The Setting

excerpted from the book

The Other Israel

Voices of Refusal and Dissent

edited by Roane Cary and Jonathan Shainin

The New Press, 2002, paper

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Uri Avnery a pro-peace Israeli who over the years has written three biographical essays about Sharon, two with his cooperation, wrote this January that Sharon's "minimum" aim now was "to imprison the Palestinians in several enclaves... each one surrounded by settlements, bypass roads and the army. In these big prison camps, the Palestinians will be allowed to 'manage their own affairs supplying cheap labor and a captive market. He does not care if they are called 'a Palestinian state.' "Sharon's "maximum" aim, Avnery said, was "to exploit a war situation or a world crisis to expel all Palestinians (including those who are Israeli citizens) from the country'

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THE SIX-DAY WAR'S SEVENTH DAY
by Michael Ben-Yair
March 3, 2002

The Zionist dream's realization and the Jewish people's national rebirth through the creation of Israel were achieved not because of the Jewish side's superior number of tanks, planes, or other means of aggression. The State of Israel was born because the Zionist movement realized it must find a solution to the Jews' persecution and because the enlightened world recognized the need for that solution.

The enlightened world's recognition of the solution's moral justification was an important, principal factor in Israel's creation. In other words, Israel was established on a clear, recognized moral base. Without such a moral base, it is doubtful whether the Zionist idea would have become a reality.

The Six-Day War was forced upon us; however, the war's seventh day, which began on June 12, 1967 and has continued to this day, is the product of our choice. We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one-progressive, liberal-in Israel and the other-cruel, injurious-in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day.

The Six-Day War's seventh day has transformed us from a moral society, sure of the justice of Israel's creation, into a society that oppresses another people, preventing it from realizing its legitimate national aspirations. The Six-Day War's seventh day has transformed us from a just society into an unjust one, prepared to expand its control atop another nation's ruins. The discarding of our moral foundation has hurt us as a society, reinforcing the arguments of the world's hostile elements and sowers of evil and intensifying their influence.

The intifada is the Palestinian people's war of national liberation. Historical processes teach us that no nation is prepared to live under another's domination and that a suppressed people's war of national liberation will inevitably succeed. We understand this point but choose to ignore it. We are prepared to engage in confrontation to prevent a historical process, although we are well aware that this process is anchored in the moral justification behind every people's war of national liberation and behind its right to self-determination, and although we are well aware that this process will attain its inevitable goal.

This is the background of the difficult testimony we have received about actions of Israel Defense Forces personnel in the occupied territories. No need to repeat the details of the painful phenomena entailed in the occupation regime and in our battle to prolong it. Suffice it to recall the killing of little children fleeing for safety; the executions, without trial, of wanted persons who were not on their way to launch a terrorist act; and the encirclements, closures and roadblocks that have turned the lives of millions into a nightmare. Even if all these actions stem from our need to defend ourselves under an occupation's conditions, the occupation's non-existence would render them unnecessary. Thus, a black flag hovers over these actions.*

This is a harsh reality that is causing us to lose the moral base of our "Black flag" was the term used by Judge Binyamin Halevy in a 1958 trial of members of the Border Police, who shot and killed nearly fifty civilians from the Israeli Arab village of Kafr Kassem in October 1956 as they returned home from work, unaware that their village had been placed under curfew at the start of the Sinai War. Defining the nature of an illegal order not to be obeyed, Halevy wrote, "The hallmark of manifest illegality is that it must wave like a black flag over the given order."

existence as a free, just society and to jeopardize Israel's long-term survival. Israel's security cannot be based only on the sword; it must rather be based on our principles of moral justice and on peace with our neighbors-those living next door and those living a little farther away. An occupation regime undermines those principles of moral justice and prevents the attainment of peace. Thus, that regime endangers Israel's existence.

It is against this background that one must view the refusal of IDF reservist officers and soldiers to serve in the territories. In their eyes, the occupation regime is evil and military service in the occupied territories, which places soldiers in situations forcing them to commit immoral acts, is evil. According to their conscience, they cannot be party to such acts. Thus, their refusal to serve is an act of conscience that is justified and recognized in every democratic regime. History's verdict will be that their refusal was the act that restored our moral backbone.

