walls, permits and land grabs. It has transformed the West Bank and Gaza into laboratories for testing the infrastructure of confinement, creating a lucrative 'defence' industry by pioneering the technologies needed for crowd control, surveillance, collective punishment and urban warfare. In this insightful and authoritative new book, leading journalist Jonathan Cook examines the many different guises in which these experiments on the Palestinian people are being carried out. Accessible and comprehensive, this is a powerful analysis of one of the most enduring and entrenched conflicts in contemporary world politics. About the author: Jonathan Cook is the only western journalist to be based in Nazareth, the capital of the Palestinian minority in Israel. He was previously a staff journalist on the Guardian andObserver newspapers, and has written about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also for the Times, Le Monde diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, Al-Ahram Weekly,Counterpunch and Aljazeera.net. He is the author of Blood and Religion (2006) and Israel and the Clash of Civilisations (2008). |
Jonathan Cook News Archive, last updated on Thursday, 04 February 2010 |
Rise of the Jewish state
Despite the mythical narrative promoted today, Israel’s victory on
the battlefield was rarely in doubt. during the first stage of the
offensive, before britain’s departure, Jewish forces were in effect
fighting a civil war against disorganized Palestinian militias, which
had not recovered from their crushing by the british army during
the three-year Arab Revolt a decade earlier. In the next stage, after
Israel’s declaration of Independence, the Arab armies entered the
war but were unprepared and lacked coordination, as the Israeli his-
torian shlomo ben-Ami notes. The Arab leaders were less concerned
about defending the Palestinians’ national rights than ‘establishing
their own territorial claims or thwarting those of their rivals in the
Arab coalition’. Neither the Palestinian militias nor the Arab armies
were a match for the Israeli forces: in fact, they were outnumbered
throughout the fighting. As benny Morris points out: ‘It was superior
Jewish firepower, manpower, organization, and command and control
that determined the outcome of battle.’ The ‘ruthless, successful
offensive’ by the new Jewish state set a pattern for its behaviour in
the future, adds ben-Ami, by unleashing ‘a momentum of territorial
expansion that [its] leaders ... would not allow to be interrupted by
premature diplomatic overtures’.
The ruthless offensive of 1948 included dozens of massacres and
rapes, the destruction of more than 400 villages, including com-
munities that had signed non-aggression pacts with their Jewish
neighbours, and the purging of the Palestinian inhabitants of a dozen
ethnically mixed cities.47 This outcome is celebrated by Israelis as
their War of Independence, but mourned by Palestinians as the Nakba
(Catastrophe). As the historian Walid khalidi observes, Israel’s rapid
and comprehensive dispossession of the Palestinian people in 1948
was ‘one of the most remarkable colonizing ventures of all time’.
strikingly, Palestine was colonized ‘in the wake of the (at least verbal)
espousal by the Western democracies of the principle of national self-
determination’ and ‘in the modern age of communication’.
Tales of atrocities are legion on both sides of the fighting, but
perhaps one incident more than any other gives a flavour of the Israeli
leadership’s intentions during the war. In July 1948, the neighbouring
Palestinian towns of Ramla and Lydd, halfway between Jerusalem
and Tel Aviv, were almost entirely emptied of their inhabitants on
ben-Gurion’s orders, despite the fact that they had been designated
part of the Arab state under the UN plan. As Lydd was attacked, a
large number of men sought refuge in the local dahamish mosque.
When they eventually surrendered, they were massacred by Jewish
forces led by Yigal Allon and his deputy, Yitzhak Rabin, a later
prime minister. some 176 bodies were reportedly recovered from the
mosque. Allon then rounded up the 50,000 inhabitants of Lydd (today
the Israeli city of Lod), who were forced at gunpoint to march many
miles to the Jordanian border; some died en route of exhaustion.49
Years later Rabin recalled how ben-Gurion indicated what he wanted
done with the inhabitants: ‘Yigal Alon asked: what is to be done with
the population [of Lydd and Ramla]? ben-Gurion waved his hand in
a gesture that said: “drive them out!”’
