The continued US support to Israel and its settlement policy founded on fear and military enforcement is causing resentment throughout the Arab world. Washington ignores that it is illegal under international law for an occupying power to transfer citizens from its own territory to the occupied territory by building more and more settlements. This is the third and concluding part of our series on Israel’s expansionist policy.
“Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important to build, it is important to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is more important to be able to shoot — or else I am through with playing at colonization.” (Vladimir Jablonsky, early right-wing Zionist leader, 1923)
The spread of settlements had long been reinforced by terror. Armed groups of Zionist-Irgun Zvail Leumi (IZL) and Lehi (the Stern group) provided amongst others an armed threat to Palestinians, who often abandoned their land under their pressure. This took on a new momentum in 1948 with the raid on Deir Yassin. April, May and September proved to be key points in the establishment of the Jewish state and auguries of the development of aggressive settlement policy.
The villagers of Deir Yassin had signed a nonaggression pact with a nearby Jewish village. Deir Yassin was built on a hill, overlooking a main access road to Jerusalem and in an area that was proposed as an airport.
However, “the clear aim was to break Arab morale and raise the morale of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, which had been hit hard for some time....,” said a senior Irgun officer after the raid.
Accounts vary as to the precise nature of the attack; some were willfully altered at the time. Essentially, 120 Jewish attackers entered the village, demolished houses killing both men and women and took 23 men to a nearby quarry and shot them in cold blood.
IZL’s commander and later Israeli Prime Minister Menachen Begin afterward said “Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest....”
About 116 people were killed; a list was compiled by the clan heads of the village a few days later. “The 116 figure makes sense,” said Yehoshua Arieli, Israeli former commander of the Haganah group that buried the bodies and now a professor of history. Mordechai Ra’anan, the IZL commander in the raid, gave the reporters who interviewed him immediately after the raid a figure of 254.
He admitted he had no way of knowing the real number. “I told the reporters that 254 were killed so that a big figure would be published and so that the Arabs would panic, not only in Jerusalem but across the country, and this goal was accomplished.”
Whether the actions of that night were a “massacre” or an attack on a source of potential Palestinian resistance is in one sense secondary. The raid was effective in issuing a message to Palestinian Arabs as part of the long campaign to scare them into abandoning land when settlement by Jews was threatened.
Just over a month later on May 15, 1948, the State of Israel was proclaimed and the western sector of Jerusalem was occupied. The settlement policy took on two approaches.
• The establishment of settlement “neighborhoods” on the lands of Jerusalem;
• Establishing settlements on the lands surrounding Jerusalem.
To implement its plans, and in the aftermath of the recent killings at Deir Yassin, the Zionist authority issued a number of laws and military orders that facilitated its activities after it consolidated its authority on the western sector of the city. These ignored both the rights of the Palestinian population and the United Nations resolutions that do not recognize this authority. The authority used the British Emergency Laws of 1945 to confiscate and demolish Arab property, using the excuse of “security” as its justification.
The implied threat issued by the events at Deir Yassin was ever present.
With the State of Israel now established as, in the new Prime Minister Ben Gurion’s words “a great Jewish fact,” the explosive rhetoric and uncompromising nationalism of the IZL helped maintain the pressure on the Arab population. Kati Marton, writing on the milieu of the new state in the New Yorker 1994 said: “Yitzhak Shamir (later to become prime minister of Israel) and his underground group hated what the United Nations mediator stood for: Compromise, conciliation, the abandonment of maximalist (sic) demands in the service of turning enemies into neighbors.”
On Sept. 17, 1948, four men dressed in Israeli Army uniforms assassinated the man appointed by the United Nations to mediate the growing Arab-Israeli dispute. “Israel’s founding Prime Minister David Ben Gurion knew who the assassins were: Members of the so-called Stern Gang, a Jewish group of several hundred members founded in 1940. Ben Gurion made a behind-the-scenes deal with the murderers: Freedom from prosecution if they would cease violence. The man who organized the killing was Yitzhak Shamir, who later became prime minister himself.” (The Ethical Spectacle, 1995)
These three events in 1948 contribute significantly to the Machiavellian pragmatism that underlies the development of settlements: Fear, force and the quasi legitimacy given to it by the State of Israel.
Menachem Begin, prime minister and congratulator of the attack on Deir Yassin, succinctly laid out the justification for continued settlement. “Settlement, one hundred years ago, in areas of the land of Israel populated by Arabs and sometimes solely by Arabs, was it moral or immoral: permitted or forbidden? If it was moral then settlement near Nablus is moral.” (Address to the Knesset, 1982.)
