For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And my guest on the show today is Ellen Contreaux.
She's a Boston-based journalist, first wrote from Israel and the West Bank in 1979.
She's been published in The Village Voice, Grand Street, and Mother Jones, among other publications.
More recently, her writing has appeared at counterpunch.org, Zenet, and Alternet.
This essay is part of a series on Palestinian nonviolent resistance, heroism, and a vanishing landscape.
And this is one of these joint essays with Tom Englehart from TomDispatch.com, a friend of the show.
It's called The Great Wall of Israel by Ellen Contreaux and Tom Englehart.
Welcome to the show, Ellen.
How are you doing?
Hi.
I'm fine.
Well, I appreciate you joining us on the show, especially on short notice like this.
Well, I appreciate your having me.
All right.
Well, this is a very interesting article you have here.
I guess maybe we can just start with giving a general description of the situation in the West Bank, as far as just the occupation, what the wall is, where it goes, that kind of thing, because I'd be willing to bet that most people really don't know anything about this at all.
Well, the wall, which is far higher than the Berlin Wall ever was, and far more extensive, Israel began building it in 2002.
The excuse was security.
And the immediate rejoinder, among other things, by a group of Israeli retired generals was that if it were to be for Israel's security, it would have been built along the pre-1967 Israeli borders, that is, Israel's borders along the West Bank, sometimes called the Green Line.
And what Israel has done instead has been to build this wall, and I will describe what the wall is for your listeners in a second, sometimes very deep into Palestinian territory.
The wall is a many-parted thing, it's very complicated.
Israel likes to call it a fence, and in some places it is a fence, if you regard very, very high, I guess, poles strung with electric wire, you can see them vanishing over the horizon across Palestinian land, four kilometers, if you can call that a fence.
It's a very complicated affair, where in some parts it's high-tension wire cutting across Palestinian land.
Your listeners, probably some of them will have seen photographs of what I call the maximum security prison version of the wall, or the one we're calling ghettos in times past, that is 25-foot-high concrete blocks surrounding whole cities.
The city of Bethlehem, for example, is entirely surrounded by a wall and no casual visitor.
Well, they have the kind of prison turret tower things built into the middle of the wall too, right?
That's right.
Israel is a very sophisticated country when it comes to lots of things, including instruments of war, electronic surveillance systems, others have written about this, not my specialty, but I think anybody who goes to the area and writes for it long realizes that Israel backed always, and your listeners should really always keep this in mind, that without U.S. support, none of this could be able to go on sustaining itself.
So the U.S. has supplied Israel with three to five billion dollars a year in annual aid since 1967 and even before that.
In any event, yes, these turrets are electronically monitored, soldiers inside, sometimes soldiers are not inside, sometimes just equipment.
I guess I should go back and do a story about that, and somebody probably has.
But Israel's electronic industry is a whole subject in itself, it does a brisk trade with the United States, which is its sponsor, and the United States is, of course, putting up such fences, I think, right around where you are.
No?
I mean, isn't there a fence going across between Texas and Mexico?
Well, you know, I'm not really sure, and actually I'm out, I'm doing a show in Austin, but I'm actually out in Los Angeles.
But yeah, I mean, all the way across the southern border there's different attempts to build a fence there, and it depends, I guess, on the era whether it's going to be more effective at keeping people out or people in, or either way.
So let me try to sum up here a little bit of what I think you're saying and try to get it on the same page.
Basically, the West Bank, since the 1967 war, the Israeli army has occupied the West Bank, and this is where the Palestinians live.
They're not, quote-unquote, Israeli Arabs, they're the Palestinians, and it's occupied territory.
And then you have Israeli settlers come in and move in and build all these suburbs and all this stuff out there, and then they have built all these walls, ostensibly to protect the colonies that they've built in the West Bank from the people who live there from violence.
But I think what you're saying is that even that is actually sort of a pretext to really go far beyond what would be necessary if just security was really the goal.
And what they're really doing is they're carving up the West Bank into these little Bantu stands, where people are separated from their own property, much less from each other.
And so then, I mean, it sounds like that way, there could never really be any kind of Palestinian state, if the West Bank is completely crisscrossed with settlements and giant walls.
That's quite correct.
And, Scott, you're very right to go back to 1967.
And let's go back even to 1948, or even farther.
In, I think, the 19th century, two rabbis were sent by the Zionist movement, which then existed, to take a look at Palestine, which Zionists in that time were eyeing as a possible homeland for European Jews, who were, of course, suffering a lot of discrimination, but that's a whole other topic, I don't want to get into it.
