I usually edit things out when I post articles and make certain things red, but the whole thing is worth reading.
by Max Fisher on June 17, 2014
JERUSALEM — There is a pleasant fiction in the United States and parts of Israel that the Israel-Palestine conflict exists in a sort of suspended animation, on pause and simply awaiting diplomatic resolution. But the truth is that the conflict, which over the decades has included several wars, countless terrorist attacks, and two Palestinian uprisings, never really goes away for most of the 12 million people in Israel and the Palestinian territories. And periodically it will escalate so rapidly, with such relatively slight provocation, and to such a level of severity, that the rest of us can't ignore what every Palestinian and many Israelis already know: the conflict may be quieter today than in the past, but it is still active, still destroying lives and communities, still scarring these two societies, every day.
One of these escalations is happening right now. On Friday, Israel discovered that three of its citizens, teenagers studying at a yeshiva in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank, had been kidnapped overnight. By whom is yet unknown; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists it was the Palestinian group Hamas, Israeli intelligence officials say it was likely a few local Palestinians acting on their own. Hamas has denied responsibility.
In a sense, it matters a great deal who did this; Hamas is both an anti-Israel terrorist group and a political party that participates in official governance, so if it ordered this kidnapping it could set back peace talks badly. But in another sense it hardly matters at all, because this uncertainty has not prevented Israel from escalating the conflict aggressively.
This is an issue that looks less gray all the time: the occupation is wrong, it is the problem, and Israel is responsible
In the three days since, the Israeli military has descended on the southern part of the West Bank where the yeshiva students disappeared, and especially on the major Palestinian city of Hebron. I happened to visit Hebron the day before the kidnapping and found it already suffocated by occupation. Dozens of Palestinians have been arrested; some estimates say 120, some nearer to 80, but all agree that it includes the entire population of middle-aged and older men who work for Hamas's political branch (remember that they are also a political party). The military has severely restricted Palestinian movement in Hebron, forbidden residents under age 50 from leaving the country, and completely shut down all movement in or out of Gaza and the southern West Bank save for "humanitarian and medical assistance."
Israel has presented this as necessary for its search for the kidnapped Israeli teenagers, and certainly it is true that finding kidnapped kids in a not-so-friendly city requires checkpoints and security forces. But to many Palestinians the scale of the reaction, and its severe impact on thousands of civilians, looks an awful lot like collective punishment, the practice of punishing an entire population for the crimes a few individuals, which is barred by the Geneva Conventions that regulate international conflict. Many of the 100,000 Palestinians who commute to jobs in Israel have been prevented from crossing the border to get to work, much less see family on the other side of the line, and in Gaza most gas stations have had to shut down for lack of fuel imports. The flavor of collective punishment has been reinforced by Netanyahu himself, who has repeatedly insisted that all of Hamas, and even the more moderate Palestinian government led by Mahmoud Abbas, are responsible for the three kidnapping victims.
The three days of escalation are a response to the kidnappings but, in many ways, are just the long, ongoing extension of the conflict and its inexorable eye-for-an-eye logic. When the Palestinians responsible for mass violence during the Second Intifada (uprising) of the early-2000s did not succeed in achieving their aim of independence through violence, their answer was more violence. When the Israelis did not succeed in winning security and de facto security through occupation, their answer was more occupation.
You see the Israeli-Palestinian insistence on perpetuation in this week's crisis. Hamas's leaders may have told the truth when they said the group did not commit the kidnapping. But when they nonethelesscelebrated the attack as a blow against the Israeli occupation, how could they not understand that such rhetoric does far more to enable the occupation than a kidnapping will do to end it?
And while it would be wrong to blame the Israeli victims for their own kidnappings, one would still think that Israelis might want to question the role of Israel's occupation of the West Bank. As children, the kidnap victims surely cannot and should not be held personally culpable, but they could be considered an extension of the occupation, which has been far from a peaceful endeavor. And what of the national Israeli policies that created the occupation — this most damaging aspect of the conflict — and then inserted three teenagers onto its front lines?
