An Israeli settlement in close-up, and what is in its shadow

Givat Ze'ev is sprouting a new neighbourhood several hundred metres away

As Israeli, Palestinian and US leaders meet again in the long-running saga of Middle East peace talks, the BBC's Martin Asser examines one of the thorniest issues on the agenda. In the first of two articles, he visits an Israeli settlement in the West Bank undergoing a major expansion.

They come in many shapes and sizes - hardline colonies deep in the West Bank, farmsteads in the Jordan valley, leafy towns within commuting distance of Tel Aviv and large developments in East Jerusalem.

But the Jewish settlement Givat Ze'ev, situated on a picturesque, undulating plain 10 minutes' drive from the northern outskirts of Jerusalem, is more dormitory town than ideological outpost.

Built, like all settlements, in defiance of international law on land captured in 1967, its location is strategically important, south of Israel's Highway 443 cutting into the West Bank for 20km to connect Tel Aviv with Jerusalem.

Apartments are cheap and the air is good. You live close to the city but you feel you are in a village Yuval, Givat Ze'ev resident

Its population is 12,000, mostly from the liberal end of the spectrum, with an Orthodox Jewish satellite on the west side. It is the fifth largest West Bank settlement and one of the fastest growing.

Although Israel agreed to freeze settlement activity under the Roadmap peace plan, Givat Ze'ev has 750 extra housing units approved, about half of which are nearing completion and awaiting their first occupants.

Little distinguishes the settlement from any Israeli town, except a low-key security post with an open gate at the entrance.

Palestinian villages surround it, but any violence has diminished markedly as those villages are now on the other side of a wide loop of Israel's West Bank barrier around the settlement.

Pragmatic population

Givat Ze'ev has a friendly small-town atmosphere - young and old mill around a row of shops and cafes on the main street; a medical centre and a hairdresser do brisk trade.

Although Israel's settlement movement was born to advance sovereignty in the occupied territories, there was no sign - among people I spoke to - of political motives underpinning their presence.

GIVAT ZE'EV Founded in 1982 Named after right-wing Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky Population 12,000 (approx) including 35% religious Jews Six elementary schools, one junior high school Middle East 'haunted by the past' Obstacles to peace: Borders and settlements

On the contrary, people mentioned affordable accommodation, that it was a good place to live and raise children, getting around was easy via 443 and other bypass roads for Israelis.

"I came here 14 years ago to enjoy quality of life," said Yuval, who did not give his second name. "Apartments are cheap and the air is good. You live close to the city but you feel you are in a village."

Everyone asserted their absolute right to live in what they considered part of Israel obtained legitimately, in their view, through conquest. One elderly man said it was the West Bank only "on paper, not in life".

But when asked if they'd be prepared to surrender their homes to enable a two-state peace deal with Palestinians, most said yes, as long as there was proper compensation.

However, there was deep scepticism that peace was possible, or that Givat Ze'ev and other settlements around Jerusalem would be forfeited to create a Palestinian state.

Diplomatic dispute

For four decades, Israeli governments have supported Jewish settlement in the West Bank, a place with strong links to Judaism and, until Jordan took control in 1948, a significant Jewish presence. The state provides funding and infrastructure, and a blanket of security from the military.

Since 1967, the Jewish population has gone from zero to about 300,000 in the West Bank and 200,000 in East Jerusalem.

Numbers have grown 5% annually since Israel signed the Oslo peace accords in 1993 - despite a stipulation that neither it nor the Palestinians took any action prejudicing the final resolution.

Lately, however, Israel's closest ally, the US, has added weight to its erstwhile diplomatically worded objections to settlement expansion.

"The US does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. It is time for these settlements to stop," President Barack Obama said in a speech in Cairo in June.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has resisted firmly this new tougher line, one of his chief arguments being that settlements must be allowed "natural growth".

In other words, younger generations of Jews shouldn't be squeezed out because they want to start families, and amenities - kindergartens, synagogues etc - must be built as required.

New development

In Givat Ze'ev's case, new construction is going on apace in an area Israelis know as the Ha'ayalot valley, which was confiscated from neighbouring Palestinian villages whose inhabitants call it Wadi Salman.

Agan Ha'ayalot is isolated from the rest of the settlement near the separation barrier

Work started in 1999, but stopped in 2000 when the violence of the second Palestinian intifada put settlers off wanting to live in what is quite an exposed spot.

Each side of the valley is topped by Palestinian houses and it extends west from the main body of the settlement, with the first new houses located 700m away - or 2.5km by a winding road.

Construction in the Agan Ha'ayalot, as it is known, resumed in 2008, following completion of a section of the barrier which passes through the valley in a series of hairpin bends cut deep into the rock.

Homes in the three dozen apartment blocks have been marketed to ultra-Orthodox families whose strict religious observance means they prefer not to live among secular or more liberal Jews.

"It's not normal or natural growth, it's a dramatic expansion for a new kind of population," says Hagit Ofran, of the Israeli group Peace Now, which campaigns against settlements.

She argues that every new Jewish home in the West Bank makes "the cost of a two-state solution higher".

"We should be in the process of getting an agreement [with the Palestinians] and not building obstacles likes this," Ms Ofran says.

Mr Netanyahu has ruled out anything but a possible "scaling down" of settlement activity. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas says substantive negotiations cannot resume without a complete freeze.

In the second half of this investigation we shall see how members of the Palestinian population around Givat Ze'ev view the situation.

