[WCUSP] A commission to investigater the occupation

[KATHARLOW at aol.com]

_http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/758207.html_ 
(http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/758207.html) 





A commission to investigate  the occupation




By Danny  Rubinstein




During the past two  months, July and August, 251 Palestinians were killed in 
Gaza and the West Bank,  all of them by Israel Defense Forces fire. About 
half of them were civilians,  including women, children and the elderly. More 
Palestinians than Israelis were  killed during the war in Lebanon, even though 
the Palestinians did not  participate in the war and were not subjected to 
Katyusha fire. 

There has  been a total freeze in the diplomatic process between Israel and 
the Palestinian  Authority. The road map has not been mentioned for a long 
time. There is no  disengagement and no realignment. There are no unilateral 
moves, and certainly  no negotiations between the two sides. Occasionally, 
low-level officials meet to  discuss essential everyday issues. And there have 
apparently been indirect  contacts about releasing Palestinian prisoners in exchange 
for Israeli soldier  Gilad Shalit. But the only area in which Israel and the 
Palestinians currently  maintain relations is the violent conflict: raids, 
shootings, shellings, terror  attacks, arrests, roadblocks, expropriations. Killed 
and wounded. 

There  ought to be a state commission of inquiry about what is happening in 
the  Palestinian territories. For all its importance, and all the shock in 
Israel  over what happened in the Lebanon war, this war cannot be compared to what 
has  been happening for almost 40 years in the territories occupied by Israel 
during  the Six Day War. Whatever inquiry is conducted into the Lebanon war, 
it will at  most find that the prime minister made a mistake one day, and that 
the defense  minister and the chief of staff made incorrect decisions on 
another day, and  that one general and several brigade commanders did not 
understand what was  happening in the field on a certain night, and that food and 
drink did not  arrive in time. There is no comparison at all between mistakes of 
that kind and  the fateful failures of all Israeli governments since 1967 with 
regard to the  West Bank and Gaza. These involved erroneous decisions of 
historic  magnitude.?      
The state commission  of inquiry into the disasters engendered by the Israeli 
regime in the  territories should include historians, social psychologists, 
sociologists and  scholars of culture and religion, and not necessarily former 
generals and  Supreme Court justices. Such a commission would probably 
discover that there is  a strong connection between the wars in Lebanon and what 
occurred between us and  the Palestinians during those years, and that our control 
over the West Bank and  Gaza contributed quite a bit to the continuing 
deterioration in the north. 

Over  time, the number of those who remember what happened in the Palestinian 
 territories after 1967 is gradually declining. Who remembers, for example, 
that  due to Israel's belief that Arab leaders were purposely leaving the 
refugees in  wretched situations in the camps in order to incite them against 
Israel, Israeli  governments decided to solve the refugee problem in Gaza through 
reconstruction?  For a while, Israel took several steps in that direction. But 
they turned out to  be divorced from reality, and were halted. Who remembers 
that the basic  principle articulated by then defense minister Moshe Dayan was 
to allow full  freedom of movement for Israelis and Palestinians from Dan to 
Eilat, and that  for over 20 years, there was not a single checkpoint between 
the territories and  the State of Israel? Who remembers that Dayan also gave an 
order to reduce the  official Israeli presence in the territories to a 
minimum: no flags, no patrols  and of course, no settlements near Arab communities? 

There  were terror attacks then, too, but with no comparison to what began 
during the  intifada years. There were years when fewer than five administrative 
detainees  from the territories were in Israeli prisons. Today, as we know, 
there are  thousands. 

What  happened during the 20 years that have elapsed since then? During the 
earlier  period, were the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza fond of the 
Israeli  regime? Of course not. So how did we get to where we are now? Does the 
blame lie  with the settlement enterprise, which created a blatant apartheid 
regime in the  territories and led to feelings of bitterness and deprivation, a 
sense of being  robbed? Or perhaps the decisions made about East Jerusalem 
were mistaken? What  resulted from the mistakes in the Oslo Accords? And where 
is the separation  fence leading? All this is far more important than what 
happened just now in  Lebanon, and it is this situation that should be the subject 
of a state  commission of inquiry.


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