The Golden Strawberry

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a ubiquitous presence on our TV screens and in our newspapers for a generation. The reports of Palestinians being killed by the Israeli army; of suicide bombings in Israel; of fanatical religious zealots on both sides; of groups with sinister sounding titles like Hamas and Fatah and, of government officials around the world ironically chanting the mantras of peace whilst simultaneously supporting successive Israeli governments who do nothing to bring it about, have left many of us (to our shame) with a sense of weariness about the whole depressing business.

‘Those silly Israelis and Palestinians are fighting again,’ we might think, as we zap the TV to a more aesthetically pleasing program. The conflict has been dragging on for so long, with so much hatred having been built up over decades of hostility and suspicion, that the prospect of any solution may seem a fool’s hope. Indeed, if you visit Palestine, you may despair at what you find there. There are several reasons to believe that things have taken a turn for the worse in recent years, and that any equitable resolution of this festering sore is further away than ever. Nearly all of these problems can be laid squarely at the door of the Israeli government, which is the single biggest obstacle to peace.

Firstly, the construction of the ‘Separation Fence’, which now cuts across the rolling, biblical hills of the West Bank. Constructed in the name of ‘Security’ This Wall is a ploy by the Israeli government to make the creation of an economically viable and territorially cohesive Palestinian state even more unfeasible. Anyone who sees it for themselves cannot but recognize that this is a symbol of oppression, Imperialism and Colonialism, part of the same noxious brood as the Berlin Wall. This wall does not ‘separate’ Israelis from Palestinians; rather, it runs right through the middle of numerous Palestinian towns, separating them from each other. It cuts across numerous roads, such as the main highway between East Jerusalem and Ramallah. The Palestinians now have to use a road that is little more than a dirt track to move between two of their largest cities; in winter it turns to mud, in the summer its dust swirls up and makes driving difficult. It snakes into the West Bank, effectively annexing large slabs of Palestinian land for Israel; the United Nations Relief and Works Agency has reported that nearly 200,000 Palestinians had been ‘directly affected’ by the construction of the wall.

Secondly, Israeli government support for Jewish colonies (often euphemized to ‘Settlement’) built in the West Bank. The Israeli pullout and forcible removal of some messianic colonists from Gaza was a feint, a smokescreen designed to distract global opinion from the government’s real goal – strengthening their grip on the West Bank. According to the Jerusalem Post, there were 267,000 colonists in the West Bank in 2006. These people have no right to be there under international law and their presence is universally opposed by the Palestinians. New settlements are being constructed all the time. Whilst in East Jerusalem, I came across a huge bill-board for a new Israeli colony. It is to be called ‘Nof Zion’ and it immediately reminded me of one of those gated communities that proliferate in the United States – it is designed so that its inhabitants will not have to mix with the 8000 Palestinian families who inhabit East Jerusalem. It is to have a country club, park, kindergarten, shopping centre, hotel and synagogue, and will be surrounded by a nice big wall. This settlement is nothing compared to the vast townships the Israelis have constructed deeper in the West Bank. Colonies such as Modi'in Illit (pop. 34,514), and Ma'ale Adummim (33,259) are vast and well organized communities, whose populace will not be moved easily. One more thing, it is commonly assumed that the West Bank colonies are inhabited solely by lunatic religious zealots, who choose to live there because they believe it is their biblical right to do so. There are many such people, such as the psychopathic Baruch Marzel, who lives in a colony of 800 people in the middle of the Palestinian city of Hebron (pop 120,000). Marzel is an extreme right winger and the leader of the Jewish National Front. However, it is very important to realize that Marzel and his ilk are in the minority. Most colonists are people who move because they want a better quality of life and a lower cost of living than in the large Israeli cities such as Tel Aviv.

Thirdly, continued Israeli demolition of Palestinian houses. The Israeli government has bureaucratized the entire process of house demolition – thus making it seem like a relatively mundane, everyday occurrence. The army hires out private sub-contractors to do its dirty work; Western firms such as Caterpillar manufacture the monstrous juggernauts which do the deed and crush people’s homes. In East Jerusalem alone, one hundred and twenty homes are demolished each year – two a week. The methodology of eviction is simple. A notice is posted on the door of the house which has been condemned, usually very early in the morning. This notice informs the occupants that their house has been selected for demolition – they are then offered a ironically disgusting choice. They can demolish their own house or, if they don’t have the means or refuse to, the Bureaucracy will do it for them. Twenty four hours later, the bulldozers move in and the house is in ruins. This deadline is absolute; any possessions still remaining inside are obliterated along with the building. Whilst walking through East Jerusalem, I saw several demolished house. The rubble has just been left there; the Israeli bureaucracy seldom pays for the clean up and the local Palestinian municipal authorities do not have the resources to do so (this is because 80% of the public works budget of Jerusalem is spent in the West). Such is the complete annihilation of these houses, you might think that they have been hit by a missile or bomb: nothing so glamorous; this is deliberate and grey-faced bureaucracy as agent of Oppression. One house was so utterly destroyed that the steel wires that supported its walls were tangled up like a mass of intestines – they were a rusty, bloody red color; there were various household possessions littering the site – a cushion from a sofa here, fragments of pottery there, I even saw a door mat, which was perhaps the first thing the bulldozer moved across as it erased a seven-story house which was home to perhaps as many as eight families. Along with its colonies, the arbitrary destruction of Palestinian homes is part of the Israeli government’s policy of disrupting the lives of Palestinian citizens.

