LETTYCOTTIN POGREBIN
LETTY COTTIN POGREBIN "I don't believe that story for a minute, " said a former high official. "Well you'd better believe it, because that's what our army is being reduced to, " interjected a...
...Until you pay attention, things happen without you...
...Yet what concrete alternatives are offered by Labor and other opposition parties...
...And now so many new immigrants fill menial jobs formerly performed by Palestinians, it is possible to avoid Palestinians altogether...
...Given that Israel's preeminent purpose is ingathering exiles, why isn't this absorption failure, this betrayal of Zionist intent, enough to bring down the government...
...In Israel, the most obvious category of denial relates to the Palestinians under occupation...
...Without peace, Israel cannot attract investments or offer immigrants a true haven...
...Until you see cultivated fields and working Palestinian olive orchards destroyed to build houses for Israelis...
...My son just came home from his army service distraught with shame...
...Well you'd better believe it, because that's what our army is being reduced to," interjected a professor...
...The high cost of settlements drains the economy...
...I don't believe that story either...
...Letty Cottin Pogrebin is the author of Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America (Crown, 1991...
...Why would we lie...
...the suicide rate is alarming, and some Soviet women are even turning to prostitution to support their children...
...said the former official...
...By now, diplomatic developments may have given Israelis hope of a solution, but this summer I found only political inertia and compassion-fatigue...
...Until you see the makeshift mobile homes erected overnight in response to Secretary of State Baker's visits...
...Last July I witnessed the anesthetic effects of denial on Israel's body politic...
...The boy's mother clutched him tightly, crying, and begged them not to take him away...
...After visiting Gaza and touring the settlements on the West Bank, I questioned Israeli friends and political figures...
...It indicates all the Jewish settlements on the West Bank but none of the Arab villages...
...Unemployment is at 10 percent and growing...
...A Soviet woman told me, "Israelis love aliyah but hate olim...
...Well you'd better believe it, because that's what our army is being reduced to, " interjected a professor...
...Experts estimate that the Jewish population of the Territories will reach 150,000 by year's end...
...until you learn that Jews now own almost 60 percent of the West Bank and their homes were built on property confiscated from the Palestinians as "state-owned land" or taken for "security...
...shortchanges education, health and social programs...
...Chaim Weizmann wrote, "There must not be one law for the Jew and another for the Arabs...
...Recent arrivals advise friends to stay in the Soviet Union or to find another destination...
...There was more talk about Palestinian violence (a relatively rare occurrence) than about Palestinian hardship and suffering (a worsening constant...
...You've known me for 20 years...
...until you see how closely these setde-ments encroach on Palestinian villages and how poor those villages are compared to their Jewish neighbors, how the new roads take Jews from the highway to their doorstep without their having to lay eyes on those villages—until you know all this, you cannot imagine what the government's "settlement policy" means in human terms...
...Everyone knows about the explosion of construction but few are ready to wrap their brains around the political and moral implications of these massive incursions across the Green Line (Israel's pre-1967 borders...
...The second category of collective denial relates to the massive Soviet aliyah (immigration to Israel...
...I was asking the Israelis about the moral costs of ruling the Occupied Territories—especially its brutalizing effect on Jewish soldiers...
...until you realize that poor people and olim are pawns in the Likud's Greater Israel agenda...
...She saw a soldier shoot a 14-year-old boy point-blank in his mother's arms," I told the group...
...Denial and avoidance keep the misery of occupation—poverty, joblessness, curfews, shut-down schools, administrative detentions without due process, denial of family reunification, house demolitions, censorship, beatings of Arab lawyers and torture of prisoners— comfortably remote...
...What do you mean you don't believe it...
...Decent, intelligent people refused to acknowledge what is happening under their noses, or didn't want to know or offered hollow excuses or defenses that glossed over the problems...
...At a refugee camp in Gaza, I'd seen 18-year-olds poke an old Palestinian with the barrels of their guns, forcing him to crawl along a filthy, garbage-strewn road collecting litter, an exercise in humiliation, not sanitation...
