Deepening crisis,

Economic conditions in the West Bank as well as Gaza are deteriorating, leaving many incensed at the masquerade of peace talks, writes Khaled Amayreh in Ramallah

As 1.5 million Gazans are crying out to the world to pressure Israel to lift its scandalously callous blockade of the coastal territory, another 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank are struggling to cope with an unprecedented economic crisis that is further impoverishing and exhausting them.

The crisis, the harshest in recent memory, stems from a host of local and global factors, including soaring food and energy prices, sagging currency value, rampant joblessness and draconian Israeli restrictions on the movement of people, goods and services.

Further exacerbating these conditions is a devastating drought, unseen for decades, and which has nearly destroyed this year's grain crops upon which many Palestinian families depend for their livelihood. And the drought is not just affecting farmers. Coupled with a phenomenal rise in temperatures, it is also expected to cause a serious water shortage crisis in most localities, especially in the summer months.

Some Palestinians are already at loss as to how they will be able to cope with the steep rise in basic commodities.

Take flour, for example -- a staple for most Palestinian families. Last year, a sack of wheat flour weighing 50 kilogrammes cost 70 Israeli Shekels, or $20. Today, the same amount costs 210 Israeli Shekels or $65. Prices of other basic consumer products, such as rice, sugar, cooking oil, meat, including poultry, vegetables and fruits have likewise skyrocketed, making them nearly unaffordable for many Palestinian families. This week, a kilo of medium-quality tomatoes was sold in the Hebron region for 10 Israeli Shekels or $3.

Further, the price of electricity and cooking gas have become a real burden for the poorer segments of society, with many families unable to pay their accumulating utility bills, some resorting to burning wood for cooking. Added to that is the freefall in the value of the Jordanian Dinar, the main currency of Palestinian savings. The Dinar has lost a fourth of its value against the Israeli Shekel.

The Palestinian Authority (PA), which depends to a large extent on handouts from the West and oil-rich Arab countries, has failed to deal with the evolving crisis.
Last week, the Federation of Palestinian Labour Unions, launched a "warning strike" to protest against the high cost of living as well as the government's refusal to pay the accumulating salaries of thousands of school teachers and other civil servants appointed in 2006 following Hamas's electoral victory.

Initially, the government of Salam Fayyad rattled sabres in the face of the striking civil servants, vowing to prosecute and punish strikers. The government eventually backed down, however, promising to resolve "all issues" in a friendly manner and through dialogue.
With PA-Israeli peace talks going nowhere, and with Israel continuing to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank, effectively annulling any remaining prospect for a viable Palestinian state, the next few months are predicted to be crucial in terms of how the Palestinians will elect to manage their national ordeal.

Al-Ahram Weekly asked Palestinian economist Hazem Kawasmi how he thought the Palestinian masses would cope with the present economic crunch. Kawasmi said he foresaw an "unprecedented" and "historic deterioration" in the Palestinian economy that would shake the political and economic system in Palestine and the region.

As to the situation in the Gaza Strip, where there is economic meltdown resulting from the hermetic Israeli blockade, Kawasmi predicts an "explosion" in the coming few weeks or months. This explosion, he argued, would again be directed towards the Egyptian border, for the sake of getting food, medicine and all kinds of goods that don't exist today in the Gaza Strip.
"One cannot expect people to live in hunger and in high rates of poverty and unemployment for a long time. There is no convincing justification why the Palestinian- Egyptian border at Rafah has not opened yet, even on temporary basis, leaving Gazan children, women and elderly people to die slowly and suffer on a daily basis," he said.

The Palestinian people in Gaza, Kawasmi said, shouldn't continue to suffer until all political problems in the region are solved, adding that unless there is an immediate economic arrangement on Rafah that will facilitate the movement of goods and people across the border, the Gazan economy will soon collapse entirely.

As to the West Bank, Kawasmi points out that Israel is taking steps to disengage itself economically from the West Bank. As soon as the so-called apartheid wall is completed, Kawasmi argues, "the basis for the new economic relationship will be, from an Israeli view point: 'We are here, and you are there, and we don't care.'"

