What is 20 years? What is 40 years? (What is 59 years?)
Twenty years ago, in the summer of 1987, I spent quite a bit of time in Israel and Palestine, with Bill the spouse and our daughter Lorna, who was then two. I think that was the first time I met the Israeli strategic-affairs writer Ze’ev Schiff, who was already a ‘grand old man’ of the Israeli military-affairs scene. I was researching my third book, The Superpowers and the Syrian-Israeli Conflict, so he was one of the people I interviewed there.
Earlier that summer, the IDF’s ‘Civil Administration’ Branch, the arm of the military responsible for actually running the military rule over the occupied territories and their inhabitants, had brought out a glossy little publicity booklet to “celebrate” the many achievements of that rule. It had a photo of a field of waving grain on the cover, and photos of smiling Palestinians inside.
Ze’ev wrote scathingly about it in HaAretz, I remember. “It’s so short-sighted and basically untrue!” he said when I talked to him later about the article.
(Looking back from today, I would say it was very similar to all the occupation-lauding p.r. materials produced by the US military and their flacks in their early months in Iraq.)
Six months after my 1987 visit to Palestine and Israel, the first intifada broke out. With it, the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza rose up as a single, fairly well-coordinated body to say “Enough!” of rule by foreign military occupiers.
The vast, vast majority of what the Palestinians did in that intifada was nonviolent, pro-independence, civilian resistance. It took the IDF and their political masters six years to break it– a feat that they finally accomplished only when they concluded the “Oslo” interim accords with the PLO, and exchanged formal recognition with the PLO.
But Oslo did not bring to either side what it needed. For Palestinians it did not bring final-status peace talks according to the mutually agreed schedule. It did not bring an end to having their land expropriated by the Israeli settlers. It brought a considerable worsening in the situation of the 180,000 or so Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem… And to Israelis it brought no end to either their conflict with the Palestinians, or their state of chronic insecurity. In 1996, a series of very lethal suicide bombs that anti-Oslo Palestinian militants from Hamas and from Fateh’s militant wing set off in Israeli cities shook many Israelis to their core.
I don’t think I went to Palestine or Israel in 1997. I know I was there in 1995; I went there to write a series of articles about the draconian new measures the Israelis were taking in and around East Jerusalem. Basically, they were working fast, in that post-Oslo period, to cut the city’s Palestinian population off from their compatriots, cousins, schoolmates, and business partners in the rest of the occupied Palestinian West Bank. This cutting-off was achieved in three ways: with the erection of new roadblocks to control the movement of Palestinians into and out of the city; with the issuing of new administrative orders that separated the life of the Jerusalem palestinians from that of their compatriots just outside the city’s boundary; and with the construction of vast, fortress-like new “Israelis-only” settlements that sliced around the city to further cut its Palestinians from their confreres in the Palestinian hinterland.
It was a grim time to be there. I should dig out my notes of the lugubrious conversations I had with Faisal Husseini, a gentle and visionary leader for all the Palestinians of the West Bank, who felt marooned in his office in the faded beauty of Jerusalem’s Orient House. He was continually being besieged there by ultra-nationalist Israeli extremists who set up a little tent camp right outside the entrance. The Israeli government did little or nothing to restrain them. He also felt nearly completely marginalized by Yasser Arafat who was busy preening for the international diplomatic corps in nearby Ramallah.
Well, that was 1995. In 1999, the deadline set in Oslo for the ending of the final-status talks between the two sides came and went. (In Washington, Clinton’s advisor Dennis Ross still talked endlessly about the need for a “process”, rather than for actual peace.)
The occupation continued.
In September 2000 the second intifada broke out– more violent on both sides than the first one. In 2002, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sent tanks and planes in to destroy nearly all the fragile institutions of “limited self-government” that the PLO had been allowed to establish after Oslo. That was almost exactly 20 years after he bloodily destroyed the institutions the PLO had established in West Beirut.
Faisal Husseini died in May 2001.
Today, the second intifada has been going for more than six and half years and it still hasn’t been suppressed, though goodness knows the Israelis have inflicted massive punishment on the Palestinians in their attempts to achieve that.
Israel killed Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin in March 2004, and his successor Abdel-Aziz Rantissi a month later. Yasser Araft died in November 2004.
… Back in 1967, I was 14 years old. I remember sitting at home in England and watching news footage of the Six-Day War on our family’s black-and-white t.v. It came with all kinds of cheerleading in the commentary, for “plucky little Israel” and its very brave and wily fighters.
In 1977, I was 24. I was hard at work covering the massacre-studded civil war in Lebanon. The year before, I had covered the fall of the Palestinian refugee camp at Tel el-Zaatar, in East Beirut, to the Falangist militia forces. I still have the clippings from the Sunday Times of the part where the “plucky” young Falangist leader Bashir Gemayyel told us– before he led our group of western journos into the corpse-strewn wasteland of the camp– that “I am proud of what you are going to see there.”