And the two rabbis came back, and they said, the bride is beautiful, but she's married to another man.
Meaning, this land that European Zionists had hoped was empty, was not.
It was inhabited.
It was inhabited by farmers who were cultivating land.
It belonged to somebody else.
And since then, the problem has always been the same.
The problem for Israel in settling Jews in what used to be historic Palestine is that, unfortunately, there are another people there.
Now, Israel in the 1967 war, among other territories, conquered the West Bank of the Jordan River, which had been occupied by Jordan.
International law forbids any occupying country to settle its civilians on occupied soil.
Jordan did not settle its citizens on occupied soil.
However, Israel, after its occupation in 1967, began building what is called in the American news, settlements.
At the time that I first reported there in 79, 79 to 88, well, I mean, these were gated communities to trailer camps.
But if your readers go to Tom Dispatch, December 8th, where my article appears with Tom's headnote, I talk about how the West Bank has changed from the time I saw it in the 1980s when it was Palestinian land, which you could travel the length and breadth of without encountering, you know, you might run into some soldiers who would stop your group taxi.
But there was no such thing as militarized checkpoints.
The wall didn't exist.
These settlements are not settlements.
They are cities, and they are vast, sprawling, California-style, red-roofed suburbs, cutting into this once absolutely exquisite Mediterranean landscape, which was largely agricultural.
And what Israel has done by design through plans that were conceived in the late 60s, one of which is called the Alon Plan, named after Yigal Alon, a high official at that time, has been to surround Palestinian cities and villages with a combination of settlements and this wall.
And the ingeniousness of the wall, and in this article, I point readers to UN maps.
If your readers will look at these maps, they are very graphic.
And what they show is that the wall winds around in such a way that it kind of lassoes the settlements, especially those that impinge on the Green Line, and many, many, many of them do, and in a virtual annexation of the settlements to Israel while keeping the Palestinians out.
And what I describe in the Tom Dispatch article is, this is illustrative of one village of many Palestinian villages, Jaius in the northern West Bank, which is impinged upon by an Israeli settlement called Zufim.
And what the wall does is, this is in its fence and military patrol road and barrier form.
Remember before I said the wall has many versions.
And so this road and fence and ditch and barbed wire version cuts across Palestinian land.
And what it does is it kind of annexes the land to this tiny little settlement Zufim, which has perhaps a thousand settlers.
But the land itself is far, far, far larger than these settlers need.
B'Tselem, which is Israel's human rights organization, discusses this.
And I think I may have a hyperlink in the Tom Dispatch article to B'Tselem's Israeli human rights organization comment.
The fact is these settlers don't need that much land.
And the bedrock fact is that the settlement is illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.
So this is what the wall does.
It segregates the Palestinians, robbing them of their land, giving the land and water, which is very important, to the Israeli settlement and virtually annexing the settlement to Israel proper.
It's a typical colonial device whereby Israel has been trying to expand its borders relentlessly into the West Bank.
It's land theft from the original inhabitants.
That's the view of anybody who looks at international law and is not relying on biblical mandates from 2,000 years ago.
Well, we won't get into whether property rights can last 2,000 years while you're in exile or whatever.
But it's such a complicated thing.
I think I really want to focus on what life is like or let you focus for a moment here on what life is like for people of the West Bank.
I mean, after all, we're not talking about cartoon characters here.
These are real people.
It's not like their economy is made from working in high-rise office buildings.
These people have an agricultural economy, and they're being separated from their farmland.
I mean, how bad is it to be a citizen of the West Bank these days?
Well, if you're a farmer like the farmer I described in Jaouz, and again, your readers can go to the article itself.
It's better than I am on air.
Oh, no, you're doing great.
I'm learning all kinds of stuff.
In fact, for people who are just tuning in, it's Ellen Cantero.
She's got this great article called Living by the Gate from Hell, the Great Wall of Israel.
It's by Tom Englehart and Ellen Cantero.
You can find it at More Viewpoints if you look at the front page of Antiwar.com or, of course, at TomDispatch.com.
But, no, please continue.
If you are one of the farmers who has stayed on the land, like the man I described, 65 years old.
He's no kid.
He gets up at 5 in the morning.
He has breakfast with his wife, and then with all the farmers in Jaouz who have Israeli permission to cross a barrier into what used to be their land.
Now, that phrase itself is, if I may use that word, pregnant with significance.
See, when you were a farmer in the West Bank, let's say when I was reporting on it in the 1980s, this man and all of Jaouz's farmers, you know, you'd get up in the morning and you'd go on your tractor or your donkeys and you'd go to your land.
You know, no barriers, no Israelis.