As Israel signed the armistice agreements with its Arab neighbours
in 1949, at the close of the war, the Jewish state found itself in
possession of 78 per cent of Palestine, far more territory than the 55
per cent allotted it by the UN Plan.51 Under the same agreements,
the tiny coastal strip of Gaza was occupied by egypt, and Jordan
acquired control of the West bank and the eastern half of Jerusalem,
the consequence of an earlier secret pact with Israel that prevented
the two armies from engaging in serious fighting.
The UN classified some 750,000 Palestinians as refugees, the great
majority of them by then living in makeshift camps across the Middle
east.53 ben-Gurion was determined that they should not be allowed
to return. ‘Land with Arabs on it and land without Arabs on it are
two very different types of land’, he told his party’s central commit-
tee in March 1949.54 Fearful that the UN might insist on the return
not only of the refugees but also of the areas of Palestine like the
Central Galilee not assigned to the Jewish state under the Partition
Plan, he cautiously referred to these regions as ‘administered’ rather
than as part of Israel. His worries were unfounded, however. In May
1949, as Israel was admitted to the UN, Pappe notes, ‘all distinctions
disappeared, along with the villages, the fields and the houses – all
“dissolved” into the Jewish state of Israel.’
For a considerable time, government officials, private citizens and
especially soldiers enjoyed free rein looting Palestinian homes of their
valuables. one government minister reported seeing the army take
1,800 truckloads of property from the single, largely deserted city of
Lydd, while another admitted that ‘the army does what it wants’.
The government sought to reassert control with new emergency regu-
lations.57 one, passed in late 1948, ended the legal definition of land as
‘abandoned’ and instead declared the Palestinian owners ‘absentees’;
their seized property was then reclassified as ‘state land’. In an
attempt to make this land grab appear legal, the same regulation
invested authority in an official, the Custodian of Absentee Property,
whose job was supposedly to safeguard the property of the Palestinian
refugees. According to a statement in 1980 from the Custodian, about
70 per cent of Israel’s total territory was ‘absentee’ land – that is,
rightfully the property of Palestinian refugees.
Although officially a trustee, the Custodian – and in turn the
state of Israel – was soon reaping the profits from rental income from
buildings, farmland and religious endowment land; from his new-
found ownership of large Palestinian businesses; and from the sale of
produce from the refugees’ olive and citrus groves, their tobacco, fig,
apple, grape and almond crops, and their quarries.60 of items from
the large store of confiscated merchandise – from clothes to furniture
– the army was given first refusal. Remaining goods were put up for
sale, with priority going to disabled war veterans, soldiers’ families
and government employees.61 Palestinian bank accounts were seized
too. When ben-Gurion was told that refugees’ deposits totalling 1.5
billion Palestinian pounds had been discovered in the banks of Haifa,
he noted simply in his diary: ‘The banks are willing to hand this
property over.’
The historian Michael R. Fischbach reports that a UN committee
set up to evaluate Palestinian losses produced a very conservative
estimate in the mid-1960s that Israel had confiscated at least 1.75
million acres of land (or seven million dunams, in the traditional
unit of measurement used by the ottomans)63 – about a third of
Israel’s total territory.64 This land was valued at close to $1 billion
in the prices of the day and would be worth many hundreds of bil-
lions more today.65 If confiscated Palestinian moveable property such
as bank accounts, jewellery, artworks, safe deposit boxes, bonds, as
well vehicles, furniture, agricultural equipment and herds of animals
was included, the total was pushed far higher. To the Palestinians, of
course, their homeland was priceless. None of the successive Custo-
dians, however, regarded their role as the protection of the refugees’
property. Mordechai schattner, the incumbent in 1953, observed: ‘All
money accruing from these sales should go the development authori-
ties. This means, in fact, that it would be used for the settlement of
new [Jewish] immigrants.’66
decades later, in 1990, Israel’s state comptroller demanded a list of
the refugees’ moveable property as part of an audit of the Custodian’s
office. seven years on, the Custodian had still not complied, claiming
that the task was ‘impossible’ because some of the records were lost
and others incomplete and because he had no computer. He added
that ‘it would require 500 workers to sit for two years’ to prepare
a complete list. on another occasion, in 1998, when an Arab legal
group, Adalah, requested information about the property under the
country’s Freedom of Information Act, the Custodian replied that he
could not divulge details because he needed to protect the refugees’
privacy. When pressed further, the government responded in 2002 on
the Custodian’s behalf that such information would ‘damage relations
with foreign governments’.67 And when Israel and the Palestinians
came to the negotiating table at Camp david in 2000 to reach a
final-status agreement, Israel’s attorney general, elyakim Rubinstein,
disclosed that the Custodian’s records were no longer available and
that the income from Palestinian assets had been spent. ‘We have
used them [the monies] up. It is up to the international community
to create funds for this [a final settlement with the Palestinians].’
