Psagot is an Israeli
settlement created in 1981 at the top of a mountain overlooking the twin
Palestinian cities Ramallah and Al-Bireh. The settlers came and made an
accomplished fact placing mobile homes at the mountain. The Palestinian
landowners turned to the Supreme Court in Jerusalem but their appeal was
rejected. Since then, the settlement has developed and grown and nowadays some
300 families live there. All of them are national-religious families who
believe that the whole of Eretz Yisrael was promised to the Jewish people and
that it is the right and he duty of Jews to settle in any place of it.
Many times the settlement
of Psagot was the focus of violent confrontations, during the first Intifada
and the second one, and also in between, continuing after the Oslo Agreement
and the creation of the Palestinian Authority. The inhabitants of Ramallah, the
PA capital, can see from far Psagot on the mountain top, surrounded by high
fences and guarded by soldiers.
Last weekend, a hooded
Palestinian cut the fence and entered into Psagot. He encountered a 9-year old
girl, named Noam Glick, who was playing in the backyard, and wounded her. The
girl cried out and the Palestinian escaped. The girl's father, Israel Glick,
who is among the founders of the settlement, told the media representatives who
had immediately arrived: "My daughter is a heroine! She saved all of
us." The girl was taken to hospital and her wound fortunately turned out
to be light.
This case is known to
everybody in Israel, even to those who give the news only a brief glance. It
was the banner headline in all the papers. In Yediot Aharonot, the whole of the
three first pages were devoted exclusively to the heroic child-victim Noam
Glick and the anger of her parents and the other Psagot settlers, and the
settlers in general, and the right-wing politicians who immediately demanded
far-reaching measures against the Palestinians, and Prime Minister
Netanyahu. Also the international media,
especially the American, took up this news item.
On exactly the same
weekend there was another event, also centered on a child - at the entrance to
the el-Fawwar Refugee Camp south of Hebron.
The el-Fawwar camp was created in 1949 to
shelter Palestinian refugees from Bait
Jibrin and Beersheba. Now about seven thousand people live there in crowded
circumstances - the original refugees and their descendants. Like other Refugee
Camps, el-Fawwar had always been a focus of agitation and militant Palestinian
nationalism. Often, the camp youth confront Israeli soldiers who pass at the
main highway near the camp, or penetrating into it. So also in recent months.
There is certainly felt there the general warming up of the situation in the
occupied territories. The same escalation about which Israeli experts again and
again make statements such as: "It is not (yet) a third intifada."
Also on this weekend a
confrontation developed between soldiers and stone-throwing youths at the gate
of el-Fawwar. The soldiers blocked the
gate and started shooting tear gas as well as what is called "rubber
bullets". In fact these bullets are of metal, covered with a layer of
rubber and - when used at short range -
could be lethal.
On this occasion the range
was not that close. Some 40 meters separated the soldiers from the Sarahneh
family who were returning home to el-Fawwar after visiting relatives. The
6-year Musab Srahneh was holding his mother's hand when the rubber bullet hit
him directly in the eye. He was immediately taken to hospital, but the eye
could not be saved. "I still can't believe it. I went out of the home with
a child, whole and healthy, and I come back with my little son having to live
with only one eye until his last day," said the father to the Palestinian
Ma'an press agency. The Palestinian media was the only press reporting on this
case.
Two days after the weekend
that the Israeli girl and the Palestinian boy were wounded, the prime minister
of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu, delivered a speech at Bar Ilan University. He
had once before spoken at this same location - four and half years ago. The
2009 Bar Ilan speech was the occasion where Netanyahu uttered for the first
time the words "a Palestinian state", without specifying where it
would be and what would be its borders. Also in the 2nd Bar Ilan speech, of
this week, Netanyahu did not disperse the fog. He did present a long and
substantive list of pre-conditions which Palestinians must meet before the
possibility of creating their independent state comes on the agenda. They must
give up the Right of Return, and agree that Israel has wide and deep security
arrangements within the territory of their state, and of course "recognize
Israel as a Jewish state".
Netanyahu drew his
arguments from how he sees the history. "The conflict started in 1921 when
Arab Palestinians attacked the Immigrants House. That was not because of
occupation or territories but because they opposed the immigration of Jews into
the country."
The above, at least, is
how these lines were translated into English. But it is an inexact translation,
since the Hebrew which Netanyahu used included terms whose connotations cannot
really be conveyed in any other language. It was not "the immigrants
house" but "the house of the Olim", not "immigration of
Jews into the country" but "Aliya to the historic Homeland". The
term "Aliya" means that a Jew who moves to this country from any
other place has ascended upwards, performed a virtuous deed deserving praise. This good deed can only be performed
by a Jew. For example, Jews who came here from Egypt are "Olim"
(i.e.: they came back from exile to the land of their ancestors). On the other
hand, Muslims or Christians who did the same track from Egypt to here are not
considered such. By this ideology, they are considered as "invaders, and
unwanted guests in the Jewish ancestral land."
