Israel & the Palestinians: Empire at Close Range

Witold Jedlicki

THE GEOGRAPHICAL AREA under the present jurisdiction of the Israeli authorities is usually conceived of as a dichotomy. The first part consists of Israel “proper” or “within the green line.” The second, depending on one’s ideological inclinations, is variously referred to as “Judea, Samaria and the Gaza district,” “occupied territories,” “benevolent occupation” or-sometimes but rarely-in terms less gentle than these.

On closer inspection, the dichotomy turns out to be a tetrachotomy. In the same way as South Africa has its “Asians” and “Coloureds” (the racists always take delight in grading “inferior” races), Israel also has its two categories or “relatively superior inferior.” These are some 600,000 Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship and some 150,000 residents of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, who respectively in June 1967 and in December 1981 were incorporated into Israel “proper.”

In the sanitized version of Israeli history, Israeli citizenship was “generously” offered to the Arabs annexed in 1967 and 1981. In reality, the offer was anything but generous; it was made in such a way as to deter as many prospective recipients as possible from accepting the honor. In any case, the primary reason for which both the East Jerusalemites and the Golan Heights resident almost to the last man and woman declined the offer was their unwillingness to renounce their respective Jordanian and Syrian citizenship.

Let us immediately observe that, as an outcome of these two annexations, Israel “proper” (including the annexations) and Israel “within the green line” (1948 boundaries) are not one and the same thing.

These gradations in the status of inferior populations have their counterpart in the delimitations of territory. Between the territories inhabited by (1) the Jews, (2) the Israeli citizenship-holding Arabs, (3) the annexed Arabs and (4) the occupied Arabs there are borders. These borders, unguarded and even unmarked, are yet very real barriers to the free circulation of people, commodities, money, services and ideas.

Needless to say, different borders dividing these four territories imply different kinds of border controls. The supposedly holy city of Jerusalem is a microcosm of the entire arrangement, in that the borders between (1) and (2), between (2) and (3) and between (3) and (4) can be quite neatly drawn in three different colors on its map.

Within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem there lies an Arab village of Beit Safafa which, like all villages in the world, has its northern part and its southern part. North Beit Safafa belonged to Israel before 1967. Its residents hold Israeli citizenship, and they vote to the Knesseth (Israeli Parliament), the bulk of them for the Communist Party. They can buy or rent an apartment in the neighborhood in which I am living, but they cannot buy nor rent an apartment on, say, the Reunified Jerusalem Square. The thus named square-the proud feature of the so-called Jewish Quarter adjoining the Wailing Wall — is, along with a good dozen other neighborhoods in the city, reserved for an exclusively Jewish habitation, either by contract or by statutes of the landowning or construction companies.

South Beit Safafa, however, before 1967 belonged to Jordan, to be included in June 1967 in the enlarged area of municipal Jerusalem. In theory, its denizens are non-citizen permanent residents, like my wife who also has never applied for Israeli citizenship. In all practical matters, however, their status would be very different from that of my wife, who is not an Arab but a Californian, an essential difference which every Israeli will immediately understand.

Let us now suppose that some South Beit-Safafaites would, in a car of their own, embark on a 40-mile voyage to Tel-Aviv. On the freeway to Tel-Aviv their car, recognizable by distinct license plates, will then be mandatorily stopped and searched. Exactly the same treatment will on the same freeway be accorded to every “occupied” car, but not necessarily to any North Beit-Safafaite car, and only on very exceptional occasions to a Jewish car. (License plates in Israel convey a lot of information.)

Let us now examine the case of another Arab neighborhood: that of El-Eizariya, which in the Gospels is referred to as Bethania. All the way from downtown Jerusalem to El-Eizariya habitation is compact. For all practical intents and purposes, El-Eizariya is just a suburb of Jerusalem. Yet, along with a number of similar suburbs, El-Eizariya is located outside of the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem.

In general, these boundaries are a curious matter. When drawn in 1967, they circumscribed a surface most of which (in my estimate up to 60%) was sheer wilderness. Wherever possible, pockets of human (i.e. Arab) habitation in between were, like El-Eizariya, left out. In the subsequent decades this huge empty space has been gradually filled by a dozen of the above mentioned neighborhoods reserved exclusively for Jewish habitation, planned so as to surround the Arab Eastern city from the North, East and South. But not only were the municipal boundaries drawn so as to minimize the Arab population of the city and to maximize the Jewish one, they were also drawn so as to minimize the numbers of annexed Arabs and maximize the numbers of occupied Arabs.

Much as they may feel flesh-and-blood Jerusalemites, the residents of El-Eizariya are therefore occupied. This means a lot. Let me first describe their legal status. The Israeli law with its fragile but by no means negligible democratic protections does not extend to them. In matters of no particular political or economic consequence, such as most common law offenses, they are under the jurisdiction of the Jordanian law which is enforced by the local police and local judiciary.

What happens if they are suspected of a political offense? This automatically places them under the tender mercies of the Israeli military jurisdiction. What is the legal basis of procedures and adjudication under this jurisdiction? It consists of two parts: of the British colonial emergency ordinances of 1945, enacted when conditions in Mandate Palestine [1919-47] were becoming hot, and of the serially numbered (up to well over 1,000 by now) Orders of the Regional Command of Judea and Samaria [sic] which are also emergency ordinances, only of indigenously Israeli manufacture. Needless to say, all this “legislation,” whether British or Israeli in its origins, consists in its entirety of executive orders, never approved nor even debated by any legislative, let alone representative, body of any sort.

