Whose land is it? Apartheid in Israel/Palestine

ON THE LONG CLIMB to Jerusalem I notice two kinds of trucks. One kind is carrying huge battle tanks still muddy from combat in the West Bank. The other is carrying tents sent from America for Palestinians who have lost their homes in the fighting. The tanks tell rush-hour commuters, "We are at war." I see them again pictured on T-shirts that say"Peace Through Superior Force." The tents on the other trucks draw little attention. Their Palestinian recipients will eventually reject them as signs of the duplicity of American policy..

We pass a Jerusalem traffic light where Israeli and Palestinian thoroughfares intersect. The green light for the Israeli traffic is long. "You belong here," it seems to say. The green light for the Palestinian traffic is short. "We call this a racist traffic light," says an Israeli lawyer who defends East Jerusalem's Arab residents. Through bypasses, overpasses and outright barriers, Israeli planners and engineers have removed most points of contact between the two populations, he explains. An "apartheid" tunnel probably will soon replace this light. To anyone entering East Jerusalem after an absence of several years, it is clear that Israel has been taking over traditional Arab neighborhoods.

Later, driving in an interchurch aid convoy to the town of Jenin, we pass military checkpoints where Palestinians wait in long lines. Not far away Israeli settlers speed to their jobs on highways cut through Palestinian land. The West Bank has 280 military checkpoints through which Palestinians must pass.

The settlements themselves make the loudest statement--190 of them now in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, including enclaves carved out of Palestinian communities, according to the Foundation for Middle East Peace. The settlements are more numerous, more complete and much bigger than they were when I was here four years ago.

When the sun is shining these bright limestone cities set on top of hills dominate the landscape. Palestinian land has been expropriated for settlements and roads; Palestinian homes have been demolished as punishment for those who resist the Israeli occupation. These deeds are documented by courageous Palestinian and Israeli NGOs. Each fallen stone, each torn olive branch is a new memorial for the villages that have vanished by the hundreds since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

Despite all these visible signs, much of the occupation is hidden, like an iceberg. Jeff Halper, an Israeli anthropologist who heads a nonprofit organization called the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, calls Israeli policy a "matrix of control." The system is "designed to allow Israel to control every aspect of Palestinian life in the occupied territories while lowering Israel's military profile in order to give the impression to the outside world that what Palestinians refer to as `occupation' is merely proper administration, and that Israel has a `duty' to defend itself and the status quo," Halper says.

Halper's group details a web of zones, restrictions and intrusions. Occupied land, for example, is divided into areas A, B, C, D, H-1, H-2, Yellow, Green, Blue and White, and controlled by a mixture of civil administrators, military orders and undercover agents. Underground water is controlled. Businesses have to cope with various licenses and inspections. Farmers cannot plant or sell certain crops. Palestinians cannot work, travel or enter other areas without permits from Israeli authorities.

Vigorous debate about the occupation takes place in Israel. In April the newspaper Ha'aretz carried a quote by Michael Ben-Yair, attorney general of Israel in the mid-1990s, calling the occupation the "seventh day" of Israel's 1967 Six-Day War: "We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities.

"Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one progressive, liberal--in Israel; and the other cruel, injurious--in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That regime exists to this day."

How much of this "seventh day" war or the "matrix of control" is evident to Americans? Could the U.S. pursue its policies if Americans could actually see what is happening in the Holy Land?

In the region itself satellite television channels are making the occupation more visible than ever. The impact of Al Jazeera TV can be compared to what CNN's might be if a regime like Saddam Hussein's occupied the homeland of 3 million Americans and CNN provided hours of direct coverage of the occupation. Across the Arabic speaking world the realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are becoming more and more palpable.