In this context, Palestinians are growing disillusioned with peace talks with Israel. According to a poll conducted in mid-April by the Jerusalem Centre for Information and Communication, the proportion of Palestinians supporting the two-state solution fell from 53 per cent in October 2007 to 47 per cent now. Similarly, those who voiced optimism about the possibility of reaching a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fell substantially from 44.9 per cent last year to 36 per cent now.

According to the poll, Palestinians are voicing a variety of views as to the alternatives available to the current political deadlock, with more than 27 per cent advocating a third Intifada or uprising, and 37 per cent calling for dismantling and dissolving the PA. Nearly 13 per cent favoured a unilateral declaration of independence.
To be sure, Palestinian frustration with the peace process is more than justified since that process has so far yielded no substantive outcome despite numerous talk sessions, highlighted meetings -- involving American, Israeli and Palestinian leaders -- as well as a number of peace conferences in the US and Europe.

This week, Henry Siegman, director of the US/Middle East Project in New York, underscored the bankruptcy and disingenuousness of the peace process. "What is required of statesmen is not more peace conferences or clever adjustments to previous peace formulations but the moral and political courage to end their collaboration with the massive hoax the peace process has been turned into," he said.

"Of course," he added, "Palestinian violence must be condemned and stopped, particularly when it targets civilians. But is it not utterly disingenuous to pretend that Israel's occupation -- maintained by Israel's army- manned checkpoint and barricades, helicopter gun-ships, jet fighters, targeted assassinations, and military incursions, not to speak of the massive theft of Palestinian lands -- is not an exercise in continuous and unrelenting violence against more than three million civilians? If Israel were to renounce violence, could the occupation last even one day?"

On Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory 3-9 April 2008

PCHRPalestinian Centre for Human Rights
http://www.pchrgaza.org/
Weekly Report: On Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory
No. 15/2008
03-09 April 2008


Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) Continue Systematic Attacks against Palestinian Civilians and Property in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT)

8 Palestinians, including a child and a farmer, were killed by IOF in the Gaza Strip.

5 of the victims, including a child and his uncle, were killed in a series of attacks launched by IOF against the east of Gaza City in less than 5 hours.

A Palestinian child was run down to death by an Israeli settler.

25 Palestinian, including 5 children, were wounded by IOF in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

IOF conducted 30 incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank, and 7 ones into the Gaza Strip.

IOF arrested 65 Palestinian civilians, including 7 children and a girl, in the West Bank and 10 others, including 3 children, in the Gaza Strip.

IOF razed at least 125 donums[1] of agricultural land.

IOF damaged a number of civilian facilities in the northeast of Gaza City.

IOF raided a number of charities and NGOs in Ramallah and al-Bireh.

IOF raided and searched a number of charities, mosques and shops in Qalqilya, and closed 4 charities.

IOF have continued to impose a total siege on the OPT.

The fuel crisis in the Gaza Strip has escalated.

6 Palestinian civilian were arrested by IOF at military checkpoints in the West Bank.

IOF have continued settlement activities in the West Bank and Israeli settlers have continued to attacks Palestinian civilians and property.

2 Israeli settlers attacked a Palestinian family near Nablus.

Summary

Israeli violations of international law and humanitarian law seriously escalated in the OPT, especially in the Gaza Strip, during the reporting period (3 – 9 April 2008):

Shooting: During the reporting period, IOF killed 8 Palestinians, including a child and a farmer, and wounded 24 others, including 5 children, in the Gaza Strip. They also wounded 2 Palestinian civilians, including a child, in the West Bank.

In the Gaza Strip, on 9 April 2008, IOF killed 4 Palestinian civilian and an activist of the Palestinian resistance in less than 5 hours in a series of attacks against the east of Gaza City, after activists of the Palestinian resistance had killed 2 Israelis near Nahal Ouz crossing, east of Gaza City. Additionally, 11 Palestinians, including 2 children, were wounded. On 3 April 2008, 6 Palestinians, including 5 civilians, were wounded when IOF moved into al-Sraij area in al-Qarara village, northeast of Khan Yunis. On 5 April 2008, 2 Palestinian children were wounded in al-Qarara village when they played with a shell left by IOF. On the same day, IOF killed a Palestinian farmer and wounded his nephew in Jabalya town. On 4 April 2008, a Palestinian child was wounded by IOF in al-Boreij refugee camp. On 8 and 9 April 2008, IOF killed 2 activists of the Palestinian resistance and wounded 2 others during incursions into al-Qarara village and Jabalya town.

