An honest appraisal of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict!
3/6/02
This is the firstof two articles summing up Holger Jensen's impressions of a recent trip to Israel and the occupied territories.
By Holger Jensen
News International Editor
Gaza is a hellhole.
Its 1.2 million people are crammed into a land area of 141 square miles, smaller than the city and county of Denver. Raw sewage has seeped into the water supply. Piles of uncollected garbage rot in the streets of Gaza City and the stinking refugee camps where many Palestinians have lived since 1948.
Right now Gaza is encircled by Israeli tanks, periodically invaded by Israeli troops and regularly pounded by F-16 jets and Apache helicopter gunships. The military blockade has cut off the territory's only economic lifeline — jobs in Israel — and unemployment ranges from 50 percent in the city to 70 percent in the camps.
The streets are filled with angry young men ambling aimlessly around, waiting for the next air strike and dreaming up new ways to kill Jews. Khalil Abu Shammala of the Al-Adameer human rights group says Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has turned Gaza into “a factory for suicide bombers.”
Tel Aviv is only an hour's drive away but it could be on the other side of the moon. The city looks like a cross between Miami Beach and Los Angeles. It seems most of its denizens have never been to the Gaza Strip and see only the government's version of what is happening there.{M1 {M0All they know is it's full of “terrorists” or Palestinians who applaud them.
Israel is a clean, prosperous and orderly nation, if not First World, at least Second. Its people live in nice homes, drive new cars and enjoy amenities not widely available elsewhere in the Middle East.
“We have done well,” says Dore Gold, an adviser to Sharon. “Our only failure is winning the acceptance of our Arab neighbors.”
So, instead of the good life, Israelis live under the shadow of terrorism. Escalating bloodshed has sown despair in their society and fueled the worst recession in Israel's 53-year history. Tourism is dead, the value of the shekel keeps dropping and workers are being laid off by high-tech firms lining the highway from Tel Aviv to Haifa.
Unemployment has crept above a previously unheard-of 10 percent. And immigration, which successive Israeli governments have relied upon to keep the Jewish state Jewish, also has dropped by 28 percent to its lowest level since the late 1980s. Who wants to live in a war zone?
The Palestinian intifada or uprising that began in September 2000 has taken on the trappings of a full-blown war.
Its front lines are the West Bank and Gaza, where 213,000 Jewish settlers live surrounded by 3.2 million hostile Arabs. Although Israel devotes massive military and economic resources to protecting the settlers and expanding their settlements, no amount of firepower deters what the Palestinians call “freedom fighters” and Sharon calls “terrorists.”
Attacks on settlers and soldiers are a daily occurrence in the occupied territories, eliciting ever harsher Israeli reprisals. Yet the attacks continue. And more and more Palestinian “martyrs” manage to sneak through military checkpoints into Israel's supposedly secure rear to blow themselves up along with innocent civilians in Jerusalem and the coastal cities.
What makes young men — and in two recent instances, women — become human bombs? The phenomenon once confined to the Muslim fanatics of Hamas and Islamic Jihad has spread to Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and other secular groups with no prior allegiance to the concept of holy war.
Despair, say the Palestinians. Despair that Israel will ever give them back their land. Despair at an occupation that the United Nations deems illegal but has allowed to last for 35 years. Despair at the hopelessness of a conflict that pits stone-throwers, snipers and a few suicidal bombers against tanks, F-16s and Apaches.
We are besieged by the world's fourth strongest army, they say. We are suffering state terrorism and collective punishment. Yet the world is so hung up on Israel's security, our insecurity means nothing.
Israelis echo that despair. We are a nation under siege, they say. Arab terrorists are killing our women and children in discos and pizza parlors. Our survival is at stake so we have no choice but to fight back.
One could argue that the Israelis brought it on themselves by colonizing territories captured in the Six-Day War of 1967. The settlements, originally intended to give Israel strategic width and provide a buffer zone between its 1948 borders and those of belligerent Arab neighbors, now pose a security nightmare for the Israeli military.
A look at any West Bank map shows Palestinian and settler communities so tightly interwoven that, in the words of Palestinian Cabinet Minister Nabil Shaath, “we live in the same skin.”
The people in that skin are locked in a deadly struggle. And both sides are bleeding.
In a sharp escalation of military combat and terrorism over the past two weeks, 150 people have been killed, two-thirds of them Palestinian. There have been three devastating attacks on Israeli checkpoints in the territories, two Israeli tank invasions of Palestinian refugee camps in Jenin and Nablus and a Palestinian suicide bombing in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem.