Curiously enough, however, some residents of the occupied territories are exempted from the Israeli military jurisdiction entirely. Predictably, these are the Jewish settlers. Whenever a settler commits a crime, political or common law alike, he is always answerable to Israeli civilian prosecutorial and judiciary authorities, not to the military and certainly not to the Jordanian ones. Since Israel is a democracy, this is no minor matter, since under Israeli civilian law the rights of the defendants are protected by procedural standards not much different from those which exist in Western Europe or North America.

And what happens when a Jewish settler has a civil legal dispute with a local Arab? Well, this is a notoriously tricky matter, because a Jewish settler’s manhood would be demeaned, were he to recognize the jurisdiction of an Arab court. Knowing this, the Arabs prefer to avoid petty squabbles with the settlers.

For the purpose of employment within Israel “proper,” the occupied Palestinians count as foreigners, and accordingly need permits which are, of course, revocable at their military rulers’ whim, This may be no different than the treatment of imported labor in other Western democracies. But for the purpose of residence within Israel “proper,” the occupied Palestinians need “passes.” If found without a “pass” at nighttime in any Israeli city, they are liable to criminal prosecution. This bears no similarity to any practices in Western democracies, but very close similarity to the analogous practice in South Africa.

To sell any merchandise within Israel “proper,” the occupied Palestinians, as foreigners, need import permits which as a rule are not granted. The more competitive the Palestinian products are, the less chance they have to reach the Israeli market. Predictably, however, this does not work the other way round. Israeli manufacturers do not need export permits when they wish to sell their me chandise in the occupied territories. And indeed, all of the occupied territories are virtually overflowing with Israeli-manufactured products.

This, incidentally, is the background of the story of the nonviolent movement of Dr. Mubarak Awad which has recently captured some attention. A Palestinian pacifist and follower of Gandhi, Awad professes loyalty to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), but abjures its “armed struggle” which he considers totally ineffectual and self-defeating; and he seeks to influence the PLO leadership accordingly. Seeking alternative forms of resistance against the Israeli occupiers, Awad has turned his attention to the possibility of boycotting Israeli goods.

For the beginning (and in order to test the feasibility of his idea), Dr. Awad proposed Mondays as days of such boycott. On the first Monday the authorities showed some apprehension, to the point that the entire circulation of morning newspapers carrying Awad’s boycott appeals were confiscated by the military.

In the long run, however, I am highly skeptical of the feasibility of Awad’s idea; and so have been the bulk of the haphazard sample of Palestinian shopkeepers when interviewed by an Arabic-speaking friend of mine. Even without the flagrantly discriminatory conditions under which it operates, the Palestinian economy may well be too weak to satisfy even the most basic needs of the populace. However, irrespective of whether it is good or bad, Awad’s idea needs to be seen as an expression of outrage at trade discrimination practices; not, as has been hinted, as some wild form of economic nationalism.

In general, there is much in the existing body of laws to deter the occupied Arabs from crossing the border into Israel, and little to encourage it. The laws of occupation are clearly so designed as to make the Arabs know their rightful place, and to make the conditions of occupation unbearable enough to prompt those who can afford it to emigrate. A “Jewish majority in the Land of Israel” remains a goal which no Zionist, no matter how “moderate,” would ever renounce or compromise. And while Israeli official pronouncements are notorious for their equivocations about the State of Israel’s outer territorial reaches, in regard to the occupied population perfect clarity reigns. The latter simply do not “belong,” regardless of what happens to the land on which they live.

Realities of the Invisible Borders

Thus far, the discussion of border controls has been limited to examples of their legal standards. In the experience of the occupied populace, however, the customary modes of enforcement of the existing laws have tended to be even more harrowing than the laws themselves. Since all the internal border lines described are unguarded and unmarked, anyone, Jew or Arab, can cross them at will, carrying whatever one wishes to carry. The problem is what will happen next.

No less than six separate police formations are responsible for the enforcement of border controls: the savage Border Guards, the ordinary police, the all-elderly Voluntary Police, the all-male army reservist Haga or Civil Defense, the volunteer Citizens’ Guard and the all-female conscript Hiba formation.

The first fact to be noted about all six of them is that each is bored to death during the long hours of guard or patrol duty, and hence itching for action. The second fact to be noted here is that all of them are trained in the art of distinguishing an Arab from a Jew: success in the performance of this art being their pride and failure their shame. Hence the selective checks of the identity documents of Arab-looking passers-by are the commonest sight in any Israeli city. (Ordinary Jewish passers-by are constantly exposed to superficial and civilly-conducted searches of their bags or briefcases at entrances to public buildings, but identity papers are seldom demanded of them; and when identity paper checks are conducted in buses or shuttle taxis, Jewish-looking passengers are ostentatiously ignored).

During the checks, questions are usually asked. When Arab passers-by can plausibly explain their presence at a particular place and time, the incident tends to end peacefully, but usually not without some mild verbal humiliations which tend to be graded, depending on whether the identity card identifies its holder as an Israeli, annexed or occupied Arab. Worse is to come, however, if passers-by cannot explain plausibly enough, or if something else appears suspect in the eyes of ever-vigilant members of one or the other of the police formations.

The first logical corollary is then a personal search, often carried out right on the street, the roadblock or wherever the suspicion-arousing Arab had been stopped. Personal searches of Arabs are normally conducted in an ostentatiously humiliating manner, and often accompanied by beatings.