The concepts
"Aliya" and "Olim" and the ideology behind them, the
Palestinians refused and refuse to accept - in 1921 and nowadays. Also in the
year 2013 the Palestinians will not declare the Zionist project to have been
justified all the way, and proclaim that it was by right that the Jews have
come to inherit the lands where their biblical ancestors lived - even if the
Palestinians do accept the accomplished fact, called "the State of
Israel" and are willing to make peace with it in the borders which it had
until June 1967.
The right-wingers, who had
been a bit apprehensive, sighed in relief after hearing Netanyahu - quickly
congratulating the PM for "good, strong, Zionist words." Only Yossi
Beilin, of Oslo agreement fame, spoiled the party, delving deeper into the
depths of Zionist history. In 1891, precisely 30 years before the attack on the
House of Immigrants, there arrived in this country Asher Ginsburg, better known
as "Achad Ha'am", who was among the founders and important thinkers
of the Zionist movement. He visited the first Zionist colonies and was quite
disturbed by what he saw. After going back to Russia, he wrote an article which
was called "Truth from Eretz Yisrael." This article is usually not
included in the curriculum of Israeli schools, which gives precedence to his
less controversial ones. But Yossi Beilin took care to publish significant
quotations this week:
"Abroad, we are used
to believe that the Arabs are all desert savages, who don't see and don't
understand what is going on around them. But this is a big mistake. The Arab,
like all Semites, has a sharp mind and is full of cunning. The Arabs, and
especially the city dwellers, see and understand what we are doing and what we
are trying to achieve in the country. However, they keep silent and pretend not
to understand, because at the moment they don't regard our acts as a danger to
their future. But if the moment will come when the life of our people in Eretz
Yisrael will develop to the point that we will displace, to a lesser or greater
extent, the people of the land, these people will not easily make place. (...)
"This certainly we
could have learned from our past and present, that we must be careful not to
arouse the anger of the people of the land by despicable acts. We must be very
careful in our behavior towards the strangers among whom we come back to live,
behaving to them with honor and respect, and needless to say: with justice. And
what do our brethren in Eretz Yisrael do? Precisely the opposite! Slaves they
have been in the land of their exile. And suddenly they find themselves in
boundless liberty, wild liberty as can only be found in such a country as
Turkey. This sudden change has aroused in their hearts a tendency towards
despotism, as always happens when 'the slave becomes a king.' They are behaving
to the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, unjustly trespass on their land;
beating them shamefully without any sufficient reason, and even boast of all
these deeds. There is nobody to stand in the bridge and stop this despicable
and dangerous tendency. Indeed our brethren are right when they say that the Arab
respects only who shows him strength and courage. However, this is only when he
feels that his opponent is right. It is not like that when he has good reason
to consider what his opponent does as outright injustice and robbery. In that
case, though the Arab may keep silent and restrain himself for some time, he
will keep the grudge in his heart and there is nobody like him to take
revenge."
Hundred twenty two years
after Achad Ha'am wrote these lines, Lior Dayan went to Ramallah. Lior Dayan,
an Israeli writer and journalist, grandson of the general and politician Moshe
Dayan, and son of the actor and film director Assi Dayan, has prepared an
extensive TV reportage of what he has seen among the Palestinians in a city
which is half an hour drive of the center of Jerusalem and which most Israelis
never visited.
In addition to what was
broadcast on TV, Lior Dayan expressed his impressions also verbally: In
Ramallah I felt anger in the streets. Everywhere you get the feeling that you
are on the threshold of a flare-up. My feeling, when I was there, that it is
just a matter of time until the next Intifada breaks out. On the day when I
came back from Ramallah, there already started stormy demonstrations following
the hunger strike of the Palestinian detainees in Ofer Prison. Therefore there
is in my eyes supreme importance to seeking an agreement with the Palestinians
and moving to a two-state solution. That's what I understood in Ramallah: we
live on boroughed time, we are two minutes before the next explosion. I saw it
in the looks of the people, in the graffiti on the unpainted walls, in the eyes
of Arafat and Abu Mazen which looked to me from framed photos everywhere where
I entered; from the despair of the taxi driver who told me that his two sons
can't find a job.
It is important to admit
that this fury has good reason. To go through the Qalandiya checkpoint is as
enjoyable as going through a meat grinder. From day to day there are more
settlement buildings on the Ramallah horizon, and on the way to Ramallah you
pass Refugee Camps which provide the human eye with unendurable sights."
The similarity to the
warning of Achad Ha'am, not heeded by his generation, may not be accidental.
