Is the Occupation Brutalizing Israel?

RUBENSTEIN, YOSEF GOELL and DANNY

TWO VIEWS Is the Occupation Brutalizing Israel? MOMENT assigned this article and response before the riots on the West Bank and Gaza began last December. Since then, the press has been asking the...

...Many of the immigrants of the late 1940s and 1950s, some from the post-Holocaust displaced persons camps of Europe, but mostly refugees from Arab countries, remained on the fringes of Israel's society and economy in the first decades after their arrival...
...For them, the occupation-equals-brutalization issue is a central concern...
...No YOSEF GOELL One of the most disturbing arguments raised against Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is that the basic immorality entailed in one people's imposing its rule over another has been eroding Israel's own humanitarian values and making individual Israelis and Israeli life more brutal...
...While the situation in the Moslem Quarter of the Old City and the Jewish terrorism near some of the Gush settlements undoubtedly provide some support for the brutalization thesis, the connection is not so much to the occupation per se as it is to the intrusion of Jewish settlements into areas with heavy concentrations of Arab population...
...The limited resonance that Meir Kahane's message of anti-Arab hatred has had in Israel is derived largely from a legacy of anti-Arab hostility that characterizes some of the newly emergent second-generation Jews from Moslem countries...
...The principal support for the occupation-equals-brutalization argument comes from common sense...
...But what have all those to do with the occupation...
...Goell chooses to ignore the direct connection between what is happening in our society and what is happening in the occupied territories...
...The decline in relations between religious and secular Jews also owes much to the occupation...
...by no stretch of the imagination can they be linked to any demoralizing effects of the occupation...
...More to the point, however, is that the Kahane brand of anti-Arab racism has been directed primarily against indigenous Israeli Arabs and only marginally against the Arabs in the territories...
...In fact, the public's awareness of instances of questionable behavior on the part of individual soldiers on occupation duty has almost always come from whistle-blowers among those same Israeli troops...
...Thus, when the polls showed that the Labor party was ahead, Menachem Begin and the Likud party consciously exacerbated existing ethnic hostilities in a successful dttempt to turn around their 1981 election campaign...
...My reading of the evidence leads me to answer: nothing, or nearly nothing...
...fii to do with the occupied territories...
...He can be detained and held without trial for up to six months...
...It is only the continuing occupation that provides the intellectual background for such despicable and racist ideas...
...An unprecedented hysterical pitch also characterizes Israeli politics...
...There have been frantic circulation wars, the likes of which were unknown to the more sedate and socially responsible media of an earlier period in Israel's history...
...and the Al-Aksa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem to make way for the building of the Third Temple and the coming of the Messiah...
...They have been spurred on by the infusion, starting in the late 1960s, of unprecedentedly large sums of easy money in American governmental and Jewish institutional aid, and by the opportunities presented by the 15-year economic boom that this money has spawned...
...Neither I nor Goell can escape the grave responsibility that this implies...
...It is also derived from a small group of aggressively fundamentalist, ultra-Orthodox, mostly recent American and Soviet immigrants...
...The volatile situation in the Moslem Quarter of the Old City is an example of dangers that must be avoided...
...The vulgarization of Israeli politics in the 1980s has similarities to that situation...
...And none of these blemishes can be expected to disappear or be cured simply by Israel's withdrawal from the territories...
...The fact that the worrisome social developments described above have occurred more or less during the same period as Israel's occupation of the territories does not prove that one has caused the other, or—and this is more important—that if the occupation is abolished these social trends will be reversed...
...Everything that has taken place in Israeli society over the last 20 years has been connected in one way or another to our continued rule over the Palestinians...
...No one who cares about the future of this country and its democratic and Jewish character can afford to ignore the painful fact that hundreds of rabbis and yeshiva students have organized anti-Moslem activities on the Temple Mount, some storing and using weapons and explosives to further their "divinely inspired" ends...