Fourthly, the web of highways currently being constructed by the Israeli authorities in the West Bank. These are well-metalled motorways often lined with high walls, along which cars speed down at one hundred and twenty kilometers an hour. They have no crossing points, but then that is the point. They are built to isolate Palestinian towns and settlements from each other and retard communication and economic development. These Highways of hell also serve to connect Israeli colonies with the motherland, making the colonists feel like they are in Israel, when, in actual fact, they are in another country. This was starkly illustrated when I left an Israeli colony, only to see a large road sign pointing the way to Tel Aviv – ‘Don’t worry’, the sign was saying, ‘You are still in Israel.’ All this is part of an attempt to erase the Palestinians from the map. Notably, all of the tourist maps I was given in West Jerusalem stopped with the Eastern walls of the Old City. East Jerusalem, which lay just beyond, and is overwhelmingly Palestinian, was not on the map.

These government sponsored projects constitute what has been dubbed the Israeli ‘matrix of Control’ over the West Bank. They are designed to subjugate the millions of people who live there, to drive them to despair, and to prevent the emergence of any sort of viable Palestinian state. This has been Israeli government policy for decades. In perhaps the saddest conversation I had whilst in Palestine, I asked my guide Abu Mazen who he preferred in Israeli domestic politics, Labour or Likud? His answer shocked me. Even though he hated them all for what they had done to his people, he reserved a special antipathy for the Labour Party and, in particular, Shimon Peres. ‘At least Likud is honest about what they think of me,’ he said. ‘They hate us.’

Likud, now part of Ariel Sharon’s new Kadima Party, is the descendent of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist movement which wants to see a Jewish state on both banks of the river Jordan, and advocates an ‘Iron Wall’ approach to the Palestinians and Arabs. In his 1923 pamphlet, Jabotinsky recognizes that the Palestinians will resist Jewish settlement. He says, perceptively, ‘Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel”.’

Abu Mazen continued, ‘Labour stabs us in the back. They promise peace and then do not deliver.’ Indeed, support for the ‘Seperation wall’ has been particularly forthcoming from the Zionist Left; they see forced separation as the best way to put the conflict on hiatus. Much of the Right wing opposes the barrier, as they see it as putting a limit on how much territory Israel can seize.

There were five women and one man with us. Several young children ran in and out; one had a tricycle and spent the entire meeting zooming around the coffee table, another little boy was encouraged by his mother to shake our hands, which he did, albeit rather bashfully. There was one very old lady sitting in the corner; I was told she was over one hundred years old - she certainly looked it. Abu Mazen translated whilst we heard her story. She had been living in this refugee camp for the past sixty years, ever since she had been driven from her home during the Nakba of 1948. She still owned the keys and deeds to the house she had lived in before she had fled – apparently now her house has gone, and a shopping mall has been constructed in the place where she used to live. Three of her daughters, now middle aged, were also sitting in the room. One of them was particularly vocal and talkative, and she was eager to answer any questions we had for her. We asked her who the picture of the man on the wall was of. ‘It is of my husband,’’ she answered, ‘he was killed by the Israelis almost twenty years ago.’

She then motioned to the man who was sitting in the room. ‘He is my son’. Abu Mazen then told us that, whilst he had been working in a Newsagent, he had been shot three times in the stomach with exploding bullets by Israeli soldiers. He was paralyzed from the waist down, and his face looked thin and unwell. What I didn’t realize, however, was that, on top of everything else, this man was deaf. He had motioned for me to sit next to him on his bed when I walked in, and I had assumed that he could hear my muttered ‘Thank you’. Not so. Along with his sister, he was completely unable to hear. His sibling then entered the room, bearing a tray of tea for us to drink; she was smiling, but her face was unbearably sad. Here was a woman who had suffered much. My suspicion was proved right - Abu Mazen told us that her husband had been ‘martyred’ by the Israelis. She had been awarded a wooden plaque for this ‘great honour’, as many people call it. I asked to see it. The plaque was made out of cheap plywood and stood on top of the television set, no bigger than a saucer. As we left, the talkative lady asked us if we could still believe that all her people were terrorists, like the media says they are. I shook my head and left, only after having shaken the hand of everyone in the room first.