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THE SECOND HALF OF 1948
by Tanya Reinhart
June 10, 2001

Ever since the 1967 occupation, the military and political elites (which have always been closely intertwined in Israel) deliberated over the question of how to keep maximum land with minimum Palestinian population. The leaders of the 1948 generation-Yigal Allon, Ariel Sharon, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres-were raised on the myth of redemption of land. But a simple solution of annexation of the occupied territories would have turned the occupied Palestinians into Israeli citizens, and this would have caused what has been labeled the "demographic problem"-the fear that the Jewish majority could not be preserved. Therefore, two basic conceptions were developed.

The Allon plan consisted of annexation of 35-40 percent of the territories to Israel, and self-rule or partnership in a confederation of the rest, the land on which the Palestinians actually live. In the eyes of its proponents, this plan represented a necessary compromise, because they believed it was impossible to repeat the 1948 "solution" of mass expulsion, either for moral considerations or because world opinion would not allow this to happen again.

The second conception, whose primary spokesman was Sharon, assumed that it was possible to find more acceptable and sophisticated ways to achieve a 1948-style solution-it was only necessary to find another state for the Palestinians; "Jordan is Palestine" was the phrase that Sharon coined. So future arrangements should guarantee that as many Palestinians as possible would move there. For Sharon, this was part of a more global worldview, by which Israel would establish "new orders" in the region-a view he experimented with in the Lebanon war of 1982.

In Oslo, the Allon plan triumphed, where gradually it became apparent that it was even possible to extend the "Arab-free" areas. In practice, the Palestinians have already been dispossessed of half of their lands, which are now state lands, security zones and "land reserves for the settlements."

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It is hard to avoid the conclusion that after thirty years of occupation, the two options competing in the Israeli power system are precisely the same as those set by the generation of 1948: apartheid (the Allon-Oslo plan), or transfer-the mass evacuation of Palestinian residents, as happened in 1948 (the Sharon plan). Those pushing for the destruction of the Oslo infrastructure may still believe that under the appropriate conditions of regional escalation, the transfer plan will become feasible.

In modern times, wars aren't openly started over land and water. In order to attack, you first need to prove that the enemy isn't willing to live in peace and is threatening your very existence. Barak managed to do that. Now conditions are ripe for executing Sharon's plan, or for-as Ya'alon put it in November 2000-"the second half of 1948."

Before we reach that dark line, there is one option that has never been tried: Get out of the occupied territories immediately.

p THE KEY TO PEACE: DISMANTLING THE MATRIX OF CONTROL
by Jeff Halper

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One indisputable fact that has accompanied the entire peace process is that Israel simply would not relinquish control voluntarily over the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It would not relinquish the core of its settlement system, or control of the West Bank aquifers, or sway over the area's economy or its "security arrangements" extending over the entire Palestinian area.

From Israel's point of view, then, the trick was to find an arrangement that would leave it in control, but relieve it of the Palestinian population-a kind of occupation-by-consent. This was the essence of the "take it or leave it" offer Barak and Clinton made at Camp David (the Palestinians left it), as well as that of the Taba negotiations in January 2001. The popular impression has it that at Camp David Barak made a "generous offer" of 95 percent of the West Bank, plus considerable parts of East Jerusalem and all of Gaza, and that the Palestinians made a historic mistake in rejecting it. This has let Israel off the hook; public opinion in both Israel and abroad (particularly the United States) supports Israeli suppression of Palestinian resistance to the ongoing and constantly expanding occupation. After all, asked Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, what are the Palestinians resisting? Even the moderate Israeli left blames the Palestinians for spoiling the peace process. It is a neat formula. "They" spurned Barak's generous offer and responded with violence, the intifada. We, the Israelis, did our part. We were forthcoming. They are not ready for peace, do not want peace, are not partners for peace, want only to throw us all into the sea. We are OK, we tried to give them a state. They are to blame for everything. They deserve anything they get. We are not responsible. "We' Sharon repeats tirelessly, "are the victims."

