An ‘Unlawful Presence’

On July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice in The Hague handed down its advisory opinion on the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian West Bank and also, indirectly, of Gaza. It is arguably the most important legal document on that subject since the Six-Day War of 1967 left Israel in control of these territories. The ICJ had been asked by the United Nations General Assembly in December 2022 to give an advisory opinion on the occupation, and although it has no power to compel change, the ramifications of its ruling may well be far-reaching. Much depends on what the major world powers, including the United States, do in response. Israel, for its part, will do everything it can to ignore the court’s decision:

The State of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful; the State of Israel is under an obligation to bring to an end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible; the State of Israel is under an obligation to cease immediately all new settlement activities, and to evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory….

The Court is of the view that, as a consequence of Israel’s policies and practices, which span decades, the Palestinian people has been deprived of its right to self-determination over a long period, and further prolongation of these policies and practices undermines the exercise of this right in the future.^*

For me and my fellow activists working in the South Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley on the West Bank, the court’s decision brought a moment of respite and relief. It is amazingly rare in Israel to hear the naked truth about the occupation, although those of us who have experienced it firsthand have known this truth intimately for what seems like forever. The Israeli mainstream, however, has mostly turned away from any such insight. The occupation hardly counts as news.

I have to qualify that statement. I think that information about the occupation and its terrors is largely available in Israel. Most of the daily crimes against Palestinians on the West Bank take place only a few miles from the homes of Israeli citizens within the pre-1967 borders of the state. Particularly vicious events are sometimes reported, in relatively subdued and peripheral ways, in Haaretz, the only respectable newspaper in the country, and also, rarely, on the evening news that everyone watches. Still, even peace-oriented, left-wing Israelis often express shock when I tell them of witnessing violent attacks by settlers and soldiers on Palestinian shepherds and peasant farmers. It is as if that kind of knowledge were pushed away from conscious awareness, or as if the knowledge itself exists somewhere in the mind but knowledge of that knowledge does not. (Classical Indian logicians claim that one doesn’t know something unless one consciously knows that one knows it.) In short, much of the population of Israel has lived through the last five decades in varying modes and intensities of denial.

Here’s a typical example. One night in late July I slept in the Bedouin village of Ras al-‘Ain in the southern Jordan Valley. Adjacent to the village, in a fiercely hot, arid zone, a cool, clean stream flows down from the hill country. The villagers need that water to survive and to sustain their herds of sheep and goats; each day they fill up five or six tankers, hitched to tractors, from the stream. Israeli settlers from the illegal outposts nearby are doing whatever they can, including committing vicious attacks, to block Palestinians’ access to the water; the goal is to dry them out so that they will have to leave their homes. The army, the police, the Civil Administration, and the military courts are all colluding with the settlers in their ongoing minibattle with the shepherds. Our activists are by the stream, night and day, to protect the Palestinians as best we can. We spent an hour or two that evening fending off knife-wielding, masked young thugs from the settler outposts who were trying to block a lone tractor and its attached tanker from bringing water to the village.

Often Israeli settlers from the older settlements, who may be less prone to violence than those from the new outposts and are usually Orthodox, come to picnic by the stream. A friend of mine, a long-standing member of the Israeli peace camp and an Orthodox Jew—and thus adept in the settlers’ language—spoke to two of these middle-aged settlers about the situation in Ras al-‘Ain. “What?” they said. “You mean there is violence here? That’s impossible.” A total surprise—for people living in the heart of the West Bank, on stolen Palestinian land. I don’t think they were pretending to be shocked. Mainstream Israelis living in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem are even less likely to grasp the reality of systematic state violence directed against innocent Palestinians when news of it somehow filters into the public sphere. Simply stated, they don’t want to know, or maybe they don’t much care.

Reality is a strong drug, too strong for many. The temptation to deny it is usually irresistible. In Ras al-‘Ain, like in so many other villages in the West Bank, reality means hanging on in the face of continuous brutal harassment and repeated death threats from the settlers. It’s not only about water. On June 22 Israeli settlers—some of them well known to us—backed up by soldiers and police, spent a long morning going from sheepfold to sheepfold in the area around Ras al-‘Ain, stealing the villagers’ sheep in broad daylight. A sheep is worth between $150 and $500 on the West Bank—a vast sum for the shepherds in their subsistence economy. The same malevolent group of armed thugs came back the next day to continue the theft. All of this was fully documented by our activists there. Stealing Palestinian sheep has become a habit of the outpost settlers throughout the Jordan Valley and the central West Bank, along with nocturnal raids, burning homes and vehicles, destroying solar panels and wind turbines, shooting live ammunition at villagers and their herds, breaking anything breakable, and beating anyone beatable. In addition there is the Civil Administration’s barbaric campaign of demolishing Palestinians’ houses in all parts of Area C, the 60 percent of the West Bank under direct and exclusive Israeli control.

To the credit of the ICJ, extreme settler violence against Palestinians, which the government makes no attempt to stop, also appears in its ruling as a war crime. Unsurprisingly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement in reply to the ICJ in which he claimed, disingenuously, that one cannot be in occupation of one’s own homeland. The main news channels either ignored the ruling or denounced it in the usual terms: the judges were obviously prejudiced against Israel or even antisemitic (the default weapon in Israeli propaganda). The hard-core Israeli right—including most of the religious Zionists; the extremists led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the convicted criminal who is now minister of national security; and the 27 percent of the electorate that still supports Netanyahu, according to a poll from June—has no need to deny anything. On the contrary: they are ideologically, or temperamentally, in support of ethnic cleansing. Only a few commentators (in Haaretz) were capable of articulating the thought that the ICJ ruling spoke the honest truth. B. Michael, the most acerbic of the left-wing journalists, suggested in a brilliant satirical piece on July 23 that Israel should bomb The Hague.

