Home > A masked reality
Haaretz (Isreal)
Media interest in the separation fence is dying down,
although construction is continuing. The disengagement
from Gaza is still making headlines, but does not go
further than words at this stage. Between the rising and
ebbing waves of interest, two basic assumptions are
being established. One, that the separation fence is the
way it is due to the typical Israeli brouhaha in
government and administration procedures. Two, that
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement is
integrally tied to his and his sons’ legal
entanglements.
However, these assumptions derive from the reality we
know within the Green Line. Within the Palestinian
territories that were occupied 1967, there is a reality
of rigorous, elaborate long-term master planning that
disguises itself as confusion. This is a reality of
evicting as many Palestinians as possible from their
lands, concentrating them in crowded residential
enclaves, and thwarting their desire to establish a
state that will enable them to live with respect.
Why should the confusion in the decision-making process
of the fence construction produce a route that harms the
Palestinians? How is it that confusion and lack of
planning result in more Palestinians being forced to
leave their homes - in Qalqilyah, Barta’a, and the
little village of Siapa in the north of the Gaza Strip?
How is it that the repercussions of the separation fence
are so similar to those of the security roads and fences
around the settlements, like Efrat, Karnei Shomron,
Beitar and Dugit? Less and less land for the
Palestinians, wider quarters for the Jews? How is it
that the brouhaha in the Oslo years produced bypassing
roads so consistent with Sharon’s plans from the ’80s,
which today are the main instruments for imprisoning the
Palestinians in their enclaves to protect the
settlements’ safety?
As chaotic as the Israeli occupation administration may
be, as shrewd and cunning a politician as Sharon may be
– they are both acting within a clear, resolved Israeli
master plan, which reality is substantiating day after
day. Sharon played an important role in creating this
reality. He reflects a ruling Israeli generation, for
which this plan has become part of its DNA code.
Sometimes the plan undergoes mutations given universal
political changes and the fact that Palestinians
stubbornly refuse to live forever as an occupied nation.
But the logic is the same, and is clearly expressed by
the statement of former director of the State
Prosecutor’s Office Civil Department Plia Albek: "The
places where Arabs live will be in the Palestinian
state, and if settlements are built on empty state
lands, where no Arabs are living in any case, the border
can be drawn there." ("This legal eagle would let her
chicks go," Aluf Benn, Haaretz, April 5.)
In other words, the Arabs will not be actively deported,
and will not be forced to be lower grade Israeli
subjects. We will even let them establish a "state." But
it will be a state without open (desolate) territories
and without territorial contiguity. It will be
determined according to their built up (residential)
area. Because in the open territories, where Arabs do
not reside, we will build settlements that will
demarcate the border of the Jewish state. Only Jews have
the right and need for green space around their cities
and for land reserves for building, for expanding and
for industry and development. That, incidentally, is the
reality on both sides of the Green Line.
Only reality, not declarations to the press and promises
to White House envoys, shows us what the goal is.
Reality teaches us that in the territories, the goal is
to crumble the Palestinian national cohesiveness as much
as possible. That is, to treat the people not as a
nation requiring physical and human resources (e.g.
land, water and freedom of movement) in order to develop
and build a future, but as a collection of individuals,
whose private property rights, on their family land, we,
in our great benevolence, will recognize.
They will be treated as a bunch of unconnected
communities. The disengagement plan from Gaza
corresponds with this approach, since the main
disengagement will be between Gaza and the West Bank.
This disengagement was started by the Labor-Meretz
government in the beginning of the ’90s, with initiation
of the closure policy even before the suicide bombings
began. This policy prohibited the movement of
Palestinians between the Gaza Strip and West Bank,
restricted Gazans from moving their residence to the
West Bank, banned Gazans from studying in the West Bank
and blocked West Bank markets to Gazan merchandise. Who
really cares that this narrow strip, with its 1.5
million Palestinian residents, gets back the little that
was robbed from it - 20 percent of the territory that
has served 7,000 Jews until now - if the main things -
most of the West Bank and its spacious lands, waters,
and development potential - are preserved for the
benefit of the Jewish nation.
Don’t underestimate Sharon and his adherence to the
national cause that Albek described so well. And don’t
underestimate the Israeli planning institutions, which
has a duty to fulfill this cause.