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Since 1967 [Israel] has put into place a matrix of control ... Israel's matrix of control is an integrated system designed (1) to allow Israel to control every aspect of Palestinian life in the occupied territories, while (2) lowering Israel's military profile so as to give the impression that what Palestinians refer to as occupation is merely proper administration, and (3) that Israel's military repression is merely self-defense against an aggressive Palestinian people endeavoring to expel it, yet (4) carving out just enough space in the form of disconnected enclaves to establish a dependent Palestinian mini-state that will relieve Israel of the Palestinian population while (5) forcing the Palestinians to despair of ever achieving a viable and truly sovereign state and thereby accept any settlement offered by Israel.

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... in the long term Israel prefers to control the Palestinians administratively-through the issuance of thousands of military orders and by "creating facts on the ground?'

Extensive use is made of collaborators and undercover mustarabi army units. The dependency that Israel's stifling administration engenders turns thousands of Palestinians into unwilling (and occasionally willing) collaborators. Simple things such as obtaining a driver's or business license, a work permit, a permit to build a house, a travel document or permission to receive hospital care in Israel or abroad is often conditioned on supplying information to the security services. So effective is this that Israel can locate and assassinate ("targeted liquidations") Palestinian figures in their cars or even in telephone booths.

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Creating Facts on the Ground

Massive expropriation of Palestinian land is an ongoing phenomenon. I Since 1967 Israel has expropriated for settlements, highways, bypass roads, military installations, nature preserves and infrastructure some 24 percent of the West Bank, 89 percent of Arab East Jerusalem and 25 percent of Gaza.

More than 200 settlements have been constructed in the occupied territories; 400,000 Israelis have moved across the 1967 boundaries (200,000 in the West Bank, 200,000 in East Jerusalem and 6,000 in Gaza). Although settlements take up only 1.6 percent of the West Bank, ) fully 42 percent is under the effective control of Israel's local and regional. councils or the military. Besides settling the "Greater Land of Israel' a key goal of the settlement enterprise has been to foreclose the establishment of a viable Palestinian state (or, for some, any Palestinian state) by carving the occupied territories into dozens of enclaves surrounded, isolated and controlled by Israeli settlements, infrastructure and military. While leaving enough land free for a Palestinian ministate of greater or smaller proportions, the settlement network ensures effective Israeli control over Palestinian movement and construction.

While a number of Israeli highways were built in the occupied territories before the Oslo accords, construction of a massive system of twenty-nine highways and bypass roads, funded entirely by the United States (at a cost of $3 billion), was begun only at the start of the peace process. Designed to link settlements, to create barriers to Palestinian movement, and, in the end, to incorporate the West Bank into Israel proper this project, which takes up an additional 17 percent of West Bank land, contributed materially to the creation of "facts on the round" that prejudiced the negotiations.

Another mechanism of division and control that came into being with the signing of the Oslo II agreement in 1995 was the further carving of the occupied territories into Areas A, B and C (in the West Bank),* H-1 and H-2 in Hebron, Yellow, Green, Blue and White in Gaza, Israeli-controlled "nature reserves," closed military areas, security zones, and "open green spaces" which restricted Palestinian construction in more than half of East Jerusalem. This system, which has become ever more formalized and controlled, confines Palestinians to an archipelago of some 190 islands encircled by the Israeli matrix. Israel formally controls 60 percent of the West Bank (Area C), 60 percent of Gaza and all of East Jerusalem. Its frequent incursions into Palestinian territory and its virtual destruction of the Palestinian Authority in March and April 2002 have left it, however, in de facto control of the entire country. Hundreds of permanent, semi-permanent and "spontaneous" checkpoints and border crossings severely limit and control Palestinian movement.

Construction of seven (of a planned twelve) industrial parks on the seam between the occupied territories and Israel give new life to isolated settlements while robbing Palestinian cities, with which they are in direct competition for workers and markets, of their own economic vitality. The industrial parks exploit cheap Palestinian labor while denying Palestinian workers access to Israel. They also allow Israel's most polluting and least profitable industries to continue dumping their industrial wastes into the West Bank and Gaza.

Israel's matrix of control extends underground as well, using settlement sites to maintain control over the main aquifers of the occupied territories and other vital natural resources.

