Almost a decade ago I wrote an article describing Israel’s “matrix of control” over the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It consisted then of three interlocking systems: military administration of much of the West Bank and incessant army and air force intrusions elsewhere; a skein of “facts on the ground,” notably settlements in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, but also bypass roads connecting the settlements to Israel proper; and administrative measures like house demolitions and deportations. I argued in 2000 that unless this matrix was dismantled, the occupation would not be ended and a two-state solution could not be achieved.

Since then the occupation has grown immeasurably stronger and more entrenched. The first decade of the twenty-first century has so far seen the steady constricting and fragmentation of Palestinian territory through still more wholesale expropriation of Palestinian land, checkpoints and other physical restrictions on freedom of movement, settlement construction, more and more massive highways intended for Israeli settlers, control over natural resources and, most visibly of all, the erection of the separation barrier in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Since December 2000, according to the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem, the settler population of the West Bank has grown by 86,000 and that of East Jerusalem by 50,000. Gaza was evacuated of settlers and soldiers in 2005, but Israel retains near complete control over egress and exit of people and goods to and from the coastal strip, regularly cuts supplies of fuel and other necessities to punish the residents and mounts military incursions at will. All the Palestinian territories are subject, to one degree or another, to the measures of house demolitions, “closures” that halt economic activity, administrative restrictions on movement, deportation, induced out-migration and much more.

Indeed, the matrix has reconfigured the country to such an extent that today it seems impossible to detach a truly sovereign and viable Palestinian state from an Israel that has expanded all the way to the Jordan River. Anyone familiar with Israel’s “facts on the ground,” perhaps first and foremost the settlers, would reach the conclusion that, in fact, the matrix cannot be taken apart in a piecemeal fashion, leaving a few settlements here, a road there and an Israeli “greater” Jerusalem in the middle. The matrix has become far too intricate. Dismantling it piece by piece, with Israel stalling by arguing for the security function of each “fact on the ground,” would be a frustrating series of confrontations that would eventually exhaust itself. The only way to a genuine two-state solution and not a cosmetic form of apartheid is to cut the Gordian knot. The international community, led by the United States, must tell Israel that the occupation must be ended entirely. Israel must leave every inch of the Occupied Territories. Period.

And now, at this critical juncture, as the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian impasse disappears under the weight of Israeli settlements, there is a great imponderable: Is President Barack Obama genuinely serious about reaching such a solution or is he merely going through the motions familiar from previous administrations? 

The Tea Leaves
Many Palestinian, Israeli and international proponents of a just peace took heart in Obama’s early gestures. Beginning with the appointment of former Sen. George Mitchell as special envoy and continuing through the president’s June 4, 2009 speech in Cairo, these proponents allowed themselves, after years of disappointment and struggle, a cautious hopefulness. Some of the speech’s formulations, like the nods to the “pain of dislocation” felt by Palestinians and the “daily humiliations” of occupation, had been heard before. But one sentence had not been: Obama said that a two-state solution “is in Israel’s interest, Palestine’s interest, America’s interest and the world’s interest.” Obama seemed to “get it,” that is, he seemed to understand that the US is isolated politically by its unquestioning backing of Israel, which is seen as obstructing a solution to the conflict. And, for the first time, a US president actually said that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in the vital national interest, not just a nice thing to do. These words significantly raise the bar. Framing the conflict in this way makes it easier for the administration to win Congressional support for tougher demands upon Israel while undermining the ability of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to mount an effective resistance, given American Jewish sensibilities about suspicions of dual loyalty.

Since the Cairo speech, however, fundamental doubts about US efforts have resurfaced. The only demand made by Obama upon Israel has been for a settlement “freeze,” a welcome symbolic gesture, to be sure, yet irrelevant to any peace process. Israel has enough settlement-cities in strategic “blocs” that it could in fact freeze all construction without compromising its control over the West Bank and “greater” Jerusalem, the Arab areas to the north, south and east of the city where Israel has planted its flag. Focusing on this one issue — which, months later, is still being haggled over — has provided Israel with a smokescreen behind which it can actively and freely pursue more significant and urgent construction that, when completed, will truly render the occupation irreversible. It is rushing to complete the separation barrier, which is already being presented as the new border, replacing the “Green Line,” the pre-June 1967 boundary to which Israel is supposed to withdraw, by the terms of UN Security Council resolutions, but on which even the most ardent two-staters have long since given up. Israel is demolishing homes, expelling Palestinian residents and permitting Jewish settlement throughout East Jerusalem, measurably advancing the “judaization” of the city. It is confiscating vast tracts of land in the West Bank and “greater” Jerusalem and pouring bypass road asphalt at a feverish pace so as to permanently redraw the map. It is laying track on Palestinian land for a light-rail line connecting the West Bank settlement-city of Pisgat Ze’ev to Israel. It is drying up the main agricultural areas of the West Bank, forcing thousands of people off their lands, while instituting visa restrictions that either keep visiting Palestinians and internationals out of the country altogether or limit their movement to the truncated Palestinian enclaves of the West Bank.

“Quiet,” behind-the-scenes diplomacy is surely taking place, but the few details that have emerged are far from reassuring. The State Department has mocked as “fiction” a ten-point document given to the Arab press by Fatah figure Hasan Khreisheh that promises an “international presence” in parts of the West Bank and US backing for a Palestinian state by 2011. The component of this alleged plan that seems more likely is that the US wants a partial freeze on settlement activity from Israel in exchange for a pledge from Washington to push for more stringent sanctions upon Iran for its nuclear research. On August 25, 2009, the Guardian quoted “an official close to the negotiations” saying: “The message is: Iran is an existential threat to Israel; settlements are not.” By all indications, if the Obama administration does present a regional peace plan, which it is expected by many to do around the time of the UN General Assembly meeting on September 20, 2009, it will be nothing more than a “rough draft.” It is no exaggeration to say a two-state solution will rise or fall on the outlines of this draft — and may perhaps fall forever if no concrete plan is presented at all, which is also possible. Although the two-state solution has been eulogized many times in the past, Obama represents a best-case scenario. If he presents, in the end, a disappointing peace plan that offers no genuine breakthrough, then the shift to a one-state solution on the part of the Palestinian people and their international supporters will be inescapable.

Sovereignty and Viability
So how can Obama’s plan be judged if and when it is unveiled? Its chance of success can be predicted by how well it addresses the fundamental needs, grievances and aspirations of the peoples involved. An effective approach to ending the conflict, as opposed to shopworn posturing, rests on at least six elements: national expression for both peoples; economic viability for Palestine; a genuine addressing of the refugee issue; a regional approach; security guarantees; and conformity with human rights norms, international law and UN resolutions.

Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs are not simply ethnic groups, like, for example, American Jews or Arab-Americans. They are two peoples who, like national groups everywhere, demand self-determination. This reality actually lends credence to a two-state solution, but only if the Palestinian state is truly sovereign and economically viable. One should not forget that, in the days of apartheid, South Africa established ten “bantustans,” small and impoverished “homelands” on 11 percent of South African land, seemingly to address the demand of the black population for self-determination but actually to ensure a “democracy” for the white population on 89 percent of the country. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s notion that the Palestinians should get “autonomy with certain characteristics of a state” on about 15 percent of historic Palestine — “autonomy plus-independence minus,” as he called it — is reminiscent of apartheid. 

If the Obama administration’s plan does not cut the Gordian knot that is Israel’s matrix of control — something no plan or initiative has yet succeeded in doing — it will simply fail to achieve an equitable two-state solution. Only a complete withdrawal of Israel from all the Occupied Territories and the sharing of Jerusalem with no restrictions on movement can avert a Palestinian bantustan. 

