Cook’s tour ends in shambles

Socialist Outlook April 1998
Roland Rance

Foreign Secretary Robin Cook misbehaved during his visit to the Middle East, and Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu sent him to bed without his supper. This, at least, was how the media presented the diplomatic row caused by Cook’s visit to the proposed Israeli settlement in the Palestinian village of Jebel Abu Ghneim. It is a measure of Israel’s propaganda success that this village is now better known by the name of the as-yet-unbuilt Israeli settlement, Har Homa (’Mount Wall’).

Israel has also succeeded in convincing most observers that Jebel Abu Ghneim is part of Jerusalem. In fact, it is less than a kilometre from the heart of Bethlehem, and until 1967 was part of the Bethlehem District. In 1967, Israel annexed occupied East Jerusalem and its surrounding areas. Since 1967, Israel has expanded the area of East Jerusalem from 6½ to over 70 square kilometres, annexing lands from many West Bank villages while excluding populated Palestinian areas. Almost all the land expropriated since 1967 was privately owned by Arabs. Some 38,500 housing units have been built on this land, all of them for the Jewish population. Not one housing unit has been built for Palestinians. A ring of exclusively Jewish settlements isolates Jerusalem, the main city of Palestine and capital of the state which the PLO hopes to establish, from the rest of the 1967-occupied territories. Since Jerusalem is also a major communications centre, this effectively cuts the West Bank in two, preventing access from Hebron and Bethlehem to Ramallah and Nablus.

Har Homa, with its planned homes for a further 50,000 Israeli Jews, will complete the last gap in this ring of Jewish settlements. The site itself is a largely unspoiled area, with several ancient Christian sites, including Byzantine monasteries. Bethlehem is now virtually surrounded by Jewish-only settlements and by-pass roads; 61% of all the land in the Bethlehem district - more than 350 square kilometres - has been confiscated or declared a closed military or conservation area. Israel is now developing its own tourist complex, to be known as ’Bethlehem, Israel’, based around the heavily fortified Rachel’s Tomb shrine. The Christian sites in the town are losing visitors, a trend that is exacerbated by the high emigration rate of Palestinian Christians and the prolonged strict curfews on Bethlehem.

The final status of Jerusalem, one of the most emotive and intractable issues of the Palestine conflict, has been deferred to the final stage of the so-called ’peace process’. The official rationale behind this is that the parties will make so much progress on other issues, that they will not let a possible deal flounder at the last hurdle. However, Israel’s actions over recent years demonstrate clearly that it always intended this process to be a smokescreen behind which it continued with its dispossession of Palestine. Following earlier disputes over the tunnel under part of the Old City of Jerusalem, and the proposed Jewish settlement on Ras al-Amud, on the Mount of Olives in the heart of East Jerusalem, there can no longer be any doubt that Israel’s strategy is to create a Jewish majority not merely in the city of Jerusalem, but in the whole Greater Jerusalem area, which includes 20% of the West Bank.

Israel is also expanding the settlement of Ma’ale Edumim, between Jerusalem and Jericho; it is planned that soon 30,000 people - all Jews - will live there, and the borders of Jerusalem will be extended a further 10 miles to the east to include the settlement within the city. Many roads are planned to link these new suburban settlements; these, too, are built on expropriated Palestinian land.

This territorial expansion is linked to a drive to deprive Palestinians of their Jerusalem residency ID cards and thus force them to leave their homes and city. According to figures collated by the BADIL Alternative Centre in Bethlehem, during 1996-7, 1300 families, comprising some 4000 Palestinians, were thus deprived of their Jerusalem residency. This represented an increase of 500% over the average from 1968-95; an increase which cannot be accidental, but reflects a determined strategy of ethnic cleansing.

Palestinians will this month be marking the fiftieth anniversary of the notorious Deir Yassin massacre of 9-10 April 1948, when Zionist terrorists from parties led by ex-PMs Begin and Shamir murdered 250 Palestinian women and children in a previously peaceful village on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Though far from the only massacre of the 1948 war of conquest, nor even the bloodiest, Deir Yassin played a major part in the campaign to terrorise and demoralise Palestinians and drive them off their land. Deir Yassin is now the site of the main Jerusalem postal sorting office, a mental hospital, and light industry. The Knesset (Israeli Parliament), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the National Museum, and Independence Park are likewise all built on stolen Palestinian villages and fields, some of whose remains can still be seen. For the past fifty years, Israel has carried out a process of ethnic cleansing; until 1967 only in the western part of Jerusalem, and since then in the entire metropolitan area. Palestinian resistance is still relatively low-key, but there can be no doubt that Israel’s arrogant intransigence will, sooner or later, ignite a new and powerful uprising.

For once, we can only welcome Robin Cook’s ’ethical foreign policy’, and his refusal to bow to Israeli demands that he condone their actions. It is also worth noting that Tony Blair, on his forthcoming visit to the Middle East, has promised to spend a night in Gaza as a sign of Britain’s commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state. But, welcome as these gestures are, they are merely a sub-text to the real struggle developing on the ground between the Palestinian people and the Israeli occupier.

Roland Rance has been a socialist activist in Israeli, Palestinian and British politics for many years.