For Sharon, the Palestinians are insects. He now wants them, impelled by anger and frustration, to smash themselves against the Wall (security barrier sounds like a screw-job, unconscionable euphemism). Combined with the fuelling of settlement growth and the theft of Palestinian natural resources to sustain it, the goal is to force the Palestinians to say uncle and either leave Palestine altogether or accept Bantustan, subordinate status in an Israel dominated by settlers, reactionary orthodox religious parties, and the greedy and tacky capitalist elite tied to the military (and who could be more tacky, reactionary, and greedy than Ariel Sharon and Benyamin Netanyahu).
Netanyahu as finance minister in Sharon’s government has recently played a key role in attacking the social programs that have been essential to Israeli identity for the past fifty years. The economy of the country, bludgeoned by a nosedive in tourist revenues and spiraling military spending, has entered a profound crisis. The officials don’t find fault with their own policies which have placed demeaning Palestinian existence above improving the lives of the majority of people who live between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. Instead, they shamelessly blame Israeli workers for being lazy and spoiled by such luxuries as adequate pensions, limits on working hours, and welfare for the unemployed and sick (American workers would find these outrageous insults all too familiar). Cuts in subsidies to single mothers resulted in massive demonstrations against the government spearheaded by the powerful Israeli trade federation Histadrut. Netanyahu spat in the face of popular pressure and arrogantly declared that this would be Histadrut’s last general strike ever. Such bravado echoes the aims of Israeli businessmen and their agents in government who have wanted to gut social programs and maximize their profits through the debasement of the labor of both Palestinians and Israelis.
As for Sharon, the list of his crimes against the Palestinians boggles the mind: manipulation of regulations as Housing Minister to drive Palestinians from their homes and replace them with settlers subsidized by cheap mortgages, investment in infrastructure, military protection, and virtual immunity for crimes committed against Palestinians; cynical colloaboration in the murder of at least hundreds of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon. We could go on, but oftentimes observers overlook his actions against Arabs whose families remained in Israel after 1948. Although blessed with the almighty Israeli citizenship card, Israeli Arabs have historically endured discrimination in the social, economic, and even cultural sphere. In the late 1970’s Sharon as Minister of Agriculture added his own contribution by purposely establishing exclusively Jewish enclaves on the outskirts of Israeli-Arab communites in order to prevent their growth and exacerbate the frustration caused by lack of space and employment opportunities. This would be criminal behavior if unleashed on a single person: Israeli Arabs represent twenty percent of the population of Israel. Today Sharon has the gall to justify expansion of the settlements in the Occupied Territories as a natural process of growth.
The various strands of prejudice held by the Israeli elite meshed seamlessly in a law just passed by Israel’s legislature, the Knesset. An inhabitant of the West Bank or Gaza can no longer obtain Israeli citizenship when they marry an Israeli-Arab. Given the prohibitions on residency within Israel by those who live in the Occupied Territories, Israeli-Arabs essentially face an impossible choice: abandon their homes that they’ve maintained in the face of immense adversity, or renounce a genuine right to marriage due to discriminatory policies and regulations. These manipulations of the definition of citizenship have everyday consequences on the ground. In a recent article journalist Neve Gordon detailed the pernicious effects of bureaucratic limbo on a single Palestinian community. (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=3994)
The town of Nuemann lies on the south slope of the plateau where one finds Jerusalem. After the 1967 war Israel annexed the land to the municipality of Jerusalem, but declined to give the inhabitants Israeli citizenship. Israeli troops have in the past few months repeatedly detained these flesh and blood human beings for illegal occupation of land their families have held for generations. In a nutshell, they’re classified as persons from the West Bank illegally living within Israel. Gordon noted bitingly that scarcely five kilometers away the night life of Jerusalem didn’t abate one iota. The up and comers of society apparently had no conception of the human dramas taking place just beyond their field of vision.
This harassment is a microcosm of the aims of these policies. Qalqilya, a Palestinian city on the Green Line, has had the agricultural hinterland its citizens rely on economically cut off by the Wall. Qalqilya is one of the biggest towns in the West Bank. Sharon's not thinking in terms of individual evictions: his ambitions aspire to the level of ethnic cleansing.
Revisionist historians of the Cold War point to the collapse of the Berlin Wall as a culmination of the struggle for human freedom, the watershed for the supposed victory of neo-liberal values as a primer for the world to live by. Another wall to divide Israelis and Palestinians is surging on the Green Line. Neither nation will profit by it. Nor will the American people, who contribute three to four billion dollars every year to Israel in direct foreign aid.
Even though the enormous American aid package by law has to be used within pre-1967 Israel, four billion dollars of military aid, grants and loans frees up the funds that fuel the concrete monstrosity that embodies the worst ambitions of the Israeli elite. They don't even care about their own people, whose social safety net they are trying to gut, whose growing unemployment they attribute mockingly to the spoiled citizens of what was supposed to be a social welfare state. Meanwhile, financial support of the illegal settlements continues unabated. A government receiving the largest outlay of foreign aid in the world cannot provide a decent standard of living for its people, Jewish or Arab. How can that be anything but premeditated and obscene
Perhaps we can find a way to help eradicate the Wall, which symbolizes all of the evil aspects of the corporatization (they call it globalization) of the Earth: greed, ignorance, prejudice, environmental damage, doublespeak, etc. The American people must make this an issue in the 2004 elections. The Palestinians have legitimate claims against Israel, both moral and economic. Why not divide the aid now sent to Israel equally between that country and the Palestinians. Two billion dollars might help alleviate some of the misery engendered by the occupation. As for Israel, why not make social policy the main criteria for continuing the aid? Nor should anyone feel circumspect or self-conscious when championing Palestinian rights. You are not advocating terrorism, nor are you against the Israeli people. As Edward Said has pointed out, being on the side of a people who have maintained a culture of resistance and community survival constitutes one of the great activist causes of our time. Only the pride, self-respect and dignity of the Palestinians themselves can surpass that which we should feel for supporting them at this crucial moment in all of our histories.
Here are some places to start informing yourself about the actual situation and how to help do something about it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3106583.stm
http://www.counterpunch.org/ashrawi08072003.html (Denunciation of double standards)
http://www.counterpunch.org/corrie05142003.html (Speech by mother of slain activist Rachel Corrie)
http://www.counterpunch.org/kuttab08092003.html (Article by a Palestinian teenager)
http://btselem.org/ (Israeli peace organization)
http://www.phrmg.org/
http://www.pchrgaza.org/
http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/palestine/