http://www.ramallahonline.com/article.php?sid=224&mode=&order=0
How to Start an Uprising
By Jeff Halper*
April, 2001
First, you create great expectations. Handshakes on the White House
lawn. A rhetoric of peace ("No more war. No more bloodshed").
Elections, giving them a flag of their own. Then secret meetings,
summit meetings, dinners, retreats, peace treaties, interim
agreements, promises, tantalizing benefits held before hungry eyes.
More handshakes, more "gestures."
Then you create a framework of peace that guarantees you negotiating
superiority. Take out international law, human rights covenants, UN
resolutions, and for good measure enlist your strategic ally, the
strongest power in the world, the one who supplies you with all your
arms, as the "mediator."
Then, as you talk peace in Oslo, Washington, Paris, Cairo, the Wye
Plantation, Stockholm, Amman, Camp David, Sharm, you "create facts" on
the ground that ensure your continued control and prejudice the
negotiations altogether. You exploit the last seven years since the
signing of the Oslo Accords to:
1. Dismember the West Bank into "Areas A, B and C," giving the
Palestinian Authority full control of only 18% of the land while
retaining control over 61%; divide tiny Gaza into "yellow, white, blue
and green areas," giving 6,000 settlers control of 40% of the
territory and confining 1,000,000 Palestinians to the rest; and
completely sever East Jerusalem from the wider Palestinian society;
2. Expropriate 200 square kilometers of farm and pasture land from its
Palestinian owners for your own exclusive settlements, highways and
infrastructure;
3. Uproot some 80,000 olive and fruit trees that are in the way of
your construction projects, thereby impoverishing their owners and
making them casual day workers in your labor market - provided they
can get access to your labor market;
4. Add some 30 new settlements, including whole cities like Kiryat
Sefer and Tel Zion, to the dozens of settlements that already exist in
the Occupied Territories over which negotiations are taking place, and
construct 90,000 new housing units in East Jerusalem and the
settlements exclusively for your own population;
5. Demolish more than 1200 homes of the people with whom you are
negotiating peace;
6. Double your settler population across the 1967 border to 400,000,
90% of which you have already decided will remain under your
sovereignty even though you haven't negotiated that with the other
side yet;
7. Begin construction of 480 kms of massive highways and "by-pass"
roads serving your settlements while dissecting the future territory
of your peace partner into tiny disconnected islands, thereby
preventing the emergence of another viable and competing economy next
door;
8. Impose a permanent "closure" to prevent those whose lands you took
from finding employment in your own economy, because you have
discovered that workers from Rumania and Thailand are cheaper and more
docile. While you're at it, you also exclude them from entering
Jerusalem, the site of their holiest places;
9. Exploit their natural resources, unilaterally and illegally
drawing, for example, 25% of your country's water from your neighbors'
aquifers while leaving them thirsty for months on end;
10. Vandalize their countryside and environment, burying its fragile
historic landscape under your massive settlements and highways and
turning it into a disposal site for your industrial and urban wastes.
Next, you wait until your occupation has become irreversible and
all-encompassing, until you've integrated your two economies under
your control, the electrical grids, the highway and urban
infrastructure, until you've completely absorbed your partner's
economy and society into your own. Then you announce that your concept
of peace is "separation," and you lock your neighbors into a few small
islands, taking away any hope they have for a better future, for a
real country and identity of their own. You keep tightening your
control, restricting their life space, humiliating and harassing them
- until the uprising finally explodes.
Then you tell your story to the world: how you tried to negotiate, how
"generous" you had been, how you wanted peace, and how disappointed
you feel that "they" let you down. How "they" met your good intentions
with stones, how "they" are not partners for peace, how "they" are not
yet ready for peace. And so, until they agree to end their violence
against you and return to the same negotiating table that allowed you
to construct your matrix of control in the first place, you resort to
force - defensive force, of course, since "they" are the aggressors.
The most up-to-date American weapon systems, snipers, closures until
starvation, clearing thousands of acres of agricultural land,
destruction of hundreds of houses.... Until they get the message.
Jeff Halper teaches anthropology at Ben Gurion University in Israel.
He is co-ordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
(ICAHD) and is editor of the critical Israeli-Palestinian magazine
NEWS FROM WITHIN, published by the Alternative Information Center.