Overall, 1,043 Palestinians and 312 Israelis have been killed in 17 months. The Israeli peace group B'Tselem keeps a detailed casualty count that shows most of the victims to be unarmed civilians. Of 720 Palestinian civilians killed through March 3, 178 have been children; of 208 civilians killed on the Israeli side, 46 have been children.
Both sides demonize each other. Sharon likens Yasser Arafat to Osama bin Laden and publicly expressed regret at not killing him when Israeli forces invaded Lebanon in 1982. His spokesmen refer to the Palestinian Authority as a “kingdom of terror” dishing out “a daily dose of death.”
Palestinian officials call Sharon a “terrorist” or “war criminal” who heads a “gangster government.” They refer to Israel as a “rapist entity.”
Both sides engage in what the other calls incitement.
Anti-Jewish diatribes are a regular feature of broadcasts by the official Voice of Palestine radio station, speeches by Arafat and his henchmen, and can be found in Palestinian schoolbooks, though they are not as virulently anti-Semitic as those found in other Arab countries.
Various Israeli politicians have referred to the Palestinians as “beasts walking on two legs,” “a cancerous growth,” “cockroaches,” “vermin” and “lice.” Even more disturbing is the growing political debate over “transfer” as in “transfer of population,” a euphemism for mass expulsion of Arabs.
There is surprisingly little outcry on a topic that on its face appears outrageous. After all, it was not too long ago that thousands of Albanians were being forced to flee Kosovo before NATO bombing stopped the expulsions.
Some of Israel's right-wing politicians openly advocate “transfer” and a poll conducted by the newspaper Ma'ariv found that 35 percent of Israelis support this “solution” to Arab terrorism.
On other other side of the coin, more and more Israelis are speaking out against the occupation. In a periodic “Letter from Israel” published on several American web sites, columnist Ran HaCohen, who writes for Israel's largest newspaper and teaches at Tel Aviv University, explains why he condemns the occupation more than Palestinian terrorism:
“Terrorism is not the occupation's twin brother,” he wrote, “but rather its murderous offspring. Terrorism is horrible, but so is occupation and the former is the result of the latter. To stop the circle of violence, to stop terrorism, the occupation must stop first.”
My sentiments exactly.
I have been visiting Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip off and on since 1973. In that 29-year period, I have seen the Palestinians lose roughly half of the West Bank to settlement expansion, road easements, green belts and “security zones.” And I have seen over a million Palestinians confined to 60 percent of the Gaza Strip while the remaining 40 percent is reserved for 5,000 settlers and their security zones.
The settlements violate multiple United Nations resolutions, the Fourth Geneva Convention and the spirit, if not the letter, of the Oslo accord. It did not expressly forbid settlement building but it did preclude both sides from “changing the facts on the ground.”
This Israel clearly has done. The settler population has doubled since the first interim peace agreement was signed in 1993, convincing the Palestinians that the Jewish state was never serious about giving up land for peace.
Israel's dilemma is that it professes to be both a Jewish state and a democracy. But it cannot be both if it maintains control of 3.2 million Palestinians non-citizens in the occupied territories.
Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg summed up the problem most succinctly when he told the newspaper Arutz: “Whoever wants a full democracy with a Jewish majority cannot hold onto the entire land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, because it is a land that has people of another nation with different national aspirations.
“Whoever wants the whole land with a Jewish majority must give up on democracy and instead have a dark and oppressive regime. And whoever wants a democracy and the entire land must give up on the idea of a Jewish state with a Jewish majority.”
When one of Israel's top lawmakers acknowledges how “dark and oppressive” Palestinians find occupation, there is hope it will end. And I witnessed one small act of kindness that suggests it may still be possible for Israelis and Palestinians to live together as neighbors.
It was night, a dangerous time to be stranded at a deserted gas station in the territories, not far from the settlement bloc of Ma'le Adumim. Our car had blown a head gasket and Ahmed, our Arab driver, had telephoned his brother to bring another car from Jerusalem.
While we were waiting, an Arab jalopy pulled in, smoke belching from its engine. The driver opened the hood but couldn't figure out what was wrong while his wife and three small daughters waited patiently in the car.
Then two Jewish settlers drove up, walked over, fixed the problem and sent the Arab family happily on its way, little girls waving from the windows of their car. For once, instead of hatred and bloodshed, there was friendship.
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Copyright 2000 Holger Jensen.
These columns may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of Holger Jensen. |