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22 September 2009

In the shadow of an Israeli settlement

Givat Ze'ev settlement is separated from local Palestinians by Israel's West Bank barrier Extensive diplomatic efforts towards reviving Mid-East peace talks have yielded little. The US has continued to demand Israel freeze settlement activity in the West Bank, while Palestinians refuse to negotiate without a freeze. In the second of a two-part investigation, the BBC's Martin Asser sees the effect of settlements on the lives of Palestinians. They are called the Seven Villages, situated north-west of Jerusalem where the West Bank hills fall away towards the Mediterranean. SEVEN VILLAGES POPULATIONS Beit Anan - 4,264 Beit Duqqu - 1,600 Beit Ijza - 671 Beit Surik - 3,818 Qubeiba - 2,069 Qatanna - 7,496 Source: Palestinian Authority (2006) Though their inhabitants live within the Palestinian Authority's Jerusalem governorate, few get to visit Jerusalem - though the city was "like a mother to us" one man said. While Israelis in nearby Givat Ze'ev settlement bloc zip to Jerusalem by car in minutes, the Palestinian villagers need permission from Israel's military authorities. If they don't get permission, apparently the norm, there are roundabout ways past Israel's defences and into the city, but this risks jail and a stiff fine. Israel says all restrictions are imposed to prevent Palestinian militants wreaking havoc with suicide bombings. But, the Seven Villages is known as a quiet area. Israeli soldiers I spoke to said there was very little militant activity. Palestinian residents insist they are peaceable folk - famers, labourers, some professionals - who just want to live normal, decent lives. Enclosed lives Everyone I met said their world was dominated by Israel's occupation of the West Bank, in place since the 1967 war. After occupation came Jewish settlements; after the violent Palestinian uprising of 2000 came Israel's vast infrastructure to protect the settlements. Now villagers in this area of the West Bank are hemmed in on all sides. To the West and South Israel's West Bank barrier follows roughly the pre-1967 border. To the East it snakes deep into the territory around Givat Ze'ev. To the North is the heavily defended Highway 443, connecting northern Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. There are two official exits: via a 1.3km-long sunken road through the Givat Ze'ev loop towards Ramallah, and via Beit Iksa village towards Jerusalem. The recently completed underpass - built on confiscated Palestinian land - made a significant improvement on the tortuous route people used to take to the West Bank's main city. But simultaneously, Israel built a military checkpoint on the road to Beit Iksa, and now only its residents can pass. Many villagers were concerned that, although the underpass undoubtedly made life easier, it also made it easier for Israel to lock down the whole area with a very small military deployment. High price While Palestinians insist the barrier is part of a land grab, Israelis officials say its purpose is purely defensive and, furthermore, temporary so it could be removed if peace breaks out. Mahmoud Salim's lives in the "security zone" beside the West Bank barrier But it has already taken a heavy price in the Seven Villages. I met Mahmoud Salim on his way from Beit Ijza to the centremost village of Biddu to pay his electricity bill. His house is located in a security zone for the barrier, which passes 15 metres away. His farmland lies on the other side and he has been told by the army he cannot "put one stone on another" in what's left of his garden. He remembered the day in 2004 when Israeli troops first came to secure the area. "People wanted to defend their land, but troops opened fire as though faced by another army. My son was the first one killed, though he wasn't involved in the demonstrations." He is not the only such case in the Seven Villages. I met another man by chance in Beit Duqqu whose brother was killed in the same clashes. Security anomalies Some villagers, thanks to the barrier, find themselves in positions of such extraordinary and precarious absurdity you can scarcely believe what you're seeing. The Sabri family home is in the middle of an elaborate high-security installation The Sabris live on the east side of the barrier, embedded in a small settlement south of Givat Ze'ev, but completely surrounded by a six-metre-high wire fence. Their simple hilltop house is reached by a stark concrete bridge over the barrier, which is dug into the rock below. The bridge is controlled by a massive steel gate operated remotely by troops in the Atarot base 5km away. To begin with, the family said, soldiers dutifully closed the gate at night, but now it stands open all the time. One can only guess how much this arrangement added to the cost of the barrier (estimated overall to be $1.3bn). They talk about a settlement freeze, but they've forgotten the occupation. If we got rid of that, the settlements would go Schoolteacher, Beit Duqqu An Israeli settlement in close-up On the other side of Givat Ze'ev, to the east, I met the Najadas, whose house lies in a "security zone" between the barrier and the settlement, cut off from their nearest village, al-Jib. To get to work or school in the village, they walk along the security road next to the barrier to the nearest checkpoint. They cannot use cars or keep goats and have given up the idea of getting their crops to market. I witnessed Abdul Baset Najada being told by checkpoint guards he couldn't walk along the road, although we were allowed to take him by car. Disagreement The people I spoke to seemed unimpressed by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas's stance that peace talks cannot resume with Israel unless settlement construction ends. "The papers are all talking about freezing settlements, but they've forgotten the occupation. If we got rid of that, the settlements would go," said a schoolteacher in Beit Duqqu. Many see Mr Abbas as dancing to Israel's tune, while in their view settlements on 1967 land should not just stop growing, but should be removed completely. Beit Duqqu is considered particularly affected by the expansion of Givat Ze'ev, one of the fastest growing Jewish settlements. The village lies just across the valley from the Agana Ha'ayalot development, and it isn't hard to imagine its new Orthodox Jewish residents coming under militant attack from snipers or infiltrators one day. "God help us if any settler gets hurt," says the schoolteacher, adding with a chuckle: "Maybe there will be an earthquake and we'll all be down in the valley."

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Colonial Tel Aviv - the truth about Israel's prime Zionist City

 Colonial Tel Aviv

http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/2009/09/colonial-tel-aviv.html

September 11, 2009

The public letter to the TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) says

In 2009, TIFF announced that it would inaugurate its new City to City program with a focus on Tel Aviv. According to program notes by Festival co-director and City to City programmer Cameron Bailey, “The ten films in this year’s City to City programme will showcase the complex currents running through today’s Tel Aviv. Celebrating its 100th birthday in 2009, Tel Aviv is a young, dynamic city that, like Toronto, celebrates its diversity.”

The emphasis on ‘diversity’ in City to City is empty given the absence of Palestinian filmmakers in the program. Furthermore, what this description does not say is that Tel Aviv is built on destroyed Palestinian villages, and that the city of Jaffa, Palestine’s main cultural hub until 1948, was annexed to Tel Aviv after the mass exiling of the Palestinian population. This program ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv/Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories or who have been dispersed to other countries, including Canada. Looking at modern, sophisticated Tel Aviv without also considering the city’s past and the realities of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, would be like rhapsodizing about the beauty and elegant lifestyles in white-only Cape Town or Johannesburg during apartheid without acknowledging the corresponding black townships of Khayelitsha and Soweto. ( Indiwire)

That hits home, but there is more. Tel-Aviv has an international reputation based on the myths the tells itself about its own identity and history. Tel-Aviv is the opposite of the settlements, the opposite of crazy Jerusalem, of the fanatics of Hebron, it is an oasis of sanity and tolerance. Meir Wieselthier, an Israeli poet, expressing the “anti-war” Tel-Aviv ethos, once said that he would only take up arms if a foreign army were about to cross the Yarkon (a river at the northern side of Tel-Aviv). The singular most important idea about Tel-Aviv is that it is innocent. It is not on occupied land (it was supposedly built on sandy dunes). It has nothing to do with the fanaticism that drives the violence of the occupation. It is secular, young, hedonistic, worldly and diverse. Perhaps it is a tad too materialistic. But when the alternative is the spirituality of a Baruch Goldstein, even crass materialism looks awfully benign.