In the West Bank, on 3 April 2008, IOF wounded a Palestinian civilian in Hebron, claiming that he wanted to seize a gun from an IOF soldier. On 9 April 2008, a Palestinian child was wounded in Beit Reema village, northwest of Ramallah, when IOF fired at a number of children who threw stones at military vehicles. Two Palestinian children also sustained bruises and dozens of civilians suffered from tear gas inhalation when IOF used force to disperse peaceful demonstration organized in protest to the construction of the Annexation Wall in al-Ma'sara village, south of Bethlehem, and Bal'ein village, west of Ramallah.

Incursions: During the reporting period, IOF conducted at least 30 military incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank. IOF arrested 65 Palestinian civilians. Thus, the number of Palestinian civilians arrested by IOF in the West Bank since the beginning of 2008 has mounted to 875.

In the Gaza Strip, IOF conducted 7 limited incursions into Palestinian communities. During these incursions, IOF arrested 10, including 3 children, razed at least 125 donums of agricultural land and destroyed some civilian facilities.

Restrictions on Movement: IOF have continued to impose a tightened siege on the OPT and imposed severe restrictions on the movement of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem.

Gaza Strip

IOF have continued to close all border crossings of the Gaza Strip for more than one year and a half. The total siege imposed by IOF on the Gaza Strip has left disastrous impacts on the humanitarian situation and has violated the economic and social rights of the nearly 1.5 million Palestinian civilian population, particularly the rights to appropriate living conditions, health and education. It has also paralyzed most economic sectors. Furthermore, severe restrictions have been imposed on the movement of the Palestinian civilian population. The siege imposed on the Gaza Strip has severely impacted the flow of food, medical supplies and other necessities such as fuel, construction materials and raw materials for various economic sectors. IOF have further tightened the siege imposed on the Gaza Strip since Hamas' takeover of the Gaza Strip, and the living and economic conditions of Palestinian civilians have further deteriorated. In September 2007, the Israeli government declared the Gaza Strip as "a hostile entity," which implies imposing more restrictions and measures of collective punishment against the Palestinian civilian population. Since then, IOF have sharply decreased food and fuel supplies allowed into the Gaza Strip. IOF have continued to prevent the entry of raw materials into the Gaza Strip, and subsequently many factories have stopped their industrial activities. Concerning the movement of persons, IOF allow a few Palestinian civilians to pass through Beit Hanoun (Erez) crossing to travel to the West Bank. Rafah International Crossing Point on the Egyptian border is the sole outlet for the Gaza Strip to the outside world. IOF have closed Rafah International Crossing Point, even though they do not directly control it. They have prevented European observers working at the crossing point form reaching it.

The closure of border crossings deprives the Palestinian civilian population in the Gaza Strip of their right to freedom of movement, education and health. IOF have continued to impose severe restrictions on fishing in the Gaza Strip. Fishermen have been subjected to intensive monitoring by IOF, which use helicopter gunships and gunboats to monitor the fishermen. The Oslo Accords allow Palestinian fishermen to go fishing up to 20 nautical miles away from the Gaza seashore.

West Bank

Contrary to Israeli claims of easing restrictions on the movement of Palestinian civilians, IOF have continued to impose severe restrictions on the movement of Palestinian civilians throughout the West Bank. Thousands of Palestinian civilians from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have been denied access to Jerusalem. IOF have established many checkpoints around and inside the city. Restrictions of the movement of Palestinian civilians often escalate on Fridays to prevent them from praying at the al-Aqsa Mosque. IOF often violently beat Palestinian civilians who attempt to bypass checkpoints and enter the city. IOF have also tightened the siege imposed on Palestinian communities in the West Bank. IOF positioned at various checkpoints in the West Bank have continued to impose severe restrictions on the movement of Palestinian civilians. IOF also erected more checkpoints on the main roads and intersections in the West Bank. During the reporting period, IOF troops positioned at various checkpoints in the West Bank arrested 6 Palestinian civilians.

