Gideon Levy : Undemocratic from the river to the sea
With the approach this week of celebrations
marking Israel’s 70th birthday, 12 million people live in the country.
Some of them are citizens, some are residents, some are detainees, and
all are subjects. Everyone’s fate has been determined by the country’s
governing institutions.
On this Independence Day,
we have to acknowledge that the country’s genuine borders are the
Mediterranean Sea to the west and the Jordan River to the east,
including not only the West Bank but also the Gaza Strip.
Israel controls all this territory and everyone who lives there through
various and sundry means, even if from a legal standpoint there’s no
mention of this.
Forget the law. Israel long ago abandoned it. In
practice it rules Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In the case
of Gaza, it suffices with control from the outside, which is more
convenient. On Israel’s 70th birthday, the time has come to recognize
that the occupation of the territories in 1967 is not temporary. It was
never meant to be and never will be. The 1967 border has been erased.
The distinction between 1948 and 1967 doesn’t exist.
It
was only in the state’s first 19 years, a blink of an eye from a
historical perspective, that the country existed without the
territories. For the balance of its history, the occupation has been an
inseparable part of it, its character, its government, its essence, its
DNA. What existed here for a brief time and is gone will not be coming
back.
It’s critical that we rip the cover off the
alleged transience of the occupation, which for some Israelis has been a
sweet delusion and for others a dangerous threat. There is an abyss
dividing a temporary occupation and a permanent one.
In its early years, Israel was small in area and
population, but its youth, like everyone’s youth, quickly passed. For
most of its existence, Israel hasn’t resembled the girl we remember. Its
days as a small country with a Jewish majority have passed and the
clock can’t be turned back. It’s no longer the small woman of our
dreams. It’s the big woman of our nightmares.
On Israel’s 70th birthday, the time has come to
recognize that Israel is a binational state under whose control two
peoples live, equal in size. It maintains separate governing systems for them: a democratic one for Jews, discrimination for Israeli Arabs, and dictatorship for Palestinians. It’s not an equal democracy for all its subjects, meaning, of course, that it’s not a democracy.
There’s
no such democracy where what’s allowed for one people isn’t for
another. Therefore, on its 70th anniversary, Israel being called a
democracy when fewer than half its subjects live in freedom is nothing
but a propaganda trick that has worked to a greater extent than one
would have thought.
It’s not only Israelis who deny and repress this
reality. It’s more convenient for the Western world, too, to look at
Israel’s more enlightened side, to ignore its dark side and continue to
call it a democracy. After all, in the West, what country hasn’t also
had such a colonialist back yard? And who could really confront Israel, a
country that rose from the ashes?
Israel
is therefore the darling of the West, despite the hollow lip service to
the Palestinians, and so the West too has embraced the excuse of the
occupation’s temporary nature: “Just wait, wait a little longer for the
‘peace process’ and the Israelis will be pulling out of the
territories.” So it’s important that the lie of the transience of the
occupation be exposed.
If
the occupation isn’t temporary, it would be clear that Israel isn’t a
democracy but rather an apartheid state par excellence. Two peoples and
two systems of rights. That’s was apartheid looks like, even if it hides
behind excuses ranging from temporariness to security grounds, from the
right to the land to the concept of the chosen people, including the
divine promise and messianic redemption.
These
excuses don’t change the picture. In South Africa, no doubt an
apartheid state, the regime invoked similar excuses to justify its
existence. No one bought them. But with Israel there actually are
buyers. One difference between South Africa and Israel is that Israel is
stronger, more sophisticated and better connected to the world. And it
has done a better job obscuring its apartheid.
It’s
big, strong and nondemocratic. Israel oppresses the Palestinians
through various means with one result: There isn’t a single free
Palestinian in the West Bank or Gaza Strip. Their fate is determined by
the Israeli government in Jerusalem and the Defense Ministry in Tel
Aviv, and they have no rights at either one. Is this not apartheid? Is
it democracy?
And
now on to the showy and proud Independence Day ceremonies planned by
Culture Minister Miri Regev. Let’s not rain on her parade.
Gideon Levy
Haaretz Correspondent
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