[Peace-discuss] The Sage of Ljubljana

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Quiet Slicing of the West Bank Makes Abstract Prayers for Peace Obscene
	Condemnation of 'illegal' settlements and violence only blurs
	the reality of what the Israeli state is sanctioning, day by day
	by Slavoj Zizek

On 2 August 2009, after cordoning off part of the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh 
Jarrah in east Jerusalem, Israeli police evicted two Palestinian families (more 
than 50 people) from their homes; Jewish settlers immediately moved into the 
emptied houses. Although Israeli police cited a ruling by the country's supreme 
court, the evicted Arab families had been living there for more than 50 years. 
The event – which, rather exceptionally, did attract the attention of the world 
media – is part of a much larger and mostly ignored ongoing process.

Five months earlier, on 1 March, it had been reported that the Israeli 
government had drafted plans to build more than 70,000 new homes in Jewish 
settlements in the occupied West Bank; if implemented, the plans could increase 
the number of settlers in the Palestinian territories by about 300,000 Such a 
move would not only severely undermine the chances of a viable Palestinian 
state, but also hamper the everyday life of Palestinians.

A government spokesman dismissed the report, arguing that the plans were of 
limited relevance – the construction of homes in the settlements required the 
approval of the defence minister and the prime minister. However, 15,000 have 
already been fully approved, and 20,000 of the proposed housing units lie in 
settlements that Israel cannot expect to retain in any future peace deal with 
the Palestinians.

The conclusion is obvious: while paying lip-service to the two-state solution, 
Israel is busy creating a situation on the ground that will render such a 
solution impossible. The dream underlying Israel's plans is encapsulated by a 
wall that separates a settler's town from the Palestinian town on a nearby West 
Bank hill. The Israeli side of the wall is painted with the image of the 
countryside beyond the wall – but without the Palestinian town, depicting just 
nature, grass and trees. Is this not ethnic cleansing at its purest, imagining 
the outside beyond the wall as empty, virginal and waiting to be settled?

On the very day that reports of the government's 70,000-home plan emerged, 
Hillary Clinton criticised the rocket fire from Gaza as "cynical", claiming: 
"There is no doubt that any nation, including Israel, cannot stand idly by while 
its territory and people are subjected to rocket attacks." But should the 
Palestinians stand idly while the West Bank land is taken from them day by day?

When peace-loving Israeli liberals present their conflict with Palestinians in 
neutral, symmetrical terms – admitting that there are extremists on both sides 
who reject peace – one should ask a simple question: what goes on in the Middle 
East when nothing is happening there at the direct politico-military level (ie, 
when there are no tensions, attacks or negotiations)? What goes on is the slow 
work of taking the land from the Palestinians on the West Bank: the gradual 
strangling of the Palestinian economy, the parcelling up of their land, the 
building of new settlements, the pressure on Palestinian farmers to make them 
abandon their land (which goes from crop-burning and religious desecration to 
targeted killings) – all this supported by a Kafkaesque network of legal 
regulations.

Saree Makdisi, in Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, describes how, 
although the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is ultimately enforced by the 
armed forces, it is an "occupation by bureaucracy": it works primarily through 
application forms, title deeds, residency papers and other permits. It is this 
micro-management of the daily life that does the job of securing slow but steady 
Israeli expansion: one has to ask for a permit in order to leave with one's 
family, to farm one's own land, to dig a well, or to go to work, to school, or 
to hospital. One by one, Palestinians born in Jerusalem are thus stripped of the 
right to live there, prevented from earning a living, denied housing permits, etc.

Palestinians often use the problematic cliché of the Gaza strip as "the greatest 
concentration camp in the world". However, in the past year, this designation 
has come dangerously close to truth. This is the fundamental reality that makes 
all abstract "prayers for peace" obscene and hypocritical. The state of Israel 
is clearly engaged in a slow, invisible process, ignored by the media; one day, 
the world will awake and discover that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, 
that the land is Palestinian-frei, and that we must accept the fact. The map of 
the Palestinian West Bank already looks like a fragmented archipelago.

In the last months of 2008, when the attacks of illegal West Bank settlers on 
Palestinian farmers became a regular daily occurrence, the state of Israel tried 
to contain these excesses (the supreme court ordered the evacuation of some 
settlements) but, as many observers have noted, such measures are half-hearted, 
countered by the long-term politics of Israel, which violates the international 
treaties it has signed. The response of the illegal settlers to the Israeli 
authorities is "We are doing the same thing as you, just more openly, so what 
right do you have to condemn us?" And the state's reply is basically "Bde 
patient, and don't rush too much. We are doing what you want, just in a more 
moderate and acceptable way."

The same story has been repeated since 1949: Israel accepts the peace conditions 
proposed by the international community, counting on the fact that the peace 
plan will not work. The illegal settlers sometimes sound like Brunhilde from the 
last act of Wagner's Walküre – reproaching Wotan and saying that, by 
counteracting his explicit order and protecting Siegmund, she was only realising 
Wotan's own true desire, which he was forced to renounce under external 
pressure. In the same way the settlers know they are realising their own state's 
true desire.

While condemning the violent excesses of "illegal" settlements, the state of 
Israel promotes new "legal" building on the West Bank, and continues to strangle 
the Palestinian economy. A look at the changing map of East Jerusalem, where the 
Palestinians are gradually encircled and their living area sliced, tells it all. 
The condemnation of anti-Palestinian violence not carried out by the state blurs 
the true problem of state violence; the condemnation of illegal settlements 
blurs the illegality of the legal ones.

Therein resides the two-facedness of the much-praised non-biased "honesty" of 
the Israeli supreme court: by occasionally passing judgment in favour of the 
dispossessed Palestinians, proclaiming their eviction illegal, it guarantees the 
legality of the remaining majority of cases.

Taking all this into account in no way implies sympathy for inexcusable 
terrorist acts. On the contrary, it provides the only ground from which one can 
condemn the terrorist attacks without hypocrisy.

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
Slavoj Zizek is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/18-0