But a suspicious-looking Arab may also be dispatched straight to a police station and searched there. Since this essay does not concern itself with apprehension of terrorists or criminals, but only with mass repression, let us assume that nothing incriminating is found. Would it mean automatic release?

Normally, it would not. The tendency then is to detain a person for 48 hours, i.e. for the maximum time allowed. During these 48 hours the detainee would typically be subject to a “circumstantial” interrogation, more often than not punctuated by refined blows administered by real professionals. Quite often this step is an attempt to scare a person into agreeing to become an informer.

Some detainees, however, are made sufficiently miser­ able even without undergoing any interrogation. For outside of the interrogation room conditions are unpleasant in the extreme: e.g., the detainees may be ordered to stand or sit motionless for hours, or to sleep outdoors or on the concrete floor, or forbidden to communicate with others, and beaten whenever they fail to comply and sometimes also when they comply.

The worst thing that can happen to innocent Arab passers-by is to find themselves in the proximity of a terrorist incident. As the papers report it, the standard practice then is to take all Arabs within the radius of one kilometer “for questioning.” What it really means, is the 48 hours of detention under conditions much aggravated by instructions, by the “retaliatory” zeal of the police and prison guards, and by the overcrowding of the premises. This, however, may still be for a luckless passer-by preferable to facing Jewish mobs in a lynching mood, as happened last year on a rather grand scale in Afoula and in Ashkelon, and more recently in Jerusalem. Judging from the coverage of such events by the media, they always involve one single pattern: angry crowds rush to beat and kill any Arabs at hand, but the forces of law and order speedily arrive and valiantly rescue the hapless victims caught in the midst. At times, it may indeed be so, but at other times the forces of law and order have been seen to do the kibitzing for the mob.

An atrocity personally witnessed by this writer on May 3, 1976 in the vicinity of the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem involved the opposite pattern, with the Border Guards and the paratroopers doing the actual job, and the civilians doing the kibitzing, A couple of soldiers, their hands fastened to the tarpaulin sustainers of a personnel carrier, were with immense force and velocity and for an extended amount of time kicking a gore-covered bundle of human bodies lying on the platform.

In Israeli-Jewish folklore, the described methods of public humiliation are considered the “right way of deal- feasibility of Awad’s idea; and so have been the bulk of the haphazard sample of Palestinian shopkeepers when interviewed by an Arabic-speaking friend of mine. Even without the flagrantly discriminatory conditions under which it operates, the Palestinian economy may well be too weak to satisfy even the most basic needs of the populace. However, irrespective of whether it is good or bad, Awad’s idea needs to be seen as an expression of outrage at trade discrimination practices; not, as has been hinted, as some wild form of economic nationalism.

In general, there is much in the existing body of laws to deter the occupied Arabs from crossing the border into Israel, and little to encourage it. The laws of occupation are clearly so designed as to make the Arabs know their rightful place, and to make the conditions of occupation unbearable enough to prompt those who can afford it to emigrate. A “Jewish majority in the Land of Israel” remains a goal which no Zionist, no matter how “moderate,” would ever renounce or compromise. And while Israeli official pronouncements are notorious for their equivocations about the State of Israel’s outer territorial reaches, in regard to the occupied population perfect clarity reigns. The latter simply do not “belong,” regardless of what happens to the land on which they live.

Realities of the Invisible Borders

Thus far, the discussion of border controls has been limited to examples of their legal standards. In the experience of the occupied populace, however, the customary modes of enforcement of the existing laws have tended to be even more harrowing than the laws themselves.

Since all the internal border lines described are unguarded and unmarked, anyone, Jew or Arab, can cross them at will, carrying whatever one wishes to carry. The problem is what will happen next.

No less than six separate police formations are responsible for the enforcement of border controls: the savage Border Guards, the ordinary police, the all-elderly Voluntary Police, the all-male army reservist Haga or Civil Defense, the volunteer Citizens’ Guard and the all-female conscript Hiba formation.

The first fact to be noted about all six of them is that each is bored to death during the long hours of guard or patrol duty, and hence itching for action. The second fact to be noted here is that all of them are trained in the art of distinguishing an Arab from a Jew: success in the performance of this art being their pride and failure their shame. Hence the selective checks of the identity documents of Arab-looking passers-by are the commonest sight in any Israeli city. (Ordinary Jewish passers-by are constantly exposed to superficial and civilly-conducted searches of their bags or briefcases at entrances to public buildings, but identity papers are seldom demanded of them; and when identity paper checks are conducted in buses or shuttle taxis, Jewish-looking passengers are ostentatiously ignored).

During the checks, questions are usually asked. When Arab passers-by can plausibly explain their presence at a particular place and time, the incident tends to end peacefully, but usually not without some mild verbal humiliations which tend to be graded, depending on whether the identity card identifies its holder as an Israeli, annexed or occupied Arab. Worse is to come, however, if passers-by cannot explain plausibly enough, or if something else appears suspect in the eyes of ever-vigilant members of one or the other of the police formations.

The first logical corollary is then a personal search, often carried out right on the street, the roadblock or wherever the suspicion-arousing Arab had been stopped. Personal searches of Arabs are normally conducted in an ostentatiously humiliating manner, and often accompanied by beatings.