There has always been, and there remains, plenty of culpability to go around in this conflict, plenty of individuals and groups that squandered peace and perpetuated suffering many times over. Everyone is complicit and no one is pure. The crisis over the kidnapped students shows all this. But it is also highlights what has become perhaps the most essential truth of the Israel-Palestine conflict: for all the complexity of how it came to be and why it's continued, for all the shared responsibility for this week's crisis and everything that led up to it, the conflict predominantly matters for the human suffering it causes. And today the vast majority of that suffering comes from Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Today, the suffering has become so disproportionately administered by the occupation and so disproportionately felt by Palestinians that, in a conflict famous for its complexity and its gray areas, this is an issue that looks less gray all the time: the occupation is wrong, it is the problem, and Israel is responsible.
Israel's occupation has become so all-consuming that every incident seems to entrench the conflict and the occupation and accomplish nothing else. Also on Thursday, in the hours before the Israeli teenagers were kidnapped, another conflict-in-miniature broke out. But while this one at first seemed like it might accomplish something and do it peacefully — both rare feats here — it dissolved quickly into the same old cycle.
What happened is that Arab shopkeepers in Jerusalem, including the tourist-heavy Old City and its famous markets, shut down completely on Thursday in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners who have been hunger-striking for weeks. Both strikes are meant to call attention to Israel's practice of administrative detention, by which it holds about 200 Palestinians without charge, Guantanamo-style, sometimes for years. The commercial strike was meant to nonviolently hurt Israel, which controls all of Jerusalem, and alert Israelis to what was being done in their name. The strike was widely noticed by Jewish Israelis, but no matter how many I spoke to, none had the slightest idea why it was happening; some guessed it was a Muslim holiday, others shrugged. Nothing. On Friday, worshippers at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem's Old City, no doubt frustrated by Israeli apathy, organized a protest, which nearby Israeli security forces immediately and perhaps overzealously put down, injuring 28 and arresting eight.
Israelis have largely given up trying to convince Palestinians to understand their point of view, that they crave security from their history of persecution. This is largely because the overwhelming force of the occupation means they don't have to convince Palestinians of anything, but Palestinians have few other options. What both Friday's non-violent strike and Thursday's kidnapping have in common is a mission of breaking through Israeli apathy, of getting them to notice the occupation and care enough to want to end it.
Ha'aretz columnist Gideon Levy generated anticipatable controversy when he wrote that "if, in the West Bank, yeshiva students aren't abducted, then the West Bank disappears from Israel's consciousness." To many, this sounded as if the column were encouraging Palestinians to abduct school-age Israelis; to others, presumably including the columnist himself, it may have rung true as a description of many Israelis' apathy to the suffering of West Bank Palestinians.
I'd have made a slightly different point: that the violence of terrorism by Palestinians against Israelis is wrong and counterproductive, and that the violence of occupation by Israeli security forces against Palestinians is wrong and counterproductive, but that the conflict is engineered in such a way that violence is often the most or only viable way for either side to impress its will on the other. This neither forgives nor softens the wrongness of violence and those who do it, of course, but if you want to understand why the conflict persists in this way, it's not enough to condemn those who do wrong, but to understand the conflict that produces them.
I have been to many strange places, but few have felt as unsettlingly creepy as the Israeli-occupied stretch of Hebron. This stretch of mostly empty buildings and dead-silent streets, all motionless save the Israeli troops who shuffle between checkpoints to maintain total security in this miniature wasteland, is known as "H2" in the parlance of the US-brokered peace agreement that divided the city in 1997.
This area, meant for Israelis and forbidden to non-resident Palestinians, is home to all of Hebron's Jews. The 1997 agreement grants them 20 percent of the city's land. They are 0.3 percent of its population. This is why the streets are empty; these people exist here only to occupy the land and to perpetuate Israeli control.
