Early 2011
MOST OF OUR FRIENDS WHO VISITED FROM AUSTRALIA wanted to go to the Dead Sea. They enjoyed caking themselves in mud, then floating on the water while looking over at Jordan. As a result, we found ourselves hopping into our Hyundai Getz and doing the 25-minute drive from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea frequently. Each time, we drove past a small structure that told the story of Israel’s occupation, but for two years we didn’t know it.
The structure was a little school made of truck tyres and mud, perched on a hill in the Palestinian Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar. The Israeli Army would not allow the village to build with anything permanent, such as steel or wood.
The children had not been allowed to attend the schools in neighbouring Israeli settlements, and the closest school they could attend was 14 kilometres away. Some children could not walk that far and for those who did, it meant crossing a four-lane highway. After four children were killed making the journey, the village decided to build its own school. In 2009, an Italian aid organisation offered to help, and working bees saw the school go up.
The Jahalin Bedouins of Khan al-Ahmar were expelled by the Israeli Army in 1952 from their traditional home in the Negev in southern Israel and forced to settle in this part of the West Bank. In Khan al-Ahmar there was little water and the desert mountains barely provided enough grass for the shepherds. The army regularly arrived, making it clear that they did not want the 150 villagers to feel they were permanent residents; soldiers even took away playground equipment and 20 solar panels which provided electricity.
In August 2012, Jack and I drove Sylvie to the village so she could sleep there overnight. She wanted to take dawn photographs to accompany a story I was writing on the village. The poverty of the village was obvious. Jack captured the moment in his diary:
As my mum was sleeping the night at the Bedouin camp to take some photos for my dad’s article we went to drop her off. We brought some food for the head of the camp who had invited us, we walked in and these kids were all standing around looking at the food. We walked a bit further and they started tugging at our food and didn’t give up but we still let them [have it] because we felt sorry for them. My mother told me how the next day when she was walking around the camp, with the daughter of Eid the chief, the girl always stayed in my mum’s shadow. When my mum turned, she did too, so she was never in the sun, always in the shadow.
The school was a major victory for the village. By using recycled tyres they had not breached any army prohibition. The 152 students appeared to be making good progress and many hoped to go to university. Above the village sits Kfar Adumim, one of the Israeli settlements that surround Jerusalem. Sometimes the settlers drove into the village of Khan al-Ahmar at night in trucks, spun in circles and screamed abuse.
Khan Al-Ahmar has for years, with the help of NGOs, been fighting in the courts against demolition of its village and school and the expulsion of its community. Around Israel an estimated 80,000 to 90,000 Bedouins are fighting against being forcibly displaced and dispossessed of their land.1 The matter of Khan Al-Ahmar is still with the Supreme Court so its future is in limbo. One village lost its fight in the Supreme Court. The Bedouin village of Umm al Hiran will be replaced by the Jewish town of Hiran.
One day, though, teachers noticed an Israeli official taking measurements. He said Israel had decided to build a 35-kilometre-long sewerage pipe from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea. Every few kilometres, the pipe needed ventilation outlets – known in Australia as ‘stink pipes’. Despite the teachers asking the official if the pipe could be located away from the school, it was built three metres from the main classroom – as close as was physically possible to the school. To me this suggested a level of nastiness – a nastiness that these days appears to characterise the Israeli occupation.
One incident I witnessed seemed to demonstrate this vividly. Journalists in Israel get constant alerts from human rights groups when Israel is demolishing Palestinian houses. I received an alert that Israeli police were demolishing a Palestinian home in the Old City. Because it was the school holidays – and Sylvie was coming with me to take photographs – we took Jack along. The house belonged to 80-year-old Sayara Fakhouri, whose family had lived there for nearly 100 years. The authorities claimed that an extension to the house was illegal, while the family argued that they had repeatedly been refused a permit, in contrast to the Jewish residents of the Old City who were allowed to expand their houses.
On this particular day, we arrived to find about 60 Israeli police supervising bulldozers demolishing the house. It was part of a plan by Israeli authorities to demolish 90 Palestinian homes in the area, increasing the Jewish presence and reducing the Palestinian presence, thereby re-weighting the demographic balance and ‘Judaising’ the Old City. Mrs Fakhouri sat on the footpath – most of the time looking at the ground but occasionally glancing at the bulldozers crushing her home. Once it was destroyed, the officer in charge walked across and whispered something to her. I was intrigued. I imagined the officer, at a personal level, might have expressed some sort of sympathy. After the police left I asked her what the officer said.
‘For every day that you don’t clean up the rubble you will be charged 600 shekels [AU$200],’ she said. Not only had her house been demolished but she had to clean it up. (Word went out around the Old City and children arrived with buckets to begin picking up the pieces of Sayara Fakhouri’s home.)
That night Jack wrote in his diary: ‘I think that it was very unfair.’
Another reality which to me suggested cruelty rather than security was Israel’s ‘cemeteries by numbers’. These cemeteries are located in military bases and are filled with small metal headstones with numbers but no names. Each number accords with the name of a dead Palestinian. Often if a Palestinian prisoner dies before their sentence is finished, Israel keeps the remains in these cemeteries until the full term is completed – sometimes a burial can be delayed for 20 years.
Haaretz newspaper called for an end to the ‘necrophilic farce which makes Israel look delusional’, that is, Israel’s retaining of the bodies of dead Palestinians. Noting that the Palestinian Authority was ‘our only partner for resolving the bloody conflict’, it argued that a refusal to transfer bodies back to the Palestinian Authority would only strengthen that body’s rival, Hamas. ‘We can sympathise with the bereaved [Israeli] families whose loved ones were murdered by some of the terrorists whose bodies are at issue, and who are upset that these murderers will presumably be given heroes’ funerals … A society that ascribes special importance to the dignity of the dead should not adopt the practices of terrorist organisations when it comes to enemy bodies.’2
The reality of the occupation is infinitely worse than the public realises. The more I saw of it, the more fascinated I grew. Each time I drove through the West Bank, I noticed it everywhere – Israeli Army jeeps encircling Palestinian villages, soldiers suddenly appearing in an olive grove in Bethlehem, the towering Israeli settlements on the hilltops. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis now live in the Palestinian Territories, protected by the best private security service in the world: the Israeli Army.
Controlling another people under occupation is not easy. Israel and its lobby groups who arrange trips play down the optics of occupation. Before Pope Benedict’s tour in 2009, fake green grass was laid at the checkpoint between Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
Most occupations have ended because the occupiers grew tired of the violence against them. The Americans in Iraq paid such a high price in casualties that they couldn’t wait to get out. The French realised they would never win over the Algerians, and withdrew. The Indonesians grew weary of the international criticism of their occupation of East Timor.
