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or Machine of War by James Brooks Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories passed through a profound transformation during the last several months. Through a series of policy changes and military orders, the West Bank “security fence” has gradually revealed itself to be the backbone of a comprehensive new system of land theft, imprisonment, collective punishment, and dispossession. The question now is not whether it is a “political fence” or a “security fence”, but whether it is an engine of ethnic cleansing. In the past ninety days Israel has established a clear pattern of using its “security fence” to deny Palestinian farmers access to their own lands. Much of the olive harvest in the northern West Bank hangs dead on the trees because farmers have been ‘caged’ for weeks at a time. Entire villages have been issued permits to farm that give them as little as two days outside the barrier - for the entire year. Even if you have a permit, you must hope the soldiers open the gate for a few minutes on your appointed day, and open it again when you return from your labors. In the past sixty days, Israel revealed its willingness to use deadly force to protect its “fence”. It relaxed its rules of engagement, and shot an unarmed Palestinian dead for disobeying orders; he touched the wall. On October 2, Israel issued new military orders that obliterate the rights of Palestinians left outside the barriers to live in their own homes. The orders expropriate their land, and all Palestinian land west of the “security fence”, to create a “closed zone” open only to Jews and citizens of Israel. All others, including the people who live there, must apply for a permit from the Israeli army. A November 8 report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates that the western half of the barrier will fence out 274,000 Palestinians living in 122 villages. The report observes, “If the military orders that restrict entry into the closed areas between the Green Line and the Wall are applied to the new parts of the Wall, then many thousands of Palestinians are likely to be forced from their homes and land.” Israel's policy on the ground appears to be changing, from piecemeal acquisition of the Palestinian territories to the use of the “security fence” as a vehicle for more rapid and overt methods of large-scale population transfer, or ethnic cleansing. To understand how this might happen, the emerging "fence" must be placed within the escalating reality of Israel's operations in Palestinian territory over the past three years. By the end of this summer, Israel’s occupation had reduced the Palestinian people to the poverty and malnutrition levels of sub-Saharan Africa, according to studies by the UN, the World Bank, and CARE International. The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food said in mid-October, "The occupied Palestinian territories are on the verge of humanitarian catastrophe as a result of extremely harsh military measures...There can be no justification for harsh internal closures that prevent people from having access to food and water; otherwise the imposition of such military measures amount[s] to what has been called a ‘policy of starvation’.." Israel’s incredibly dense network of army checkpoints, “flying” checkpoints, roadblocks and barriers has made travel for Palestinians in the West Bank almost impossible. A five-mile trip can take all day, waiting at checkpoints for hours on end out in the open, no shelter provided. If you don't have a permit, you cannot go to work, even if it is a quarter-mile away. It often doesn't matter if you’re having a baby or bleeding to death from an Israeli-inflicted wound - you wait. So far, thirty-one “checkpoint babies” have perished. (On the other hand, any Jew can use the bypass roads and get from one side of the West Bank to the other in minutes.) Since Israel signed the Oslo Accords, the settler population has doubled to 390,000 (including the Israeli takeover of Palestinian neighborhoods and suburbs of Jerusalem), strewn over a thick web of at least 145 settlements and their interconnecting Jewish-only roads, blanketing the Palestinian West Bank. Since the beginning of the Second Intifada three years ago, the Israeli army has been systematically wrecking Palestinian infrastructure throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Water mains, wells, and pumping stations, sewage systems, telephone and internet hubs, markets, airports, police stations, roads, civic buildings, mosques and churches, all have felt the special attentions of Israel’s bulldozers, bomb teams, helicopter gunships, and F-16s. The army goes virtually everywhere, usually raiding two or three cities or villages every day and night, leaving a string of casualties and appalling human rights abuses rarely reported by the American media. The death toll of innocent civilians, children, mothers, grandfathers, mounts daily, in ones and twos and fours that slip through the cracks of the wire services, or are entombed as eleventh-paragraph filler in policy-and-politics stories. Over 41,000 Palestinian civilians have been wounded by Israeli fire in the last three years. Americans relying on domestic news sources do not see how constant the occupation is, how it teems round-the-clock, 24/7, month in, month out, leaving an ever-larger trail of both indiscriminate and calculated destruction. Even when the Israeli army informs the world press that they have withdrawn, or relaxed curfews and closures, they seldom do, as testified repeatedly by eyewitness reports. The Israeli army has earned special notoriety for failing to issue the many permits it demands from Palestinian civilians. It seems to have become a game, profitable in land and bribes, to make permits necessary for even the simplest travel or human activity. The army typically fails to respond to permit applications and repeated requests, or refuses to issue the permit, citing preposterous technicalities. A Palestinian must always have her ID card ready, to indicate her “enclave” assignment. If she has a West Bank ID, she cannot go to Jerusalem or Israel except for rare medical care. If she lives in Jerusalem, she may be issued a West Bank ID instead. That can be used later to prove that she is illegally residing in the Holy City, which is cause to demolish her home and seize her land for Israeli “military purposes”. It is policy to give her five minutes to retrieve her belongings. Wherever she lives, she almost certainly will not receive a permit to build or change her home. If she does so anyway, that is cause for the Israeli army to demolish it. Even houses hundreds of years old require permits in some areas, which the army almost never issues. These homes are also subject to demolition at Israel’s convenience. And if a Palestinian’s home lies in the path of a new Israeli road, settlement expansion, or the massive “security fence” project, that is cause to demolish the home and seize the