Brian Johnston SEEING PALESTINE

SEEING PALESTINE
In 2007 a group from Pittsburgh visited Palestine on a fact-finding trip. For most of our excursions our companion was a doughty little bus whose logo appropriately recalled the Good Shepherd. It disdained luxury, offering instead unswerving dependability under the most trying conditions. Faced with a terrain that would daunt the hardiest four-wheel drive and roads of all gradients and surfaces often evolving into dirt tracks that severely tested its suspension, it always was
equal to the challenge. Our bones frequently were shaken, but never our loyalties, even when, on occasion, we returned from more luxurious, air-conditioned rivals. With its cheerfully unmistakable Christian insignia, and its (mostly) Christian passengers, it was enthusiastically hailed in every town and village we passed through, effectively refuting the fiction that it is Muslim hostility not Israeli policy that continues to drive Christians out of Palestine. Our bus guided us through unfriendly IDF Checkpoints and over a roller-coaster landscape of mountains and deep valleys, through desert and fertile lands. Its unfailing maneuverability helped us see the land close up.

Seeing Palestine is not a simple matter, because Palestine is a palimpsest of violently
conflicting narratives that are both written into and concealed within the landscape. Like
the ancient monasteries hidden deep in gullies or perched precariously on the mountain
cliffs that are only apparent after diligent looking, seeing the realities of Palestine is a
matter of looking intently. No area of the world conceals so much, past and present,
beneath what it shows. To better understand what it was we were seeing we would spend
up to thirteen hours a day over eleven days visiting groups of Palestinians and Israelis,
popular committees and activists, Israeli human rights groups like B’Tselem (and one
‘refusenik’), illegal settlements (interviewing a settler), villages, towns and cities, the
refugee camps, universities, and arts and theatre groups. This visit organized by the Siraj
Centre for Holy Land Studies, based in Beit Sahour close to Bethlehem was as
informative as it was enjoyable and I highly recommend those who want to understand
the situation of the Palestinians to sign up. They also hold a Summer Camp each year
attended by students from all over the world.

In Israel we visited the area of Ein Hod, a Zionist "artists' colony" established on the land
of the previous Palestinian village, Ayn Hawd. Ayn Hawd's original, rightful and dispossessed
Palestinian residents, now deemed "present absentees", are settled only 1.5 kilometers away
on the outlying hills and are prevented from returning home. Their new, improvised village is
'unrecognized' by Israel and so denied water, electricity, or an access road. Like many such communities
it was built after its inhabitants were expelled from villages established hundreds of years before Israel
was created and is vulnerable to demolition under discriminatory ‘Planning Laws’. We
heard from a group in Haifa how Israeli Palestinians always dread hearing of new
planning developments by the government, because these are almost certainly a cover for
fresh depredations on Palestinian land and property. Planning is always at the expense of
Palestinian citizens. The Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, for example, was
recreated after the eviction of its original inhabitants,(1) requiring the state to expropriate
one third of the land from its Palestinian owners “under the pretext of catering for ‘public
needs’. The use of the term ‘public’ reveals more than anything else the government’s
political bias: the ‘public’ on whom expropriations were imposed always comprised
Palestinians: the ‘public’ who enjoyed the fruits of the expropriation always exclusively
comprised Jews.” (2)