...it addresses the soul of a democratic nation...
...The fact of Israeli rule over the West Bank and Gaza cannot simply be removed from the overall picture and dismissed as irrelevant to the obvious and continuing process of brutaliza-tion...
...Is the vulgarization of Israeli society discussed above connected to the continuing occupation of the territories...
...Without intending to do so, Goell's article grants legitimacy to permanent Israeli military rule over 1.5 million Palestinians who have no civil and political rights—a situation that is intolerable from any democratic viewpoint...
...It is true that the situation was created by a prolonged national and political conflict that came to a head in the 1967 war...
...It may be that the answer depends on how often the question is raised, not here, but in Israel.—Ed...
...There is no need to check whether every Israeli soldier who serves in the territories has become more brutal when he comes home in order to prove that there is a direct connection between brutality and occupation...
...The issue is important not only to the extreme left, which favors immediate unilateral withdrawal from the territories, but also to the overwhelming majority of Israelis, who, while they reject immediate unilateral withdrawal, also reject the other extreme— immediate unilateral annexation of the territories...
...Goell's impression that Israeli society has become more brutal is certainly correct...
...True, the media have not fabricated the bad news about the vulgarization of various aspects of life in Israel, but they have been playing the news in a way that has aggravated a sense of social jealousy among the have-nots, and encouraged their determination to get their share of the action...
...In late 1986, a number of random attacks by Jews on Arab residents living in the Moslem Quarter of the Old City followed the murder of a yeshiva student by PLO-instigated terrorists...
...We Israelis—as a society and as a state— rule the West Bank and Gaza by brute force...
...There is obviously another face to Israel and its people...
...Occupation duty is universally detested...
...What is this if not brutality...
...Israel's social and political system has changed radically since the 1967 war...
...More recently, Labor's Shimon Peres, who is justly renowned as a politician fully in control of his emotions, accused those opposed to an international conference of "murdering the peace...
...After examining the evidence, however, I can only conclude that the hypothesis has not been proven...
...It would be hard to deny that the Israel of today is a much more abrasive and vulgar (brutal would be an unwarranted exaggeration) place than it was 20 or more years ago...
...Another anti-Arab pogrom, which occurred in a largely working-class Sephardi suburb of Tel Aviv, was aimed at Israeli Arab students and Arab workers from the territories who were renting apartments there...
...Now, in the late 1980s, ethnic tensions are clearly on the wane, while religious tensions are on the rise, for reasons that have nothing The same is true of labor relations and welfare programs...
...Arab workers from the territories have taken over manual labor previously done by Sephardi Jews and have pushed the latter further up the scale of employment, earnings and opportunities...
...Such intrusions have made the conduct of the occupation much more difficult and have tended to foster situations of increasingly brutal confrontation...
...In this decade, for example, doctors and nurses have engaged in strikes that endangered the lives of helpless hospital patients...
...The occupation-equals-brutaliza-tion thesis is often presented as irrefutable...
...One and a half million Palestinians are a captive market for Israeli consumer products, just as they are a cheap and easily available source of labor...
...So did the increasingly open expression of anti-Arab hostility by many Israelis...
...I served in the territories years ago and I have made a point, as a journalist, of interviewing other soldiers on such duty...
...Even if every Israeli soldier were an angel, the picture would not change...
...many reservists try to finagle their way out of it...
...And the fact of a binational society—with Israelis as rulers and Palestinians as ruled—is the main component of this tragic and painful reality...
...One anti-Arab rampage in the town of Afula occurred in direct response to such a double murder, which Kahane agitators claimed was committed by Israeli Arabs (West Bank Arab youngsters were eventually proved to be the culprits...
...For them it is a hostile, foreign rule that uses force to take away their lands and to settle more and more Jews there...
...Even those who have not carried out arrests in Nablus at night, those who have not fired tear gas grenades, rubber bullets or live bullets at violent demonstrators, those who have not confiscated land, imposed a curfew or settled in the West Bank, even Israelis who have never even visited the territories, are full accomplices...
