All settlments must go

Omar Barghouti

There have been numerous calls from various intellectuals in Israel for Jewish settlers to leave the occupied Palestinian territories. Almost all were motivated by an unconcealed fear for those settlers' and their families' lives, like the famous Israeli writer A. B. Yehoshua, who appeals to the settlers: "For your children's sake and ours, please, be brave and wise and come back home to Israel." He then asks: "Did you have to go to the Gaza Strip and to the heart of Samaria (West Bank) [...] , you had to go to Nitzarim, Kfar Darom, Gush Qatif and Psagot? [Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories]." (Yediot Ahronot, November 22, 2000)

Commenting on the injury of several settlers' children in a recent attack, Yoel Marcus of Ha'aretz (November 28, 2000) repeats the same argument, saying: "What are children doing in the middle of a real-life firing range? What are their parents doing in such settlements as Netzarim and Kfar Darom, or in the 30 to 40 "political" settlements that were established by successive generations of Israeli leaders who used the pretext of "national security" but who, in practice, were setting up these communities in order to create irreversible faits accomplis? In the name of what cause are the soldiers assigned to defend these settlers getting killed?"

No Israeli has come out bravely against this tide and asked for a full dismantling of all the settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Only the settlements that are "too close" to the Arabs, and therefore more liable to be attacked by Palestinians, are the focus of the current consensus of the Israeli "peace movement".

There are two essential factors that are common to all those calls: racism, and disregard for international law.

The fact that Palestinians are being victimized by the occupation, by the fanatic settlers' killings, land expropriations, brutal repression by the Army ..etc, does not bother Israel's "peace" intelligentsia; the only thing that matters is "Jewish blood". This ardent disdain for the value of Palestinian lives reflects a prevalent phenomenon shared among Israeli politicians and intellectuals as well, whether on the right or the "left"; the only variant is the degree of honesty in expressing it. Rabbi Meir Kahane often boasted: "There are a million Kahanes, but only one Kahane speaks!" Indeed, Meretz' leader, Yossi Sarid, supported the inhumane air raids against the densely-populated Gaza strip days ago; and Nobel Peace Laureate Shimon Peres supported the iron-fist policy in dealing with Israel's Arab-Palestinians. Others have simply remained silent, complacent, or simply apathetic to the slow massacre of Palestinians.

Last month Israeli PM Barak declared that he would have killed 2000 instead of 200 Palestinians if he only though it would "benefit Israel" and its "security". Most Israeli intellectuals were not only silent about this fascist tendency, they joined in the chorus, reiterating in their writings the same principle that only "Jewish life" should matter. The debate between left and right was over whether killing more Palestinians hurts or benefits Israel's quintessential "security concerns" and its image in the world. Only last month, the Israeli Army spokesman did not hesitate to say: "The last thing our image needs is another Kufr Qana", referring to the Israeli bombardment of a UN shelter in Lebanon in 1996, which massacred over a hundred Lebanese women and children!

Fervent contempt for international law is the other shared factor in most such debates. The fact that repeated UN resolutions have condemned Israel's occupation of Palestinian (and Arab) lands as illegal have been typically ignored or zealously rejected by consecutive Israeli governments, which justified their intransigence with accusations of the UN as being "biased" against Israel. The entire world community, minus the US and some of its banana islands, has been portrayed by Israeli leaders as "naturally" insensitive to Israel's security requirements.

International law (embodied in the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as various UN resolutions) says that all settlements are illegal, and therefore must go. Israeli "leftist" appeals to dismantle only those settlements in the midst of Arab populations reflects a racist mentality that is solely motivated by concern for the lives of the settlers and the soldiers who protect them. This mentality also insists on violating international law.