[A-List] Looking Back on Forty Years of Occupation

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by Chris Hedges

Truthdig.com (June 03 2007)


Israel captured and occupied the Gaza Strip and the West Bank forty
years ago this week.  The victory was celebrated as a great triumph, at
once tripling the size of the land under Israeli control, including East
Jerusalem.  It was, however, a Pyrrhic victory.  As the occupation
stretched over the decades, it transformed and deformed Israeli society.
 It led Israel to abandon the norms and practices of a democratic
society until, in the name of national security, it began to routinely
accept the brutal violence of occupation and open discrimination and
abuse of Palestinians, including the torture of prisoners and collective
reprisals for Palestinians attacks.  Palestinian neighborhoods, olive
groves and villages were, in the name of national security, bulldozed
into the ground.

Israel's image has shifted from that of a heroic, open society set amid
a sea of despotic regimes to that of an international pariah.  Israel's
West Bank separation barrier, built ostensibly to keep out Palestinian
bombers, has also been used to swallow huge tracts of the West Bank into
Israel.  Palestinian towns are ringed by Israeli checkpoints.  Major
roads in the West Bank are reserved for Israeli settlers.  The UN
estimates that about half the West Bank is now off-limits to
Palestinians.  And every week there are new reports of Palestinian
produce that is held up until it rots, pregnant women giving birth in
cars because they cannot get to hospitals, and even senseless and
avoidable deaths, such as one young woman who died recently when she
couldn't get through a checkpoint to her kidney dialysis treatment.

"We are raising commanders who are policemen", former Israeli General
Amiram Levine told the newspaper Maariv. "We ask them to excel at the
checkpoint. What does it means to excel at the checkpoint?  It means
being enough of a bastard to delay a pregnant woman from getting to the
hospital."

The occupation was benign at the beginning.  Israelis crossed into
Palestinian territory to buy cheap vegetables, eat at local restaurants,
spend the weekend in the desert oasis of Jericho and get their cars
fixed.  The Palestinians were a pool of cheap labor and by the
mid-1980s, forty percent of the Palestinian workforce was employed in
Israel.  The Palestinians flowed over the border to the shops and
beaches of Tel Aviv.  But the second-class status of Palestinians,
growing repression by Israeli authorities in the West Bank and Gaza and
festering poverty saw Palestinians, most of them too young to remember
the moment of occupation, rise up in December 1987 to launch six years
of street protests.  The uprising eventually led to a peace accord
between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization led by Yasir
Arafat.  Arafat, who had spent most of his life in exile, returned in
triumph to Gaza.

The Oslo Accords that followed momentarily heralded a new era, a moment
of hope.  I was in Gaza when they were signed.  The Gaza Strip was awash
in a giddy optimism.  Palestinian businessmen who had made their
fortunes abroad returned to help build the new Palestinian state.  The
radical Islamists seemed to shrink away.  Palestinian women threw off
their head scarves and beauty salons sprouted on city streets.  There
was a brief and shining sense that life could be normal, free from
strife and violence, that finally Palestinians had a future.  But it all
swiftly turned sour.

The 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, coupled
with mounting draconian restrictions on Palestinians to prevent them
from entering Israel and keep them in submission, led to another
uprising in 2000.  This one, which I also covered for The New York
Times, was far more violent.  This latest uprising has led to the deaths
of more than 4,300 Palestinians and 1,100 Israelis.  It ushered in an
Israeli policy that saw Jewish settlers relocated from Gaza.  Gaza was
then sealed off like a vast prison.  Israel also began to build a
security barrier - at a cost of about $1 million per mile - in the West
Bank.  When it is done, the barrier is expected to incorporate forty
percent of Palestinian land into the Israeli state.

Israeli air strikes have, over the past year, decimated the
infrastructure in Gaza, destroying bridges, power stations and civilian
administration buildings.  The breakdown in law and order, coupled with
the growing desperation in Gaza, has triggered an internecine conflict
between Hamas and Fatah.  There are some 200 Palestinians who have died
in clashes and street fighting between the two factions during the past
year - more than one-third of those killed by Israel during the same period.

The Israeli abuses have been well documented, not only by international
human rights organizations, but Israeli human rights groups such as
B'Tselem.  On June 4 2007, Amnesty International released a new 45-page
report called "Enduring Occupation: Palestinians Under Siege in the West
Bank", which again illustrates the devastating impact of four decades of
Israeli military occupation. The report documents the relentless
expansion of unlawful settlements on occupied land.  It details the ways
Israel has seized or denied crucial resources, such as water, to
Palestinians under occupation.  It documents a plethora of measures that
confine Palestinians to fragmented enclaves and hinder their access to
work, health and education facilities. These measures include the
700-kilometer barrier or wall, more than 500 checkpoints and blockades,
and a complicated system of permits to heavily restrict movement.

"Palestinians living in the West Bank are blocked at every turn. This is
not simply an inconvenience - it can be a matter of life or death.  It
is unacceptable that women in labor, sick children, or victims of
accidents on their way to hospital should be forced to take long detours
and face delays which can cost them their lives", said Malcolm Smart,
director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Program.

"International action is urgently needed to address the widespread human
rights abuses being committed under the occupation, and which are
fueling resentment and despair among a predominantly young and
increasingly radicalized Palestinian population", said Smart.  "For
forty years, the international community has failed to adequately
address the Israeli-Palestinian problem; it cannot, must not, wait
another forty years to do so".

Of Gaza's 1.4 million residents, a staggering 1.1 million now depend on
outside food assistance.  The World Food Program has identified Gaza as
one of the world's hunger global hot spots.  The WFP is a principal food
aid provider to Palestinians, providing assistance to 640,000
Palestinians, more than a third of them in Gaza.

The desperation - with young men unable to find work, travel outside the
Gaza Strip or West Bank and forced to sleep ten to a room in concrete
hovels without running water - has empowered the Islamic radicals.  The
desperation has led the Palestinian population, once one of the most
secular in the Middle East, to turn to radical fundamentalism.  The more
pressure and violence Israel employs, the more these radicals are empowered.

The Israeli lobby in the United States is captive to the far right of
Israeli politics.  It exerts influence not on behalf of the Jewish state
but an ideological strain within Israel that believes it can crush
Palestinian aspirations through force.  The self-defeating policies of
the Bush administration are mirrored in the self-defeating policies
championed by the hard-right administration of Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert in Jerusalem.  Israel flouts international law and dismisses
Security Council resolutions to respect the integrity of Palestinian
territory.  It has instead trapped Palestinians in squalid, barricaded
ghettos where they barely survive.

It is not in Israel's interest - or our own - to continue to fuel
increased Palestinian strife and rising militancy.  Economic sanctions
and an arms ban against Israel are our last hope.  These were the tools
that toppled the apartheid regime in South Africa.  And it was, after
all, the sanctions imposed by the first President Bush - he suspended
$10 billion of loan guarantees for resettling Russian immigrants in
Israel - that prodded right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir
to attend peace talks in Madrid.

A trade embargo - even if imposed only by European states - would be a
start.  It is outside pressure that can alone halt the inexorable slide
into a conflict that could become regional.  And a new regional conflict
with Israel could spell the end of the Zionist experiment in the Middle
East.  It may be quixotic, perhaps even impossible, but it is the last
measure left to save Israel from itself.

_____

Chris Hedges is a veteran journalist and former Mideast bureau chief for
The New York Times. His most recent book is American Fascists: The
Christian Right and the War On America (Free Press, 2007).

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070603_looking_back_on_40_years_of_occupation/


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