JERUSALEM
Jerusalem, viewed from a distance, looks as if some indignant heave of the land would
send it toppling into the precipitous valleys that surround it, fulfilling the biblical
promise: "Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low."
The city reflects the political divisions of the country at large. The Jewish Quarter
exists as an act of violence against the Palestinians.
To dispossess a people, steal their land, inhabit or demolish their buildings and then complacently
occupy the confiscated space in reciprocal view of the victims requires a carefully
cultivated myopia apparent at all levels of Israeli discourse. The Chief Architect of the
District of Jerusalem, Elinoar Barzacchi, after returning from Europe, enthused, “In
Rome I lived in the Old City. In Paris I lived in Montmartre. Here, in the [Jewish]
Quarter it looked to me like the most Jerusalemite thing there is, the most authentic, the
most multicultural it can be.” (3)
Eyal Weizmann comments,
“Rather than a multicultural city centre the Jewish Quarter might better be described as
an artificial, ethnically homogenous, gated neighbourhood, whose construction was
made possible by the forced displacement of its inhabitants. It is a ‘biblical’ theme park,
sending out further tentacles of Jewish housing and enclaves and religious study centres
into the Muslim Quarter to which it is connected above street level via protected and
exclusive roof paths. The separation of this enclave from its surroundings is further
enforced by the fact that all entrances and exits to the Jewish Quarter are guarded by
border police, providing access, after body and bag scans, only to Jewish
residents/settlers, tourists, and the Israeli army and police.”4
The “most Jerusalemite thing there is” is a space emptied of its native people.

In the Palestinian section of Jerusalem, always under threat as more and more of its land is
confiscated and its buildings seized or demolished, people go to work uncertain if their
houses will still be standing when they return. One reason the government gives to justify
house demolitions is the lack of a building permit, that costs two thousand dollars and is
almost impossible for Palestinians to obtain. As the householder is not permitted to add to
his house on his own land he is forced to build illegally as his family grows. Then the
Caterpillar bulldozers arrive without notice and, even with a family inside the building,
begin destruction. Often, only minutes are given for a family to be made homeless. In a
further sadistic twist, the householder is then exorbitantly billed by the municipality for
the cost of the demolition. 18,000 houses in Palestine have been demolished in this way since 1967. We met with members of the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD)
who showed us sites of such demolished houses, mounds of rubble where once a whole
family lived and its children played. ICAHD's goal is the Sisyphean task of rebuilding all demolished houses.


Demolished Palestinian Home

The contrast between the Jewish and Palestinian areas of the city is stark. Despite
contributing 40% of Jerusalem's taxes Palestinians receive only 7% of municipal
expenditure. The result is that while Jewish areas are immaculate, Palestinian areas suffer
from mounds of unsanitary, uncollected garbage. Shopkeepers clean the streets of the
Souq because the municipality refuses to do so. These policies are purely vindictive, to
impress upon the populace its impotence under colonial rule. The most blatant example
of this oppression is the apartheid Wall.

THE WALL
Recurrent encounters with the Wall were always a shock. A drive down a Jerusalem
street would suddenly end in the sheer brute fact of a towering mass of concrete terminating the street’s functions of movement, life and trade. We came upon the Wall
everywhere in Palestine; cleaving through towns and villages, streets and houses,
overriding farmlands, demolishing buildings and communities, arrogantly indifferent to
all it encountered. It is twice the height of the Berlin Wall, and every fifty yards or so is
flanked with tall military towers that recall the worst imagery from World War II. Its
appearance emphasizes its function as part of the huge penal complex into which
Palestine has been transformed. Israel's Ministry of Defense has published new maps
showing the Wall annexing further large tracts of Palestinian land, resulting in 46% of the
West Bank coming under full Israeli control. The Wall's destructive progress through
Palestine has been likened to that of a serpent but that is an injustice. A serpent is a
subtle, exotic, living organism, sensitively adaptive to its environment: the Wall reflects
the gross banality of domination that can only crush, disfigure and destroy. Like the
settlements, the Wall’s violation of the landscape betrays an actual alienation from it. Did
its builders see what they were doing? A ‘love of the land’ could not do this to it.

Apart from omnipresent IDF soldiers, armed settlers and a handful of brave activists,
Israelis, with rare exceptions, do not enter the Occupied Land. This seems a matter of
inclination as much as of actual prohibition. On the flight from London to Tel Aviv my
seating companion, a pleasant Jewish lady from the north of England visiting relatives,
was astonished when I told her I would be staying in the Palestinian Territories. She had
never been there. She had heard it was ‘once’ a pleasant area to visit - but no longer. She
seemed to have no inkling why. One strong disincentive for Israelis entering the West
Bank or Gaza is certainly that they then would have to confront the shameful
contradictions that vitiate the whole Israeli utopian project. More effective than the
physical wall, perhaps, is the mental wall most Israelis have erected to prevent
themselves from seeing.