In the modern age, how does a country – Israel – run a military occupation for 50 years?
It was something that Sylvie witnessed at the checkpoint between Jerusalem and Bethlehem that pointed me towards part of the answer. She saw an old Palestinian man talking to a soldier. The man was coming from Bethlehem to visit his daughter in Jerusalem. He’d handed the soldier his permit. Palestinians often request such permits, and more often than not are refused. This man, however, had succeeded. He’d brought a pink bag containing hot food to have with his daughter.
But the soldier said he couldn’t pass. A valid permit didn’t make any difference: the soldier had decided no, and in a military occupation the soldier is the law. ‘Mahar!’ the soldier told him – the Hebrew word for ‘tomorrow’. By now Sylvie knew the place well enough to realise that if the old man came back tomorrow, another soldier – or even the same one – might tell him that his permit was for the previous day.
She watched the old man shuffle away with his pink bag.
This incident made me realise that the tyranny of the occupation comes through the power of 18- or 19-year-old soldiers. These checkpoints are daily incubators of hatred, generation after generation. As long as there is an occupation there will be hatred. And, in some cases, a desire for revenge.
And so, because of that old man whose name we never knew, I set about investigating Israel’s permit system. The more I saw, the more I came to realise that it was a massive case of remote-controlled social engineering. Dr Yael Berda, from the Harvard Academy for International Studies who specialises in the permit system, said: ‘The permit system is the world’s largest and most developed mechanism for filtering, identifying and restricting movement of a large civilian population.’3
The most significant fact I discovered, which even most Israelis seemed not to realise, was that Israel has 101 different permits for Palestinians. Not one applies to Israeli settlers. The information about the permits was obtained by B’Tselem under Freedom of Information.4
There are business permits, permits for religious purposes and permits for spouses of Palestinians who live in Jerusalem. There are permits for hospital visits, permits that a doctor needs to travel and permits to escort sick people in an ambulance. There are permits to travel to a wedding and permits to attend a funeral, permits for work meetings and permits for court hearings. There are permits under which a Palestinian must leave Jerusalem by 9pm. On one occasion, a meeting of Israeli and Palestinian business leaders was organised to try to develop better relationships. At the end of the day, they all sat down for a dinner. But at 8pm, all the Palestinians stood up, explaining that if they were not out of Jerusalem by 9pm they could be imprisoned.
Israel’s web of permits largely runs on auto-pilot. ‘A population of two million people is dependent on the functioning and good will of sixteen clerks, said a major report by Israeli human rights group Machson Watch.’5
Nowhere is Israel’s permit system better illustrated than in the Seam Zone. This is the Palestinian area that has been cut off from the rest of the West Bank by the wall. When building that wall, Israel cut into the West Bank, trapping these Palestinians between the Green Line – the armistice line that operated from 1948 until 1967 – and the wall.
For the Seam Zone, Israel has created 13 special permits. In 2003, the Seam Zone was declared a ‘military zone’. This means that 11,400 Palestinians who live in 12 villages have to obtain permits to live in their own homes. B’Tselem reported that for the Seam Zone, Palestinians had to prove ‘needs’ and ‘connections to the land’. A permanent resident certificate required documentary evidence to show they had a right to the house and land. If a piece of land was owned by two siblings, only one would be given a permit.
Research by other human rights groups documented the difficulties of living in the Seam Zone. ‘Only those who live in the Seam Zone can enter, meaning that the women who have usually moved into the Seam Zone to live with their husbands, are isolated from their own families, friends and community … even for funerals, where family and friends would normally come to the home of the deceased to pay respects cannot take place as family members cannot cross into the Seam Zone.’6 There is restricted access to health services and great overcrowding, as there have been virtually no building permits given and repairs are rarely allowed. The living conditions are dangerous, with zinc roofs and asbestos ceilings. Often the trucks to pick up the sewage are not allowed through the checkpoints and sewage overflows, causing skin and other diseases. The checkpoints are not regularly open and sometimes the men cannot make it home after work.
In March 2017, the regulations were further tightened to deny permits for agricultural plots of 330 square metres or less, which can eventually lead to dispossession. One illustration of life in the Seam Zone is the ‘Lone House’. The Israeli wall goes straight through this family’s land. The family now live hemmed in by the wall and barbed wire.
Human rights group HaMoked documented the case of SK and RK, a couple from Jenin in the West Bank who married in 2009. The distance between their homes was a few hundred metres, but Israel’s wall separated them. They sought to make their new home in the wife’s village. After the wedding, the husband updated his address to his wife’s address and applied for a ‘new seam zone resident certificate’. In Israel’s Orwellian permit system, the application was rejected on the basis that the applicant was ‘not a permanent resident’. To see his new wife, he requested a permit to visit the Seam Zone. The military issued ‘a personal needs permit’ that allowed him to visit his wife for three days over three months, and only during the day.7
The genius of the permit system – from Israel’s point of view – is that it is silent and mostly invisible. The lives of Palestinians are being made difficult by a brilliantly masterminded bureaucracy. A lot of thought by a lot of very clever people has gone into this system, which is why, after 50 years, the occupation is more entrenched than ever. Israel says its permit system is for ‘security reasons’, but over time I realised that the security justification is the default position – sometimes justified, but often completely without foundation.
If you are a settler, your life is free of regulations; you have the complete protection of Israel’s civil law code. If you are Palestinian, you live under Israeli military law. There are many roads on which Palestinians are not allowed, but on those where they are permitted to drive they must have a permit. If they do not, they can be taken for interrogation. This can mean remaining in prison, without charge, if an Israeli soldier says he believes they are a ‘security risk’. In 2010, Israel passed a military order that any Palestinian without an army permit in the West Bank was ‘an infiltrator’ and liable to seven years’ imprisonment. Palestinians are also liable to pay the cost of their own imprisonment and can be deported from the West Bank to Gaza.
