On Palestine (21 page)

The official Israeli navigation between impossible nationalist and colonialist ambitions turned a million and half people in 1967 into inmates of such a mega-prison; it was not a prison for a few inmates wrongly or rightly incarcerated: it was imposed on a society as a whole. It was and still is a system of malice that was built due to vile motives, but not only. Some of its architects searched genuinely for the most possible humane model for this prison; probably because they were aware that this was a collective punishment for a crime never committed. Others did not even bother to search for a softer version or more humane one. But the two camps existed and therefore the government offered two versions of the mega-prison to the people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. One was an open-air prison and the other a maximum security one. Should they not accept the former, they would get the latter.

The open-air prison allowed a measure of autonomous life under indirect and direct Israeli control; the maximum security one robbed the Palestinians of all the autonomies and subjected them to a harsh policy of punishments, restriction, and in the worst-case scenario execution. The reality on the ground was that the open-air prison was harsh enough and sufficiently inhuman to trigger resistance from the enclaved population and that the maximum security model was imposed as retaliation to Palestinian resistance. In general the softer model was attempted twice between 1967 and 1987 and between 1993 and 2000, and the retaliations occurred in 1987 until 1993 and 2000 until 2009.

The open-air prison became the false paradigm of peace as it was marketed by Israel, and by American and European allies of the Jewish state, as an ingenious idea for how to solve the conflict. The best open prison was eventually propagated first as an autonomous zone, in the 1979 Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt that led to nowhere, and later on as an independent Palestinian state in the Oslo Accord of 1993. When the Oslo accord was translated into reality, by the sheer power of the occupier, the resemblance of the idea of a “state” to an open prison became clear with the partitioning of the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C and the exclusion of the Jewish settlements in Gaza from any Palestinian rule. The map of the Oslo B accord of 1994 gave autonomy only in small parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but left the control of the enclaves' security and sovereignty in the hands of the Israeli security apparatuses. When the Israeli regime felt security deteriorated for a short while, the maximum security model was reinstalled in 2002 and in many ways it is still there today while the rebellious prison of Gaza is severely punished by a continuous siege and closure.

The success of turning the open-prison model into a diplomatic effort and a “peace process” could not have been possible had it not won the support of large sections of the Palestinian political elite, the Zionist Left, and even some very well-known and highly respected international supporters of the Palestinian cause. But it is mainly a new creation, the Quartet, a kind of ad hoc international tribunal for Palestine, consisting of the European Union, Russia, the United States, and the United Nations, that gave the process the legitimacy it needed to be seen as a powerful paradigm for peace.

In Israel and in the West, a huge laundry list of words and a very cooperative media and academia were essential for maintaining the moral and political validity of the open-air prison option as the best solution for the “conflict” and as an ideal vision for normal and healthy life in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip. “Autonomy,” “self-determination,” and finally “independence” were used, and mainly abused, as words to describe the best version of an open-air prison model the Israelis could offer the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

But this laundry list did not cleanse the reality, and the hyperbolic discourse of peace and independence did not deafen the conscientious members of all the societies involved: in the territories, in Israel, and in the outside world. In the age of the Internet, an independent press, an active civil society, and energetic NGOs, it was hard to play the charade of peace and reconciliation on the ground where people were incarcerated in the biggest ever human prison witnessed in modern history.

In this situation, out of conscious intention to control the area indefinitely and deny all the human rights of its people, Israel invented the magic formula of presenting the occupation as temporary. The status of the population will be settled “with the coming of peace.” This mode of operation allows Israel to continue to present itself as a “democratic state” and enjoy the many benefits attached to this status in the international arena.

Hence “the peace process” and talk about “two states for two peoples” are not in any contradiction with the occupation, not even the “temporary occupation” of 1967. They are a political and conceptual framework designed to enable and perpetuate the status quo for as long as possible.

Israel would find it hard to market this façade to the world if it were not assisted by many others, some serving their self-interests and others out of misled good intentions. The leadership of the Palestinian national movement also plays a key role in providing credibility for the fake peace process. It is followed by a large part of the leadership of the Palestinian Arab population within the Green Line. Many peace activists around the world have fallen into this trap.

Meanwhile, Israel has been working on the ground to deepen its control over the land, water, economy, and all aspects of Palestinian lives. It creates a situation where even if a Palestinian state is announced, headed by Mahmoud Abbas as president, it will not have any practical significance.

There is no chance of getting out of the deadlock in Palestine without tearing apart the façade of a fake peace process and the two-state solution. It is time to look for the key where we lost it. We need to start by correctly identifying the problem: expose Zionism as a colonialist movement and characterize Israel as an apartheid racist state. There is no other Zionism nor other Israel. Exposure, by itself, may have a huge effect: because of the importance of international support in preserving Israel's superiority against all local forces, but also due to internal conflicts within Israeli society.

Any solution should be derived from our understanding of the problem. It should start with a discussion among all residents of the country on how to live together within a framework where all enjoy full rights, equality, and partnership. The Palestinian refugees should also take part in this discussion, as they have the right to return to Palestine and to fully take part in shaping their country's future. It is essential to set the goal of establishing one state for all inhabitants and refugees of the country, because it defines who should participate in the discussion about this future.