But a suspicious-looking Arab may also be dispatched straight to a police station and searched there. Since this essay does not concern itself with apprehension of terrorists or criminals, but only with mass repression, let us assume that nothing incriminating is found. Would it mean automatic release? Normally, it would not. The tendency then is to detain a person for 48 hours, i.e. for the maximum time allowed. During these 48 hours the detainee would typically be subject to a “circumstantial” interrogation, more often than not punctuated by refined blows administered by real professionals. Quite often this· step is an attempt to scare a person into agreeing to become an informer.

Some detainees, however, are made sufficiently miser­ able even without undergoing any interrogation. For out­ side of the interrogation room conditions are unpleasant in the extreme: e.g., the detainees may be ordered to stand or sit motionless for hours, or to sleep outdoors or on the concrete floor, or forbidden to communicate with others, and beaten whenever they fail to comply and sometimes also when they comply.

The worst thing that can happen to innocent Arab passers-by is to find themselves in the proximity of a terrorist incident. As the papers report it, the standard practice then is to take all Arabs within the radius of one kilometer “for questioning.” What it really means, is the 48 hours of detention under conditions much aggravated by instructions, by the “retaliatory” zeal of the police and prison guards, and by the overcrowding of the premises.

This, however, may still be for a luckless passer-by preferable to facing Jewish mobs in a lynching mood, as happened last year on a rather grand scale in Afoula and in Ashkelon, and more recently in Jerusalem. Judging from the coverage of such events by the media, they always involve one single pattern: angry crowds rush to beat and kill any Arabs at hand, but the forces of law and order speedily arrive and valiantly rescue the hapless victims caught in the midst. At times, it may indeed be so, but at other times the forces of law and order have been seen to do the kibitzing for the mob.

An atrocity personally witnessed by this writer on May 3, 1976 in the vicinity of the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem involved the opposite pattern, with the Border Guards and the paratroopers doing the actual job, and the civilians doing the kibitzing, A couple of soldiers, their hands fastened to the tarpaulin sustainers of a personnel carrier, were with immense force and velocity and for an extended amount of time kicking a gore-covered bundle of human bodies lying on the platform.

In Israeli-Jewish folklore, the described methods of public humiliation are considered the “right way of dealing with the Arabs” which is adapted to their “mentality” and which will “teach them a lesson.”

No less discriminatory and humiliating is the treatment of Arab applicants by government bureaucracy in its various high offices. In addition to the usual discrimination according to the “category” of an Arab, particularly vicious treatment is accorded by the Israeli diplomatic outposts abroad, airport personnel and agencies of the Ministry of Interior to Palestinian exiles with foreign passports who visit or wish to visit their families or relatives in the country.

For instance, U.S. citizens of Arab extraction regularly complain that during their visits to Israel they are treated completely differently than all other Americans. Yet the treatment accorded to visitors from Arab countries crossing the border bridges from Jordan is much worse.

Unlike on the streets, where Arab women tend to be treated a little bit more considerately than Arab men, in the public offices, especially those of the “Regional Command of Judea and Samaria,” they tend to fall prey to refined forms of chicanery and red tape. One has to understand that Arab women seldom venture into a street without a clearly defined purpose which even the dumbest cop on the beat can understand. In the offices, however, they typically appear with small children, in the role of begging for some help, relief or mercy for their sons or husbands in trouble. This role invites their humiliation.

The border control pattern is also detectable in the way public resources are allocated and distributed between municipalities and regions of the country. Although much progress in the development of Arab-inhabited towns and villages within Israel “proper” has in recent years been noted, isolated villages unconnected to the electric grid and water supply system exist even there, let alone in the territories. The absence of electricity or running water in the most God-forsaken Jewish village would be unthinkable.

The second biggest all-Arab town in Israel “proper,“ Umm-El-Fahm, has a notorious open sewage “problem,” and, progress or no progress, this “problem” has thus far resisted all “solutions.” Needless to say, in the occupied territories urban blight tends to be much worse.

This is not the place to discuss the economic impact of internal borders. Reliable research on this subject has been made, particularly by Meron Benvenisti’s West Bank Data Base Project. Research findings almost always require plenty of caveats and qualifications, and the findings of Benvenisti and his colleagues are no exception. Yet in general they do seem to indicate, first, that the Arab-inhabited areas subsidize the Jewish-inhabited ones mildly; second, that the supposedly “modernizing” impact of the occupation is much more problematic than good Jews would like to believe; and third, judging from the pattterns of allocation and distribution of public funds, that the government of Israel does not seem to be particularly anxious to foster development of what in Hebrew bureaucratese is called “the Arab sector.”

One has to bear in mind, however, that the primary source of relative prosperity of the “Jewish sec;:-tor” is American aid rather than exploitation of Arab labor or plunder of Arab property. And one has to bear in mind, further, that the developmental gap between the “Jewish sector” and the “Arab sector” had existed long before the Jewish colonists became masters of the realm.

The Politics of Intimidation

The native English-speaking reader needs perhaps to be cautioned here not to project on this situation the Anglo-Saxon notions of law and its enforcement. Nothing in Israel bears any resemblance to cultistic attitudes towards the Law which in the English-speaking countries remain in force, or at least in prominent display. In Israeli popular culture, the law, if anything, tends to be somewhat disparaged.

The analogies with South Africa are in this particular respect not very accurate. Apartheid, at least when looked at from afar, seems first and foremost to be a system of laws enforced with savage ruthlessness and unbending rigidity. But in Israel no laws are enforced rigidly or ruthlessly. All laws tend to be enforced randomly and whimsically, on some occasions but not on other ones, victimizing some transgressors savagely while sparing others to the point of letting them commit offenses openly with impunity. This is the way the border controls are enforced too.