The Encroaching Wall: Stealing Palestinian Land
CHECKPOINTS
Israelis seem to have developed to a fine art the faculty for not seeing. At checkpoints,
soldiers insultingly do not look directly at the men, women and children they humiliate and often physically abuse
every day, as if these are beneath recognition excepts as objects of humiliation. On our
journeys we watched one form of humiliation after another as long lines of Palestinians,
forced to dismount from the taxis that had brought them to the checkpoint, were made to
stand, sometimes for hours, in the heat of day. Meanwhile, Jewish cars sped by them and
we, though unwelcome as tourists and witnesses in the Occupied Territories, were subject only to
cursory, unfriendly examination. The mostly young and apparently not well-educated
IDF soldiers at the checkpoints are, for the most part, themselves afflicted by the system,
encouraged to play roles that only can be morally corrupting. The boredom of their
situation must be disagreeable, but they are provided with victims upon whom to unleash
their frustrations. There are numerous accounts of Palestinian suffering at their hands; of
being insulted, beaten, humiliated; of actual deaths; of the injured delayed until they died;
of women in labor denied passage, giving birth and of their newborn dying. As Israelis
cannot by nature be more sadistic than other peoples, their behavior towards those in their
power would seem almost inexplicable.

In a now notorious Stanford Prison experiment a group of students were assigned roles
either as guards or as prisoners and placed in simulated prison conditions. The
experiment had to be called off because, in a frighteningly short time, the students who
played the guards began to obey punishment orders of increasing severity and to behave
with sadistic violence towards the 'prisoners'. The subjects of the experiment were,
presumably, 'normal' educated Americans. Domination over others clearly encourages
atavistic savagery. The tortures inflicted at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraig merely took to
an extreme the situation in many U.S. penitentiaries. Israel, which has turned Palestine
into one large-scale prison, has trapped itself in the 'Stanford syndrome'; compounded, as
in many U. S. prisons, by a racist attitude towards the inmates. It has a captive and
despised population whose presence in the land it resents and upon whom it devises
continually new forms of suffering, humiliation, and degradation. Ha'aretz reprinted
details of a recent study in which " psychologist Ishai-Karen was (unaccountably) shocked to find that the [IDF] soldiers enjoyed the `intoxication of power', and had pleasure from using violence.
She said: `Most of my interviewees enjoyed their own instigated violence during their
Occupation service." ( 21.09.07} The scenes at the checkpoints, therefore, encapsulate
the situation of the country at large. Anyone who genuinely has Israel’s well being at
heart must wish it would free itself from this moral death trap - and not by the
contemplated greater crime of even further ethnic cleansing.

At a Checkpoint

The Checkpoints serve less the cause of security than that of the harassment and
disruption of Palestinian life - part of the effort to make life so unbearable that
Palestinians will quit their homeland. There are over hundreds of Checkpoints, not there
primarily to make entry into Israel difficult (though they do that) but to fragment the
occupied territory into multiple, isolated Bantustans, making the Palestinians' own
homeland inaccessible to them. This is not 'security' but a particularly ugly cruelty - to
divide Palestinians from their families, their workplaces, schools, clinics and hospitals.
To make travel even more burdensome, 'flying checkpoints' are set up anywhere without
warning so that any road one may be traveling upon suddenly becomes a barrier
disrupting the delivery of goods or food or aborting a family's planned visit. We
witnessed some of these flying checkpoints set up on roadways with no proximity to any
conceivable security site. Their function was plain: like the Wall, to assert and impress
upon the natives the power of the colonial occupier. The purely arbitrary way in which this power is
exercised makes it all the more absolute.

