Category: Magazine Publications

Published in +972 Magazine (November 12, 2019)

In 2012, two Israeli residents of Mitzpe Yair, an unauthorized settlement in the Hebron Hills, spontaneously attacked an elderly, unarmed Palestinian man, beating him so badly that he was hospitalized. Since Israel is, according to the Oslo Accords, obligated to regulate all aspects of civilian life in the occupied territories, soldiers from a nearby army base were deployed to search for the perpetrators.

The search was desultory and unsuccessful; the soldiers were ordered back to base within a couple of hours. During a debriefing the next morning, one of the soldiers asked his commanding officer what they should do if the reverse happened — i.e., what if they saw two Palestinian residents of the same area spontaneously attacking an unarmed Jewish settler? The officer’s curt response: “Shoot to kill.”

One of the soldiers at that briefing recounted the incident, which received almost no coverage in the Israeli media, to Breaking the Silence, an organization of veteran Israeli combat soldiers that works to raise awareness about the occupation. His account is one of 41 collected from former combat soldiers who served in the area; they are compiled in a new publication called The South Hebron Hills: Soldiers’ Testimonies, 2010-2016.

The purpose of the book is set out in the introduction, which presents the organization’s mandate: by collecting the data Breaking the Silence seeks to present a clear picture of the “systemic and institutionalized” discrimination between Israeli settlers and Palestinian residents that defines Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank. They believe that by recording and presenting this information to the public, they will raise the awareness that is a first step toward ending the occupation.

The report shows the effect of discriminatory law enforcement, with settlers treated as privileged citizens while Palestinians have almost no rights at all. Not only does this policy perpetuate the occupation and oppress the Palestinians, it also allows settler riots like the one that occurred in mid-October, with settlers from Yitzhar attacking volunteers from Rabbis for Human Rights while they harvested olives with Palestinian farmers.

Reading the testimonies is a harrowing experience; in the aggregate, alongside the data, they make it impossible find any shred of morality in the occupation.

A recent poll found, again, that most Israelis identify the Israel Defense Forces as the most moral army in the world. In popular culture, the army is presented as a defensive force that carries out the critical task of protecting Israeli civilians from violent enemies. The South Hebron Hills presents a very different picture of the army. In their testimonies, the former soldiers describe a private security company that puts settler interests first, while abusing Palestinians — who, for the most part, are no threat to anyone.

According to the testimonies, the soldiers were told that their job was “deterrence,” rather than “defense.” Their orders were to make Palestinians feel that Israeli soldiers were “the boss”; this was often accomplished through gratuitous violence, which one former soldier describes as “just to drive people crazy.”

There is no democracy in the Hebron Hills. The settlers are the lords of the land, and the army does their bidding, to the point that one former soldier says he frequently could not tell the difference between orders from his own commanding officers and those from the settler “security coordinators.”

Another former soldier recounts that the army blocked the roads leading in and out of Palestinian villages in order to protect a few settlers.

The “shoot to kill” order applies only in the case of Palestinians attacking settlers. Soldiers are not permitted to use force against settlers who attack Palestinians, or even against those who attack soldiers. That is why border police were deployed, rather than regular soldiers, to deal with the October 16 incident involving Yitzhar settlers who attacked olive harvesters

The soldiers who testify to Breaking the Silence recount having witnessed settlers assaulting Palestinian children on their way to school, beating farmers in olive groves, and attacking random individuals harassed for no apparent reason. None of this is new, but in the aggregate the testimonies are powerful, as is the culture of impunity. The army does almost nothing to apprehend violent settlers, while the Israeli media covers only the most egregious incidents. The consequence of the poor media coverage is a distorted version of reality: most Israelis so rarely see reporting on settler violence that they believe it is rare, and therefore not representative.

Those soldiers volunteered for combat service after high school with high hopes and idealism, and with their morality intact. By the end of their service, they carry the heavy emotional burden of having participated in immoral acts. Those who try to resist illegal orders only feel helpless. As one soldier testifies:

These young soldiers are also victims of an oppressive system. Now they are trying to make amends by telling the public what they did, and why it was wrong.

Published in ‘+972 Magazine’ (September 20, 2019)

Illegal settlement outposts have become increasingly regularized during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s tenure, according to a recent report from Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now. In a trend largely kept hidden from the Israeli public, these unauthorized outposts enjoy unwavering support from the government, despite their clear illegality. According to the report, 15 such outposts have already been legalized, with at least 35 more on the way to authorization.

The goal is permanency; the strategy is “facts on the ground.” Starting out as ostensibly temporary settlements, courts find themselves unable to enforce demolition due to outpost leaders’ clever legal tactics.

One such method involves settlers using various code words and phrases in official correspondence: “The preservation of state lands” means the removal of Palestinian presence from the area, for example. Another strategy sees outpost leaders using trucks on wheels for housing rather than buildings, as vehicles do not require building permits. In this way, the outposts evade court demolition orders.

