An Old Movie

artículo en español: http://www.kaosenlared.net/noticia/israel-palestina-pelicula-vieja


Let’s see, I think I have seen this movie before. Israel calls a 10-month partial ban on settlement construction in the West Bank (not including 3,000 buildings already approved, public buildings, or construction in East Jerusalem[1]), the settlers cry foul and images of screaming settlers carried away by police are flashed through the news. Oh, the pain! Obama, can’t you see the pain you are inflicting on Netanyahu and the Israeli people by telling them that they don’t have a legal right – much less a biblical right – to build in the West Bank?

Of course, everyone foresaw it coming. No one needed the settlers to explicitly say that for every outpost or settlement building dismantled or evicted, the Palestinians would be the ones who would suffer. Will Israel ‘vow to uphold the law’ against the ‘extremists’ who attack ‘innocent’ Palestinians? “Without a doubt,” says my 8-ball. Because of course, Israel is better than that. Israel wants peace. It is even taking ‘far-reaching and painful steps’ for peace. Indeed, even the government’s ‘unilateral freeze’ shows “who is for peace and who is against it.” (Let’s consult the 8-ball again: Are the Palestinians the ones against peace? “It is decidedly so”.)

We can be sure that following the mosque arson in the West Bank village of Yasuf, by ‘extremist elements’ within the settler ‘movement’ - I have conflict with that term, because it implies a separation, a distinguishing from Israeli government policy, which actively subsidizes and coddles [2] their ‘brothers’ in the West Bank -, the Israeli government will wash its hands of responsibility and say that it is doing everything possible for peace, and that some people (a ‘small percentage’ of settlers and don’t forget, 100% of Palestinians) don’t want peace. All the Livnis, the Baraks, the Netanyahus, and the Leibermans are the doves, can’t we see that?

Speaking of Livni, she became almost philosophical regarding the attacks on the mosque. “We must turn to introspection and contend with what is happening within Israeli society.” [3] Can someone tell me what the hell that means? I don’t recall her introspecting when white phosphorous was melting the skin of Gazans and she was rejecting a cease-fire. Maybe Israel only introspects when gun-toting Brooklynites with chutzpah and Torah-wielding dudes with curly locks are carrying out attacks.

The settlers – for economic or ideological reasons, 500,000 are living in the West Bank, furthering the dream of ‘Greater Israel’ – are a very vocal group within Israel, and opinions differ on whether they enjoy support from ‘mainland’ Israel. At a recent settler rally in Paris Square in West Jerusalem (which at first sight looked more like a Jonas Brothers concert, what with all the braces and 14-year old girls screaming their heads off), of the two dozen or so people I spoke with, at least 80% were from the U.S., and of these, almost all of them were from ‘Little Israel’ (you know, New York and New Jersey). And all of them had something to say to the Obama administration.

“Let Obama keep his change and let us keep building!” “Bibi [Netanyahu], don’t give in to American pressure!” One American teenager, holding a yellow flag with the portrait of Rabbi Meir Kahane on it, came up to me and eagerly said he wanted to tell me something. Go for it. “Tell Obama that if it doesn’t work out in the White House, maybe it will work out in the N.B.A.” Do you have anything else to say to Obama? “Um, yeah. He should go back to Iran and mind his own country.” (Rabbi Meir Kahane, the assassinated ideologue of the ‘fringe elements’, once claimed that to defend Israel you need “faith in God and a strong army.”) In the background, I heard a Yesha Council leader sound out clearly the name of the enemy, to cheers from the crowd: “Barack HUSSEEEEEEEEIN Obama”. Two 18-year olds from Brooklyn told me that ‘any empire that doesn’t align itself with the Jews’ will fall. G-d gave them the land, and now f---ing Obama wants to take it away?

We tried to visit the village on Ni’lin for their Friday demonstrations against the wall. The previous week, the army had used live ammunition against stone throwers and the night before, in the adjacent town on Bil’in, had arrested the organizers of the Popular Committee Against the Wall [4]. The army refused us entrance to Ni’lin for ‘safety purposes’. So we entered the bordering settlement of Mod’in Ilit and watched the protest from the other side. Some settlers approached us and gave their point of view of the situation. The wall, they said, has given protection against terror attacks and ‘stealing car radios’. “But,” one British-sounding settler graciously reminds us, “there was nothing on this land before. No one lived here. Just olive trees.” About the protest? Most didn’t pay attention except for one settler whose doctor wife reports that some Fridays, when the wind is pro-Palestinian, tear gas wafts into her clinic from across the valley and leaves her patients crying. About the Palestinians? “Well, the problem is that they don’t know how to manage their own people.” As we spoke, across the valley, another Palestinian youth was shot with live bullets.

These people would clearly fall into what Netanyahu would call the ‘not-fringe elements’. They don’t carry around M-16s like the settler at nearby Dolev settlement who was visibly shocked and surprised when we asked for directions to Ramallah. They most likely would condemn mosque attacks, though they might accept a wall to keep out ‘terrorists’, or the fact that another Palestinian family may be evicted from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem this week, or that Palestinians who want to enter Israel for work have to wait hours at checkpoints or are arbitrarily detained, or even ‘targeted strikes’ by Hellfire missiles on Gazan homes. They’re not ‘fringe elements’, they’re the mainstream. Netanyahu’s real brothers. He can afford to label a few scary guys as extremists, as obstacles to peace, while he counts on the passive majority who accept occupation and don’t see that as the real obstacle to peace.

When Palestinians reject this settlement freeze as the farce that it is – as they already have-, the Clintons and the Obamas and the Mitchells will express disappointment that Israel’s ‘gestures’ have not been accepted, the settlers would be vindicated and Israel will ‘be forced’ to reign in the Palestinians. It’s an old movie. Just rewind and replay.

Will the settlement freeze open ‘new doors’ to peace in Palestine and Israel? Eight-ball says: “Outlook not so good.”



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1. “Israeli PM Netanyahu declares 10-month freeze in new building in West Bank settlements”. http://blog.taragana.com/business/2009/11/25/israeli-pm-netanyahu-declares-10-month-freeze-in-new-building-in-west-bank-settlements-3277/

2. “Land Expropriations and Settlements.” B’Tselem. http://www.btselem.org/english/settlements/migration.asp

3. “Officials Blame ‘Extremist’ Settlers for Arson Attack on West Bank Mosque”, Robert Mackey, December 11th, 2009.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/extremist-settlers-blamed-for-arson-attack-on-west-bank-mosque/

4. “Release Bil’in popular leader Abdallah Abu Rahmah”, International Solidarity Movement. http://palsolidarity.org/2009/12/9688