Zionism has done, and continues to do, whatever it can to divide the Palestinian people and guide all of them to a dead end. First came the distancing of the refugees outside Palestine's borders and the isolation of the Palestinian population in the 1948 territories. Today we also witness the political separation between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Posing a new agenda, common to all sectors of the Palestinian people, is the beginning of the road toward a solution. Today's technology can provide the basis for an open discussion across borders and checkpoints, forming a platform for more intense links and together designing the common path.

All this is not at all easy. There are problems in the relationship between different sectors of the public, between secular and religious folk, between the indigenous inhabitants and the third generation of settlers. A new distribution of resources is required to compensate for generations of dispossession and discrimination. It is not clear what will be the nature of the new society and what political framework we will build together; but it is essential that we start a serious discussion about all of it. Beyond that we face a hard struggle against an oppressive regime that regards any perspective other than that of a racist Jewish state as “suicide” and an “existential danger.”

This is our task and those are the problems we must solve. Until we look straight at this reality, we are wasting precious time. Understanding the problem and presenting a real solution can create strong dynamics for changing the balance of power.

Chapter Eleven

Ceasefires in Which Violations Never Cease

Noam Chomsky

On August 26, 2014, Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) both accepted a ceasefire agreement after a fifty-day Israeli assault on Gaza that left 2,100 Palestinians dead and vast landscapes of destruction behind. The agreement calls for an end to military action by both Israel and Hamas, as well as an easing of the Israeli siege that has strangled Gaza for many years.

This is, however, just the most recent of a series of ceasefire agreements reached after each of Israel's periodic escalations of its unremitting assault on Gaza. Throughout this period, the terms of these agreements remain essentially the same. The regular pattern is for Israel, then, to disregard whatever agreement is in place, while Hamas observes it—as Israel has officially recognized—until a sharp increase in Israeli violence elicits a Hamas response, followed by even fiercer brutality. Rather than “mowing the lawn,” in Israeli parlance, the most recent was more accurately described as “removing the topsoil” by a senior US military officer, appalled by the practices of the self-described “most moral army in the world.”

The first of this series was the Agreement on Movement and Access Between Israel and the PA in November 2005. It called for a crossing between Gaza and Egypt at Rafah for the export of goods and the transit of people, continuous operation of crossings between Israel and Gaza for the import/export of goods, and the transit of people, reduction of obstacles to movement within the West Bank, bus and truck convoys between the West Bank and Gaza, the building of a seaport in Gaza, and the reopening of the airport in Gaza that Israeli bombing had demolished.

That agreement was reached shortly after Israel withdrew its settlers and military forces from Gaza. The motive for the disengagement was explained by Dov Weissglass, a confidant of then prime minister Ariel Sharon, who was in charge of negotiating and implementing it. “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process,” Weissglass informed the Israeli press. “And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders, and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a [US] presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.” True enough.

“The disengagement is actually formaldehyde,” Weissglass added. “It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” Israeli hawks also recognized that instead of investing substantial resources in maintaining a few thousand settlers in illegal communities in devastated Gaza, it made more sense to transfer them to illegal subsidized communities in areas of the West Bank that Israel intended to keep.

The disengagement was depicted as a noble effort to pursue peace, but the reality was quite different. Israel never relinquished control of Gaza and is, accordingly, recognized as the occupying power by the United Nations, the United States, and other states (Israel apart, of course). In their comprehensive history of Israeli settlement in the Occupied Territories, Israeli scholars Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar describe what actually happened when that country disengaged: the ruined territory was not released “for even a single day from Israel's military grip or from the price of the occupation that the inhabitants pay every day.” After the disengagement, “Israel left behind scorched earth, devastated services, and people with neither a present nor a future. The settlements were destroyed in an ungenerous move by an unenlightened occupier, which in fact continues to control the territory and kill and harass its inhabitants by means of its formidable military might.”

Operations Cast Lead and Pillar of Defense 

Israel soon had a pretext for violating the November agreement more severely. In January 2006, the Palestinians committed a serious crime. They voted “the wrong way” in carefully monitored free elections, placing the Parliament in the hands of Hamas. Israel and the United States immediately imposed harsh sanctions, telling the world very clearly what they mean by “democracy promotion.” Europe, to its shame, went along as well.

The United States and Israel soon began planning a military coup to overthrow the unacceptable elected government, a familiar procedure. When Hamas preempted the coup in 2007, the siege of Gaza became far more severe, along with regular Israeli military attacks. Voting the wrong way in a free election was bad enough, but preempting a US-planned military coup proved to be an unpardonable offense.

A new ceasefire agreement was reached in June 2008. It again called for opening the border crossings to “allow the transfer of all goods that were banned and restricted to go into Gaza.” Israel formally agreed to this, but immediately announced that it would not abide by the agreement and open the borders until Hamas released Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held by Hamas.

Israel itself has a long history of kidnapping civilians in Lebanon and on the high seas and holding them for lengthy periods without credible charge, sometimes as hostages. Of course, imprisoning civilians on dubious charges, or none, is a regular practice in the territories Israel controls. But the standard Western distinction between people and “unpeople” (in Orwell's useful phrase) renders all this insignificant.