That was what he said. It was all on the record. Six years later, after Gemayel had been assassinated, Ariel Sharon led his vengeance-seeking followers into two more Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut– in Sabra and Shatila. And Sharon later claimed he “did not know” that those Falangists might be seeking to kill Palestinians indiscriminately once they got into the camps.
In the summer of 1977, I was newly pregnant with my first child. My husband of that time and I drove our new Fiat 127 from Beirut to England, where I did a pregnancy test and was able to announce our happy news to my family.
Now my son Tarek is nearly 30.
What is 30 years? What is 40 years? What is 40 years of a military occupation rule that is a burden both to the occupier and to the occupied?
But most especially for the occupied.
Here in the US, our government has been maintaining a military occupation rule over the people of Iraq for four years. Both occupying bodies– the Israeli and the American– have sought to use divide-and-rule to decrease the chances of a successful nationalist resistance emerging. In Iraq, that divide-and-rule has already, after just four years, had devastating consequences. In occupied Palestine, there has as yet been only a little of the kind of terrible, internecine fighting that occupied Iraq has seen, though recently Gaza has teetered on the brink of something like that. But for Palestinians, for all the years I’ve been going there, it has been the steady grinding effect of the many administrative controls and rules imposed against them by the (completely unaccountable and anti-democratic) occupation authorities that have– along with the every day visible expansion of the racist settlement proejct– worn them down… Year after year after year after year.
That, and the intense concern about the fate of their brothers and cousins in very vulnerable positions in the ghurba (the Palestinian diaspora)… in Lebanon, still today, in Iraq, or Jordan, or Kuwait…
Is there still hope for two viable states there west of the Jordan, in Israel and Palestine? I hope so. But the insidious and continuous spread of the settlement project has made it harder and harder to see how a viable two-state outcome can be won. Maybe all that is possible now is something like the unitary binational state that Martin Buber and Judah Magnes both called for long ago?
Right now, though, no-one in the “international community” is even talking about moving to any kind of a swift final outcome. So in the absence of any truly hope-inspiring diplomacy, it just looks like more of the same.
Unless, the people on both sides can come up with a new pardigm. Perhaps one day soon, they might start to really understand that violence– whether direct physical violence of weapons or the grinding, anti-humane violence the oppressive occupation– can never solve their problems. Neither side can wipe the other out…
So where is the principled and visionary leadership from the “international community” that tells them all that this conflict needs to get resolved fast– and indeed that it can be resolved, speedily and satisfactorily, on the basis of the well-known principles of international law and in a way that allows both these peoples to be safe and to flourish?
I do not want to be here 10 years hence, writing a follow-up to this same essay.
11 thoughts on “Living under military occupation for 40 years”
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Helena:
A just settlement in Palestine, Iraq, iran or anywhere else in the Middle East is wishful thinking until and unless the Israel lobby is taken down a few pegs.
The recent capitulation of the Democrats to Bush on Iraq shows yet again the dangers of harboring illusions about this party which gets about half its funding from wealthy Zionists.
Now that would be something that Michael Moore and Mel Gibson could agree on.
Nothing positive will happen in the next 10 years or the next millenia unless the American public wakes from its stupor and demands justice.
Gordon
What is happening in Gaza is a spit image of what Hitler did to Jews, the only difference, is Israel is executing the plan slowly but surely.
And the world is watching.
Gordon Reed,
What is happening in Gaza is a spit image of what Hitler did to Jews,
Gordon Reed you are right, not just you believe in this read this coming from a JEWS who have seen the horror of Hitler:
These words are from a letter written by Dr Shlomo Shmelzman, a survivor of the Holocaust, to the press in Israel announcing his courageous hunger strike at the height of the bombing of West Beirut in Lebanon in August 1982
Not to let one exotic Levantine exception take precedence over the general and global rule.
By and large, and almost everywhere else, FORCE WORKS WONDERS!
The Middle East really seems not to march to that otherwise universal drum beat, and it is certainly very interesting indeed that it should not, but nevertheless the tail is not the dog, the exception is not the rule, and to give up on the dogma of FORCE WORKS WONDERS (FWW hereinafter) merely because some eccentric and antecedently improbable Lebanon, or that bushogenic quagmire of an alien-invasionized neo-Iraq, seem scarcely to have ever heard of the FWW dogma would be premature, in my opinion. Why don’t we FWW sceptics just wait a couple of centuries and compare notes in 2207/1634 or 2307/1737 or 2907/2355 about whether even the Levant might not really be more or less normal at bottom too and thus normally forcible, although doubtless, for reasons unknown, somewhat retarded as well?
What’s with almost everybody’s hasty rush to judgment about such matters nowadays? I’ve gotten to where I can feel Dr. Altzheimer’s monkey on my back nearly all the time, but what on earth can such a private sensation of mine have to do with a public and presentable Just Judgment about their FORCE WORKS WONDERS dogma, some judgment about FWW, whether for or against, that Princess Posterity won’t dismiss retrospectively as an ignorant prehistoric mistake? It’s always fun to be on the winning side, of course, but when “our” definitive triumph can be cheerfully (?) postponed as far off as 2907/2355, perhaps love of fun is not quite the whole story?
