Forty
Years of Occupation: A Forum
June 6, 2007
An
outpouring of retrospectives -- good, bad and indifferent --
has marked the fortieth anniversary of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli
war. Predictably, and perhaps appropriately, most looks backward
have also attempted to peer forward, and consequently most
have focused on the impasse between Israel and the Palestinians.
This question, though predating 1967 and not the only one left
unresolved by the war, is nearly synonymous with “the
Middle East” in the global media. Plentiful as the 1967
commentary has been, the relative silences have also spoken
volumes. Middle East Report asked six critically minded
scholars and analysts for their reflections on what has been
missing from the conversation about Israel-Palestine occasioned
by the passage of 40 years since that fateful June.
Lori Allen
In 1970, the
UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting
the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories
presented its first report to the UN Secretary-General. That
first report, written before the policies, practices and intentions
of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem
had been made known to international diplomats and publics across
the globe, adopted a stern tone about refugees’ right to
return, deplored Israel’s “acts of destroying homes
of Arab civilian population, deportation of inhabitants and the
resorting to violence against inhabitants expressing their resentment
to occupation,” and then called upon the government of
Israel “to put an immediate end to such acts.”
While the
intervening years have changed many things, so much of the essence
of the occupation has stayed the same. Twenty years ago, when
the occupation was 20 years old and the first intifada broke
out, the UN Special Committee was still dutifully submitting
its annual report. By that time, the reports had started to betray
a sense of weariness. 1987 was marked, the Committee noted, “by
a recrudescence of tension and violence in the territories. According
to evidence observed by the Special Committee, it seems that,
after 20 years of occupation, the tragedy of the Palestinian
people persists.”
Indeed, the
tragedy not only persists, but grows in scale and becomes more
entrenched. In addition to the slow destruction of enforced poverty,
Israeli air force attacks on neighborhoods, land confiscations,
house demolitions, tree uprootings and the incarceration of thousands
of Palestinian political prisoners produce more spectacular forms
of devastation. During the last week of May 2007, the Israeli
army killed 19 Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories
and injured 67 people. Those are only some of the events in one
of the 2,080 weeks of life under occupation that have stretched
Palestinians’ fortitude thin.
Ending its
1987 report on a note of desperation, the Special Committee reiterated “its
hope that in view of the plight of the civilian population, the
international community will be more determined than ever in
its efforts to improve the conditions prevailing in the occupied
territories.” But now, 20 years on, it seems that the international
community has become more determined than ever to keep the Palestinians
down. This “community,” including Israel and the
US, punished Palestinians’ democratic success after the
January 2006 election of Hamas by imposing a financial siege
on the Palestinian Authority and tightening the noose around
the Gaza Strip.
Statistics
from 2006 reveal the results of this policy: Eighty percent of
households in the Gaza Strip earn less than $1 per day. The economic
suffocation produced by international sanctions and Israel’s
checkpoints and (no-) permit system reduced the Palestinian Authority’s
income by 60 percent. Poverty among government employees -- the
teachers, nurses and doctors who provide vital services of daily
life -- showed an increase from 35 percent to 71 percent. In
2006 alone, food insecurity rose by 13 percent. Israel’s
visa restrictions have meant that fewer internationals are able
to witness these conditions and offer their own forms of assistance.
Palestinians
have known poverty, oppression and existential insecurity since
the occupation began. Just as the UN, that structure and symbol
of the “international community,” has known about
it through its Special Committee, rapporteurs, agencies and observers.
These physical and economic pressures are not the result of any
natural disaster or irreversible social process. They are the
deliberate orchestrations of human agency. Israeli, US, Palestinian
and EU governments, as well as the citizens who vote them into
office, are responsible. Their tax dollars pay for the Apache
helicopters and Caterpillar bulldozers. Their companies sell
the cement that become checkpoints and walls.
The warring
factions of Hamas and Fatah in Gaza are also responsible. The
murderous, thuggish behavior of a handful of Palestinian men
vying for a pitiable form of partial power over an occupied strip
of land has thrown Gaza into chaos. That a political vacuum and
crushing economic conditions should lead to chaotic eruptions
is not surprising. That this should happen given how long and
unceasing has been their oppression is even less so. What is
surprising is that social chaos did not start to emerge sooner.
While this
bloody infighting gains immediate mainstream press coverage,
the ways in which most Palestinians manage to get by, and do
what they can to protest the inhuman conditions that the Israeli
occupation forces them into, are ignored. Palestinian teachers
have held strikes over unpaid wages, exercising a union’s
democratic right to pressure their government -- a right those
living in the union-bashing US may have forgotten exists. Thousands
marched on International Labor Day with banners proclaiming: “We
want to work and get paid, but we don’t want begging.” Palestinians
blog to express their disgust and frustration as much as their
hopes. Teenage girls rap: “With unity we’ll be stronger.” Artist
collectives make funny documentaries mocking inept Arab leaders
and delighting in their own sarcastic talkativeness. Scholars
write critical histories trying to learn from a past of foiled
efforts to realize independence. And Palestinians continue to
remind themselves, and ask others, to learn that when the occupation
ends, more of this creativity can be nurtured and put to building
a thriving society. As we stand in the shadow of 40 years of
occupation, is there anything we can we do to achieve that?
