Bradley Burston : The Occupation Makes Israelis Stupid
It is the settlement enterprise which runs the occupation. And it is the occupation which now runs Israel.
haaretz.com
There are things which even your best friends won't tell you.
Maybe they won't tell you because they fear you'll take it wrong. Or be unwilling to listen. Or cease to be your friend.
But these people I live with, my people, the Israelis, always say just come out with it. So here it is:
The occupation makes Israelis stupid.
These are not by nature stupid
people – far from it. They are, or at least they once were, shrewd,
adaptable, pragmatic, innovative and independent thinking people. But
the occupation makes them stupid.
For most Israelis, the
occupation is unseen, literally walled off from view. It is the swamp to
be avoided, the painful sore best left under the cover of thick
bandages.
It wasn't always like
this. But the more it gets like this, the more entrenched the
occupation becomes. And the more hidden and misrepresented and unreal it
becomes to most Israelis, the more the occupation makes Israelis – and
the occupation's rightwing supporters abroad – stupid.
It is the need to defend the
occupation which compels intelligent people like Benjamin Netanyahu to
insist that "wild and false" Palestinian incitement, coupled with "the
will to have us exterminated" are solely to blame for the wave of
knifings and car-rammings against Israelis over the past month.
Of course, we realize, the
attacks cannot be a result of anything else. Because if they were, we
might have to do something about that particular Anything Else – which
is the occupation.
It is the effort to defend the
occupation – as opposed to defending Israel - which brings the
government, and many of its supporters abroad, to stridently deny that
a principal driving force of the violence is the systematic, permanent,
and ever-expanding deprivation of the most basic rights of the
Palestinians living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
It is in fostering occupation -
as opposed to working for a society, in the words of the Declaration of
Independence "based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the
prophets of Israel" – that keeps millions of Palestinians from rights to
property, employment, freedoms of expression and movement, the right to
vote, the right to elemental due process of law. In all, a system which
we have come to know as the occupation.
Just last week, Israel's Chief
of Military Intelligence was attacked in Netanyahu's cabinet for
telling the ministers that there were three main triggers of the
eruption of bloodshed: tensions over the Temple Mount, the late July
firebombing triple-murder of the Dawabsheh family of the West Bank
Palestinian village of Duma, and "an overall sense of hopelessness and
frustration among the younger generation of Palestinians," senior Israel
journalist Ben Caspit reported.
Many of the young Palestinians
decided to carry out attacks because they were in despair over the
state of things “and felt they had nothing to lose," intelligence chief
Maj. General Herzl Halevi continued.
Cabinet minister Ze'ev Elkin,
angered that Halevi had not laid all of the blame on incitement,
reportedly declared that Halevy's view was essentially reciting "the
Palestinian narrative." Elkin was further quoted as saying that it
seemed as if Halevi were "a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority and
not the Israeli government."
Ze'ev Elkin is not a stupid
man, far, far from it. But the power of the occupation is such that it
grants him the authority – as a man who entered the IDF as a private and
finished the IDF as a private– to lecture the chief of Military Intelligence on security issues.
Ze'ev Elkin is also a settler.
It is the settlement enterprise that runs the occupation. And, through
people like Elkin, it is now the occupation which runs Israel.
The settlement enterprise is,
when all is said and done, the only reason for the occupation, which is
the settlements' servant and Golem.
The occupation makes Israelis
stupid. Because they know where it's leading us. They know that it will
cost us in children, children drafted to enforce the occupation,
children endangered because of the evils of the occupation, children who
leave Israel because they don't want their children to be victims of
occupation.
Late last month, when Benjamin Netanyahu finally unveiled his fundamental prediction of
the Israel to come (" … we need to control all of the territory for the
foreseeable future … we will forever live by the sword …") it was the
occupation speaking, clear as day.
It was, in fact, an
unintentional echo of former Alabama Governor George Wallace's 1963
inaugural address, in which he declared "segregation now, segregation
tomorrow, segregation forever."
Occupation makes Israelis
stupid. It makes them into what they fear the most – what they think us
native North Americans and other "Anglo-Saxim" are at heart – freiers,
chumps, easy marks.
What Netanyahu is selling is
an amalgam of evils, slavery, segregation, and apartheid, each one of
which seemed permanent in its time. And because occupation does what it
does, Israelis are still buying it.
I'm not immune. I watched it
happen to me. I served in - sorry, I occupied – southern Lebanon,
northern Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And in each
case, it seemed permanent. At the time.
But the occupation had made me
stupid. And I didn't account for the unforeseen. Just as one day, I
believe, the combined efforts of a phalanx of worthwhile NGOs and, who
knows, an asteroid hitting earth, will break the occupation into all of
the millions of broken shards it deserves.
As it turns out - and I know
I've both said and forgotten this in the past - there's no such thing as
permanent anywhere. Not even stupidity.
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