American journalist Richard Ben Cramer has written that the cost of maintaining this permit system is ‘mind-numbing’. ‘No one in the developed world can truly understand what these numbers mean’, he wrote in How Israel Lost.8 In 2016, the International Monetary Fund estimated that Palestinian GDP would be between 40 and 130 per cent higher if the West Bank and Gaza had not yet years of political uncertainty and restrictions on the movement of people and goods. Israeli analyst Bradley Burston says the settlement movement has cost Israel some $100 billion in the past 40 years.9 The Israeli human rights group Hamoked concluded: ‘Violations caused by the permit regime have a destructive effect. They lead to creeping dispossession of West Bank residents from their land under the cover of a bureaucracy that operates pursuant to military law with the Israeli Supreme Court’s seal of approval, yet in breach of a number of norms accepted in both Israeli and International law.’10
Israel uses the permit system to recruit informants. One source close to Israeli security told me there are about 20,000 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem paid to inform. Payment often means giving informers permits so they can travel to Jerusalem for work. Palestinians who are approached to be informants but who refuse are often blacklisted, meaning they cannot get permits. Referring to them as ‘invisible prisoners’, Israeli group Machsom Watch has estimated that 180,000 Palestinians are ‘security blacklisted’. Most have never been in prison and have no idea why they are blacklisted. According to Machsom Watch, the majority are victims of a system that aims to maintain ‘a big pool’ of potential collaborators. It says blacklisting helps to keep the population ‘frightened, hungry, vulnerable and in continuous uncertainty’, and hampers social cohesion by fostering suspicion about who might be informing.11
Israel has also established a network of secret units to infiltrate the Palestinian population. As early as 1950, Mossad set up ‘Ulysses’, whose purpose was to plant ‘deep agents’ among Palestinians. Yasser Arafat held his first meeting to plan the downfall of Israel in the apartment of an undercover Mossad agent.
Known in Hebrew as ‘Mista’arvim’, these units include the Dovdevan, who dress as Palestinians. Often they are Sephardic Jews or Druze, both of whom speak Arabic. They blend in with protesters, sometimes even going to Friday prayers. Once a protest starts, they pounce on the Palestinians. Part of their training is to go from complete calm to complete violence within seconds. Because the Dovdevan go into crowds of protesting Palestinians, Israel gives them Rishaon laheshel – licence to kill. To minimise the risk of infiltration, Palestinians now insist that those who join protests tie their shirts above their waists to reveal they are carrying no weapons.
Well-placed sources say that Israeli security services recruit from Palestinian crime groups. They sometimes approach crime gangs and tell them they are aware of their activities but will not prosecute them on two conditions: that they never sell drugs to Jewish Israelis and that they become informers for Shin Bet.
It was 8 September 2014, and as I walked up several flights of stairs in an old Bauhaus-style building in Tel Aviv, I felt enormous excitement. It’s a sensation that – every so often – journalism presented. I didn’t know who I was about to meet but what I did know was that the people waiting in the apartment had been working at the heart of Israel’s military intelligence. They knew many of the country’s deepest secrets. And they were prepared to talk to me.
The meeting had been months in the making. The process began when an Israeli military contact came to our apartment – he wanted to meet privately. He explained that there could soon be major defections from Israel’s most elite military intelligence unit, Unit 8200, Israel’s equivalent of the US National Security Agency. Unit 8200’s main role, he said, was electronic surveillance of the 2.9 million Palestinians in the West Bank to monitor any security threats and to gather material that could be used to blackmail them into becoming informants.
Israel’s electronic capability is brilliant. Israeli journalist Shimon Shiffer gave an insight into it when he recalled a visit to the Defence Ministry in Tel Aviv. ‘Trying to impress me with the depth of the intelligence blanket that covers Gaza, an aide to the minister opened a map on a screen and offered me a tour of a specific street in Khan Yunis,’ Shiffer wrote. ‘In seconds, we had a close-up view of the goings-on in the street.’
The contact who visited our apartment stressed that the defectors would be branded as enemies of Israel and might even be sent to jail. He said that in a couple of months a selected group of journalists would be given access to some of the defectors and I would be one of them.
Months went by. Finally, I found myself walking up four levels in this old apartment building. My contact introduced me to four men – reservists from Unit 8200. They had put their names to a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu signed by 43 members of the unit. But with us they asked to be known as Nadav, ‘A’, Daniel, and the fourth said he would prefer not to speak.
Before telling us what their letter concerned, they gave us some background to their action. ‘We know what’s happening inside,’ said Nadav. ‘We’ve been there and we are the ones who did those things. We are in favour of Israel defending itself. However, the occupation is a choice; when it lasts for almost 50 years it’s not self-defence.’
Daniel said: ‘We realise the occupation is detrimental to the safety of Israel because it’s perpetuating a cycle of violence. We were a part of this cycle of violence and we think it would be better for both Palestinians and Israelis if this situation, this occupation, would end.’
Aspects of 8200’s operations that disturbed several of the letter’s signatories were the use of blackmail against gays or those who needed medical treatment for their children. Palestinian society, whether Muslim or Christian, is conservative, and homosexuality is something people often try to hide. One officer said: ‘If you’re homosexual and know someone who knows a wanted person – and we need to know about it – Israel will make your life miserable. If you need emergency medical treatment in Israel, the West Bank or abroad – we searched for you. The State of Israel will allow you to die before we let you leave for treatment without giving information on your wanted cousin.’
One-third of Unit 8200 were women and it had a large number of gay officers who each year held a concert where one of the men is crowned ‘Miss 8200’. The targeting of gay Palestinians by the unit added to the anger that many of the officers felt. Nadav said: ‘An 18-year-old soldier sitting in the intelligence forces can say who is a target and who is not a target. In this way every Palestinian basically can be a target … Every country has its military intelligence and it’s legitimate because it’s against other countries. But the Palestinians do not have a country. They are under our military regime. It’s not another country that can protect itself. They’re like citizens of Israel except with no rights like the citizens of Israel.’
According to one of the defectors, there is no limit on the information-gathering; Israel’s aim is to strengthen its grasp on ‘every aspect of Palestinian life’.
The use of Palestinian informants is a daily fact of the occupation, said AFP journalist Philippe Agret. ‘I don’t like to make a moral judgment on collaborators – I would not, as a French person who knows French history. Palestinians have been under occupation since 1967. It’s a tragic story and a human story: you live in Gaza, you send your wife to the hospital and she’s going to die because she has cancer, and you’re asked to collaborate with Israel if you want her to be treated in Israel. It’s part of a daily, grim reality. It’s a major story.’
The most secret – and feared – of Israel’s intelligence machines is Mossad. Its motto says: ‘By way of deception, thou shalt do war.’