...Kahanist anti-Arab racism is partly an import from the fringes of American Jewish Orthodoxy...
...It was a crude but essential phase in the democratization of the United States...
...There is, by definition, no military occupation that is not brutal...
...Mustafa Natshe is forbidden, by administrative decree, to leave the country...
...Goell cannot comfort himself with the fact that immense pressure to pardon the convicted members of the Jewish terrorist underground did not succeed in swaying the authorities...
...In many fields of human and social relations, we find a general atmosphere of kasah, a Hebrew slang adaptation of an Arabic word meaning an intent to cripple and annihilate, to go for the jugular...
...These fears were fanned by a small but highly publicized spate of kidnapping, torture and murder of Jewish men, women and children, both soldiers and civilians, by Israeli Arabs...
...This is a partial and unsatisfactory description of what is, sadly, becoming an increasingly popular view in this country...
...Israel's ethnic and religious tensions are indigenous factors...
...What was once one of the most comprehensive social welfare systems in the world has become distorted since 1967, because it simply does not embrace the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who cross the old "green line" to work in Israel every day...
...We ask whether as a result of an occupation that Israelis never sought and many Israelis do not want, Israel has undergone a gradual erosion of that sensitivity to injustice that enables a democratic nation continually to right its own wrongs...
...The one place where a persuasive argument can be made for a connection between occupation and brutalization is in East Jerusalem...
...I am sure that Israel's army must have its share of sadists...
...This vast center—the overwhelming majority of Israelis—finds the entire issue of policy toward the territories rife with contradictions and confusions...
...Goell describes the phenomenon of Rabbi Meir Kahane and his racist Kach party as an American import with limited influence in Israel, whose activities are mostly directed against the state's Arab citizens...
...One can make it big financially in this Israel directly by exploiting a managerial position or using financial know-how to rip off the system...
...Has the occupation affected the respect Israelis have for their own nation and for one another...
...Israeli society as a whole is an accomplice to this brutality, irrespective of individual political views...
...October 1987...
...Returning to the undeniable vulgarization of life in Israel in the 1980s, I suggest that this can best be understood by three factors which have nothing to do with the occupation...
...In order to differentiate between Levinger and Natshe—as well as hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians—the Israeli government has had to promulgate laws and regulations that are manifestly discriminatory and undemocratic...
...They seem to have developed a healthy resistance to this...
...The result has been a period in Israeli history pockmarked with financial scandals, with a spin-off effect in the aggravated tenor of labor relations...
...One unit of a Jewish vigilante underground from among the settlers mounted an attack on the Arab college in Hebron, in which several Arab students were randomly gunned down and killed...
...It is an undeniable fact that the Israeli authorities are lenient toward Jews who retaliate against Arabs—a fact fully and devastatingly documented in a Justice Ministry report on the workings of the legal system in the occupied territories...
...Abetting these developments has been a popular press that in the 1980s has begun to pander to the lowest common denominator among its readers...
...Kahanist anti-Arab racism reared its ugly head in this same period...
...But I can personally attest that I have never met, nor have I heard of, any Israeli soldier who has actually enjoyed doing Yes DANNY RUBENSTEIN Yosef Goell's argument that the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is not directly connected to the many symptoms of brutality that are affecting Israeli society is a dangerous one...
...occupation duty, not even an assortment of military types who enjoy the macho aspects of army life...
...Tensions between Jewish ethnic groups—the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim—reached unprecedented heights in the late 1970s and early 1980s...
...First, the heightened, nearly hysterical pitch of Israeli politics is a result of the supplanting of an earlier elitist politics by a more populist mode, and of the frantic determination of the two major political parties to stop at nothing in their attempt to break the deadlock that has emerged in recent elections...
...They simply do not trust the Israeli government...
...And why should they...
