by John Lyons
When Israel evicted 8000 settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the settlers put up considerable resistance. The removal of more than 600,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem would be much more difficult – though not, in my view, impossible. The way to do it would be for Israel to offer financial incentives for settlers to move back into Israel – but there is no political will to do this and insufficient pressure from the international community.
As successive Israeli governments encourage settlements, the chances of a Palestinian State recede. In addition to this the settlements have been strategically located to make a contiguous Palestinian State impossible.
At this stage, the best the Palestinians can hope for are the equivalent of Bantustans – the disconnected black communities built by apartheid South Africa, allowing the government to claim it was giving blacks some autonomy. The Israeli Government likewise claims that under the Palestinian Authority, Palestinians have autonomy.
The Israelis have two major problems in terms of their occupation. The first is international opinion, which, as will be seen, is increasingly hostile. The second is a growing Palestinian population. When Israel took over the West Bank in 1967, there were 1 million Palestinians. Now there are 2.9 million, and by 2020 there are likely to be 3.5 million. Palestinians do not want to live under occupation, and their number is growing.
Australian lawyer Gerard Horton of Military Court Watch told me: ‘Imagine if the US put 600,000 Americans into Afghanistan and the army was told they had to guarantee their protection. Any military given that mission has three options: it can kill all the locals, deport them or intimidate and terrorise them. It’s essentially the third option employed by the Israeli military at the friction points in the West Bank.’
French journalist Philippe Agret said if this was Israel’s strategy it would not work. ‘I don’t think the Palestinians will leave. The Israelis want to show who’s in charge – they are the boss, they are in charge and you shut up. One can be shocked by this never-ending occupation, the sheer brutality of it. Comparison is not reason but France was occupied for four years, they [the Palestinians] have been occupied for 50 years. Fifty years of occupation, so yes it’s shocking, the repression is shocking.’
Much international law has been written from practical experience. The legal order established at the end of the Second World War drew on the horrors of war to try to prevent another. Its foundation was that most wars begin over territory disputes. The key legal principle is the non-acquisition of territory through aggression, even if acting in self-defence (Article 2 of the UN Charter and numerous Security Council resolutions).
Israel argues that it was acting in self-defence when it occupied the West Bank, but even so this does not give it any rights of permanent possession. On top of that, Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory. This is precisely what Israel is doing.
For the international community, an important principle is at play. If it allows Israel to continue to breach the Geneva Convention, does that mean every country can do so? When Russia annexes Crimea, can the world object? When China begins colonising the South China Sea, can the world object?
Either international law applies across the board, or international politics is a free-for-all survival of the fittest.
One of the images of the occupation I will never forget is a crushed car in a water cistern.
The Supreme Court had ruled that everyone in the West Bank was entitled to be supplied with water – but not necessarily where they lived. In the remote Bedouin village of Susiya, water was available, but the villagers had to travel many kilometres to collect it.
For the Palestinians of Susiya, who had farmed their land since the days of the Ottoman Empire, life had become a daily battle with the Israeli settlers across the hill. In 1982, the whole village of Susiya was expelled and two Palestinians were murdered by settlers. However, some Palestinians returned. But in 1991, said Yehuda Shaul, the army came and put the villagers into trucks and took them away again. On this occasion a settler was murdered by Palestinians, and the army’s response was ruthless. ‘The IDF erased the village,’ said Yehuda Shaul. ‘My [army] company took part in it.’ Some Palestinians again resumed living in their village. In 2001, they won an important victory: the Supreme Court ruled that the village had been demolished illegally. Two months after the villagers returned, the IDF showed up with a demolition order for the whole village. The army said the tents the Palestinians were living in did not have building permits. ‘The strategy works,’ Yehuda Shaul told me. ‘There used to be 100 families in Susiya, now it’s down to 30. Every time there is a demolition of the village fewer and fewer families come back. Some decide it’s just too hard.’
The army and settlers had tried various ways to cut off the water supply of the Palestinians. Thirty of their 36 cisterns had become part of a ‘security buffer zone’, and any Palestinian who entered the zone was liable to be shot. The army had then brought in bulldozers to push rocks into the six cisterns that remained. Yet still the Palestinians were able to place hoses through the rocks to draw water.
Finally, the IDF came up with another idea. As a former army officer, Yehuda Shaul is ashamed of what his army did next. ‘The army crushed a car and pushed it into one of the water cisterns so it would poison the water and make it undrinkable.’
On 1 May 2013, I drove to Susiya, about an hour from Jerusalem. I wanted to see for myself the car that had been crushed into a cistern. In a place already so tough, where water was gold, I found it an almost unspeakably cruel thing to do. It was an unforgiving place: no greenery and unrelenting heat. The village leader, Nasser Nawaja, told me: ‘We are on the edge of the desert so we don’t have much rain. [Not having access to our water] makes our lives very hard and makes it very difficult to do our farming. It drains you.’
I stood there looking at the rusted old vehicle in the well and tried to reconcile this with the constant refrain of the Israeli lobby: that this is the most moral army in the world.