Certainly, the likelihood of avoiding penalties is affected by a given Arab’s status, appearance, dress, verbal articulation and impression management skills. But the pure chance factor is also operative.

The effect is intimidation without deterrence, simply because much as every Palestinian lives in fear of the occupying power, everybody also wants to try his luck. This effect is particularly noticeable in regard to those border controls which obstruct the free circulation of ideas. Thus, the prisons are filled with Arab convicts who by Amnesty International’s standards are clearly classifiable as “conscience” cases: those who unfurled the Palestinian flag, sang nationalist songs, attended demonstrations, helped organize trade unions, protected the integrity of Palestinian social service networks or other institutions from administrative pressures or from penetration by police spies. Yet these and other forms of defiance go on, in public, in broad daylight, visible to anyone who cares to look.

Roughly the same can be said about the contents of Arabic newspapers. All Arabic newspapers have sheltered themselves in East Jerusalem where the jurisdiction of the “Regional Command of Judea and Samaria” does not extend. (All the “Regional Command” can do-and time after time indeed does-is to “punish” the newspapers by prohibiting their distribution in the territories, but it cannot prohibit their publication.) In East Jerusalem they are mercilessly chopped by military censorship (Hebrew newspapers also are, but gently). Yet by and large, the Arabic newspapers still manage to fill their pages with anti-Israeli and pro-PLO contents. [Since this article was written, however, Akram Hanieh, editor of the East Jerusalem paperA’Sha’ab, was deported, and another paper Al-Ahd closed down–ed.]

Although the so-called Tamir Law* prohibits all manifestations of allegiance to or sympathy with “terrorist organizations,” the newspapers manage to identify themselves with the PLO in no uncertain terms. Observers of such open acts of defiance often get the impression that residual democratic freedoms are respected by the occupation authorities. Yet the impression is illusory, because the manifestations observed are not backed by any guaranteed rights, but merely reflect an arbitrary and inconsistent enforcement of the denials of rights.And besides, racists are seldom overly concerned with what the inferior races think.

The contrast between the legal cultures of Israel and the Anglo-Saxon countries can also be observed in the quite different roles and self-concepts of law enforcers. Whatever an American cop actually does, he is supposed to serve the law, and he is trained accordingly. Serving the law is his pride, his self-esteem, his excuse in any adversity. An Israeli cop, however, is first and foremost trained and expected to serve the Jewish nation.

Now, the survival of the Jewish nation is said to be threatened not only by Arabs and their terrorism,
but also by Jewish emigration from Israel, assimilation, intermarriage, low birth rates, and general moral decline, as well as by traffic accidents, ecological hazards, contagious diseases, drugs, etc. This makes an Israeli cop rather prone to assume the role of a moral philosopher, as when he scolds an Arab whom he tortures for his “ingratitude” for Israel (an authentic torture allegation seen by this writer), gently or urgently reminds a Jewish girl of the inevitably grievous consequences of miscegenation, protects the dignity of the State of Israel when cross-examined by an Arab or Communist lawyer, or the like. In general, given the enormity of his task of protecting the Jewish nation from extinction, the actual wording of a law tends to be a rather secondary matter for him.

On a somewhat higher level of sophistication, the Israeli judiciary tend to conform to the same role pattern. This explains their extraordinary sensitivity to “security considerations” whenever presented or merely hinted at by the prosecution.

As an instrument of social regulation, the Israeli law and its enforcement can therefore only be described as a dismal failure. But this only means that for the sake of order maintenance, some mechanisms other than legal must be relied upon. To an extent astonishing in a modern urbanized society, regulatory order rests in Israel on symbolic controls. True, there are areas (payment of taxes, deterrence of Jewish emigration) where symbolic controls do not work either. Nonetheless, they can be amazingly effective in enforcing the desired levels of conformity in such emotionally loaded matters as military duty or racial segregation.

With the possible exception of the already mentioned employment “passes,” Israeli law has no institutions comparable to “petty apartheid” in South Africa: no separate pissoirs for the Jews and the Arabs, no separate park benches, no separate entrances to public buildings and no “Immorality Acts” imposing severest of penalties on interracial sex. But Israel has no need for such institutions, because the presence of an Arab after working hours in a “Jewish only” neighborhood will immediately be noticed and deterred by the neighborhood itself, because Jews maintaining any social contacts with Arabs other than employment and market exchanges will be nagged and condescended to mercilessly as “Arab lovers,” “Beautiful Souls,”” “Freaks,” or “Oddballs,” because a Jewish woman making a sexual choice across the racial barrier will immediately be considered a prostitute and treated by the menfolk accordingly.

Much of the existing segregation rests on factors other than racism. Fear of terrorism not only adds to neighborhood pressures against “unexplained” Arab presence in Jewish residential areas, but also makes many of even the least racist Jews reluctant to tour the Arab ones. Another such factor is sheer convenience. The language (and script) factor makes it convenient to have separate educational systems, and it obstructs many well-intentioned initiatives in maintaining personal relationships, which anyway tend to flounder in view of cultural differences. Residential segregation makes it convenient to maintain separate currencies. And so on.

Flimsiness of legal standards and fortuities of informal segregation make it somewhat difficult to assess the exact magnitude of the horror. Arbitrariness in enforcement fosters the worst forms of corruption and malice, especially when economic interests are at stake, but it also spares occasional hardships for some. Likewise, segregation means not only exposure to racist humiliation, but also the opportunity for the occupied population to protect themselves to a certain extent through self-containment and entrenchment.

