Everything
Is Possible
By Yigal Bronner
23 June, 2007
The
Electronic Intifada
It feels strange to discuss possible
solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Do we prefer a one-state
formula or two states, one next to the other? Which of the two solutions
is more possible? These questions sound so remote from the harsh reality
on the ground, where a resolution of the conflict never seemed so distant.
Currently, Israel is dramatically
and unilaterally changing the regional landscape. The project misleadingly
called the "Security Fence" is perpetuating and vastly expanding
the colonies Israel has established in the areas it occupied in 1967,
while sacrificing a handful of settlements located in the remote and
most populated Palestinian areas. The project also complements the system
of Jewish-only roads and numerous checkpoints that already fragment
the West Bank -- it concentrates the Palestinians in densely inhabited,
impoverished enclaves, and ensures complete Israeli control over the
region's most precious resources: open land and water.
Many Palestinian communities
in the West Bank are already fenced in from all sides (and sometimes
also cut in the middle) by a system of trenches, concrete walls and
barbed-wire fences. Gaza too is sealed. Movement between the Palestinian
pockets is extremely difficult. Access to healthcare, education, and
work is limited and in some cases impossible. Poverty is everywhere
(60 percent of the population is under the UN poverty line of two dollars
of income a day). In a matter of months, the project will be successfully
completed. It will lock the Palestinians in small ghettos, connected
by subterranean roads that will be controlled by Israel. There will
be no airport, seaport, and the passage by land to neighboring countries
will be manned by Israeli soldiers. The end result -- already in place
in the Gaza Strip and several West Bank "strips" -- is a system
of crowded, open-air prisons. And if the inmates will get out of hand
and revolt, the wardens will target them with air raids and artillery
shells.
Note that what is happening
in the territories occupied in 1967 is not essentially new. The Israeli-Palestinian
conflict is not 40 years old but 120 years old. Throughout this period,
the Israeli Yeshuv-turned-state used a variety of means to seize as
much land as possible and displace or strangle the native population.
A major breakthrough in this effort took place during the 1948 War,
when at least 700,000 Palestinians either fled in fear or were forced
out of their towns and villages at gun-point. Their homes were systematically
razed to the ground by the newly founded sate of Israel and they were
not allowed to return.
As for those Palestinians
who in 1948 held fast to their homes (and who withstood a further round
of expulsions in the 1950s), they were granted Israeli citizenship and
today constitute 20 percent of Israel's population. But policies of
displacement and land grab have continued to be practiced consistently
also inside Israel, against its own Arab citizens. In the Negev, to
give just one example, some 80,000 Bedouins live in "unrecognized
villages," which the state refuses to supply with water, electricity,
adequate schools and medical facilities. As we speak, Israeli forces
are hard at work to involuntarily resettle this population in crowded
townships. Hardly a week passes without homes, sometime whole villages,
being destroyed, cattle confiscated, and fields extirpated, while the
government is generously distributing lands in this area to Jewish settlers.
This is just one front of push-and-grab operations inside Israel. Overall,
the opinion that the state should revoke the citizenship of its Arab
citizens and that they should be fenced out or even expelled is becoming
mainstream among Israeli Jews.
In the late 19th century
Jewish immigrants to Palestine were rallied by the slogan: "A land
without people for a people without a land," and it seems that
the Zionist movement has never given up on emptying the land of its
native people. Another well-known slogan spoke about the redemption
of "an acre here and an acre there" (dunam po ve-dunam sham).
The ingeniousness, historical vision and relentlessness of the Zionist
project are all apparent in this slogan, taught to us in school: different
patches of land may be obtained by resorting to different means -- some
bought, other confiscated, yet others taken by force. The land won may
initially not be contiguous, some of it here and some of it there, but
in the end, "acre-by-acre," it will all be taken.
There is nothing in the slogan
about the people already inhabiting those acres. As late as the 1970s,
Israel's Prime-minister Golda Meir insisted that there is no such thing
as a Palestinian people. And Ariel Sharon, who had a profound impact
on Israel's colonization of the West Bank since the late 1970s, repeatedly
said that if the Palestinians want a state they should find it in Jordan.