The battle to achieve Greater Israel is timeless.
If the messianic campaign to colonise the West Bank takes decades, so be it. God has ordained that the Jewish people should have ‘Judea and Samaria’, the settlers argue, and they are obliged to make sure that his wish is observed. If the fight for Greater Israel needs to be done house by house, room by room, water cistern by water cistern, then so be it.
In the Old City of Hebron, each floor of shared apartment buildings where Jews replace Palestinians is a triumph. Some settlers moved next door to Palestinians in the main street, Shuhada Street. One day, when the Palestinians were not there, the settlers smashed down the connecting wall and moved in. They were heavily armed, so the Palestinians knew it would be a massacre to try to re-enter. One more house on the road to Greater Israel.
Today, settlers live in that house and taunt foreigners or Israeli human rights workers who walk past. (Palestinians are not allowed to walk on that street.) I’ve been on a tour with Yehuda Shaul, while a young settler boy walked alongside him shouting ‘Kelev!’ – ‘Dog!’
As I discovered when researching the eviction of Nasser Jaber, much of the battle over property in Jerusalem goes on in the Old City. This is not just the world’s slowest war, it is also the world’s quietest war. Pilgrims and other tourists bargain over Armenian pottery, rent crucifixes for their stations of the cross or sip coffee while, in courtrooms a kilometre away, the battle over ownership goes on.
We also saw this battle in the East Jerusalem suburb of Sheikh Jarrah. First came the Hebrew names to replace the Arab ones, then came the Israeli settlers. In our first six months in Jerusalem, Sylvie and I would go sometimes to Sheikh Jarrah to cover the weekly protests as Palestinians were removed from houses they were resettled into according to an agreement between Jordan and the UN in 1967. After the Six Day War, these people had been evacuated from Jaffa or East Jerusal
em, where their houses had been taken over by newly arrived European Jews.
A year or so after one of these evictions, I drove back down there to see how it was all going. I saw a distressed old Palestinian man in a dressing gown. He told me his water supply had been turned off. Two young Jewish settlers standing nearby admitted they had done it. They said they meant to turn off their own water but accidentally turned off the old man’s water. I asked them: why would you want to turn off your own water? They had no answer.
This old man looked like he was close to breaking point. I realised he was a bit player in a big, historic drama. History will probably never know his name, but he was a small part of the march towards Greater Israel.
This is a long game. One day the army pushes a rusted car into a water cistern in the Hebron Hills. The next some settlers in East Jerusalem turn off the water of an old man.
This is how Israel works in this seemingly endless occupation.
CHAPTER 12
Coffee with the Israeli Army
9 December 2011
WHEN THE MOST POWERFUL ARMY IN THE MIDDLE EAST wants to meet for coffee, something is happening. Captain Arye Shalicar, who’d been my guide on ‘children’s day’ at the West Bank military court, phoned to say the army was unhappy with my story about the visit.
We agreed to meet. Just before he hung up, he said: ‘I’ll be bringing my wife.’
By this point I’d been in Israel almost three years – long enough to be suspicious of the IDF. I was worried that Captain Shalicar might later misquote something I said then produce his wife as a witness. I mentioned my concern to Sylvie. ‘Then I can come along too,’ she said.
So, on 2 December, Sylvie and I walked into Masaryk Café in the German Colony. Over the next hour, we would take part in a very strange conversation. But it would also prove to be illuminating in terms of how Israel views international opinion.
Captain Shalicar pulled from his pocket the article I’d written for the Weekend Australian Magazine on 26 November 2011, entitled ‘Stone Cold Justice’.
‘We have a problem with this,’ he said.
‘Are there any factual mistakes in it?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said, ‘we’re not challenging the accuracy, but our concern is that it’s been published outside Israel. If this had appeared in Israel, in Haaretz or Yedioth [Ahronoth], we could live with it. This sort of thing appears quite a lot. But this appeared in Australia.’
I told him I didn’t understand his point.
He explained: ‘People in Israel are committed to the State of Israel. Either they have moved here because they are committed to Israel or have remained here because they are. So when they read a story about Israeli soldiers and Palestinian children they read it in the context that whatever they read, it is not going to shake their commitment. But people in Australia may not have the same commitment. So when they read a story like this they may question their support for Israel. If I was sitting in Australia reading this I would think that Israeli soldiers were brutally treating Palestinian children.’
He paused. I said nothing. He continued. ‘A story like this may damage the view that Australians have of Israel and they don’t have the commitment to Israel to go along with that.’
Captain Shalicar was articulating a view that is widespread among Israelis: they don’t mind if something is printed in Israel, but when it is published more widely they react badly. But to hear these words from an IDF media officer was extraordinary.
I’d faced this mindset ever since I filed my story on the tractor incident during the 2009 Gaza War. I’d endured an even worse barrage from Noga Tarnopolsky following my story about Nasser Jaber. Frequently in the Israeli media I’d read stories about various abuses by the Israeli Army, but the moment I reported them in Australia I was attacked.