...The result has been an impoverishment of the public sector, in which schools, universities and health services have been cut to the bone (see "Is Hebrew University Going Down the Tubes...
...Levinger, by contrast, is protected by the full panoply of laws and rights afforded by a Western democracy...
...In some ways this issue is at the heart of our incessant debate over what to do in what many see as a no-win situation in the territories...
...During this period, Israel unfortunately has gradually copied the worst aspects of the American ethos of achieving personal success at any cost...
...And if the many thousands of Israeli soldiers who have personally participated in policing the territories over the past 20 years have been made brutal by the performance of their duties, it also stands to reason that they must have brought home their newly corrupted personalities...
...Israel's first anti-Arab pogroms—against both Israeli Arabs and Palestinians in East Jerusalem—broke out in the mid-1980s...
...Is that not also part of the process of bru-talization in the widest possible sense...
...From this perspective, the parade of horrors cited above is a fair, though far from comprehensive, description of part of Israel's persona of the last decade...
...But military rule without freedom of organization, freedom of expression and constitutional power and rights, without elected bodies and equality before the law, is the very essence of brutality...
...They are indeed related...
...Nor can they be members of Kupat Cholim, Israel's largest health insurance plan...
...Or one can make it indirectly through the strategically placed labor unions, which have the power to throttle the country and grab an inordinate share of the pie for their members...
...Likud and other right-wing politicians (for example, Minister Yosef Shapira, Yuval Ne'eman of the Tehiya party, Deputy Defense Minister Michael Dekel) have called recently for the "transfer" of Arabs out of the country, a subtle variation on Kahane's crude demands for forcible deportation...
...As I review this parade of horrors, I ask myself whether it is a fair reflection of what has happened to me as a typical Israeli, and to my country...
...But they, too, were intercepted...
...Peres knows full well that the issue is largely procedural, and whatever emerges will be far from the hoped-for peace...
...the argument they make is that they were only ' 'good fellows who had gone wrong," engaging in unwarranted, excessive behavior in their zeal to fight Arab terrorism in the territories...
...The Palestinians in the occupied territories hardly bother even to complain about the discrimination against them...
...It is ironic that this situation erupted in East Jerusalem, which even those who counsel withdrawal from the territories do not regard as occupied territory but as part and parcel of a "reunited" Israeli Jerusalem...
...Part of the electoral support that enabled Kahane to win a seat in the Knesset in 1984, after a number of earlier failures, came from people who were voting their fears and animosities...
...The West Bank and Gaza Strip have become economically integrated with Israel...
...Meanwhile, thousands of Israelis have been flinging their ill-gotten incomes around in expensive trips abroad and in the country's five-star hotels, cafes and restaurants that were intended to cater largely to the tourist trade...
...Hopefully, it will not take too long before Israel outgrows the cruder aspects of this phase in its democratic development...
...I am reminded of the vulgarization of American politics in 1828, the beginning of the Age of Jackson, when ruffian hordes from the West came to Washington...
...But in considering the occupation-equals-brutalization thesis, we need only consider the negative side, skewed viewpoint though it is...
...In the business world, a large number of Israelis are on the make...
...Meanwhile, Likud has been determined to recreate the worst aspects of Mapai's party-machine conduct of government in the 1950s, which Labor outgrew in the 1970s...
...And, as we all know, more Israelis than ever before are on the make, ready to clamber over the backs of anyone in the way of their rush to personal success and the almighty shekel...
...But Israeli withdrawal from the territories would not seem to^be an effective weapon to use in that struggle...
...Before the 1980s, there was not a single case of such an attack by an Israeli Arab...
...The messianic element in the thinking of Gush Emunim, whose members planned to blow up the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, is only the tip of the iceberg of a much larger mass of lunatic religious and political ideas...
...He can be expelled from the country...
...It is primarily an expression of an early phase in the ongoing democratization of Israel...
