[wvns] Yigal Bronner: Everything Is Possible
Everything Is Possible
By Yigal Bronner
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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