It’s a good story with fetching characters. But it is also false. Let’s take the issue of diversity first. Although 20% of Israeli citizens are Palestinians, only 4.2% of Tel-Aviv residents are. For a major city, that is an impressive lack of diversity. Moreover, almost all these Palestinians live in a few segregated neighborhoods in the far end of Jaffa, mostly Ajame. Excluding these marginal and poor neighborhoods at the edge of the city, Tel-Aviv is almost completely free of Arabs. As such, the city no doubt constitutes a demographic miracle. The below-margin-of-error percentage of Arabs in this “diverse,” bustling, Mediterranean metropolis is lower than in Paris, Geneva, London, or Brooklyn.

That "diversity" makes Tel Aviv a rare example of successful ethnic cleansing. Until its destruction, Jaffa was an important hub city in the Arab Mediterranean. Today it is home to less than 1% of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, a marginal and isolated community. Jaffa was conquered by the Jewish paramilitary organizations in 1948 and over 60,000 of its residents were forced to leave as as a result of the shelling of the city. They were literally “thrown into the sea” and had to sail, mostly to Gaza. The conquerors then proceeded to bulldoze 75% of the city. The Ajame and Jebaliah neighborhoods were left standing, with less than 4,000 Palestinians allowed to remain. The area was left to deteriorate and become a dumping ground for municipal waste and a zone for crime and drugs. Moreover, the houses were confiscated and the remaining Palestinians became tenants of the state housing agency, Amidar, which neglected the properties and even refused to let the residents upgrade them on their own. The final turn of the screw in this cruel tale came with the new millennium. As Tel Aviv enjoyed a finance driven speculative real-estate boom, Ajame became attractive for real-estate developers. The obstacle was, of course, how to get rid of existing tenants. Amidar’s ingenious solution was to impose fines on the tenants for illegally upgrading and repairing their homes, and then offer to forgive the debt in return for evacuation. (See Jonathan Cook, Jaffa Renewal plan aims at eviction)

Another part of town, the Old City, ethnically cleansed to the last, and most of its urban space destroyed, leaving only the outer wall and a few Christian landmarks, was turned into a touristic and nightlife attraction. The original Arab street names have been erased, and the Tel-Aviv municipality is happy to let you know that “the alleys of Old Jaffa are named after the signs of the Zodiac and it is possible to find there artists galleries and Judaica shops, jewelry and art from top ranking artists”.(http://www.tel-aviv.gov.il/english/tourism/sites/jaffa.htm). Read that touristic blurb in vain for any mention of Jaffa’s past and its demise. Napoleon’s visit is the only historical event worthy of the tourist’s knowledge; the mark of the fleeting footsteps of a great White Man being more important than the whole of local history. Not mentioned is that Napoleon’s stay included a thirty hour long butchery and rape of the local civilian population followed by the massacre of 4.500 prisoners of war. That is not history, apparently since it did not happen to European Jews.

The artist galleries, property of dispossessed Palestinians, were distributed by the state to Israeli artists. You need to file an application to get one. This is one of the ways in which the intellectuals and bohemians of Tel-Aviv have been inducted, made accomplices in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and given a solid stake in the preservation of a Jewish State. Sooner or later someone will make a list of these towering moral lights, most of them probably self-identifying as members of the “peace camp”, who accepted these gifts. But I’ll mention one famous name as an emblem. Dan Ben-Amotz was a first generation bohemian and writer (he was member of the elite Palmach unit in 1948) who in many ways typified the secular Tel-Aviv-ish brand identity and even played an important role in fashioning it. He was a handsome celebrity, went to Hollywood, befriended Marlon Brando, acted in Israeli films, including one of the most critical ever made in Israel about Zionism (Uri Zohar’s A Hole in the Moon), wrote long profane novels about his sexual exploits, pioneered the Tel Aviv nightlife and club scene, studied Hebrew slang and profanities, was “anti-war” before it was fashionable, ridiculed Israel’s shibboleths in the name of individual expression and put the ‘carnal’ in “make love not war.” Nationalist and religious fanaticism was as meaningful to his persona as coconuts are to the Inuit diet. His first wife was Christian and his signature dress code was an Arab galabiyeh. In addition to being a fixture of Tel-Aviv and a symbol of its anarchic and individualistic streak, Ben-Amotz also took part in creating the Tel-Aviv myth. In 1980 he co-wrote a play that celebrated the establishment of first “Hebrew City.” Yosef Rachelski, an Israeli cultural critic, called him one of the two most influential cultural icons of Israel in the late sixties, the other being Moshe Dayan.

Ben-Amotz lived in an Arab house in Old Jaffa overlooking the mediterranean sea; he also owned valuable commercial property in the area that the conquerors destroyed. After his death a scandal broke out involving rumors about his sexual mores, not always consensual. But there was never a scandal about his real estate transactions, also apparently not always consensual. Ben Amotz’s irreverent and insouciant enjoyment of the racist order he mocked is a symbol of secular and fun loving Tel-Aviv’s relation to the apartheid system of israel.

As architect Sharon Rotbard, who wrote a magisterial book excavating Tel-Aviv's hidden story, and whose insights I plunder here with abandon, claims,

Tel aviv was not born from the sand. It was born in Jaffa. Yet, its attitude to Jaffa reminds one of the Christian attitude to Judaism, including contradictory violent elements of birth and matricide, continuity and separation, inheritance and appropriation, erasure and masking, guilt and exculpation. From the moment the first Jewish neighborhood Neve Tzedek was born from the womb of the “Bride of the Sea,” in the eighties of the nineteenth century, Tel-Aviv never ceased to flee from Jaffa and to persecute Jaffa. The war of [creating a] “white city,” over conquering the symbolic and historic space of the metropolis, is the war of Tel-Aviv against Jaffa and her biological daughters and step-daughter….to create that Tel-Aviv of street and grocery shop and invent the normality of a house, a courtyard and a staircase, Tel-Aviv eradicated a whole [urban] space. It conquered Jaffa and her daughters, emptied them of their residents, eradicated neighborhoods, villages, roads and landscapes, destroyed places, houses, streets, public monuments…In doing so, Tel-Aviv erased the memory of Jaffa. The war did not end with the 1948 conquest and exile of the residents. It continues to this very day. Although Jaffa is a dead city, Tel-Aviv still tortures her corpse…From its inception as a city separate from Jaffa, and in its cultural, ethnic and now historical construction as a “white city,” Tel-Aviv constituted itself through its opposition to Jaffa, as separation from Jaffa, as the dialectical negation of Jaffa. For Jaffa, this dialectic relation was no less fateful. While Tel-Aviv built and wrote itself, it also destroyed and erased Jaffa, fashioning it as its own negation – a city of the night, neglected, criminal, dirty, derelict, and black. (White City Black City [Hebrew], p.126 )

The Museum of The Irgun houses an educational collection about the terrorist organization,

its means, strategiesand achievements. The building makes an unambiguous statement:

the modern, corporate,glass-and-steel Israel rising out of the hollowed husk of an Arab

house in the area where the Manshiyeh neighborhood once stood.