In recent years, settlement organizations have employed a new method of rapidly expropriating large swaths of Palestinian land with little investment, by setting up agricultural farms. As the report explains, initial takeovers of land for outposts are often carried out by a handful of people, perhaps a couple of families with children, who take over stretches of land for “land cultivation” or grazing.

To the naked eye, these farms look like an individual, local initiatives, and because outposts are illegal, it is difficult to establish “who is behind their establishment, where the money originates, and what portion have the various authorities contributed to them.” Yet Peace Now’s research shows that these outposts are an organized and well-funded project backed by non-governmental bodies such as the Amana movement, a private organization promoting Jewish settlement on occupied lands, and the Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization.

The report emphasizes that the most significant assistance comes from the government itself, which sends a clear message to the settlers: “You may establish facts on the ground illegally, and we will expunge your crimes.” Most of the time, the Israeli authorities remain passive and simply refuse to enforce the law, thereby turning a blind eye to the everyday acts of official bodies.

This attempt to create geographically contiguous settlements has direct effects on the Palestinians. Settlers frequently act as self-appointed “wardens,” expelling Palestinians from their home villages. Palestinians who remain are often subjected to intimidation in the form of “threats, harassment, theft and even violence by settlers,” according to the report.

Conflicts do not last forever. It is likely that in the future, a peace agreement will involve the evacuation of Israeli settlements — a price that will likely be paid by the settlers themselves, who will have to endure the trauma of leaving their illegally-seized homes. This was the story of Yamit in the Sinai in 1982, then Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip in 2005, whose settlers were evacuated by Israeli authorities.

Published in ‘+972 Magazine’ (August 26, 2019)

There are many ways of calculating the “cost” of the occupation. Since 2008, the Adva Center, a leading Israeli progressive think tank that monitors social and economic developments in Israel has for years published annual reports outlining the burden of the occupation on Israeli society.

The organization’s latest report, “Annexation Trumps Start-up Nation,” tells the story of two Israeli settlement projects: the “development towns” established in far-flung areas of the country before the 1967 war, and the settlements built in the occupied West Bank ever since.

While both involve significant public expenditures, and both are part of the Israeli government’s strategic aim is to encourage people to settle the land, that is where the similarities end. As the report notes, successive Israeli governments may have wanted Jews to settle in the development towns, generally far away from the corridors of political, economic, and cultural power, yet the state never really made them a priority of national importance. Inhabited disproportionately by Jewish immigrants from North Africa, development towns have seen systematic underinvestment, coupled with decades-long institutionalized racism against Mizrahim by Israeli authorities.

The same cannot be said about West Bank settlements that have sprouted up since 1967. According to Adva, West Bank settlers, particularly in ideological settlements, enjoy massive housing and infrastructure subsidies, including exemptions from tenders and convenient mortgages.

But the big money being spent on settlements, says the report, has little to do with the standard of living. Rather it is spent on providing military and police protection for the settlers — all in order to mitigate the threat of Palestinians.

While development towns connote the promise of Israel joining the developed world, says the report, the settlements carry a different, hyper-politicized message: maintaining Israeli control over the Palestinian territories conquered in 1967 by chopping up the territory into separate enclaves, eating away at whatever Palestinian land is left.

The report also demonstrates how government support has turned West Bank settlers into a hugely powerful lobby in Israeli society whose political power goes far beyond their electoral clout. Development towns, on the other hand, have never succeeded in attaining such immense political power. The report concludes: “The settler right constitutes a key factor in the determination of the entire national agenda: the constant pressure to jettison the Oslo Accords, to oppose negotiations with the Palestinians… to define who and what is patriotic and who and what is not.”

Israeli governments have continually justified the settlement enterprise, arguing that it contributes to the country’s security. The reality, according to Adva, is that settlements drain the public purse and are a burden on Israel’s defence establishment. In short, a costly fiasco.

 

There is a tendency among secular Israelis to scapegoat the ultra-Orthodox. The popular argument goes that while enjoying all the rights that come with citizenship, the ultra-Orthodox are free of civic duties and nevertheless exert crucial influence on society; they do not work and are exempt from the mandatory military service imposed on Jewish Israelis. However, they control religious institutions, impact the secular sector’s freedom, and have been a deciding element in the assembling of almost all previous Israeli governments.

However, this no longer holds true. The last decade has seen a shift in the power dynamics inside Israeli society and its government.

Four months ago, after Avigdor Lieberman’s move resulted in Binyamin Netanyahu’s failure to assemble a new coalition. Secular liberals, including Aluf Benn and Raviv Drucker, were deeply impressed. It was not the fact that Lieberman’s had challenged Binyamin Netanyahu, but rather that he had stood up to the ultra-Orthodox.

