Israel Withdraws Troops, But the Occupation Has Not Ended

By Rachelle Marshall

The jubilant celebrations that followed Israeli troop withdrawals from six Palestinian cities this past fall were unmistakable evidence that for Palestinians so long under military occupation the departure of the Israelis from their midst was an unbounded blessing. Even a critic of the Oslo agreements had to be moved by the joy and relief of a Palestinian friend who phoned to say that he and his family could go to bed at night for the first time in 28 years without fearing that soldiers would break into their apartment at any moment.

In accordance with Oslo II, Israeli troops have withdrawn from more than 400 Palestinian towns and villages, and the cities of Bethlehem, Jenin, Jericho, Nablus, Qalqilya, and Tulkarem. They will partially withdraw from Hebron in March. About 400,000 Palestinians are now rid of the daily presence of Israeli soldiers. Nevertheless, Joel Greenberg seemed detached from reality when he asserted in the New York Times of Dec. 31 that "Virtually all Palestinians in the West Bank have come under self-rule, ending 28 years of occupation." For most Palestinians the occupation continues in all but name—Israel still controls their lives.

West Bank residents are confined to small enclaves they can enter and leave only with difficulty because of bypass roads and army checkpoints. They are denied free access to East Jerusalem, with its mosques and other institutions that provide vital services to Palestinians. Palestinian growers complain that long delays at Israeli roadblocks located between all Palestinian cities have caused the spoilage of thousands of tons of fruit intended for sale in Jordan.

Although the cities are now free of Israeli soldiers, they have the authority to return to the villages at any time in case of "emergency," and they have done so. In late November soldiers raided five villages near Jenin, from which they had previously withdrawn, and arrested 16 youths suspected of belonging to Hamas. In one of the villages, Qabatiya, residents held two Israelis hostage until soldiers turned over a Palestinian suspect to Palestinian police. In retaliation, Israeli authorities promptly sealed off Jenin and Jericho, cities that supposedly enjoy self-rule.

In fact, the most apt symbol of the new Palestinian autonomy may be the recently issued Palestinian passport. For the first time Palestinian travellers will have a document issued by their own governing authority, and not have to carry papers identifying them with Israel or Jordan, or some other Arab country. But the new passport is largely a formality—Palestinians still have to get Israel's permission before they can go anywhere.

At the same moment that many Palestinians were cheering the troop withdrawals, others were protesting their losses. The day after Israeli troops left Bethlehem, for instance, the New York Times heralded their departure with the headline, "In Bethlehem a Season of Joy for Palestinians." The article did not mention that a few days earlier Israeli military authorities had erected signs at the entrance to the city warning tourists not to enter without a permit from Israeli police. Although visitors who flock to Bethlehem at Christmas are a major source of revenue for local Palestinians, Israel did not plan to issue the permits until January 1996.

A more serious blow to Bethlehem residents was Israel's plan to expand the 10 Jewish settlements that border on Bethlehem by building new housing units and access roads. The editor of the Jerusalem Times commented, "Such infringements of the spirit of a peaceful settlement are sapping public confidence." Public confidence was undoubtedly further eroded by the revelation on Israeli radio last fall of an army pamphlet that described Palestinian police as "trigger happy" and "illiterate." With what may have been deadpan humor, the Israeli press explained that the pamphlet was intended to "provide guidelines" to Israeli soldiers on "how to work with the Palestinians." The booklet was withdrawn after its wording was made public.

A Grudging Approach to Change

Other displays of the army's grudging approach to change took place in Nablus, where only a few days before soldiers withdrew they shot and killed two Palestinian youths and wounded 18 others during street demonstrations. Just before they did leave the city, soldiers turned the civil administration building into a shambles by ripping out telephones, breaking the furniture, and smashing the plumbing. The New York Times did not report the vandalism but did describe the prison section of the building, where Palestinian suspects had been confined to 4-foot-high windowless closets during days and weeks of interrogation.

"You can smell freedom!" one former prisoner exclaimed as he toured the building. But some 6,000 other Palestinians are still behind bars. The Israelis have moved hundreds of West Bank prisoners to prisons inside the Green Line and replaced closed West Bank detention centers with a new interrogation unit at the notorious Majeddo prison, where nearly a thousand Palestinians are being held under deteriorating conditions. Prisoners at Majeddo and other Israeli prisons are suffering from exposure to rain and cold, and "atrocious" food, according to the Palestinian press. And the use of torture continues. The Jerusalem Times reported in December that a 15-year old boy was rushed to a hospital suffering from paralysis, after spending two months in the interrogation center at Ashkelon.

Two weeks before the scheduled Palestinian elections, and several months after the last terrorist incident, Israel initiated a new round of violence with the assassination of Yahya Ayyash, who was thought by Mossad to be the mastermind of several deadly suicide bombings. The fact that the killing took place in Gaza, which is theoretically under Palestinian jurisdiction, was a clear demonstration of Israel's contempt for Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian National Authority. Most Palestinians would not condone Ayyash's alleged crimes, but in death he became a symbol of resistance to Israeli oppression, and a martyr. His murder had the effect of a match tossed into a gas can. Tens of thousands of Gazans turned out for his funeral, chanting vows of vengeance, and mosques in the West Bank called for a three-day strike. Both Palestinians and Israelis feared Islamic militants would retaliate with acts of terrorism in Israel, which would enable Israeli extremists once again to claim credibility.