THE SETTLEMENTS
After the experience of the checkpoints and the omnipresent apartheid Wall, the strongest
shock was the sight of the settlements; alien fortress growths striding across the hilltops
or clamped upon them like the fungi of aggressive sci-fi invaders. An architecture of
domination disfigures the natural landscape, implicitly proclaiming its power over a
subjugated people. However, this architecture inadvertently carries an ironic subtext: the settlements do not belong in this landscape; they actually are hostile to it, brutally
indifferent to its contours and texture. Their clumsy and intrusive incongruity reflects
their origin in Ariel Sharon’s injunction to the colonizers - “to grab as many hilltops as
they can…because everything we take now will stay ours. Everything we don’t grab will
go to them.” (5) They are therefore proclamations of triumphant pillage. Their hilltop
positioning as fortresses (like Crusader castles) reveals a desire not to live within the
landscape but to ‘oversee’ and dominate it. Rapidly constructed, uniform and sterile for
all their luxury, settlements like that of e.g. Ma'ale Adumim near Jerusalem lack the
texture of historical presence found in Palestinian communities.

Dominating the landscape

Palestinian towns and villages in the valleys emerge organically from their past intimate
life with the land. They respect the land, following the natural contours they have
pastured. In contrast to the meticulously laid out, uniform spaces of the settlements, the
Palestinian towns are mostly makeshift, bustling, noisy, unkempt and crowded; the
clusters of houses are individual, haphazard and human. They show a history of mutual accommodations and compromises over time rather than resulting from any instant
master plan for an ethnocratic utopia. Old cities like Bethlehem, Hebron, Haifa, Nablus
and Nazareth still possess much of the Ottoman architecture that is prized – and
confiscated – in Israel. There are ruins, poverty and enforced neglect everywhere in
Palestine; but even in the appallingly destitute and cramped refugee camps, continually
invaded and battered by the IDF, the communities possess a vibrancy and intimacy that
the settlements lack.

Palestinian townscape

Many of the heavily subsidized settlement houses remain empty, revealing that they never answered any housing need; only the motive of asserting control. They were “built with the self-proclaimed aim of bisecting, disturbing and squeezing out the Palestinian communities. ...The question of whether there are a pair of eyes looking out of the windows of settlement houses becomes irrelevant as the effect of domination is achieved by the mere presence of these buildings.” (6) As commuter colonies they are wholly dependent on Jews-only highways to distant Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Isolated, with no contact with the immediately surrounding land, they resemble defensive outposts preparing for a time of siege. "Settlers talk to the camera in front of their newly built homes. The sense of an ideal and luxurious rural life is contrasted with the violence of its setting seen through the window or over the fence" 7

Like the similarly isolated, gated and guarded communities in the United States, they may be intimations of a future dystopia where the world’s wealthy defend their walled-in communities against the increasing multitudes of the poor who grow more desperate as the planet's resources are pillaged beyond repair. In the words of Naomi Klein, “This is what a society looks like when it has lost its economic incentive for peace and is heavily invested in fighting and profiting from an endless and unwinnable War on Terror. One part looks like Israel; the other part looks like Gaza ... In South Africa, Russia and New Orleans the rich build walls around themselves. Israel has taken this disposal process a step further: it has built walls around the dangerous poor." (The Shock Doctrine - the Rise of Disaster Capitalism.)

The settlements cannot escape the appearance of being alien to the terrain in spite of occasional cosmetic olive trees, stolen from their owners and uprooted from their natural, productive life in the land.
Once they supported the now devastated families who tended them. The transplanted olive trees point to a malaise at the heart of the utopian project. Disconnected from any intimate history with the land and its people, refusing to admit the motives and means by which they now claim ownership, the settlers reconfigure the land as a fictive space
between a semi-mythic biblical past and a utopia in the making. Substituting fantasy for reality, such ‘attachment’ to the land is less like love than pornography. (“Menorah Katzover, the wife of a prominent settler leader, said of the view of the West Bank mountains from her living room windows in the settlement of Homesh, "It causes me such excitement that I cannot even talk about in modesty’.”8)