Unwelcome Citizens
The new Jewish state faced an uncomfortable twofold legacy from
the war.
First, the remains of several hundred Palestinian villages dotted
the countryside, not only an embarrassing reminder of the native
population that had recently been expelled but also a testament to
the war crimes that had been committed during the ethnic cleansing
campaign. Furthermore, there was a general fear among the leader-
ship that, should the villages remain standing, Palestinian refugees
might successfully lobby the international community for their right
to return.69 Israel therefore invested much energy after the war in
the mammoth task of erasing the villages. A significant number of
the more impressive homes in cities like Jerusalem, Haifa, Lydd and
Ramla were used to house Jewish officials or new immigrants,70 but
most rural communities were destroyed by the army, which either
dynamited them or bombed them from the air.71 Maps were changed
too: over the course of several years a Jewish National Fund com-
mittee replaced Arab place names with Hebrew ones, often claiming
as justification to have ‘rediscovered’ biblical sites. The committee
hoped to invent an ancient, largely mythical landscape all the better
to root Israeli Jews in their new homeland. The real landscape of
hundreds of destroyed Palestinian villages was entirely missing from
the new maps.72 Cleared of Palestinian traces, the ‘empty’ lands were
handed over to Jewish agricultural communities, the kibbutzim and
moshavim, for their exclusive use.
by the 1960s, however, dozens of remoter Palestinian villages
could still be found intact across Israel. during a search of the official
archives, a history professor at Tel Aviv University, Aharon shai,
discovered that in 1965 the Israeli government had recruited the
JNF and prominent archeologists to a project to ‘clean’ the land of
these last Palestinian blemishes. several arguments for renewing the
destruction programme were offered, according to Tom segev:
The deserted villages spoiled the beauty of the landscape and consti-
tuted a neglected nuisance. There were pits filled with water which
endangered the well-being of visitors, particularly children, as well
as many snakes and scorpions. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was
concerned about the ‘unnecessary questions’ which tourists would
present regarding the deserted villages.
The Association for Archeological survey issued the permits needed
by the government to make the destruction ‘lawful’, while a body
called the society for Landscape Improvement lobbied to preserve
any architecturally important buildings.73 Historic or scenic mosques
were sometimes left intact: one in Caesarea became a restaurant and
bar, for example, while another in al-zeib was incorporated into the
site’s seaside complex.
