BY AHMED NIMER
RAMALLAH — The remarkable ease with which the mainstream media obscures the reality of life for Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip has been starkly demonstrated by its coverage of US President George Bush's June 24 speech, in which Washington's policy on the Palestinian crisis was spelled out.
The fact that half of the West Bank's 2 million Palestinian people live under total house arrest is not mentioned by the Western press. Every Palestinian town in the West Bank, with the exception of Jericho, is under complete military occupation by Israel's soldiers and tanks.
Tanks and jeeps patrol the streets announcing that a curfew is in place and that any resident who leaves their house will be shot on sight. Since June 14, at least 20 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers. The vast majority were civilians trying to go about their daily lives.
Palestinians who live in the countryside find their villages completely cut off from the towns. All life has come to a complete stop — no-one is able to go to work or school, even the 29,000 students due to sit their matriculation exams have had their tests cancelled.
Instead of acknowledging the daily abuse and collective punishment inflicted upon Palestinians by Israel, Bush on June 24 chose to portray Israelis as the victims of unceasing "terror".
Washington's cynical hypocrisy was no better demonstrated by the fact that on the day Bush delivered his speech, six Palestinians in the Gaza Strip were killed as an Israeli missile which deliberately hit a taxi.
For Bush, other Western governments and the capitalist mass media, Palestinian civilians who are killed by the most advanced military power in the Middle East while travelling to work are not considered victims of "terror". After all, the military forces that have occupied the West Bank and Gaza for 35 years are on Washington's side in its international "war against terrorism".
Bush's speech was another green light to Israel's government to continue its "bantustanisation" of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Throughout June, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government has been carrying out a plan aimed at expropriating land in the West Bank and forcing Palestinians into small cantons resembling the reservations (bantustans) for Africans set up by South Africa's apartheid government.
A 9-metre high wall stretching for hundreds of kilometres is being built around the northern West Bank towns of Nablus, Jenin, Qalqilya and Tulkarem. A similar wall is being built around Jerusalem.
In conjunction with this, a pass-card system has been put in place that requires any Palestinian wishing to move between Palestinian towns to obtain a special weekly permit issued by Israel's military commander of the West Bank. All goods moving into Palestinian areas must pass through one of three transit points under the control of the Israeli military.
The West Bank has been divided into three bantustans — in the north, centre and south — separated by large Israeli settlements and massive highways that are off-limits to Palestinians. Special license plates distinguish Palestinian drivers from Israelis drivers. They symbolise the emerging apartheid system that is being imposed in the West Bank.
The Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip has been cut off from the West Bank for more than a decade. It constitutes the fourth bantustan under the Israel's plan. The Gaza Strip has been surrounded by a fence for many years and is now one of the most densely populated areas on the planet, with 1 million people literally locked into a few square kilometres. Permits are even required from Israel's military for Palestinian fisherpeople to venture out to sea.
These four bantustans constitute what Bush referred to in his speech as the "provisional Palestinian state". In reality, they form the basis for Israel's version of apartheid for the Palestinians.
The movement of Palestinians and their economy will remain under the control of the Israeli military and government. While the Palestinian population will supposedly be "ruled" by the Palestinian Authority (PA), any power it has will be dependent on the whims of governments of Israel and the United States.
The primary responsibility of the PA will be to ensure the "security" of Israel by acting as a police force on behalf of Israel. In the classic colonialist sense, the natives are to be given "self-rule", carefully circumscribed within Israel's continuing control and domination.
This apartheid plan is not a new invention. Between 1967 and 1977, Israel's Labor government unofficially followed what was known as the Allon Plan. This called for the construction of settlements in Jerusalem and along the Jordan valley. These settlements were considered "security buffers" and divided the West Bank from Jordan.
During the mid-1980s, construction of Israeli settlements shifted to the creation of corridors between Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley settlements. In the north of the West Bank, settlements were constructed between the major Palestinian towns of Nablus and Ramallah, dividing them from each other.
In 1991, Sharon announced his "Seven stars" plan, which called for the construction of Israeli settlements with the intent of dissolving the border between the West Bank and Israel. This plan represented the first stage of encircling Palestinian towns and villages and delineating the contours of the future Palestinian bantustans. Its underlying goal was to control the Palestinian people without having to directly occupy their population centres.
The second stage was the Oslo accords of 1993 and 1995, which established the PA as the self-rule government and obtained official recognition through negotiations for the future bantustan state. Settlement expansion was accelerated, while the PA was given control over basic social services. Israel's military withdrew from direct occupation of Palestinian areas. The Palestinian economy formed a sub-sector of the Israeli economy and all borders were completely controlled by the Israeli military.
Israel's present intensification of its war against the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories is an attempt to force the Palestinian people to accept the final stage of this bantustanisation. The US government stands fully behind Israel because it is Washington's key ally and partner in controlling the markets, cheap labour and oil of the Middle East. Washington knows it can count on Israel to act decisively against any attempts by any Arab people to take control of their political and economic future, as was demonstrated in 1967.
Following Bush's speech, the Palestinian and Arab masses overwhelmingly condemned his overt support for Israel. Despite the curfew, grassroots leaders of all political factions leading the Palestinian intifada distributed leaflets that condemned Bush's support for Israel.
However, the PA leadership presented a different response. PA President Yasser Arafat and his closest advisers said Bush's speech was "balanced with many interesting ideas" and urged a quick resumption of negotiations to put those ideas into practice.
The split between the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian population, who support a continuation of the intifada, and the PA leadership is becoming more marked. The Palestinian "street" is calling for democracy and an end to corruption. However, what the masses mean by "reform" of the PA has a completely different content to that being demanded by the Bush and Sharon regimes.
As a leader of the Palestinian National and Islamic Forces (the umbrella grassroots organisation that is leading the intifada) told Green Left Weekly: "Bush is calling for democracy and the rule of law, yet it was the US and Israeli governments which supported the Palestinian security forces in their activities to suppress the Palestinian population in the years following Oslo. Most recently, it was the US, Britain and Israel that organised the imprisonment of Ahmed Sa'adat [the general secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a prominent opponent of the Oslo process] without trial or charge."
Sa'adat and five other Palestinian activists remain in a Jericho prison under the supervision of a British official who ran Northern Ireland's notorious Maze Prison. This is despite an order issued by the Palestinian High Court for Sa'adat's immediate release.
Palestinians continue to debate the issue of military operations inside Israel that take the lives of Israeli civilians. In June, Palestinian academics and non-government organisation leaders issued two statements in Palestinian newspapers calling for an end to these attacks.
While the debate around this issue has been vigorous, the signatories to these statements do not represent the overwhelming sentiment of the Palestinian population. The vast majority of Palestinians continue to support these attacks as a legitimate and natural response to the daily reality of Israel's military occupation.
The signatories have been criticised because their statements did not mention that the root cause of these attacks is the homelessness and desperation that the Palestinian people feel in the face of daily attacks by an overwhelmingly superior military force.
From Green Left Weekly, July 3, 2002.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.