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"Security" is defined by Israel in such maximalist terms that it ensures Israeli political, military, and economic control. Israel insists that a Palestinian state must be demilitarized and forbidden to enter into military pacts with other states, that Israel control Palestinian airspace, and that it reserve the right to deploy forces in the Jordan Valley in the indeterminate event that it perceives a threat of invasion. Controlling Palestinian labor and commercial movement through the imposition of security borders, part of Israel's declared policy of "separation" from the Palestinians, constitutes additional constraints on Palestinian development, dividing the less than 20 percent of Palestine that would be the Palestinian state from the more than 80 percent that is Israel.

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All the neighboring Arab states, as well as the Palestinians, recognize Israel's right to exist within its pre-1967 borders. None of them recognizes the legitimacy of the Jewish colonial project beyond the Green Line.

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When the Oslo process collapsed at the end of summer 2000 and the intifada erupted, the Israeli public underwent a rapid shift to the right. Many perceived the failure of the Camp David talks and the subsequent violent outburst as a sign of the Palestinian pretense that had characterized the negotiations from the start, or of the Palestinian insistence on principles that endanger the very existence of the State of Israel-an insistence that proved, in retrospect, that there was never anyone to talk within the first place. At the moment of truth, they claimed, the cat was let out of the bag. That was true, except that the cat was out, first and foremost, of the Israeli bag. The left that quickly slid to the right was a left that had never internalized the fact that the occupation is the point of departure; that ending the occupation is a condition of reconciliation-not vice versa. This large segment of the public, which soon became a partner in Sharon's right-wing government, never perceived the occupation as the template for the Jewish-Palestinian power relationship and social interactions in the territories. Moreover, they never grasped the extent to which the occupation also determines relationship patterns, both between Jews and Palestinians and among Jews within the Green Line, and shapes each side's perception of the other and interpretation of its acts and words. Only a very few on the radical left, who did not forget the state of occupation, who knew that diplomacy had long been detached from events in the occupied territories, who persisted in seeing the ongoing injustice, the suffering and the humiliation, were not surprised by the outburst of rage and violence of the intifada, nor by the force of the Israeli violence employed to suppress it. These are people whose critical faculties were not anesthetized by the Oslo process, whether or not they supported it. From the moment the productive role-playing facilitated by the Oslo process was over, the divide between two segments of the Israeli public was once again apparent: On the one side were the consistent opponents of the occupation, on the other were those willing, somewhat uneasily, to accept the continuation of the occupation, together with those attempting to perpetuate it by any means possible.

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one's acts and intentions, a decision whose implications may be far-reaching. It was the point in time and the particular circumstances that invited such decision in the fall of 2000, a few key officials were compelled to make decisions that have since shaped the fate of the inhabitants of Israel-Palestine-indeed determined their very life and death, and will continue to do so for many years. The Israeli leaders chose to ignore the circumstances under which the Palestinian uprising broke out, the daily anguish of the occupation and the frustration and hopelessness that nurtured it, instead reacting to the uprising as if it were a threat to Israel's existence, using immense force completely disproportionate to the actual threat. At the same time, the Palestinian leaders chose to ignore the Israeli sense of threat and did not take into account the Israeli readiness to employ full military force to suppress the uprising and preserve the occupation.

The Israeli response generated a chain reaction of violent escalation. Networks of "normal" interactions between Israelis and Palestinians were ripped apart, apparatus that were already working to coordinate in the various friction zones and mollify the violent reactions fell apart; reconciliation proponents on both sides either aligned themselves with the right wing or were squeezed into the extreme margins. Hatred and a thirst for vengeance were everywhere. The Palestinian decision to react to the collapse of the Camp David negotiations with violence and terror and the Israeli decision to control the uprising and terror with massive force created a whirlwind of violence that today threatens to obliterate not only the prospect of reconciliation between the two people and the Palestinians' chance of leading some semblance of a normal life, but also the hope of maintaining civil and democratic life in Israel itself. The Palestinians' choice of violence and terror results in endless suffering with no real hope on the political horizon, the development of a regime of armed gangs, and the destruction of the fabric of civilian life. The implication of this choice on the Israeli side is an acceleration in the nationalization processes of the Jewish state and an institutionalization of its regime as one of apartheid.