Obama’s plan, like its predecessors, seems destined to leave the major Israeli settlement blocs intact, including those in Palestinian East and “greater” Jerusalem. Even with so-called territorial “swaps,” this measure would significantly compromise the sovereignty and economic viability of a Palestinian state. The area designated on Israeli maps for future expansion of the Ma’ale Adumim settlement reaches to the outskirts of Jericho in the Jordan Valley, while the Ariel bloc already extends between the northern West Bank town of Nablus and points south. Taken together, settlements and the highways that interlink them displace Palestinian passenger and commercial vehicles onto a few narrow routes, while the checkpoints intended to protect the settlers snarl traffic on a predictably unpredictable schedule. And then there is the towering wall. It is not a landscape made for easy economic integration.

Why, then, leave these massive settlements intact? The argument is that their residents would object to the point of a civil war in Israel. This is patent nonsense. True, these settlement blocs contain 85 percent of Israelis living in the Occupied Territories, but these are not the ideological settlers who claim the entire Land of Israel from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. Instead, they are “normal” Israelis who have been attracted to the settlements by high-quality, affordable housing. They would have no objection to resettling inside Israel on the condition that their living standards do not fall, while the Israeli economy, assisted by international donors, would have no problem footing the bill for this population, about 200,000 in number. Settlements in “greater” Jerusalem, housing another 190,000 Israeli Jews, present no problem whatsoever. Residents are free to stay where they are in a shared and integrated Jerusalem. 

As for the “ideological” settlers of the West Bank, only about 40,000 in number (out of almost six million Jews altogether), they can easily be relocated inside Israel, just as were their counterparts in Gaza. Their relocation will be a test of international assertiveness, of course, because the settlers are able to mobilize the support of the right-wing parties in Israel. Since Israel can make no cogent argument as to the security necessity of these tiny settlements, however, internal opposition will simply have to be overruled; the international community cannot allow such frivolous ideological matters to destabilize the entire global system. If the legitimate concerns of the Israeli public over its security are addressed by the international community, which they can be, there is no compelling reason why Israel should not return to the pre-June 1967 border. In fact, if the Gaza episode indicates anything, it is that the Israeli public is willing to remove settlements if it is convinced that doing so will enhance its security. Reminding Israelis that leaving every inch of the Occupied Territories will still leave them sovereign over a full 78 percent of the country — not a bad deal for what will soon become a minority Jewish population — should seal the deal.

Refugees
The Obama platform, should it see the light of day, will probably also adopt the Israeli position that Palestinian refugees can only be repatriated to the Palestinian state itself, not to their former homes inside Israel. This plank would place a weighty economic burden on that tiny prospective state, since the refugees are, by and large, a traumatized and impoverished population with minimal education and professional skills. Add to that another significant fact: Some 60 percent of the Palestinian population is under the age of 18. A Palestinian state without the ability to employ its people and offer a future to its youth is simply a prison-state. 

Now the need for a viable Palestinian state is recognized and embodied in the “road map,” the peace initiative propagated by President George W. Bush in 2003, and will probably be acknowledged in a plan from Obama as well. Despite its limited size, a RAND Corporation study concluded that such a state is possible, but only if it controls its territory, borders, resources and movement of people and goods. Israel must be made to understand that while it will remain the hegemonic power in the region, its own long-term security depends upon the economic wellbeing of its Palestinian neighbors. 

Eighty percent of the Palestinians are refugees, and half of the Palestinians still live in refugee camps within and around their homeland. Any sustainable peace is dependent upon the just resolution of the refugee issue. Technically, resolving the refugee issue is not especially difficult. The Palestinian negotiators, backed up by the Arab League, have agreed to a “package,” to be mutually agreed upon by Israel and the Palestinians, involving a combination of repatriation in Israel and the Palestinian state, resettlement elsewhere and compensation. 

The “package” must contain, however, two other elements, without which the issue will not be resolved and reconciliation cannot take place. First, Israel must acknowledge the refugees’ right of return; a resolution of the issue cannot depend solely on humanitarian gestures. And Israel must acknowledge its responsibility for driving the refugees from their country. Just as Jews expected Germany to accept responsibility for what it did in the Holocaust (and Israelis criticized the Pope during his summer 2009 visit for not apologizing enough), just as China and South Korea will not close the book on World War II until Japan acknowledges its war crimes, so, too, will the refugee issue continue to fester and frustrate attempts to bring peace to the region until Israel admits its role and asks forgiveness. Genuine peacemaking cannot be confined to technical solutions alone; it must also deal with the wounds caused by the conflict. 

Regional Approach, Security and International Law
Obama’s edge over his predecessors lies in his understanding that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is part of — and in some ways the symbolic epicenter of — a wider regional problem that extends from the neighboring countries to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and, indeed, throughout the entire Muslim world and beyond. This understanding lies behind his framing of the conflict’s persistence as being antithetical to vital US interests, and behind his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s statements making a solution for the conflict a virtual precondition for addressing the Iran issue. It is precisely this linkage, long denied by Israel, which insists that the Palestinian issue be handled separately, that the Obama administration seems finally to have embraced. Indeed, even in the confines of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, the key issues – refugees, security, water, economic development and others — are regional in scope. A perfect peace between Israel and Palestine, in which both countries flourish, is not a viable solution for either if they exist as prosperous islands in an impoverished, unstable region.

Israel, of course, has fundamental and legitimate security needs, as do the Palestinians and the other peoples of the region. Unlike Israeli governments, the Israeli peace camp believes that security cannot be addressed in isolation, that Israel will not find peace and security unless it enters into a lasting peace with the Palestinians and achieves a measure of integration into the Middle East region. It certainly rejects the notion that security can be achieved through military means. Israel’s assertion that the security issue be resolved before any political progress can be made is as illogical as it is self-serving. Everyone, the Israeli political establishment and the military together with the peace movement and the Palestinians themselves, knows that terrorism is a symptom that can only be addressed as part of a broader approach to the grievances underlying the conflict. Israel, which also must be held accountable for its use of state terror, cannot be allowed to exploit legitimate security concerns to advance a political agenda of permanent control. 

To the degree that negotiations are entered into, they must have as their terms of reference international law and UN resolutions if the Palestinians are to enjoy even minimal parity with their Israeli interlocutors. The lack of grounding in such principles was the fatal shortcoming of all the preceding attempts to reach an agreement. Once negotiations are based solely on power, the Palestinians lose, the differential being so heavily weighted on the Israeli side, which totally controls Palestinian life and territory. Indeed, a peace agreement rooted in international law and human rights — in short, a just peace — would offer the best prospect of working.

Trump Cards
Put simply, any plan, proposal or initiative for peace in Israel-Palestine must be filtered through the following set of critical questions: Will this plan really end the occupation, or is it merely a subtle cover for control? Does this plan offer a just and sustainable peace or merely an imposed and false quiet? Does this plan offer a Palestinian state that is territorially, politically and economically viable, or merely a prison-state? Does this plan genuinely and justly address the refugee issue? And does this plan offer regional security and development? 

While one may glean optimism from the fact that a US president finally comprehends the need for a comprehensive peace in the Middle East, even if solely for the sake of US interests, it is difficult to be optimistic over the prospects of such a peace. No matter what the plan, Israel will neither cooperate nor negotiate in good faith. A solution will have to be imposed, if not overtly, then in ways that make Israel’s continued hold on the Occupied Territories too costly to sustain. Simply withholding Israel’s privileged access to American military technology and markets, for example, would have that effect. 

