How Israel Will Control the West Bank
and GazaBy Israel Shahak
The reason which prompted the Labour party and its allies to opt
for an indirect form of rule over the part of the territories densely
populated by the Palestinians, instead of continuing to rule them
directly, have been often enunciated by the late prime minister,
Yithzak Rabin, and other ministers. They can easily be understood in
the context of the deeper Israeli assumptions held since the
territories where conquered.
Israel's basic strategy has always been about how to rule the
Palestinians with maximum efficiency. At first, the idea called
"the Jordanian option" (a favourite of Shimon Peres) was to
bring the Jordanians to the West Bank in order to do the job on
Israel's behalf. Later Israel created the Villlage Leagues, whereby
local collaborators effectively ruled the West Bank for some years
until seen off by the intifada. Both concepts were intended for the
same purpose as the Oslo process: to let the Palestinians be ruled
without Israeli Supreme Court interference and without regard for the
reports of human rights organisations such as Betselem and other
hindrances.
Settlements and roads
The Israeli strategy under the Oslo process, as followed in the
Gaza Strip and the West Bank, is based on the settlements as the
focuses of military power. To take Gaza first, detailed maps of the
Strip often published in Israeli papers show it is criss-crossed by
"military roads" which, according to the Cairo Agreement,
remain under Israeli jurisdiction. These roads are patrolled by the
Israeli army, either separately or jointly with the Palestinian
police. The Israeli army has the legal right to close any section of
such roads to all Palestinian traffic, even within the autonomy, and
it uses this right when a convoy to a settlement is using the
roads.
One of those roads, the "Gaza City Bypass", traverses the entire
length of the Strip, carefully avoiding the population centers. A
military road and a narrow strip of land not included in the autonomy
cuts it off from Egypt. A number of parallel roads travers the
Strip's autonomous area from the Israeli border on the east to the
Mediterranean coast or an Israeli settlement bloc on the west. All
authorised entry points to the autonomy are located at the beginning
of the military roads. One such is the Netzarim road which begins at
an authorised entry point to the autonomy at Nahal Oz, from there
running west, skirting all major Palestinian localities. After
crossing the "Gaza City Bypass", it reaches the settlement of
Netzarim. It does not end there, however, but continues to a military
fortress on the sea shore.
This road cuts the Gaza Strip in two, in its strategically most
sensitive spot: between Gaza town and the big refugee camps to the
south of it. After the Oslo Accords were signed, the Hebrew press
reported that large military forces were stationed at Netzarim. It is
its official status as a settlement which allowed Israel to do this
legally. As the commentator Nahum Barnea quipped at the time "had
Netzarim not existed we would have had to invent it".
The overall effect of all these roads is that the autonomous part
of the Gaza Strip is sliced into enclaves controlled by the bypass
roads. The role of the Israeli settlements in the Strip is to to
serve as pivots of the road grid devised to ensure Israeli control.
This new form of control, referred to by Rabin and other Labour
politicians as "control from the outside", allows the army to
dominate the Strip (and to reconquer it with minimum effort if need
be, as sometimes mentioned in the Hebrew press) without having to
commit large manpower for the task of pacifying the Strip's towns and
refugee camps "from inside".
This task is now being undertaken on Israel's behalf by the
Palestinian security forces. The effectiveness of those forces in
controlling Gaza drivers on the Netzarim road (and, one can add, the
entire Palestinian population) has lately been graphically described
by Ari Shavit, who travelled on it as a part of an Israeli convoy
which included soldiers and settlers going to Netzarim (
Ha'aretz, 22 September). He reported that the advance part of the
convoy drives on both sides of the road, ordering all the Palestinian
vehicles to park beside the road until the convoy passes, "as we
do i Lebanon". The drivers he saw appeared to him as
"submissive enough". This is one of the many instances in
which the Palestinian authority can be said to actually help the
settlements while pretendeing to oppose them.
The settlers will stay
Moving on the West Bank, the task of the Oslo II agreement is to
eventually produce results similar to those existing in the Gaza
Strip. The conditions there may turn out even worse, due to a much
larger number of settlers and to the construction of separate
networks of roads and water supplies for the settlers which cannot
but pass near or through the many Palestinian enclaves in the West
Bank, in stark contrast to the relatively compact autonomous Gaza
Strip. Moreover, the West Bank includes the "Greater Jerusalem" area,
which from a stategic point of view cuts the territory in two and
serves as the focus of the system of bypasssing roads whose task is
going to be to allow effective control "from the outside" of
Palestinian West Bank localities.
So it can be said that the settlements in the territories have a
double significance: on the one hand they express the continuation of
Zionist ideology and on the other they serve as a focus of a form of
military control which saves a lot of manpower. In addition, the new
pattern of indirect control is more in tune with recent developments
of imperial control, particularly as used by the US. After all, the
US, which in effect rules Panama, El Salvador and similar countries,
does so now much more effectively through the local regimes than by
any direct occupation or military invasion. The indirect pressure on
Iraq which followed the Gulf war falls into the same category.
I should be clear from this discussion that the Israeli government
has no intention of removing any settlements in the foreseeable
future. On the contrary, the settlements are being strenghtened. As
Oslo II was being signed, Yossi Beilin, one of the chief architects
of the Oslo process, reassured the Israeli public that "We have
not abandoned the settlers".
Rebutting the accusations of Likud, Beilin, added: "The most
ridiculous accusation is that of abandoning the settlers. The
agreement was delayed for months in order to guarantee that all of
the settlements would remain an immense financial outlay. The
situation in the settlements was never better than that which has
been created following the Oslo agreement" (Ma'ariv, 27
September).
Even more important is the fact that when the government had a
good opportunity to remove the Hebron settlers (or at leats part of
them), in the aftermath of the massacre, it did not. Daniel Ben-Simon
(Davar, 18 August) revealed that during discussion of this
problem which took place in the prime minister's office, "the
heads of Israeli security services", that is the chief of staff,
the head of the Military Intelligence and the heads of Mossad and
Shabak, "all opposed the evacuation of Hebron's settlers".
Text published in "Forward", Nr. 122, March 1996
