Fateful Triangle

by Noam Chomsky

  Seven New Settlements has been Authorized in Judea and Samaria,” while the subheading reports the government’s announcement that “with no connection to the Reagan plan, a new settlement will be established in the northern part of the Gaza Strip” On September 2, Amos Levav reported in Ma’ariv that “a new city and four towns will be established in Samaria.” In fact, just prior to the announcement of the Reagan plan, “the Ministers of Finance and Development, Mr. Yoram Aridor and Professor Yuval Ne’eman, worked out yesterday methods of raising 500 million Shekels for development activities in Judea and Samaria.” In a significant parallel move, Justice M. Ravid “ruled categorically that Israeli companies registered in Israel but operating primarily in the territories are exempt from taxation.” Two new settlements (one a kibbutz) were announced in the Golan Heights; and five new Nahal (paramilitary) settlements were announced in Samaria.22

  Levav reviewed plans laid down by the Zionist Organization Settlement Branch to settle 400.000 Jews in Samaria by 2010, in the planned city and towns; there were 5000 at the time. The Arab population is expected to reach 5-700,000. The development plan includes six highways that will break up the area, circumventing Arab cities such as Nablus. The Arab population will be confined in a “limited area in the heart of the region,” at double the current population density. Various measures will be adopted to prevent the expansion of Arab towns and villages, including road construction, building bans, and intensive efforts to purchase lands for Jewish settlement. A Defense Ministry official in charge of settlement confirmed that these plans were already being put into effect in Judea and Samaria.

  A few months later the government announced another step towards putting these plans into effect: the “Green Patrols” will be extended to the West Bank.23 The Green Patrols were established under the Rabin (Labor) government with alleged ecological concerns, under the “Authority for the Preservation of Nature” headed by General (Res.) Avraham Yoffe, a Greater Israel enthusiast. They were directed by Ariel Sharon during his tenure as Minister of Agriculture under the first Begin government, gaining notoriety for their cruelty as they turned to terrorizing Bedouins in the Negev (Israeli citizens who serve in the armed forces, for what that may matter) to prevent them from encroaching on “national lands,” that is, lands reserved for Jewish use. Working together with the Border Guards and police, they forcefully evacuated Bedouins from their homes to areas where they are to be concentrated, terrorizing women and children, shooting animals, destroying tents, and in general behaving in the manner that has typified the bloody and brutal career of their director from its origins in the early 1950s.24 Now they are to turn their attention to the West Bank as well. Barel reports that they will be concerned with “illegal construction by Arabs in state lands or areas intended for [Jewish] settlements.” The “state lands” are those that have been taken over by Israel under one or another legal ruse, to satisfy the needs of American civil libertarians. Shortly after, the government announced that the new “Land Patrol,” similar in character to the “Green Patrol,” will “take action to destroy structures built without an appropriate permit” (permits are regularly denied to Arabs), and to prevent the “increasing Arab movement of settlement on state lands,” which are to be reserved for Jews in “Judea and Samaria.” See note 23. It can be predicted with fair confidence that these Patrols, operating in their customary manner, will expedite what the approved history books will describe as “the voluntary sale of lands” by Arabs who have so far proven recalcitrant, and in general will act to ensure that Israel will take what it wants from the helpless Samidin, while the U.S. remains silent and provides the funds.

  In a statement on Israeli radio dismissing the Reagan Plan immediately after it was announced, Defense Minister Sharon stated: “Not only will Israel not accept it, it will not discuss it.” Reagan’s plan has “no chance,” Sharon continued, and “The United States could have saved itself a lot of embarrassment and frustration” by not proposing it. “In the end the United States will have no choice but to back down because its plan cannot be implemented.” Meanwhile Jordanian and PLO sources, while expressing interest in the plan though with reservations, remained skeptical about the Administration’s determination. One Jordanian stated “that unless the United States showed the same forcefulness in acts that Mr. Reagan had shown in words, ‘nobody in the region will take it seriously’.” Another added the following comment, “reflecting official Jordanian thinking”:

  The crucial question is whether Mr. Reagan has the will and the power to back up his words. If Sharon starts a new series of settlements tomorrow, will Washington stop arms supplies or financial aid to Israel, will it go to the Security Council, recognize the P.L.O.?25

  The question was surely rhetorical, and the answer to it was given very quickly. Israel “started a new series of settlements,” going out of its way to express its contempt for the settlement freeze request. And Reagan responded, as we have seen, by advocating an aid increase while maintaining the arrangements that permit the funds to be diverted to settlement in the occupied territories (as they would be, in some manner, arrangements or not), only to have the terms of the aid improved still further by Congressional liberals. The rational response to these events, given a few weeks later, has already been quoted from the Jerusalem Post: “the American Government has been financing the very policies it denounces with such consistency that one doesn’t have to be an Arab to wonder if the denunciations are sincere.”26 The following months led to increasing conflict between Israel and the U.S. at the rhetorical level and even occasional direct military confrontation between U.S. marines and the IDF in Beirut. The verbal response of the U.S. government was critical, while at the same time it proposed that the phenomenal level of military aid for 1983 be maintained for the fiscal year 1984, thus indicating its true intentions, while Congress moved to increase the aid still further as usual.*

  In case Americans didn’t get the point, Reagan’s settlement freeze request evoked a virtual frenzy of announcements and advertisements about new settlements and other developments in the occupied territories. By the year’s end the projected population in Judea and Samaria by 2010 had risen to 1.3 million, according to the calculation of the head of the Jewish Agency’s settlement department, Mattityahu Drobles. This should yield a Jewish majority, he added, when we take into account the expected “emigration of Arabs from the territory.” In early December, the government announced its plans to build 35 additional urban settlements in Judea and Samaria in addition to those already publicized, and shortly after, Deputy Minister of Agriculture Michael Dekel raised this figure to 42 new settlements, most of them urban, in the next four years.27 Meanwhile Minister of Science and Development Yuval Ne’eman announced that Samaria will become Israel’s Silicon Valley, with “the most advanced section of Israeli industry” concentrated there, and a new “science city” established near

  * Bernard Weinraub, New York Times, Feb. 5, 1983. See previous *. The timing of the proposal for the 1984 fiscal year was striking, coming as it did at a point of considerable diplomatic conflict between the U.S. and Israel over the fate of Lebanon and immediately after a well-publicized incident when an American marine drew his pistol to stop movement of Israeli tanks into an area that the marines understood to be under their control.

  the new town of Ariel in the center of Samaria, where the Arab population is concentrated. Other industrialists are also “streaming into Samaria,” including a French-financed electronics factory, military industry, and many others. Industry is encouraged to move there by the “easy development loans and even grants” from the government (ultimately, the U.S. government). Amnon Rubinstein “demonstrated” that all of this is in contradiction to the Fourth Geneva Convention, which Israel signed,”28 but such considerations may be left to those who are now derided in Israel as “beautiful souls.”

  Meanwhile, other regions were not being neglected. On the first anniversary of the virtual annexation of the Gola
n Heights, Ha’aretz observed that 1000 settlers had moved in and efforts were being made to bring 5000 more in four new settlements now planned. And in the Gaza strip, about 800 million shekels of the national budget have been invested in the past 6 years for 8 settlements with 300 settlers, with a ninth being planned along with a large tourist center. Asked at a press conference about the huge investment for so few settlers, Housing Minister David Levi responded that “there are national-political aims which a state may invest in not on the basis of the number of settlers, but according to its need to develop these places in our country,”29 a policy that may be undertaken with particular dispatch when the “investment” is provided by a generous donor from abroad.