Settlement Activities: IOF have continued settlement activities and Israeli settlers living in the OPT in violation of international humanitarian law have continued to attack Palestinian civilians and property. On Monday evening, 7 April 2008, an Israeli settler driving a bus ran down to death a Palestinian child to the east of Nablus. The child was on a donkey grazing animals crossing the bypass road to the east of Salam village. An Israeli bus coming from the east ran him down to death. His donkey and 8 sheep were also killed. On 9 April 2008, 2 Israeli settlers attacked a Palestinian vehicle near Nablus. As a result, 2 women were injured.

The full report is available online at:
html format:
http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/W_report/English/2008/10-04-2008.htm
pdf format:
http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/W_report/English/2008/pdf/weekly%20report%2015.pdf

Grab more hills, expand the territory

LRB Vol. 30 No. 07 dated 10 April 2008 Henry Siegman
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n07/print/sieg01_.html

Grab more hills, expand the territory
Henry Siegman

The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-77 by Gershom Gorenberg
Lords of the Land: The War over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007 by Idith Zertal

The title of Gershom Gorenberg’s book is somewhat misleading in its suggestion that the establishment of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza was ‘accidental’. While Gorenberg, an American-born Israeli journalist, notes that no Israeli government ever made a formal decision about the future of the West Bank, his account of the first decade of Israel’s occupation leaves no doubt that the settlements were deliberately founded, and were intended to create a permanent Israeli presence in as much of the Occupied Territories as possible (indeed, the hope was for them to cover all of the Occupied Territories, if the international community would allow it). No Israeli government has ever supported the establishment of a Palestinian state east of the 1949 armistice line that constituted the pre-1967 border. At the very least, the settlements were designed to make a return to that border impossible.
It is clear from Gorenberg’s account, and from Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar’s comprehensive survey of the settlement project, Lords of the Land, that the issue dividing Israeli governments has not been the presence of settlements in the West Bank. Shimon Peres of the Labour Party played a key role in launching the settlement enterprise. Their differences have been over what to do with the Palestinians whose lands were being confiscated. Most have argued they should be granted home rule and Jordanian citizenship. Over the years, some cabinet members – Rehavam Ze’evi, Rafael Eitan, Effi Eitam and Avigdor Lieberman, for example – have openly advocated ‘transfer’, a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. There has been general agreement that, rather than adopt a formal position on the future status of the West Bank’s residents and risk provoking international opposition, Israel should continue to create ‘facts on the ground’ while remaining discreet about their purpose. In time, it was thought, the world would come to accept the Jordan River as Israel’s eastern border.

These books give the lie to the carefully cultivated narrative that has sustained the occupation. According to that narrative, the government of Israel offered peace to the Palestinians and to its Arab neighbours in the aftermath of the war of 1967 if they would agree to recognise the Jewish state. But at a meeting of the Arab League in Khartoum on 1 September 1967, the Arab world responded with ‘the three “no”s of Khartoum’: no peace, no recognition and no negotiations. This left Israel no choice but to continue to occupy Palestinian lands. Had Palestinians not resorted to violence in resisting the occupation, the story goes, they would have had a state of their own a long time ago.

The story is a lie. Israel’s military and political leaders never had any intention of returning the West Bank and Gaza to their Arab residents. The cabinet’s offer to withdraw from Arab land was addressed specifically to Egypt and Syria, not to Jordan or the Palestinians in the territories. The cabinet’s formal resolution to return the Sinai and the Golan in June 1967 said nothing about the West Bank, and referred to Gaza as ‘fully within the territory of the state of Israel’. With only a murmur of dissent, the cabinet, led by Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan, and the then prime minister, Levi Eshkol, committed itself to policies that would allow only local forms of autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza, an arrangement they believed would in time allow them to establish the Jordan River as not only Israel’s security border but as its internationally recognised political border as well.

The decision to retain control of the territories was taken days after the end of the 1967 war, and was not a response to Palestinian terrorism, or even to Palestinian rejection of Israel’s legitimacy. Zertal and Eldar cite a report by Mossad officials, prepared at the request of the IDF’s intelligence division and presented to the IDF on 14 June 1967, which found that ‘the vast majority of West Bank leaders, including the most extreme among them, are prepared at this time to reach a permanent peace agreement’ on the basis of ‘an independent existence of Palestine’ without an army. The report was marked top secret, and buried.