The stark result of this pattern, in any case, is that few Jews have ever personally known an Arab, and that for few occupied Arabs the word “Jew” has any other meaning than that of a soldier, policeman or bureaucrat who came from abroad to harass and persecute them.

Democracy and Occupation

The crass myth of the “benevolent occupation” can be disposed of safely. The occupied population lives under a brutal military dictatorship. The “Regional Command of Judea and Samaria” is a junta, consisting of professional army officers, corrupt, parasitic, coarse and violent to the core. Perhaps the crucial fact about them is that even a middle-ranking professional Israeli army officer earns a salary 8-10 times as high as the average salary in Israel “proper.” The existence of a military-industrial complex, and of a military-agricultural complex as well, allows these officers to easily engage in various get-rich-quick schemes, particularly in real estate and the construction business, with individual Arabs who happen to stand in the way being disposed of quickly and efficiently by intimidation, harassment, blackmail or fraud.

Corruption goes hand-in-hand with the implementation of such government policies as land confiscation for Jewish settlements, maximizing Arab residential congestion through systematic denial of building permits, or various forms of administrative interference intended to halt development of local Palestinian production, trade or services. The line dividing the supposed “public interest” from private enrichment of the favored servants of the state is notoriously blurred.

But even when not tied to economic motives, racist imagination works wonders. Punishments for terrorist violence, stone-throwing by Palestinian children or other forms of unrest are as a rule inflicted upon whole cities, villages or refugee camps in which a given incident happened to occur. Collective punishments range from round-the-clock curfews, to uprooting trees, poisoning crops, banning supplies of cooking oil, roll calls of all the adult males in the middle of the night, nightly sessions of the military courts summarily pronouncing verdicts, and search-and-destroy missions in high schools and universities. Conscript and reservist Israeli soldiers under order to inflict such punishments are rapidly becoming socialized into perpetrators of atrocities.

In sheer savagery, this military dictatorship stops short of its Latin American counterparts. Mass murders were indeed committed, particularly after the 1967 war, on refugees returning from Jordan, and in the early 1970s during the so-called “pacification” of Gaza under Ariel Sharon. They have receded since into a steady trickle of individual murders. Even early mass murders were rather modest in scale, compared to the Israeli air force or commando performance in various “retaliatory operations” across the border, and to the entire Israeli army’s performance during the Lebanon war of 1982-85.

These trends in murder incidence need to be seen against the background of the changing Israeli perceptions of the “Palestinian problem.” In the years following the 1967 conquests, the Palestinians were perceived by the Israeli officialdom as “superfluous for the Israeli economy.” Hence the best policy was to make as many of them as possible emigrate or otherwise disappear.

Gradually, however, their utility as a pool of cheap menial labor which can be kept docile through denial of rights became increasingly recognized. This is why the present policy is to keep the Palestinians as poor as possible rather than to make them vanish into the thin air.

Judging from the occupied territories’ experience, it takes a lot of administrative harassment to ensure that people stay poor. Still, while most occupied Palestinians live in abject poverty, there is no mass starvation. In this respect, again, Palestine is not yet quite to the level of the Latin-American empire of the U.S.

Contrary to what is usually taken for granted, democracy in Israel does not seem to have any appreciable mitigating impact upon these conditions. The opposite impact, however-that of the military dictatorship upon the democratic structures and institutions in Israel-is all-powerful, pervasive, and visible to the naked eye.

In the liberal intelligentsia circles it has become fashionable to say that occupation corrupts. Sure it does, but there is much more to the story than the mere corruption of souls. Thanks to the occupation, the military is in the position to reduce to powerlessness the judiciary, legislative and even civilian executive authorities of the state. Thanks to the occupation, the domain of government secrecy is allowed to steadily expand and, along with it the censorship, the range of “unmentionable” topics and the mendacity of the acceptable political discourse

Thanks to the occupation and the “security” issues it raises, Israeli criminal laws can become progressively more extended in scope and more punitive. Thanks to the occupation, the entire national economy can be thoroughly militarized, wealth taken away from the poor and redistributed to the rich, and Jewish wage earners told to live in austerity or else.

Last but not least, the occupation, by posing an acute demand for all varieties of obscurantist blood-and-soil myths, is the primary factor responsible for the pervasive militarization of the national culture. Consequently, Israel belongs to the countries undergoing a religious revival today, except that in the “revived” beliefs and forms of worship no room seems to be left for the humane and the compassionate. The parasitical and impossibly overgrown rabbinical bureaucracy, with its own holy and unholy interests in undermining the democratic institutions, and with its preachings of racism, colonization, armed expansion and license to murder enemy civilians or· captives, largely performs the function of the military’s flunkeys for ideology and morale keeping.

However, these developments within Israel “proper” are of little concern to the occupied populace.

Among educated Palestinians, in fact, one often encounters preferences for Likud’s government (right-wing coalition) over one led by the Labor Party. Such preferences are easily understood. First, judging from East Jerusalem’s precedent, annexation (more likely under Likud) by extending Israeli law may confer on the residents some tenuous legal protections in place of the naked fist of the occupation. Second, annexation in combination with a continued denial of political rights may at one blow wreck the public relations marvel which had taken years of Labor’s patient efforts to craft. This would isolate Israel and weaken its international position accordingly.

But what does this mean? It means that the Palestinian struggle would have to begin from zero, approximately from the point at which the working class of the English-speaking countries was prior to winning the vote and the right to form unions. Judging from that precedent, it may last as long as a hundred years.

