http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?mador=4&datee=5/30/01&id=120357
All the way from the sea to the river
By Amira Hass
Ha'aretz 05/30/2001
Since the publication of the Mitchell Commission report earlier this
month, the Israeli public has been deliberating, without any sense of
urgency, the question of freezing construction in the settlements. But
this feeble debate must not be allowed to divert attention from the
heart of the issue: the very existence of the Jewish settlement in the
West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza Strip.The question is
whether Israelis as a whole, most of whom still live within the
borders of June 4, 1967, are ready to live as a normal people in a
state with set boundaries, or whether they are prepared personally,
emotionally and financially to mobilize for a lengthy war, so that the
area of Israeli sovereignty be determined by the location of the
settlements.
Israel's development of the settlements creates a geography of a
single state, stretching from the sea to the Jordan River. Israel has
been working on this particular geographic layout for over 20 years,
but most insistently during the last decade, "the peace process
years," by linking the settlements' roads, water and electricity
systems to the infrastructure within the Green Line. Israeli society,
sending more and more of its sons to defend the settlements, is thus
replying to the question posed above: It is ready for the prolonged
war over the right of the settlements to determine the state's
borders.
But it is not only a question of borders. The fundamental question is
whether the Israeli Jewish people, seeing itself as part of the West
and competing in various European forums, believes in its ability to
maintain, from the sea to the Jordan River, a regime that
discriminates in its favor, merely because it is Jewish.
In the geographic territory on both sides of the Green Line lives
another people.
Its development options are limited by a low-quality infrastructure,
deliberately kept that way by Israel's governments since 1948. Its
access to water and land resources is limited, compared to Jewish
access, by laws (inside the Green Line) and military orders (outside
the Green Line).
A Jew born in Jaffa can move to Ma'aleh Adumim. A Palestinian born in
Jericho is not entitled to move to Jaffa, much less to set up a
neighborhood of villas for himself and his friends on a mountainside
in the Galilee. On the civil administration committees, which decide
where and how to build roads for Jewish settlers, and when to send
inspectors to find Palestinian trees planted on "state lands" - there
are no Palestinian representatives.
A Jew from Beit El does not need a permit to travel to Jerusalem,
while a Palestinian from neighboring Ramallah in ordinary times
requires an Israeli permit to travel to East Jerusalem or Gaza, not to
mention Tel Aviv, and nowadays may not even be able to go to
Bethlehem. A Jew born in Marseilles and currently living in Neveh
Dekalim can study at the Ariel College at any time. A Palestinian
whose mother was born in Ashdod and now lives in the Khan Yunis
refugee camp needs an Israeli permit to study at Bir-Zeit University
or at al-Najah University in Nablus, and is not at all certain to get
it.
Summer is at hand, and there is not one Jew in one settlement, nor in
most of the towns inside the state of Israel, who needs to worry that
the water in his pipes will dry up. The Palestinian neighbors of Beit
El, Ma'aleh Adumim, Ma'aleh Hahamisha, Kfar Sava and Yad Hana are at
the same time beginning to count the drops in their containers,
because Israel sets quotas for Palestinian personal water consumption.
In this single-state geography, a Jew born in Tel Aviv or Moscow can
live in a new residential neighborhood in Upper Nazareth.
A non-Jewish Israeli citizen, whose family's land in Nazareth was
confiscated for that same Jewish neighborhood, will not manage to
initiate and set up a new, Arab residential neighborhood in the
outskirts of Ramat Aviv, because the "national land" cannot be leased
to non-Jews.
True, he has the right to vote and fight for equal rights within the
state.
But when the state itself does everything in its power to blot out the
Green Line, why should the residents of Dir Hana, Sakhnin and Taibeh
be expected to sanctify this line and present discrimination against
themselves as something separate and different than the discrimination
against the residents of Jalazun and Jabalya?
In this one-state geography there are two separate, unequal systems of
laws and rights.
The members of one ethnic group are more privileged than those of the
other community. The settlers' lobby is busily trying to convince the
Israeli public that in any case, all Palestinians have their eye on
the entire country.
The truth is that the vast majority in the Palestinian political
organizations still support a solution of two states in the June 4,
1967 borders, leaving the task of democratization inside Israel to the
Jewish-Arab Israeli society. However, this policy-making generation,
which in the years before the closure learned to recognize Israel as a
multi-dimensional society, is dwindling; a new generation is growing
up, for whom the Israelis are all settlers and soldiers who aim to
ensure - in the entire area from the river to the sea - not only their
existence, but the superior position of their ethnic community, at the
expense of the other community.
How long can Jewish-Israeli society protect its privileges in the
single state