  The fate of Gaza is generally ignored in discussion of the occupied territories, perhaps because it has already been tacitly granted to Israel. The Gaza region was “pacified” with extraordinary brutality by Ariel Sharon under the Labor government in the early 1970s. Since then, Israel has ruled with an iron hand. As an indication, the military courts opened 3853 new cases in the year April 1980 to March 1981, having found 3458 people “guilty” and 180 innocent in the preceding year. The domain of the military courts under what is called “the civilian administration” is quite broad, extending, for example, to merchants who refuse to pay special value-added taxes that they regard as reflecting Israeli claims to sovereignty. Half the working population— about 40,000 people—travel to work in Israel,* some with a working day from 3AM to 8PM, because, although Arabs are encouraged to perform the “dirty work” at extremely low wages in the Jewish state (in fact, conditions are designed so that there are few alternatives), they are not permitted to sleep there (see chapter 4, section 5.4). These official figures are surely an underestimate, as is indicated, for example, by the occasional study of illegal child labor.

  The Gaza strip is vastly overcrowded and the population is rising rapidly. No opportunities are provided for development. On the contrary, the only land reserves have been expropriated for potential Jewish use. Since the only means of survival are service in Israel’s cheap labor force, and since regular commuting is virtually impossible, workers find ways to sleep illegally in Tel Aviv and elsewhere. In Tel Aviv, each worker is picked up by the police several times a year on the average. Workers sleep in fruit stalls in the open markets or in rotting rooms or cellars in slums where they are lined up wall-to-wall, sleeping in their work clothes with no sanitary facilities or showers, waiting for the knock of the police. The rough estimate is that thousands of Arab workers live this way, though no one knows. While the police are empowered to prevent Arabs from sleeping in Tel Aviv, there are no laws establishing minimal conditions for their survival.

  Within the Gaza Strip itself, the most serious problem is water. Local * Danny Tsidkoni, Davar, Jan. 16, 1983. There is little reporting from the region, as Tsidkoni explains, in part because the military administration regards journalists as “the enemy” and keeps them away. His report is based on “official information” of a sort rarely released.

  sources are already overused, leading to increase in salinity and other contamination which threatens to become a “catastrophe.” To prevent this catastrophe, water utilization is controlled and local Arabs are punished if they go beyond their ration or dig wells. But, Rafael Gaon reports, “the law concerns only the former [i.e., Arab] residents of the region. The new settlers [Jews]—that is a different story entirely.” For their projects—e.g., profitable raising of fruit for the European market— local water supplies are provided in quantities far beyond anything available for Arab agriculture or other Arab use. Apart from the profitability for the Israeli economy (to which the captive market also contributes), this has the added advantages of compelling local Arabs to serve as a superexploited labor force for Israeli enterprises (including kibbutzim), and of permitting foreign visitors to be amazed by Israel’s remarkable achievements in making the desert bloom. In short, the usual story—for the Arab citizens of Israel itself, the drugged roaches in the occupied territories, and perhaps, before too long, the residents of the “North Bank” as well.30

  Like the industrialists, many Israeli citizens are being drawn to “Judea and Samaria” with their empty spaces (the Arabs being properly confined to “limited areas”), cheap land, and generous government loans and grants. Leah Etgar describes how, particularly since Reagan’s call for a settlement freeze, the roads to Samaria are clogged as families drive out to tour the area on the Sabbath, “a national sport,” in endless rows of cars. There are many Arab villages, but one driver said that there is “no reason to be afraid of them.” “Once they threw a stone in Kalkylia, and after that got their market closed down for two weeks. Now they don’t even peep outside.” Just Samidin, trying to hold on to what they have left as the strangers walk through their walls. Besides, there are plenty of Border Guards, so the pleasant family outings will not be disturbed.