In a way, it is the consistent signs of denial by relatively rational mainstream figures that are most telling. Take, for example, the moderate, usually sensible reporter Itamar Eichner, who writes for Ynet, a popular left-to-center-leaning website. In a lengthy response to the ICJ, Eichner summarized each major element in the ruling and then juxtaposed that paragraph with what he called the “facts on the ground”; in nearly every case, the facts he cited substantiate the claims of the court. But Eichner came to a startling conclusion: the court’s ruling, he said, is “totally absurd” (hazui in Hebrew, a strong term for the inconceivable). It’s as if the facts fade away or become meaningless in the face of tribal solidarity. It apparently doesn’t cross Eichner’s mind that it is the occupation that is absurd, indeed obviously criminal.

Once, in the South Hebron Hills, after an attack on Palestinians by marauders from the settlement of Susya backed up by the army, a European journalist who was present asked me, “How can this completely absurd, crazy situation exist?” An activist friend answered, “It’s because Israelis are like sheep; they just go along with the herd.” A Palestinian shepherd overheard this remark and immediately protested. “Not my sheep,” he said. “Every one of them thinks for herself.” I suppose sheep are incapable of denial. But Israelis are not like sheep.

Denial, as we see in Israel today, is an illness. Some might think that, like fear, it’s an evolutionary advantage; denial allows people to live in conditions of severe cognitive dissonance. But denial always comes at a cost. It is a form of lying to oneself, consciously or not. And what happens when millions of people succumb to this lie in highly charged, dangerous circumstances? Denial of the very existence of a Palestinian people who share the land with the Jews but who are disenfranchised, without legal recourse, indeed without any basic human rights, inevitably generates violence and aggression. One needs violence to maintain the lie, including violence against the denying self. Routine acts of destruction by state-backed settlers against their Palestinian neighbors, over years, have a cumulative effect on Israel as a moral community. Denying or ignoring or (even worse) rationalizing such acts destroys our potential to become fully human.

The original sin goes back to the beginnings of the state. The early Zionists were blind to the presence of a Palestinian population with its own claim on the land; the standard Zionist view was that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” There were important exceptions: the great Hebrew writer Ahad Ha’am, who in a prescient essay, “Truth from Eretz Israel” (1891), noted the existence in Palestine of a deeply rooted Arab people who “will not easily yield their place”; the eccentric journalist Leopold Weiss, who spent some years in Palestine immediately after World War I and foresaw the fierce ethnic conflict that would soon break out; the group of impassioned intellectuals associated with Brit Shalom, such as Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, and Judah Magnes, who in the 1920s and 1930s sought political equality between Jews and Arabs in Palestine and a rapprochement between the two national movements; and later, in the 1940s, Hannah Arendt, who thought the only hope for the Zionists, in the long run, was to be part of a multiethnic regional polity with equal rights for all. But these were voices crying in the wilderness.

It is important to note that violent Palestinian resistance to the Zionist project erupted early on, and that in the lethal internal Palestinian struggle between moderates and extremists in the Mandate period, the latter prevailed. Now it’s our turn to repeat this pattern. And yet, if we jump to the Oslo period in the 1990s, we see that a clear majority of ordinary Israelis were prepared to recognize the Palestinian national movement and to support a historic compromise. The denial bubble burst, for a fairly long but transient moment. The outbreak of the second intifada in 2000 and the subsequent rule of the extreme right brought Israel to its present nadir even before the horrific Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023.

Of course, people on the right, in particular the far right, think that people like me are in denial; some of us, they say hopefully, “sobered up” on October 7 and have now realized that all Palestinians, without exception, are murderous terrorists. That, in fact, is what the outpost settlers like to tell us to our faces. This warped view hardly needs refutation. One of the most damaging statements of the last quarter-century was Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s declaration, after the failure of the Camp David talks in 2000, that the Palestinians are not a partner to peace. In the years after that failure, Israel made sure there would be no viable partner. It is eminently possible that its policies and actions today will lead to Hamas and Islamic Jihad taking control of the West Bank.

In his song “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Bob Dylan asked, “How many times can a man turn his head/and pretend that he just doesn’t see?” Probably not an infinite number of times. Truth has a way of eventually piercing the veil, as the ICJ has shown to anyone who cares. Despite everything, despite the rampant hypernationalism and the relentless drive toward Jewish supremacy, despite an extremist, totally dysfunctional government intent on destroying the state, millions of Israelis still yearn for peace, though by now they are too terrified and full of despair and anger to admit it. In the meantime we have work to do in Ras al-‘Ain and dozens of other villages hovering on the brink. Don’t expect the occupation to end anytime soon.

As I write, Israel is bracing itself for major missile attacks from Hezbollah in Lebanon and from Iran following the assassinations of the Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut and of Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the political division of Hamas, in Tehran. No one would deny that Israel has enemies intent on genocide, but the Tehran assassination was clearly an act of extreme foolishness, or worse, by Netanyahu, who also continues to stall on a cease-fire in Gaza that would enable the return of the surviving Israeli hostages. One might wonder why the army has failed to notice, after accumulating vast experience in targeted assassinations, that this policy almost never serves any meaningful or lasting purpose.

Moreover, this ongoing war, always threatening to turn into a devastating regional conflict, cannot be disconnected from the half-century of occupation, the criminal settlement project, and the daily acts of settler savagery toward innocent Palestinian communities on the West Bank. As long as Israel insists on deepening the occupation and stubbornly denying the Palestinian right to self-determination, the existential threat to the state remains, indeed continually escalates. There is an alternative to endless war and eventual self-destruction, but Israel may no longer have the political means, or the will, to achieve it.

—August 21, 2024