The Real Escalation Is the Destruction of Palestinian Space
Monday, October 3, 2022 at 01:58PM Through its conduct since Oslo, Israel has proven what the Palestinians have claimed for more than 100 years – that the goal of Zionism is to dispossess and expel them from their homeland
by Amira Hass 3 October 2022 Haaretz
The frenetic elections that take place with Italian frequency stands in contrast to the stability of Israeli policy in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem). By that, I mean the policy that, ever since the occupation began in 1967, has been breaking up Palestinian territory into as many small enclaves as possible, each surrounded and disconnected from each other by as many Jewish-only settlement blocs as possible. These blocs are expanding and are increasingly being connected to Israel by a network of roads that is upgraded frequently.
The shredding of Palestinian space is the first and most important escalation, a permanent one written in advance into all government plans. Every Palestinian witnesses it and experiences it personally. Israeli Jews ignore it, out of elective ignorance, indifference and because they profit from it.
This is the mother of all escalations, avout which every diplomat from the European Union or the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem receives regular reports. But in the mouths of their bosses at these nations’ foreign ministries, it is translated into cliches such as “we support Israel’s right to defend itself.” Diplomatic cynicism is also escalating.
Our media enthusiastically obsesses over minor, transient issues like the latest election poll and parrots ad nauseam the military/settler mantra about the escalation in Jenin. Its most important mission is to avoid dealing with what’s truly important – the planned, calculated territorial dissection that many Israelis have been carrying out with cold, juridical, surgical efficiency, wrapped in cunning, sophisticated propaganda and carefully calculated pious lustfulness. The geographic, demographic and aesthetic mutilation of Palestinian space is carried out in broad daylight.
Israelization is racing forward. Luxurious suburbs awash in greenery, signs at every intersection with ads for affordable single-family homes, new traffic circles, and malls which boast a neighborly atmosphere have all been turning Palestinian communities into two-dimensional scenery or hiding them completely behind iron gates, bypass roads, blocked roads and Israeli signs announcing that it’s illegal for Israelis to enter. Israel’s spatial planning screams the Palestinians’ redundancy and the unassailable superiority of residents of the Jewish colonies, now and in the future.
Here and there, Haaretz or +972 website report on acts of spatial rape perpetrated by Israel. But two or three reports per month, or even per week, don’t reflect its scale, pace and serial nature. To understand the destructiveness of Israeli planning in this Palestinian territory and the diligent work of breaking it apart, you have to keep redrawing the lines connecting thousands (did I say thousands? It’s millions) of points – the facts on the ground created by all Israeli governments over the years.
- It started with a military order from 1971 that abolished Palestinian towns’ planning authority. This order remains valid today in roughly 60 percent of the West Bank.
- It continues with the expropriation of land for military purposes and its subsequent transfer to the settlements, in violation of international law; forbidding Palestinian construction and development; environment-guzzling roads; agricultural land expropriated (“for the public’s needs”) to benefit every isolated settlement; California-style highways that connect the settlements to Israel; shining new paved roads that connect the heart of each settlement with its new neighborhoods and outposts – built several kilometers away – and in the process swallow up more of the nearby Palestinian villages’ land reserves and pasturage; a ban on Palestinian construction near these roads; and let’s not forget the security road that surrounds each settlement.
- First Settlers Beat Them Up, Then Ismail and His Family Were Jailed
- Settlers Attack Palestinians. The Israeli Army Punishes the Palestinians. Repeat
- The occupation is spinning out of control
- It is taken further by preventing Palestinians from accessing their lands for years, on various pretexts and through various means; limiting the amount of water allocated the Palestinians and restricting their own drills to find water; declaring hundreds of thousands of dunams of Palestinian land to be “state land”; allocating these state lands exclusively to Jews; creating army firing zones to block Palestinians’ natural rural development; acquiring land through forged sale documents; outposts that begin with mobile homes and turn into permanent villas; blocking the exits from nearby Palestinian villages for the sake of these outposts’ security; agricultural outposts that plant vineyards on ostensibly “abandoned” Palestinian land; and herding outposts, which are the new hot thing, so far the most gluttonous devourers of Palestinian land.
- And it concludes with cabinet decisions to legalize all of the above, as well as the separation fence, which imprisons large swaths of fertile Palestinian land to its west. The owners of this imprisoned land can obtain permits to access it at certain times only with great difficulty, but any Israeli can wander through it to his heart’s content, and sometimes even take it over.