But God knows best. Happy days!
From here it looks like the palestinian question is approaching resoltion. Because at least so far, let’s be fair, the Israelis have been focused, quite sucessfuly, on the goal of eliminating the hope/threat of a palestinian nation, rather than a genocide of the palestinian people. Maybe later, after the Ghettos. But then again, how long have we all got the way things are going?
Many commentators; even Chomsky, seem to be coming to the view that any realistic hope of a state for palestinians, single or “binational unitary” has been lost. Their once fervent arguments for plans have of late reduced of late into simple condemnation and talk of lost opportunities. Helena, trying to be optimistic, hopes for both sides coming up with a new paradigm, or for the internationaly community (which bits of it?) intervening diplomaticly. That does seem unlikely. Only a masssive power shift in the region and/or globally might; as a by-product, effect the status quo. And that may well happen during the life of our species.
Mention of Faisal Husseini brought to mind Edward Said’s powerfully humane writings in the 90s in opposition to the Oslo accords. At the time Said was very persuasive (to me anyway)but in retrospect one wonders if his eloquent demolishments of the PLO didn’t help fuel the religious rejectionists who have now all but destroyed Palestine?
Out of interest what’s happened to Hanan Ashrawi? She must be devastated at what’s happening.
The idea that Palestine has been “destroyed” by “religious rejectionists” is not easily understood. Is bb referring to the extreme religious zionists? I suspect not.
The critical factor missing in the equation in Palestine is not US (by which I include its satellites’ governments too) commitment to justice but an end to its vigorous promotion of injustice. The current situation in Lebanon is good example of the problems that arise when the US actively prevents indigenous politics from working out solutions. Just as in Iraq the price of US support is the active prosecution of sectarian warfare.
The consequences of the withdrawal of US military (overt and covert) forces from the middle east would be entirely beneficial. As to Israel its relationship to the US is close to being its raison d’etre. The relationship is no longer just military and economic but spiritual with Israel filling the vacuum in national life left by the expulsion of morality. We are come full circle and the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, their hands dripping with the blood of natives, comfort themselves that they are the chosen of God fulfilling an ancient prophecy.
You’d be wrong Bevin. Extreme religious zionists are a significant part of the equation owing to their implacable maximilist aims, their appalling treatment of Palestinians and their assassination of Rabin – not that this is in any way a brief for Rabin who was the person who ordered the IDF to break the limbs of Palestinian children and adolescants in the first intifada. But at least Rabin finally understood the jig was up and so the PLO was recognised by Israel
That was then, 14 years ago. The current situation in Gaza is something else. Hamas and associated extreme religious Muslim groups spectacularly destroyed Oslo and the Israeli peace movement via their relentless suicide bombings inside Israel. They could claim in justification of their tactics they had finally forced Sharon of all people to take on the religious zionists and pull all the settlers out of Gaza. Then to cap it off Hamas won government for itself in a democratic election.
But Hamas, so long entrenched in Gaza; supposedly, like Hezbollah, so disciplined, so well trained, uncorrupt, foresighted and clever, turned out to be totally incapable of taking sole control of the anti Israel resistance with result Gaza has turned into another Mogadishu. Or maybe Hamas didn’t think it was necessary to have the “monopoly of force”? Or maybe they didn’t care? Or maybe they were just hopelessly faction ridden and useless all the time and this wasn’t exposed until the Israelis pulled out?
The point of my initial comment: Helena’s post got me reflecting on the Westbankers who carried the flag for so many years inside the Territories – Husseini, Ashawri etc, for whom Said was such an eloquent supporter. Said uncompromisngly publicly exposed the PLO over and over again for its corruption, cronyism, authoritarism, lack of democracy, abandonment of the Palestinian diaspora and so on which had a lot of influence on outsider social democrats like me who initially saw Oslo as the big breakthrough.
Hamas destroyed Oslo. Destroyed the Israeli peace movement too. Big win, but for what ends? Instead of building Gaza its incompetence or whatever is destroying Gaza too and the result will be two separate Palestinian entities. A sick version of the “two state” solution. In retrospect I feel Said might have done better to use his influence and stature to support Oslo but with reservations, relentlessly oppose the religious extremists and fight his battles with the PLO inside the organisation, not outside.
ps and please don’t give me any guff it was all to do with the financial boycott or Israel withholding tax revenue. Hezbullah would never, has never, indulged in that kind of victimhood-pleading.
what’s happened to Hanan Ashrawi? She must be devastated at what’s happening.
She used to get Oslo, they used her and other academic respectable people, who have c ridable backing by mainstream Palestinians thats what was the plane.
They paid for their work and that’s it.