Roger Harrison, Arab News staff

Settlements are as much a weapon of war as tanks. Since the 1967 war, Israel has used them to create “facts on the ground.”

Through settlements, the Zionist movement aimed, in David Ben-Gurion’s words, “to establish a great Jewish fact in this country” (emphasis in the original) that was irreversible. Moshe Dyan later added an apologetic and self-justifying note when he wove armed forces and settlements into the fabrication: “We are a generation of settlers and without the combat helmet and the barrel of a gun we will not be able to plant a tree or build a house.”

Bearle Katznelson has a reputation as the conscience of the Zionist movement. He eulogized “there has never been a colonizing enterprise as typified by justice and honesty toward others as our work here in Eretz Israel.”

It is hardly surprising that America supports the process. Theodore Roosevelt in his 1889 book “The Winning of the West” concluded of the dispossession of the native population of North America: “No other conquering nation has ever treated the savage owners of the soil with such generosity as the United States.” It ignores the fact that the “savages” are the original owners of the soil and there is no reflection on what the recipients of the ‘blessings’ of occupation and theft have to say.

The simple facts are these.

It is illegal under international law for an occupying power to transfer citizens from its own territory to the occupied territory. That law is stated unequivocally in the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The Hague Regulations prohibit an occupying power from making permanent changes in the occupied area unless they are due to military needs (defined in the narrowest of senses) or for the benefit of the local population. The population of Palestine has hardly benefited from Israel’s permanent changes made by the building of settlements on Palestinian lands, the restriction of access to farmlands and movements between areas of Palestine.

Israel has flouted international law and resolutions of the United Nations. If it was not for the financial, military and moral support of the United States, then based simply on its occupation and aggressive tactics, it would have been roundly condemned as a “rogue state.” Certainly, in terms of the definitions used by the United States to define rogue states viz. military aggression, non-compliance with UN resolutions, occupation of territory, possession of weapons of mass destruction and record of human rights violations, Israel is a prime candidate.

The current conflict and intifada are only part of the long history of conflict between the two peoples. The boundaries of both modern political entities, Palestine and Israel, were delineated by external powers. The creation of Israel as a discrete entity happened in 1948. However, Palestine — the biblical home of the Philistines — was occupied by Christians and Jews for a score of centuries.

It is not just political motivation that drives the conflict; the driving force is a belief in the rightness of the causes, both Palestinian and Israeli. The Israelis base theirs on a God-given right to be there; the Palestinians on a historical right justified by length of tenure.

The underlying Zionist ethos of the occupation is that it is not occupation, but liberation. Daniel Levy is a resident in the settlement of Beit El, 18 km north of Jerusalem and just 2 km from Ramallah, an island of Palestinian autonomy on the West Bank. He points to archaeological evidence that the land is Jewish. “Three hundred and fifty Jewish archaeological sites have been dug up on the Golan. This land, promised (by God) to Abraham extends from the Nile to the Euphrates, right up to the Turkish border. Everything will be simple when the Arabs understand that Abraham’s favorite son was not Ishmael, but Isaac.”

This view conveniently forgets that — to use Levy’s justification of divine authority — that the land was given to all Abraham’s descendants and not just the descendants of Isaac.

This view is supported by the strong belief that Palestine is an artificial creation and, more significantly, that the concept of a ‘Palestinian’ is equally artificial. Once again, this view ignores both Jewish and Christian scriptural references to the Philistines.

“The Jews will regain their identity when they stop wanting to live as America,” says Levy. This ambition to separate the Jewish people from America does not appear to hinder his acceptance of its financial, military and moral support.

Strongly identifying with ‘Jewish’ as an identity, Levy sums up the situation as he sees it. “The word Palestine is an English word. What is this people that it doesn’t even have a word to describe itself?” he says.

Not all Jews think this way. There is a visible divide between the hard-line settler and right-wing Israeli on the one hand and a community of academics and more liberally minded Jews on the other.

“I regard the current situation as nothing less than tragic,” said Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Professor David Sacks in an interview given to the Guardian newspaper in August 2002. “It is forcing Israel into postures that are incompatible in the long run with our deepest ideals...This kind of prolonged conflict together with an absence of hope generates hatreds and insensitivities that in the long run are corrupting to a culture.”

Underlying Sacks’ announcement is his belief, formulated in 1967, that “Israel should hand back all the (newly gained) land for the sake of peace.” He still sees no reason to renounce that view.

Unpopular amongst Jews in Europe, this belief is politically dangerous in the USA. The refusal of liberal Jews in America to make an independent stand has rendered the American ‘left’ helpless. They are one of the biggest contributors to the Democrat Party, and have brought a unique perspective to numerous social justice reforms from the advancement of blacks to free speech.

A bill was brought before Congress in the spring of 2001 that called for solidarity with Israel. Almost 100 congressmen argued against it because it was “so one-sided” and in their view uncritically supported Israel’s cause. Only 21 voted against it when it came to the floor of the house. Two of those were not re-elected when their term was finished.

“The great Jewish fact” is that Israel occupies territories illegally under international law and in the terms of the Geneva Convention. The Jewish identity as victim is a transparently thin cover for the slaughter of a people.

On Oct. 14, 1953, an Israeli Army force of Commando unit 101, led by the now Prime Minister Sharon, attacked the West Bank village of Qibya. After eight hours, 75 villagers were dead, two thirds of them women and children, some blown up by demolition charges placed in their homes. Some 56 houses, a mosque and water pumping station were destroyed. Even the livestock was killed.

The attack was a ‘reprisal’ for a hand grenade that was tossed into a house in an Israeli settlement, Tirat Yhuda, killing a woman and two children. The attack was condemned by the Mixed Armistice Committee and the Jordanian government which had sovereignty over Qibya had “asked the police for bloodhounds to track down the Yahud (sic) murderers.” (Jerusalem Post. Oct. 31, 1965)

Of course, Palestinians throw stones, shoot and bomb Israelis. No one negotiates with them. Their political and a great deal of their physical infrastructure has been destroyed. Many are slowly starving, many have lost their livelihoods and centuries old farms.

Their attacks are directed against an illegally occupying power, supported by the US. Of course, soft targets are the ones often chosen — no different in principle from an Israeli tank shelling and rocketing an undefended refugee camp. The settlement policy is simply an extension of the occupation policy, and gives a false yet highly publicized validity to the Israeli Army for their actions defending the settlers. Attacks have always been intended to overawe and terrorize the Palestinian population into submission. How else is such an escalated response justified?

Settlements are as much a weapon of war as tanks. The policy of extending them over the occupied territories involves using committed religious Jews as a spearhead and then, when they are attacked, claiming that they are the ‘innocent victims’ of Palestinian aggression. The extreme responses of the Israeli government to attacks on settlements continue much in the same vein as that on Qibya half a century ago.

Are the settlers, with their religious conviction of absolute right, innocent victims? Certainly naive, their use by the government even cynical; but their use is not new. It began over a century ago.

(To be continued)

- Arab News Opinion 19 June 2003