The refugee camp had only one school, and it was run by the UN. Class sizes were upward of 50, and all the foreign teachers had left due to the mounting violence and tension in the camp. We were shown a youth club, where Palestinian kids went to play sports and use the computers. There were three monuments outside the entrance; two of them were to the Palestinians who had died in the first and second Intifadas, the third was for the dead Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat, and it bore his portrait, with him wearing his distinctive black and white head-dress. My guide told me that the Israelis, during one of their ‘incursions’ (another euphemism, they are brutal attacks), they had stormed into the youth centre and smashed all the computers. It seemed like a petty thing to do, so I asked Abu Mazen why they had done it. ‘Simple’ he said, ‘to make the kids feel desperate.’ Abu seemed convinced that the Israelis simply wanted to grind his people into the dust and, seeing things from his perspective, there seemed little reason to think the Israelis have been engaged in doing anything but that in the West Bank. He put it simply, ‘The Israelis have turned our land into a prison camp.’

This conflict is all about History. Both sides are acutely aware of the history of the conflict, but, sadly, neither can accept the others interpretation of events. Palestinians see Israelis solely as the latest Western European colonial occupiers of the Middle East. They are continuing the long tradition of European humiliation of the Arab people; stealing their land and resources and showing no respect for a civilization with a glorious history. Israelis, for their part, see the Palestinians as the latest in a long line of gentile Anti-Semites, who have no dearer wish than to slit Jewish throats and ‘drive them into the sea’. Israeli society is paranoid, and not completely without reason – suicide bombings on Israeli civilians within Israel are horrific and utterly unacceptable.

This is tragic, because both groups of people have been abused and humiliated by the same Continent – Europe. As is often the case, two children of an abusive parent do not get on. They see the face of their abuser whenever they look at their brother or sister, and come to hate them as much as they do their real foe.

On the Israeli side of the debate, things seem like they are maturing slightly. In the past twenty years, with the opening of Israeli government records regarding the 1948 War (known to Israelis as the ‘War of Independence’ and the Palestinians as the Nakba – ‘Catastrophe’), a group of historians (the ‘New Historians’) have been challenging the official Zionist historical narrative of the conflict. Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim and (to a lesser extent, because his politics are rabid) Benny Morris are all engaged in the rewriting of Israel’s history to fit the facts. There are many Israeli peace groups who are campaigning for an end to the Occupation – Peace Now and Breaking the Silence are only the two most notable. The Israeli Communist Party, which has a record of bad politics but good social struggle, has three seats in the Knesset.

Amongst the Palestinians I met, there was one fellow who stood out. His name was Bashar, he was born and raised in East Jerusalem and had studied in America; he now works for the World Bank. Bashar was in the process of setting up a new political party for Palestinians, with its emphasis being on moderation. Moderate in religion, moderate in politics, moderate in rhetoric, it would stand for what he called the ‘silent majority’ in Palestine, those people who so often feel sidelined by the quarreling of Hamas and Fatah. He had high hopes for his new organization and, observing his poised manner and wide-ranging intellect, I had little reason to doubt his optimism.

It seems that this conflict will not be solved through love, there is too much toxic nationalism on both sides for that to happen. Peace, however, is achievable, and the onus is on the Israeli government to make it happen. The Israeli novelist Amos Oz, perhaps best summed up this tragic situation when he said,

''The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a tragedy, a clash between one very powerful, very convincing, very painful claim over this land and another no less powerful, no less convincing claim. Now such a clash between right claims can be revolved in one of two manners. There's the Shakespeare tradition of resolving a tragedy with the stage hewed with dead bodies and justice of sorts prevails. But there is also the Chekhov tradition. In the conclusion of the tragedy by Chekhov, everyone is disappointed, disillusioned, embittered, heartbroken, but alive. And my colleagues and I have been working, trying...not to find the sentimental happy ending, a brotherly love, a sudden honeymoon to the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy, but a Chekhovian ending, which means clenched teeth compromise. ''

Israel is a beautiful country. Anyone who has read modern Hebrew literature, or who has seen the magnificent city of Tel Aviv, which literally rose out of a few sand dunes; anyone who is aware of what a liberating thing it is for Jewish people to have a safe haven from Anti-Semitism; anyone who admires Israel’s democratic government and free media, cannot but think that, to save Israel, Palestine must be free.

-posted by Adam