The most extensive information about Mossad has come from Victor Ostrovsky, who worked as a secret agent for four years but became disillusioned. In By Way of Deception he wrote:
The [first] intifada and resultant breakdown of moral order and humanity are a direct result of the kind of megalomania that characterizes the operation of the Mossad … This thing is uncontrollable. In Israel, they’re still beating Palestinians, and [Prime Minister Yitzhak] Shamir says, ‘They’re making us become cruel. They’re forcing us to hit children. Aren’t they terrible?’ This is what happens after years and years of secrecy; of ‘we’re right, let’s be right, no matter what’; of keeping the officials deliberately misinformed; of justifying violence and inhumanity through deceit, or, as the Mossad logo says: ‘by way of deception.’ It’s a disease that began with the Mossad and has spread through government and down through much of Israeli society … The strongest curse inside the Mossad that one katsa [agent] can throw at another is the simple wish: ‘May I read about you in the paper.’ It might be the only way to turn things around.12
The longevity of Israel’s occupation could not have been achieved without settlers.
In a settlement deep inside the West Bank, Daniella Weiss is Queen of Greater Israel. In December 2012 this matriarch of the settlements made Sylvie and me a cup of tea and gave us a tour of her home and its collection of Judaica – this home could have been on the leafy north shore of Sydney.
But when the conversation turned to Palestinians, her warmth evaporated. She had a clear message for Palestinians: you will never have your own State.
Daniella Weiss had been one of Israel’s first settlers. In the early 1970s, she and her husband had moved to Kedumim in the West Bank, where they put up tents on Palestinian land. By the time their children were born they’d put up caravans and eventually they built a permanent brick home. The local Palestinians were not game to try to force them off, as the Israeli Army was always close by to intervene should the Weisses call for it.
As well as having an army on call, Daniella Weiss developed a close relationship with Ariel Sharon, then Minister of Housing. She told us: ‘With my work with Ariel Sharon, there was a clear understanding, a very clear planning of spreading the communities, the Jewish communities, in the way that there will be no option for a Palestinian State in Judea and Samaria.’
For Daniella Weiss, the vote by the United Nations in 1947 to divide Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab State was irrelevant. ‘We came to a land where there were other people living, but this land was promised to the Jewish nation by God,’ she said. ‘And if the Palestinians behave themselves then they can stay. As long as they are good guests. This is the only way I see it, so those who accept it live nicely. Those who do not accept it encounter confrontations.’
We asked Weiss, as a grandmother, what message she had for young Palestinians. ‘It’s true that in the course of history Arabs came to this area from all over, but the promise of God is more important than the changes in history and the political changes. That is why you have to put it deep, deep into your mind, that you do not have any chance whatsoever in any point of history, neither you nor any of your offspring, to ever have an independent State of your own here.’
She continued: ‘The settler leadership should not by any means criticise any element of settler behaviour, no matter how extreme it is. The Arabs keep threatening our lives every day and every night. I very much believe in creating a situation where the Arabs are afraid of what we do.’
In February 2014, after Sylvie and I had done two years of research, I would present a report for the ABC’s Four Corners, on the trials of Palestinian children in the Israeli military court in the West Bank. It would be my use of Daniella Weiss in that report that most angered the Israeli lobby in Australia. To have an Israeli saying that the settlements had been deliberately planned to ensure there could be no Palestinian State was far more confronting for the lobby than to have an Australian lawyer, Gerard Horton, talking about abuses by the Israeli Army of Palestinian children.
Weiss took Sylvie and me to visit the Hilltop Youth, a group of Jewish youth who target a hilltop or piece of land – often privately owned by Palestinians – and, heavily armed, take it over. Like Daniella Weiss, they believe they are entitled to take such land because of a biblical mandate from God. The owners of the land know that if they try to take it back they are likely to be met with gunfire. The Hilltop Youth are usually armed, but if not they know that they can call on the army should they get into a confrontation. Videos abound in which the Hilltop Youth attack Palestinians while soldiers stand by.
In the West Bank, the settlers have become the law enforcers. When you spend time with people out here – both Israeli settlers and Palestinians – it becomes clear that the settlers are in total control. Each settlement has a security committee that is able to summon the army at any time. Former Israeli soldiers say these committees are able to give orders to the army. Over several months in late 2013, I researched a case in which one complaint from a settler in Hebron led to the arrest of a five-year-old Palestinian boy by six soldiers. When the boy’s father intervened – peacefully – the soldiers blindfolded him. The settler had been able to activate the army within minutes of one unsubstantiated allegation that the boy had thrown a stone.
Once a small settlement is established the army will often come and set up a ‘monitoring point’ and have two or three soldiers staying there, and if it becomes big enough, they will form a small army base. This suits the settlers because they are being returned the land they claim God gave them; it suits the army because it gives them more bases throughout the Palestinian Territories and it means that they can enforce the occupation and have army bases ‘looking out’ across Jordan and towards the Arab world should they come under attack.
Given the power of the settlers, it would be a brave, or naïve, soldier who countermanded a settler security chief. ‘I saw one settler threatening a colonel in the Israeli army,’ Israeli journalist Gideon Levy told me. ‘The settler stood with a gun and told the colonel, “If you do one more step I’m shooting you,” and the colonel went away.’
In addition, settlers are often armed with weapons the army gives them; this is official Israeli policy if settlers say they feel threatened. Sylvie and I visited a firing range attached to the settlement of Gush Etzion where Israelis are trained in how to use hand and machine guns. A significant number of settlers has become heavily armed gangsters who roam the West Bank taking over Palestinian houses and destroying property and – sometimes – lives.
Many of the settlers I spoke to had come from the US originally. They loved the pioneer spirit, they were fanatical about how God had ‘given’ them this land, and they felt they had an obligation to take it and protect it.
But why are the settlers so powerful? Israeli journalist Gideon Levy said: ‘They are the only group in society which is ready to do something for collective reasons. There’s no other group in Israeli society today which is ready to sacrifice, to fight for something collective. Israel is totally individualistic now – people here would not go on the street for anything. Settlers would. They care about something. This must be appreciated – they are fighting for an idea. From day one they were very powerful. They can blackmail any government here.’