  Many of the families are searching for land or houses in the new settlements that are springing up everywhere, so rapidly that often only the local Arabs can direct the drivers to them. One particular tourist attraction is a mansion on a hill belonging to Moshe Ser, a wealthy graduate of a religious youth movement. Tourists watch the “Arab workers rushing back and forth, carrying mountains of cement”; the Rabbis have no doubt found an appropriate dispensation to permit the beasts of burden to work on the Sabbath. Here and in the surrounding areas buyers are helped with government funds. “Whenever the money runs out, the Defense Minister comes to visit us with a group of Americans,” one middleman in the new settlement of Karnei Shomron explains. “He climbs on Moshe Ser’s hill and shows them how near Natanya [in Israel] is to the guns. That persuades them and they pull out the cheque books.” In such ways wealthy American Jews are enabled to fulfill their fondest dream: to contribute to turning Israel into South Africa.*

  * Israel has recently devised a method to enable them to fulfill this dream more directly. At a meeting organized by Americans for a Safe Israel in New York in March 1983, Israeli government officials outlined to 300 prominent American Jews the ways in which they could purchase land on the West Bank themselves, without moving there. A brochure entitled Purchasing Land in Samaria explains how Arab lands can be bought by Americans through an Israeli institution established in the West Bank “in areas to be developed in the near future.” It is a good investment, given the vast government (ultimately. U.S. government) subsidies and the cheap land—which will remain “cheap,” and “available.” thanks to the Land Patrols, the Border Guards, and other mechanisms of persuasion, no doubt. The State Department professed to be “shocked.” Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Boston Globe, April 9, 1983. In a letter to the Boston Globe, three officers of Americans for a Safe Israel deny

  Israeli soldiers, meanwhile, continue to report their current activities and the attitudes of their officers: arbitrary search and imprisonment, looting, punishment, degradation, general harassment of the population. An IDF officer, a man of considerable culture, breaks into a discussion of a Mahler symphony with this comment to his troops: with regard to the local Arab population,

  There are two alternatives, to live with them or to destroy them. Personally I hate them. They stink. They do not share our culture. They sleep with goats. It is necessary to vaporize them, to turn them to a gas.31

  Once again one observes the curious, almost pathological drive to imitate the posturing of those we do not “dare to mention by name” (as Abba Eban put it in his comments quoted earlier), to the point of grotesque caricature.

  The reaction to all of this in the United States was to increase the funding that makes it possible. One reason is that what is happening in the occupied territories is not really happening, as Jeane Kirkpatrick explained after a visit to Israel: contrary to what has been reported at length in the Israeli press, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations “said Israeli settlements on the predominantly Palestinian West Bank were not on the verge of changing the region’s character.”
32 Another reason may be the one explained by Henry Kissinger: we must show

  that any Israeli government official discussed the program (it was a private organization, they claim) and state that Arabs in Judea and Samaria “are jumping at an opportunity” to sell their lands. Michael I. Teplow, Mark Espinola, and Josef E. Teplow, letter, Boston Globe, May 2, 1982. On the facts concerning the willingness to sell land, see chapter 4, section 4.1.

  Israel “compassion” and “maybe even affection” or we might “harass it into emotional and psychic collapse.” Fortunately, the Samidin are a tougher breed, so no such solicitude is required with regard to them.

  The fact that Israel reacted to President Reagan’s call for a settlement freeze with a huge expansion in the settlement program was partially reported here. It must have made the President feel rather powerful, given that the only precedent for such an upsurge in settlement was in response to his earlier pronouncement that settlement in the occupied territories is not illegal, as had previously been maintained. See also 610*.

  3.2.2 The March on West Beirut There was also a second Israeli response to the President’s peace initiative, one of much greater short-term significance than the expansion of settlements. On September 3 and 4, Israeli forces crossed the cease-fire lines, violating the Habib agreements that had just been reached under which the PLO had departed from Beirut. They moved towards the Sabra and Shatila “refugee camps”—actually urban neighborhoods, now surrounded by the expanded city of Beirut. The Israeli forces cleared mines and established observation posts overlooking the camps, which had been heavily damaged by the bombardment from early June. “Observers noted that the Israeli roadclearing operation might have been aimed at clearing a path for a later advance by an armored column on the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps.”