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Last in a series of three articles in which Reform Editor David Lawrence reflects on a visit to Israel/Palestine with Christian Aid

(Feb 2003)

I remember the event, even if the date is hazy. I suppose it must have been in 1967 that an appeal went out for volunteers to come and load emergency aid onto ships bound for Israel. War had broken out and hundreds of us flocked to the docks in East London, our only reward for a day’s labour a free ride home from the inevitable Jewish taxi-driver. Looking back, I’m not sure just what benefit Israel would have derived from the second-hand clothes we wrestled into the holds but, in any case, the war was victoriously concluded before the ship bearing them could ever have arrived.

To sympathize with Israel in those days was almost instinctive. It was not just that I grew up in a Jewish area of London and that childhood Friday evenings were time for a glass of sickly-sweet fortified wine with the elderly lady next door, a reward for acting as her Shabbos Goyim by switching on the lights so that she didn’t have to break the Sabbath. Few of us had ever visited Israel but we all understood that ‘plucky little Israel’ carried the torch for our kind of democracy amidst the corruption and confusion of the Middle East.

The Hurtful Difference

And then, in the fullness of time, you do visit. And you see the stark contrast between the relative affluence of Israelis and the grinding poverty of Palestinians in the occupied territories. You see Palestinians being slowly and deliberately forced off the land – the devastated olive groves in the occupied territories, the crops unpicked for fear of sniping – while more land is expropriated to build, expand and protect the illegal armed colonies we are invited to call ‘settlements’. You see Palestinian farmers desperate for water while nearby settlements irrigate their public lawns. You see the contempt for and the daily humiliations heaped upon Palestinians under Israeli occupation and even on Palestinian citizens of Israel. You see tired queues of people at the checkpoints while Israelis sweep by on their own exclusive roads. You hear the desperation in the voices of people who have never carried a gun in their lives and yet find themselves treated like criminals. The Israel you find is not the Israel you imagined, and the difference hurts.

So it was that after five days of intensive visits to Palestinians in the occupied territories, I for one found myself depressed and confused. That what we had seen was terrible was not in doubt. The problem was that it also senseless. The suffering inflicted on ordinary Palestinians seemed to bear no relation to any conceivable ‘security need’ of Israel – indeed it was fanning the flames of hatred. The question was: why?

Vision and Reality

Even to begin to understand the problems of the Middle East, a little history – inevitably over-simplified – is necessary.

In 1947-48, when Britain washed its hands of Palestine, the United Nations declared that Palestine should be partitioned into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The high ideals included democratic constitutions, the right of existing populations to remain where they were and free movement between the two. What actually resulted was a desperate and bloody struggle over territory. Of the Palestinian population of the fledgling Jewish state, some 700,000 (80%) fled. Israel found itself in possession of more than 75% of historic Palestine.

Rightly or wrongly, Israel’s Arab neighbour states never accepted the partition and continued to threaten the Jewish state’s existence. After years of on-off conflict, in 1967 Israel launched a pre-emptive war and at the end of six days Israel had occupied the remainder of Palestine, with a population of around a million Palestinians. The majority of the territory consisted of a single block bordered by the River Jordan – what we now call the ‘West Bank’. Another substantial block lay along the coast bordering Egypt – the Gaza Strip. Though the conflict continued after 1967 and subsequent peace deals led to territory in Egypt being handed back, the map of Palestine has not changed materially since 1967.

Under international law, the land Israel conquered is ‘occupied territory’. Its conquest does not make it part of Israel; in fact the whole thrust of international law is to prevent a country increasing its territory by conquest. Over the last 30 years Israel has consistently flouted a large part of the provisions of the 4th Geneva Convention, which governs the treatment of occupied territories. Israel’s arbitrary executions and imprisonments without trial, its punishment of whole communities for the crimes of individuals, its moving of its own population into the territories, coupled with expelling indigenous populations are all illegal, to name but a few of the tactics employed.

Israeli Opposition

And still the question remains: why? Towards the end of our stay we sought an explanation – this time not from Palestinian sources but from Israel itself.