The 500 or so Israelis who live here are considered settlers by everyone but themselves. If you speak to them, they will tell you this: Jews consider Hebron a holy city (so do Muslims) and began moving here during the Zionist movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1929, a mob of Hebron's native Arabs attacked the newcomers and killed about 65; most fled, and were barred from returning when Jordan conquered the West Bank in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. After Israel occupied the West Bank in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, some Jews moved to Hebron, either to reclaim property they believed was rightfully theirs by family inheritance or because they want to control the city as Jewish holy land. The Israeli military put the city under occupation, and in 1997 the Hebron Agreement divided it, which the Israelis here believe was to keep them safe from Arab terrorists.
A Palestinian boy next to his family’s water tank, which he says was destroyed by the settlers who built a home next door (Max Fisher)
If you walk through the city's many Israeli military checkpoints — you will have no problem doing this as long as you are not Palestinian, although Israeli civilians are legally meant to be barred from crossing as well — you will arrive at "H1," the 80 percent of the city that is Palestinian. This feels like a real city, with noise and traffic and families crowding the markets. If you speak to people there, they won't tell you about 1929 or 1948 or even 1997, they'll tell you about today: Hebron is under Israeli military occupation, they'll say, and both the military and settlers bring daily torments and humiliations.
Ask about today, and Palestinians in Hebron will tell you they can't cross over the Israeli-controlled section of their city, and can't move freely in even the section that's supposed to be their own, but is divided by Israeli checkpoints. They'll show you metal cages they installed over Hebron's long open-air market; the cages are covered in trash, and overlooking them are prim new buildings occupied by settlers, whom the locals say throw down their trash on the Palestinian market. They will look up warily at the Israeli soldiers watching from rooftops over their part of the city.
They will tell you the names Nadeem Nawara and Mohammad Salameh, two local students ages 17 and 16, who were shot in the chest and killed by Israeli soldiers as they walked home from school one month ago. The soldiers were presumably on edge from a Palestinian protest earlier in the day, but security camera footage shows the killed students harmlessly walking down the street. Whether or not it was an accident, the deaths were a direct result of the occupation.
by Max Fisher on June 17, 2014
JERUSALEM — There is a pleasant fiction in the United States and parts of Israel that the Israel-Palestine conflict exists in a sort of suspended animation, on pause and simply awaiting diplomatic resolution. But the truth is that the conflict, which over the decades has included several wars, countless terrorist attacks, and two Palestinian uprisings, never really goes away for most of the 12 million people in Israel and the Palestinian territories. And periodically it will escalate so rapidly, with such relatively slight provocation, and to such a level of severity, that the rest of us can't ignore what every Palestinian and many Israelis already know: the conflict may be quieter today than in the past, but it is still active, still destroying lives and communities, still scarring these two societies, every day.
One of these escalations is happening right now. On Friday, Israel discovered that three of its citizens, teenagers studying at a yeshiva in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank, had been kidnapped overnight. By whom is yet unknown; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists it was the Palestinian group Hamas, Israeli intelligence officials say it was likely a few local Palestinians acting on their own. Hamas has denied responsibility.
In a sense, it matters a great deal who did this; Hamas is both an anti-Israel terrorist group and a political party that participates in official governance, so if it ordered this kidnapping it could set back peace talks badly. But in another sense it hardly matters at all, because this uncertainty has not prevented Israel from escalating the conflict aggressively.
This is an issue that looks less gray all the time: the occupation is wrong, it is the problem, and Israel is responsible
In the three days since, the Israeli military has descended on the southern part of the West Bank where the yeshiva students disappeared, and especially on the major Palestinian city of Hebron. I happened to visit Hebron the day before the kidnapping and found it already suffocated by occupation. Dozens of Palestinians have been arrested; some estimates say 120, some nearer to 80, but all agree that it includes the entire population of middle-aged and older men who work for Hamas's political branch (remember that they are also a political party). The military has severely restricted Palestinian movement in Hebron, forbidden residents under age 50 from leaving the country, and completely shut down all movement in or out of Gaza and the southern West Bank save for "humanitarian and medical assistance."