Lori Allen
is an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International
and Area Studies and an editor of Middle East Report.
Yoav Peled
With the fortieth
anniversary of the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967, the accumulated
ills of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories,
coupled with the devastation wrought by neoliberal economic policy,
have brought the country to its worst crisis of governability.
While the economy is booming and Israel’s international
standing remains high thanks to the September 11, 2001 attacks,
since the summer 2006 Lebanon war, most Israelis feel like passengers
stranded on a rudderless ship. Support for the government is
in the single digits, and the only thing keeping Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert in office is the fear of most members of the Knesset
that they will not be reelected if new elections are called.
In the meantime, lacking any legitimacy, the government cannot
tend to the country’s pressing business, most importantly,
ending the bloody conflict with the Palestinians.
It was Olmert’s
bad luck to succeed Ariel Sharon just as the steam was running
out of Sharon’s miracle: the wedding of an aggressive war
of politicide against the Palestinians with an aggressive economic
war against all but the richest Israelis. Until Sharon came to
power in 2001, it was widely believed that Israel had to choose
between economic liberalization and accommodation with the Palestinians,
on the one hand, and continuing occupation and a welfare state,
on the other. Sharon tried to cut that Gordian knot and pursue
liberalization and war simultaneously. The price he was willing
to pay was the withdrawal of Israel’s military forces and
Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West
Bank. The idea, however, was not to relinquish control of the
Palestinian territories and population, but to make that control
more cost-effective.
Sharon’s
scheme would have backfired with him at the helm too, but the
process was expedited by the inept Olmert. After two relatively
minor military provocations from Hamas and Hizballah, Olmert
abdicated his authority in favor of Chief of the General Staff
Dan Halutz, who launched a war for which the Israeli military
was ill-prepared and for which it did not possess any workable
plan. The sorry state of Israel's military resulted from years
of policing the occupied Palestinian territories, a process intensified
by the second intifada in 2000.
While irresponsibly
launching the Lebanon war of 2006, the government abandoned the
civilian population of northern Israel to Hizballah’s missile
attacks. Economic liberalization had meant the extensive privatization
of public services and the gradual stagnation of those that could
not be made profitable enough to be privatized. Maintenance of
public bomb shelters and supplying the needs of the people who
find refuge therein when under attack are not profitable activities.
Thus, these services were cut off, or provided very inadequately.
Lately, the
southern town of Sderot has been bombarded by Qassam missiles
from Gaza, an area that Israel has nominally evacuated, but that
it keeps under tight siege. Although Qassams have been falling
on Sderot on and off for years, the government has done nothing
either to solve the problem politically or to provide shelter
for residents. Enter Arkadi Gaidamak, a controversial multi-billionaire
of Russian origin who is being investigated for alleged financial
misdeeds. In the summer of 2006, Gaidamak evacuated 30,000 people
from the north and kept them housed and fed at his own expense
for a month. He has now taken it upon himself to fortify 1,300
apartments in Sderot against Qassam missiles, taking on the state’s
responsibility for protecting its citizens even as the state
fails to find a political resolution that addresses the roots
of the violence. There could be no more apt manifestation of
the demise of Israel’s social democracy after 40 years
of occupation. As prophesied, the occupation -- in addition to
its effects on the Palestinians -- has brought about the moral
and political bankruptcy of the Israeli state.
Yoav Peled
is professor of political science at Tel Aviv University.
Samera
Esmeir
1967 was a
year of setback for the Palestinians not only because Israel
occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but also because the
new occupation effectively set the older one of 1948 in stone.
As political attention quickly turned to the newly occupied areas,
it became more difficult to mount challenges to the earlier stages
of the occupation, or even to name them occupation. The “occupied
Palestinian territories” became the name of the Palestinian
areas occupied in 1967, not in 1948. While Israel, in many of
its official narratives, refers to the events of 1948 as occupation,
the reference to 1948 as occupation dropped from the international
vocabulary, effectively naturalizing the existence of Israel
and concealing the violence constitutive of its creation.
Since then,
attempts constantly to “catch up” with new forms
of Israeli subjugation shaped much of Palestinian politics, as
Israel consistently raised the stakes on its dispossession of
the Palestinians. If the settlements and green areas were the
main vehicle for dispossessing Palestinians and confiscating
their lands, soon the networks of highways and the separation
wall became new mechanisms. But among many Palestinians, this “catching
up” produced tragic politics characterized by amnesia.