Interfering with the fantasy, however, are the Palestinian people and their undeniable, long established imprint on the land. Settlement real estate agents actually encourage in their customers what they term “a process of landscape interpretation …what the settlers think they see (a pastoral biblical landscape and its figures)” magically transforms “what the settlers really see – the daily life of Palestinians and their poverty under occupation. Within this panorama lies a cruel paradox: the very thing that renders the landscape ‘biblical’ – its traditional habitation and cultivation in terraces, olive orchards, stone buildings – is produced by the Palestinians, the very people whom the settlers would like to displace.” (9)

The Settlers

PALESTINIAN LAND
The Palestinian landscape everywhere refutes the Zionist recreation of it into a biblical theme park. The hills continue traditional terrace farming, the villages show the subtle and complex imprint of their long history. The most notable feature is the ubiquitous olive tree, a major source of the Palestinian economy, uprooted and destroyed in the thousands by Israel soldiers and settlers but still stubbornly persisting. Each tree
proclaims a history of human tending and nurture. Each survival is a testimony to the peaceful resistance of Palestinians who continue to live here in spite of all efforts to drive them out.

Protecting a Market from Settler Garbage Attacks

The Land Under Siege
To the tourist, Israel and Palestine offer the sight of a land of rich contrasts between mountains and deep valleys; fertile agricultural land and areas of extreme aridity; seacoast cities and beaches and inland wilderness. The large stretch of the Negev Desert merges into the startling mountain terrain between the Dead Sea and Bethlehem. Here the landscape is wrinkled with huge gullies and cliffs and is the site of isolated ancient monasteries, tenaciously nestled in deep canyons or precariously perched on cliff sides. Between Ramallah and Jerusalem the hills are still ribbed with the ancient terrace farming by which, over the centuries, the native inhabitants have made the desert bloom. Stretching north to Nablus, the landscape becomes increasingly fertile and green. On the coast, huge twentieth century Tel Aviv looms like a misplaced Los Angeles.

Diligent seeing instead of 'landscape interpretation' however, would reveal, not a biblical fantasy nor a utopia in the making but the uglier truth of a land under siege, its water stolen, over one million olive tress uprooted and the land used to dump sewage from the settlements onto Palestinian communities and to receive Israel's industrial toxic wastes. "Their effluents drain down on Palestinian towns and have blighted them." (10) Destitute adults and children scour the waste from the settlements to scrabble together a few dollars to support their families.

The settlers, not satisfied with frequently physically assaulting the Palestinians with Israeli army indifference or even cooperation and deliberately throwing their garbage onto Palestinian streets and markets,
are "destroying their agricultural and pastoral lands by tearing up olive groves and spreading poison pellets that kill indigenous wildlife as well as goats and sheep." (11)
The groundwater is irreparably contaminated while massive amounts of garbage are diverted to the Palestinian areas. Israel further "plans to dump 10,000 tons of solid waste from the Dan and Sharon regions into a quarry near Nablus, in defiance of international treaties and the advice of environmental experts." (12) The settlers who are, as yet, only a
tenth of the population of the Occupied Territories not only produce twenty five percent of its untreated sewage but use five times as much water as the Palestinians who are allotted less than World Health Organization minimum standards require. Unlike the settlers, they then have to pay for it.

Palestinian poverty: scavenging settler garbage

This degradation of the land not only is destroying what is an ancient irreplaceable heritage: it is imperiling the land's future. Evidence is emerging that the leakage of radiation from the Dimona nuclear reactor is leading to high incidents of leukemia among Palestinian children in nearby villages. This contamination reportedly has affected Jewish
residents in the area also and has crossed the border into Jordan. Israel, as well as Palestine, has become an ecological disaster zone. In 1997 a group of Jewish athletes visiting Israel from Australia were crossing a bridge that collapsed and plunged them, fatally, into a lethally contaminated stream. Israel, it seems, has made the desert glow.

Thousand-year-old trees endangered.