Security was the reason offered by Israel to justify the founding of the settlements. But the overwhelming majority of them actually created new security problems, if only because vast military and intelligence resources had to be diverted to their defence. The settlements have also enraged the Palestinians, whose land has been stolen to make room for them – this, too, has done nothing to increase Israel’s security.

Both books demonstrate in considerable detail that this was the conclusion not only of external critics but of Israeli military and security experts as well. Haim Bar-Lev, a former chief of staff, asserted before Israel’s Supreme Court in 1979 that Jewish settlements in densely populated Arab areas would make terror attacks easier, and that securing the settlements would distract security forces ‘from essential missions’. Major General Matityahu Peled rejected the security argument as ‘not made in good faith’, and intended ‘for only one purpose: to give a justification for the seizure of the land that cannot be justified in any other way’.

The most influential supporter of a vigorous settlement policy was Yigal Allon, the legendary commander of Israel’s Palmach, an elite force established before the founding of the state. ‘A peace treaty,’ he said at a government meeting on 19 June 1967, ‘is the weakest guarantee of the future of peace and the future of defence.’ Zertal and Eldar report that he warned against returning even a single inch of the West Bank, and told the cabinet that if he had to choose between ‘the wholeness of the land with all the Arab population or giving up the West Bank, I am in favour of the wholeness of the land with all the Arabs.’ Allon’s views, which shaped the strategic thinking of Israel’s political and security elites for decades, were deeply influenced by his mentor Yitzhak Tabenkin, one of the founders of the Yishuv. Tabenkin believed that partition was a temporary state of affairs and that the ‘wholeness’ of the land would eventually be achieved, whether peacefully or through war.

Lords of the Land and The Accidental Empire reveal the massive scale of Israel’s theft of Palestinian lands and the involvement of every part of Israeli society in advancing the settlement enterprise in clear and deliberate violation not only of international law but of Israel’s own laws. Gorenberg reports that when asked by the foreign minister, Abba Eban, in 1967 about the legality of settlements, Theodor Meron, the foreign ministry’s legal counsel, responded: ‘Civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.’ The prohibition, he stressed, is ‘categorical and is not conditioned on the motives or purposes of the transfer, and is aimed at preventing colonisation of conquered territory by citizens of the conquering state’.

The settlements were carefully investigated in 2005 by a commission headed by Talia Sasson, who was cynically appointed by Ariel Sharon to uncover the illegal activities that he himself had orchestrated. Sasson found that the settlements – illegal according to Israel’s own laws – were established with the secret support of virtually every government ministry, the IDF and Shin Bet. Feigning shock when Sasson presented her findings, Sharon and his ministers promptly buried the report.

Zertal and Eldar make clear that the settlers lord it not only over the Occupied Territories and their subject population but over the state of Israel as well. It is important to remember that the majority of Israel’s settlers are driven not by ideology but by economic and quality-of-life considerations, and are attracted by the heavy subsidies the government supplies to the settlements. Some of these ‘non-ideological’ settlers are secular Israelis, while others are members of ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities that are deeply ambivalent if not opposed to the Zionist national enterprise. But the driving force behind the settlements is a small religious-nationalist group, whose members are widely considered the most savvy, well connected and effective political operators in Israel. Their ideology combines an intense form of religious messianism with an extreme nationalism that has far more in common with the religious and ethnocentric nationalism of the Serbian Orthodox militias of Mladic and Karadzic than with any Jewish values I am familiar with. That Sharon and some of his settler friends were virtually the only politicians in the West (other than Serbia’s Slavic supporters) who opposed military measures to prevent Serbian ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo was not an accident.

The religious-nationalist leadership now seems to have lost much of its authority with the far more radical younger generation born and bred in the settlements. This new generation draws inspiration from the ‘hilltop youth’, young people who responded to Sharon in October 1998 when, as foreign minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, he called on settlers to ‘grab’ hilltops in the parts of the West Bank from which he and Netanyahu had agreed to withdraw, as stipulated by the Oslo Accords. ‘Grab more hills, expand the territory,’ Sharon urged on Israel Radio. ‘Everything that’s grabbed will be in our hands. Everything we don’t grab will be in their hands.’

The ‘hilltop youth’ reject the authority of the Jewish state and its institutions. They run around in what they imagine to be biblical dress, assaulting Palestinians, stealing and destroying their homes, crops and orchards, occasionally beating them and every so often killing them. Occasionally the IDF intervenes, but their efficacy is undermined by their belief that their main job is to protect the settlers, not the population under occupation.