If Hamas members suspected collusion in the killing by Palestinian security forces, the hard-won truce between Hamas and the PLO would be canceled. "This takes us back into the whirlpool we've been in for 28 years," said Fateh Azzam, former director of the Palestinian human rights organization Al Haq. "It's Hamas versus the Palestinian Authority versus Israel." As if by calculation, the assassination was a setback for moderates on both sides. Even the most peace-loving Israelis must have been shaken by the huge outpouring of Palestinian anger and grief at the funeral of a suspected terrorist. And Palestinians who have been urging peace with Israel were again reminded of Israel's double standard: the self-confessed killer of Yitzhak Rabin is entitled to a comfortable jail cell and a scrupulously fair trial, but a suspected Palestinian killer has his head blown off before even being charged with a crime.

Ayyash's assassination is only the latest example of Israel's disregard for due process of law where Palestinians are concerned and indicates that Israeli authorities have yet to give up their occupation mentality. Israel's refusal to freeze settlement construction, release Palestinian prisoners, or lift travel restrictions, reinforces Palestinians' doubts that the new agreement will improve their lives. But even more worrisome is the mounting evidence that the Labor government under Shimon Peres will go into the final negotiations in May determined that any settlement will be on Israel's terms and that in the long run the Palestinians will get little more than they have today.

The Oslo agreements grant the Palestinians administrative authority over the day-to-day operations of local government but deny them the goal of their long struggle, control of the land. Almost as soon as the Declaration of Principles was signed, Israel proceeded to swallow up more and more of the West Bank for Jewish settlements, new roads and utilities, and military installations. Between September 1993 and June 1995, the government took at least 27,500 acres. In 1995 alone, it uprooted 4,200 fruit trees. Despite the troop withdrawals, Israel has continued to confiscate land on almost a daily basis, in village after village. The result is a loss to Palestinians of scarce agricultural land needed to grow food that farmers rely on for their livelihood.

Just before Israeli soldiers withdrew from Qalqilya, for instance, the army suddenly declared a large Palestinian-owned area just east of the city a closed military zone, and a neighboring village lost scores of acres of land when Israeli bulldozers began clearing the way for a wide new settler road. Palestinian residents of an area around Halhoul lost a thousand acres of productive vineyards in one week last November, when Israeli construction crews started work on a major north-south highway.

Walled-Off Cities

The cities are also suffering losses. New roads that encircle Tulkarem, Jenin, Hebron, and Bethlehem are on land these cities need for new housing. Israeli authorities are also taking Palestinian-owned land to wall off cities from nearby Jewish settlements. Residents of Tulkarem recently accused Israel of illegally taking 400 acres of land well within Palestinian territory in order to build a fence around the city.

Israel's frenetic construction activity on the West Bank undermines hope that the final round of negotiations on the future of Israeli settlements will be anything more than a formality.The multimillion dollar network of new roads is designed to protect the settlements and connect them with Israel, while at the same time fragmenting the Palestinian population in such a way as to make a unified Palestinian state impossible to achieve. There is nothing temporary about the new construction. A Labor minister told the newspaper Ma'ariv on Nov. 29 that "We are not building bypass roads just to abandon them in two or three years." And Peres has made it clear that he has no intention of doing so.

His chief deputy, Yossi Beilin, negotiated a deal last December with Zvulun Hammer, leader of the National Religious Party and a parliamentary spokesman for the settlers, that calls for freezing the present situation indefinitely. The Labor government will preserve the settlements, and in return the settlers will not demand that the army return to the cities it has evacuated. At a memorial service for Yitzhak Rabin on Dec. 4, Peres assured settlers that he would not "bargain with their security," meaning that Israeli troops will remain in the West Bank and Gaza to guard them.

According to the Israeli journalist Tikva Honig-Parness, both Peres and Beilin have adopted Rabin's four main goals of maintaining the Jordan River as Israel's "security border," annexing the major West Bank settlement clusters to Israel, insisting on a united Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and rejecting the Palestinians' right of return. The newspaper Ha'aretz quoted Peres as saying on Nov. 22, "The Palestinian state will be established in the Gaza Strip and Jericho only, while the rest of the West Bank will, for the time being—and I mean a very long time—be merely an autonomous zone."

If the present situation is allowed to stand, without further concessions to the Palestinians, the so-called autonomous zone will remain a series of isolated communities surrounded by Israeli soldiers and heavily armed settlers, some of whom are driven by fanatic hatred of Palestinians and call for their expulsion. Except for low-wage factories located just inside the borders of Gaza and the West Bank and financed with foreign capital, there is little prospect of increased employment, since Israel still allows fewer than 20,000 Palestinians to work inside the Green Line. As Palestinians continue to lose productive land to Israeli bulldozers, their dependence on non-agricultural jobs becomes even greater.

When 15,000 people gathered in New York's Madison Square Garden on Dec. 10 to honor the memory of Yitzhak Rabin, one Israeli supporter complained to a New York Times reporter. "I still don't understand why the question has not been raised: What are the Palestinians giving up for peace?" It is unfortunately an easy question to answer. Judging by what is happening in the West Bank and Gaza, they are giving up their land, their livelihoods, and for the time being their demand for independence, all in the hope that peace with Israel rather than continued bloodshed will eventually bring them closer to their goal.

In the long run it is in Israel's interest to help fulfill this hope. The Palestinians' euphoria at the withdrawal of Israeli soldiers from their cities could turn to bitter resentment if they find that concrete and barbed wire have gone up in their place and there is no more freedom than before. The mass demonstrations that followed the assassination of Islamic resistance leader Yahya Ayyash suggests that for many Palestinians, armed struggle is not yet out of the question.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance writer living in Stanford, CA. A member of the International Jewish Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.