Just
over a year ago, I sat in a home near the Egyptian
border in Rafah, in the Gaza strip. A five-year-old,
curly-haired charmer of a girl was on my lap.
Her older sister and brothers did homework to
the background music of the thudding of bullets
into the walls. The children were so inured
to gunfire from the Israeli sniper towers and
tanks that they didn’t even react until
the gunfire grew so loud that the older ones dived
for the floor, the babies for the fragile shelter
of their mother’s arms.
I was there with the International Solidarity
Movement, which supports nonviolent resistance
against the Occupation. I’d come to help
the teams that were with our member Rachel Corrie,
who was crushed by a soldier in a bulldozer as
she attempted to stop a home demolition, and with
Tom Hurndall when he was shot trying to rescue
a group of children who were under fire from an
Israeli sniper tower.
I think of them, of the families I met and the
traumatized children who followed us in packs
whenever we ventured out on the streets, as I
read the horrifying reports of the last weeks
in Rafah. The homes I stayed in have been razed
to the ground, along with the crowded neighborhoods
where the old men would visit each other at twilight
to brew tea over a small fire and talk, where
the women still baked bread in clay ovens. The
olive groves, the orange trees have fallen to
bulldozers. Children like the ones I held and
sang to, and their parents, have been killed in
the demonstrations protesting the destruction
of their communities.
To make the lives of those more hopeful, and to
safeguard the lives of Israeli children, it is
vital that we understand the true thrust of Sharon’s
current policies. Sharon is the sleight-of-hand
magician, saying ‘Look here!” while
the real action is somewhere else. Sharon
says, “Look over here! We’re
pulling out of Gaza!” and Bush says, “OK,
and in return, we’ll stop looking at what
you’re doing in the West Bank.” But
Gaza and the West Bank are related, and unless
we keep our eyes on both, we’ll be victimized
by the shell game.
Firing on a crowd of peaceful demonstrators with
tank shells and helicopter gunships was such an
outrage that it finally caught the attention of
a jaded and cynical world. But the Israeli
military has been responding to nonviolent demonstrations
with extreme violence consistently throughout
the past months, when an upsurge of civil resistance
has arisen in the West Bank. This growing
nonviolent movement is focused against the so-called
‘security’ wall that the military
is building, which winds its way deep into Palestinian
territory, confiscating farmland without compensation,
scarring the green hills, uprooting ancient olive
trees, and destroying the very communities who
have historically had the most peaceful relationships
with their Israeli neighbors.
Those demonstrations have been supported by internationals
from the International Solidarity Movement, the
International Women’s Peace Service, and
other human rights groups. The villagers
have also called for help from the Israeli peace
community, and groups as diverse as Rabbis for
Human Rights, Bat Shalom, and Anarchists Against
the Wall have responded, along with many others.
Standing together, Palestinians, Israelis and
internationals have faced clubs, horses, and arrests,
and been fired on with sound bombs, tear gas,
rubber coated steel bullets, and real bullets.
In the village of Biddu alone, five Palestinians
have been shot to death and one has died of tear
gas inhalation in peaceful, unarmed protests.
Israelis, too, have been seriously
injured, and many have privately confessed to
me that they believe it is only a matter of time
before an Israeli is killed.
The first intifada, in the late eighties, was
primarily a movement of civil resistance, involving
every sector of society in acts of noncompliance
with the occupation, such as boycotts, work stoppages
and tax revolts. Among Palestinians, the
first intifada is seen as bringing Israel to the
bargaining table, establishing the PLO as the
negotiating voice of the Palestinian movement,
and laying the groundwork for the Oslo peace accords.
But the Oslo process is widely seen as one of
betrayal. During the decade of Oslo, Israel
continued to fund and support illegal settlements—really
armed suburbs planted on hilltops--in the West
Bank and Gaza, doubling the number of settlers.
They confiscated Palestinian land without
compensation, built a network of roads which are
off-limits to Palestinians and which divide and
segment their communities, and established a huge
military infrastructure to guard the settlers
and staff the checkpoints that restrict Palestinian
freedom of movement.. Disillusionment with Oslo
led to disbelief in the Israeli government’s
good faith, and formed the ground for the
armed struggle that characterizes the second intifada.