For, if the Palestinians were expected to respond systematically
to the newly enacted empirical ends of the occupation, they had
to suspend their responses to previous ends. The trouble was
that new ends were always being introduced.
The politics
of amnesia produce a narrative that speaks of 1948 as an historical
event belonging to the past. This historicizing narrative, with
its understanding of history as moving forward from past to present,
is premised on forgetting the extent to which the deaths 1948
generated continued to live on in the present, and also on forgetting
the impossibility of redemption or the dissipation of such death
when attending only to the troubles of the present. Consequently,
the historical consciousness that resulted separated historical
time into discrete periods, while associating certain political
aspirations with confined temporal periods. But this consciousness
did not only guide Palestinians in their understanding of their
journey. More crucially, it also informed their political practice. This
was evident in the main forms of struggle that the Palestinians
waged since the establishment of the PLO in 1964. In the 1960s,
activism on Palestine focused on the demand to allow Palestinian
refugees to return to their homes. With the solidification of
the occupation, the occupation itself defined the Palestine question,
and Palestine conceptually shrunk into the areas occupied in
1967. With this shrinking, the solution to the Palestine question
came to be conceived as the end of the occupation and the establishment
of a Palestinian state on the territories occupied in 1967. Since
then, Palestine, and its question, have undergone a further metamorphosis.
Palestine has become the Palestinian Authority, established on
much less than the land occupied in 1967, and the question of
Palestine has become the Israeli-Arab conflict, effectively erasing
the injustice that the vocabulary of occupation emphasizes. Instead,
victims and perpetrators become two parties to a conflict awaiting
its international resolution, or worse, intervention.
So, rather
than conflict, it might be best to insist on the persistence
of the question of Palestine. This persistence suggests that
we separate the struggle against the occupation from the struggle
to reach a resolution to the question of Palestine. The second
should not be subsumed in the first, though the first requires
our urgent attention. Equally important is to separate both the
question of Palestine and the struggle against the occupation
from the establishment of the Palestinian state. Put differently,
state building should not constitute an alternative to, or the
mechanism for, ending the occupation or genuinely considering
the question of Palestine.
On the fortieth
anniversary of the 1967 war, it is worth remembering that the
struggle for a Palestinian state is a product of the same history
of dispossession that this state is meant to overcome. It, the
state, too, is trapped in a historicizing logic and can only
offer a solution to some of the recent ends that Israel set in
stone. And even this is no longer evident. With the network of
highways and the separation wall, it is unclear that a Palestinian
state can indeed constitute a response to the most recent escalations
in Israeli policy. This presents the Palestinians with two options.
The first is to persist with the politics of amnesia and to demand
the end of the wall and the end of checkpoints. The second is
to consider Israel’s escalations as an opportunity to redefine
the question of Palestine as a history of escalations, not as
their last episode. Rather than confining the question of Palestine,
and therefore its solution, the Palestinians might rescue it
from the nothingness Israeli policies have reduced it to. Ironically,
it is Israel’s arrogance and insistence on further shrinking
the question of Palestine that might lead, if the appropriate
politics were practiced, to a reconfiguration of that which was
destined to vanish.
Samera
Esmeir, an editor of Middle East Report, is a former
lawyer who now teaches in the Department of Rhetoric at the
University of California-Berkeley.
Robert
Blecher and Jeremy Pressman
Since 1967,
Israeli politics have been defined by the question of what to
do with the West Bank and Gaza and the Palestinians who live
there. This question, in some ways, is as old as Zionism itself;
early Jewish settlers upon arrival were confronted with the physical
reality of another people in the Holy Land. In a profound sense,
however, the 1967 war was a watershed that transformed Israel’s
geographic and political topography shortly after the state’s
nineteenth birthday. Once diplomacy came to focus on the occupied
territories, the spotlight shifted away from the lands of pre-1967
Israel. The former borders -- which Foreign Minister Abba Eban,
shortly after the 1967 war, famously dubbed “Auschwitz
borders” -- quickly came to be seen as indefensible despite
his country’s overwhelming victory. When the partition
of Palestine between Jews and Arabs reemerged as the focus of
diplomatic activity, it was the West Bank and Gaza that were
up for discussion, not the territory of Israel itself.
Yet with the
marking of the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 war, many in
Israel feel that the clock has been turned back, with fundamental
questions about the essence and future of the Jewish state open
to question. Despite Israel’s military dominance and nuclear
prowess, the waxing of Islamist movements in Iran, Lebanon and
the occupied territories have stoked existential fears. The definition
of Israel as a Jewish state, seemingly put to rest after contestation
by Palestinian citizens in the late 1950s and early 1960s, has
returned to the agenda as a new generation presses for an end
to Jewish privilege.