Finally, there is the question of dates and origins. Where to begin? What to choose as year zero? What does it mean, for example, to tell the history of the Americas from 1492? What is the meaning of 1909 as the date of the “beginning” of Tel Aviv? What exactly was born in 1909? Was it the point of departure of the urban habitat that is today Tel-Aviv-Yafo? No, since Jaffa has always been there, and Jaffa has been included in Tel-Aviv-Yafo, the history of urbanism in the area does not start in 1909. Was it the beginning of Jewish habitation? No. Leaving aside why a “diverse” modern city should be celebrated based of a single ethnic identity, Jews have always been residents of Jaffa. Was it then the first organized Jewish settlement in the area? No. Neve Tzedek was established in 1887 by Palestinian Jews from Jaffa. Kerem Hateimanim was established in 1905. Jews from Jaffa and from Yemen established Jewish neighborhoods near Jaffa because Jaffa was overcrowded. These Jewish suburbs of Jaffa were incorporated later into Tel-Aviv and allowed to become derelict slums as symbolic punishment for their guilty proximity to Jaffa, geographically as well as culturally. In the same period Muslims established a largely Muslim neighborhood to the north of Jaffa, Manshiyeh, that was completely erased in 1947 (a single mosque is all that remains today, near a parking lot called "the conquerors").

1909 is an arbitrary date, chosen, according to Sharon Rotbard, mostly because of the convenient existence of a commemorative photograph of the land ruffle for the establishment of the neighborhood Ahuzat-Bait. What distinguishes this neighborhood, not only from Jaffa and the Palestinian villages but also from the older Jewish neighborhoods, is that it was established by white European Jews. It is on the basis of this distinction that the history of Tel-Aviv was written and transformed into a myth of a city created on sands, separate from the natives, and therefore paradoxically pure and innocent of the bloody history of apartheid. The principles of segregation that would lead to an apartheid regime thus becomes the foundation of the claim of innocence relative to that apartheid. Tel-Aviv is innocent because it is a pure European city! Events celebrating the 1909 birth of Tel-Aviv are thus not only inappropriate homage to the financial capital of an apartheid state. They are not only attempts to white wash the massacre of Gaza. They are also opportunities for legitimizing colonialism through the commemoration of the arrival of white Europeans to the orient. By celebrating Tel-Aviv, and especially by claiming the right to separate the city from the conflict and thus confirm its image of innocence and “diversity”, Western curators are able to pay homage to colonialism and justify its role in their own societies.

Posted by Gabriel Ash @ 10:49 PM

Architecture as the continuation of politics: White City, Dark City

By V.G. Smith

10 February 2009

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/feb2009/lett-f10.shtml

While Israeli tanks and bombs hit Gaza, a sales video for an apartment tower in Tel Aviv, 40 miles north of Gaza City, pitches the "Neve Tsedek White City Residence." As photos roll, the voice describes the tower in the heart of the "vibrant cosmopolitan city" of Tel Aviv; it cites "luxurious apartments," even a penthouse designed by Armani Casa, Milan, a "sophisticated lobby, lounge, and business rooms" for new enterprises. Sharing the same Mediterranean coast, Gaza City and Tel Aviv offer a brutal display of contrasts.

There is no need for conference rooms in Gaza, since 80 percent of inhabitants live under the poverty level, and 38 percent are unemployed. No call for penthouses by Armani, Milan, in Palestinian houses destroyed by US-supplied F16s. No sophisticated lobby for shelter, but refugee camps and darkened homes without electricity. While residents of the "White City" tower will enjoy sea views, Gaza inhabitants experience a blockade and see gunboats that occasionally fire "practice" shots inland, which last year killed a family picnicking on Gaza Beach. Where is the truth about these two towns?

The myth of Tel Aviv as "the White City" rests on the importation of style characteristics from European Modernism into Israel, and the number of Israeli architects educated or practicing in the "International style." This last connection centers largely on Arieh (not Ariel) Sharon, who studied with Hannes Meyer at the Bauhaus. The myth supports the presentation of Israel as a sophisticated, modern nation, understanding and willing to further goals of harmony and peace—a better life.

Those were the goals underlying buildings of the Modern Movement in Europe in the 1920s, practiced primarily in the Netherlands, Germany and France. The myth started in 1959 at the 50th anniversary of Tel Aviv, progressed in the 1980s through museum exhibitions in Tel Aviv and their publications; in 2003, the district was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO; and continued most recently in the Netherlands with an exhibition from Israel at the Technical University of Delft in September entitled "Revival of the Bauhaus in Tel Aviv," introduced by the Cultural Attaché of the Embassy of Israel.

Completed in Poissy, outside Paris, France, in 1929, LeCorbusier's Villa Savoye provides an iconic representation of early modernism, incorporating the five points which the architect used to define this "entirely new kind of building": columnar structure, roof gardens, open plan, horizontal window and free design of the facade.

In the construction boom of the 1930s, virtually all of Tel Aviv was built in the "International Style," understood here as white walls, flat roofs and massing of cube-like blocks, sometimes raised on columns. Conditions favored this style. Concrete construction was cheap and used unskilled workers. Buildings raised on columns like Corbusier's pilotis worked especially well in Tel Aviv because they allowed sea breezes to pass through. Flat roofs are not alien to Canaan, but stem from ancient tradition; David lusted after Bathsheba from his roof, and later, Jesus healed the man on a litter whose friends cut a hole in the roof to let him down (Mark 2:4). The Eastern aspect of Tel Aviv has been acknowledged and sometimes surfaces in White City "International" construction—atriums with splashing pools (not German), cupolas, tall arches, occasional ogees and ornament.