THE SIEGE OF THE TOWNS
Palestinian communities also are under siege. Land continues to be expropriated, houses demolished, olive trees uprooted, farmland cordoned off from its owners by the Wall. Our group took part in one weekly, peaceful protest in the village of Bi'lin and got to experience, first hand, IDF violence from the rubber coated steel bullets and CS gas with
which Israel regularly greets peaceful resistance. Contrary to reports in the U.S. press, there has long been a tradition of peaceful protest from Palestinians and it is always met with violence from Israel. In the towns, houses are subject to frequent IDF raids when doors are broken down, or, in the refugee camps, house walls smashed through. Sometimes a whole building of many apartments is demolished in punishment for one wanted man or woman. frequently, these arrests, beatings and house demolitions are reprisals for peaceful protest. In every town we passed through, we saw the ruins of houses destroyed by shells, bombs or Caterpillar bulldozers of the kind that killed Rachel Corrie. The beautiful town of Nablus and its adjoining Balata refugee camp endure daily attacks from the IDF. These lead to street battles and repeated night raids upon the camp that especially traumatize its children who have only known life under violent occupation. The night we stayed in Nablus we listened the gunfire and saw the flares from one such military raid upon the camp.

In contrast to the new highways for Jews only that quickly connect settlements with each other and with Israeli cities, roadblocks, checkpoints and frequent closures frustrate and prevent travel between Palestinian towns. Areas around towns become virtual Bantustans severed from each other. Many, like Bethlehem are encircled by the Wall with entrances and exits controlled by IDF soldiers who open and close them erratically at morning and night, often at whim shutting out farmers returning from their fields. Towns can be subjected to curfews for months, with schools and universities shut down. Such a curfew
turns a city into a ghost town. Bir Zeit University was once closed for years. A curfew means the inhabitants of a whole city are not allowed to leave their houses on pain of death for as long as the curfew lasts - not for food, medical emergencies, education. Such a collective punishment is a flagrant violation of international law; but Israel has always held international law in contempt.

Bi'lin Defenders

THE PEOPLE
From earliest recorded time the Middle East has been one of the world’s great melting pots, a fact immediately apparent to the visitor in the great diversity of human features you encounter in both the Jewish and Arab populations. Any DNA investigation would reveal the absurdity of imposing a fallacious ethnocracy upon this rich ethnic mix instead
of rejoicing in it. Since the human species emerged out of Africa, the division between Arab and Jew within the Semitic branch is only one product of multitudinous accidents of history and is more a linguistic than a racial designation. Like all such divisions, this conceals how the two groups “are literally related across the historical divide – for how many Palestinians are descended from Hebrews who stayed behind after the expulsions of the second century, and later converted to Christianity and to Islam?” (13) The ancient Hebrews, it seems, might themselves
previously have been Canaanites, Philistines, and Edomites who were assimilated into the briefly dominant Hebrews? A major embarrassment for Israel is the work of its own archaeologists whose findings call into question the whole biblical narrative on whose myths the modern claim of a "return" of a people to its land justifies its dispossession of the native inhabitants.

The insistence on racial distinction is a tribal recidivism as lethal as it is absurd. Its evil flowering as racial and nationalist ideologies devastated the modern world; and its implantation into the middle east has been calamitous. Many migrations, many invasions and alliances, many mercantile contacts, many incorporated subject peoples, many conversions and intermarriages over the Ottoman empire and throughout the world fed into the rich, inextricably inter-racial mix beneath current Jewish, Arab, Christian and Muslim identity. If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, as Samuel Johnson insisted, racism is a refuge of the mediocre, similarly inflating personal identity with unearned significance. It comes with an alluring package of fictive collective identity: its 'blood and soil' myths of 'homeland'; its history, legends, flags, rites, commemorative ceremonies, future agenda, and a supply of inimical 'others' against whom one can be recruited for acts of violence, dispossession and war.