Any attempt to pressure Israel, however, will run into a familiar obstacle: Congress, Israel’s trump card in its encounters with the administration. In the case of Obama, Israeli leaders know well that his own party has always been far more “pro-Israel” than the Republicans. Already his loss of momentum after the Cairo address (perhaps related to his difficulties over his health care plan) has emboldened the temporarily cowed AIPAC. In early August, the vaunted lobby produced a letter signed by 71 senators from both parties — led by Sens. Evan Bayh (D-IN) and Jim Risch (R-ID) — telling the president to lay off Israel and place more pressures on the Arab states to “normalize” relations with Israel. Obama had already, in his comments introducing Mitchell as special envoy and subsequently, called for “normalization” simultaneous with Israeli moves to lessen the burdens of occupation, in contravention of the 2002 Arab League peace plan, which proposed that the Arab states establish ties with Israel after withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines. Now AIPAC and its backers in Congress want the administration to push for “normalization” before any Israeli overtures whatsoever. The Netanyahu government has played its part, as well. In August, its ministers, standing on the strategically crucial site of “E-1” between Jerusalem and the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, vowed that Israel would continue building settlements anywhere it pleases. On September 7, 2009, Israel announced it was beginning work on 500 new apartments in Pisgat Ze’ev and 455 in other West Bank locales. These actions essentially tell Obama to go to hell mere weeks before he is projected to launch his peace initiative. The US replied with an expression of “regret.”

Any plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace that has a hope of succeeding requires both an effective marketing strategy and a level of assertiveness as yet unseen in a US president, excepting, perhaps, Dwight Eisenhower and Jimmy Carter. Obama’s only hope of breaking through the wall of Israeli and Democratic Party resistance is to articulate an approach to peace based on clear and accepted principles anchored in human rights and justice and then framed in terms of US interests. A cold, calculating assessment of US interests would certainly push Obama in this direction. Time will tell, though the limp response to the new settlement construction does not bode well.  

In the meantime, growing opposition to the occupation on the part of the international grassroots is making it increasingly difficult for governments to support Israeli policies. The movement targeting Israel for boycott, divestment and sanctions gains strength by the day, as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict begins to assume the dimensions of the anti-apartheid struggle. But the Palestinians, exhausted and suffering as they may be, possess a trump card of their own. They are the gatekeepers. Until the majority of Palestinians, and not merely political leaders, declare that the conflict is over, the conflict is not over. Until most Palestinians believe it is time to normalize relations with Israel, there will be no normalization. Israel cannot “win” — though it believes it can, which is why it presses ahead to complete the matrix and foreclose the possibility of a viable Palestinian state. The failure of yet another peace initiative will only galvanize international efforts to achieve justice for the Palestinians. Only this time the demand is likely to be for a single binational state, the only alternative that fits the single-state, binational reality that Israel itself has forged in its futile attempt to impose an apartheid regime. 

Jeff Halper is director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. He can be reached at jeff@icahd.org.

Norwegian Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen

The director general of the Foreign Ministry, Yossi Gal, on Thursday summoned the Norwegian ambassador to Israel, Jakken Bjørn Lian, to protest Norway’s decision to pull all of its investments from the Israeli arms firm Elbit.

Following the meeting, the Foreign Ministry relayed that, “Israel will consider further steps of protest in the future.”

Norway’s finance minister, Kristin Halvorsen, announced at a press conference in Oslo earlier in the day that the divestment was due to Elbit’s involvement in the construction of the West Bank separation fence.

According to a political source in Jerusalem, the Foreign Ministry had planned to issue a harsh statement of condemnation immediately after the announcement, but following the meeting with Lian the ministry decided to tone it down.

The explanations for the divestment provided by the Norwegian envoy at the meeting were apparently the reason for the ministry’s moderation of its response.

At the press conference, Halvorsen said the decision was based on the recommendation of Norway’s Ministry of Finance council on ethics, whose role is to ensure that government investments abroad meet ethical guidelines.

“We do not wish to fund companies that so directly contribute to violations of international humanitarian law,” said the minister. She said the shares were sold secretly ahead of the announcement.

Elbit manufactures a monitoring system installed on several parts of the separation fence.

The recommendation submitted by the Ministry of Finance council on ethics stated that it considered “the fund’s investment in Elbit to constitute an unacceptable risk of complicity in serious violations of fundamental ethical norms.”

The council is thus explicitly referring to a 2004 International Court of Justice ruling, stating that the separation fence represented a breach of international law.

Israel erected the fence following a wave of Palestinian terror attacks at the height of the second intifada; it says the barrier is a necessary measure to stop Palestinian suicide bombers and protect settlers. The Palestinians oppose the fence’s route, saying it is designed to grab land they want for a future state.

Palestinian as well as Israeli anti-occupation groups, aided by Norwegian leftists, have all protested extensively against Norwegian involvement in companies involved in West Bank development and construction over last two years, which have seen an increase in Norway’s investment in Israeli firms.

Norway’s pension fund is invested in 41 different Israeli companies.

A research project by the Coalition of Women for Peace called “Who profits from the occupation” found that almost two thirds of those firms are involved in West Bank construction and development.

Up at 6am after quite a restless night (alarms going off, people talking in their sleep, snoring, fans rotating loudly – all things to be expected in a room of 40 people…), coffee at cafe Salim (the little corner to the right of the house just inside the gate), filling our bellies (when we thought we could eat no more after three huge meals a day for the last week) with egg and falafels and other such wholesome food and off to work around 9am. We spent the morning on site – I’m with the group working at the house of Abu Hussein, whose son was at the house today helping to co-ordinate the building work. When he’s not at the house, he’s working at Modi’in, one of the biggest settlements in the West Bank (on the green line) between Ramallah and Tel Aviv, building the new settlements which Israel agreed to stop expanding at Annapolis. With a heart-breaking sense of resignation and helplessness, he told me “We build their settlements while they destroy our houses…” The irony of the situation is what is so devastating. So many Palestinians are forced into taking work not only on the settlements but also on the wall – they are themselves helping to build their own walled prison. It’s impossible to imagine that people would do this but the economy leaves many with little choice. The Israeli government has closed Palestinian banks, shops and much else besides. Since the early 1990’s Israel also closed its borders to the 150,000 Palestinians that used to come each day to work in Israel.

On top of this, inside the Occupied Territories there are the checkpoints, the road closures and the settler-only roads which make it extremely difficult for Palestinians to get from one place to another in the West Bank, making trade virtually impossible. As a result, 70% of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories now live on less than 2 euros a day and most rely on humanitarian aid to survive. They work on settlements and the apartheid wall when work comes along – which is frequent and overlooked by the Israelis despite it being illegal because it’s cheap labour, and it is often taken by Palestinians needing to feed their families and to survive. There are Palestinians who don’t share this view. I spoke to a man in Sucia, a village in the surrounding region of Hebron, who was strongly against Palestinians working on the wall – “People should find other work in Israel if they need to, any work but the wall… Will we be able to enter Israel to even work after the wall is finished?”

We didn’t build in the afternoon on Thursday – instead we went to Ramallah to visit Yasser Arafat’s tomb and hear a presentation by a representative of the PLO – the Palestine Liberation Organisation. As well we were able to spend some time downtown Ramallah, the economic capital of the West Bank. It’s a buzzing place, so vibrant and full of energy, colourfulness and delicious smells. There are people and cars everywhere, kebabs and falafels, street vendors, children, bright lights and even a couple of ‘Stars and Bucks’ as a familiar reminder of home…

The presentation was held at the Quaker Peace Centre. The Quakers have been in Palestine since the 1850’s. In 1869 they established the Friends’ Girls School, which continues today as a co-ed school for Palestinian boys and girls. This center, built in 1910, alongside a place of worship and a youth group, is also a meeting place for people coming to learn more about human rights issues and life under the Occupation. The PLO representative shared some of the key facts on the ground from past to present, from the UN partition plan in 1947 through to the on-going siege of Gaza.