You were just an ordinary farmer.
I don't know, many of your listeners may not be familiar with agriculture because we only have agribusiness here, but in the West Bank, small farming still has gone on and people used to just be able to go to their land and come back.
You know, you'd come back at noon if you had an emergency.
You'd come back for lunch.
During the midday heat, you might take a rest.
At dusk, which is the best time for watering your crops, you would water your crops.
Okay, now what has happened is that Israel has sliced and diced the West Bank so that it's really one vast prison network.
And I describe in my article something that's called an agricultural gate, which is an integral part of this complex thing that's called the wall.
And it's this monster set of steel jaws, always painted yellow in my experience.
Maybe there are some that aren't.
Anyway, Israeli soldiers open these gates for 40 minutes in the morning and I think 40 minutes in the evening.
There may be a noon time.
I didn't put it in the article.
I wasn't sure.
But Israelis are now in charge, in complete control of the lives of these farmers, saying you can enter the land that was once yours for 40 minutes through this gate in the morning.
And I went to the gate with these farmers at 6.30 and then you come back at 4.30 in the afternoon.
In addition to which, these farmers must have permits, which are very complicated to get.
They are visitor's permits.
These farmers who once owned their land, farmed their land, there were owners and then there were people who worked for them.
And some of the land of the central character in my essay, Abu Azam, some of his land actually went into Israel and he farmed into Israel.
A city called Qalqilya, which is just to the west of the village in which Abu Azam lives, is completely surrounded by the wall.
But when it wasn't Qalqilya people, merchants, for example, used to go back and forth between Israel.
Israelis went back and forth into Qalqilya and it was called something like the City of Peace or the Peaceful City.
People just did regular trading with each other.
There were a lot of relationships between Palestinians and Israelis.
Palestinians and Israeli Jews and Palestinians and Israeli Arabs because there are still some Israeli-Palestinians.
Well, and because people will, you know, regular private citizens will find ways to work and trade together.
When they have access to state power to say, oh, well, I don't have to trade anymore, I can just take it.
If it's cheaper to rent a parliamentarian or congressman than it is to trade, then it's all just a matter of the bottom line, right?
Well, I would say more that in a colonial situation like South Africa or like Israel, and there are ways in which the Israeli situation is worse than South Africa's, I would put it a little bit differently.
The business of Israeli government from 1948 forward, and I can give your readers a reference to another article that I wrote at CNET in a minute if you just remind me to do that, but the object has been to expand the borders of the Israeli state and to control the natives as much as possible in order to expand and to settle what used to be Palestinian land.
Look, your listeners have a perfect example of that.
We live in the United States.
The European colonists did exactly the same thing to the original population of the Americas as Israel is doing to the Palestinians.
Well, it is sort of like the ethnic cleansing of the Balkans or something.
It just takes place in a bit slower motion.
They use zoning laws in Jerusalem instead of just outright pogroms and forced marches, right?
Yeah, well, I mean, there are, yes, you essentially, Scott, yeah, you're right.
Although I would contend that there are, you know, in East Jerusalem, I just wrote an article at Counterpunch on the evictions in Sheikh Jarrah, and yes, they did use the excuse of the sale of houses that had taken place through one of these American settler supporter middlemen.
They seized the land, but they also do some violence in entering the houses.
And on the West Bank, there is harassment, which I would describe as vigilante-type harassment or pogrom-type harassment that goes on in Hebron, for example.
Well, you know, I think maybe we do need to get into 2,000-year-old property rights.
I mean, if somebody is born in America or in Russia and a distant relative was Jewish, then they are presumed to have a birthright, a property right, to not just, you know, the 48 borders, but even the West Bank, even the Gaza Strip.
And yet, if you're from there, you don't have any rights at all?
I mean, that's pretty incongruent, I think.
You mean if you're Palestinian, you don't have any rights?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, a bunch of Russian immigrants, I mean, wasn't it the Nazis that said that Jewishness was a race and not a religion anyway and all that?
I mean, I don't understand this, where if somebody is a Russian, they can claim a birthright to land in Israel and take it from Palestinians there.
Well, take me, for example.
My family background is Jewish, and my grandfather was born in the Ukraine.
My maternal great-grandparents were born in Germany.
And I can just move to Israel anytime I want to.
And I can move to a settlement, and I can be subsidized.
And yet, Palestinian friends of mine can't go back.
Oh yes, I think that's, one, I think that's very unfair.
Two, I think there's quite an exodus now of Israeli Jewish citizens who don't really want to live in Israel, because of what in Northern Ireland was called the Troubles, right?