It is easy to forget that some of the most vociferous critics of Israeli policy are themselves Israelis. There are the hundreds of conscripts who risk imprisonment by refusing to serve in the occupied territories. There are religious critics like Rabbis for Human Rights who seek, through civil disobedience and legal challenges to recall Israel to the deepest values of Judaism.

Our group was privileged to meet two of the most prominent and respected human rights organizations within Israel.

B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, is a Christian Aid partner which documents and publicizes instances of abuse like the use Palestinian civilians as human shields by the Israel Defence Forces, the regular deaths of Palestinians (6 children and 9 adults in the last year) arising from arbitrary delays to ambulances, the ‘mysterious’ deaths of individuals taken into custody and the many lesser humiliations imposed on civilians in the occupied territories.

It was at the offices of B’Tselem in Jerusalem that we were introduced to the map of the West Bank today: a complex jigsaw of colours representing varying degrees of Israeli control over the land. ‘This is Sharon’s map. He conceived it in the 1970s and it has changed little in the last 30 years,’ we were told. ‘His vision is not of a Palestinian West Bank with Israeli settlements, it is of an Israeli West Bank with Arab villages.’

In the 1970s a former general named Ariel Sharon, following a military career regularly punctuated by accusations of war crimes, was placed in charge of Israel’s policy of locating ‘settlements’ in the occupied territories. In a variety of roles he has been one of the settlement movement’s driving forces ever since; now he is Prime Minister. Since 1967, while frequently protesting its willingness to trade land for peace, Israel has steadily moved nearly 6% of its population into the occupied territories. That growing presence is the greatest single root of the current conflict. But for the full meaning of the map we had to wait for our meeting with one of the most colourful and internationally respected figures in the Israeli human rights movement, Jeff Halper.

The Matrix of control

Every inch the image of a Hebrew patriarch, Jeff Halper seems a strange critic of Israeli policy. A Professor of Anthropology at Ben Gurion University, Halper has lived in Israel since 1973 and written extensively on Israeli society. Far from being an enemy of the Israeli ideal he was the founder of the Committee to Save the Ethiopian Jews, whose work led to the airlifting of 15,000 Jews from that war-torn region to Israel in 1991. Jeff Halper is a believer in Israel, but he is first of all a believer in the prophetic values to which its own constitution commits it. Today he co-ordinates the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, a Christian Aid partner which pioneers new forms of peace activism based on non-violent direct action and civil disobedience to the occupation authorities.

With Halper as our guide we set out on a tour of some of the new (and future) developments with which the Israeli government is cementing its control over the Palestinian lands it conquered in 1967 and the 3m Palestinians who live there. We saw the new ‘neighbourhoods’ growing up around Jerusalem – new towns of tens of thousands of people, built on expropriated Palestinian land and often cheek by jowl with impoverished Palestinian villages where it is illegal to build new houses. We pored over maps which showed the extent, not of the illegal settlements as they are now, but of the vast areas of land set aside for future expansion. We marvelled at the extent of the public facilities in a new settlement, far beyond anything required for the relatively modest present population. It became clear that Israel is not building ‘settlements’ on Palestinian land: it is building the towns and cities of the future.

To explain what is happening, Jeff Halper has coined the phrase ‘the matrix of control’. It includes the current military occupation but goes far beyond. The matrix of control is a complex portfolio of policies designed to establish permanent Israeli control over the land and the people – preferably without the need for a costly military occupation.

The settlements are one part of the matrix – Palestinian population areas are increasingly hemmed in settlements, or by land reserved for them. With the settlements come the settlers, many of them implacably opposed to the right of Palestinians to remain on the land. To service the settlements a massive system of highways and by-pass roads has been built, helping to create barriers between Palestinian areas and to incorporate the West Bank into Israel proper. Some of the highways are the width of three football fields and fenced to ensure that they cannot be crossed. The presence of the settlements, their roads and their security areas means that movement within the territories is difficult at the best of times and almost impossible without Israeli permission.