Some of the figures pre- (between Dec 06 and Nov 07) and post- (Dec 07-Nov 08) Annapolis (the Bush-Olmert-Abbas negotiations – the first in seven years – held in 2007) were astounding:

• 137 settlements had been tendered pre-Annapolis. Despite an agreement that settlement expansion would freeze, 2,300 settlements have since been tendered.
• Pre-Annapolis 704 Palestinian building permits had been blocked. Since, 1926 have been refused.
• Pre-Annapolis there were 563 road closures (roadblocks, checkpoints etc). Since there have been 630.

Given these statistics it’s hardly surprising that they believe Israel is showing its lack of seriousness about reaching a peaceful resolution and that Israeli attempts to isolate Gaza and fragment the West Bank are seriously threatening any possibility of a Palestinian state and a peaceful end to this horrendous conflict.

Back to Beit Arabiya and to the 65 or so other people who share the camp, the house, the building work, the five showers, the food, the washing and pretty much everything else. We have become a big family this past week.

Yesterday I spoke with a Jerusalem Post reporter, and invited her to come and see the camp in Anata for herself. She couldn’t, she told me, “because we’re not allowed to go to the West Bank.”

And that’s a shame, because that means she won’t be able to see and report on so many things that might help her audience understand what occupation means to the more than 2 million residents of the West Bank.

She won’t see the curious children who come to our construction site near the Israeli “security fence,” the wall that snakes through the West Bank, cutting through villages, separating farmers from their land, and even splitting in two the campus of Al Quds University (Al Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem). Some of the children began throwing stones at the soldiers by the wall the other day, drawing attention from the police and making us nervous that they might shut down our project, a home for the Sbaih family, whose previous house was demolished by the Israeli authorities. (Some 15 percent of the 162 houses that ICAHD has reconstructed over the last seven years have been re-demolished by the Israeli military—the reconstruction work is at least as much a statement of resistance as it is an effort to provide homes for Palestinians, and the families who participate do so with this understanding.)

The Jerusalem Post reporter won’t see the contrast between the illegal Israeli settlements here — lush green landscaped communities with municipal swimming pools and well-maintained roads — and the Palestinian villages, whose narrow streets, if they are paved at all, are so uneven that the vans we cram into to go to our worksites can only travel at five or ten miles an hour most of the time.

Jeff took us on a tour of one of these communities yesterday — Ma’ale Adumim. It encompasses land stretching all the way to the Dead Sea, and, when construction finishes, it will nearly bisect the West Bank. It includes an industrial park and an aeronautics and space college. This school is intended to turn out technicians to work at the airport that is planned to serve “Greater Jerusalem,” itself a sprawling swathe of land with settlements topping the hills and dividing the surrounding Palestinian villages from each other. Most people live in Ma’ale Adumim more for economic than ideological reasons; unlike the religious settlers who believe the land was deeded to them directly from god, they moved to the settlement because government subsidies make it financially attractive and they feel alienated from the Orthodox population that is ever more dominant in Jerusalem.

Residents drive to work in the city every day, as they do in suburban bedroom communities in the United States, but here they use four-lane highways reserved for Jews, while Palestinians must travel on smaller side roads, going through checkpoints that the settlers never see. The ubiquitous checkpoints that can cause a trip of 10 miles to take hours are tucked out of sight in the tunnels where the Palestinian roads pass under the settler highways. Even the wall itself is constructed so that it is not so intrusive from the Israeli side. While Palestinians are greeted by a 25-foot concrete barrier, often on the Israeli side, the area approaching the wall is a gentle slope with landscaping.

The Israeli journalist won’t see the irony of the acres and acres of stumps from Palestinian olive trees that have been cut down by the military, while other ancient trees with thick gnarled trunks have been uprooted whole and transplanted to beautify the grassy traffic circles in the settlements. “Imagine seeing a 400-year-old olive tree that has been in your family for generations planted in a Jewish settlement,” says Jeff. These green oases with their grass- and tree-lined streets are a tremendous drain on the water resources of the region. Israel and its settlements in the West Bank use 85 percent of the water from the West Bank, while in many Palestinian villages and cities, municipal water comes only two days a week.

And it’s too bad the reporter won’t come to our construction site to see what a small group of people, fueled by a passion against injustice, can accomplish. In only a few days, we have gone from a bare foundation to a structure with four walls and a roof, with the beginnings of interior walls tracing out the rooms where a family will raise children, eat, drink, sleep, and, we hope, grow old together.

Yes, with a little effort, it’s possible to go through life in Israel and the settlements without ever seeing a Palestinian. And that’s the real shame.

This piece was also posted on Mondoweiss.

I am a Jew. I am a religious Jew. I am an anti-Zionist Jew. I realize that to make this last claim is to risk that you will stop reading, as often any claim of anti-Zionism brings with it a label of traitor, anti-Semite, self-hating Jew. I hope, however, that you will give me the benefit of the doubt, at least for the few minutes that it will take you to read what I have to say.

I’ve been a Jew all my life although I was not raised with a Jewish education. In my late 40s, I began to study. I read, I joined a synagogue, I helped start a Talmud study group. I was and am drawn to the essential command, attributed to the great Rabbi Hillel, that our task as Jews is essentially to “not do to others that which is hateful to you.” I love how, in very Jewish fashion, Hillel tells us what not to do. I love and am daily challenged by how extremely difficult such a simple command can be.

I did not know much about Israel until I became more engaged as a religious Jew. The organized Jewish community teaches us that the Israeli narrative is the Jewish narrative. Support for Israel, the story goes, is synonymous with being a good Jew.

Now, some ten years and four trips to Israel/Palestine later, I invite you, if you think you can bear it, to hear why I care more about Hillel’s commandment than I do about a state.

With my partner who is also Jewish, I have just returned from 15 days of staying with friends, a family who lives in Samiramis, technically a Jerusalem neighborhood, but one that sits on the Palestine side of the Wall, less than a mile from the infamous Qalandia checkpoint.

Unlike previous years where we participated in delegations, house rebuilding, or activism related to our work with ICAHD-USA (Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions-USA), this time we frequently walked the streets of Ramallah, stopping for homemade ice cream at Baladna’s, shopping for shoes and handmade embroidery. We traveled north to Nablus and Tulkarem to visit family members and share succulent meals that left us bursting. We took one late night trip to Jericho to sit in the local park, drink cola, and talk; another to Jaffa Beach where we shared a picnic, conversation, laughter; we went to multiple weddings where men and women danced late into the night to the beat of loud, pulsing music.

We were privileged to see again what we have seen before — how rich and full and engaging life in Palestine can be, how the people here are like people everywhere, attempting to live with some degree of happiness in a culture that deeply values familial relationships, good food, education, meaningful work, laughter.

We also bore witness, as we do on each trip, to encroaching apartheid. As we drove deep in the West Bank along the road snaking north to Nablus from Ramallah, we could look up and see virtually every hillside topped by a Jewish settlement. In some cases, the settlement is recent, a few caravans dotting the hilltop, their electric lights strung from pole to pole, glowing bright yellow through the night, a display of dominance. More often, the settlements are permanent, neat rows of identical houses with their prototypical orange roofs, poised on the top of the hill, ready to dip down onto the Palestinian farmland below. These are announced by the row of modern streetlights on the two-lane road we are traveling, beacons proclaiming the presence of Israeli Jews on the landscape. The lights illuminate the stretches of Arab road where Jewish settlers have to drive because the infamous “bypass” roads (the Palestinians call them apartheid roads) have yet to be built, the ones that allow only Jews to travel from mainland Israel into the West Bank without encountering Palestinians.