David Shulman, a distinguished academic, peace activist and a member of Ta’ayush, an organisation of Israeli Palestinians and Jews promoting coexistence, wrote about the hilltop youth in his recent book Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine.[*] ‘Like any society,’ he writes, Israel has violent sociopathic elements. What is unusual about the last four decades in Israel is that many destructive individuals have found a haven, complete with ideological legitimation, within the settlement enterprise. Here, in places like Chavat Maon, Itamar, Tapuach and Hebron, they have, in effect, unfettered freedom to terrorise the local Palestinian population; to attack, shoot, injure, sometimes kill – all in the name of the alleged sanctity of the land and of the Jews’ exclusive right to it.

Even otherwise law-abiding Israelis see the hilltop youth as latter-day halutzim, the Zionist pioneers who cleared malarial swamps and built the kibbutzim.

As a result of Sharon’s dismantling of Jewish settlements in Gaza in 2005, many young people in the religious-nationalist camp have become further radicalised and alienated from the settler leadership. They saw the withdrawal as a bitter and unforgivable betrayal, and found fault with their own leaders for their failure to prevent it. They could not accept Sharon’s argument that the removal of the Gaza settlements was unavoidable if Israel was to hold onto Palestinian land in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. That was the deal Bush agreed to in a letter he handed Sharon at Camp David in 2004: in return for withdrawal, Bush stated his administration’s position that ‘in light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centres, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.’

In a recent editorial, Ha’aretz accused not only the settlers but all of religious Zionism of having ‘positioned itself as a movement that denies the sovereignty of the state’:
As long as the state serves the goals of the settlements, they support it. But the moment a contrary decision is made – on territorial withdrawals or evacuation of outposts – this camp allows itself to break the law . . . This is not the passing caprice of a few teens, but the metamorphosis of an entire camp from a centre of constructive activity to a centre of subversion.
Similar criticisms have even been expressed by members of the religious-nationalist camp. The rabbi of Moshav Nov, Yigal Ariel, recently published a book called Leshem Shamayim (‘For the Sake of Heaven’), which condemns the movement for its hostility to the ‘basic rule of law’. He accuses the settlers of becoming ‘delusional and irrational’, in danger of ‘being swept into a dark abyss of their own making’.

Lords of the Land lets no one off the hook. But in a society in which security is a central concern, the military inevitably plays an unusually powerful role in shaping the values of the young men and women who serve in it for two to three years or more. Its pervasive influence poses by far the greatest danger to Israel’s future: to its survival as a democratic state and to the Jewish values the state was intended to embody.

Since 1967, the IDF has transformed itself into the army of the settlers, to which abused Palestinians cannot turn for protection. The settler leadership’s close ties with government power-brokers mean that they can make or break the careers of the IDF’s most senior officers. The most chilling part of Zertal and Eldar’s story is their description of how the settler leaders intimidate IDF commanders and make them fall into line. The most decorated soldier in the history of the IDF, Ehud Barak, Israel’s former prime minister and currently the minister of defence in Olmert’s government, had to eat his words after settler leaders walked out during a speech he made when he was the head of the IDF’s Central Command in May 1987 because he used the word ‘occupation’ to describe Israel’s presence in the West Bank. They returned to their seats only after he agreed to repeat his talk without using that word.

While the IDF, with the help of Shin Bet, is somehow able to locate almost every potential Palestinian terrorist in the West Bank and seems to be aware of their most intimate conversations, they don’t often appear able to locate Jewish settlers who have attacked innocent Palestinians, destroyed their homes and farms, or murdered them. Most settlers’ crimes remain unsolved, as do crimes committed by IDF soldiers. The military justice system rarely fails to find extenuating circumstances for IDF abuses. And the few Israelis who are found guilty receive ridiculously lenient sentences. Meanwhile, more than ten thousand Palestinians, including women and teenagers, languish in Israeli jails, many without having been indicted or tried for specific crimes.