While the settlements grow inexorably, development in Palestinian areas is choked off. A wide range of restrictive planning laws ensure that the growth of Palestinian communities is next to impossible – and where the discriminatory building regulations are broken out of desperation, the bulldozers are never far away. Arbitrary withdrawal of residency permits, plus the pressure of unemployment and hunger, act as constant encouragements for Palestinians to leave. For at least two parties in the governing coalition, the enforced mass ‘transfer’ of population is a declared part of their policy.

For those who are determined to stay, Palestinian industry is stunted by the erection of the new Israeli-controlled industrial areas on the fringes of Palestinian areas, siphoning off labour without encouraging Palestinian enterprise. Bureaucratic restrictions on crop-planting and land clearances progressively sever the connection between Palestinians and the soil, while strict inspections and licensing regimes ensure control over the growth of Palestinian businesses. Education is disrupted by movement restrictions and now educational institutions are being targeted as potential centres of unrest.

And permeating the whole situation are the unbearable stresses of the occupation for its victims. In Jeff Halper’s own words: ‘loss of life, imprisonment, torture, harassment, humiliation, anger and frustration, as well as traumas suffered by tens of thousands of Palestinians (especially children) who witnessed their homes being demolished, saw their loved ones beaten and humiliated, suffered from inadequate housing, and who lost opportunities to actualize their life potentials. These are wounds that will take generations to heal.’

Did the palestinians miss the boat?

Much has been made of Israel’s ‘historic’ offers to the Palestinians of amounts of land varying, according to the teller, between 88% and 95% of that part of Palestine not already incorporated into Israel before 1967. An offer was made but, Jeff Halper points out, the conditions of that offer are seldom spelled out: the land which Israel proposed to keep was precisely the land which ensures that the matrix of control remains intact. The occupied territories are now fragmented into some 190 islands, each surrounded by Israeli settlements, roads and checkpoints. The Palestinians were offered their own territory in the same sense that prisoners are offered 95% of a gaol, reserving only 5% (and the keys) for the guards.

In any case it is pointless for those of us who do not bear the cost of the conflict to pretend we can play with percentages and pronounce what is or is not an acceptable solution. Peace can only come on the basis of a settlement which leaves Israel at peace within secure borders, free of atrocities like the suicide bombings. It can only come when Palestinians, having already conceded the right of Israel to live at peace within its 1967 borders, are offered the hope of a decent life and the opportunity to build a future for themselves and their children. The negotiations to reach that point will be long and hard and they will include arguments over every road, river, house, hill and valley in certain areas. They must deal with intractable problems like the status of Jerusalem and the fate of the millions of refugees outside Palestine. Generations of hatred and bloodletting cannot be overcome by easy words of reconciliation and real trust will take decades to build.

But those of us who watch from the sidelines can and must speak the truth as we see it. We must not be afraid to say forthrightly to Palestinians that terrorism and the evil of suicide bombings can never be an answer to their pain.

And there is a message to Israel which is just as pressing. This year’s Moderator, John Waller, began his address on the Middle East to General Assembly in 2001 with a sad story. Ordered brusquely to open his case at Tel Aviv airport, Bishop Mounib Younan, the Lutheran bishop in Jerusalem and himself a Palestinian, asked the young Israeli security officer gently: ‘Could you not ask a little more politely. After all I am human too.’ Contemptuously she replied, ‘Are you?’

The Two israels

In that painful true story lies the whole tragedy of Israel today, for peace can never come while Israel builds a whole policy around treating Palestinians as less than human beings.

But there is a better Israel. It is the Israel of the volunteers who rebuild the houses their army has demolished, who help pick the olive harvest under the resentful guns of the settlers, who turn out in their thousands to demonstrate for peace. It is the Israel envisioned in its declaration of independence: ‘based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.’

To the hard-hearted Israel, the Israel which has convinced itself that security lies in keeping an entire people in poverty and serfdom, with the fourth most powerful army in the world ranged against a poverty-stricken and fragmented population little larger than that of Manchester, there can only be one response. It is the same response of implacable condemnation that the peoples of the civilized world once gave to another inhuman regime in South Africa.

But for that other Israel, for the courageous ones who seek to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with their God – for that Israel I for one will load second-hand clothes any day.

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