The omnipresence of these smaller settlements on the road to Nablus is new since our last trip in 2005; a look at the latest UN map shows the Palestinian landscape dotted with them like an x-ray showing a virulent, spreading cancer.

When President Obama talks about stopping the spread of settlements most people probably have little idea of what he means. Somehow the word “settlement” invokes an image of tents, a kind of unstable, fragile community. The first settlement I ever saw had to be pointed out to me because it looked like any modern suburb in the U.S., row upon row of contemporary houses set along well paved roads. I certainly did not expect what I saw – a solidly interwoven infrastructure common to any town or city – housing, water, lights, streets, stores planted immutably on the landscape. I soon came to understand their function. The massively large ones, housing hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers, are designed to penetrate deep into the West Bank. Pisgat Ze’ev, Mod’in, Ma’eleh Adumim – each is protected by the Wall whose crooked path illegally pilfers huge swaths of Palestinian land. Each functions to divide Palestine into separate cantons making a contiguous state impossible. The newer smaller ones, the ones I see on the hilltops between Ramallah and Nablus, act like beachheads, strategically positioned to continue the slow but sure process of Israeli land grab.

The stories about how these settlers take over this territory deep in the West Bank are horrible. These are Jewish idealogues, often newly arrived from the U.S. Once they seize a hilltop, they move down the hill by harassing the unfortunate Palestinians who happen to live or farm the valleys below, sometimes poisoning their water and fields, killing their animals, introducing hostile plant and animal life, burning precious olive trees. Their goal is to intimidate farmers and families physically until they leave, making room for more settlement construction in their place. What you could not know, because no one ever says so, is that whenever a group of Jews establish a settlement, soldiers come in to protect them, making it possible for the Israeli government to hide this theft of land in plain sight.

As I ride along the road, any road, I realize that a Palestinian cannot drive from here to there anywhere in the West Bank now without encountering a settlement, or two, or three. I begin to take in how it feels to be surrounded, literally, by entitlement and hostility. I think about the ubiquitous story told in the Jewish community, crafted carefully by the ideology makers, painting Israel victim to a hostile Arab population that wants nothing more than to drive us into the sea. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the irony of such a story, for it’s not us, the Jews, who are being driven out. It’s us, the Jews, it’s Israel, the state designed for us the Jews, that is driving Palestinian people off of their land and into exile.

I think too, of the irony in the Israeli mantra that the Palestinians, the PLO, the PA, Hamas, all Arab nations, must recognize Israel, something that each of these groups has done in one way or another, although Israel refuses to acknowledge it. Again, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this recurring argument for the incursion of Gaza, the killing of innocent men, women, and children, the essential incarceration of a culture for over 40 years of Occupation. We have to do these awful things, the story goes, until they, the hated Other, recognize us, declare our right to exist. From my seat in the car, traveling to Nablus, looking up at settlement after settlement, it is not Israel’s right to exist that is in question.

The only way to justify this literal occupation of other people’s lives and land is to make them inhuman. Israel, with the help of AIPAC, B’nai Brith, the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Federations, and a myriad of other mainstream Jewish organizations, have done this well. In conversation after conversation here in this country, I witness their success as otherwise compassionate Jews deftly generalize about Palestinian men, women, and children in ways that we swiftly condemn when done about us. An elderly couple almost spits their anger at me, describing the fear their Israeli daughter feels living in such close proximity to the threat of rockets and suicide bombs.

I want to invite them to consider that their daughter’s fear is shared, often many times over, by daughters and mothers and sisters and sons in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. I want to invite them, and any of you who have never been, to come and live, as I did, for two weeks in Occupied Palestine. Come with me to the checkpoints, where you will be herded into metal troughs so narrow you can’t turn around, through turnstiles designed specifically to be too small for the average human body, yelled at by young 18, 19, 20 year olds whose contempt and disregard for those they control reeks off their skin like sweat. Come with me as we attempt to travel the short trip to Nablus on a Saturday to meet up with friends and family, only to find that Israel has closed all the roads leading out of Ramallah, a city of over 25,000 people, trapping us here on the Jewish Sabbath day without explanation or care.

Come and hear the stories, told at every gathering of Palestinians, of the latest injustice endured by a family member, a friend, at the hands of an Israeli soldier or settler. Point as I did, to inquire about a man dancing, full of joy, in a wedding picture. Hear the story of how he was taking his pregnant wife to Gaza to meet his parents, how he was stopped by Israeli soldiers, forcibly taken to Gaza while his wife was sent back to Ramallah. Two years have passed and he has yet to meet his young child because Israel will not give him the identity papers they require so he can see his family. Meet Fadi, a member of the family we are visiting, a young man in his late twenties who spends his days and many of his nights working, trying to make a living as we all have to do. Fadi cannot go with us to Jaffa Beach, next to Tel Aviv, literally half an hour from his home on the Palestinian side of the Wall, because he does not have and will never get Israel’s permission to go. These two people, and millions like them, are not a security risk of any kind; their crime is to be Palestinian.

Come with me and talk to the family whose home, built on their own land, was demolished for lack of a permit that Israel will not give, a family who has only to raise their eyes to see Jewish homes constructed at a fervid pace on a Palestinian hillside a half mile away. Come with me to the fields of a man, the mayor of a local village, who has been separated from his fields by the Wall, forbidden to ever reach them again by an Israel who tells the world that all he has to do is petition for permission to get to them, when the reality is that his petition has been permanently denied without explanation. Come meet the grieving father and mother whose young boy was killed when Israeli tanks parading through the town sprayed bullets sending one through their gate and into their son’s back. These people, and millions like them, are not a security risk of any kind; their crime is to be Palestinian.

Come with me, I beg you, and tell me that your safety, mine, depends on treating people this way. I have not even spoken the worst of it. I have not described the legalized theft of water, land, crops, trees; the complex system of laws that rob Palestinians of both livelihood and a future. I grew up as a white girl in the Jim Crow South and I have spent my adult life in the study of racism; what I see when I go to Palestine is Jim Crow on steroids. What I’m saying to you, although I’m not supposed to say it, is that Zionism is indeed racism – the supremacy of one race over another for the benefit of the first.

The Jewish community is not in danger from Palestinians or Arab nations. We are in danger because we interpret “never again” to mean never again for us when we should mean anyone and everyone. We are in danger because we continue to engage in a community-wide denial about what Israel is doing in our name.

I remember the time when a respected member of the Jewish community in my town called me a “shonda” (shameful) when, with my partner, I talked to a Jewish Sunday school class about what we had witnessed in Palestine (an unusual occurrence, for few synagogues will allow us to speak). I was struck, as I have been when attempting to address racism here in the U.S., that the focus of his anger was not Israel’s transgressions but the fact that we were speaking about them.

What does it mean that we are silent while the very meaning of what it means to be Jewish is becoming irreparably damaged? Our survival does not depend on a state that violates our fundamental values; our survival depends on honoring those values, the ones that instruct us “not to do to others that which is hateful to you.”

I invite you to consider what I’ve witnessed, or, if you can, to go and witness for yourself. I invite you to consider what it means to be a Jew today, when literally millions of people experience us as a people who control their every movement, their ability to access water, farm their land, build houses, live their lives. I invite you to consider what you hope it will mean tomorrow and the day after. For me, the question is not what are we willing to do for the sake of Israel. The question is what are we going to do for the sake of Judaism?