You can quantify the enormous number of dunams taken over by the herding outposts again and again. You can calculate how many dunams have been expropriated from Palestinian areas, whether de jure or de facto. You can describe the teeth of the bulldozers that uproot olive groves both ancient and new. And you can measure almost to the inch how much clearly Palestinian agricultural land, with ancient wells and gurgling springs, has been converted into a treasury of real estate for Jews or green lungs free of Arabs (except for the workers), or on the way to becoming Arab-free.
But you have to connect all these facts again and again to understand how the land has been filled with settlement blocs – the Shiloh bloc, the eastern and western and northern Etzion blocs, the Reihan bloc, the Latrun enclave, the Talmonim bloc, the Ariel bloc, the Rimonim bloc, the bloc comprised of the Old City of Hebron plus Kiryat Arba. These will soon be joined by the northern Jordan Valley bloc, the Shima bloc in the southwestern Hebron Hills and the Susya bloc in the southeastern West Bank. And Israel’s grasping hand is still outstretched.
There’s no doubt that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s hope/plan of 1995 has been fulfilled. A month before he was murdered, he told the Knesset that one of the foundations of any permanent-status agreement would be “to establish settlement blocs like Gush Katif – and I wish theywere [already] established – in the West Bank as well.” Gush Katif, located in the Gaza Strip, was admittedly dismantled. But in its place, more and more settlement blocs and metastasis have been and still are being established in the West Bank including East Jerusalem, as numberless as the grains of sands on a beach.
Aside from the ongoing reports in the Palestinian press, Israeli organizations like Kerem Navot, Bimkom, Ir Amim, Peace Now, Emek Shaveh, B’Tselem and Yesh Din, as well as Arij, the Palestinian Applied Research Institute – Jerusalem, provide a great deal of information about all of the above, along with real-time alerts and periodic in-depth analyses. Nevertheless, anyone who hasn’t experienced this process or seen it with their own eyes will have trouble grasping the violence and destructiveness of these planning measures.
Dedicated lawyers, both self-employed and from organizations like Haqel, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and Hamoked – Center for the Defense of the Individual, together with Palestinian and Israeli activists from various organizations try to stop this serial rape, or at least send alerts. But these organizations, which are few and small in number, are increasingly being persecuted and marginalized.
The rightist media and settler organs frequently publish victorious reports about another Godly Zionist real estate achievement. Consumers of this media experience the shredding and fragmentation, and the compression of Palestinians into pales of settlement as a redemption of the land, the fulfilment of a divine commandment and a leap forward in their quality of life and material gains.
The settlers’ violence and their takeover of Palestinian land, beyond that of the official, published master plans, are an inseparable part of the system. The violence is reported on a bit more, because it’s a story with a plot. Nevertheless, despite occasional expressions of shock, the forces of “law” and order permitted and continue to permit this systematic violence, and thereby legitimize and encourage it.
It all takes place before the soldiers’ very eyes, yet they either stand aside or shoot the Palestinians who rush to the assistance of their brethren. The victims of the attacks are arrested, the Jewish assailants file complaints against the victims, the police either fail to locate any Jewish suspects or fail to question them, the case is closed due to lack of public interest, and the prosecution doesn’t file indictments. That’s what happens month after month, year after year.
The Jewish violence that accompanies every new outpost was and is like the urine a dog uses to mark his territory. After it comes the army, the planners, the settlements' regional council and the lawyers. Then they finish the job with mobile homes, followed by hookups to water and electricity, and most likely by taking over a spring and/or barring Palestinians from accessing their olive groves. The grove’s owners are allowed to go there only twice a year, with advance coordination and a military escort – if the settlers are so kind as to allow it.
But this is never a permanent, final border. More violence expands the territory even further, if only by a few dunams each time. And amid it, the pockets intended for the Palestinians get swallowed up. The smaller, denser and more isolated they are from other such pockets, the better.
Shattering the territory goes far beyond “thwarting the establishment of a Palestinian state.” It’s deliberate, institutionalized abuse of each and every one of the five million Palestinians living in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip (the severance of Gaza’s population from the West Bank's is part of this territorial segmentation). This abuse targets property and income, tradition and family life, the possibility of an education, social ties, freedom of movement, any chance of a future.
The institutionalized, sophisticated theft of territory assaults both the present and the history of every locale, city, village and family and harms the physical and mental health of every Palestinian. The problem with this territorial carve-up isn’t that it weakens the Palestinian Authority, but that it inevitably and intentionally sabotages the collective living in Gaza and the West Bank.
