The Other Occupation. posted by Richard Seymour

If Iraq is an example of a failed occupation, Israel is perhaps the most successful and enduring occupation in history. So successful in legitimising itself, in fact, that the only problem it now has is with how much of the land it has claimed it may keep. I've written about it before, but Israel's double-bind in the Occupied Territories is germane to something I discovered today thanks to a friendly e-mail spectre.

"The Demographic Problem"
In a nutshell, the problem is as put by Yitzhak Rabin to his own party back in 1976:

The majority of the people living in a Jewish State must be Jewish. We must prevent a situation of an insufficient Jewish majority and we dare not have a Jewish minority.... The minority is entitled to equal rights as individuals with respect to their distinct religion and culture, but not more than that.

Religious and cultural rights, but not political rights. Binyamin Netanyahu got himself into trouble for saying this a couple of years ago:

Netanyahu's speech, his first diplomatic address since becoming finance minister, attacked Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's call for a withdrawal from most of the territories due to the concern that Israel could not remain a Jewish democratic state if it didn't ensure a 80% Jewish majority.

...

"We do have a demographic problem but it is with the Arab Israelis, not the Palestinians," Netanyahu said. "The declaration of independence depicts Israel as both Jewish and democratic. To stop democracy from wiping out the Jewish nature of the country we must insure the Jewish majority. Incorporating the Arab Israelis fully into Israeli society should be done hand in hand with protecting the Jewish nature of that society," he said.

The left-wing Israeli historian Baruch Kimmerling notes that this is precisely one of the considerations underlying present Israeli policy toward the Occupied Territories, since the Palestinian population is set to rise exponentially. Annexing the Occupied Territories right now would immediately lead to a binational state:

[T]he territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river contains 5 million Jews (and non-Arabs) and 4.5 million Palestinians (citizens and non-citizens).

Current demographic projections indicate that future population figures will favour the Palestinians and further imperil the slender Jewish demographic majority. Arnon Sofer, a geographer from Haifa University, calculates that by the year 2020, a total of 15.1 million persons will live on the land of historic Palestine with Jews being a minority of 6.5 million. (Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War Against the Palestinians, Verso 2003, p 17).

"Greater Israel"
This represents a serious challenge to the very idea of a Jewish State. The other side of the bind is the historic commitment of Zionist leaders, both right and left, to the notion of a Greater Israel. In Ben Gurion's words:

Just as I do not see the proposed Jewish state as a final solution to the problems of the Jewish people, so I do now see partition as the final solution of the Palestine question. Those who reject partition are right in their claim that this country cannot be partitioned because it constitute one unit, not only from a historical point of view but also from that of nature and economy ... after the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the [Jewish] state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of the Palestine.

Avi Shlaim in The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000) describes how the doctrine of 'the Iron Wall', (Ze'ev Jabotinsky's argument that overwhelming military force would be needed before the Arabs would even consider sharing land which they, rightly, considered theirs) has not merely been the informing policy of both Labour and Likud governments, but is also being distorted and amplified into an even more vicious doctrine by the Israeli right today. Netanyahu argues that there can be no peace with Arab states, and that the Iron Wall posture must remain in place to ward off Arab hostility. He ardently espouses the dream of an undivided Land of Israel, in the tradition of the revisionist right, which bases its claim on ancient biblical maps. (John Rose expertly demolishes the nonsense around this in The Myths of Zionism (2004)).

Since Israeli governments of both left and right have in practise pursued a Greater Israel, it would make sense for them to find a way to resolve the demographic problem without exciting international attention. Yes, I am being deliberately sarcastic with those euphemisms.

The Solution.
The problem is therefore as follows: how to hold on to effective control of the Occupied Territories, annexing much of the land without absorbing too many Palestinians. Hence, the offer of bantustans at Camp David in 2000 - thin strips of land punctuated by settlements. Hence, the continuation of settlement-building in the West Bank, which Israel will not be withdrawing from, during the Oslo years (and especially under the odious racist, Ehud Barak).

But what about the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, where the settlements are to be dismantled? True, there are only 17 settlements in Gaza compared to 118 in the West Bank, but still - a concession to realism, perhaps? A miserly, pitiful gesture toward the possible construction of a sovereign Palestinian state, if nothing else to soften its international image and give Bush something to talk about? A recognition of the demographic problem for the Jewish State?

So I had thought. It transpires that Israel will remain an occupying power under law in Gaza. According to the UN Special Rapporteur:

It plans to retain ultimate control over Gaza by controlling its borders, territorial sea and airspace. Consequently, it will in law remain an Occupying Power still subject to obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

There you are, then. There is to be no relinquishing of the grip on Gaza, just a mild loosening. The West Bank will, in all likelihood, continue to sprout settlements like a teenager pustulating. And the Palestinians who live in these areas? The IDF has been doing its best to ensure that as few as possible can stand to remain, not merely by bulldozing homes, shooting civilians, blasting neighbourhoods, torturing prisoners and so on. They have also struck at one of the few remaining means of Palestinian subsistence, by destroying 4,000,000 square metres of cultivated land including olive groves . They have bulldozed homes in Gaza to create a 'buffer zone' on the border with Egypt, and Human Rights Watch report that in 2004 alone the IDF made 16,000 people homeless - whether they were suspected of insurrection or not. They are planning now to destroy 3,000 homes in the Gaza Strip under a spurious pretext .

One would be forgiven for thinking that the Israeli government was sending a strong hint to the Palestinians to leave.