februari-juni - KVS

28
focus / en
if a solution to
the israeli-palestinian
conflict exists,
it will Be Belgian.
– HILdEGARd dE VuySt
As a regular visitor to Israel / Palestine, I am frequently
asked the following question: ‘What is going
to happen there? Surely there is no solution?’ Officially
it’s still the two-state solution: two separate
states on the territory historically called Palestine,
for two separate peoples: the Jews, the majority of
whom arrived after the horrors of the Second World
War, and the indigenous Palestinians. The state of
Israel has existed for more than sixty years, but now
the Palestinians have to have their state too. They
are often represented as mirror images of each other,
but this disguises the true power relationships.
I can understand why Israel holds onto the idea of
a negotiated two-state solution. For Israel, to continue
negotiating is the best way to get more and
more territory out of any settlement, since, as the
strongest party in the conflict, it is able to create
ever more irreversible ‘facts on the ground’. This is
international Newspeak for illegal settlements in
the occupied territory, the illegal Wall, the illegal
annexation of wells, and so on. For all these illegal
actions Israel has been officially condemned, but
with no further consequences. In 1947 the UN proposed
a division into two states by which the Palestinians
would receive 44% of historical Palestine.
They rejected the proposal. After a couple of wars
and rounds of negotiations, this percentage has
been more or less halved.
This makes Israel a country without borders.
There is the famous Green Line, the line of demarcation
drawn in 1949 after the first Arab-Israeli war. Israel
crossed the line in 1967 when it invaded and then
occupied the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, the West
Bank of the Jordan, the Golan Heights and the Sinai
Desert. Since the Oslo Agreements of 1993, part of
the Occupied Territories – in practice this is the Gaza
Strip and the urban centres on the West Bank – has
been governed by Palestinian Authority (PA). Despite
all the jargon of peace accords, Israel’s objective remains
just as clear: to gain as much land as possible.
With as few Palestinians on it as possible.
What is even stranger is that the Palestinian authorities
continue to swear by the two-state solution.
Israeli interventions make this notion of
the future state increasingly unfeasible: the Wall,
which cuts deep into the West Bank far from the
Green Line and thereby annexes land; the checkpoints,
fixed or mobile; the blockade of Gaza; the
entry to the Occupied Territories, which nothing
and no one can enter or leave, by land, air or sea
without being under the control of Israel; the roads
that connect the settlements and tear up the landscape
into pieces; the enclosure of Jerusalem by an
expanding circle of settlements as far as the Jordan,
so that the West Bank is de facto divided into
a North and South, now only connected by Wadi an-
Nar (the Valley of Fire). The road here was recently
widened and newly asphalted, but it is a deadly
road through a deep valley that can be controlled
effortlessly from the settlements that look down
on it from every hillside. So in the two-state logic,
where is this Palestinian state? The West Bank and
Gaza are several dozen kilometres from each other,
with Israel in between, so how can there ever be
the free movement of people and goods as is to be
expected within any single state? And you cannot
even call the West Bank a joined up whole, as it’s
a patchwork of towns with settlements and other
Israeli-controlled territory in between. And what
about Jerusalem, which people so much like to
on loVe anD other lanDscapes © yazan khalili
portray as an East (Palestinian) and a West (Israeli),
neatly divided rather like East and West Berlin?
Everything runs through it and there’s a struggle
for every inch of land and every house, though the
means used are unequal. Any way of forcing Palestinians
out of Jerusalem is a good way: refusing
them planning permission, expulsion and demolition
for real or supposed planning offences, and
all manner of administrative torments. To give one
example, any Palestinian inhabitant of Jerusalem
who transports a resident of the West Bank in their
car risks having it confiscated.
Why does the Palestinian Authority stick to the
two-state solution when Israel makes it increasingly
clear it does not want a viable Palestinian
state? Is it possible that they have become part of
the problem? The government of a country that is
not a country, in an economy that is not a true economy
but functions on the basis of ‘aid’ from abroad,
above all the US and Europe. It was also this international
community that demanded democratic
elections and which then denounced them when
the result was not to their liking, since it wasn’t the
friends of Fatah that won but the Islamist Hamas,
which was not recognised internationally as a discussion
partner.
It is invariably said of Hamas that it took power
by force in Gaza in 2007. It has almost become a set
phrase, just check it in any newspaper. To read that
Hamas thereby thwarted a US-sponsored coup by
Fatah you have to go to www.electronicintifada.
net or read Noam Chomsky. I have never read in my
newspaper that the present PA seized power in the
West Bank. President Abbas put a technocrat at
the head of an unelected emergency government.
And then even if one argues that this was the only
way the international community was able to continue
sponsoring the government on the West Bank,
the legitimacy of this government remains shaky.
One of the things the PA has to take care of is
Israel’s security. When the Palestinians made their
bold application for recognition as a state at the UN
and related institutions, the US couldn’t turn off the
money supply quickly enough. With the exception of
part of a programme for training policemen. Many
young Palestinians are already bitter because their
PA has to be Israel’s policeman. Perhaps the reasoning
of those in the PA is that it’s better to have
a little power than none at all. Israel controls everything
(borders, taxes, water, etc.), annexes land
and moves its population, but the presence of the
PA conceals the true nature of this occupation,
which goes against all international rules.
