‘The realities on the ground are ultimately derived from the aims and interests of the stronger side..”
By Ran HaCohen*
“If the only way to save your child’s life is by betraying your brother, what would you do? The permit system allows the Israeli occupation forces to spot the soft points of a Palestinian – a family tragedy, a sick child, a dying parent, financial plight – and take advantage of them. The weakest is always the easiest prey..”
(ANTIWAR.COM) - One of the difficulties in writing regularly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, in my eyes, that so little ever changes. The basic constants – above all, Israel’s overwhelming military, economic, and political superiority, all serving its colonialist aims – change slightly over years, if at all. The media concentrate on immediate episodes: a violent incident, a statement, a peace plan – but in hindsight, they all make very little difference. In the longer term, the realities on the ground are ultimately derived from the aims and interests of the stronger side, with minor considerations, modifications, or delays due to Palestinian resistance or international reservations.
Blockade on Gaza
[click link at the end of the article to read about this]
Apartheid Roads in the West Bank
“For nearly five years, the basic freedom of movement has been denied to 2.5 million residents in the West Bank. … Most of the roads in the West Bank are desolate, with no people or cars. On days [Shabbat] and hours when the settlers are not traveling on them, they become ghost roads. … If you strain your eyes, you will notice at the sides of the road the traffic lanes assigned to the Palestinians: pathways through the terraces winding up the hills, goat paths on which cars are sputtering, including those carrying the sick, women in labor, pupils, and ordinary citizens who decide to place their life in their hands in order to travel for two to three hours to reach the neighboring village.”
The Permit System
There are about 700 checkpoints and roadblocks spread throughout the West Bank. The checkpoints are not an ad hoc measure for the short term; they are part of long-term policy. The checkpoints are supported by an entire bureaucratic edifice, responsible for the permit system. Incredible as it sounds, a Palestinian needs an Israeli permit to pass internal checkpoints within the occupied territories – not just from the Occupied Territories to Israel, but also between the different geographical cells in the West Bank, whose borders are defined by the Israel security forces; in order to get to the Palestinian enclaves that have been created by the Wall; in order to move between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank; and between both of these and East Jerusalem. The permits are issued by eight so-called “District Coordination and Liaison Offices” (DCO) – historically a joint Palestinian-Israeli institution of the Oslo period, but in fact the authority to issue permits is exclusively in Israeli hands.
The DCOs are chronically – i.e., intentionally – undermanned; applicants wait for hours on end, treated like cattle, humiliated by rude Israeli teenage soldiers who are given the chance to play God over the helpless colonized subjects. A permit is issued – or, more often, not issued – by a confidential, unaccounted-for decision by Israel’s notorious General Security Services. Estimated hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, mostly men, are blacklisted by the GSS and cannot get even a magnetic card, which is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition to get a permit of any kind. Appeals to a court or even just hiring a lawyer often makes the GSS change their mind, exposing the total arbitrariness of their previous rejections. Rules for blacklisting Palestinians are Kafkaesque: if a Palestinian is killed by a settler or soldier, the whole family is blacklisted – thus deprived of job opportunities, access to health and education facilities, etc. – for fear of revenge. If issued, a permit can be valid for a few days or for a month, from sunrise to sunset only; it has to be renewed regularly.
*-Dr. Ran HaCohen is a university teacher in Israel. He also works as a literary translator and as a literary critic for the Israeli daily Yedioth Achronoth. Mr. HaCohen’s work has been published widely in Israel. “Letter from Israel” appears occasionally at Antiwar.com
Parts of this article are not complete, I gave myself the right to choose a must-read sub-parts.
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Related tags: Palestine, Gaza disengagement, Apartheid Wall
