[News] Population Transfers, Land Theft and Bankrupt Ghettos

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/

June 5, 2006


Population Transfers, Land Theft and Bankrupt Ghettos


Palestine: It's All Over

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

The first item I ever wrote about Palestinians was around 1973, when 
I was just starting a press column for a New York weekly called the 
Village Voice. It concerned a story in the New York Times about a 
"retaliatory" raid by the Israeli air force, after a couple of Al 
Fatah guerillas had fired on an IDF unit. I'm not sure whether there 
any fatalities. The planes flew north and dumped high explosive on a 
refugee camp in Lebanon, killing a dozen or so men, women and children.

I wrote a little commentary, noting the usual lack of moral disquiet 
in the Times' story about this lethal retaliation inflicted on 
innocent refugees. Dan Wolf, the Voice's editor, called me in and 
suggested I might want to reconsider. I think, that first time, the 
item got dropped. But Dan's unwonted act of censorship riled me and I 
started writing a fair amount about the lot of the Palestinians.

These were the days when Palestinians carried far less news value for 
editors than Furbish's lousewort, and no politician ever held that 
this beleagured plant didn't actually exist as a species, which is 
what Golda Meir, Israel's prime minister said of Palestinians.

Back then you had to dig a little harder to excavate what Jewish 
Israelis were actually doing to Palestinians. Lay out the facts about 
institutionalized racism, land confiscations, torture and a hail of 
abuse would pour through the mailbox, as when I published a long 
interview in the Voice in 1980 with the late Israel Shahak, the 
intrepid professor from Hebrew University.

It's slightly eerie now to look at what Shahak was saying back then 
and at the accuracy of his analysis and predictions: "The basic 
trends were established in '74 and '75, including settler 
organizations, mystical ideology, and the great financial support of 
the United States to Israel. Between summer '74 and summer '75 the 
key decisions were taken, and from that time it's a straight line." 
Among these decisions, said Shahak, was "to keep the occupied 
territories of Palestine," a detailed development of much older 
designs consummated in 1967.

Gradually, through the 1980s, very often in the translations from the 
Hebrew language press that Shahak used to send, the contours of the 
Israeli plan emerged, like the keel and ribs and timbers of an old 
ship: a road system that would bypass Palestinian towns and villages 
and link the Jewish settlements and military posts; ever-expanding 
clusters of settlements; a master plan for control of the whole region's water.

It wasn't hard to get vivid descriptions of the increasingly 
intolerable conditions of life for Palestinians: the torture of 
prisoners, the barriers to the simplest trip, the harassment of 
farmers and school children, the house demolitions. Plenty of people 
came back from Israel and the territories with harrowing accounts, 
though few ever made the journey into a major newspaper or onto national tv.

And even in the testimonies that did get published here, what was 
missing was any acknowledgement of the long-term plan to wipe the 
record clean of all troublesome U.N. resolutions, crush Palestinian 
national aspirations, steal their land and water, cram them into ever 
smaller enclaves, ultimately balkanize them with the Wall, which was 
on the drawing board many years ago. Indeed to write about any sort 
of master plan was to incur further torrents of abuse for one's 
supposedly "paranoid" fantasies about Israel' bad faith, with much 
pious invocation of the "peace process".

But successive Israeli governments did have a long-term plan. No 
matter who was in power, the roads got built, the water stolen, the 
olive and fruit trees cut down (a million) the houses knocked over 
(12,000), the settlements imposed (300) the shameless protestations 
of good faith issued to the US press (beyond computation).

As the new millennium shambled forward, surely it became impossible 
to believe any Israeli claim to be bargaining, or even to wish to 
bargain in good faith. By now the "facts of the ground" in Israel and 
the territories were as sharply in focus as one of Dali's surrealist paintings.

In May of this year the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, comes to 
Washington and addresses a joint session of Congress in which he 
declares: "I believed, and to this day still believe, in our people's 
eternal and historic right to this entire land." In other words he 
doesn't recognize the right of Palestinians to even the wretched 
cantons currently envisaged in his "realignment". Why should Hamas 
believe a syllable of Olmert's poppycock? When Arafat and the PLO 
gave worrisome signs of being eager for an accommodation Israel's 
reply was to invade Lebanon.

In Olmert's "realignment plan the "Separation Barrier," now scheduled 
to be Israel's permanent "demographic border," annexes 10 per cent of 
the West Bank, while melding into Israel vast settlements and half a 
million settlers. The Palestinians lose their best agricultural land 
and the water. Israel's greater Jerusalem finishes off all possible 
viability for a viable, separate Palestinian state. This Palestinian 
mini-archipelago of cantons is shuttered to the east by Israel's 
security border in the Jordan Valley.

The press here, timid and ignorant, greets Olmert's "realignment" 
with tranquil respect. In the meantime a frightful historical tragedy 
is in its final chapters. With the connivance of what is sometimes 
laughably referred to as the "world community"--notably the US and 
EU, Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians into submission as 
the reward for having democratically elected the party of their 
choice. Whole communities are on the edge of starvation, cut off by 
Israel from food and medicines. The World Bank predicts a poverty 
rate of over 67 percent later this year. A UN Report issued in Geneva 
on May 30 says that four out of 10 Palestinians in the territories 
live under the official poverty line of less than $2.10 a day. The 
ILO estimates the jobless rate to be 40.7 percent of the Palestinian 
labor force.

The end of the story? I'd say the basic strategy is what it was in 
1948: population transfer, to be achieved by making life so awful for 
Palestinians that most of them will depart, leaving a few bankrupt 
ghettoes behind as memorials to all those foolish hopes of a 
sovereign Palestinian state.

Footnote: A shorter version of this column ran in the print edition 
of The Nation that went to press last Wednesday.


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