Imposing racial/ ethnic divisions upon the human landscape of Palestine and Israel has to fly in the face of history, scientific evidence and contemporary fact. Gideon Levy recently reports "racist discourse has become the norm in Israel and the Jewish world at large. It began with the "danger of assimilation" and "mixed marriages" - a supremely racist term - continued with the "danger of Haredization" and ended with the
"peril of the Arab majority." Demographers and geographers constantly publish forecasts and projections, competing among themselves for the title of chief doomsayer. A putrid stench emanates from the talk about "fertility tendencies," and the government's establishment a few years ago of a "Public Council for Demography," whose members included three senior gynecologists, shows the depths of pathology" to which such discourse has sunk. (14)

LOOKING AND NOT SEEING
Not seeing the evil it is being driven to has become the lifestyle of a culture that, if it did actually see, might recoil in shame. The head of the architecture department in Ariel College in the West Bank “…claimed that his architecture students watching out of their classroom windows 'see the Arab villages, but don’t notice them. They look and they
don’t see.'” This would seem to any normal person the confession of a lamentable deficiency in his students - but the professor proudly adds, “And I say this positively.” (15)

Israel, with its complicit partner, the United States, has managed to infect much of the world with this moral blindness. Israeli tourist guides quickly usher flocks of credulous visitors away from the inconvenient facts of a cruel occupation to indulge in exercises in utopian ‘landscape interpretation’. U.S. Evangelicals and Congressmen, thus indoctrinated, relay the fantasy wholesale to their congregations. An alternative reality Israel has been brought into being as the recipient of its admirers’ ardent devotion and dollars. Despite concerted attempts of archaeologists, biblical Israel and the kingdom of David remain as elusive as the Court of King Arthur. Refusing to see its shared humanity with its victims, Israel willfully has become a land of the blind.

Convenient blindness has been a long established Israeli tradition:
“It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”
Thus Golda Meier in 1969, wiping a whole people off the map by repeating the myth of “a land without a people” against all evidence - and which even the early Zionists soon realized was false. The myth is necessary, however, so that Israeli Jews need never see the people they have dispossessed, never need to engage with those on whose land and
often in whose houses they are living. Gideon Levy writes of a scene that confronts one settlement’s inhabitants every day:

"Looking to the east, near the military court and the base, the settler will be able to discern a long line of Palestinian villagers walking silently alongside the fences, in the shadow of the tanks. Children and the elderly, pregnant women and sick patients carry their bags as the turret of a tank throws its threatening shadow upon them. These are the
residents of the nearby villages who have no other way of reaching their regional town, Ramallah, other than on foot. They walk six or seven kilometers in each direction in order to get to work, to stores or to the clinic. The settlers’ cars cruise by on the bypass roads open only to Jews.
Tanks, roadblocks, refugees, bypass roads, columns of villagers on foot, ambulances driving haphazardly down improvised dirt paths – a great and awesome suffering is the view that the settler from Beth El sees every day from his window, and yet he remains indifferent.
It is difficult to understand how, among some 200,000 settlers, there is not one person who has the integrity to stand up and admit that his settlement, along with all the others, is causing all this pain and suffering. It’s Sodom without a single righteous man. An immense degree of wickedness is required to take from the Palestinians their last piece of land, to occupy it so crudely and to say: everything, absolutely everything is ours, because we are stronger, because we have the power to take it." (16)


Part of the Peaceful Resistance

NOTES
1. Eyal Weizmann, The Hollow Land; Israel's Architecture of Occupation (London New York 2007) p. 46
2. The Hollow Land, ibid.
3. ibid. p.45
4. ibid.
5. ibid. p.3.
6. Ed. Rafi Segal, Eyal Weizman (London: New York Verso 2007). 22. -23
A Civilian Occupation.
7. ibid. 22
8. Quoted by Eyal Weizman, 135.
9. The Hollow Land p. 136-7
10. . Joel Kovel Overcoming Zionism (London: Ann Arbor, Pluto Press 2007) 118
11 . ibid.
12. ibid
13. ibid. p.247
14. Gideon Levy, Haaretz 22/07/2007
15. Weizman, 136- 137
16. Gideon Levy ‘The Lowest Points in Israel” A Civilian Occupation 171-72)


***Gideon Levy The Punishment of Gaza (London: Verso 2010)