Just before I returned to Palestine in April there was a front page story in the New York Times which seemed to be gravely (and finally) coming clean about accurately characterizing Israel's unilateral prosecution of the "piece" process in the West Bank. In an April 19th story entitled "Israel, on its own, reshaping West Bank Borders" the current facts concerning the path of the "annexation" wall as reported by the Times were true enough. But what its reporter did with those facts in his disingenuous analysis was another matter.
While seeming to damn the course of the "annexation" wall with only the faintest of criticism, the story's total effect as a result of the reporter's artful spin seemed to encourage a conclusion in the reader that the current dimensions of the Sharon land grab is not a bad thing…logical in fact. Because, after all, he is only pulling 8 percent of West Bank land and only 10,000 Palestinians into a vastly diminished greater neo-Israel.
Dismissing those territorial percentage and population figures as only minimally significant represents just one facet of my quarrel with Times' spin. Another was its enlisting the analytical services of a so-called "expert" from a twenty year old Washington DC think tank (the Washington Institute For Near East Policy) to lend credibility to the newspaper's underrating thesis. "The real story," the "expert" opined to the clearly receptive Times "is how Mr. Settlement [Sharon, ED] who wanted to build on 100 percent of the West Bank, is down to 8 percent." Then the Times writer seconded the notion by describing Sharon's paring down as a kind of epochal magnanimity because only "63,000 settlers will live in the West Bank beyond the barrier."
Gosh only 63,000!!!
Should the Prime Minister really be praised for that?
Please. Doesn't anyone remember the Sudetenland in 1938….and what happened not too long after to Czechoslovakia in 1939? That snowballing episode is a cruel example of "piece in our time!" I think an argument could be made, despite the cataclysmic mayhem in Iraq and Afghanistan, that where the West Bank is concerned President Bush is the Neville Chamberlain of Palestinian freedom, complicit as he is in the area's dismemberment. The real story (the Institute's spokesman notwithstanding) which the Times avoided is the effect Israel's irreversible seizure of that 8 percent without benefit of negotiations is having on the rest of the West Bank, the areas in which the 63,000 remaining settlers have been set down ulcer like amidst about two million Palestinians. Nevertheless the Times reporter in a whopping assumption that has no historic Israeli parallel asserted, "The [63,000]…are likely to be stranded in an independent Palestine or having to move, for it is highly unlikely that in any negotiation this notional [an arcane word suggesting speculation, hypothetical, fanciful, ED] Israeli border, along the barrier's route, will move farther into the West Bank."
"Stranded!" "Move!" "Notional?" Was the presumably experienced reporter really serious? Leaving settlers behind is not the way it works with any Israeli government. Whether or not they wanted to leave, ultimately no settlers were left behind in the northern Sinai after Camp David I, and if the Gaza retreat does take place this summer no settlers will be left in place there either. So the impression that the 63,000 will be hung out to dry once the "annexation" wall as presently announced goes up is wily to say the least. And that is especially true so long as the Israelis have a friend in court like President Bush (the last in a long line of presidential appeasers) to declare that the settlements which have reached a certain size and density are no longer settlements but "population centers" that quite logically belong in a neo-Israel situated safely behind some future extension of the "annexation" wall. So in the absence of the U. S. devising any means to dissuade Israel's leaders from enlarging settlements until they metamorphose into population centers then it is not illogical to expect the eight percent to grow. In fact those 63,000 will continue to be protected in the manner to which they have long been accustomed…by the occupation, the ruthless condition behind all Palestinian misery.
The "occupation" is/was the rampaging elephant in the room in the Times story that never was mentioned let alone acknowledged. Like the energy rabbit the ruinous occupation keeps on going, because unchanging Israeli policy requires the Defense Ministry to carry out the government's colonial mission, which to begin with will continue to involve the protection of those 63,000 Jews not their Palestinian neighbors. But because the military is forbidden to lay a finger on a marauding Jew bent on violent harassment or the pushing of his or her settlement's boundaries further and further down from its hill top location, the continual encroachment of surrounding Palestinian land shielded by Israeli soldiers and border police continues. That's how settlement caterpillars have been able to emerge from their cocoons as fully formed U. S. administration and congress backed population center butterflies.
It is true that the Times did consult one refuting Palestinian Authority spokesman, Saeb Erekat, whose dire prediction that the continuation of the Sharon style piece process would result in "putting more Palestinians effectively in prison," was immediately followed by the Times reporter solemnly reporting (perhaps to take the sting out of Erekat's complaint) that, "Eight percent is half of what the figure was last summer, before the Israeli Supreme Court told the Government to move the barrier closer to the Green Line."
Thanks. We needed that editorial qualification, because after all, we all do know don't we, how shrill, or is it hysterical that the hyperbole prone Saeb Erekat gets when you put him in front of a camera.
After all, eight percent of the land and 10,000, now doubly stateless, Palestinians should hardly matter or be missed. But consider this: if one were to proportionally compare the eight percent of Palestine that the Israeli high court jurists say is ok to disappear behind the "annexation" wall to for instance a crucial part of America's agricultural heartland, here's what would happen. The area being unilaterally disconnected from the rest of the U. S. would encompass the very critical tier of states starting down from the Canadian border through North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. So what's the big deal? The big deal in part is that Israeli Supreme Court rulings are sometimes what Israel's Ministry of Defense wraps yesterday's garbage in. The magic words the military uses to circumvent such rulings are, "for security reasons."
For example, take Tel Rumeida. That's the small inner city settlement established along a ridge overlooking Hebron's Old City. The handful of ultra Orthodox ultra nationalist settlers living there are among the most violently aggressive in the West Bank. For several months now they have been ratcheting up their perpetual menacing of Palestinians still hanging on to their homes and way of life on the slope lying directly beneath Tel Rumeida between it and settler only Shuhada street running about a quarter of a mile below.
But that is a story that the settlers and the military definitely don't want to get out. For instance here's what happened earlier this week on Shuhada Street as I was about to lead a group of interested upper middle aged and beyond visitors up to Tel Rumeida so that they could see for themselves what's been going on. As we passed the military outpost just before the road leading to Beit Romano, a pack of about thirteen young adolescent along with what appeared to be some ten and eleven year old settler kids came swooping down on us yelling and snarling at us to leave. Then they began stoning us…at close range. Actually some threw rocks - not just stones - some the size of tennis balls. My effort to move the astonished and momentarily transfixed group out of range was fortuitously assisted by an Israeli soldier who came to the outpost entrance to see what the noise was all about. Seeing what was happening he rushed over to the kids and quickly shooed them off.
That episode, however, was small potatoes compared to what happened to sixty compassionate Israeli nonviolent peace activists, their Palestinian colleagues, a handful of CPTers and other internationals when there was an attempt to show these Israeli friends first hand what has been happening there. We learned quickly how adamant the settlers and the military are about trying to keep the story quiet. In the words of our would be Palestinian host the settler violence we were subjected to that afternoon was some of the worst he and his frightened but not cowed family have experienced in a very long time.
(To be continued)