Finding an equitable solution to the intractable, festering decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Gordian Knot that must be cut to achieve peace overall in the Middle East.  Today, no solution is in sight nor are any serious efforts planned to find one despite occasional rhetoric to the contrary like what’s now being heard from Washington with similar disingenuous echoes inside Israel. 

 

Palestinians know otherwise from long experience.  They’ve heard this siren song before.  It’s the same old tired refrain going nowhere and not intending to.  The so-called “road map” goes nowhere, and the “peace process” guarantees only more conflict because Israel wants it that way to justify its harshness and refuses to discuss the most fundamental Palestinian concerns.  Unless they’re resolved there can never be peace.  They include a sovereign integral independent Palestinian state, the Right of Return, status of Jerusalem Palestinians want as their capital, settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) that must be removed, and established borders.  They also include ending what Palestinian-American scholar and activist Edward Said once called Israel‘s agenda of “refined viciousness” against the Palestinian people.  Since Hamas’ Palestinian Authority (PA) January, 2006 legislative electoral victory, there’s been nothing “refined” about it.

 

As long as these issues and present conditions go unaddressed, this long-running tragedy will go on without end destroying the lives of new generations of young Palestinians who nonetheless continue their valiant struggle for freedom and justice even against overwhelming odds.  Today they’re greater than ever as the tiny Israeli state with six million Jews (including those in OPT settlements) is a world nuclear power compared to a virtually defenseless Palestinian population of about five million. Included are 1.4 million Arab Israeli citizens.  They’re denied all rights Israeli Jews get and are subjected to constant abuse and neglect.  They’re a fifth of the population but are forced to live on 2% of the land plus 1% more for agricultural use.  The Jewish population gets nearly all the rest.

 

Another 3.9 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank only get the right to live under the boot of a hostile occupier.  They live under “vicious” repression and are denied all rights including the fundamental one to their own home on their own land that may be bulldozed to rubble anytime for any reason because Israel wants the land for Jewish settlements and relentlessly takes it and the lives of many Palestinians as well. 

 

Then there are the refugees.  About five million are in the Palestinian diaspora including about 260,000 internally displaced and living inside Israel.  Most others live within 100 miles of Israel‘s borders in neighboring Arab states.  Half are in Jordan, 15% in Lebanon, another 15% in Syria while others live throughout the world including in other Arab countries like Egypt and the Gulf states.  Many live with a dominant dream so far unfulfilled – the absolute universal “Right of Return” affirmed in UN Resolution 194 passed in December, 1948 resolving that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property….made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.” 

 

This “universal right” is also established in Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and under various Geneva Conventions.  Israel won’t recognize it and adamantly refuses to include it in negotiations even though the Jewish state doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on.  In 1948-49, its leaders ethnically cleansed 800,000 Palestinians slaughtering many in the process.  They also destroyed 531 of their villages in their “War of Independence” all Palestinians call the Nakba or catastrophe.  Many refugees dream one day of returning to their homes, and all Palestinians want and deserve  their own sovereign independent state never losing hope they’ll get it.

 

Israel exacerbates their plight practicing a rigid policy of police state control while ignoring binding legal provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.  Its preamble cites the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and UN Charter, that’s also binding international law, stating “civil and political freedom….can only be achieved (if) everyone may enjoy his civil and political rights (and that it is the) obligation of States under the Charter of the United Nations to promote….human rights and freedoms (for everyone).” 

 

Its many Articles also affirm:

 

— The right of self-determination and freedom to freely determine one’s political status and freely pursue one’s economic, social and cultural development.

 

— The inherent right to life and freedom from subjection to torture, cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment or punishment and to be free from arbitrary arrest or detention or deprived of liberty.

 

— The right to liberty of movement and freedom to choose one’s residence.

 

— The right freely leave any country and not be deprived of the right to return to it.

 

— The right to freedom from arbitrary or unlawful interference with one’s privacy, family, home or correspondence.

 

— The right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

 

— The right to have equal access as all others to public services in one’s country.

 

— The right of all persons to equal protection of the law without discrimination…..and much more.

 

In the way it treats Palestinians, Israel willfully violates all the above provisions as state policy and has done so for six decades and gotten away with it.  People of conscience must condemn this lawlessness and demand Israeli leaders be held accountable for their crimes of war and against humanity so the long-suffering Palestinians one day have the same rights and freedoms as all Israeli Jews.  They and all others deserve no less.

 

Jeff Halper’s Concept of An Israeli “Matrix of Control”

 

Jeff Halper is the Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) based in Jerusalem.  He’s also a professor of anthropology at Ben Gurion University and has lived in Israel since 1973.  ICAHD was originally formed as a non-violent, direct-action group to resist Israeli home demolitions in the OPT.  It’s activities now include resistance to settlements, land expropriation, fruit and olive tree uprootings and other crop destruction, bypass road construction, policies of “closure” and “separation,” denial of civil and human rights, and all other elements of repression of a people under occupation it wants to help end to achieve an equitable and sustainable peace only possible once Palestinians have their own sovereign integral independent state.

 

Halper established the concept of a repressive “Matrix of Control” to explain how Israeli governments dominate Palestinian life.  For these long-suffering people ever to achieve justice and a land of their own, this system chaining them in bondage must end.  Here’s how it works.

 

Halper explains it’s composed of three layers of control.  The first one is “physical control” of key “links and nodes.”  It’s done through illegal OPT settlements on expropriated land, use of military zones, industrial parks, control of aquifers and other natural resources, checkpoints, control of all border crossings, a network of bypass roads for Jews only, national parks for recreation underneath which are former Palestinian villages destroyed and their history erased to make way for them, and the oppressive (World Court ruled) illegal Separation or Apartheid Wall claimed for security but, in fact, another part of a land grab and confinement agenda.  It’s being built to continue ethnically cleansing Palestinians and keep those remaining virtual prisoners in restricted cantonized OPT areas.  They’re isolated from and unconnected to others as part of Israel‘s policy of ghettoization, repression and social control. 

 

Halper’s second control layer is bureaucratic and legal encompassing a host of policies constricting Palestinians in a maze of procedures and restrictions.  These include harassing zoning and other regulations governing the following:

 

— Allowable home and village construction.

 

— Building permit restrictions.

 

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