The International Style can be understood as a vocabulary of forms or as a social movement to achieve a better life through architecture. Its iconic buildings in Europe manifest both. Betondorf, a 1920s white concrete village outside Amsterdam, admitted only socialists, and provided a village green with adjoining library, but banned bars and churches. During a visit last autumn, it appeared to be still happily inhabited. The movement inspired sanitariums with balconies for TB patients, workers' housing projects, open-air schools and orphanages. The style allied architecture with a conscience.

Today, there are two architectures in Israel, as there are two politics. There are peace movements in Tel Aviv, and elsewhere in the land, and there are extremists, defiant of the law, even the laws of their own courts and certainly that of the UN. So there is another architecture alongside the imported/borrowed-International/Bauhaus style. It is the architecture of the outposts: wall and tower.

In July 2002, two Israeli architects won a competition within the Israeli Association of United Architects to produce an exhibition of Israeli architecture in Berlin. It was a trenchant critique of the architecture of occupation. When a spokesman for the Interior Ministry reviewed the exhibition the day before its shipment, he became enraged, demanding that the exhibition be cancelled and all the catalogs shredded.

The architects themselves revised and published the catalog as A Civilian Occupation (Verso, English edition 2003). In the catalog, they map the spread of settlements in the West Bank and document through photographs a new native building type, a hasty ensemble of a wall, a tower and dwellings. The wall area outlines and claims the territory, usually a hilltop, and the tower allows surveillance of the surroundings. The dwellings housed pioneer settlers. This model was favored by Ariel (the Prime Minister) Sharon when he constructed an upscale wall-and-tower residence on land allegedly taken from a Palestinian farmer.

As Israel continues its aggression on Palestinian land, wall-and-tower architecture appears as its authentic voice. To mimic International Style characteristics is as false as the nation's imitation of a modern state. Claiming a free press, it controls journalists at gunpoint at the Gaza border; having established a court system, it ignores its rulings; boasting of cosmopolitanism, it shuts down airports and forbids Palestinian travel—somehow in imitating Modernism it has violated all the beliefs of what was truly the spirit of Modernism, that of social justice.

V.G. Smith is a designer and design historian, and Professor Emerita of Art at City University of New York.

from World Socialist Website

www.wsws.org

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Dismantling the Matrix of Control

Jeff Halper

September 11, 2009

http://www.merip.org/mero/mero091109.html

(Jeff Halper is director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. He can be reached at jeff@icahd.org.)

Jeff Halper’s original article on the “matrix of control” appeared in Middle East Report 216 (Fall 2000). For additional background, see Gary Sussman, “The Challenge to the Two-State Solution,” Middle East Report 231 (Summer 2004).

Almost a decade ago I wrote an article describing Israel’s “matrix of control” over the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It consisted then of three interlocking systems: military administration of much of the West Bank and incessant army and air force intrusions elsewhere; a skein of “facts on the ground,” notably settlements in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, but also bypass roads connecting the settlements to Israel proper; and administrative measures like house demolitions and deportations. I argued in 2000 that unless this matrix was dismantled, the occupation would not be ended and a two-state solution could not be achieved. 

Since then the occupation has grown immeasurably stronger and more entrenched. The first decade of the twenty-first century has so far seen the steady constricting and fragmentation of Palestinian territory through still more wholesale expropriation of Palestinian land, checkpoints and other physical restrictions on freedom of movement, settlement construction, more and more massive highways intended for Israeli settlers, control over natural resources and, most visibly of all, the erection of the separation barrier in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Since December 2000, according to the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem, the settler population of the West Bank has grown by 86,000 and that of East Jerusalem by 50,000. Gaza was evacuated of settlers and soldiers in 2005, but Israel retains near complete control over egress and exit of people and goods to and from the coastal strip, regularly cuts supplies of fuel and other necessities to punish the residents and mounts military incursions at will. All the Palestinian territories are subject, to one degree or another, to the measures of house demolitions, “closures” that halt economic activity, administrative restrictions on movement, deportation, induced out-migration and much more.

Indeed, the matrix has reconfigured the country to such an extent that today it seems impossible to detach a truly sovereign and viable Palestinian state from an Israel that has expanded all the way to the Jordan River. Anyone familiar with Israel’s “facts on the ground,” perhaps first and foremost the settlers, would reach the conclusion that, in fact, the matrix cannot be taken apart in a piecemeal fashion, leaving a few settlements here, a road there and an Israel “greater” Jerusalem in the middle. The matrix has become far too intricate. Dismantling it piece by piece, with Israel stalling by arguing for the security function of each “fact on the ground,” would be a frustrating series of confrontations that would eventually exhaust itself. The only way to a genuine two-state solution and not a cosmetic form of apartheid is to cut the Gordian knot. The international community, led by the United States, must tell Israel that the occupation must be ended entirely. Israel must leave every inch of the Occupied Territories. Period.

And now, at this critical juncture, as the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian impasse disappears under the weight of Israeli settlements, there is a great imponderable: Is President Barack Obama genuinely serious about reaching such a solution or is he merely going through the motions familiar from previous administrations? 

The Tea Leaves

Many Palestinian, Israeli and international proponents of a just peace took heart in Obama’s early gestures. Beginning with the appointment of former Sen. George Mitchell as special envoy and continuing through the president’s June 4 speech in Cairo, these proponents allowed themselves, after years of disappointment and struggle, a cautious hopefulness. Some of the speech’s formulations, like the nods to the “pain of dislocation” felt by Palestinians and the “daily humiliations” of occupation, had been heard before. But one sentence had not been: Obama said that a two-state solution “is in Israel’s interest, Palestine’s interest, America’s interest and the world’s interest.” Obama seemed to “get it,” that is, he seemed to understand that the US is isolated politically by its unquestioning backing of Israel, which is seen as obstructing a solution to the conflict. And, for the first time, a US president actually said that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in the vital national interest, not just a nice thing to do. These words significantly raise the bar. Framing the conflict in this way makes it easier for the administration to win Congressional support for tougher demands upon Israel while undermining the ability of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to mount an effective resistance, given American Jewish sensibilities about suspicions of dual loyalty.

