Israeli advantages

I wrote a couple of days ago about the current Palestinian narrative. Today I’ll try to describe the Jewish Israeli narrative, though that is more difficult because there is a far wider range of views. The Palestinians seem to me to have become a nation (that is: a community with a common language, culture and beliefs about their identity, even though most are Muslim and a small percentage Christian) but failed to complete their state, partly due to Israeli resistance. The Jews have built an impressive state that dominates both in Israel inside the 1967 borders and outside them, but their nation is less fully formed. My liberal Judaism, to which most American Jews adhere, is a small and sometimes barely tolerated minority in Israel.

Many Israeli Jews believe their presence in the West Bank and the (not complete) blockade of Gaza are security necessities. They attribute the decline of terrorist attacks in Israel to the security barrier, which they like to call a fence (they claim it is 92% fence and only 8% wall). They are pleased with the recently unveiled capacity to detect and destroy tunnels Hamas and others dig into Israel from Gaza. Even Israeli Jews who would like to see withdrawal from the West Bank in order to allow the creation of a Palestinian state emphasize that the Jewish settlements there constitute a small percentage of the land area: some say less than 3%, others less than 6%, as it depends on what you count.

There is little doubt though that someone in Jerusalem is planning the settlements and infrastructure (roads, electricity, water) for a permanent presence in the West Bank, especially but not only in the territory near Jerusalem that the Israelis have formally annexed. The settlements already break up the areas the Palestinian Authority controls or administers into more than 150 enclaves (islands). Some are connected by tunnels, but not most. The right-wing parties that participate in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government want to expand the population living in the West Bank to one million, while legalizing many outposts that are currently considered illegal.

Some claim that the settlements built on state or privately owned land are legitimate. This relies on a claim that Israel is the successor state to Jordan, the British mandate, and the Ottoman Empire in the territory it controls, a claim that has been neither agreed nor adjudicated so far as I am aware. Some also believe legitimate settlements should be able to stay under Palestinian sovereignty after final status is decided. That is difficult to imagine in practice, but there are certainly Israeli Jews putting it forward in theory.

When talking about the Palestinians, many less liberal Israeli Jews–and for that matter American ones–betray an attitude that can only be described as discriminatory, or worse. One carefully explained that the more Orthodox Jewish settlements outside the 1967 borders were built to give poor Haredim more acceptable living conditions than in the crowded neighborhoods of West Jerusalem. There is little concern or funding for the crowded Palestinian neighborhoods, and certainly no building of new towns for them near Jerusalem. Another cited his settlement’s good relations with its Arab neighbors–a laudable achievement–in terms that suggested their social and cultural inferiority. Americans should be familiar with these attitudes: in a more virulent form, they now occupy the mind of the current inhabitant of the White House when it comes to Mexican and African Americans, not to mention all of Africa and Haiti.

Israeli Jews both inside and outside the 1967 borders find the current situation tolerable. Most have little contact with Arabs, apart from those who do construction or menial jobs. Intellectual interchange with Palestinians is now mostly limited to a Jewish elite that sympathizes with their desire for self-determination. The fence/wall is not only physical but psychological and cultural. The costs of securing (the Palestinians would say occupying) the West Bank and blockading Gaza are tolerable. Tuesday’s “day of rage” against Trump/Pence proved eminently manageable. The Israelis exploit the water and other resources of the West Bank with abandon, training their soldiers in its nature parks and raiding supposedly Palestinian-secured areas at will while denying building permits.

There is an enormous power imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians: politically, militarily, and economically Israel is overwhelmingly dominant. Its per capita GDP is perhaps 20 times that of the Palestinians outside the 1967 borders. The Palestinians have no army and apart from their police no legitimate weapons. Their state is largely dysfunctional and their security forces beholden to the Israelis. The Palestinians say the West Bank and Gaza live under an apartheid system in the making, or some say already made. The Israelis see these asymmetries as advantages to be exploited.