land outright, sometimes with no pretext at all. This has been going on steadily for many years, as part of a larger accelerating project of land theft and dispossession that Israelis call “Judaisation”. Now the “security fence” is carving out broad new areas of dispossession, invisibly creating tens of thousands of new permits that will probably never be issued. It is transforming the landscape of Israel’s aggression in the Palestinian territories from a study in many miniatures into a work of more sweeping scope. Israel is on course to render at least 15,000 Palestinians homeless this year. Could the hundreds of thousands soon to be stranded outside the barriers be next? US politicians from Howard Dean to Dick Cheney express support for the "fence" as part of Israel's "right to defend herself". But most would "prefer" that it be temporary, and “wish” that Israel would build it along the Green Line, the recognized Palestinian boundary since 1967. Meanwhile, they say "it is imperative" that America continue to pay Israel billions of dollars a year in combined military and foreign aid to wage war in civilian areas with American-made weaponry inside the same Green Line. US press reports commonly mention that the “fence” deviates from the Green Line by “a few miles in places”, without mentioning that the West Bank spans 34 miles at its widest point. The West Bank is being severely affected by these "deviations". The best estimates indicate that at least 45% of the West Bank will be in Israeli hands when the project is complete. This may be what Bush and Powell find “troublesome”. In late October, an official from the Israeli Defence Ministry (IDM) announced that the barrier will now extend 450 miles, nearly five times longer than the Berlin Wall. And that’s not including the ‘eastern fence’ beginning to amputate the Jordan Valley into Israel’s waiting arms. When it’s all done there will be at least three walled Palestinian islands controlled by the Israeli army; at least one in the north, one in the south, and a tiny enclave around Jericho, marooned inside the Zionist dream; a Greater Israel reaching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, at least. The IDM official offered an estimate of $1.6 billion for the cost of the “fence”, but, according to Israel’s Business Arena (Globes), he also explained that this figure does not include the cost of the ‘eastern fence’, or the barrier’s terminals, or anything else involved in making it operational. At the end of the briefing, the official said that “the fence, including the east and west fences, the terminals, and maintenance” would cost 15 billion shekels ($3.3 billion), “which Israel would have trouble meeting.” For reasons that ought to be explored, the US media immediately agreed that the barrier would cost $1.6 billion. On November 12, the head of the Israeli Knesset Economics Committee announced a new plan for the wall, now 687 kilometers (427 miles) long, totaling $3.4 billion. It’s possible the US will make good on its threats to deduct costs of the “fence” from the $9 billion in loan guarantees it pledged to Israel this summer. If deductions are made, they will likely be for only for short sections of the "fence" that cause greatest US “concern”. One of the few points of sharp disagreement is the wall around Ben-Gurion Airport. The US says the wall is not necessary to protect planes from shoulder-fired missiles. Israel says it is. If they follow the pattern of prior adjustments for settlement construction, modest deductions will be arranged for Israel’s convenience. For instance, the loan guarantee agreement sealed in August is reported to put off the "final decision" on any deductions until 2006. A study of available maps of the “security fence” is recommended for those seeking a better feel for the shape of the very near future. For a good picture of what it is likely to look like when completed, see Gush Shalom’s general map or Foundation for a Middle East Peace’s highly detailed projection. B'tselem just published some updated maps that are very good. Now the Israeli Defence Ministry has released its own map, upon which the UN OCHA based its new map of the western barriers. The IDM map shows some finished sections of the barrier as merely "planned construction". A more serious omission is the entire eastern half of the barrier system, including the "eastern fence", which already extends south of Tayasir. Because it follows the IDM map, the UN OCHA report on the barrier estimates that the "security fence" will place only 14.5% of the West Bank in Israeli hands. Other maps and studies, largely based on land "expropriation" orders already issued by the Israeli army, project at least 45% of the West Bank lost to the Palestinians if the planned barrier system is completed. Despite its glaring omissions, the Defence Ministry map reveals much about Israel's plans. It projects the western side of the West Bank cracking apart with interior barriers, leaving twelve areas totally walled in by a back-tracking scrawl, further separating Jews from Palestinians, and Palestinians from other Palestinians. This is soon to be superimposed upon the Holy Land as a 300-foot wide security zone, complete with trenches filled with razor wire, electronic sensors, motion detectors, infra-red cameras, barbed wire, and the actual barrier, be it fence, electric fence, or a 10- to 26-foot tall concrete wall, replete with guard towers. It is little remarked that every kilometer of this “fence” will have to be maintained by the Israeli army. Indeed, the barrier system promises to permanently insert the army within the West Bank. The many interior barriers already planned for the first phase suggest simple possibilities for future encroachment. Soon we may be hearing about the “natural growth of the security fence”. Whether it is called a “fence”, “wall”, or “barrier”, this construction project is also emerging as a machine of war, one that will enormously increase the control of the Israeli army over the Palestinian people. If the events of the last three months portend the future, the "fence" will become the geographical superstructure for an accelerated campaign of starvation, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing. The Bush administration has been resolute in opposing world opinion and any condemnation of the "security fence" in both the UN Security Council and General Assembly (where only Israel, the Marshall Islands and Micronesia joined us in voting against a recent resolution condemning the "fence"). Any renewed Security Council action on the question appears doomed to face another US veto. Whether it becomes an issue in the Presidential campaign remains to be seen. Both Republicans and Democrats must be hoping that it will not. Yet next summer's news from the Palestinian territories may force the issue upon both the media and the candidates, if public outrage doesn't do it first.
1. http://gush-shalom.org/thewall/index.html
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