Since the Cairo speech, however, fundamental doubts about US efforts have resurfaced. The only demand made by Obama upon Israel has been for a settlement “freeze,” a welcome symbolic gesture, to be sure, yet irrelevant to any peace process. Israel has enough settlement-cities in strategic “blocs” that it could in fact freeze all construction without compromising its control over the West Bank and “greater” Jerusalem, the Arab areas to the north, south and east of the city where Israel has planted its flag. Focusing on this one issue -- which, months later, is still being haggled over -- has provided Israel with a smokescreen behind which it can actively and freely pursue more significant and urgent construction that, when completed, will truly render the occupation irreversible. It is rushing to complete the separation barrier, which is already being presented as the new border, replacing the “Green Line,” the pre-June 1967 boundary to which Israel is supposed to withdraw, by the terms of UN Security Council resolutions, but on which even the most ardent two-staters have long since given up. Israel is demolishing homes, expelling Palestinian residents and permitting Jewish settlement throughout East Jerusalem, measurably advancing the “judaization” of the city. It is confiscating vast tracts of land in the West Bank and “greater” Jerusalem and pouring bypass road asphalt at a feverish pace so as to permanently redraw the map. It is laying track on Palestinian land for a light-rail line connecting the West Bank settlement-city of Pisgat Ze’ev to Israel. It is drying up the main agricultural areas of the West Bank, forcing thousands of people off their lands, while instituting visa restrictions that either keep visiting Palestinians and internationals out of the country altogether, or limit their movement to the truncated Palestinian enclaves of the West Bank.

“Quiet,” behind-the-scenes diplomacy is surely taking place, but the few details that have emerged are far from reassuring. The State Department has mocked as “fiction” a ten-point document given to the Arab press by Fatah figure Hasan Khreisheh that promises an “international presence” in parts of the West Bank and US backing for a Palestinian state by 2011. The component of this alleged plan that seems more likely is that the US wants a partial freeze on settlement activity from Israel in exchange for a pledge from Washington to push for more stringent sanctions upon Iran for its nuclear research. On August 25, the Guardian quoted “an official close to the negotiations” saying: “The message is: Iran is an existential threat to Israel; settlements are not.” By all indications, if the Obama administration does present a regional peace plan, which it is expected by many to do around the time of the UN General Assembly meeting on September 20, it will be nothing more than a “rough draft.” It is no exaggeration to say a two-state solution will rise or fall on the outlines of this draft -- and may perhaps fall forever if no concrete plan is presented at all, which is also possible. Although the two-state solution has been eulogized many times in the past, Obama represents a best-case scenario. If he presents, in the end, a disappointing peace plan that offers no genuine breakthrough, then the shift to a one-state solution on the part of the Palestinian people and their international supporters will be inescapable.

Sovereignty and Viability 

So how can Obama’s plan be judged if and when it is unveiled? Its chance of success can be predicted by how well it addresses the fundamental needs, grievances and aspirations of the peoples involved. An effective approach to ending the conflict, as opposed to shopworn posturing, rests on at least six elements: national expression for both peoples; economic viability for Palestine; a genuine addressing of the refugee issue; a regional approach; security guarantees; and conformity with human rights norms, international law and UN resolutions.

Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs are not simply ethnic groups, like, for example, American Jews or Arab-Americans. They are two peoples who, like national groups everywhere, demand self-determination. This reality actually lends credence to a two-state solution, but only if the Palestinian state is truly sovereign and economically viable. One should not forget that, in the days of apartheid, South Africa established ten “bantustans,” small and impoverished “homelands” on 11 percent of South African land, seemingly to address the demand of the black population for self-determination but actually to ensure a “democracy” for the white population on 89 percent of the country. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s notion that the Palestinians should get “autonomy with certain characteristics of a state” on about 15 percent of historic Palestine -- “autonomy plus-independence minus,” as he called it -- is reminiscent of apartheid. 

If the Obama administration’s plan does not cut the Gordian knot that is Israel’s matrix of control -- something no plan or initiative has yet succeeded in doing -- it will simply fail to achieve an equitable two-state solution. Only a complete withdrawal of Israel from all the Occupied Territories and the sharing of Jerusalem with no restrictions on movement can avert a Palestinian bantustan. 

Obama’s plan, like its predecessors, seems destined to leave the major Israeli settlement blocs intact, including those in Palestinian East and “greater” Jerusalem. Even with so-called territorial “swaps,” this measure would significantly compromise the sovereignty and economic viability of a Palestinian state. The area designated on Israeli maps for future expansion of the Ma’ale Adumim settlement reaches to the outskirts of Jericho in the Jordan Valley, while the Ariel bloc already extends between the northern West Bank town of Nablus and points south. Taken together, settlements and the highways that interlink them displace Palestinian passenger and commercial vehicles onto a few narrow routes, while the checkpoints intended to protect the settlers snarl traffic on a predictably unpredictable schedule. And then there is the towering wall. It is not a landscape made for easy economic integration.

Why, then, leave these massive settlements intact? The argument is that their residents would object to the point of a civil war in Israel. This is patent nonsense. True, these settlement blocs contain 85 percent of Israelis living in the Occupied Territories, but these are not the ideological settlers who claim the entire Land of Israel from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. Instead, they are “normal” Israelis who have been attracted to the settlements by high-quality, affordable housing. They would have no objection to resettling inside Israel on the condition that their living standards do not fall, while the Israeli economy, assisted by international donors, would have no problem footing the bill for this population, about 200,000 in number. Settlements in “greater” Jerusalem, housing another 190,000 Israeli Jews, present no problem whatsoever. Residents are free to stay where they are in a shared and integrated Jerusalem. 

As for the “ideological” settlers of the West Bank, only about 40,000 in number (out of almost six million Jews altogether), they can easily be relocated inside Israel, just as were their counterparts in Gaza. Their relocation will be a test of international assertiveness, of course, because the settlers are able to mobilize the support of the right-wing parties in Israel. Since Israel can make no cogent argument as to the security necessity of these tiny settlements, however, internal opposition will simply have to be overruled; the international community cannot allow such frivolous ideological matters to destabilize the entire global system. If the legitimate concerns of the Israeli public over its security are addressed by the international community, which they can be, there is no compelling reason why Israel should not return to the pre-June 1967 border. In fact, if the Gaza episode indicates anything, it is that the Israeli public is willing to remove settlements if it is convinced that doing so will enhance its security. Reminding Israelis that leaving every inch of the Occupied Territories will still leave them sovereign over a full 78 percent of the country -- not a bad deal for what will soon become a minority Jewish population -- should seal the deal.