On 25 February 1994, US-born doctor Baruch Goldstein left his settlement of Kiryat Arba and drove to nearby Hebron, where he entered the Ibrahimi mosque and shot dead 29 people as they prayed. Goldstein’s tomb carries the epitaph ‘He gave his life for the people of Israel, its Torah and land. His hands are clean and his heart good.’ In 1999, the Israeli Government passed a law outlawing monuments to terrorists. After pressure to dismantle Goldstein’s tomb, the army took down the shrine but left the tombstone. Israel’s District Court ruled that ‘lauding’ Goldstein does not constitute incitement. The BBC covered the sixth anniversary of Goldstein’s massacre, when settlers dressed up as Goldstein, wearing doctors’ coats and fake beards.13
In this war for land, the settlers are the advance unit. The most common way that Israel takes Palestinian land is for armed settlers to take it in the first instance. Because Palestinians are not allowed to carry weapons, the land is taken relatively easily. If a settler kills a Palestinian, they will not be prosecuted if they say that they believed they were in danger. The only complication is if someone captures it on video and it is clear the settler killed the Palestinian in cold blood – though, based on statistics, the settler still has a high chance of being found not guilty. Data from the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din indicates that there is only a 1.9 per cent chance that a complaint filed by a Palestinian will result in a conviction of the perpetrators.14
Yehuda Shaul is a former Israeli Army commander who founded human rights group Breaking the Silence, which has collected the testimonies of more than 1000 current and former Israeli combat soldiers. ‘The Israeli occupation of the West Bank has certain checks and balances,’ Shaul told me:
but there is one thing about which Israel is ruthless and for which there are no checks and balances: land. With everything else there are boundaries. Today, rather than the assumption being that it is Palestinian land and Israel needs to prove a claim, it is the exact opposite: the assumption is that it is Israel’s land and Palestinians are the ones who have to prove it is their land. This is the way it works: a Palestinian comes to cultivate his land and the settlers who have moved in come and beat him up. There is no point calling the army or police because you know which side they will support. Then the Palestinian comes back to try again to work his land, and he gets beaten up again. Without farming he has no money so finally, after a number of beatings, he decides to leave and move to the closest town, Yatta, to look for a job. He moves on with his life, which means moving off the land. The settlers then control the land with no opposition from the owners.
The settlers then farm the land for 10 years – which means that legally it becomes theirs. As Yehuda Shaul told me: ‘The less land the Palestinians have to farm means the less chance they have of surviving.’
When their land is taken, Palestinians often appeal to the Israeli Army. The army often tells the Palestinians that it is not up to them, but the Supreme Court, to decide the ownership. Appeals to the Supreme Court can take up to 15 years, during which time settlers build houses, schools and synagogues on the land. Once enough time has elapsed, Israeli authorities sometimes say it is too late to reverse the decision. Even if the Supreme Court makes a ruling that it is private Palestinian land, the army will not enforce that or, if it does, the settlers ignore the ruling. It surprised me how often that happened. The Palestinians rarely get their land back. This is a pattern that has been occurring since Israel began its occupation in 1967.
Israel uses a range of laws and devices to take private Palestinian land. One of these is to apply a ‘state of emergency’ law. Until I lived in Israel, I had no idea that it was still operating under a state of emergency The law is renewed by the Knesset every three or six months, and gives it almost total power regarding Palestinians.
The legislation is called the Defence (Emergency) Regulations and began under the British Mandate in 1945. According to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, it means the Israeli Army can imprison someone indefinitely, demolish and seal homes, impose indefinite curfews and deport residents. In 2011, the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee extended the powers to cover enterprises by Palestinians including ice-cream production, selling tickets for artistic performances and conducting amniocentesis tests for pregnant women – such enterprises can be shut down.
One emergency power that has had an enormous impact on Palestinians is the Absentee Property law. Award-winning British journalist Jonathan Cook, who lives in Nazareth, has reported that since this law was established in 1950 Israel has used it to transfer millions of acres of privately owned Palestinian land, as well as thousands of homes, bank accounts and other properties, from the 800,000 or so Palestinian refugees. Essentially, the law says Israel is entitled to seize any Palestinian house or property that was vacant in 1948. Cook said:
By the early 1950s, Israel’s rural economy depended on the plundering of Palestinian refugees’ farmlands, whether olives trees, vineyards or Jaffa orange groves … no compensation was, or ever has been, offered to the refugees or the millions of their descendants, many of whom today languish in poverty in refugee camps across the Middle East. Nor has Israel settled accounts with the absentees who live inside the Jewish State. A quarter of a million Arab citizens of Israel are today deprived of all rights to their original property, having been declared, in truly Orwellian language, ‘present absentees’ [present in Israel but absent from their property for a day or more in 1948].15
Another way Israel takes over private Palestinian land is to invoke an old Ottoman law. Under the Ottoman Empire, in order to farm land the owner had to pay a high registration cost. If someone stopped farming their land for three years, the sultan could declare it dead land and give it to someone else to farm. Importantly for today’s occupation, the sultan decided that if someone farmed unregistered land for 10 years it became theirs. The Israeli Army often prevents Palestinians from gaining access to their land while settlers are permitted to use it. The settlers then need only go to the Supreme Court to show that for 10 years they have been caring for this ‘abandoned’ land. The Palestinian ownership is then cancelled. Although the Israeli Supreme Court overturned this law in 2012, it still influences decisions of the court.
I regularly witnessed the court’s endorsement of discrimination. ‘Most of the cases we deal with involve a twisted interpretation of the law,’ Yariv Mohar from Rabbis for Human Rights told me. ‘Mostly the government tries not to bluntly disobey the law but they try to make it confusing so that it always serves the interests of the settlers. They will say that they are considering a claim by settlers under Ottoman law but then the Israeli courts will give it an interpretation that has never been made in the past. What they do is invent new interpretations of the law without inventing new laws themselves.’16
Israel has also claimed land through ‘security buffer zones’. There are 12 settlements in the West Bank that have formal buffer zones, and any Palestinian who enters one of these areas is liable to be shot.
Sylvie and I had an opportunity to meet Dror Etkes, Israel’s foremost expert on land in the West Bank, soon after he finished a report on the amount of agricultural land taken over by settlements. He had also investigated ‘closed areas’ in the West Bank. More than 50 per cent of the West Bank land controlled by Israel has been closed for military activities, even though 78 per cent of it is not used for manoeuvres. These closed military zones are not accessible to Palestinians, but some of them have been built on by settlers.
This is how Etkes described the creation of Greater Israel: ‘From audacious fraud and forgery to military seizures for “security needs” and “the public good” to dusting off antiquated Ottoman laws, the Israeli settlement enterprise has no shortage of tools for taking over Palestinian land in the West Bank … What we are actually witnessing is the rule of law disappearing before our eyes.’17
Simply counting the number of settlers in the West Bank does not give an accurate picture of settlement growth, said Etkes. The fastest growth now is through agricultural rather than residential settlements, through gaining more land rather than simply more settlers. The growth of commercial areas is also substantial. In addition to commercial centres inside settlements, there are approximately 20 Israeli-administered industrial zones in the West Bank, according to Human Rights Watch.18
Dror Etkes also found that in the last decade there had been a decline of about one-third in cultivated Palestinian agricultural lands in the West Bank. One factor behind this was the ongoing expansion of Israeli agricultural areas. This expansion included de facto appropriation of actively cultivated private lands whose Palestinian owners – individuals or entire communities – had been expelled, whether by the settlers or by the Israeli military.
