Red Rag column
Gideon Spiro
23 March 2010
Fata Morgana
Israel the schlemiel has succeeded in rousing bears from their sleep. Just as US Vice-President Joe Biden was visiting Israel in order to advance the so-called “proximity talks” between Israel and the Palestinian Authority with US mediation, Israel saw fit to announce authorization for the construction of 1,600 housing units in a Jerusalem neighourhood beyond the Green Line. The Palestinian Authority responded with anger, the opening of the talks was cancelled, and the American Administration saw the Israeli announcement as an “unfriendly” move. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even spoke of an “insult”. That is not how a friendly state behaves.
Some saw in the slightly emphatic US criticism of the Israeli government the beginning of a turnabout in US policy towards the Israeli Occupation. Many opponents of the Occupation were quick to welcome the change, but it very soon became clear that it was all a fata morgana, an illusion. To me it was clear from the beginning that this disagreement was like foam on the surface of the water. After all, during the past 40 years of Occupation the US has winked at Israel’s massive-scale construction across the Green Line. Now that 300 thousand Jews live in Jerusalem neighbourhoods that have been built across the Green Line and annexed to Israel, the demand to freeze construction there is akin to closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.
And indeed, not many days had passed before the USA succumbed to Israeli power. Netanyahu did not fold. He announced that construction in Jerusalem would continue, the Americans hastened to replace the critical tone with the familiar friendly talk, accompanied by an invitation to meet with President Obama in the White House. At the conference of the Israel lobby, AIPAC, which was held in New York, Hillary Clinton gave a speech in which she repeated the mantra about an unshakable eternal alliance with Israel. Netanyahu was received at the conference as a hero returning from the field of battle and his speech was received with thunderous applause. Over half of the members of the US Congress were present at Netanyahu’s speech, an expression of unreserved support for Israel. Netanyahu’s talks with Secretary Clinton, Vice President Biden and President Obama, in that order, were described as successful and friendly. The American commitment to what is called “Israel’s security” was reaffirmed and the heads of the Palestinian Authority bit their lips as the illusion of a gaping rift between the USA and Israel burst before their eyes.
At this juncture, USA and the European Community opposition to construction in settlements in East Jerusalem is a mere formality, for protocol only, and Israel can continue to treat the world with contempt.
This does not necessarily mean that things will always remain as they are. Serious change certainly can come, but only if it is preceded by substantial sanctions. If the USA and the European Community decide to become serious in their opposition to the Israeli Occupation, they will inform Israel that from now on it will have to finance the Occupation from its own resources, without any American or European financing, that the shipments of arms to Israel will stop and that Israeli exports will be boycotted. Then we will know that the opposition has teeth, and the Messianic harbinger of the end of the Occupation will be visible on the horizon.
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News from Strasbourg
Citizens of Greek Cyprus, who in 1974 fled from their homes after the Turkish invasion of the island, have sued the government of the Turkish zone of the island in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to demand that their lands be returned to them. Most of the 17 judges of the court accepted the Turkish position that over the course of 35 years a new reality has been created that must be taken into consideration. The judges ruled that individuals can receive their due in cash, but not necessarily in land. (The information is taken from an article by Akiva Eldar in Haaretz, 12 March 2010)
The Human Rights Court in Strasbourg is a very prestigious institution, and this judgement will undoubtedly have repercussions beyond the case immediately at hand. Israeli settlers can take comfort from it, for some of them have lived in the Occupied Territories for 40 years. Conversely this may be bad news for Palestinian refugees, whose demand to return to their homes and lands has sustained a heavy blow.
One of the implications of the ruling is that crime can pay. All thieves have to do is hold on to the property they stole for long enough, and they will be excused from the requirement to return it. In that regard the ruling affirms the reality that was created in many countries of immigration in which the immigrants murdered and robbed the natives. Thus it was with the Indians in the US, the Aboriginals in Australia and the Maoris in New Zealand. Zionist immigration was a latecomer to the scene. If it had taken place in the 18th and 19th centuries and treated the natives like the whites did in the US, probably we would not be hearing a word of objection today. But in the 20th century, especially after the Holocaust, norms changed, and Zionist immigration is stuck with the Palestinian people without being able to swallow them or to separate from them. That part of the ruling does not give joy to the settlers.