...But these events, as reprehensible as they are, are in no way connected with the occupation of the territories...
...fi...
...Since then, the press has been asking the surface questions: Has Israel used excessive force in controlling the rioters...
...This situation has had a profound influence on intercommunal relations in Israeli society...
...The answer is clearly no...
...These trends should be opposed...
...Brutality is not only what happens when Arabs and Jews attack each other, or when religious and secular Jews use violence against each other, or what happens in confrontational labor relations...
...The Ashkenazis of the Labor party want to return the territories to the Arabs so that we Sephardim will go back to washing floors and doing all the dirty work," Moroccan Jewish immigrants in the city of Beit Shemesh told the writer Amos Oz in his 1982 book, In the Land of Israel...
...It would seem reasonable that 20 years in which the armed men of one nation have been lording it over the helpless members of another people must have had a brutalizing effect on the armed men...
...But what do these disfiguring blemishes on Israel's visage have to do with the continued occupation...
...Another unit planted a bomb on an Arab civilian bus, but the Israeli Security Services averted its detonation...
...Many members of the Gush Emunim initially expressed horror that some of their fellow members could have descended to such depths...
...This never occurred before the 1980s...
...In Hebron, side by side, live Rabbi Moshe Levinger, an Israeli citizen who enjoys all civil and political rights, and Mustafa Natshe, deposed from his post as mayor by order of the local military governor, and utterly unprotected from the arbitrary hand of Israeli rule...
...But in an internal debate within the Gush movement on whether to disown the Jewish terrorists or to brazen it out and support them, the latter view, championed by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, won out...
...What Goell's article is saying, in effect, is this:' 'Yes, there are problems of brutality in Israel, of intercommu-nal tension, of religious-secular violence, of labor relations and, of course, of brutality on the Arab-Jewish level...
...There has been occasional harassment of neighboring Arabs around some of these settlements, almost always in retaliation for Arab attacks...
...The yeshiva student's murder came at the tail end of a spate of knifing murders of Jews by Arabs in and around the Old City...
...If this were an article on Israeli society in general, I would examine Israel's positive visage as well...
...Since then, a persistent campaign has been mounted by the Gush Emunim settlers, the religious parties and the political right to grant pardons to the Jewish terrorists who still remain in jail...
...it would not even have entered our minds at an earlier time...
...In the 1980s, however, they, and especially their mature Israeli-educated sons and daughters, have been making it in Israel...
...The basic brutality lies in the very existence of rule imposed by force on a civilian population that does not want it...
...Before I explain this statement, I must point out that Goell's grasp of the terms "brutality," "vulgarity" and "violence" is limited, and therefore misleading...
...These workers enjoy neither social security nor unemployment benefits...
...This question has become virtually irrelevant because the present system does not grant equality before the law to all individuals...
...By the mid-1980s, similar tensions had surfaced between ultra-Orthodox haredim and secular Israelis...
...The question posed here does not address the riots, it addresses the occupation...
...in fact, they have been largely avoided in most parts of the occupied territories...
...There is no doubt that the Ashkenazi-Sephardi tension that Goell describes owes much to precisely that kind of thinking...
...Thus far, the majority of Israel's political community has resisted these demands...
...And what about the system of law and order...
...Yet another unit planned to blow up the Dome of the Rock * Gush Emunim, meaning "Bloc of the Faithful," is a movement committed to settling the biblical areas of Judea and Samaria, referred to in this article as the West Bank...
...And there are new elements in Labor itself who would like to bring back those bad old days...
...Among the many Israelis I ^know who have served in the territories there is an awareness of the danger of being brutalized by the tasks entailed in the performance of their duties...
...We have also seen a greater abrasiveness in ordinary social life, in business and in labor relations...
...Another area in which the brutalization thesis has some validity is among some—and I emphasize some—of the Gush Emunim* settlers in the territories...

Vol. 13 • April 1988 • No. 2


 
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