The occupation
of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, for its part, has not proven
any more tractable. The traditional solutions for resolving the
territorial deadlock are frozen: Proponents of the main ideological
positions -- trading land for peace and annexing the occupied
territories -- have suffered major setbacks, as have those backing
a more recent fad, unilateral Israeli withdrawals. Surveying
her state’s travails, a Jewish social worker confessed, “I’m
starting to think we have no future here.”
In the face
of these challenges, the state’s leadership is paralyzed
by corruption and incompetence. Corruption has reached such a
startling degree that, according to a January poll, Israelis
believe the highest priority for their country is cleaning up
the establishment and “salvaging the state” -- a
concern they ranked ahead of rehabilitating the Israeli military
and peacemaking with the Palestinians. Coupled with the army’s
lackluster performance in the war with Hizballah and Lebanon,
the scandals have crippled the Israeli government’s ability
to tackle the serious challenges the country faces.
Public soul-searching
has generated anxiety over the country’s moral decline,
but in a way that differs from that expressed in the past. For
many on the left and even in the center of the Israeli political
spectrum, ethical unease has often centered on the occupation
of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Today by contrast, almost two
years after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza
Strip and four settlements in the West Bank, the Jewish state’s
anxieties are directed inward. Israelis have taken former Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon’s assertion that his country no longer
bears “responsibility” for Gaza quite literally;
their ethical imagination, too, has disengaged from the Palestinians. “We
got out,” say many Israelis, “and still, the Palestinians
shoot rockets at us every day. It doesn’t matter what we
do.” The ball is now on the other side of the separation
barrier. Until Palestinians “prove their desire for peace,” as
Sharon phrased it to the UN in September 2005, they will have
no claim on the Israeli collective conscience.
Four decades
after the 1967 war changed the face of Israeli politics, the
legacies of 1948 remain central. When Israeli Jews look around
the region, they see an array of military threats, while at home,
their Palestinian compatriots assertively challenge the nature
of the state. The Winograd commission report, Labor Party primaries
and coming shakeups in the Kadima Party might seem to offer transformative
possibilities, but a substantive reorientation of the Israeli
political trajectory is improbable.
Robert
Blecher is an editor of Middle East Report. Jeremy Pressman
is an assistant professor of political science at the University
of Connecticut.
Mouin Rabbani
June 5, 2007
may well be the last time we commemorate a further decade of
Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
At the rate things are going -- the accelerated colonization
of West Bank territory most visibly represented by the wall that
Israel is building, and unprecedented levels of international
neglect/support for such policies -- these are unlikely to remain
occupied territories for much longer.
Prolonged
military occupation lasting successive decades was an untenable
proposition to begin with, and has been sustained only by international
law, the refusal of the international community to formally recognize
Israel’s territorial claims and, most pertinently, the
presence and resistance of the Palestinians in the form of individual
communities and, until recently, a coherent national movement.
By 2017 that
is likely to change. How the international community seeks to
accommodate Israel’s claims to strategic portions of the
West Bank while maintaining effective control over the rest,
and how the Palestinians and others in the region will respond,
are interesting questions. The answers are likely to combine
elements of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries:
the colonialism and ethnic structures of the first, the formal
adherence to independence of the second, and the belief of the
third that advanced technology can resolve the political challenge
resulting from the inherent contradictions of the first two.
Absent drastic
changes, remaining doubts about the feasibility of a two-state
settlement are also going to be removed in the coming years. Many
believe the point of no return has already been passed. Most
view it as imminent. The one certainty is that the two-state
settlement paradigm is not going to be replaced by that of a
secular democratic state -- desirable as the latter may be. Rather,
the more likely scenario is a regression toward existential conflict,
on a more bloody scale than seen thus far and probably with a
greater regional dimension than in recent decades.
In that context,
the fortieth anniversary of the Israeli military occupation of
the West Bank and Gaza Strip may well coincide with the completion
of Israel’s victory over the contemporary Palestinian national
movement. The murderous squabbling recently observed in the Gaza
Strip -- which can only be characterized as being about nothing
of even remote political or national significance and is essentially
a rumble between prison gangs about seats in a dining room where
meals are only occasionally served -- has the air of a movement’s
death throes about it.
The short-
and medium-term prospects therefore seem increasingly dim. Yet,
over the longer term, Israeli domination is equally unrealistic.
Just as its victories over Fatah produced Hamas, those over the
Palestinian national movement as a whole will produce something
fiercer still among Palestinians and others in the region --
perhaps represented in its embryonic stages by Fatah al-Islam
in Lebanon. Just as the concept of a benign occupation or one
accepted by the occupied has proven a fantasy, so the idea that
its ramifications can be contained to the occupied population
is equally illusory.
Mouin Rabbani
is a contributing editor to Middle East Report.
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