Only a tiny fraction of the Palestinian population
actively participates in armed resistance. The
vast majority of people want to defend their rights,
but don’t want to kill. A mass movement
of civil resistance could provide an avenue for
that struggle and kindle international sympathy
and support. A movement in which Palestinians
and Israelis struggle together, side by side,
facing the same clubs and bullets as they have
been in these past months, is tremendously threatening
to the power base of the Israeli right wing. So
this movement must be repressed, its leaders arrested,
international peace activists denied entry, and
demonstrations brutally repressed. The shooting
of demonstrators in the West Bank sets the stage
for the shelling of a demonstration in Gaza and
the deaths of dozens of Palestinians.
The West Bank is the goal of Sharon’s aborted
Gaza pullout. Gaza has few resources, was
not part of biblical Israel, and contains a large
and unruly Palestinian population who cannot easily
be integrated into Israel proper without threatening
the demographics that maintain the thin fiction
that Israel can be both Jewish and democratic,
while denying full rights to the twenty percent
of its own citizens who are Palestinian, and
keeping those who live in the territories under
martial law for decades.
In the contest for this region, the West Bank
is the prize. It contains some of the most
fertile land, two major aquifers, and regions
of still-unspoiled natural beauty. Most
importantly, it is the historic land of the Bible,
where Abraham walked and is buried, where Joshua
fought his battle of Jericho, where the prophets
thundered and the festivals were celebrated. The
West Bank was Judea and Samaria, the heart of
the promised land.
Trading Gaza for Bush’s tacit agreement
to the annexation of the West Bank looked like
a good deal to Sharon. However, he couldn’t
sell the deal to the right wing of his own party,
who don’t want to give up an inch or retreat
from so much as an outhouse. So now the
military has repaid assaults on soldiers by massive
home demolitions and all-out war on civilians.
The ‘security’ wall is not a response
to suicide bombings or some escalated condition
of danger. It is part of a long-planned
strategy, in place since the 1970s, to expand
the state of Israel into the coveted West Bank
lands. One piece of that strategy
has been the building of the illegal settlements’which
the wall encloses and, in effect, annexes along
with surrounding farmland, destroying the livelihood
of the neighboring Palestinian farmers. The linked
maze of barriers isolates many Palestinian villages,
enclosing them behind barbed wire, cutting them
off from each other and the rest of the West Bank,
and turning them into open-air prisons. The
wall and settlements are also linked to the building
of Israel’s transnational highway, which
will shift population within Israel proper to
the east, closer to the settlement blocs, so that
they can become fully integrated parts of Israel
proper.
The wall confiscates land that sits atop the major
aquifers of the region. Already the settlers,
who comprise less than 10% of the population of
the West Bank, use 80% of the water resources.
The wall will take what’s left.
The wall is the end of any possible Palestinian
state. The two-state solution was a reluctant
compromise for many Palestinians, but was adopted
and supported by their leadership and the vast
majority of those who live in the Occupied Territories.
It relinquished almost 80% of the historic
land of Palestine to Israel, in return for the
promise of an autonomous state on the other 20%.
To most Israelis, it seemed a reasonable
solution, and most Palestinians were willing to
accept it, however reluctantly.
With the construction of the wall, that option
is gone. The wall does not leave enough territory,
water or resources to constitute a state. It
creates isolated, open-air prisons out of the
Palestinian population centers.
Whether you personally favor a two-state, one-state
or no-state solution, unilaterally removing one
of the major options for the region is no way
to bring about either peace or security. And
if Sharon’s policies remove the option of
a separate state for Palestinians, we must ask
what end-game is he planning? Perpetual occupation,
eternal effectual imprisonment for four million
people? Transfer? Outright genocide?
These options, elsewhere, are called ‘ethnic
cleansing,’ and none of them are likely
to bring about increased security or peace for
Israel or the rest of the world.
A real policy of security would begin with a moratorium,
on Israel’s part, on the building of the
wall, on policies of ‘targeted assassinations’,
on attacks on civilians and brutal responses to
nonviolent demonstrations. Such acts would
be a small beginning of a change in course that
would demonstrate good faith and a genuine desire
for negotiations in which all people of the region
could have a voice in determining their future.
It is up to those of us in the US, which funds
the Occupation, and the international community
to raise our voices now, to put pressure on Sharon
to stop murdering civilians and children in the
name of security, and begin pursuing a true path
toward peace.
For a map of the wall, see:
http://www.gush-shalom.org/thewall/index.html
For information about the International Solidarity
Movement, see
www.palsolidarity.org
Copyright (c) 2004 by Starhawk. All rights reserved.
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