Israel has presented this as necessary for its search for the kidnapped Israeli teenagers, and certainly it is true that finding kidnapped kids in a not-so-friendly city requires checkpoints and security forces. But to many Palestinians the scale of the reaction, and its severe impact on thousands of civilians, looks an awful lot like collective punishment, the practice of punishing an entire population for the crimes a few individuals, which is barred by the Geneva Conventions that regulate international conflict. Many of the 100,000 Palestinians who commute to jobs in Israel have been prevented from crossing the border to get to work, much less see family on the other side of the line, and in Gaza most gas stations have had to shut down for lack of fuel imports. The flavor of collective punishment has been reinforced by Netanyahu himself, who has repeatedly insisted that all of Hamas, and even the more moderate Palestinian government led by Mahmoud Abbas, are responsible for the three kidnapping victims.
The three days of escalation are a response to the kidnappings but, in many ways, are just the long, ongoing extension of the conflict and its inexorable eye-for-an-eye logic. When the Palestinians responsible for mass violence during the Second Intifada (uprising) of the early-2000s did not succeed in achieving their aim of independence through violence, their answer was more violence. When the Israelis did not succeed in winning security and de facto security through occupation, their answer was more occupation.
You see the Israeli-Palestinian insistence on perpetuation in this week's crisis. Hamas's leaders may have told the truth when they said the group did not commit the kidnapping. But when they nonethelesscelebrated the attack as a blow against the Israeli occupation, how could they not understand that such rhetoric does far more to enable the occupation than a kidnapping will do to end it?
And while it would be wrong to blame the Israeli victims for their own kidnappings, one would still think that Israelis might want to question the role of Israel's occupation of the West Bank. As children, the kidnap victims surely cannot and should not be held personally culpable, but they could be considered an extension of the occupation, which has been far from a peaceful endeavor. And what of the national Israeli policies that created the occupation — this most damaging aspect of the conflict — and then inserted three teenagers onto its front lines?
There has always been, and there remains, plenty of culpability to go around in this conflict, plenty of individuals and groups that squandered peace and perpetuated suffering many times over. Everyone is complicit and no one is pure. The crisis over the kidnapped students shows all this. But it is also highlights what has become perhaps the most essential truth of the Israel-Palestine conflict: for all the complexity of how it came to be and why it's continued, for all the shared responsibility for this week's crisis and everything that led up to it, the conflict predominantly matters for the human suffering it causes. And today the vast majority of that suffering comes from Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Today, the suffering has become so disproportionately administered by the occupation and so disproportionately felt by Palestinians that, in a conflict famous for its complexity and its gray areas, this is an issue that looks less gray all the time: the occupation is wrong, it is the problem, and Israel is responsible.
Israel's occupation has become so all-consuming that every incident seems to entrench the conflict and the occupation and accomplish nothing else. Also on Thursday, in the hours before the Israeli teenagers were kidnapped, another conflict-in-miniature broke out. But while this one at first seemed like it might accomplish something and do it peacefully — both rare feats here — it dissolved quickly into the same old cycle.
What happened is that Arab shopkeepers in Jerusalem, including the tourist-heavy Old City and its famous markets, shut down completely on Thursday in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners who have been hunger-striking for weeks. Both strikes are meant to call attention to Israel's practice of administrative detention, by which it holds about 200 Palestinians without charge, Guantanamo-style, sometimes for years. The commercial strike was meant to nonviolently hurt Israel, which controls all of Jerusalem, and alert Israelis to what was being done in their name. The strike was widely noticed by Jewish Israelis, but no matter how many I spoke to, none had the slightest idea why it was happening; some guessed it was a Muslim holiday, others shrugged. Nothing. On Friday, worshippers at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem's Old City, no doubt frustrated by Israeli apathy, organized a protest, which nearby Israeli security forces immediately and perhaps overzealously put down, injuring 28 and arresting eight.
