Earlier this month, Israelis celebrated the 40th anniversary of the 1967 ‘Six-Day War’ with much fanfare and glorious tales of heroism. Despite the many analyses and historical studies, most Israeli Jews still believe that the 1967 war was one of survival. Some even believe that the recent attack on Lebanon was a war of survival – despite the findings of the government-appointed committee of inquiry which has shown clearly that the war had been planned months before Hezbollah kidnapped the two Israeli soldiers.
However, as the Palestinians and their supporters mark the 40th anniversary of the occupation of the Palestinian Territories, and despite the rhetoric of Israeli victimhood, in the war between Israel and the Palestinians there are no winners. The occupation has shaped the lives of both Israelis and Palestinians in untold ways, but it has definitely made a living hell for the Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (which, despite the recent re-deployment, is still under Israeli military rule, complete with targeted extrajudicial assassinations and incursions as the Israel Occupation Force sees fit).
The biggest measure of harassment against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories (OT) in recent years has been the horrible apartheid wall, sanitisingly called the ‘separation fence‘ in Israeli security speak. The wall means that, in going about their daily business – going to work, visiting relatives, shopping, going to the hospital, school or university – Palestinians are never sure how long it will take, because of the discretion exercised by the soldiers staffing the many checkpoints and wall openings, dubbed (again sanitisingly) as ‘terminals’.
Other measures include the law prohibiting Palestinians with foreign (including Western) passports from gaining permanent residency in the OT, even in those areas designated as under the sovereignty of the Palestinian Authority, and the prohibition on OT residents to marry Palestinians with Israeli IDs – many couples exist in a legal dangerous twilight zone.
On top of this, there is the distancing of the Palestinians’ daily grind from most Israelis. It is only thanks to a few courageous and watchful groups such as Checkpoint Watch – a group of women observing the checkpoints to minimise the harassment – or the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, dedicated to re-building demolished Palestin-ian homes, and to a few brave journalists such as Amira Hass and Gideon Levy of Haaretz, that Israelis cannot get away with saying ‘we didn’t know’.
As an Israeli who has been publicly opposed to the occupation since 1967, I am also aware that in commemorating the 40th anniversary of this horrific situation, we must remember that the occupation of Palestine had begun many years earlier, with the 1948 conquest of historic Palestine, in what Israeli Jews call their ‘war of independence’ – and the Palestinians their Nakba, or catastrophe.
Struggling together with my Palestinian colleagues for freedom for Palestine, I am committed to a single democratic, secular state solution. To quote Saree Makdisi’s recent article in The Nation (4 June 2007): “Having unified all of what used to be Palestine (albeit into one profoundly divided space) without having overcome the Palestinian people’s will to resist, Zionism has run its course. And in so doing, it has terminated any possibility of a two-state solution. There remains but one possibility for peace with justice: truth, reconciliation – and a single democratic and secular state, a state in which there will be no ‘natives’ and ‘settlers’ and all will be equal; a state for all its citizens irrespective of their religious affiliation.”
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Eireann