Apart from the PA’s democratic deficit, which is
smoothed over by the mainstream media and the
international community, the additional problem
is that the PA only represents the Palestinians in
the Occupied Territories, who are only a fraction
of those affected by the conflict. The PA does not
represent the Palestinian refugees (who have been
in camps in the surrounding Arab countries since
1948) or the Palestinian diaspora (Saudi Arabia,
Chile, etc.). They are however represented by the
PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organisation), but Hamas
is not a member of that either. So there is also
a problem of representation for the Palestinians.
No one, not even the PLO, speaks about or for the
Palestinians in Israel. The courageous Israeli historian
Illan Pappe wrote his latest book on this subject:
The Forgotten Palestinians. These people, left
behind by the ethnic cleansing of 1948, currently
make up 20% of the Israeli population. They are often
called Arab Israelis, as if they were immigrants
from Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. These communities of
Palestinians in Israel are just as much of a patchwork
as the settlements on the other side of the
Wall: from Galilee in the north, in and around Um el
Fahm and Haifa, to Jaffa near Tel Aviv and the Palestinian
Bedouin in the south around Beersheba.
Perhaps this is already making you dizzy? Let me
make my point: a two-state solution does not offer
a viable prospect for the Palestinians in the Occupied
Territories, it does not offer any prospect at
all to the Palestinian refugees and in Israel will only
perpetuate the Palestinians’ status as secondclass
citizens. We have to get rid of this mantra of
the separate state. ‘People become State’, that’s
what I went to the IJzer plain for, as an adolescent
member of ‘Sturm und Drang’, embittered by injustice.
But in the meantime Flemish rights have been
guaranteed by the federal state of Belgium thanks
to the state reforms of 1993 and later. Since then I
have also learnt that ‘people’ is often only a term by
which to exclude other peoples.
Israel is scared to death of losing its Jewish character.
It does not have a constitution that guarantees
equal rights to all its citizens. This means that
Jews have more rights than non-Jews. In Israel,
the Palestinians are thought of as a demographic
threat. At some point, because they have a higher
birth rate, there will be more Palestinians than
Jews between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan.
The fear of this is constantly being cranked up,
to the extent that it might even contribute to bringing
about that Palestinian state more quickly. On
the understanding that Israel empties its territory
of Palestinians. It is already doing this by means
of specific laws: if an Israeli Palestinian chooses a
partner from the West Bank, he or she cannot bring
them into Israel. What will happen to the Palestinian
population in Israel if the two-state solution
comes about? Will they be transported – the dream
of the Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liebermann?
Or will these territories be added to the Palestinian
state in exchange for the annexation of illegal settlements
into Israel?
It is this fear of the loss of supremacy that prevents
a different solution to the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict: the single-state solution, federal, like the
Belgian model, or bi-national. One state that treats
all its citizens on an equal basis, with equal rights
and duties regardless of ethnic and religious origins.
Where it’s one man one vote. Where Jews can
return to their dreamed-of homeland, just like Palestinians.
Where compensation mitigates the injustice
suffered by the tens of thousands of Palestinians
who were driven from their land and home.
Where everyone can speak their own language, receive
their education, experience their own culture,
and where at the same time infrastructure work is
carried out for the benefit of all.
At first sight Israel has everything to lose in this
scenario, just like the whites in South Africa. But
on closer examination there is a lot to be gained. To
keffiYeh /
maDe in china
p. 12
start with there is security, which we can assume
is the highest priority for the Jews (and not only the
Israeli Jews). The Palestinians in Israel, who do after
all count for one in five of the population, do not
throw themselves on their Jewish fellow-citizens,
not even during the horrors of the Gaza War. They
do not carry out attacks, even though there are no
walls between them and their so-called arch-enemies.
They do not force their Jewish fellow-citizens
into the sea – the cliché held out by the heralds of
fear. The Palestinians in Israel do not want to lose
their Israeli citizenship because in spite of everything
it gives them the opportunity to get on in life,
to get an education, pursue a trade, and build up a
better existence for their children. Unlike the Palestinians
in the Occupied Territories, who don’t get
anywhere. It would seem that the best guarantee
of security would be to give all the inhabitants the
chance of a dignified existence. And secondly, the
big gain for Israel would be moral rehabilitation.
The one-state solution could bring an end to the
degeneration that goes with the political, military
and social manifestation of the idea that others are
inferior. What is more, this single Israeli-Palestinian
state could enter the 21 st century as a mixed nation
that had grown out of an indigenous population
and immigrants, all of whom consider themselves
citizens.
Israel boasts of being the only democracy in the
Middle East. Yet recent parliamentary bills point to
the accelerated crumbling of this democracy. The
intention is to impose controls on ‘political’ NGOs
whose activities are partly financed from abroad.
But what they actually have in mind are human
rights organisations that publicise Israeli violations.
They would like to prosecute citizens who
give their support to BDS (Boycott, Divestment,
Sanctions), a worldwide boycott campaign analogous
to the international boycott of the Apartheid
regime in South Africa. And they want Palestinians
and non-Jews to take an oath of loyalty to Israel as
a Jewish democratic state. No loyalty, no citizenship.
So where is the democracy in all this? High
time that Wall was brought down.
29