And there are some Palestinians who would like to move back.
Of course, it's grossly unfair.
And I honor and have a regard for the rule of modern law.
I am not, I think it's quite useless to focus on biblical 2,000-year-old rights.
I may have misunderstood you.
Yeah, no.
Well, I mean, that's really my point, is that I think we're in agreement.
That here you have people, actual people, with property.
They own it.
It's their property.
And then you have somebody saying, it's true that for 2,000 years my ancestors have been in exile in Europe, but now I'm back.
Get out.
I mean, that is, it's ridiculous to have religious property rights from too many generations ago to count somehow trump the real property rights of real people who live in this place.
Well, we have a dialogue, or if you will, not a dialogue, between people who believe in rational values of, let's say, the Enlightenment, and have a regard for the rule of international laws as they've been laid down over the past hundred years, give or take.
The Hague Conventions, the Geneva Conventions.
Then on the other side, we have people who are either fundamentalist Christians or, for want of another word, maybe fundamentalist Jews who believe in the Bible, and I think that that's an irrational belief.
I don't see any way of, there's no way of having a reasonable discussion, although there are settlement leaders, and I'd be hard-pressed right now to even go to my archives and find this, but there have been a few settlement leaders who have been in dialogue with Hamas, and that's kind of interesting.
Does that mean they're going to try to work out some sort of religious edict to solve it or something?
No, no, no, no.
Actually, before Israel invaded Gaza in this lugubriously termed war, chaos fled, there were dialogues going on between, I believe, leaders in Sderot, and I think there were rabbis involved, and Hamas.
And I could look it up for you if you needed me to, but I think we don't have the time.
Well, actually, we've got all the time in the world, but that's all right.
I'd be happy to email back and forth with you later, and maybe we'll try to add the footnote to the summary of this.
No, it's extremely interesting, because throughout the history of Jewish settlement in Palestine before the state of Israel, and after the state of Israel was founded, there have been a lot of, there have been good relations and attempts to forge relationships, and the state has intervened because, of course, what the state wants to do is expand its borders.
It doesn't want permanent borders.
It wants something it calls the greater Israel.
Does that mean you think ultimately the plan is, like, maybe the Likud government's operating principle here is that eventually, as long as it may take, they're just going to push all the Palestinians out into Jordan or somewhere else and take the whole West Bank forever?
Is that the plan, do you think?
Well, there has been talk.
Let me give you the general, I'll give you the general idea, but there has been talk about annexing parts of the Galilee, which is within Israel, within northern Israel, with a heavy burden of Israeli-Palestinian, or used to be called Israeli-Arab citizens, to those parts of the West Bank on which the Galilee abuts.
And your listeners would have to look at a map, a really good map of the region to see that there are parts of the Galilee that border on the West Bank.
And if you annex these parts to the West Bank, these parts become dependent on a third world country, whereas Israel gets rid of its Arab population handily.
Well, this is what the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, was proposing, right?
Is that we take more of the West Bank, but we'll give some parts of Israel that are occupied mostly by Arabs, or lived in mostly by Arabs, in trade.
Exactly right.
Hence, we win, tails you lose.
Yeah.
If you look at Counterpunch, I had an article up there called, Beware the Lieberman Trap, in which all of this is discussed.
And I would also steer your listeners to a very long, but extremely good essay by Noam Chomsky called, Exterminate All the Brutes.
Based on an MIT talk in 2009, in which he discusses it.
I mean, I think the plan underway now is to make life so oppressive for West Bank Palestinians, that many of them will just leave.
And there was a quote by Moshe Dayan, when he was in charge of the occupied territories, he said, The situation today resembles the complex relationship between a Bedouin man and the girl he kidnaps against his will.
You Palestinians as a nation don't want us today, but we'll change your attitude by forcing our presence on you.
You will live like dogs, and whoever will leave will leave, while we take what we want.
So I mean, that's basically been the plan since the earlier days of the occupation.
There are many quotes that you can find from Ben-Gurion saying even harsher things than that, before the founding of the state in which he said, we'll simply expel them.
Well, in fact, there's some pretty interesting quotes from Ben-Gurion explaining that Israel started all the wars, and that they were great in terms of public relations and making it look like it was always Egypt and Syria and everyone else that started the wars, but no, it was us, we chose.
Well, again, and I hate to, it's just that I've written on this stuff recently, so I would also steer your readers to a book review that I did.
It's on Z-Net, March 21st, 2009, and I called it The Wages of Force.
It was a review of a book by a man named Ze'ev Ma'oz called Defending the Holy Land.
Huge book.
I mean, it's a huge book.
