Towards the end of the 1980s, I travelled to Palestine during the first Intifada. I wrote in hotpress of my reaction to seeing children playing around an open sewer in the refugee camps of Gaza. The refugees had already been there for 40 years and a grandmother asked me what kind of future was in store for her grandchildren.
Back then, I might have felt that there was reason to hope. Now, almost 20 years on, all I saw was desperation.
Everything in Gaza has got worse. Whereas on my previous visit, the issue was scarcity of water, now the water is undrinkable. A more telling metaphor for the inhuman way in which the people of Palestine have been treated would be hard to invent.
In Gaza over 70% of the population are refugees – 969,588 out of a population of 1.3 million. Forty-seven percent live on less than $2.10 a day and 16% live in deep poverty, i.e. they are in need of ongoing emergency food aid.
Where is the food to come from? Since 2001, agriculture has been decimated and Palestinian fishermen have been unable to fish. They had always claimed the right to 20 miles of fishing waters and had at least been allowed by the Israeli authorities to fish up to six miles. Since 2001, because of restrictions, activity has ceased. Neither has there been any movement in or out of Gaza. As many as 100,000 refugees have no papers, making it impossible for them to go anywhere.
In effect, Gaza has been, and remains, an open prison. This is the territory from which an alleged ‘disengagement’, or withdrawal, of Israeli settlers has taken place in recent weeks – an initiative that has been described as a breakthrough. What has happened, in real terms, however, is minimal.
About 8,000 settlers have been removed from 21 settlements in Gaza and from four settlements in the Northern part of the West Bank. The internal blockades and checkpoints have been removed – these have been replaced with five strengthened military installations on the border. The air space, the sea and the crossing with Egypt all remain under Israeli control.
Gaza, of course, is a mere one percent of historic Palestine and six percent of the territory that was left after the 1967 war.
This then is the battered and shrivelled entity that the International Community has been conned into thinking might form the basis of an independent, viable Palestinian State and part of a two state solution to the troubles in the region.
Historically, in all of the talks aimed at peace, Gaza and the West Bank were considered to be the one entity and the position of East Jerusalem was to be considered as part of the Final Stage Discussions.
Any realistic, moral or legal approach to solving the conflict in the Middle East has to begin here. It also has to address the Settlement policy of the Israeli Government and the ongoing colonisation of the West Bank, which they have been effecting by stealth.
While 8,000 settlers were being removed from Gaza, over 30,000 settlers were being facilitated with new permissions in the West Bank. The Israeli Government has acknowledged that there are now over 250,000 settlers in the occupied West Bank. In addition, over 150,000 are in new settlements in a horseshoe around East Jerusalem. Israel controls over 60 percent of the West Bank. This is the backdrop against which all of the recent events should be viewed.
Meanwhile, the Security Wall, judged an illegal structure by the International Court of Justice at the Hague in July 2004, takes more land from what has been left to the Palestinians. It is 80 percent built on Palestinian land. The Green Line, which defined the partition of land at the end of the 1967 war, is 315 kilometres long. The projected length of the Wall is 621 kilometres. It weaves in and out, dividing villages from their hinterland, taking in settlements and expanding Jerusalem into a Greater Jerusalem area, which will have a substantial Israeli majority.
The population between the Wall and the Green Line, excluding East Jerusalem, will comprise 93,200 Palestinians in 63 communities and 140,200 settlers in 56 communities. In other words, the Wall is about annexation. It is a crude and wholly unjustified land grab.
Among those who seem to have been taken in by one of the best managed public relations stunts in international politics of our times are Jack Lang, former Minister for Culture in France, and Jesse Jackson of the United States – both friends of the Palestinian cause in the past.
If the withdrawal of settlements stops at the withdrawal from Gaza, they will have been woefully misled. If the withdrawal from Gaza is followed by withdrawal from the West Bank, demolition of the Wall and the beginning of talks of the future of Jerusalem takes place, they will be proven right. How likely is this? I am convinced that only an extraordinary effort by the international community, invoking international law and a willingness to back it up can make it happen.
But will it? My own feeling is that the prospects are grim.