Etkes found that Israeli agricultural lands in the West Bank covered about 93,000 dunams (Ottoman acres) – about one and a half times the total built-up area of the settlements, not including East Jerusalem. This showed that ‘settlement growth’ covered more than residential areas. This is important because Israel’s lobby groups, including AIJAC in Australia, often point to residential settlements to argue that they only account for a small area of the West Bank. According to Ektes, Israel’s system was set up for ‘a land grab’ such as this. ‘There’s no rule of law,’ he told me. ‘The rule of law is a dead letter in the West Bank.’
I’d arrived in Israel with the belief that, whatever the country’s problems, it adhered to the rule of law. But the more I researched the reality in the West Bank the more I came to the gradual realisation that the manipulation of the rule of law was used in the quest for Greater Israel. There was one occasion, for example, when a regulation was changed for 24 hours by the Defence Ministry’s Civil Administration to allow 250 settlement houses to be approved. Israelis from the settlement of Ofra retroactively requested a permit for 200 houses that had been built and 50 planned houses. Most of the 200 houses had been built illegally on private Palestinian land. But there was a problem: the houses were 80 metres from the main road and the army regulation was that no house could be built within 120 metres of the road. So for 24 hours the Civil Administration reduced the limit from 120 metres to 80 metres, which meant all settlements houses could be approved. The next day, a Palestinian family in the village of Beit Ummar, hearing of the changed law for the neighbouring settlement, also retroactively requested a permit for a house that had received a demolition order. The Defence Ministry rejected the application, saying that the rule was that a house could not be within 120 metres of a road.19
Israel’s settlements began with guns and a lie. Soon after Israel took the West Bank in 1967, hardline religious elements decided to ‘reclaim Judea and Samaria’. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol made no official ruling on whether settlements could proceed, but Rabbi Moshe Levinger, a leader of the pro-settlement national religious supporters, took the initiative. A firebrand who today would fit the US State Department’s definition of a terrorist, Levinger and his supporters travelled to Hebron in the West Bank for Passover in 1968. They checked into the Park Hotel saying they were Swiss tourists. And they hid their weapons. The Park Hotel would become a base from which they formed a militia to seize central Hebron and force out Palestinians. A secret document from 1970 confirms the deception the government engaged in to help those first settlers: 250 new housing units were to be built, but ‘all the building will be done by the Defence Ministry and will be presented as construction for the IDF’s needs’.20
What began as Israel’s ‘settlement enterprise’ has, 50 years later, become Frankenstein’s Monster.
One myth perpetuated by many of Israel’s supporters is that the occupation came as a surprise – but the ambition of taking over the West Bank as part of Greater Israel was clear before the country won the Six Day War of 1967. In the documentary The Law in These Parts, former Supreme Court president Meir Shamgar states that laws for the West Bank were written in the early 1950s.
The master plan for Israel to take over the West Bank was formed by Yigal Alon when he was Minister of Labour in the early 1960s. The strategy was that controlling most of the West Bank would effectively push Israel’s border to Jordan. It gave Israel a security buffer against Jordan, Syria and Iraq. The Alon plan also meant Jordan and the West Bank could never form any political or military entity against Israel.
Another result was the fragmentation of Palestinian towns, according to British journalist Jonathan Cook who has studied Israel’s methodology in Nazareth, where he lives. Cook’s view is that a neighbouring Jewish city of Upper Nazareth, built in the 1950s, was the prototype for Israel’s settlement movement. He told me that is where Israel first tested the model of encirclement, isolation and containment of Palestinian communities. Today, Upper Nazareth encircles the Palestinian community in Nazareth, leaving it unable to expand, while also isolating it from Palestinian villages nearby. This is similar to the way many Israeli settlements in the West Bank have encircled Palestinian villages.
Under the Oslo Accords, the West Bank is divided into three areas: Area A, which is 18 per cent of the West Bank and is under the control of the Palestinian Authority; Area B, 21 per cent, is under civil control of the Palestinian Authority, and Israel retains control of security; Area C, 61 per cent, is totally under Israeli control. This is where all the settlements are. But even in Areas A and B, the Israeli Army can enter anytime and has complete authority if it claims there is a security issue. It enters parts of Areas A and B most nights.
Oslo was intended to be an interim agreement of five years to allow both parties to move to a final agreement under which a Palestinian State could be formed. But Israel has entrenched its control over Area C.21 There were 110,000 settlers in the West Bank when Oslo was signed in 1993. Today there are 394,000. In a time of peace, the number of settlers has surged.
‘One of the things that killed Oslo was as a result of Oslo,’ Yehuda Shaul said. ‘The system of bypass roads that it led to.’ At Oslo the Israelis won the right to build bypass roads in the West Bank – they argued this was necessary for security. Before Oslo, many settlers would need to drive through Palestinian towns to get to and from their settlements. The US mediators should have realised that if Israel wanted to build a network of roads they were not thinking of leaving after five years. ‘It [Oslo] was fatal for the Palestinians,’ Israeli journalist Gideon Levy told me. ‘All the big settlements came after Oslo. If the Israelis did not evacuate one house in the settlements from Oslo it shows they had no intention.’
The by-pass roads entrenched the settlements. After building these roads, Israel banned Palestinians from using many of them. Israel had used Oslo to make a Palestinian State more difficult.
‘It gives them absolute control over Palestinians’ movements,’ said Yehuda Shaul. ‘The way the dual infrastructure of roads and permits has been set up by Israel means less restrictions but absolute control. In 15 minutes, 300 army jeeps can shut down the West Bank’s entire road system. We have absolute control over what roads you can use and at any moment we can block them.’
It also made access to the settlements from Israel easier, effectively turning them into commuter suburbs. Yehuda Shaul explained: ‘Because of that system, settlers could say, “When I drove out here I saw Palestinians and had to drive through Palestinian towns. Now I see modern highways, I see no Palestinians and I’m safe.”’ Crucially, settlements went from being a pioneering and messianic experience to a suburban, middle-class one.