This course of deterioration is the result of decisions made by few - Ehud Barak, Minister of Public Security Shlomo Ben-Ami, army Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz, Yasser Arafat, secretary general of Fatah in the West Bank Marwan Barghouti, PA chief of Preventive Security in Gaza Mohammed Dahlan, the Hamas leaders) Following the acts of violence, both peoples aligned themselves with the right wing in response to "their" violence, and out of a need to justify "our" violence. The real decision engendered by this period, at least in Israel, was not made by a broad section of the population, nor was it reflected in the public sphere, the political arena, or the elections that brought Sharon to power. The Israeli majority that supports the government policy today was created in response to decisions made by a few figures whose realm of action was removed from any public or party debate.

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... Barak ... renounced the gradation principle of the Oslo accords. He wanted peace now. He wanted everything, immediately. He broke the rules of the game, which had enabled the existence of a shred of a chance for progress. In the summer of 2000, when the peace talks at Camp David fell apart, the match was over. Gradually, with vigorous assistance from the intifada, all the playing courts were closed, and in February 2001 they sent the whole team home. Sharon's election and all his actions since have had one determinate meaning: There is no longer a disparity between the de jure state and the de facto state. The actual state of occupation is also the state on paper, both legally and formally. There is no political horizon, no process, no negotiations, no nothing. Only occupation.

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What choice do the occupied have in this state? Lost Israeli Jews think that because the Palestinians refused to accept the "generous offer" they wished to impose on them, they should have waited patiently and continued talking indefinitely. But since February 2001, if not earlier, the Palestinians have not had anyone to talk to or anything to talk about, apart from cosmetic changes in the way they are being dominated or an agreement to turn the occupation state back from temporary to permanent. And the occupation continues, the violence continues, the dispossession continues. What choice do the Palestinians have? The liberal tradition of political thought in the West, the tradition upon which the Israeli legal system is also based, and the mainstream tradition of political action in the West-a tradition that Zionism, which defines itself as the Jewish people's liberation movement, wished to join-says that in such a situation the occupied have no choice ...

The occupied party's resistance to the occupier is its moral right. Its violent resistance to the occupation is a direct result of the violence of the occupation itself. Such violent resistance is perhaps immoral and perhaps unwise (under certain conditions it might be morally wrong precisely because it is unwise). But according to the legal and political tradition to which most of the political leadership in Israel belong, there is no doubt that such resistance-or at least certain forms of it - legitimate. The Palestinians have no choice but to resist.

These simple statements can hardly be made out loud today. Only very few Israeli Jews are willing to openly state that they understand the resistance and support it, even if they cannot under any circumstance condone the criminal forms it sometimes assumes. The vast majority o Jewish Israelis are unable to admit today that the Palestinians have no choice. It is too threatening. It means that every Jewish victim was in vain. It undermines the mobilization efforts demanded by the form of fighting, the new form of occupation. And so they claim that they, the Jews, have no choice. They turn the tables and portray themselves as once again fighting with their backs against the wall. This is the type of war they fight best, and so they would do well to present every war as if it were a "no alternative" war. They try to portray the Palestinian resistance in all its forms, from the most vile terror to the most heroic and respectable struggle, as a threat to the existence of the State of Israel and the entire Jewish people. In this state one must focus on the Jewish victims and look aside, systematically and deliberately, every time Palestinian victims come into sight. The daily victims of closures and encirclements are not even mentioned. The other victims are dismissed with military rhetoric: they are objects of "targeted eliminations" or subjects of "collateral damage." The blindness is systematic and contagious. Every day you find more and more people around you and have been affected by this blindness. The blinder one becomes, the ' greater one's fear, and thus the greater one's willingness to stand behind the threats embodied in the crimes. Israeli Jews must be blind in order to be able to accept the new form of the struggle with the Palestinians. They must be nationalistic so that they can live in peace with the war, the eliminations, the starvations and the curfews. Let us be clear-nationalism did not spawn the new form of occupation, but rather it was the new law of occupation, the unrestrained sovereign's law of temporariness, which caused nationalism to reemerge as state religion.

The Other Israel

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