Refugees

The Obama platform, should it see the light of day, will probably also adopt the Israeli position that Palestinian refugees can only be repatriated to the Palestinian state itself, not to their former homes inside Israel. This plank would place a weighty economic burden on that tiny prospective state, since the refugees are, by and large, a traumatized and impoverished population with minimal education and professional skills. Add to that another significant fact: Some 60 percent of the Palestinian population is under the age of 18. A Palestinian state without the ability to employ its people and offer a future to its youth is simply a prison-state. 

Now the need for a viable Palestinian state is recognized and embodied in the “road map,” the peace initiative propagated by President George W. Bush in 2003, and will probably be acknowledged in a plan from Obama as well. Despite its limited size, a RAND Corporation study concluded that such a state is possible, but only if it controls its territory, borders, resources and movement of people and goods. Israel must be made to understand that while it will remain the hegemonic power in the region, its own long-term security depends upon the economic wellbeing of its Palestinian neighbors. 

Eighty percent of the Palestinians are refugees, and half of the Palestinians still live in refugee camps within and around their homeland. Any sustainable peace is dependent upon the just resolution of the refugee issue. Technically, resolving the refugee issue is not especially difficult. The Palestinian negotiators, backed up by the Arab League, have agreed to a “package,” to be mutually agreed upon by Israel and the Palestinians, involving a combination of repatriation in Israel and the Palestinian state, resettlement elsewhere and compensation. 

The “package” must contain, however, two other elements, without which the issue will not be resolved and reconciliation cannot take place. First, Israel must acknowledge the refugees’ right of return; a resolution of the issue cannot depend solely on humanitarian gestures. And Israel must acknowledge its responsibility for driving the refugees from their country. Just as Jews expected Germany to accept responsibility for what it did in the Holocaust (and Israelis criticized the Pope during his summer 2009 visit for not apologizing enough), just as China and South Korea will not close the book on World War II until Japan acknowledges its war crimes, so, too, will the refugee issue continue to fester and frustrate attempts to bring peace to the region until Israel admits its role and asks forgiveness. Genuine peacemaking cannot be confined to technical solutions alone; it must also deal with the wounds caused by the conflict. 

Regional Approach, Security and International Law

Obama’s edge over his predecessors lies in his understanding that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is part of -- and in some ways the symbolic epicenter of -- a wider regional problem that extends from the neighboring countries to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and, indeed, throughout the entire Muslim world and beyond. This understanding lies behind his framing of the conflict’s persistence as being antithetical to vital US interests, and behind his chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel’s statements making a solution for the conflict a virtual precondition for addressing the Iran issue. It is precisely this linkage, long denied by Israel, which insists that the Palestinian issue be handled separately, that the Obama administration seems finally to have embraced. Indeed, even in the confines of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, the key issues – refugees, security, water, economic development and others -- are regional in scope. A perfect peace between Israel and Palestine, in which both countries flourish, is not a viable solution for either if they exist as prosperous islands in an impoverished, unstable region. 

Israel, of course, has fundamental and legitimate security needs, as do the Palestinians and the other peoples of the region. Unlike Israeli governments, the Israeli peace camp believes that security cannot be addressed in isolation, that Israel will not find peace and security unless it enters into a lasting peace with the Palestinians and achieves a measure of integration into the Middle East region. It certainly rejects the notion that security can be achieved through military means. Israel’s assertion that the security issue be resolved before any political progress can be made is as illogical as it is self-serving. Everyone, the Israeli political establishment and the military together with the peace movement and the Palestinians themselves, knows that terrorism is a symptom that can only be addressed as part of a broader approach to the grievances underlying the conflict. Israel, which also must be held accountable for its use of state terror, cannot be allowed to exploit legitimate security concerns to advance a political agenda of permanent control. 

To the degree that negotiations are entered into, they must have as their terms of reference international law and UN resolutions if the Palestinians are to enjoy even minimal parity with their Israeli interlocutors. The lack of grounding in such principles was the fatal shortcoming of all the preceding attempts to reach an agreement. Once negotiations are based solely on power, the Palestinians lose, the differential being so heavily weighted on the Israeli side, which totally controls Palestinian life and territory. Indeed, a peace agreement rooted in international law and human rights -- in short, a just peace -- would offer the best prospect of working. 

Trump Cards

Put simply, any plan, proposal or initiative for peace in Israel-Palestine must be filtered through the following set of critical questions: Will this plan really end the occupation, or is it merely a subtle cover for control? Does this plan offer a just and sustainable peace or merely an imposed and false quiet? Does this plan offer a Palestinian state that is territorially, politically and economically viable, or merely a prison-state? Does this plan genuinely and justly address the refugee issue? And does this plan offer regional security and development? 

While one may glean optimism from the fact that a US president finally comprehends the need for a comprehensive peace in the Middle East, even if solely for the sake of US interests, it is difficult to be optimistic over the prospects of such a peace. No matter what the plan, Israel will neither cooperate nor negotiate in good faith. A solution will have to be imposed, if not overtly, then in ways that make Israel’s continued hold on the Occupied Territories too costly to sustain. Simply withholding Israel’s privileged access to American military technology and markets, for example, would have that effect. 

Any attempt to pressure Israel, however, will run into a familiar obstacle: Congress, Israel’s trump card in its encounters with the administration. In the case of Obama, Israeli leaders know well that his own party has always been far more “pro-Israel” than the Republicans. Already his loss of momentum after the Cairo address (perhaps related to his difficulties over his health care plan) has emboldened the temporarily cowed AIPAC. In early August, the vaunted lobby produced a letter signed by 71 senators from both parties -- led by Sens. Evan Bayh (D-IN) and Jim Risch (R-ID) -- telling the president to lay off Israel and place more pressures on the Arab states to “normalize” relations with Israel. Obama had already, in his comments introducing Mitchell as special envoy and subsequently, called for “normalization” simultaneous with Israeli moves to lessen the burdens of occupation, in contravention of the 2002 Arab League peace plan, which proposed that the Arab states establish ties with Israel after withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines. Now AIPAC and its backers in Congress want the administration to push for “normalization” before any Israeli overtures whatsoever. The Netanyahu government has played its part, as well. In August, its ministers, standing on the strategically crucial site of “E-1” between Jerusalem and the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, vowed that Israel would continue building settlements anywhere it pleases. On September 7, Israel announced it was beginning work on 500 new apartments in Pisgat Ze’ev and 455 in other West Bank locales. These actions essentially tell Obama to go to hell mere weeks before he is projected to launch his peace initiative. The US replied with an expression of “regret.”