The second problem was that Israel had acquired, along with most
of Palestine, a small rump population of Palestinians, about 150,000,74
who had managed to remain within the new borders in more than 100
Palestinian communities that were spared.75 They constituted then,
and continue to constitute today despite subsequent waves of Jewish
immigration, nearly a fifth of the total population.76 Israel worked
quickly to ‘de-Palestinianize’ the minority, who were officially re-
ferred to either as ‘the minorities’ or as ‘Israeli Arabs’.77 state policy
was to encourage group identification at the sectarian and ethnic
levels – in a classic strategy of divide and rule – by accentuating
communal differences. In 1949, for example, the education Ministry
was advised to ‘emphasize and develop the contradictions’ between
the druze, Christian and Muslim populations to diminish their Arab
and Palestinian identities.78
There was no official interest in integrating the Palestinian popula-
tion. As a commentator observed in the Ha’aretz newspaper in 1954,
‘the authorities did not even try to think, after the establishment
of the state, about the possibility of “Israelizing” the Arab minor-
ity.’79 eleven years later, the Ma’ariv newspaper reported an election
speech by Moshe dayan in which he dismissed the idea of integration:
‘This is going too far. It shall not be.’80 Having expelled Palestinian
intellectuals and eradicated Palestine’s urban centres, the minority
could be kept in an almost permanent state of social, economic and
political underdevelopment. Meron benvenisti, a former deputy mayor
of Jerusalem, notes that decades later ‘no urban society worthy of
the name has been created [for Palestinian citizens] in Israel. There
are, indeed, Arab towns in Israel, but they are merely dormitory
communities.’81
No single reason can explain why the Palestinians who remained
inside Israel were not expelled too. some belonged to the small druze
community – 10 per cent of the new Palestinian minority – whose
leaders had backed the Jewish forces during the fighting. A few Chris-
tian communities in the Galilee, most notably Nazareth, were left in
peace for fear of the international reaction,82 and other Christians,
such as those in the village of eilaboun, were allowed to return under
pressure from the Vatican. some villages, such as Jisr al-zarqa and
Fureidis, were untouched after local Jewish communities, which relied
on their Palestinian neighbours for manual labour, lobbied on their
behalf. other villages were spared by individual Jewish commanders
who refused to carry out expulsion orders. A number of Palestinians,
including some bedouin in the Negev, managed to sneak back over
the porous borders after they were driven out. And, finally, 30,000
Palestinians living under Jordanian rule in an area of the West bank
known as the Little Triangle were belatedly handed over to the Jewish
state as part of the 1949 armistice agreement with Jordan.83
Most of these Palestinians eventually received citizenship, though
that was not the original intention. As the fighting subsided, the
authorities issued Palestinians inside the borders of Israel with a va-
riety of residency permits. The primary purpose was to distinguish
the permit holders from the refugees outside Israel, and so ensure the
continuing exclusion of the overwhelming majority of Palestinians
and prevent them from returning undetected to their properties.84
only later did the permits entitle their holders to citizenship. The
first Nationality Law, drafted in 1950, for example, proposed that
the Palestinian minority inside Israel be denied citizenship and left
stateless. The law was not ratified, notes Meron benvenisti, because it
became clear ‘it would irrevocably deface the state’s image in the eyes
of the international community’.85 Citizenship was finally conferred on
most of the Palestinian minority two years later in a different draft
of the law.86
Nonetheless, the Jewish leadership still hoped the numbers of
Palestinians could be significantly reduced. sabri Jiryis, a Palestinian
lawyer who lived through those early years, observes: ‘Apparently
there were many [in the leadership] who hoped to be rid of the
Arabs, if not by “sending” them after their brothers beyond the
borders, then at least by “exchanging” them for Jews from the Arab
nations. International events stifled such hopes.’87 Researching Israel’s
archives, the Palestinian scholar Nur Masalha has found evidence
of almost continual plotting by governments in the first decade to
expel these new Palestinian citizens. some schemes, such as offering
incentives for whole communities to relocate to brazil, Argentina or
Libya, remained on the drawing board.88 but other plans were carried
out: 2,000 inhabitants of beersheva were expelled to the West bank
in late 1949,89 while 2,700 inhabitants of al-Majdal (now Ashkelon)
were driven into Gaza a year later;90 as many as 17,000 bedouin were
forced out of the Negev between 1949 and 1953;91 several thousand
inhabitants of the Triangle were expelled between 1949 and 1951;92
and more than 2,000 residents of two northern villages were driven
into syria as late as 1956.93
In the most ambitious plan, operation Hafarferet, Israel hoped to
find a pretext to expel to Jordan what had become 40,000 inhabitants
of the Little Triangle on the eve of the suez War of 1956. The plan
was shelved, however, when a brigade of soldiers implementing the
early stages of the plan by enforcing a curfew massacred 49 Palestinian
citizens, including women and children, returning to their village of
kafr Qassem.94 Later, in 1964, according to Uzi benziman, political
editor of Ha’aretz newspaper, Ariel sharon, then head of the army’s
Northern Command, asked his staff to work out the number of buses
and trucks needed to expel the country’s 300,000 Palestinian citizens
in time of war.95
Judaizing the Land
Visiting the north in the 1950s, ben-Gurion expressed his shock at
the number of Palestinian villages still to be found there. ‘Whoever
tours the Galilee gets the feeling that it is not part of Israel,’ he
declared.96 His concern was widely shared. The Galilee had been
assigned to the Arab state under the UN Partition Plan, and Israeli
officials feared that the neighbouring Arab countries might make a
case for the region’s secession unless Jews were quickly settled there.
