‘Guns n Moses’ – a trip to Israel and Palestine

Mike Scott of Nottingham Left Unity writes.

As someone from a secular Jewish background, I’d taken an interest in the Israel-Palestine conflict from an early age. Even though I had no close relatives there, I always felt some degree of involvement and indeed responsibility – after all, everything that was happening was being done in my name and supposedly for my benefit.

What I was sure of was that I didn’t want to go to Israel or identify with the Israelis, so I never did. But gradually my curiosity got the better of me and I finally put my name down for a study tour, which I hoped would deepen my knowledge of the issues and enable me to see the conflict for myself. This article summarises what seem to me to be the main points of a really interesting and thoroughly worthwhile trip.

I thought the popular Israeli T-shirt slogan “Guns n Moses” was a joke when I first saw it, but soon realised that it actually represents the way Israelis see themselves rather well. I also discovered that strangely, most Israelis don’t see themselves as living in the Middle East – or not deliberately, anyway. Their view is that Israel is a European country that somehow took a wrong turning and landed up there by mistake and they make strenuous efforts to pretend they’re somewhere else: for example, they take part in the Eurovision Song Contest and are members of UEFA, the European Football Association.

Going back to the T-shirt, one of the most bizarre and alarming aspects of life in Israel is that there is no real distinction between history, religion and politics, which means that things that probably didn’t happen 2,000 years ago are routinely used to justify political decisions today. And of course, you can’t argue with someone when God has told them they’re in the right.

No trip to Palestine can escape the presence of The Wall, which is supposedly all about security. However, it doesn’t take much detailed study to see this is not the case at all: if it was, Israelis would be on one side and Palestinians on the other. In fact, there are Israelis and Palestinians on both sides, which makes no security sense at all. Similarly, the numerous checkpoints are supposed to be about stopping suicide bombers, but actually, almost all of them are within the West Bank, not on Israel’s theoretical border.

The reality, based on the evidence, is that the Wall is about directly incorporating large quantities of the West Bank into Israel and the checkpoints are about making it as difficult as possible for the Palestinians to move around in what is supposed to be their own country.

The contradictions which are obvious to the visitor don’t trouble most Israelis at all. While the UN calls the occupation of the West Bank illegal under international law and the current forcible relocation of the Bedouin a war crime, Israelis hear little about this and care less, secure in the knowledge that it simply doesn’t matter, as no-one will do anything about it and all critics are anti-semitic anyway. They live in a bubble, maintained by the USA and the EU, and nothing will change until it’s popped. The local media are certainly not going to take on this responsibility: while there is little direct censorship, it isn’t really necessary as most of them censor themselves and don’t report anything their readers or viewers might find disturbing. As a result, any well-informed visitor to the region is likely to have a better understanding of what is happening (and, crucially, why) than the average Israeli.

Another part of the Israel story is that they are the only democracy in the region, but this praiseworthy commitment is not quite what it seems. In fact, there are many of the appearances of a religious fundamentalist state, ironically rather more akin to Iran than the UK. For example, here are some (easily checkable) facts about Israeli society:

• There is no civil marriage in Israel: it is only possible to marry in an Orthodox synagogue or mosque.

• It is not possible to marry someone of another faith (or no faith at all).

• Only Orthodox (ie. fundamentalist) Judaism is recognised by the state: the Reform, Progressive and secular Jews who form the majority of the population don’t officially exist.

• There is a long history of discrimination against Israeli Arabs and other non-Jews in terms of the way the law is interpreted and it has recently been announced by Prime Minister Netanyahu that this second-class treatment will in future be legally recognised and enforced.

• There is no legal category of “Israeli” – only “Jews” and “others”.

• There is no naturalisation process: the only possible ways for immigrants to get an Israeli passport are to be Jewish or to marry an Israeli citizen.

• The education system is completely segregated: while 20% of Israelis are Arab, there are no integrated state schools. Funding for Arab schools is much less than for Jewish schools and their curriculum is rigidly controlled.