When Jewish leaders in Australia complained I asked them: ‘Are you saying Australians should not be able to read what Israelis read?’ I resented the pressure not to report what I saw; I was covering the Middle East as an Australian journalist in the belief that events should be reported as you find them.
As one Australian who moved to Israel told me: ‘The reason some people in the Jewish community in Melbourne don’t want you writing stories about the treatment of Palestinian children is not that they think they’re untrue but because they think that by appearing outside Israel they give Israel’s enemies a weapon.’
Captain Shalicar’s response wouldn’t be the last criticism my story received. In mid-2012, Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr would run into an old friend from the Labor Party, Mary Easson, in the Qantas lounge in Sydney. She was eager to show him something: she had been copied in on an email from Michael Danby, the federal Labor member for Melbourne Ports, to Gerard Henderson, the Executive Director of the Sydney Institute and columnist with my newspaper. By then I’d written several articles about the plight of Palestinian children in the Israeli military court. I had recently written an update about how Carr as Foreign Minister had raised concerns about the plight of Palestinian children in Israeli jails. Danby’s email to Henderson on 28 July 2012 said he was not impressed with Bob Carr’s ‘fawning over John Lyons’s attempts at self justification’.
When Carr read it he was outraged that one of his Labor colleagues would send this to a newspaper columnist and saw it as an attempt to portray his interest in the issue as ‘a cook up’ between him and me. Carr rang Danby, giving him what he now describes as ‘a shot across the bows’. As Carr recalled: ‘I told him that I have seen this [email] and I don’t think that it is very loyal behaviour, especially given that you have not raised the matter with me … I have not had any involvement with Lyons’s stories.’
Carr and I had had dealings when I was editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and he was premier of New South Wales – often about stories he had not liked – but we hadn’t spoken for a decade – the idea that Carr was ‘fawning’ over anything I’d written was ludicrous.
For me, one of the most bizarre aspects of being a correspondent in Israel was that while criticism coming from the Jewish leadership in Melbourne seemed continuous, from Israeli publications the response was much more reasonable. In fact, one of Israel’s leading news websites even referred to the same article that Danby had used to attack me to praise me for my fairness. The Times of Israel website carried a blog post about me entitled ‘An objective journalist – the unicorn of the Middle East’. Of the article about Bob Carr and the Palestinian children in the Weekend Australian, the writer said: ‘I could imagine the pro-Israel lobbyists spitting out their Corn Flakes across the paper. What an anti-Israel, Iran-sympathising terrorist puppet! Why does he care so much about what’s happening in Israel – look at Syria! He probably donates to the New Israel Fund. Shudder.’
The blog post then went on to note that in the very same edition of the paper I had a story about how Hamas was demolishing Palestinian homes in Gaza to sell their land and corruptly take profits. I had reported how when I rang the United Nations for comment they refused to condemn the creation of these new Palestinian refugees. ‘The story was great journalism,’ The Times of Israel item said.
This is the kind of stuff pro-Israel media watchdogs exist for. House demolitions, quite rightly, draw much fire from the Western media when carried out, or threatened to be, by Israel. Identical events undertaken by Hamas, however, apparently do not. This journalist is the exception … Drawing fire from all sides is a signpost of good journalism in the Middle East. Here, this journalist had written two articles that described, in sober but firm terms, violations of what are considered international rights and norms by both Israel and Hamas. In isolation, each article could be viewed by partisans as bias in the extreme. Together, they leave the reader with the impression that both sides do bad stuff. It’s up to the reader from thereon.1
In 2014, when I presented a television report for Four Corners based on my articles in The Australian, it was attacked by hardline Israeli activists in Australia b
efore it even went to air. Some even circulated the link by which viewers could make a formal complaint to the ABC. Being a government broadcaster, the ABC was duty-bound to investigate each complaint, but the accusations proved groundless.
While the program faced a fierce attack by a small group, it was well received by the Australian public. Even the Israeli Government took the report in its stride.
France’s leading current affairs program, Envoyé Special on France 2, decided they also wanted to cover the story, and contacted Sylvie, the co-producer of the Four Corners program. She put six weeks’ research into it – people who could be interviewed were lined up and France 2 in Paris booked accommodation for the team. But two days before filming was due to start, France 2 pulled out. The explanation? The Israeli Army had said it would not give access. Separately, a journalist from Britain’s Daily Mail told me: ‘Your story about Palestinian children is a strong story but there’s no way we could get that into our paper because of the influence of the lobby in the UK.’
Worse still was a media conference held by UNICEF, the UN’s children’s fund, on 6 March 2013, to launch a report on the same topic; Sylvie and I were invited because of the articles we had done together. The conference had been postponed several times, and one UNICEF official I knew had told me: ‘You won’t believe the pressure that has been put on us [by Israel] to cancel this press conference.’ Another UNICEF official had said: ‘We were limited [by Israel] in the number of journalists we could invite.’
Sylvie had brought her video camera, but as the briefing began UNICEF’s Jerusalem chief, Jean Gough, announced that only the first five minutes could be filmed. ‘And we ask that you don’t quote us [by name].’