The government therefore set its primary goals as containing the
Palestinian population within the tightly delimited boundaries of
their remaining villages and confiscating their wider lands for the
benefit of Jewish immigrants, in what the state was soon referring to
as a ‘Judaization’ programme. Joseph Nahmani, the long-time head of
the Jewish National Fund, set out the rationale for Judaization in a
memo to ben-Gurion in 1953:
The Arab minority centred here [in the Galilee] presents a continual
threat to the security of the nation. ... The very existence of a unified
Arab group in this part of the country is an invitation to the Arab
states to press their claims to the area. ... At the very least, it can
become the nucleus of Arab nationalism, influenced by the nationalist
movements of the neighboring states, and undermining the stability of
our state.
It was, therefore, ‘essential to break up this concentration of Arabs
through Jewish settlements’, and create ‘faits accomplis which will
make it impossible for the government, for all its good intentions,
to give up any of the uncultivated land for the Arabs to live on’.
*****************************************************
Goals of Colonization
Ariel sharon’s ‘disengagement’ in 2005 removed 8,000 settlers from
twenty-one colonies in Gaza and a handful more Israelis from four
isolated and unviable settlements in the northern tip of the West
bank. despite the fanfare of publicity that greeted the withdrawal,
the evacuees were survived by the overwhelming majority of the
settlement population: 270,000 living in 120 official colonies in the
West bank; a few thousand settlers in more than 100 tiny outposts,
usually land-grabbing extensions of the settlements that lacked of-
ficial recognition but were secretly supported by both the army and
government; and nearly 230,000 settlers living in the Jewish neigh-
bourhoods of east Jerusalem, the Palestinian half of the city annexed
to Israel since 1980.41 Today, these half a million settlers and the
army that protects them control 60 per cent of the West bank. The
remaining ghettoes – islands of Palestinian land surrounded by a sea
of Israeli-controlled territory – are nominally ruled by the Palestinian
Authority, a kind of Palestinian government-in-waiting created by the
oslo agreements of the mid-1990s.
shortly after the Gaza evacuation, sharon advised his Likud Party
of the urgent need to expand the surviving colonies in the West bank
without attracting attention: ‘There’s no need to talk. We need to
build, and we’re building without talking.’ Indeed. In the year of
the disengagement, the settler population actually grew, with an
estimated 14,500 new settlers in the West bank more than making
up for the loss of the 8,000 from Gaza. dror etkes, an expert on the
settlement enterprise, warned in the wake of the disengagement that
Israeli officials were seeking to pre-empt any final peace agreement
being considered by the Us: ‘They don’t know how long they’ve got.
That’s why they’re building like maniacs.’42 In 2006, 27 per cent of
all the apartments purchased by Israelis were situated in the West
bank.43 And in the first half of 2007, the settler population grew by
5.5 per cent, several times the rate of increase inside Israel proper.44
In places like Ma’ale Adumim and Ariel, the settlements have evolved
into proper towns, numbering tens of thousands of inhabitants and
strategically located to destroy any chance of a territorially coherent
Palestinian state emerging. The half a million settlers, nearly a tenth
of Israel’s Jewish population, with ties to friends and families on the
other side of the Green Line, are a powerful constituency that few
Israeli politicians choose, or want, to confront.