The contrast with the courts’ treatment of settlers is striking. Pinchas Wallerstein, one of the most prominent settler leaders, fired at an Arab youth whom he saw burning a tyre on the road. The boy, whom he shot in the back, died. Wallerstein was sentenced to perform public service. The judge, Ezra Hadaiya, quoted the rabbinic admonition that ‘one should not judge one’s fellow until one is in his place.’ In 1982, a settler, Nissan Ishegoyev, fired his Uzi machine-gun into an alley from which Palestinian children were throwing stones, and killed a 13-year-old boy. His punishment was three months’ public service. Between 1988 and 1992, the violent deaths of 48 Palestinians were recorded in the Occupied Territories. In only 12 of these cases were indictments filed against the Israeli suspects; of these, only one resulted in a murder conviction; another ended in a conviction for manslaughter, and six resulted in convictions for causing death through negligence. The defendant who was convicted of murder, for which the maximum punishment is 20 years in prison, was sentenced to three years.

The belief that people who spend some of their most impressionable years in the IDF will return from their service with their democratic, humanitarian and egalitarian sensibilities intact is the absurd myth underlying the IDF’s conceit that it is the most moral army in the world. Equally absurd is the notion that Israel has a model justice system in which Palestinians can get fair treatment. Israelis concerned about the double standards of their justice system have taken comfort in the enlightened rulings of Israel’s Supreme Court. But these can no longer be counted on. Recently, in an interim decision, the Supreme Court accepted for the first time the idea of separate roads for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories; the Association for Civil Rights in Israel sees the arrangement as marking the onset of legal apartheid.

What makes the situation particularly frightening is that the senior leaders of the IDF are increasingly settlers in the religious-nationalist camp. Many of them are under the sway of settler rabbis, who, like their jihadi counterparts, provide religious rulings – fatwas, in effect – inciting their followers even to murder Israeli prime ministers if they cross the settlers’ red lines. The extent of this change in the IDF was described by Steven Erlanger in the New York Times last December. Colonel Aharon Haliva, the commander of Israel’s officer training school, told Erlanger that more than a third of the volunteers in combat units now come from the religious settler youth. ‘You don’t find them in Tel Aviv, but all over the hills of Judea and Samaria,’ Haliva said. ‘They are the pioneers of today.’ Their influence on their charges is profound. ‘In two months I’ll command 20 soldiers,’ one of them said to Erlanger, ‘and from them there will be maybe two officers, and that’s another forty soldiers, and another forty families . . . First commanders matter. The way I hold my weapon – it’s the way my first commander held it.’
Haggai Alon, a senior official in the Ministry of Defence in Olmert’s government when the ministry was headed by Amir Peretz, recently charged the IDF with furthering the settlers’ agenda. Alon told Ha’aretz that the IDF ignores the Supreme Court’s instructions about the path of the so-called security fence, and is instead ‘setting a route that will not enable the establishment of a Palestinian state’. Alon noted that when in 2005 James Wolfensohn negotiated an agreement signed by Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which was intended to ease restrictions on Palestinians travelling in the Occupied Territories, the IDF eased them for the settlers instead; for Palestinians, the number of checkpoints doubled. According to Alon, the IDF is ‘carrying out an apartheid policy’ that is emptying Hebron of Arabs and Judaising (his term) the Jordan Valley, while co-operating openly with the settlers in an attempt to make a two-state solution impossible.

The claim that it is only Palestinian violence and rejectionism that compelled Israel to remain in the territories is a fabrication. As I argued in the LRB (16 August 2007), the assiduously promoted story of Israel’s pursuit of peace and its search for a Palestinian ‘partner for peace’ was fashioned to buy time to establish ‘facts on the ground’: settlements that would so completely shatter the territorial and demographic contiguity and integrity of Palestinian land and life as to make the establishment of a Palestinian state impossible. In this, Israel’s leaders have succeeded so well that Olmert, who claims finally to have realised that without a two-state solution Israel will become an apartheid entity that cannot survive, has not been able to implement even the smallest of the changes he promised in Annapolis. The expansion of the settlements and of a Jews-only highway system in the West Bank continues without interruption. The price that Israel and Jews everywhere – not to speak of the Palestinian people – may yet have to pay for this ‘success’ is painful to contemplate.

Note
* Chicago, 236 pp., £11.50, May 2007, 978 0 226 75574 8.
Henry Siegman is director of the US/Middle East Project and a research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Programme at SOAS. He was a senior fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations from 1994 to 2006.