The world once promised that this collective’s right to independence and freedom would be realized. It promised and betrayed its promise. Only the Palestinians’ impressive rootedness and endurance have disrupted the Israeli master plan a tad.
Some people criticize the outgoing (anti-Netanyahu) government, which has been in place for the past year, saying it’s worse than its predecessors with regard to its policy in the West Bank – the high number of Palestinians killed by soldiers; the pogroms perpetrated by settlers with a green light from the police, prosecution and army; the plans to legalize outposts; and so forth. This accusation is both correct and incorrect.
Israeli security forces deploy on the roof of a Palestinian home during a search, following reports of a shooting attack on a bus in Salem village, near the West Bank city of Nablus, on Sunday.Credit: Majdi Mohammed /A
But it’s only by chance that the current government played this part in 2022. In 2023, the planning escalation will continue, because – disastrously for us – there’s no chance that the world will wake up anytime soon and exert significant pressure on Israel and Israelis to stop it.
This destruction and dispossession isn’t a new invention; Israel has both expertise and experience in this field. It is now doing in the West Bank what it has been doing within it's recognized borders ("the green line") ever since 1948.
In the early 1990s, when the diplomatic process between Israel and the PLO was launched, the logical expectation – on the part of the Palestinians; the Israeli peace camp, which once existed but no longer does; and the countries that lent their aegis to the Oslo process – was that Israel would stop this process of carving up and stealing land in 22 percent of historic Palestine. But under cover of the peace talks, Israel actually accelerated this process and developed an ever greater appetite for real estate.
It thereby proved the accuracy of the Palestinians’ analysis and claims for more than 100 years – that the goal, and the essence, of Zionism is their dispossession and expulsion from their lands and their homeland.
The Oslo Accord was worded vaguely enough that it was possible to waste time on interpretive arguments over the dates, the amount of territory to be transferred to Palestinian civilian authority in each military redeployment, the connection between Gaza and the West Bank, the return of the Palestinians uprooted in 1967, construction in the settlements, the right to water and the economy. Given the patently unequal balance of power, the interpretations and interests of the stronger side – Israel – obviously won out and were reflected in practical policy.
The interim period stipulated by that agreement was supposed to last five years and end in May 1999. By that time, the sides were supposed to have reached understandings about a permanent agreement that was then supposed to be implemented immediately.
The Palestinian leadership and the leaders of the Fatah party, which headed the PLO, as well as Israeli peaceniks and both Arab and Western countries, all concluded that the permanent agreement would be based on establishing an independent Palestinian state in the territory Israel occupied in 1967, despite the vehement opposition to such a state by the Israeli leaders responsible for Oslo, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. The belief of the Palestinian negotiators, headed by Yasser Arafat, that Israel had indeed decided to change its spots and stop taking over occupied Palestinian lands is a subject for historical, psychological and political research.
In exchange for a gradual shrinking of the occupation during the “interim period,” which was supposed to end 23 years ago with the transfer of most of the West Bank to Palestinian authority (that is, to what the Oslo Accord termed Area A), the Palestinian leadership agreed to begin security coordination and cooperation with the main mechanisms of the occupation – the Shin Bet security service and the army. It agreed to take action against members of its own people who used or advocated the use of weapons to oppose the agreement with Israel. The reasons it gave for this were that only the Palestinian Authority was entitled to bear arms, and that security coordination was essential to the success of the five-year-long interim phase, and thus to the establishment of the Palestinian state.
Almost 30 years have passed since then, and the promise embodied by the Oslo Accord – that the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank would be freed from the Israeli occupation – hasn’t been kept. Nevertheless, Israel demands that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian security services continue protecting the occupation – the settlers and the army. And Abbas and the security services obey. This behavior peaked two weeks ago, when, under a steamroller of Israeli pressure, the PA security services acted like an army of occupation and arrested a Palestinian in Nablus who was suspected of shooting at Israeli military targets and settlers.
What benefit or meaning there is in weapons that do nothing to stop the Israeli machinery of destruction and dispossession and leave tens of thousands of Palestinians prey to settler violence is a question for another article. But the absurdity is clear. The army and the Shin Bet have a Palestinian subcontractor. They continue to demand that it uphold its part of a deal that expired long ago and that Israel, from the very first moment, gutted of any respect of Palestinian rights, whether human rights or their rights as a people. How long will senior Fatah officials and the Palestinian security services continue collaborating with this Israeli escalation and humiliation? Only time will tell.
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