The pharaoh of Jerusalem
by
on September 18, 2010 12:16 PM in Politics
by Philip Weiss
Mondoweiss
September 15, 2010
In the last two days two guides have taken me through the geography of the
Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, and I’m staggered. I wonder why this
monstrous structure is not better known, even to people like me, who study
the conflict. I wonder how it is that American reporters are not
describing the racist devouring of Jerusalem every day in our newspapers
and showing it every night on our television news. I wonder why our
politicians, or our liberal Democratic ones anyway, are not holding angry
press conferences in front of the repulsive separation wall as it lunges
to separate a Palestinian village from virtually all its connections to
the outside world, so as to privilege the lifestyle, and short commute, of
Jews in the new development on the hilltop above them.
I wonder why Rabbi Arthur Waskow, who calls for boycotting the “pharaoh”
of BP as a response to the destruction in the Gulf, cannot see the
Pharaoh’s works right here and call for boycott. I wonder how it is that
Ethan Bronner of the New York Times, who lives in West Jerusalem, could
give lectures back home about covering the story and lament the (remote)
possibility of Palestinians moving back into Arab houses in West Jerusalem
when the only real movement and dispossession, eastward, is in front of
his eyes; and millions of Palestinian ambitions are blighted by lack of
freedom of movement and constant insults to their human rights. And
believe me, if a fraction of what the Palestinians are experiencing were
happening to Jews, it is all we would hear about.
But let me try to be a little more reportorial.
What I’m seeing is the result of 40 years of Jewish colonization of one of
the jewels of world civilization. During the 43-year occupation, the
Israelis have essentially constructed a system of spears radiating out
from Jewish West Jerusalem into Palestinian East Jerusalem, and on into
the West Bank. These new Jewish neighborhoods are designed to solidify
Israeli control over greater Jerusalem in the event of any possible
division of the place in a two-state solution, but more important, to make
Jerusalem into a Jewish city by choking off the Palestinian life of this
international city.
And yes, I imagine, there is a security component to the thinking too.
They want to kill us, we have to keep them behind fences.
The choking-off is what I saw in my tours. As this colonization
progresses, it takes more and more village land around the city and throws
out more infrastructure to serve the colonists, special roads and high
barbed wire fences and walls to protect the drivers and their communities.
The infrastructure isolates more and more Palestinians from one another.
You can tell Palestinian villages from the black water vessels dotting the
rooftops-because their water is shut off for days at a time. So when
Jeffrey Goldberg, pushing the Israeli side in the U.S., says that Gilo is
just a neighborhood in Jerusalem, well it is actually a white stucco
fortress/colony built on the outskirts of southern Jerusalem on
Palestinian village land, and now requiring more of that land so as to
expand, with plans to build a wall right through the neighboring village
to protect the colonists from the farmers in the valley. And again, all of
this on land that international law says is Palestine’s.
Homes are routinely demolished in that village facing Gilo, so as not to
prevent the colony’s growth; and as you travel through Greater East
Jerusalem you often see the rubble of Palestinian buildings, Palestinians
who dared to try and develop their communities. The Israeli authorities
come in and destroy the houses or businesses. Even as the Israelis expand
a colony nearby. Rubble and palaces. In a word, systemic racism.
Maybe the most pitiable sight I saw yesterday, inside the West Bank but
close to the north Jerusalem colonies of Ramot and Ramat Shlomo, is the
hilltop tomb of the prophet Samuel, which is worshiped by Jews and
Muslims. The tomb is both a mosque with a minaret and a Jewish place of
worship. Well when we visited, busloads of Jewish schoolchildren were
arriving and Israeli soldiers were in the tomb davening and Hasidic boys
were descending, too. A moving sight. We must have seen 150 religious
Israelis.
And meantime the Islamic portion of the tomb is dead. The door is chained,
pigeons fly into the outer rooms, the Palestinian who runs a store there
told us that the authorities had shut down the minaret. There are no
Palestinian worshipers.
Alongside the tomb is a Palestinian village in the West Bank, but the
occupation has now cut this village off from the rest of Palestinian life
in the West Bank. The school serving the village-that is the photograph at
the top of this post-is a one-room building. At this point in our travels,
my wife walked away for a few minutes so that our Palestinian friend who
lives under these conditions all the time would not see her feelings.
