Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 11:56:33 +0100 From: James Heartfield <James at heartfield.demon.co.uk> Subject: Back from the unholy land
A kid with a new toy
James Heartfield reports from Ehud Barak's Israel
The new Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's diplomatic offensive promises a fresh start to Arab-Israeli relations. Barak has suggested that an agreement with Syria could lead to a compromise over the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel. Turkey's President Suleyman Demirel visited Barak in July offering a deal over much-needed water supplies, and even Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat welcomed Barak's election, calling him a friend. In Washington and London Barak has suggested that the peace process, in abeyance under his hawkish predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu is back on track. In his excitement, President Clinton let slip not just his feelings about Barak, but also the American estimate of Israel's status, saying that he was 'as excited as a kid with a new toy'.
As toys go, Israel is quite expensive. The US defence grant alone to Israel is $1.87bn and now a further $1.2bn 'peace process' aid has been unfrozen. Happily the Israeli Defence Force have repaid the favour, offering to buy a new fleet of F16 long range bombers that can reach 'as far as Tripoli or Iran' from America's Lockheed Martin, price $2.5bn. (Understandably the Syrian President Hafez Assad asked why one needs long range bombers to make peace.)
Financial support for Israel is a long-standing American commitment, but one that has been called into question in recent years. When Likud's Netanyahu was elected on a ticket of resisting concessions to Palestinian's America reined in the money, leading to the most serious breach between Israel and its most important sponsor to date. Netanyahu's aggressive support for new settlements on Arab land in the occupied territories was seen as a rejection of the US-brokered peace process with the newly created Palestinian authority under Yasser Arafat. Now with Barak in charge, Clinton is looking forward to playing with his new peace process toy.
Ehud Barak's new Labour regime appears on paper to have the broadest possible base, but in many ways it is an election that signals the demobilisation of militant Zionism. The outgoing regime's confrontational approach was rejected by many Israelis as divisive. Barak's achievement is to have welded together a coalition behind him that is as shallow as it is broad. Where Netanyahu mobilised militant support from settlers and from the hitherto despised oriental Jews, Barak has gathered the old Labour elite, won over the newer Russian immigrants and even got 93 per cent of the votes of Arab Israelis.
Barak's loose coalition is beholden to no particular constituency, which is the secret of its success. Rising above the entrenched positions of Israeli political life, Barak has created a greater room to manoeuvre. The newly galvanised elite around the Labour party is likened to Tony Blair's New Labour. Like Blair, Barak is intuitively conservative, an army man who ordered raids against Islamic militants. But he is also pragmatic in his style, keen to cut the Gordian Knots in Israeli politics with technical solutions. His proposed solution to the Palestinians' complaint that Israeli land and checkpoints separate their territories in Gaza and the West Bank was to build a vast motorway on stilts across the desert. It certainly sounded like a practical solution until it was costed at five times the total budget of the Palestinian Authority to date.
Barak's new broom has alarmed the ancien regime. Israeli settlers in the Golan have promised a campaign against withdrawal. Likud are up in arms about the first Arab appointment to the defence committee - Hashem Mahameed, they claim has in the past called for an 'armed Intifada' by Israeli Arabs.
Relations between Barak and the settlers are strained. In Kiryat Arba a newly lain monument stands to a 'Holy Man' Baruch Goldstein. This Israeli reservist from Brooklyn walked into the Ibrahim mosque - claimed by settlers as a Synagogue and site of Abraham's tomb - and opened fire on praying moslems. Twenty nine were killed, and more than a hundred wounded before he was overpowered and killed. At his monument a settler leading a tour to this shrine tells me that the official version of events is all propaganda to demonise the settlers in preparation for a sell-out. In fact, Goldstein was a doctor who was preparing medicine to help injured Arabs, or maybe the gunfire was really Palestinian stun grenades.
To the Palestinian residents of Hebron, the settlers' excuses for their own mass-murderer are characteristic of the settler mentality. 400 settlers live in Hebron, supported by 2000 IDF members. Their handful of houses are placed right in the centre of Hebron, to justify the division of the city with barbed wire fences and eighteen-foot high walls. In helmets and flak jackets, the soldiers barge through the narrow streets of the Arab market menacing the shoppers and traders. A three year-old settler child climbs up on a pile of sand on their side to shout abuse and throw rocks at Arabs, defended by a five-man IDF patrol. You have to walk up the main road because only settlers can drive on it as there are two houses occupied by Jews. As I do a man with a beard and Yarmulke spits in anger at my feet: I am with Arabs. A link wire grill has been put over a street overlooked by the settlers' compound and suspended above us are the half-bricks and concrete lumps that they toss onto the market-goers.