As we have seen, the colonization of the occupied territories was
far from accidental: for four decades it followed the general outlines
proposed by Allon and dayan in 1967. However, over time officials
grew more confident that more specific and brazen goals of settlement
could be achieved. An idea of their thinking was offered by the World
zionist organization, an unaccountable quasi-governmental body
overseeing settlement policy in the occupied territories on behalf
of the state in a role mirroring the activities of the Jewish National
Fund inside Israel’s borders. In 1978, in the immediate wake of Israel’s
agreement, under Us pressure, to return the sinai to egypt, the
Wzo drafted a report on the settlements, the drobless Plan, named
after its principal author, Mattiyahu drobless. Hoping to avert any
danger that a similar agreement would be repeated with the occu-
pied Palestinian territories, drobless asserted bluntly that ‘settlement
throughout the entire land of Israel’ – that is, including the West
bank and Gaza – was ‘our right’. An amended version of the plan
was issued two years later that was even clearer about the aims of
settlement. Israel was in ‘a race against time’ and must concentrate on
‘establishing facts on the ground. ... There mustn’t be even a shadow
of a doubt about our intention to keep the territories of Judea and
samaria [the West bank] for good’.45 drobless envisioned a million
settlers in the occupied territories by 2013, an ambition that may
have looked deluded at the time but today looks less unrealistic.46
The report offered a strategy for how to settle the land – one, as
the Middle east expert david Hirst notes, that
was expressly modelled on techniques which, since 1948, had been
applied to the organized remnants of the Palestinian community in the
original Israel, despoiling yet more of their land and villages, fragment-
ing them geographically, paralysing them politically and reducing them
to a condition of abject dependence on the Jewish economy.
settlement, drobless suggested, should be not only around Palestinian
communities, to contain them, but also between them, ‘in accordance
with the settlement policy adopted in Galilee’, to fragment them.47
The settlements, and the infrastructure needed to integrate them
into Israel proper, would break up the continuity of the Palestinian
living space, preventing the emergence of any future Palestinian
state. or, as sara Roy observes, settlement was designed ‘to normal-
ize and institutionalize land expropriations by eroding the 1967
borders making territorial retreat difficult if not impossible.’48 sharon
gave voice to precisely this ambition on a helicopter flight over the
Gaza strip in 1980 when he was agriculture minister. Accompanied
by the Israeli military governor of Gaza, who wanted to know how
he was supposed to contain the Palestinian refugee camps below,
sharon replied: ‘I want the Arabs to see Jewish lights every night
500 meters from them.’49 The Palestinians had to be made to accept
that Jewish dominion in the occupied territories was an irreversible
fact of life. In the different context of the second intifada, but
expressing much the same sentiment, Chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon
called for Israel’s invincibility to be ‘burned into the Palestinian and
Arab consciousness’.50
For the settlement drive to succeed in fragmenting the Palestinians
and disabuse them of any hope of ever attaining statehood, Israel
required a large number of Israelis to move from the safety of their
homes inside Israel to a more uncertain life in the occupied territories.
despite Israel’s long-term intentions, its formal position was that the
settlements were only temporary and might one day be dismantled as
part of a peace agreement. Apart from in the case of east Jerusalem,
which had been annexed to Israel, the undecided status of the West
bank and Gaza explained the reluctance of the wider Israeli popula-
tion to settle in the territories in the first decades of occupation. Israel
therefore invested huge sums of money on the settlements, making
them attractive to families who needed cheap housing or a better
quality of life away from the overcrowded centre of the country.
subsidizing the settlers
A report by the b’Tselem human rights group during the second
intifada noted that Israel had ‘carried out a vigorous and systematic
policy aimed at encouraging Israeli citizens to move to the settle-
ments. one of the main tools serving this policy is the granting of
benefits and significant financial incentives to settlers.’ Much of the
money had been funnelled either through the settlers’ local councils
or by classifying the settlements as ‘national priority areas’. In these
areas, settlers received a reduction on their income tax, special loans
at discounted rates, greater expenditure on their local schools and
subsidized housing and transport, while businesses were eligible for
large grants.