Israel’s largest-selling newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, reported in 2003: ‘When most of the Israeli public, and maybe most of the world too, think about the Jewish settlements in what used to be called “the territories”, they envision mainly a handful of wind-swept sheds and beat-up old trailers. But the current state of affairs is completely different. The Jewish population in the 1967 territories is already equal to half of the Palestinian population there, and it is in the midst of one of the largest demographic surges in the world.’22
New York Times journalist Jodi Rudoren agreed. ‘One thing people are totally shocked by is how big and established the settlements are and who lives there,’ she told me. ‘You come and have this notion it’s bearded, gun-toting [people] and caravans and you go to Ariel or Maale Adumim or Efrat and it’s full of people who are mostly middle-class people. First of all, sometimes you meet non-ideological people and their view is “My government gave me tax breaks to move here and I moved here because I wanted a backyard and I didn’t mean to oppress anybody and by the way I do think it’s mine.”’
Since Israel began its occupation it has provided financial incentives for Israelis to move to settlements. You get tax concessions, you get private security, you get good schools and hospitals, and most of all you get cheap housing. House and land packages are much cheaper when you don’t have to pay for the land part. This has been a major attraction – my Hebrew teacher could afford a much bigger apartment in Har Homa than he could in Jerusalem. Some people distinguish between economic and religious settlements, but in the end they amount to the same thing: ever more land for Israel.
Some secular Israelis may be moving to the settlements, but other Israelis think the settler movement is not worth it: Israel takes so much punishment in the Western world because the settlements are always the running sore for the international community. Some in the centre or on the centre left of politics are contemptuous of the settlers. However, the majority of Israeli opinion now would be: ‘We’re there and it’s ours. The Palestinians should find somewhere else to live.’
For Israel today, there are three main reasons why the settlements are important. The first is religious: the references to Judea and Samaria in the Bible. The second is security: having a large number of the hilltops looking east towards the Muslim and Arab world allows the best defence. And the third is economic: the Jordan Valley’s agriculture is lucrative and the settlements alleviate housing pressures in Israel. The dominant view is that if Israel can keep increasing the number of settlers in the West Bank, then eventually it can argue that there are more Israelis there than Palestinians so it’s logical to annex it – or at least Area C. This would leave Areas A and B for an independent, although tiny, Palestinian State.
According to the Washington Post, 39 per cent of the land used for settlements is privately owned Palestinian land.23 There are 131 settlements, including three very large ones – Maale Adumim, Gush Etzion and Ariel. There are also 99 outposts – small communities that attach themselves to settlements but which even under Israeli law are illegal. Even the outposts have military protection, cameras, mailboxes, public transport and electricity. This is despite the fact that connecting electricity to an unauthorised location is illegal. Once they have electricity and water from the settlements, they begin lobbying to be made official. Israel’s human rights group Yesh Din researched how Israel retrospectively makes these outposts ‘authorised settlements’. They found: ‘Approximately a quarter of the 100 outposts that currently exist have been approved or are at various stages of the approval process … Simultaneously, the [Government of Israel] consistently denies the status of these outposts, established without official permission and in violation of Israeli (as well as international) law, as settlements.’24
‘The strategy with the outposts is to fill in the gaps between the settlements,’ former Israeli commander Yehuda Shaul told me. ‘The intention was that the settlements and outposts would duplicate themselves – that every settlement would break out of its borders and duplicate itself. Every Palestinian village in the West Bank is encircled. With Bethlehem, for example, on one side are the settlements of Nokdim and Tekoa, one side a military base and nature reserve. We’ve worked it all out. We’ve taken Bethlehem as a test case. This is a strategy of fragmentation.’
In 2005, the Israeli Army commissioned a comprehensive database of Israel’s settlements to give legal ammunition to the State to defend any claims of loss of ownership by Palestinians. In 2009, when Defence Minister Ehud Barak received the report and saw the result, he decided that it should not be published because ‘publication could endanger state security or harm Israel’s foreign relations’.
But someone leaked the report to Israeli newspaper Haaretz. It revealed that in about 75 per cent of settlements, construction – sometimes on a large scale – had been carried out without the appropriate permits or contrary to the permits that were issued. The database also showed that in more than 30 settlements extensive construction of buildings and infrastructure – roads, schools, synagogues, yeshivas and even police stations – had been carried out on private land belonging to Palestinians. Put simply, the settlement construction had been conducted illegally.25
Sarit Michaeli from human rights group B’Tselem told me:
Everything has been incremental but 50 years later you have half a million Israelis living in an occupied area that’s not part of Israel’s sovereign territory – except East Jerusalem which was annexed, therefore Israel views it as its own – you have 120 so-called legal settlements and another 100 so-called illegal settlements that are all illegal under international law, you have two legal systems that apply to Israelis and Palestinians in parallel, you have Israeli democracy in tatters because of all the problems that stem from such a long-term occupation. Everything is legal because they found various legal excuses to justify it but of course it’s not legal. Clearly it’s a complete farce.
The settlers have established deep roots in Israel’s political and military establishments: an estimated 12 per cent of the commanders of the IDF themselves live in settlements. Even Avigdor Lieberman lives in the illegal settlement of Nokdim: the only defence minister in the world who does not live inside his country’s borders. The task of the IDF in vacating settlers – including many of their own commanders – would be extraordinarily difficult.
The New York Times’s Jodi Rudoren thinks that ‘among left-wing people or critics of settlements or the occupation there’s a view that undoing it would be simple. When people come here they realise it would not be simple.’
According to Dror Etkes:
If you applied the law tomorrow you would have to evict thousands of Israeli settlers. You have entire settlements which are constructed on private Palestinian property. What would you do with Ofra, with half of Beit El? You have thousands of families and tens of thousands of dunams of agricultural land which you would have to uproot. You would have to break roads in settlements which are passing through Palestinian property. The entire system in the West Bank is built on breach of law. Two neighbourhoods in the same settlement – in between them is a valley which used to be cultivated in the ’80s by Palestinians, then the settlement took over and there is a road which joins the two. How do you deal with that? There is no way a settlement could function if the law was applied.
When Israel evicted 8000 settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the settlers put up considerable resistance. The removal of more than 600,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem would be much more difficult – though not, in my view, impossible. The way to do it would be for Israel to offer financial incentives for settlers to move back into Israel – but there is no political will to do this and insufficient pressure from the international community.
As successive Israeli governments encourage settlements, the chances of a Palestinian State recede. In addition to this the settlements have been strategically located to make a contiguous Palestinian State impossible.
At this stage, the best the Palestinians can hope for are the equivalent of Bantustans – the disconnected black communities built by apartheid South Africa, allowing the government to claim it was giving blacks some autonomy. The Israeli Government likewise claims that under the Palestinian Authority, Palestinians have autonomy.
The Israelis have two major problems in terms of their occupation. The first is international opinion, which, as will be seen, is increasingly hostile. The second is a growing Palestinian population. When Israel took over the West Bank in 1967, there were 1 million Palestinians. Now there are 2.9 million, and by 2020 there are likely to be 3.5 million. Palestinians do not want to live under occupation, and their number is growing.