...until you ride through sprawling townships like Ariel or quasi-cities like Ma'aleh Adumim...
...Too many facts on the ground complicate future disengagement Without the possibility of land concessions, there will be no peace process...
...One said, "If you restrict yourself to the Jewish areas, you'll never know we have a Palestinian problem...
...loan guarantees...
...Other than Peace Now activists and other peace and civil rights groups, most Israelis I talked to had never been to Gaza, which is barely 90-minutes' drive from Jerusalem...
...He might have added "fear...
...until you see a Jewish settlement outside Gaza City ringed with barbed wire and hear about a Jewish resort in Rafa that has a swimming pool (while Gazan Arabs cannot get enough drinking water...
...Denial works psychologically and physically...
...Iwill never forget a conversation I had this summer in Jerusalem...
...Suddenly one soldier lost patience and just pulled the trigger...
...I don't know why," the other man answered...
...The Green Line and 400 Arab villages had disappeared while they weren't paying attention...
...The Israel map that comes with a Hertz rent-a-car takes denial to its logical extreme...
...The third arena of collective denial involves those creeping settlements— 13,000 housing units are being built in the West Bank and Gaza, averaging 3.7 inhabitants per unit...
...She had lived through Chernobyl, the riots in Tblisi and now one year in an Israeli absorption center...
...But how can Israel continue to be democratic if it bloats itself into a binational state where Palestinians are systematically denied the rights and services enjoyed by Jews...
...The army claimed he was throwing stones...
...Our Israeli friends were shocked: the map symbolized how far things had gone...
...Although some think it anathema to link the setdements to anything—the Arab boycott, loan guarantees, etc.— it's clear they affect every other issue of importance to Israel...
...Indeed, most people don't even know where the Green Line is anymore, and they won't find it on any Israeli map in current circulation...
...Yitzhak Rabin says, "An Israel that cannot save oppressed Jews loses its moral raison d'etre...
...It cannot do both...
...Housing is inadequate or nonexistent—and dangerously dependent on U.S...
...It's not that ignorance is bliss, but it postpones the agony of confronting reality and dealing with it...
...Hebrew University political scientist Itzhak Galnur notes among Israelis "a growing sense of fatalism and power-lessness...
...He would never forgive himself for following his superior's order to dangle a six-year-old Arab by his feet outside a window four floors up to force information from his parents...
...Few had traveled within the West Bank since the intifada began...
...When truth is too disturbing—when acknowledging facts would require some action but we cannot bring ourselves to move or consequences would be too painful—we take refuge in denial...
...Denial is a powerful anesthetic...
...I have a son, no husband, no home, no job, no relatives and no hope," she said, crying...
...You've known my son his whole life...
...But I know the Israeli army, and they don't do such things...
...Denial will not change the bottom line: Israel can police 1.7 million Palestinians or settle one million Jewish immigrants into a secure, prosperous, democratic state...
...More than 300,000 olim (immigrants) swelled the population by 6 percent in the 18 months ending last June, and Israelis are well aware that the absorption process is a national disaster...
...Ariel Sharon has made it economically attractive to settle in the Territories with mortgage incentives and other benefits, but having escaped the discomfort of minority status at home, few Soviets elect to live in the hostility of the West Bank...
...until you understand that settlements do not advance security—they put Jews in danger and make settlers vigilantes...
...I'd been upset by this sight and more so by a story I'd heard from a woman who runs kindergartens in Gaza City...
...and tilts national priorities toward an extreme ideological goal...
...until you realize that settlements cost millions to build and to service with new roads, water, electricity, and army protection...
...Palestinian reality had simply vanished...
...I don't believe that story for a minute," said a former high official in the Labor government...
...Jerusalemites warned me not to walk in the eastern part of town or in the Old City (I did so anyway with no ill effect...
Vol. 16 • October 1991 • No. 5