From the roof of his family’s home in East Jerusalem within the walls of the Old City, Raed Sa’id points to the golden Dome of The Rock, which is glowing in the late-afternoon sun.

“This view is what I will miss most,” he said. Soon after, his brothers smashed the walls and ceiling of the second floor of their home to pieces.

Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem face many bureaucratic challenges to obtain building permits and often must choose between building illegally or moving out of the city. Around1900 Palestinian houses were demolished from 2000-2007 for lack of a building permit, according to the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions (ICAHD).

Amir Paz-Fuchs of the Israeli non-profit Bimkom estimated that on average for each month during the past three years, Israel’s Civil Administration has given an average of 60 demolition orders, demolished 20 structures, and granted just one building permit.

The Sa’id family of 13 children and grandchildren built a second floor room onto their existing single floor structure to accommodate the growing family of one of the brothers. Since they didn’t have a permit, Israeli authorities gave them a choice – pay a large fine and the Israelis would demolish the area or pay a smaller fine and demolish it themselves.

“Home demolitions are a part of Israel’s long-standing depopulation of East Jerusalem through the abuse of the permit system,” said Karin Ryan, director of the Carter Center’s Human Rights Program. “Palestinians face many obstacles such as excessive fee for building permit application, the rezoning of land to be in areas not designated for development, and disproportionate fines for those who do build illegally. The Carter Center promotes a two-state solution, and every plan for peace involves East Jerusalem remaining in the hands of the Arab community.”

Israelis face the same application procedures for building permits as Palestinians in East Jerusalem, yet since 1967 Israel has sponsored the construction of nearly 50,000 units for Israelis only, while fewer than 600 government-sponsored housing units have been built in the Palestinian sector, with the most recent being 30 years old, according to the Israeli non-profit Ir Amim.

Meanwhile, Israel is resisting pressure from the United States to freeze Jewish settlement expansion in East Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank. They say they must build to allow for “natural growth.”

“But since the 1993 Oslo Accords, Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem have increased by more than 170,000, which indicates much more than just a natural increase in families already living there,” said Ryan.

On June 14, Jamal Sa’id, Raed’s father, went to court to seek a reprieve for completing the demolition at his family’s home. They had run into difficulties when destroying the ceiling and weren’t sure how to bring it down without damaging the rest of the house.

He was granted three additional days to destroy the structure and fined an additional 10,000 shekels (around USD$2600) for not completing the demolition within 24 hours of the deadline.

The growing violence appears to be in response to Israeli government moves, not to Palestinians’ actions.

Burin, West Bank – A stone smashed through the windshield. Falastin Maali, 31, raised her arm to shield the blow, but the rock glanced off her head and struck her 7-year-old daughter, Hadeel, in the back seat.

Maali was released Monday from a hospital in Tel Aviv after doctors performed two operations to stop internal bleeding in her brain. Her 7-month-old fetus survived. Hadeel suffered a fractured skull but is expected to fully recover.

The attack drew headlines in Israeli media because the suspected assailants are Jewish and the victims Arab.

It was the latest in increasingly bold attacks by Jewish settlers against unarmed Palestinian civilians in the West Bank, Israeli police say.

Settlers and Palestinians have fought a long-running tit-for-tat conflict that has left hundreds dead. What is different in a recent spate of settler violence is that it appears to be in response not to Palestinian attacks but Israeli government attempts to rein in expansion of illegal settlement outposts, according to Israeli human rights groups.

“When a building is evacuated, [settlers] lash out at Palestinians. They’re the easy victims,” said Sarit Michaeli, communications director for B’Tselem, an Israeli organization that monitors human rights abuses in the occupied territories. “Settlers in a sense widen the areas under their control through the use of intimidation.”

The activity has increased as Israeli and Palestinian leaders are negotiating a framework for a peace deal that would carve out most of the West Bank for a future Palestinian state.

Soon after Israel conquered territories from its Arab neighbors in the 1967 war, fortified hilltop Jewish communities sprung up throughout the West Bank.

Today, 270,000 Israelis live in settlements in the West Bank and another 220,000 in east Jerusalem – on land Palestinians claim should be theirs.

The proximity of Jewish settlements and Palestinian towns and villages has long been a source of tension and violence.

According to complaints filed this summer with Israeli police, settlers allegedly have torched Palestinian homes, burned hundreds of acres of olive groves, stabbed donkeys, poisoned sheep and beat Palestinian shepherds. Some of the attacks have been captured on video.

Settlers have also apparently turned to throwing stones, a tactic popularized by Palestinian youth in the 1980s during the first Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation.

Hazam Maali, 35, who was driving with his wife and three daughters to a family wedding in the Palestinian city of Jenin when they were ambushed, speaks fluent Hebrew and works as a representative in the West Bank for the Israeli food company, Strauss Group Ltd.

“There are many good Jews. But now what am I going to tell her?” he said of his daughter, Hadeel. “Where did this stone come from? I’ll have to tell her there are people who are not good from here and also from there.”

Police questioned two Israeli teens and one adult in connection with the attack. None have been charged and authorities continue to investigate the incident.

The assault occurred on a road that passes between the Jewish settlement of Yitzhar and the Palestinian village of Burin, an area that has become a flashpoint of settler violence, according to Palestinians and Israeli human rights activists.

Since mid-June, villagers in Burin say they have been attacked nine times.

Settlers explain the violence as retaliation for Palestinian rock-throwing and other attacks.

“In areas where there is friction between Jews and Arabs, when the Arabs attack, people attack back. And it’s not the Jews [that] start with it,” said Daniella Weiss, a longtime leader in the settler movement.

Israeli police say incidents of Palestinians throwing rocks at Israeli vehicles in the West Bank are much more common than Israelis throwing rocks at Palestinian vehicles, but there are no official statistics on such attacks.

In the area of Burin, however, Palestinian attacks are rare, according to Danny Poleg, assistant district commander for the police district of Judea and Samaria, the biblical name for the West Bank used by the police and settlers.

Burin, population 1,200, sits in a valley south of Nablus and is hemmed by settlements and settlement outposts on the hilltops to the north and south.

Palestinian olive, fig and almond groves were bulldozed to clear land to build the settlements, according to the villagers.

Last month, several dozen settlers rioted at two highway junctions in the West Bank, including the one near Burin, police said. Right-wing activists coordinated the actions in response to the Israeli government dismantling an illegal structure built by settlers, Weiss said.

According to Palestinian witnesses in Burin, the settlers set fire to olive groves and cut electricity and telephone lines. Villagers said they threw stones at the “zaaran” —- bandits —- to protect their land. When the Israeli army arrived to break up the clash, one of the Israeli rioters wrested away a soldier’s automatic rifle and fired it in the air, police said. The man was arrested.

“We were sitting under the olive tree like we are now … and they shot at us. Imagine that,” said Hind Abdel Kader, 68. “I gathered my grandkids and held them. I was scared they would be shot.”

Israeli police and army say they have stepped up patrols in the area and the army suspended the Yitzhar security coordinator because, in part, he “did not fully cooperate with [army] and other security forces as expected, and prevented the transfer of essential information to these forces,” according to an army statement.

The Yitzhar spokesman, Yigal Amitai, did not respond to several requests for comment over three weeks.

But a statement issued by the settlement and quoted in the Hebrew edition of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz welcomed the increased Israeli security presence.

“This step had been necessary for some time. Maybe it will succeed in reducing the embarrassing actions in which Arabs are throwing stones at Israeli cars,” the statement said.

Yitzhar, which means fine olive oil in Hebrew and is mentioned many times in the Bible, was founded in 1983 and is home to 130 families, according to the settlement Web site. It also includes a yeshiva, or religious seminary.