On the basis of the norms of the European Court for Human Rights, the conclusion is that if the government of Israel wants the settlers to remain where they are, it must extend citizenship to all those who are subject to its authority, directly or indirectly, from the sea (Gaza) to the Jordan river, and establish a new state – multinational, multi-confessional and multicultural, and ideally democratic. The era of the destruction of peoples is no longer all that popular, except maybe in Israel, which, faced with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, it does not have that option.
Informing
Passover is coming, and in the Haggada we are commanded to remember that we were slaves in Egypt. But in fact most of Israeli society has forgotten, otherwise it would have been impossible to maintain an Occupation and apartheid regime for 42 years now. The denial is expressed not only in Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, but also in its treatment of foreign workers within the Green Line.
There are about 200,000 foreign workers in Israel, some of them being kept in Israel under conditions of slavery. The government forbids those who have work permits to work at jobs apart from the ones for which they received permits. Accordingly, for example, when a Filipina worker who takes care of a senior citizen works in the home of another family on her day off in order to supplement her income, most of which she sends to her family, she runs the risk of being deported and the family that hires her risks a large fine.
An inspection unit was set up at the Interior Ministry the function of which, among other things, is to find such foreign workers. How do the inspectors find out about a domestic worker who is working “illegally”? After all, the inspectors cannot go from house to house to check. It works through informants. The unit’s offices receive anonymous telephone calls informing them that a Filipina, or Chinese, or Indian or Nigerian domestic servant has been hired at a certain address. The inspectors go to that address and catch the unfortunate worker and throw her in jail.
This reminds me of my friend the journalist and the writer Israel Segal, may he rest in peace, who was a correspondent in Germany for the Israel Broadcasting Authority years ago. I visited him in his home in Bonn, then the capital of West Germany, and he told me that one of the things that drove him crazy in Germany is the tendency to inform to the authorities. And of course immediately the subject switched to Nazi Germany, where many Germans informed on their neighbours who concealed Jews.
Those who help the regime in its hunt for foreign workers who work hard for their livings are afflicted with “informer’s syndrome”, one of the causes of which is xenophobia.
A path that leads to Albert Speer
The racist “National Unity” party, which has three Knesset Members, is a replica of the neo-Nazi fascist parties in Europe. All three of its Knesset Members are settlers, participants in the apartheid Occupation regime in the Occupied Territories. The party’s chairman, the settler MK Yaakov Katz, who is also the chairman of the Knesset Committee on Foreign Workers, paints an alarming picture of hundreds of thousands of refugees and foreign workers inundating Israel. He says that today there are already thousands of Africans from Sudan and Eritrea in Tel Aviv, and they are gradually taking over the city and in a few more years Tel Aviv, “the first Hebrew city” in Israel, will no longer be Jewish. Of course this is a false picture, but that is how xenophobia is nurtured and inflated in Israel.
Yaakov Katz has a solution. He proposes to set up a special city in the Negev, where the foreign workers from Africa will be concentrated. The workers will be hired for projects that will benefit the residents of the Negev, such as paving roads and laying track, building the border wall with Egypt, and so on. Under his proposal, the workers will be employed under harsh conditions in order to remove from them the temptation to invite their families to come to Israel.
Yaakov Katz has set out on a path at the end of which stands Albert Speer, the German Minister of Munitions during World War Two, who used forced labourers in the military factories to help to supply the German army. If MK Katz goes to the Yad Vashem archives he will find there several recipes to improve his proposal.
Light finger on the trigger
In recent days the Israeli Occupation army has again proved its heroism by killing 4 Palestinian youths in the Nablus area, one of them a 16-year-old boy, in 2 days. They were not armed, they presented no danger, but the lives of Palestinians are not worth a fig.
When all is said and done, this light finger on the trigger hurts the army itself as well. A breach was detected in the electronic fence that surrounds the Gaza Strip. Soldiers rushed to the scene, hastily opened fire and killed one of their comrades. If they had thought for a moment before shooting, they would have discovered three unarmed Palestinians who were trying to cross the fence, evidently to try their luck in the Israeli labour market in the face of the hardship in Gaza.
The Israeli media reported extensively on the soldier who was killed – about his dreams, his aspirations and the pain of his family and friends. But who were the four Palestinians who were killed? Their stories do not interest racist Israel.
Translated from Hebrew for Occupation Magazine by George Malent.
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