The Zionist experience of state building in Palestine in the first half of this century led Israeli leaders to believe that civilian Jewish settlements were the building blocks upon which sovereignty was created and which defined its territorial limits. The two-prong settlement policy began in earnest in 1948.
Between 1948 and 1963, 15 “neighborhood” settlements were established by the newly formed state authority. Between 1948 and 1952, 21 settlements were established on the sites of Arab villages demolished and their populations evicted in 1948. So the processes of compulsory replacement of the Arab population by Jewish settlers, the demolition of Arab villages and their replacement with settlement, illegal confiscation of Arab land and legalization of Jewish immigration into Palestine proceeded.
It was supported by the fear and threat of military action as part of policy, as shown by Moshe Dayan.
In the wake of the June 1967 war, settlement in the Arab lands intensified. Building on experience gained since 1948, the Knesset annexed Jerusalem to Israeli control on June 27, 1967. It then expanded Jerusalem’s borders to cover 70.5 sq km — up from 6.5 sq km — thereby appropriating West Bank lands and annexing 28 villages and cities in the vicinity. It was then but a small step to declare the area “Greater Jerusalem” as the capital of “Erez Israel.” One-third of the West Bank had been annexed — and the settlements formed a cordon round Jerusalem, isolating it from the rest of the West Bank and securing it with military reinforcements.
This put the Arab population under tremendous pressure and encouraged them to leave — allowing replacement by new Jewish immigrants. They were actively encouraged by attractive payment plans on new apartments, extension of financial assistance and municipal tax holidays.
The current Jewish Quarter, erected in 1968 on the remains of the Arab neighborhoods, and the 56 Arab homes confiscated and given to settlers of Jewish religious schools, form the bulk of settlement within the walls of Jerusalem.
After 1977 Begin’s Likud government embraced settlements as its raison d’etre and as the key to the party’s political renaissance. He saw settlements as an opportunity to create a political constituency founded in the settlements of the West Bank, along the lines of the Labour government with its kibbutzim and moshav settlements of pre-state Israel.
Begin’s Minister of Agriculture Ariel Sharon called for the settlement of two million Jews in the occupied territories by the year 2000. The Likud plan was to settle Jews in areas of Arab habitation as well as large urban concentration.
The settlements under Likud were designed to bring about a demographic transformation of the territories and achieve a Jewish majority there. They also attempted to pre-empt a territorial division of the land and destroy the continuity of Palestiniancontrolled territory and the basis of their sovereignty.
The co-chairman of the World Zionist Organization’s Settlement Department, Mattityahu Drobless observed that the Likud plan “will enable us to bring about the dispersion of the Jewish population from the densely populated urban strip of the coastal plain eastward to the presently empty (of Jews) areas of Judea and Samaria.”
“The disposition of the settlements must be carried out not only around the settlements of the minorities (Arabs) but also in between them....,” said Drobless over 20 years ago. So, when negotiators met during the 2000 Camp David to reach a permanent agreement on the border, they were faced with a situation in which Palestinian cities, towns and villages were often surrounded and separated by Israeli settlements and roads. (Foundation for Middle East Peace, Special Report, 2002)
It is unlikely that Israelis or Palestinians will give up the idea of their own statehood. If the settlements remain, a prolonged civil war seems likely. The continued support of the Israeli government by America and, by implication its settlement policy that is founded on fear and military enforcement will continue to cause resentment in Palestine and throughout the Arab world.
The intifada will not go away as long as there is no hope offered to the Palestinians, nor will their use of what are described as “terrorist” tactics. People are equally dead from state or private terror.
To recapitulate: It is illegal under international law for an occupying power to transfer citizens from its own territory to the occupied territory. That law is stated unequivocally in the Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory. “The occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” This is precisely what Israel has been doing since it achieved statehood.
The Hague Regulations prohibit an occupying power from making permanent changes in the occupied area unless they are due to military needs (defined in the narrowest of senses) or for the benefit of the local population. The population of Palestine has hardly benefited from Israel’s permanent changes made by the building of settlements on Palestinian land, the restriction of access to farmlands and movements between areas of Palestine.
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1990) defines “the transfer indirectly by the occupying power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies” as a war crime, indictable by the International Criminal Court. Settlements have been used as a weapon of war, the civilian “shock troops” followed up by Israeli Defense Forces weaponry and actions. Israel has been transferring through the process of immigration and internal migration “parts of its civilian population into the territory it occupies” in direct contravention of the Rome Statute and the Fourth Geneva Convention. Quite apart from the viciousness of the methods employed in achieving its ends, by any international legal standards Israel is guilty of a major war crime. (Concluded)
