Current Affairs

Fifty seats will be taken out of two hundred and twenty tomorrow. The sadness of those sitting down to eat will not be lost on the families around them waiting for a loved one to take their seat. Of course the sadness will be tinged by some relief, but there will also be 170 seats empty waiting for a loved one to sit down. There will be families who will feel their joy at being re-united but they will also feel sadness for lost loved ones who are in the catacombs of Gaza and will not be sitting down at the table for Friday night dinner.

A step has been taken to release Palestinians from detention and they will also be sitting down to Friday night dinner, but their worry and sadness will be that little bitter as a lot of them have been kept in pre-trial detention, which means they have very little say on whether they are innocent or guilty. The kids miss school, the teens miss exams and those with any potential miss out on jobs or places at university, as they have been held among the grey concrete slabs of an Israeli prison with watch towers and barbed wire.

As much as the catacombs of Gaza have imprisoned the kidnapped, the kids from the West Bank will be that little less comfortable as the settlers in the name of the state will be rampaging through the territories, vandalising, tearing down olive groves, threatening and assaulting families and shooting those who they just don’t give a damn for. The army will do very little and in some cases conspire with the settlers and in final judgement of those who throw stones to defend their territory, soldiers will come at midnight and take that child into detention, whether innocent or guilty and hold them indefinitely.

As for the settlers, they will be angry with the politician who has released the Palestinian children from a never ending cycle of detention for throwing stones, being cheeky or swearing at the soldiers. There will be no quarter given in their mind to the Palestinians who have the nerve to stand up to the settlers and they like everybody else sickened by the 7^th October attack will use it to their advantage and take another life, destroy a Palestinians hard work and act in such a way that the world is sickened by the spectacle of settlers with guns degrading the people who have lived in the West Bank for generations.

The logic of the settlers is that this land is theirs. The settlers argue they have a two thousand year old tenancy that they use to claim property. But as one settler put it in the boldest of terms, what is ours is ours and if we cannot live here, then it is anti-Semitism, if you take away our rights as we have taken away the Palestinians then this is anti Semitism and if you say anything to us then this is anti Semitism. In other words, to be critical of scum that uses weapons to negate the legal tenure, legal arguments and the right of those who have lived on this land for generations is to be anti-Semitic.

I was once given a tour of the settlements, “it is only business, ”said my guide.  “It is property development, that is all, it is progress.” I asked where he had come from, “Minnisota”, came the reply. The settlement was next to Hebron, a heavily divided city that is split so badly that the market is now inoperative and those living in the centre of Hebron are either guarded or forced through turnstiles to get to their homes. The next settlement I went to was in east Jerusalem, a place that I had often walked through. The leader of the settlement smiled “you are British, you do not have the right to tell me about colonialism, we were here 2000 years ago, this is our home.”  I smiled, left it at that, but the conversation took a turn, “this is a Yeshiva, we brought the property legally, so I have every right to be here.” The demonstrable aggressiveness had gone and instead, I was given lunch, which was a salted burger.

However you see the settlements, they are there to stay, even though the settlements have taken the most important resource that the Palestinians have and that is water. “Without water, we cannot farm or live,” a Palestinian farmer told me. The ground water is being syphoned into the settlements and the god given rights of the settlers as they see it. The settlers laugh at the primitiveness of the Palestinians who are reliant on an antiquated water truck, which runs from a spring to the Palestinian villages dependent on it to fill the water tanks on the Palestinian homes.

There was one settlement that I could not get to, Rabbi Levinger who had led a charge into Hebron in 1972, would not let me visit. “Think of what you did to Princess Diana, you British are scum.” Interesting, I thought, this was the man who moved into a property in Hebron straight after the 1968 war, which led to the West Bank being governed by military law. The mayor of Hebron pleaded with the Rabbi to move out in the hope that the status quo would be preserved, so that Hebron would not be divided. But like some squatters, Levinger and his entourage could not be moved. He and his followers squatted in the building arguing that it had been the home of the Jews two thousand years ago and he was taking it. The city of Hebron became a flashpoint between the Palestinians and Israelis with a hard argument and what you see in the West Bank today was first characterised by the hard nosed Rabbi Levinger.

My last visit was to a small office in East Jerusalem, the inconsequential man sitting behind a desk was small in stature and had hands like a child. He was the leader of Kahane Kach, a hard right argument that was founded in the name of a Jewish rabbi from New York, who advocated a violent guerrilla war against the Palestinians in the West Bank and to a degree in Israel itself. Behind him in another room was a man pacing up and down, mad with anger, I watched him warily not knowing who he was. “East Jerusalem is ours, we need to get rid of the al Aqsa mosque and rebuild Temple Mount.” What about the right of all to worship peacefully, I asked. This is our country now, they (the Palestinians) have no right to be here.” Where will they go, I asked. “They will go to other countries, I don’t give a damn, they have no right to be here.” Wary, and a bit shocked by the venom of the argument, I asked how they would achieve the clearance of Palestinians from their homes. He smiled, then he just looked back at the raving man in the background.

I did not understand what he meant, but I was very aware of the man in the background, you could feel his anger. A few days after this interview, a man in an Israeli army uniform walked into the grand mosque in Hebron and opened fire with an M16. A lot has been written about it, the massacre was appalling, grandfathers, fathers and children lost their lives. Blood soaked prayers mats and shoes of the dead were left at the doorway in reverence to the Mosques rules. The murderous act horrified the Israeli public and world opinion turned against the Israeli’s so much so that Kahane Kach became a banned political organisation. It was not the last act by extremists, a few years later, after the Oslo agreement, a young Jewish radical fired a gun and murdered Prime Minister Rabin at an election rally.

This was all a long time ago, the settlements have expanded and those with an affinity to Kahane Kach are now in government. The hardlined and hard nosed have joined the government and the Oslo Accords is to all intents and purposes, dead in the water. The European leaders who have visited the West Bank and spoken to President Abbas and the Palestinian Legislator, have all made statements that the settler movement and their aggressiveness is defacing the possibilities that there can be peace in the West Bank. David Cameron and others have begun arguing that after 7^th October there should be a renewed concentration on finding a settlement to a two state solution, while it is still possible to do so. But after 30 years of the world looking away while the West Bank bled, the impetus for the Oslo Accord has been negated to words of subservience, while those in the Knesset find ways to destroy the essence of a good agreement.

So this week, fifty will sit down to Friday night dinner, free from the catacombs in Gaza. Fourteen thousand Palestinians have been killed and will be grieved for by their loved ones who have left them buried in northern Gaza or in a mortuary. Of those that have survived the bombings and military action by the IDF, there are five thousand children who will never reach their potential and be remembered by their mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters after their deaths. Their families will not have the comfort of the thousands flocking to a square in Tel Aviv looking at art works pressuring the Israeli government to negotiate with the Palestinians for the return of those taken to Gaza. The Gazan’s will not be demanding an end to the war, because they can’t, as there is nobody listening to the families who have lost loved ones. The families have had to put their belongings on donkey carts when they fled to the south of Gaza. Lost in silence and with the few things they possess, they like their fore-fathers will be moving from a property that they had lived in as a family, and with the remnants of their belongings they could salvage from their bombed out home, they are now refugees in their own country and will be standing in line waiting for aid.

Meanwhile the thousands who have taken to the streets in Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia, will be waiting to see what happens in four days time when the truce is meant to end. People in Gaza will be nervously looking out to the wider world and hoping that pressure can be placed on world leaders to hear the voices marching in opposition and hope that they can place enough pressure on Israel to stop the bombardment and come to the table for talks. But that is in four days and a lot can happen in four days.