I spent just over a week in Gaza, Israel and the occupied Palestinian lands with Andreas Van Aaght, former Prime Minister of the Netherlands, and six others, including three former ministers, one a former Ambassador of France, one a survivor of Auschwitz. We travelled the routes Palestinians travel and endured the long, humiliating and degrading ordeal to which Palestinians are subjected in the name of security on a daily basis. As I made my way through the checkpoint at Erez, passing through one turnstile after another, a voice from a speaker issuing instructions, the impression was inescapably Orwellian.
It was in Hebron that the greatest despair, and anger too, hit me. I became acutely conscious of the function of humiliation in the strategy of settler occupation. There are about 400 Israeli settlers in Hebron. They are protected by 5,000 Israeli soldiers. As to the 150,000 Palestinians – they are forbidden from entering the city’s central area.
Contrary to a Hebron Accord that dates from the time of the Oslo Accords, a particularly vicious and ideologically-driven group of settlers continue to press for expansion and expropriation of Palestinian property. When they enter a house illegally, often from next door by opening the walls, they change the locks. A confrontation takes place and the Israeli army moves the Palestinians into custody, allegedly for their own protection. Apart from houses stolen, over 2,500 Palestinian businesses have been closed by such intimidation.
We saw the process of establishing a settlement at first hand. It begins with a simple tent or more usually a set of mobile homes. These, in time, become single storey dwellings, later two storey and three storey houses, with red tiled roofs and swimming pools. In November 1998, the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon produced the immortal advice: “We must all run to the top of every hill. What we occupy we will keep, what we leave they will get.” It is on the tops of the hills that the settlements dominate, their security zone constituting a vast footprint, with the Israeli Defence Forces available as protection.
Intimidation, backed by the might of the State, is rife. In Hebron, we walked along a small, narrow, foul smelling street allowed for the Palestinian market. The street had a kind of fishing net cover to protect those trading down below. It was littered with toilet rolls, refuse and waste of all description that sat there like a provocation. Through the net came small stones and gravel, which were being thrown from above.
Two Arab women, one with two teenage children, the other with three small ones, subtly attached themselves to us as a means of getting down the street. As we reached the end, a large bottle was sent hurtling down onto a glass table where an old man and a small child were selling packets of cigarettes. Glass scattered in every direction.
During my week in Hebron, a report I had read began to haunt me. It had suggested that children are more traumatised by the humiliation of their parents than by their loss. I saw the evidence of this repeatedly in the startled, mistrustful eyes of the children.
We also visited Bethlehem. There, the wall is nine metres high and will soon encircle the town. Built on Palestinian land, it robs Beth Jala, Bethlehem and Beth Sahour of most if not all of the land available for agricultural use.
In Bethlehem, at less than 5 percent of what it was before 2001, tourism is effectively extinct. Besides, the wall will end all movement without Israeli permission. It weaves its way in and out of Palestinian territory, dividing villages, including settlements. It cuts off communication from the north to the south of the West Bank. As an act of vandalism, the construction of it has no equal.
In Beth Sahour, we visited the YMCA/YWCA to plant some trees. These olive trees have been saved from the destruction caused by the building of the wall. We were met by an old man who had saved a tree that is between 400 and 1,000 years old and was replanting it.
Since September 2000, 456,389 olive trees have been destroyed. Important economically, each olive tree produces nine kilograms of olives and two litres of oil. But, as a symbol of peace, olive trees have a deeper importance too. As an old man put it, ‘the olive tree binds us to our grandfathers!’
I spent a lot of time after the visit to Beit Sahour thinking what it must take to bulldoze an olive grove. In the destruction of the olive trees the livelihood, the memory and the culture of a people are being obliterated.
The Holy City of Jerusalem is being turned into Greater Jerusalem. Twenty-eight villages have been taken in. Sixty-four square kilometres has been added since 1967, turning it into a sprawl three times its size in 1967.
The effect of the Wall on East Jerusalem will be severe. There is no hospital behind the Wall and so it will cut off 70,000 people from any health service. In a similar act of cultural brutalism, 350 teachers will be cut off from the children they teach.
Indeed, there are houses where, in the same family, some of the inhabitants have West Bank Cards and others Jerusalem Cards. When what is really a new city, Ma’ale Admin, is added in, Jerusalem will have a 72 percent Israeli majority. Palestinian villages such as Abu Dis will become enclaves.
Exclusion from Jerusalem, apart from religious or political considerations, is economically critical. The Jerusalem area currently generates over 40% of the income in the Palestinian economy. Without this, there is no possibility of a viable Palestinian state.