Any plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace that has a hope of succeeding requires both an effective marketing strategy and a level of assertiveness as yet unseen in a US president, excepting, perhaps, Dwight Eisenhower and Jimmy Carter. Obama’s only hope of breaking through the wall of Israeli and Democratic Party resistance is to articulate an approach to peace based on clear and accepted principles anchored in human rights and justice and then framed in terms of US interests. A cold, calculating assessment of US interests would certainly push Obama in this direction. Time will tell, though the limp response to the new settlement construction does not bode well.  

In the meantime, growing opposition to the occupation on the part of the international grassroots is making it increasingly difficult for governments to support Israeli policies. The movement targeting Israel for boycott, divestment and sanctions gains strength by the day, as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict begins to assume the dimensions of the anti-apartheid struggle. But the Palestinians, exhausted and suffering as they may be, possess a trump card of their own. They are the gatekeepers. Until the majority of Palestinians, and not merely political leaders, declare that the conflict is over, the conflict is not over. Until most Palestinians believe it is time to normalize relations with Israel, there will be no normalization. Israel cannot “win” -- though it believes it can, which is why it presses ahead to complete the matrix and foreclose the possibility of a viable Palestinian state. The failure of yet another peace initiative will only galvanize international efforts to achieve justice for the Palestinians. Only this time the demand is likely to be for a single binational state, the only alternative that fits the single-state, binational reality that Israel itself has forged in its futile attempt to impose an apartheid regime.

The Two-state Solution, Israeli-Style

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 22:02:07 +0200
The two-state solution, Israeli style, or how to disperse and destroy ,once and for all, Palestinian society.

Charity, checkpoints and client rulers

By Jonathan Cook in Ramallah

July 09, 2009 "Information Clearing House"

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has been much criticised in Israel, as well as abroad, for failing to present his own diplomatic initiative on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to forestall US intervention.
Mr Netanyahu may have huffed and puffed before giving voice to the phrase “two states for two peoples” at Sunday’s cabinet meeting, but the contours of just such a Palestinian state -- or states -- have been emerging undisturbed for some time.

In fact, Mr Netanyahu appears every bit as committed as his predecessors to creating the facts of an Israeli-imposed two-state solution, one he and others in Israel’s leadership doubtless hope will eventually be adopted by the White House as the “pragmatic” -- if far from ideal -- option.

While Israel has been buying yet more time with Washington in bickering over a paltry settlement freeze, it has been forging ahead with the process of creating two Palestinian territories, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, that, despite supposedly emerging from occupation, are in reality sinking ever deeper into chronic dependency on Israeli goodwill. This is creating a culture of absolute Israeli control and absolute Palestinian dependency, enforced by proxy Palestinian rulers acting as mini-dictatorships.

For a growing number of Palestinians, the conditions of bare subsistence and even survival are Israeli gifts that few can afford to spurn through political activity, let alone civil disobedience or armed resistance. The Palestinian will to organise and resist as their land is seized for settlements is being inexorably sapped.
It is little mentioned but Israel all but abandoned completing its massive separation wall in the West Bank some time ago. There are significant gaps waiting to be filled, but, with things having grown so quiet and the cost of each kilometre of wall so high, the sense of political and military urgency has evaporated.
Suicide bombers, had they the determination, could still slip into Israel. But increasingly Palestinians view such attacks as futile, if not counterproductive: Israel simply wins greater international sympathy and has the pretext to turn the screw yet tighter on Palestinian life.

None of this has been lost on Israel’s leaders of either the so-called Left or Right.

Rather than being an aberration in response to rocket attacks, the blockade of Gaza has become Israel’s template for Palestinian statehood. The West Bank is rapidly undergoing its own version of disengagement and besiegement, with similar predictable results.

Gaza’s blockade -- and the savage battering it took in December and January -- has suggested even to Mr Netanyahu that the Israeli version of the carrot-and-stick approach works.

The stick – a devastated Gaza unable to rise from the rubble because aid and basic goods are kept out – has transformed most of the population into a nation dependent on handouts, borrowing where possible to buy necessities smuggled through the tunnels, and concentrating on the lonely art of survival.

As the normally restrained International Committee of the Red Cross reported last month: “Most of the very poor have exhausted their coping mechanisms. Many have no savings left. They have sold private belongings such as jewellery and furniture and started to sell productive assets including farm animals, land, fishing boats or cars used as taxis.”

The carrot -- if it can be called that -- is directed towards Gaza’s leaders, Hamas, rather than its ordinary inhabitants. The message is simple: keep the rocket fire in check and we won’t attack again. We will allow you to rule over the remnants of Gaza.

In the West Bank, the carrot for the leadership is even more tantalisingly visible. The Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas is colluding in the creation of a series of mini-fiefdoms based on the main cities.
Trained by the US military, Palestinian security forces with light weapons are taking back control of Jenin, Nablus, Jericho, Qalqilya, Ramallah and so on, while the PA is encouraged by promises of economic charity to prop up its legitimacy.

The leader of a Palestinian non-governmental organisation in Ramallah confided at the weekend that what is being created are “City Leagues” -- a mocking reference to the Palestinian regional militias known as the Village Leagues armed by Israel in the early 1980s to stamp out Palestinian nationalism by threatening and attacking local political activists. Those were a dismal failure; this time Palestinians are less sure Israel will not succeed.

Palestinian prisons are starting to fill not only with those suspected of belonging to Hamas but those who dissent from Fatah rule. The ground is being carefully tended by Israel to create a brutal client state.
The stick, as in Gaza, is directed at the ordinary population. The news headlines are of the easing of movement restrictions at the checkpoints. That may be true at a few places deep in the West Bank. But at the big checkpoints that separate Israel from what is left of the West Bank, such as the one at Qalandiya between Ramallah and Jerusalem, the monitoring of Palestinian movement is becoming fearsomely sophisticated.

These checkpoints are now more like small airport terminals, with limited numbers of “trusted” Palestinians entitled to pass through. To escape the poverty of the West Bank each day to reach manual work inside Israel, they must have a magnetic ID card storing biometric data and a special permit. Cards are denied by Israel not only to those with a record of political activity but also to those who have distant relatives deemed to be politically engaged.

The same NGO leader concluded, again with bitter irony: “Our leaders are declaring victory: the victory of defeat.”

Should Mr Abbas and his PA functionaries sign up to this Israeli vision of statehood, the defeat for the Palestinians will be greater still.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net .
A version of this article originally appeared in The National ( www.thenational.ae ), published in Abu Dhabi.