Convergences.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Salt, Jeremy
• Date: 01 January 2003

Israel and Palestine

In October the UN General Assembly decided by an overwhelming majority to call on Israel to pull down the wall it is now building across the West Bank and through Jerusalem. The only governments to join the United States in voting against the resolution were Micronesia and the Marshall Islands. The passage of a similar resolution tabled at a meeting of the UNSC had been blocked by an American veto. While constructing its wall (or walls, as they are now turning out to be), Israel has continued its land and air campaign against the West Bank and Gaza, killing dozens of civilians and destroying homes, apartment buildings and hundreds of dunums of arable land. The destruction in the Gazan town of Rafah rivalled the levelling of the centre of Jenin in April 2002, according to one correspondent. Tanks and mammoth bulldozers were brought in to crush 200 homes. Claiming that only ten were destroyed, the military then sent the bulldozers back 'to grind the evidence that the houses ever existed into the dust'. (1) The civilian victims included children, with their heads ripped off by tank shells. (One in five of the 280 people killed in Rafah over the past three years have been children or teenagers. During the same period Palestinians operating from Rafah have killed three Israeli soldiers and one settler.) 'The trouble is,' said an Israel army spokeswoman, 'when no one else is practising law and order we have to do it ourselves'. (2)

The ostensible purpose of this onslaught is to stop the suicide bombings which have been killing Israelis (including many children) in Jerusalem, Haifa and Netanya. Towards this end, senior figures in the Sharon government are openly saying that it might be necessary one day to kill Arafat and even to get rid of the source of the evil--the Palestinian people--altogether. In February last year Israeli Tourism Minister Benny Elon, representing the openly racist Moledet Party, launched what was described as a 'campaign' for the transfer of the Palestinians.3 In conditions of war, he argued, Israel would have the 'right' to bring on 'another nakba'--the Arabic word for disaster used to describe the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. The idea has never been repudiated by Ariel Sharon, whose position has been described by his spokesman Rana'an Gissin: 'There is a difference between wishful thinking and realpolitik. If the Palestinians would have a change of heart and move, okay, but Sharon realizes transfer cannot be done because of the stance of the Israeli public. What Elon is saying is not something that today seems possible'.4 Not impossible, just not possible today.

As Elon and Gissin spoke, Israel was putting the finishing touches to the 360-kilometre wall it is now building across the West Bank, running close to the 'green line' (the pre-1967 border) but biting into Palestinian land, enclosing within the 'seam zone' (between the wall and the green line) tens of thousands of Palestinians and separating landowners on one side of the wall from their land on the other. Israel plans to build supplementary walls that will enclose the Palestinians in a series of enclaves on the eastern side: if all these walls are constructed as planned they could reach 700 kilometres in length. But 'we are not talking about ghettos', spokesman for Likud MP Michael Eitan said last year. 'People will be able to exit and enter through a security gate'. (5) What the Israeli government likes to describe as a 'fence', and what the Western media obligingly accepts as a fence, is in fact a ten-metre high concrete wall complete with sensors and barbed wire and a 'dead zone' security perimeter with access through gates controlled by the Israeli military or paramilitary. Israeli journalist Amira Hass, who lives in Ramallah, has described the effects of the wall on Palestinians living in fifteen villages or towns enclosed within the seam.

Farmers [on the east side of the wall] cannot make their way to their land; hothouses and orchards have been destroyed; olives are left unpicked; teachers and students fail to get to school because the gate of the separation fence is not opened on time; feed for the livestock does not arrive consistently and the animals are being sold or slaughtered or left to die; water pipes for drinking or irrigation have been cut; siblings and parents are not permitted to visit; garbage trucks are unable to complete their routes; cesspits are not being drained on time. (6) The assault on Palestinian agricultural life described in this passage is thoroughly consistent with Israeli government policies in the West Bank and Gaza since the beginning of the occupation in 1967. Exempted from the permit regulations governing access to or exit from the 'seam zone' are Israeli citizens (in practice these are not likely to include Israeli Palestinians) or anyone entitled to emigrate to Israel under the Law of Return. All Palestinians within the zone will need military permits to live in their own homes.

In Tel Aviv and elsewhere the suicide bombings continued regardless. A poll of West Bank and Gazan Palestinians in April this year indicated that: 75.3 per cent strongly supported or 'somewhat' supported the intifada; 59.9 per cent supported suicide bombings; almost 70 per cent were pessimistic or very pessimistic about the prospects for a peaceful...