The Yitzhar Web site describes the settlement as “national religious,” which is a right-wing movement that combines religion with politics, centered on the belief in the historic religious right of Jews to live on the biblical Land of Israel, which includes the West Bank.

Palestinians say settlers have fired four rockets at Burin within the past month, but Israeli police concluded they were flares.

“They want to see us leaving here. They put all this pressure on us to make us leave,” Munir Qadous, 33, said of the settlers. No one has left, he added.

“There is no other option. Either live here or die here.”

Would Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu say the magic words “two states” after his meeting with President Obama? All Israel held its breath. (He didn’t). The gap between the two is wider than those words could ever have bridged, however. Obama, I believe, sincerely – perhaps urgently – seeks a resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, a pre-condition, he understands, to getting on with larger, more pressing Middle Eastern issues. Netanyahu, who rejects even the notion of a Palestinian mini-state as grudgingly accepted by Barak, Sharon and Olmert, is seeking a permanent state of “warehousing” in which the Palestinians live forever in a limbo of “autonomy” delineated by an Israel that otherwise encompasses them. The danger, to which we all should be attuned, is that the two sides might compromise on apartheid – the establishment of a Palestinian Bantustan that has neither genuine sovereignty nor economic viability.

For his part, Obama seems to understand the strong linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the hostility towards the West so prevalent in the Muslim world. His administration has been quite candid about the need to move forward on Palestine in order to deal with the Iranian nuclear issue, and his ability to withdraw from Iraq, stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan and deal with the challenge political Islam poses to the “moderate” Arab states also depend, to a meaningful degree, on forging a new relationship with the Muslim world , which requires an end to the Israeli Occupation.

Netanyahu and his Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman have already presented the outlines of their new “reframing” of the conflict:

1. The Iran threat is preeminent, uniting the US and Israel into a strategic alliance and completely overshadowing the Palestinian issue;
2. Such “slogans” (as Lieberman characterized them) as occupation, settlements, settlers, land for peace and even the “simplistic” two-state solution must be abandoned in order to “go forward” according to a new slogan: “economy, security, stability” – meaning improving the Palestinian economy while ensuring Israel’s security. The stability that results (Lieberman invokes the “stable” situation between the Greek and Turkish populations of Turkish-occupied Cyprus as his model) will then somehow facilitate some future and vague peace process;
3. Israel will continue to expand its “facts on the ground.” Just the day before the Netanyahu/Obama meeting the building of a new settlement was announced – Maskiot, in the Jordan Valley, the first settlement to be officially established in 26 years. Two days after returning from Washington, Netanyahu further declared: “United Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. Jerusalem was always ours and will always be ours. It will never again be partitioned and divided.” It then announced that it will continue building within the “settlement blocs.” Just a month before, on the day Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell were to arrive in the country, the Israeli government announced that it would conduct massive demolitions of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem. This “in your face” approach signals the Administration that Israel is not about to accept dictates, as the Minister for Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya’alon put it, testing just how assertive Obama will be.
4. Both the US and Israel seek broader involvement in the peace process by the Arab states, but once again, Israel has its own particular spin on that. While the US is formulating a comprehensive approach to peace and stabilization in the entire Middle East region (which King Abdullah of Jordan calls a “57-state solution” whereby the entire Arab and Muslim worlds would recognize Israel in return for a genuine end to the Occupation), Israel’s formula of putting “economic peace” before any politically defined peace agreement tries to create a state of normalization between Israel and the Arab/Muslim world that would relegate the Palestinian issue indefinitely to the back-burner. Given the record of the so-called “moderate” Arab states, and given the opposition to a rising Iran they share with Israel, their involvement does not necessarily bode well for the Palestinians.

Then there are the mechanisms for delaying or undermining negotiations:

• Creating insurmountable political obstacles, such as the demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a “Jewish state.” Netanyahu well knows that the Palestinians will not accede to that, the fact that such recognition would prejudice the equal status of Palestinian citizens of Israel, a full 20% of the Israeli population, being an important consideration. The fear of further ethnic cleansing (“transfer” in Israeli parlance) is a real one. When she was Foreign Minister, Tsipi Livni stated clearly that the future of Israel’s Arab citizens is in a future Palestinian state, not in Israel itself. And remember, last year the Israeli Parliament passed a law requiring a majority of two-thirds to approve any change in the status of Jerusalem, an impossible threshold. Similar legislation, supported by the government, will be passed on other issues such as dismantling settlements and ratifying any peace agreement.
• Delayed implementation. OK, the Israeli government says, we’ll negotiate, but the implementation of any agreement will wait on the complete cessation of any resistance on the part of the Palestinians. “Security before peace” is the way the Israeli government frames it. Since, however, there has never been any indication that Israel would agree to a viable Palestinian state, and since Israel views any resistance, armed or non-violent, as a form of terrorism, “security before peace” actually means “stop all resistance and you may get a state.” The catch here is that if Palestinians do stop their resistance they are lost. Without Palestinian pressure, Israel and the international community would lack any motivation for making the concessions necessary for a genuine solution. And even if an agreement is reached, “security before peace” means that it will not be implemented until Israel unilaterally decides the conditions are ripe. This so-called “shelf agreement” erects yet another insurmountable obstacle before any peace process.
• Declaring a “transitional” Palestinian state. If all else fails – actually negotiating with the Palestinians or relinquishing the Occupation not being an option – the US, at Israel’s behest, can manage to skip Phase 1 of the Road Map and go directly to Phase 2, which calls for a “transitional” Palestinian state before, in Phase 3, its actual borders, territory and sovereignty are agreed upon. This is the Palestinians’ nightmare: being locked indefinitely in the limbo of a “transitional” state. For Israel, such a situation is ideal, since it offers the possibility of imposing borders and expanding into the Palestinian areas unilaterally while seeming to respect the Road Map process.

Needless to say, all of this is to avoid a real two-state solution, the very idea of which is anathema to the Likud-led government. More than a decade ago Netanyahu set out his vision of Palestinian self-determination: somewhere between “state-minus and autonomy-plus.” The best, if bleakest, term for what Israel is intending for the Palestinians is warehousing, a permanent state of control and suppression in which the victims disappear from view and their situation, emptied of all political content, becomes a non-issue.

Although the Obama Administration may truly desire viable two-state solution and even understands all Israel’s tricks, it is also clear that without significant pressure it cannot be achieved. And here is where the real problem arises. Israel’s trump card has always been Congress, where it enjoys virtually unanimous bi-partisan support. And Obama’s own Democratic Party, which received almost 80% of the Jewish vote in 2008, has always been far more “pro-Israel” than the Republicans. It may well be that Obama and Mitchell will try to take American policy in a new and more assertive direction and the leaders of his own party will balk, fearful of not being re-elected.

In this case, the “compromise” between the desire to resolve the conflict and the inability to move Israel to withdraw from the Occupied Territories so that a viable Palestinian state may emerge may be nothing less than apartheid. The difference between a viable Palestinian state and a Bantustan is one of details. Already signs are that the Obama Administration will allow Israel to keep its major settlement blocs, including a “Greater” Jerusalem, and prevent the Palestinians from having sovereign borders with the neighboring Arab states. Since few appreciate the crucial meaning of such details, Israel believes that it can finesse an apartheid situation in the guise of a two-state solution. Over the past decades the job of civil society has been to force governments to fulfill their responsibilities and enter into a political process that will actually lead to a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Now that that process is upon us, our task is now to keep it honest.