Mashtiq, who is showing me around Hebron has little reason to believe that Barak will make a difference. He is unimpressed by the peace process because of the daily confrontations with the bigoted settlers and their aggressive IDF guard. No propagandist would have dared to make up anything as damning as Goldstein's atrocity, but there are tensions between the settlers and the government. The finance minister has put a freeze on cash for new developments. A conveniently timed report on the state of Israel's environment warns of a catastrophe because of over- irrigation and building. The very promise to make the desert bloom is now portrayed as an ecological disaster. Doubtless the building is unsound, since it is almost entirely done for reasons of political control, creating a dictatorship of real estate over the cramped Arab homes. Each Israeli consumes 85 times as much water as a Palestinian. But the real significance of the report is that, however tentatively, the ideology of settlement is being called into question.
That does not mean that the Palestinians can expect to gain their freedom from the new regime. What it means is that the mechanisms of control are being adapted. The Justice minister Yossi Beilin is proposing to end the state of emergency that has been regularly renewed throughout Israel's fifty years, saying 'that will be much less convenient' but 'we must exploit these moments of government to relinquish power'. Whether the suspension of the state of emergency will help the 64 Palestinians held in administrative detention - like 24 year-old Iman Darmeh held since July 1994 - has yet to be seen. But in any event Beilin's 'relinquishing of power' in emergency regulations is accompanied by a commitment by the new Internal Security minister Shlomo Ben-Ami to put more police on the streets to tackle crime 'especially in Arab towns and villages'.
The most marked change in the apparatus of repression, is in the creation of the Palestinian Authority itself. According to Barak, the point of the PA for Israel is to rid it of the burden of ruling the Palestinians. Some Palestinian Towns like Ramallah and Bethlehem on the West Bank of the river Jordan do show a marked improvement, and the withdrawal of Israeli troops is plainly a great relief.
But the minimal amount of land released to the PA (just 3 per cent) underscores the humiliating terms of the deal. On the Gaza strip one and a half million Palestinians live in a row of six 'refugee camps'. The refugees of Jabilya have been refugees so long that the camps have become breeze block cities, with dirt streets. Other than the taxis, the principle means of transport is still a horse and cart. To leave the strip they must pass through the Erez crossing, a cross between a Cold War 'Check-point Charlie' and a cattle crossing, where Palestinians are packed in there thousands behind wire mesh as the bully-boy IDF guards check their passes, search and grill them.
The key to the Israeli's policy towards the PA is that they have relinquished responsibility for policing to a Palestinian police who boast of co-operating with the IDF and the CIA in suppressing the Islamic Hamas opposition. The authority of the PA is paper-thin, with the police force as the only real institution under their control. Every development or welfare project is run by a vast army of aid organisations or Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) staffed by Europeans. Recently the PA complained that the NGOs control all the funds and tried to introduce laws to register them.
Severine, a chic young French worker with a Swiss organisation Terre Des Hommes expressed the characteristic outlook of the NGOs. She shares all of the Palestinians contempt for Israel, but she only empathises with the Arabs in so far as they are cast in the role of victims. For the PA she has nothing but contempt. Of the Legislative Council she says 'they have no mandate to pass this law on NGOs' because their five-year interim term is up. The fact that the members of the legislative council, unlike the NGOs were at least elected seems to be of no account.
All of the NGO workers are quick to point out the weaknesses in the PA, the cronyism and the heavy-handed policing of opposition groups. In Hebron, Mushtiq is just as critical of the PA, but for its failure to face up to Israel. He is more contemptuous of the European observers based in Hebron 'who can't wait to get away from here to spend their fat salaries in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, in "civilisation".
At Bir Zeit University Salaami and Mona are both the children of radical Diaspora parents and both studying accountancy. They say that you cannot fight on two fronts. First Israel must be dealt with, and then we can deal with the shortcomings of the Palestinian government. It is an argument that all the NGO workers are quick to dismiss as an excuse for poor governance. But the truth is that the NGOs' instinctive contempt for Palestinian self-governance is quite different from criticisms like Mushtiq's. Their authority arises out of the weakness of Palestinian society. They are the colonial masters waiting to take over from Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, if Clinton succeeds in making Barak give up more land.
-- James Heartfield