I wouldn't say your listeners should read the book itself, although they might look into it if they want.
But my review of it summarizes it, I think, pretty well.
And what that book concludes is that all of Israel's wars, except Ma'oz thinks, with a possible exception of 1948, have been wars of choice.
He says wars of choice or wars of folly.
I think wars of choice, because since Israel has wanted to expand its borders and has never wanted to have borders defined, you know, this, by the way, is what is meant by the phrase, recognizing Israel's right to exist.
You know, there's always such a hullabaloo about it, and Hamas doesn't want to recognize Israel's right to exist.
There's no international law that recognizes any state's right simply to exist.
States exist within borders.
Everybody knows that Israel is there.
It's right to exist.
Well, it's a whole bogus thing anyway, because Hamas has said, look, if you'll just stop bombing us and let us work out a Palestinian state and all that, we will, in essence, we'll do everything but utter that phrase.
But obviously we'll have a handshake that says, you know, we want a permanent ceasefire here.
Right, and they offered a 30-year truce.
Here's the thing, too, Ellen, and we are getting long on the interview here, but one more thing that I want to try to inject into the discussion, because, well, it matters to me, and I think probably this may be the part of it that is of most consequence to Americans, so they can understand this conversation is not just, you know, a morality tale about, gee, isn't it sad what's happening in the West Bank?
There are a lot of sad places in the world, but for Americans, I think it's worth noting that after the Kwana massacre of 2006, pardon me, 1996, Osama bin Laden, I guess Bill Clinton had Sudan expel him and he went to Afghanistan, and then he put out his declaration of war against the United States and Jews and Americans anywhere you can find them.
And, you know, at least a good third of it is about what Israel's been doing in Lebanon lately, what Israel does in Palestine all day, every day.
And also, according to Lawrence Wright, who wrote The Looming Tower, which is the pretty definitive, well, it's one major part of the story, anyway, many major parts of the story of the road to 9-11 there, and he explains that Mohammed Atta, after the Kwana massacre as well in 1996, wrote out his last will and testament, like a kamikaze pilot attending his own funeral, and said he was going to dedicate his life to getting revenge for that.
This is the guy who was the head pilot in the 9-11 attack that killed 3,000 Americans.
Getting revenge for Israel and Palestine?
Yes, and in fact, you know, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who put the thing together, when his nephew, Ramzi Youssef, who blew up the World Trade Center in 1993, went to prison, the judge said, alright, you have anything to say for yourself?
And all he talked about was Palestine.
I blew up, I was trying to kill tens of thousands of people in your towers by knocking over one or the other, as revenge for what Israel does in Palestine every day.
This is why we have a terrorism war against us, and a terror war back against them.
That's what this is about, is America's support for Israel and Palestine and Lebanon.
Well, it certainly is a flashpoint, and there are millions upon millions of ordinary Arabs living under the despots that are the clients of the United States, who in fact do look to Palestine as a touchstone, as a flashpoint.
Well, sure, I mean, the reason we support Mubarak is so he'll pretend to like Israel.
That's why we pay him all that money every year.
Well, I think that the reason we support them is, there's all that oil, but then that's another topic which you might...
Well, not in Egypt, there's not.
Well, it has been the most, it was the most powerful state in the region.
Actually, natural gas has been found off Gaza, but that's another conversation.
Oh, right, you're right.
In fact, that's the start of a whole other conversation.
I'd like to have that one with you sometime, because that is very important indeed.
Probably you could talk to my colleague Irene Genger, who is, even as we speak, writing a major book on oil, and if you want, I can email you her contact.
Okay, great.
Yeah, I'm really interested in that story, and I know very little about it, other than, well, they found some natural gas offshore there.
That's about all I know.
The greatest material prize in human history, I think that was the way it was put by a high state department official in 1945.
Wow.
About, you know, the reason the U.S. might have strategic interests in Israel, in the region.
It is the greatest material prize in human history.
You mean in the Mediterranean Sea there?
No, I'm talking about Iraq and Afghanistan.
No, I mean, I don't know much about the discovery of natural gas in off Gaza.
This is a story I haven't followed up on.
Oh, I see.
You're talking about the Middle East in general, basically.
Yeah, I mean, that's why we're there.
Sure.
Well, the empire needs a place to refuel its boats.
There you go.
All right, well, thanks very much for your time on the show today.
I really appreciate it.
I learned a lot.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's Ellen Cantereau.
She's got this article at TomDispatch.com, and if you go to more viewpoints on the front page of Antiwar.com, you can find it.
It's called The Great Wall of Israel, Living by the Gate from Hell.