And yet, in recent years, the same Sharon suddenly adopted the rhetoric
of a two-state-solution, and called for the establishment of a Palestinian
entity in areas Israel occupied in the 1967 war.
Coming from the man who masterminded
the settlements, the outposts, and, most recently, the strangling of
West Bank towns with walls, this new rhetoric signals a historical achievement.
The fruits of 120 years of "an acre here and an acre there"
are finally within sight. The Arab population of the historical Palestine
has become sufficiently disintegrated and dispossessed. The tenuously
related, landless enclaves of the West Bank are being terminally fixed
-- they have nowhere to expand to. Sharon, Olmert and Barak can now
change their language -- to the applause of the Bush administration
and the Western nations.
If the Palestinians hoisted their flag in their isolated ghettos, or
held elections, Israel couldn't be happier. Calling the open-air prison-system
a state will allow it to wash its hands off the impoverished inmates.
So, is a solution possible?
Some say that the reality that Israel has created on the ground is irrecoverable
and that the partition of the historical Palestine into two states is
no longer practical. Others argue that it is the one-state solution
which is infeasible, as Israelis will never agree to a power-sharing
deal of the Northern Ireland type.
Both arguments are wrong
-- nothing is impossible. De Gaul pulled all of France's million settlers
out of Algeria when few believed he would. For decades, South African
whites said they will never agree to share power with the country's
black majority, and then, overnight, they agreed to do exactly that.
The Iron Wall fell, and so did the Berlin Wall. As we do not know the
future, we have no way of ascertaining the impossible.
But if the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict is to find a just and stable solution -- one state, two states,
some other solution -- this will have to involve a true sharing of land,
water, and, indeed, power. It will have to be the result of bilateral
negotiation between two equal partners. It will have to allow both groups
to exercise their cultural and political rights, to hold on to their
narratives, languages, and religious traditions.
To such true sharing, the
Zionist movement has never agreed. Some argue that the 1947 partition
plan amounted to a sincere offer to share the land. But everyone who
studied the history of the region knows that the Jewish subscription
to this plan was meant to seize an "acre here" while waiting
for the "acre there" to materialize. The Yeshuv had no intention
to settle for what it was offered then. Others say that in Oslo Israel
truly intended to share the land with the PLO, but ask any Palestinian
in the West Bank: The Oslo 1990s, when Israel doubled the settlements'
population, built many new colonies, and erected the outposts, were
the worst decade of Israeli occupation -- until the 2000s, that is.
The well-oiled machine of
push-and-grab has been running for decades without ever stopping. Indeed,
it steadily gained momentum and has almost a life of its own now. The
ears of Israelis have become so accustomed to its constant sound --
the rattle-and-hum of demolition and uprooting to make room for new
settlers -- that they no longer hear it. They hear their occasional
calls for peace. They hear when they are shot at. But they long ago
stopped hearing the monotonous drilling of the colonizing machine, and
they cannot imagine the quiet that will result from turning it off.
I have witnessed this unrelenting
machine in action. With my friends in Ta'ayush and other peace groups
we have built homes that it has tore down, only to see them demolished
again, and again, and again, five times over. The bulldozers always
come back. Or take the struggle of the residents of Susya, in the South
Hebron hills. Years of tremendous efforts of hundreds of people on the
ground, in court, and in the media, have by no means secured the fragile
status quo of the handful of families clinging to their tiny, simple
huts. Israeli soldiers knocked them down at the time of prime-minister
Barak, and despite all efforts, the bulldozers will return at some point,
to clear the area for the nearby settlers.
The machine of displacement
never tires. It continues its work in the occupied territories and in
Israel proper, from Rafah to the Negev, from Hebron to Jerusalem, from
Budrus to Bil'in, from Jenin to Sakhnin. It grabs an acre here and an
acre there. Let me be clear: no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict is possible so long as it continues its work.
But dismantle it, and everything
is possible.
Yigal Bronner
teaches South Asian Literature at the University of Chicago. He is an
activist in Ta'ayush: Arab-Jewish Partnership and a refusenik who spent
much of the past decade fighting for peace and against injustice in
Israel/Palestine.
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