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CounterPunch
February
7, 2003
Voting Under Lockdowns
Israeli Elections
by SAREE MAKDISI
Surely the most remarkable thing about last week's
election in Israel was the fact that, even as Israeli citizens
were enjoying their right to vote, their army was enforcing a
lockdown that kept 3.6 million Palestinians confined to their
homes for three days. Few Israelis seemed to notice the irony
that the central act of their participatory democracy required
for its execution the collective punishment of millions of people
in total disregard for international humanitarian law. And by
choosing to grant Likud its handsome victory-doubling its seats
in the parliament from 19 to 37--the Israeli electorate has given
its strong endorsement to the open--ended policy of violence
and brutalization represented by the Sharon government.
Taken together, these facts remind us
again that one of the keys to peace in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict is held by the Israeli voters, who are free to exercise
a right that their occupation denies to the Palestinians, and
hence free to determine, up to a point, the immediate future
that both peoples must share. The Palestinians have never chosen
to live under military occupation; the Israelis have now chosen
to extend that occupation, to strengthen it, and to feed it with
the misery, suffering and humiliation that it requires on a daily
basis. Most Palestinians have no choice but to continue their
legitimate resistance, though in the meantime others will probably
vent their rage in those mindless and bankrupt gestures-of which
suicide bombing is the ultimate expression-which only the most
impossibly desperate circumstances could produce. In response
the Israelis will undoubtedly make those circumstances more desperate
still.
By any measure, life for the Palestinians
in the Israeli occupied territories was already on the edge of
the impossible. Since June, when Israel reoccupied the West Bank,
almost a million Palestinians there have been living under a
system of closures and curfews that confine men, women, and children
to their homes for weeks on end and have completely disabled
normal life. A network of 90 army checkpoints-the progeny of
the Oslo peace process-isolates each town and village from the
others, so that, even when curfews are lifted, movement for Palestinians
within the West Bank is almost impossible. Israelis, on the other
hand, can move around at will among the settlements that they
have established in violation of the Geneva Convention and numerous
UN Security Council Resolutions, and between those settlements
and Israel proper. The contrast between natives and settlers
in the West Bank is nowhere clearer than in Hebron, where, in
order to ensure the freedom of movement of some 400 illegal Israeli
settlers, the city's 130,000 Arabs can be confined to their homes
at a moment's notice. The tiny Israeli settlement-which comprises
a third of a percent of the city's population-effectively controls
a third of the city's space.
Unimaginably, the situation in Gaza is
even worse. As though it were not bad enough that the 1.5 million
Palestinians of Gaza are crammed into the territory's most barren
land-making it the most densely populated area on the planet-the
7000 Israeli settlers there are spread out into settlements whose
location deliberately disrupts the territorial contiguity of
the 65 percent of Gaza nominally under Palestinian control. Thus
the 35 percent of Gaza given over to the settlers (who constitute
less than half a percent of the territory's population) is used
to turn on and off the movement of Palestinians among their towns,
unpredictably isolating workers from their meager jobs, children
from their schools, parents from their children, farmers from
their fields, merchants from their markets, and patients from
the hospitals meant to serve them (27 Palestinians have died
at these Israeli checkpoints in recent months, forbidden, at
the slightest whim of bored Israeli guards, from reaching emergency
rooms).
This is not to mention the ongoing violence
inflicted by the Israelis, whose frequent assaults and bombardments
exhibit a wanton disregard for human life (as seen for example
in the July bombing in Gaza, in which, to eliminate one man,
an Israeli F-16 dropped a one-ton bomb on a crowded neighborhood
in the middle of the night, killing 17 others, half of them young
children); nor the ongoing house demolitions, mass arrests, random
assassinations, destruction of trees and crops, and the immiseration
produced as a result.
Various agencies, including USAID and
most recently the British charity Christian Aid, have been warning
of the dramatic deterioration in living standards among the Palestinians,
some two thirds of whom now live on less than $2 a day, with
their children facing malnutrition, and with men, women and children
alike facing a life of confinement, harassment, dismemberment
and death.
Although this is precisely the life that
the Israeli electorate has voted to continue, it is a life that
the Palestinians have no choice but to resist.
Saree Makdisi
is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature
at the University of Chicago, and an associate member of the
university's Center for Middle East Studies.
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