I was already aware that during the apartheid era in South Africa, Israel had supported the white regime both politically and economically. What I was less clear about was the extent to which the Israelis are now using the apartheid philosophy to impose a strikingly similar regime on the Palestinians in the West Bank. This view is strongly disputed by Israeli government supporters, but the evidence is plain for anyone prepared to look:

• Up to now it is true that there have been no explicitly discriminatory laws, but this is because universal laws and regulations have been used in a discriminatory way to achieve the same effect. For example, planning permission for house extensions is easy for Israelis and virtually impossible for Palestinians. And Palestinian land keeps getting mysteriously rezoned for agriculture or military use, allowing for individual houses and whole villages to be demolished and their residents evicted.

• Palestinians living in “approved” areas are entitled to a water supply, but it’s restricted and the cost to them is high compared to the illegal “settlers” – this accounts for the black water tanks on the roof of every Palestinian house. There are no such restrictions for the Israelis and the same applies to the supply of electricity.

• The West Bank (of the River Jordan) is agreed by all sides to be the place where the Palestinian state will be created at some unspecified point in the future, but it has already been carved up by the Israelis and 60% of the land is specifically reserved for them. The remainder is also controlled by the Israeli army and there are currently 540,000 illegal settlers spread across the whole area, including the parts supposedly reserved for the Palestinians (UN figures). Even while the peace negotiations were at their height after the Oslo Agreement, numbers increased from 110,000 in 1993 to 204,000 in 2000, while around 1,000 Palestinian homes were destroyed.

• Since 1967, Palestinians have been pushed into smaller and smaller patches of territory, none of which are actually joined up to each other. This policy has created what the white South Africans called “Bantustans”, in areas where the land isn’t fertile enough for the settlers to want to take it over. Travel between these isolated patches of land is being made increasingly difficult by the use of frequent checkpoints – though new Israeli-only roads are built between illegal settlements, many of which are the size of small towns and still expanding, fuelled by a combination of religious extremism and heavy subsidies.

It became increasingly clear to me that these policies were – and could only be – part of an overall plan to effectively divide and imprison the Palestinians and eventually drive them out entirely, to join the 3,000,000 plus in refugee camps in surrounding countries. This “Judaisation” has encouraged the fundamentalist view that the whole of the West Bank is in fact part of Israel, to be occupied only by Jews, though this isn’t shared by any foreign country, including the USA.

The overwhelming implication of all this is that not only won’t there be a Palestinian state in the foreseeable future, there actually can’t be – it’s simply not possible. The “facts on the ground”, to use the stock Israeli phrase, mean that in order to create anything resembling a unitary Palestine, over half a million religious fundamentalists would have to either agree to move from their “God-given” land or be forced out by the Israeli army and that is just not going to happen. Any attempt to do so would result in a (quite inconceivable) civil war.

So is there no hope of progress, let alone justice, for the Palestinians? The current view of both Israelis and Palestinians does point to this conclusion, but there are possible outcomes other than the current deadlock punctuated by sporadic violence.

Until now, the Israelis have had by far the best of the international publicity: their PR machine is second to none and they have the support of both Jews and fundamentalist Christians in the USA, together with the collective guilt of western and EU countries for their failure to prevent the Holocaust. But too many years of taking the world for granted has resulted in an assumption that it will always be possible to do this and even some US politicians are beginning to get irritated with the aggressive “don’t care” attitude of successive Israeli governments. The current thawing of relations between the USA and Cuba also sends a clear signal that even decades-old policies can change.

The real game-changer however, would be for the PLO/Fatah to follow through with its occasional threat to dissolve the Palestinian Authority and pass all responsibility back to Israel, as the occupying power – not what the Israelis want at all, as it would inevitably transform the international view of the struggle from being about terrorism to being about civil rights and the Geneva Convention.

At some point, Israel is going to have to understand that the current situation cannot continue in the long-term: things will change. And then, there would be only two possibilities: a genuine two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, or a single federal state with entrenched guarantees for the four main religious groups – Jews, Muslims, Christians and Druze. Neither side would be prepared to accept this latter proposal at the moment, but if a two-state solution really is impossible, only the unlikely remains.