throwing filth at cowering Palestinians?
When you hit your 60th birthday, most of you will guzzle
down your hormone replacement therapy with a glass of
champagne and wonder if you have become everything
you dreamed of in your youth. In a few weeks, the state
of Israel is going to have that hangover.
She will look in the mirror and think – I have a sore back,
rickety knees and a gun at my waist, but I'm still standing.
Yet somewhere, she will know she is suppressing an old
secret she has to face. I would love to be able to crash the
birthday party with words of reassurance. Israel has g
iven us great novelists like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua,
great film-makers like Joseph Cedar, great scientific
research into Alzheimer's, and great dissident journalists
like Amira Hass, Tom Segev and Gideon Levy to expose
her own crimes.
She has provided the one lonely spot in the Middle East
where gay people are not hounded and hanged, and where
women can approach equality.
But I can't do it. Whenever I try to mouth these words,
a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit.
Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is
pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large
metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it
can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and
become a poison.
Standing near one of these long, stinking brown-and-yellow
rivers of waste recently, the local chief medical officer,
Dr Bassam Said Nadi, explained to me: "Recently there
were very heavy rains, and the shit started to flow into
the reservoir that provides water for this whole area.
I knew that if we didn't act, people would die. We had to
alert everyone not to drink the water for over a week,
and distribute bottles. We were lucky it was spotted.
Next time..." He shook his head in fear. This is no freak:
a 2004 report by Friends of the Earth found that only
six per cent of Israeli settlements adequately
treat their sewage.
Meanwhile, in order to punish the population of Gaza for
voting "the wrong way", the Israeli army are not allowing
past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and
cement needed to keep the sewage system working. The
result? Vast stagnant pools of waste are being held within
fragile dykes across the strip, and rotting. Last March,
one of them burst, drowning a nine-month-old baby and
his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste.
The Centre on Housing Rights warns that one heavy
rainfall could send 1.5m cubic metres of faeces flowing
all over Gaza, causing "a humanitarian and environmental
disaster of epic proportions".
So how did it come to this? How did a Jewish state founded
60 years ago with a promise to be "a light unto the nations"
end up flinging its filth at a cowering Palestinian population?
The beginnings of an answer lie in the secret Israel has
known, and suppressed, all these years. Even now, can
we describe what happened 60 years ago honestly and
unhysterically? The Jews who arrived in Palestine
throughout the twentieth century did not come because
they were cruel people who wanted to snuffle out Arabs
to persecute. No: they came because they were running
for their lives from a genocidal European anti-Semitism
that was soon to slaughter six million of their sisters
and their sons.
They convinced themselves that Palestine was
"a land without people for a people without land".
I desperately wish this dream had been true. You can see
traces of what might have been in Tel Aviv, a city that
really was built on empty sand dunes. But most of
Palestine was not empty. It was already inhabited by
people who loved the land, and saw it as theirs. They
were completely innocent of the long, hellish crimes
against the Jews.
When it became clear these Palestinians would not
welcome becoming a minority in somebody else's country,
darker plans were drawn up. Israel's first Prime Minister,
David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1937:
"The Arabs will have to go,
but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen,
such as a war."
So, for when the moment arrived, he helped draw up Plan Dalit.
It was – as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe puts it –
"a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly
evict the people: large-scale intimidation; and laying siege to
and bombarding population centres". In 1948, before the
Arab armies invaded, this began to be implemented: some
800,000 people were ethnically cleansed, and Israel was
built on the ruins. The people who ask angrily why the
Palestinians keep longing for their old land should imagine an
English version of this story. How would we react if the 30m
stateless, persecuted Kurds in the world sent armies and
settlers into this country to seize everything in England
below Leeds, and swiftly established a free Kurdistan from
which we were expelled? Wouldn't we long forever for our
children to return to Cornwall and Devon and London?
Would it take us only 40 years to compromise and offer to
settle for just 22 per cent of what we had?
If we are not going to be endlessly banging our heads against
history, the Middle East needs to excavate 1948, and seek a
solution. Any peace deal – even one where Israel dismantled
the wall and agreed to return to the 1967 borders – tends to
crumple on this issue. The Israelis say: if we let all three
million come back, we will be outnumbered by Palestinians
even within the 1967 borders, so Israel would be voted out
of existence. But the Palestinians reply: if we don't have an
acknowledgement of the Naqba (catastrophe), and our
right under international law to the land our grandfathers
fled, how can we move on?
It seemed like an intractable problem – until, two years ago,
the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research
conducted the first study of the Palestinian Diaspora's
desires. They found that only 10 per cent – around
300,000 people – want to return to Israel proper. Israel can
accept that many (and compensate the rest) without even
enduring much pain. But there has always been a strain of
Israeli society that preferred violently setting its own borders,
on its own terms, to talk and compromise. This weekend, the
elected Hamas government offered a six-month truce that
could have led to talks. The Israeli government responded
within hours by blowing up a senior Hamas leader and killing
a 14-year-old girl.
Perhaps Hamas' proposals are a con; perhaps all the
Arab states are lying too when they offer Israel full
recognition in exchange for a roll-back to the 1967 borders;
but isn't it a good idea to find out? Israel, as she gazes at
her grey hairs and discreetly ignores the smell of her
own stale shit pumped across Palestine, needs to ask
what kind of country she wants to be in the next 60 years.
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