[News] Welcome to the World’s First Bunker State

[Anti-Imperialist News]

January 18, 2012
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/18/welcome-to-the-world%E2%80%99s-first-bunker-state/

Room for Jews Only in Israel’s ‘Villa in the Jungle’


Welcome to the World’s First Bunker State

by JONATHAN COOK

The wheel is turning full circle. Last week the 
Israeli parliament updated a 59-year-old law 
originally intended to prevent hundreds of 
thousands of Palestinian refugees from returning 
to the homes and lands from which they had been 
expelled as Israel was established.

The purpose of the draconian 1954 Prevention of 
Infiltration Law was to lock up any Palestinian 
who managed to slip past the snipers guarding the 
new state’s borders. Israel believed only savage 
punishment and deterrence could ensure it 
maintained the overwhelming Jewish majority it 
had recently created through a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Fast-forward six decades and Israel is relying on 
the infiltration law again, this time to prevent 
a supposedly new threat to its existence: the 
arrival each year of several thousand desperate African asylum seekers.

As it did with the Palestinians many years ago, 
Israel has criminalised these new refugees – in 
their case, for fleeing persecution, war or 
economic collapse. Whole families can now be 
locked up, without a trial, for three years while 
a deportation order is sought and enforced, and 
Israelis who offer them assistance risk jail sentences of up to 15 years.

Israel’s intention is apparently to put as many 
of these refugees behind bars as possible, and 
dissuade others from following in their footsteps.

To cope, officials have approved the building of 
an enormous detention camp, operated by Israel’s 
prison service, to contain 10,000 of these 
unwelcome arrivals. That will make it the largest 
holding facility of its kind in the world – 
according to Amnesty International, it will be 
three times bigger than the next largest, in the 
much more populous, and divine retribution-loving, US state of Texas.

Israeli critics of the law fear their country is 
failing in its moral duty to help those fleeing 
persecution, thereby betraying the Jewish 
people’s own experiences of suffering and 
oppression. But the Israeli government and the 
large majority of legislators who backed the law 
– like their predecessors in the 1950s – have 
drawn a very different conclusion from history.

The new infiltration law is the latest in a set 
of policies fortifying Israel’s status as the 
world’s first “bunker state”- and one designed to 
be as ethnically pure as possible. The concept 
was expressed most famously by an earlier prime 
minister, Ehud Barak, now the defence minister, 
who called Israel “a villa in the jungle”, 
relegating the country’s neighbours to the status of wild animals.

Barak and his successors have been turning this 
metaphor into a physical reality, slowly sealing 
off their state from the rest of the region at 
astronomical cost, much of it subsidised by US 
taxpayers. Their ultimate goal is to make Israel 
so impervious to outside influence that no 
concessions for peace, such as agreeing to a 
Palestinian state, need ever be made with the “beasts” around them.

The most tangible expression of this mentality 
has been a frenzy of wall-building. The 
best-known are those erected around the 
Palestinian territories: first Gaza, then the 
areas of the West Bank Israel is not intending to 
annex – or, at least, not yet.

The northern border is already one of the most 
heavily militarised in the world – as Lebanese 
and Syrian protesters found to great cost last 
summer when dozens were shot dead and wounded as 
they approached or stormed the fences there. And 
Israel has a proposal in the drawer for another 
wall along the border with Jordan, much of which is already mined.

The only remaining border, the 260km one with 
Egypt, is currently being closed with another 
gargantuan wall. The plans were agreed before 
last year’s Arab revolutions but have gained 
fresh impetus with the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Israel is not only well advanced on the walls of 
the bunker; it is also working round the clock on 
the roof. It has three missile-defence systems in 
various stages of development, including the 
revealingly named “Iron Dome”, as well as US 
Patriot batteries stationed on its soil. The 
interception systems are supposed to neutralise 
any combination of short and long-range missile 
attacks Israel’s neighbours might launch.

But there is a flaw in the design of this 
shelter, one that is apparent even to its 
architects. Israel is sealing itself in with some 
of the very “animals” the villa is supposed to 
exclude: not only the African refugees, but also 
1.5 million “Israeli Arabs”, descendants of the 
small number of Palestinians who avoided expulsion in 1948.

This has been the chief motive for the steady 
stream of anti-democratic measures by the 
government and parliament that is rapidly turning 
into a torrent. It is also the reason for the 
Israeli leadership’s new-found demand that the 
Palestinians recognise Israel’s Jewishness; its 
obsessions with loyalty; and the growing appeal of population exchange schemes.

In the face of the legislative assault, Israel’s 
Supreme Court has grown ever more complicit. Last 
week, it sullied its reputation by upholding a 
law that tears apart families by denying tens of 
thousands of Palestinians with Israeli 
citizenship the right to live with their 
Palestinian spouse in Israel – “ethnic cleansing” 
by other means, as leading Israeli commentator Gideon Levy noted.

Back in the early 1950s, the Israeli army shot 
dead thousands of unarmed Palestinians as they 
tried to reclaim property that had been stolen 
from them. These many years later, Israel appears 
no less determined to keep non-Jews out of its precious villa.

The bunker state is almost finished, and with it 
the dream of Israel’s founders is about to be realised.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special 
Prize for Journalism. His latest books are 
“Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, 
Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” 
(Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: 
Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed 
Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20120118/e9119949/attachment.htm>