Israelis have largely given up trying to convince Palestinians to understand their point of view, that they crave security from their history of persecution. This is largely because the overwhelming force of the occupation means they don't have to convince Palestinians of anything, but Palestinians have few other options. What both Friday's non-violent strike and Thursday's kidnapping have in common is a mission of breaking through Israeli apathy, of getting them to notice the occupation and care enough to want to end it.
Ha'aretz columnist Gideon Levy generated anticipatable controversy when he wrote that "if, in the West Bank, yeshiva students aren't abducted, then the West Bank disappears from Israel's consciousness." To many, this sounded as if the column were encouraging Palestinians to abduct school-age Israelis; to others, presumably including the columnist himself, it may have rung true as a description of many Israelis' apathy to the suffering of West Bank Palestinians.
I'd have made a slightly different point: that the violence of terrorism by Palestinians against Israelis is wrong and counterproductive, and that the violence of occupation by Israeli security forces against Palestinians is wrong and counterproductive, but that the conflict is engineered in such a way that violence is often the most or only viable way for either side to impress its will on the other. This neither forgives nor softens the wrongness of violence and those who do it, of course, but if you want to understand why the conflict persists in this way, it's not enough to condemn those who do wrong, but to understand the conflict that produces them.
I have been to many strange places, but few have felt as unsettlingly creepy as the Israeli-occupied stretch of Hebron. This stretch of mostly empty buildings and dead-silent streets, all motionless save the Israeli troops who shuffle between checkpoints to maintain total security in this miniature wasteland, is known as "H2" in the parlance of the US-brokered peace agreement that divided the city in 1997.
This area, meant for Israelis and forbidden to non-resident Palestinians, is home to all of Hebron's Jews. The 1997 agreement grants them 20 percent of the city's land. They are 0.3 percent of its population. This is why the streets are empty; these people exist here only to occupy the land and to perpetuate Israeli control.
The 500 or so Israelis who live here are considered settlers by everyone but themselves. If you speak to them, they will tell you this: Jews consider Hebron a holy city (so do Muslims) and began moving here during the Zionist movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1929, a mob of Hebron's native Arabs attacked the newcomers and killed about 65; most fled, and were barred from returning when Jordan conquered the West Bank in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. After Israel occupied the West Bank in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, some Jews moved to Hebron, either to reclaim property they believed was rightfully theirs by family inheritance or because they want to control the city as Jewish holy land. The Israeli military put the city under occupation, and in 1997 the Hebron Agreement divided it, which the Israelis here believe was to keep them safe from Arab terrorists.
A Palestinian boy next to his family’s water tank, which he says was destroyed by the settlers who built a home next door (Max Fisher)
If you walk through the city's many Israeli military checkpoints — you will have no problem doing this as long as you are not Palestinian, although Israeli civilians are legally meant to be barred from crossing as well — you will arrive at "H1," the 80 percent of the city that is Palestinian. This feels like a real city, with noise and traffic and families crowding the markets. If you speak to people there, they won't tell you about 1929 or 1948 or even 1997, they'll tell you about today: Hebron is under Israeli military occupation, they'll say, and both the military and settlers bring daily torments and humiliations.
Ask about today, and Palestinians in Hebron will tell you they can't cross over the Israeli-controlled section of their city, and can't move freely in even the section that's supposed to be their own, but is divided by Israeli checkpoints. They'll show you metal cages they installed over Hebron's long open-air market; the cages are covered in trash, and overlooking them are prim new buildings occupied by settlers, whom the locals say throw down their trash on the Palestinian market. They will look up warily at the Israeli soldiers watching from rooftops over their part of the city.
They will tell you the names Nadeem Nawara and Mohammad Salameh, two local students ages 17 and 16, who were shot in the chest and killed by Israeli soldiers as they walked home from school one month ago. The soldiers were presumably on edge from a Palestinian protest earlier in the day, but security camera footage shows the killed students harmlessly walking down the street. Whether or not it was an accident, the deaths were a direct result of the occupation.