There are some people whose faces betray the difficulties they have encountered throughout their lives. Salah Shweiki is one of them. Sitting under the large tent set up in Silwan’s Bustan Quarter, seeking warmth from the wood burning in an old wheelbarrow, Shweiki emanates the aura of an elderly sage. In his 56 years of life, he has seen a lot, maybe too much, but today, he is focused, his face determined and his will iron solid.

Salah Shweiki is one of approximately 1,500 people who are being threatened with expulsion from their homes by the Israeli Jerusalem municipality. According to the eviction order distributed among the residents of the Bustan neighborhood, the demolitions are being carried out under the pretext of lack of proper licensing. Once the homes are torn down, Israel plans to construct a national park in its place, a park, its archeological experts say, is part of the ancient City of David.

Shweiki disregards any and all of these claims, saying the eviction order falls under a larger scheme for Jerusalem, which is to expel as many Palestinians from the city as possible.

Looking at Israel’s recent activity in Jerusalem, I would say Shweiki hit the nail right on the head. Silwan has been plagued with Israeli demolition orders for years, many of this latest group having been handed orders back in 2005. The residents of Silwan say the claim that their homes are built without the proper Israeli licensing is preposterous since most of them were built even before Israel captured the city in 1967.

Shweiki, for example, says he has deeds to his house and land that date back to the British Mandate, which in turn prove that the house was built even before that. “Besides,” he says, “This is Waqf land,” he said, in reference to the Islamic Endowment that handles the administrative affairs of Jerusalem’s Muslim areas. “Wafq lands can neither be bought nor sold,” he adds, thus discrediting any claims that Palestinians sold their lands to settlers who have taken up residence in the heart of Silwan.

If these demolition orders are put into effect, Israel claims it would relocate the residents in other areas of east Jerusalem, mainly in the suburbs of Beit Hanina and Shufat. The people of Silwan’s Bustan neighborhood are not having any of it, though, saying they will fight the Israeli order tooth and nail. “Before they take our land, they will take our lives,” Shweiki says defiantly.

He is not the only one who feels this way. Sitting with him in the tent are at least ten other men all huddled around the fire drinking coffee and tea. One man, Abed Shaloudi, says the residents have set up the Public Committee for the Defense of Silwan’s Bustan Quarter in order to attract as much media and international attention possible to their plight.

Shaloudi himself is no stranger to hardship. He served 10 years in an Israeli prison back in the nineties during which Jewish settlers made a claim on his home. He is still in his house but admits he does not know when the day will come when settlers will force him out with a court order.

Shaloudi’s youth is reflected in his passionate convictions. He says representatives from various media outlets have visited them, emissaries from the Egyptian embassy and European groups have all come to their tent. He has a guest book he asks all to sign as evidence of those who came in solidarity. His hopes are high that their activities will make a difference. “We are planning a march from Sheikh Jarrah to Al Bustan”, he says, referring to another east Jerusalem neighborhood under constant attack and confiscation by Israeli settlers. “We also hope to form a human chain of children around Silwan.”

These are all commendable efforts and could certainly bring attention to the injustice being meted out in Silwan. The question is, will it be enough to halt the demolitions? If history is to be our indicator, this possibility is pretty slim.

Take Sheikh Jarrah for example. For years settlers have taken over houses in this neighborhood claiming to have ownership deeds that date back before 1948. While Israel insists that the Palestinian families whose homes are being taken over have legal recourse in the Israeli court system, this is hardly a comfort. The best they can hope for is a stay of the demolition or eviction order for a few months, at best years, but never a reversal. The latest settler takeover was the home of Um Kamel, who slept in a tent with her elderly husband (who later died after their eviction) while settlers moved into their house.

In Silwan, Jabal Al Mukabber and the Old City, the stories only differ in the details. Claims of original ownership by Jews almost always trumps years of ownership and family inheritance by Palestinians. The problem with this logic is manifold, first and foremost the fact that it is one-sided. As recent as 1948, Palestinians owned and lived in homes in what is now west Jerusalem, passed down to them by their parents and grandparents. The fact that they hold original and authentic documentation to these homes just across the city’s seam line is completely irrelevant to Israel, which disregards any Palestinian claim to what is now Israel.

If only it would stop at that. Israel has systematically refused to accept even the principle of the right of return on the basis that any major influx of Palestinian refugees into Israel would alter the Jewish character of the state. Its aspirations, unfortunately, go even further than Israel proper. In the West Bank and east Jerusalem, Israel has built tens of Jewish settlements in the heart of occupied Palestinian land and has filled them with half a million Jewish settlers. In Jerusalem, the thorniest of all final status issues, Israel continues to impinge on Palestinian land and residency rights in a bid to vacate the city of as many of its Palestinian-Arab residents as possible.

So, it is hard not to agree with Salah Shweiki. When he says the battle is not about Silwan but about Jerusalem, he is right. When he says the issue is not even the buildings, but the land, I can only shake my head in agreement. In Jerusalem, Israel does not hide its intentions. To make it the Jews’ eternal capital, it will have to rid the city of those who dare to defy that assertion. Sadly, as anyone can see, it is doing just that, one house at a time.

Joharah Baker is a Writer for the Media and Information Program at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). She can be contacted at mip@miftah.org.

Palestinians living in Area C of the West Bank, under Israeli control, have given up on obtaining construction permits from the authorities and instead build without them, leaving 3,000 structures in the territory under constant threat of demolition, according to a UN report.

“Over 94 percent of [Palestinian] applications for building permits in Area C, submitted to the Israeli authorities by Palestinians between January 2000 and September 2007, were denied,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) report, ‘Lack of Permit’ Demolitions and Resultant Displacement in Area C, stated.

In the first quarter of 2008, 124 Palestinian structures were destroyed by the Israeli authorities for not having a permit; in all of 2007, some 208 structures were demolished. Between 2000 and September 2007 about 1,600 structures were destroyed, the report stated.

However, Major Peter Lerner from the Israeli Coordinator of the Government Activities in the Territories (a division of the Ministry of Defense), said: “In the last two years we’ve approved 13 master plans for villages in Area C and another 14 are in process”, explaining that this meant fewer house demolitions would take place and more building would be able to go ahead.

According to the Oslo Accords signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation in the 1990s, the occupied Palestinian territory was divided into three categories: Area A was supposed to be under complete Palestinian control, Area B was split and Area C, comprising more than half of the West Bank, remained under Israeli control.

“Area C is under Israeli responsibility, as the majority of the [Palestinian] population do not live there,” said Lerner.

The majority of Palestinians live in Areas A and B.

It is in Area C that the demolitions continue today, with more than 400 Palestinian communities in that section. According to OCHA, over 200,000 people are affected by the Area C policies.

Children affected by demolitions

Children are particularly affected by the demolitions. According to a forthcoming survey by the Palestinian Counseling Center, demolitions lead to gaps in children’s access to education, health services and clean water.

Their schooling suffers and can lead to dropouts, the OCHA report stated.

“Even though demolition is a single event, its impact is similar to multiple and continuous traumas,” it said.

During a recent press conference in Jerusalem, Tony Blair, the envoy of the Quartet – the Middle East international body made up of the US, EU, Russia and the UN – said he was working with the Israeli authorities on issues such as home demolitions in Area C.

In general, Blair has stressed the importance of developing Area C for the future Palestinian state supported by the Quartet.

Area C not only connects the main population centres in the other two areas, but would also serve as the site for many needed projects, including waste-water treatment.

However, Area C is also home to the majority of Israeli settlements.

“While Palestinian development in Area C has been impeded, the expansion and development of Israeli settlements and other Israeli infrastructure has flourished … despite these settlements’ status as illegal under international humanitarian law,” OCHA said.

The report added that “Palestinian residential areas already have a population density double to that in the Israeli settlements.