Now, the Palestinian rejectionists do often say that their struggle may last a hundred years. If this is what they mean, that’s difficult to challenge, because waiting for the U.S. to start to press Israel real hard economically — the only possible circumstance which may prod the “moderate” Zionists of Labor’s type to contemplate any territorial withdrawals-may well take more than a hundred years!

Contrary to all the piled up falsehoods and distortions, this issue is the fundamental bone of contention between the Arafatist PLO legitimists and the rejectionist opposition. The former believe that it will take less time to wait for America; the latter that the shorter way is to follow historical precedents of other liberation movements in waging the struggle for equal rights all the way through.

Having amassed so much power and wealth, the military, the religious and the throngs of crooked entrepreneurs living off the occupation have an obvious interest in legitimizing the need for further armament build-up, further foreign conquests and further domestic repression. Given this, the supposed “protection of national security” turns into an active search for the ways of making the nation live under conditions as insecure as possible, simply because without the constant threats to protect the nation from, the military’s wealth and power would in the end have to dwindle.

In this respect, the massive humiliation of Palestinian passers-by may not be as irrational as it looks. It obviously swells the ranks of volunteers to local underground organizations busily scheming ill-conceived acts of “revenge” which, far from hurting either the military itself or any V.I.P.s, scare ordinary Jews to the point of screaming for “deterrence” and “retaliation,” and thus recycle the sequence of violence and counterviolence with ultimately suicidal effects.

Paradoxical as it may seem, without the Israeli army and its religious and entrepreneurial appendages, the Israeli Jews could today live under fairly secure conditions. It is the Israeli army which, far from protecting their security, dooms them to living under constant and ever-present dangers.

Yet perhaps this coexistence of a liberal democracy with a military dictatorship under the authority of one and the same government is not as historically unprecedented as it may seem. Perhaps the metropolis-colony relationships in, say, the British or French empire were no different in essence, except from the geographical proximity factor which in Israel accounts for their high visibility and saliency.

This writer, who happens to be an elderly European, can still recall an atmosphere in which, for example, an inanity such as that “the British empire was created in a fit of absent-mindedness” could pass for profound insight, and in which, again for example, the conquest and partition of Africa could hardly be mentioned as something incidental, of marginal consequence, remote from the centers of “real” history making.

Compared to that, the factor of geographical proximity makes it somewhat difficult, even if not altogether impossible, to confine the existence of Israel’s colonies to a “memory hole.” True enough, there is a lot of metropolitan parochialism in the Israeli popular culture, a lot of Broederbond-like self-containment within a maudlin “Jewishness.” But such a cultural contradiction rests on shaky foundations, as the colonial empire nearby has ways of reminding everyone about its existence day-by-day. Hence the fundamental paradox of Israeli-Jewish existence: craving for security and living on constant anguish.

Zionist Left at An Impasse

For the Palestinians of all legal categories, Jewish racism is the border controls: all the discriminatory barriers to their free movement, while Jews can travel wherever they wish; all the obstacles to free circulation of their commodities and their ideas, when Jews can freely trade and preach whatever they like; all the “Jewish” places they are banned from; all the institutions they are forced to enter into contact with, only to sustain their humiliation, harassment and red tape. By the same token, for the occupied Palestinians in particular, Jewish fascism is the military rule on their necks.

For the broad segments of Israeli liberal intelligentsia, however, as well as for their American counterparts in the American Friends of the Peace Now, New Jewish Agenda and the like, Jewish racism and Jewish fascism mean completely different things. For them, such labels refer to the forces of Kahane, the Gush Emunim settlers, Ariel Sharon, all varieties of messianists seeking to replace democracy by theocracy and secular law by the talmudic one, and all varieties of thugs seeking to enforce “Jewish thinking” and “the Jewish way of life” by thuggery. For obvious reasons, educated, secular Israelis fear and hate the assorted forces of the “National-Religious” camp intensely, and are hated by these forces in turn.

The Palestinians have accounts to settle with, and seek protection from, the state, while the Jewish liberals are in conflict with a segment of public opinion. For liberally-minded Jews, the prospect of state power falling into the hands of the messianists is absolutely terrifying. But for the occupied Palestinians it hardly is, simply because those who live under a brutal military dictatorship cannot be overly concerned by the prospect that a current junta may be replaced by another one, more brutal still.

This actually happened, for example, in the dark 1967-1974 years of the history of Greece. In the middle of that period, the junta of General Papadopoulos was overthrown and replaced by the reputedly still more bloodthirsty junta of General Ioannides. Insofar as it can be gauged from afar, the ordinary Greeks by and large reacted to this event with detachment. The Palestinians react likewise.

What about the settler violence, then? According to Jan Abu-Shakra’s splendid Settler Violence in the Occupied Territories (Chicago, Palestinian Human Rights Campaign, 1985), the incidence of settler violence against the occupied Palestinians falls much below the incidence of state violence against them, and slightly below the incidence of Arab terrorism against the Jews. Moreover, the Begin-Sharon government had a nice custom of delegating law enforcement responsibilities to assorted privateers: be it the Jewish settlers, or the Arab Village Leaguers, or apparently even the Moslem Brothers. In view of this, many of Abu-Shakra’s figures on settler violence committed in the Begin-Sharon period should rather be subsumed under the state violence category.

