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by Peter A. Belmont / 2013-02-27
© 2013 Peter Belmont
Presently, as aftermath of the war of 1967, Israel occupies the Palestinian territories of West Bank, Gaza (which it occupies as a sort of out-door prison with the guards outside), and Syria’s Golan Heights.
Presently, there is absolutely no sign that the occupation is about to end. Nor do I predict the same.
But what would be the consequences if the occupation were to end?
Some pro-Palestine, pro-human-rights, pro-international-law people, imagining an end of the occupations, are dissatisfied because they predict that the Israelis who are Palestinians will still be discriminated against by the Israeli state, and they predict that the refugees, the Palestinian exiles of the 1948 war, will not be allowed re-entrance to Israel, their homeland.
I argue here that that prediction, that fear, is misplaced.
If occupation were over (which is not exactly a peace treaty, not yet equable sharing of water, of off-shore oil, etc.), it would still be an enormous advance. Not enough, immediately, for the Israeli Palestinians, and not enough at all for the exiles-of-1948 who would wish to return to live in Israel, but a great deal nevertheless.
One thing to remember is this: the occupation will not end by itself, nor yet by Israel’s voluntary act. Pressure from somewhere will have to be applied. Maybe from EU, maybe (hah!) from Obama. Without pressure, nothing will happen.
Accordingly, to imagine the end of the “slavery”, the end of the “apartheid”, which characterize the occupation, is necessarily to imagine the pressure which would bring it about.
And when we contemplate how Israelis will feel after the application of that pressure, we will imagine a chastised people. We will imagine a people whose dream of greater Israel has been crushed, a people whose messianic (or some such) dreams, whose dreams of racist triumphalism, will have been crushed, a people pushed back into what may seem a ghetto (and we might properly say, into a self-chosen ghetto, for no-one twisted Jewish arms to get them to engage in the terrorism and warfare that expelled the British and 85% of the Palestinians and established the State of Israel in the period 1945-48).
We will also imagine an Israel which recognizes that its horrible intransigence w.r.t. occupation (1967-present) finally got the world’s nations to erupt in such a surge of anger as to create the pressure that brought about the end of the occupation and the end of many Israeli grandiose dreams., That anger will still exist! It may serve the exiles of 1948.
Moreover, that surge of pressure will occur, if at all, only after the protective shield—which has given Israel and its leaders immunity and impunity with regard to all their violations of international law—has been lifted. The power of the incantation of the “Holocaust” and “antisemitism” mantras will have been broken, as of course they long ago should have been broken, and the USA’s and big-international-finance’s economic and political strangle-hold on the nations will have been broken. As they surely should be, and ASAP.
So, comrades in struggle, don’t despise the end of occupation.
Also, don’t imagine it is around the corner. The business of extending the civil-society BDS project to a nation-state level will be an ongoing effort, possibly for as many years as it took to collapse apartheid in South Africa. it won’t be easy, nor will it be quick.
But if and when it achieve an end to occupation, much more may be in train as well.
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