And this is a National Park. An Israeli National Park for the tomb of
Samuel, inside Palestinian territory! Do you think the Israelis are ever
going to part with this colony? Of course not. We are in the West Bank,
the home of the Palestinian state, and these Jews will be here forever.
Now let me remind you that the Israeli settlement nearby, Ramat Shlomo, is
the one that pissed off Joe Biden in the spring, when he blew up at
Netanyahu over the latest construction orders. Biden got really angry. He
said you’re endangering American lives. There was a showdown, and in the
end what happened, Obama swallowed it.
Still, you can see why Biden was pissed off. This situation is monstrous
and racist. If our politicians were not hogtied by the Israel lobby, they
would be bringing reporters with them to the tomb of Samuel and saying, Is
this right? This is happening with our tax dollars? They are making a
National Park inside Palestinian territory and choking off all Palestinian
access to the place! Are you crazy?
Our politicians would declare that the road to peace in Jerusalem doesn’t
lead through Baghdad or Tehran– no the road is right here in Jerusalem,
and it is blocked by Israeli bulldozers.
Now I mentioned a minute ago that my wife hid her feelings from our
Palestinian friend, and I want to unpack this somewhat. The Palestinians
live with this all the time. They have the boot stuffed down their throat
at every turn. Even the educated professionals, their horizons are blocked
off, their aspirations. Academics can’t travel, even into Jerusalem; and
when I say, Oh they can’t sustain this, my friend responds, They have
sustained it as long as I can remember. You cannot normalize this
oppressive situation. The polticians talk about all the businesses
thriving. Well the Palestinian people are always trying. The Palestinians
are not defeatable, and they are always struggling for this and that. You
see beautiful restaurants inside the occupation, lovely hotels, good book
stories. But it is not a flourishing life. It is not the life that these
people would make for themselves if they had any real freedom. If they
were able to compete and cooperate as equals with the Israelis, you would
see something entirely different.
So they live with this daily humiliation and they stuff their souls down
inside their chest somewhere and one day they bring in friends from the
United States and show them around, and a visitor is so overwhelmed by the
oppression that she starts crying and has to walk away. Well you
understand that it is a little rude to show your friend just how pitiable
life here seems to us.
I don’t know how they live with this, my wife said later, and of course
you ask that question. The other day we met a man who works in Sheikh
Jarrah, right up from the house evictions that happened last winter, a
funny Palestinian, my wife and he were joking around a lot, when I said to
him, “Are they still living in the tent down there?” I meant the
Palestinians who had been thrown out of their houses in Sheikh Jarrah and
were living in a tent in the road.
The man’s smile disappeared. “I don’t know.”
“Well it’s just a block away.”
“I’ve never been there. It would make me sick. And then I would have to
walk away and there would be nothing I could do about it. So I’ve never
seen it.”
Imagine feeling so helpless, and feeling that powerless over your own fate
and the life of your society that you avoid knowledge of the fierce
conditions. Jews were like this during the advance of anti-Semitism in
eastern European cities, they tried to ignore it.
And that’s why my wife walked away, she didn’t want to seem a complete
tourist of someone else’s suffering.
My rage at this situation is directed at my own community, American Jews,
who have allowed this to develop. I can think of only a few responses to
Jerusalem that I can honor. Earlier this year Michael Ratner of the Center
for Constitutional Rights visited Jerusalem and came back and gave
speeches about the colonization and said the two-state solution is
finished. Jeff Halper came to the States more recently and described the
endless process of house demolition. And Charney Bromberg came back and
told a Columbia University audience that this situation reminds him of
apartheid.
These are exceptional statements. Liberal Zionists generally can’t face
this reality; and our politicians are mute and even the fairly-good piece
that Isabel Kershner did on the colonization of East Jerusalem a couple of
months back in the Times didn’t convey the monstrous reality. No, liberal
Zionsts are are concerned with preserving Israel against the “demographic
threat”– a possible Palestinian majority. When you see what Jewish
control has meant for non-Jewish residents of Jerusalem, that seems a
particularly filthy euphemism.
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