The foregoing is not intended to mean that settler violence-and thereby Jewish fascism as understood by Israeli liberals-is of no concern to the occupied Palestinians at all. The intention is merely to say that this is a side issue for them.+

It is worth recalling in this context that in its relatively most radical period in the aftermath of Emil Greenzweig’s++ assassination in the winter and spring of 1983, Peace Now actually undertook some token actions in defense of occupied Arabs from their harassment by the settlers. But, being nice Jewish boys and girls, Peace Now would have never contemplated doing anything to protect the occupied populace from the state, no matter how eagerly the latter sought such protections. Given this, the Peace Now initiative, well-intentioned as it was, was in advance restricted to a marginal issue, and as such could not promote any lasting solidarity.

There was a moment in the summer and fall of 1984, exactly when a certain differentiation of Arab attitudes towards the rise of the Jewish extreme right could be observed. After Kahane solemnly announced his intention of establishing “emigration offices” in Arab townships within Israel “proper,” large crowds of scared Israeli Arabs rushed to join various anti-racist blocs and coalitions which then mushroomed.

Soon, though, they got cold feet. For the farce was indeed too blatant to be funny. The wider the blocs and coalitions were, the more detrimental they were to rudimentary Arab interests.

For the racists, excoriating Kahane was an ideal occasion for presenting themselves to the public as abhorring racism. Others were not concerned with racism at all, only with the state’s, Zionism’s or Judaism’s international reputation which Kahane had tainted. A man who then eagerly sought speaking engagements at anti-Kahane rallies was the Mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, who bears responsibility for all the discriminatory harassment of East Jerusalemites by his municipal administration.

On top of that, Kahane had at least some perverse utility for the Palestinians by saying loudly that, yes, Zionism is racism; while all the mass rallies against him sought first and foremost to deny this simple truth. In general, the campaign against Kahane, by seeing to discredit racism as understood by liberal Israelis, achieved quite a lot in rehabilitating and thereby strengthening racism as Palestinians know and feel it. It was good for the Jews, but quite bad for the Arabs, including those who campaigned along.

The main impetus to the anti-Kahane campaigns was provided by the four parties: the Communist Party, the Progressive List for Peace, the Citizens’ Rights Movement and Mapam, together with a number of smaller Zionist Left groups, including two religious ones, whose primary concern seems to have been salvaging the shaky reputation of Judaism.

From hindsight, it is rather clear that all these forces bear equal responsibility for the ensuing fiasco. All of them invested all their energies in the formation of wall-to-wall coalitions with mainstream Zionist party hacks. This was self-defeating and counterproductive, for two reasons. First, the unique opportunity for a joint Jewish-Arab mass movement, opened by the initial massive participation of the Israeli Arabs in the venture, was wasted. Instead, the movement quickly evolved into an exclusively Jewish affair.

Second, the vested interests of the Zionists in making their ideology appear immaculate imposed the necessity of resorting to the strategy of shutting Kahane’s mouth rather than answering his claims straight. Kahane’s basic message was that he merely articulated what has always been implicit in the content of both Zionism and the Jewish religion. The strategy of evasions intended to avoid the need to seriously answer this message could only contribute to the subsequent rise in Kahane’s stature and popularity. By all means, Kahane and the like-minded forces of Jewish revivalist messianism need to be fought tooth and nail; but emphatically not in ways they have been fought to date.

There are signs that the unspeakable moral and intellectual barbarity of the messianists of both the military-patriotic and God’s law-abiding strains may ultimately produce a backlash. Larges masses of normally apolitical Israeli Jews-ordinary human being with ordinary human weaknesses have, after all, no desire to renounce the whole of modern civilization in order to please God or fulfill the historical mission of the nation. Yet the political articulation of this mood of the Jewish masses by the Zionist Left is singularly weak, hesitant, devoid of conviction, hampered by considerations of patriotism and respectability and mentally dependent on definitions of reality and agendas imposed by the officialdom.

The situation is ironic. If a confrontation comes, Peace Now and like-minded characters will be totally defenseless against the heavily-armed storm troops of the messianists. The only chance they have to survive such a confrontation is by forming alliances and establishing solidarity with the Palestinians in advance. This, however, can be done only through siding with the latter against the state authorities: otherwise the two sides will have little substance to talk to each other. This course of action, however, is effectively precluded by the Zionist Left’s patriotism. Thus patriotism becomes a device for suicide.

The not so tiny numbers of the sympathizers of the Zionist Left in the United States seem to share the same characteristics. Clinging desperately to their middle-of-the-roadism and fearing “extremism,” the Zionist Left in both Israel and the U.S. is mortally afraid to know what meanings Jewish racism and fascism have for the Palestinians under the Israeli occupation.

*The Tamir Law specifically exempts from liability the “statements of fact.” The effect is somewhat paradoxical. Who says “J remain loyal to the PLO” automatically becomes liable to criminal prosecution, whereas someone who says “Most Palestinians remain loyal to the PLO” does not, although the latter statement is no less likely to be banned by censorship than the former. But censorship and the legal foundations of its operations are an entirely different matter.

**A term of abuse aimed at peace demonstrators or those advocating reconciliation with the Palestinians.

+ Much as this attitude is understandable, its rationality can be questioned in view of the mounting evidence that the messianists are perfectly willing to slaughter the Palestinians one by one. There is, after all, a difference between ongoing repression, no matter how harsh and brutal, and mass extermination.

++ An Israeli peace activist killed by a grenade thrown into a march protesting the war in Lebanon.

March-April 1987, ATC 8