Lieberman is a politician with no actual impact on his name. He has earned his repute by the sheer volume of his tone and sustained efforts to stoke the flame of mass racism and violence. I find it hard to be impressed by this rallying of opposition to the ultra-Orthodox, which strikes me as yet another spin. The ultra-Orthodox, after all, no longer the powerful party in the Israeli government.

I believe that perpetuating this false notion of the ultra-Orthodox electoral sway allows other forces, subtle yet destructive, to interfere with the Israeli secular’s march towards advanced, egalitarian, open-minded society.

Over the last decade, we have been witnessing a shift of power in the Israeli public sphere, with subtler yet broader changes in what used to be considered the secular Israeli institutions. Core formative institutions for the collective Israeli consciousness, like the military, the judicial system, or the education system, have been consequently affected. These significant gradual changes will have a far more lasting effect on the future face of the Israeli state than the ultra-Orthodox draft law.

In the last few years, religious Zionists have been serving as ministers of education. During Naftali Bennett tenure in the office (2015-2019), a new civics textbook was introduced, which, judging by its contents, could potentially represent an informal introduction to the controversial Nation-State Bill. Among other things, the new textbook suggests that the Jews have an absolute, exclusive claim to the Land of Israel, while constantly questioning the Palestinian nationality.

The same minister was responsible for the removal from the school curriculum of Dorit Rabinyan’s novel All the Rivers, on the grounds that “intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews threaten their separate identities.” Bennett’s tenure was also marked by a string of lesser, yet significant, incidents: A school principal, for example, was reprimanded after inviting a representative of the New Israel Fund to give a talk to his students.

And it is getting worse. Upon entering office last month, the new minister of education, Rabbi Rafi Peretz, stated in an interview that Torah studies must take up more of the school curriculum (unlike mathematics or English) in order to promote the inner strength of our children through awareness of their Jewish roots. Peretz further expressed his support for conversion therapy for homosexuals (which he has since withdrawn) and his aspirations of enforcing Israeli sovereignty in the occupied territories at large, without affording their Palestinian residents the vote.

Examples abound of actions aiming to transform the core values in the domains of justice, education, media, and culture by national right-wing elements outside the ultra-Orthodox parties. Jewish ethnicity has always enjoyed prominence in the Israeli state institutions, but now the Jewish national-religious lot seem to be taking over.

The rise of overt racism, women’s exclusion from the public sphere, the legislative standstill on LGBTQ rights, the racist bills in the parliament, and other basic human rights issues in Israel can all be traced back to the general public’s obliviousness to the main problem. We have been driven into a flight of regrouping into our sub-identities (the main identity being Jewish, with the sub-identity being woman, gay, secular, etc.), when we should be coming together as an egalitarian society and fight for equal rights for all, in a democratic state.

The ultra-Orthodox are indeed a burden on the Israeli economy and used to be the obstacle facing the left and its progressive values ​​in the government. However, until recently, they had no real decisive influence on the Israeli public in its effort to catch up with the west. Nevertheless, they remain secular society’s scapegoats, shouldering the blame and anger for the shortage of government funding for social services, wage erosions etc. The opposition politicians as Yair Lapid and Avigdor Lieberman regularly stoking anti-ultra-Orthodox sentiments in order to gain more support and votes from the secular public instead of facing the real economic burden on the Israeli society.

For several years now, Adva Center has been releasing reports that emphasize the attending costs of the occupation. The last two reports demonstrate how the settlement project affects the standards of living among many groups of Israel’s Jewish population. The authors claim that the Palestinian resistance to the occupation means political-security instability, which forces Israel to adopt a cautious financial policy, at the expense of Israeli citizens within the Green Line. In order to finance the ongoing occupation, the government cuts funding for social services, which in turn forces citizens to pay for services once provided by the welfare state. Thus, the lack of government funding widens inequality in Israeli society, which already ranks among the highest in the west in this respect.

The general public’s opposition to an Israeli-Palestinian agreement that may bring an end to the occupation is part of what drives secular Jewish Israelis to support national religious Zionist parties and allows the latter to gain power in the government and man key positions in Israeli institutions. Their acts compromise the left’s influence and its progressive values.

Avigdor Lieberman has indeed shaped the conversation surrounding the election and turned religious-secular relations into its pivot. But by doing so, not only has he widened the rift and increased prejudice and hate between these two groups, but he has also undermined Netanyahu, in a brilliant maneuver that fooled many centrist and leftist Israelis who wish to end the human rights violations in the occupied territories. More importantly for his own sake, Lieberman may have undermined the ultra-Orthodox parties, but he has boosted the religious Zionists parties, with their sustained, methodical effort to make Israel a Jewish, rather than democratic, state.

Published in ‘The time of Israel’ on August 25, 2019.