The total amount spent by Israel on the settlements will prob-
ably never be known, as the figures have been buried deep in the
general budgets of government ministries. This was done to avoid
both international censure and the likely outcry from ordinary Israelis
appalled at the waste of public money. However, in 2003 the Ha’aretz
newspaper did try to estimate the additional cost of the settlements
to the Israeli taxpayer after excluding all military expenditure. It
admitted that its calculations were intentionally ‘very conservative’,
that it had not factored in the whole period of the occupation and that
it had excluded the half of the settler population that lives in east
Jerusalem. Nonetheless, it found that at least 50 billion shekels ($12
billion) had been spent on benefits for the settlers over and above
what would have been spent on them if they had remained inside
Israel.51 Given that for much of the occupation there were no more
than a few tens of thousands of settlers in the occupied territories, it
was a truly astounding sum.
The other factor encouraging Israelis to move into the occupied
territories, paradoxically, was the signing of the oslo peace agree-
ments in the mid-1990s that established the Palestinian Authority
under the leadership of Yasser Arafat. during the short, seven-year
period of oslo, the number of settlers doubled to some 200,000.
Raja shehadeh sheds some light on this strange phenomenon. The
declaration of Principles, approved by the Palestinian leadership in
Tunis, was
achieved at the price of keeping the settlements out of the jurisdiction
of the Palestinian Authority. ... With one blow, political expediency
led to the acceptance [by the Palestinian leadership] of all the illegal
changes we in the occupied Territories had been struggling to nullify
for two decades.52
or as the Foreign Ministry’s legal adviser, Alan baker, himself a
settler, told an Israeli newspaper in 2003:
It was resolved – and the Palestinians agreed – that the settlements’
fate would be determined in a future peace agreement. After we signed
those [oslo] accords, which are still legally in force, we are no longer
an occupying power, but we are instead present in the territories with
their [Palestinian] consent and subject to the outcome of negotiations.53
Israelis came to believe, and were encouraged to think by their lead-
ers, that, with the signing of the oslo Accords, the settlement blocs
had received Palestinian acceptance and international legitimacy.
A sign of the extent to which Israeli society and the wider inter-
national community had allowed themselves to be deceived by the
legal facade of the settlement enterprise recently came to light.
Ha’aretz revealed in october 2006 that a secret report on the settle-
ments had been compiled by General baruch spiegel, special adviser
to the defence minister. Military sources described its contents as
‘explosive’.54 Following the newspaper’s investigation, an Israeli group,
Peace Now, petitioned the courts under the country’s Freedom of
Information Act to force the government to publish the details. offi-
cials countered by arguing that publication would ‘damage the state’s
security and foreign relations’, a presumed reference to the fact that
the report’s findings would embarrass the United states, whose bil-
lions of dollars in aid had been secretly siphoned off to prop up the
settlement drive. only later, in early 2008, was information from the
report leaked to Peace Now. It showed that more than a third of the
120 colonies in the West bank had been built on private Palestinian
land, officially seized temporarily and out of military necessity. It
further revealed that 19 of these 44 settlements had been built after
1979 when the cabinet took a decision, in the wake of the elon Moreh
case, to build on ‘state land’ only. The list of the settlements included
many of the largest and most famous, including Ariel, efrat, kiryat
Arba, ofra, beit el, Psagot, kedumim and shiloh. Peace Now pointed
out that the data showed many of the settlements were illegal even
according to the perverse rules laid down by Israel. A legal source
warned improbably that the courts might demand that the state
hand back the land on which these settlements were built to their
Palestinian owners.55
The brief bout of soul-searching in Israel prompted by these revela-
tions allowed Israelis to avoid pondering the deeper purpose of the
settlements. It was left to an Israeli journalist, Amira Hass, to offer
a dissenting view:
The exaggerated concentration on private ownership feeds into the
Israeli denial of the fact that the Palestinians’ right is to all of the
territory that has been occupied. Not as private individuals, but rather
because they constitute an indigenous national group in this land.
No comments:
Post a Comment