Australian lawyer Gerard Horton of Military Court Watch told me: ‘Imagine if the US put 600,000 Americans into Afghanistan and the army was told they had to guarantee their protection. Any military given that mission has three options: it can kill all the locals, deport them or intimidate and terrorise them. It’s essentially the third option employed by the Israeli military at the friction points in the West Bank.’
French journalist Philippe Agret said if this was Israel’s strategy it would not work. ‘I don’t think the Palestinians will leave. The Israelis want to show who’s in charge – they are the boss, they are in charge and you shut up. One can be shocked by this never-ending occupation, the sheer brutality of it. Comparison is not reason but France was occupied for four years, they [the Palestinians] have been occupied for 50 years. Fifty years of occupation, so yes it’s shocking, the repression is shocking.’
Much international law has been written from practical experience. The legal order established at the end of the Second World War drew on the horrors of war to try to prevent another. Its foundation was that most wars begin over territory disputes. The key legal principle is the non-acquisition of territory through aggression, even if acting in self-defence (Article 2 of the UN Charter and numerous Security Council resolutions).
Israel argues that it was acting in self-defence when it occupied the West Bank, but even so this does not give it any rights of permanent possession. On top of that, Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory. This is precisely what Israel is doing.
For the international community, an important principle is at play. If it allows Israel to continue to breach the Geneva Convention, does that mean every country can do so? When Russia annexes Crimea, can the world object? When China begins colonising the South China Sea, can the world object?
Either international law applies across the board, or international politics is a free-for-all survival of the fittest.
One of the images of the occupation I will never forget is a crushed car in a water cistern.
The Supreme Court had ruled that everyone in the West Bank was entitled to be supplied with water – but not necessarily where they lived. In the remote Bedouin village of Susiya, water was available, but the villagers had to travel many kilometres to collect it.
For the Palestinians of Susiya, who had farmed their land since the days of the Ottoman Empire, life had become a daily battle with the Israeli settlers across the hill. In 1982, the whole village of Susiya was expelled and two Palestinians were murdered by settlers. However, some Palestinians returned. But in 1991, said Yehuda Shaul, the army came and put the villagers into trucks and took them away again. On this occasion a settler was murdered by Palestinians, and the army’s response was ruthless. ‘The IDF erased the village,’ said Yehuda Shaul. ‘My [army] company took part in it.’ Some Palestinians again resumed living in their village. In 2001, they won an important victory: the Supreme Court ruled that the village had been demolished illegally. Two months after the villagers returned, the IDF showed up with a demolition order for the whole village. The army said the tents the Palestinians were living in did not have building permits. ‘The strategy works,’ Yehuda Shaul told me. ‘There used to be 100 families in Susiya, now it’s down to 30. Every time there is a demolition of the village fewer and fewer families come back. Some decide it’s just too hard.’
The army and settlers had tried various ways to cut off the water supply of the Palestinians. Thirty of their 36 cisterns had become part of a ‘security buffer zone’, and any Palestinian who entered the zone was liable to be shot. The army had then brought in bulldozers to push rocks into the six cisterns that remained. Yet still the Palestinians were able to place hoses through the rocks to draw water.
Finally, the IDF came up with another idea. As a former army officer, Yehuda Shaul is ashamed of what his army did next. ‘The army crushed a car and pushed it into one of the water cisterns so it would poison the water and make it undrinkable.’
On 1 May 2013, I drove to Susiya, about an hour from Jerusalem. I wanted to see for myself the car that had been crushed into a cistern. In a place already so tough, where water was gold, I found it an almost unspeakably cruel thing to do. It was an unforgiving place: no greenery and unrelenting heat. The village leader, Nasser Nawaja, told me: ‘We are on the edge of the desert so we don’t have much rain. [Not having access to our water] makes our lives very hard and makes it very difficult to do our farming. It drains you.’
I stood there looking at the rusted old vehicle in the well and tried to reconcile this with the constant refrain of the Israeli lobby: that this is the most moral army in the world.
The battle to achieve Greater Israel is timeless.
If the messianic campaign to colonise the West Bank takes decades, so be it. God has ordained that the Jewish people should have ‘Judea and Samaria’, the settlers argue, and they are obliged to make sure that his wish is observed. If the fight for Greater Israel needs to be done house by house, room by room, water cistern by water cistern, then so be it.
In the Old City of Hebron, each floor of shared apartment buildings where Jews replace Palestinians is a triumph. Some settlers moved next door to Palestinians in the main street, Shuhada Street. One day, when the Palestinians were not there, the settlers smashed down the connecting wall and moved in. They were heavily armed, so the Palestinians knew it would be a massacre to try to re-enter. One more house on the road to Greater Israel.
Today, settlers live in that house and taunt foreigners or Israeli human rights workers who walk past. (Palestinians are not allowed to walk on that street.) I’ve been on a tour with Yehuda Shaul, while a young settler boy walked alongside him shouting ‘Kelev!’ – ‘Dog!’
As I discovered when researching the eviction of Nasser Jaber, much of the battle over property in Jerusalem goes on in the Old City. This is not just the world’s slowest war, it is also the world’s quietest war. Pilgrims and other tourists bargain over Armenian pottery, rent crucifixes for their stations of the cross or sip coffee while, in courtrooms a kilometre away, the battle over ownership goes on.
We also saw this battle in the East Jerusalem suburb of Sheikh Jarrah. First came the Hebrew names to replace the Arab ones, then came the Israeli settlers. In our first six months in Jerusalem, Sylvie and I would go sometimes to Sheikh Jarrah to cover the weekly protests as Palestinians were removed from houses they were resettled into according to an agreement between Jordan and the UN in 1967. After the Six Day War, these people had been evacuated from Jaffa or East Jerusalem, where their houses had been taken over by newly arrived European Jews.
A year or so after one of these evictions, I drove back down there to see how it was all going. I saw a distressed old Palestinian man in a dressing gown. He told me his water supply had been turned off. Two young Jewish settlers standing nearby admitted they had done it. They said they meant to turn off their own water but accidentally turned off the old man’s water. I asked them: why would you want to turn off your own water? They had no answer.
This old man looked like he was close to breaking point. I realised he was a bit player in a big, historic drama. History will probably never know his name, but he was a small part of the march towards Greater Israel.
This is a long game. One day the army pushes a rusted car into a water cistern in the Hebron Hills. The next some settlers in East Jerusalem turn off the water of an old man.
This is how Israel works in this seemingly endless occupation.