by John Lyons
German journalist Gil Yaron told me:
The occupation is not only hazardous but dangerous to Israel, though I can think that it could be fatal, because it endangers Israel’s connection to the Western world. It’s becoming worse by the day and because of what it does to Israeli society, that lawless vacuum in which ideological organisations act with impunity, which teach generation after generation of Israelis [in the army in the West Bank] how to solve problems with violence … and they take this knowledge and bring it back home to Israel and it is affecting our society back here. The anti-democratic trends that we have in Israel I think are in part as a consequence of the occupation and at the same time I belong to the school who fervently believes that this problem is unsolvable in the foreseeable future because I do not think that the maximum concessions that both sides are willing to make will satisfy either side.
Within Israel there is an inherent contradiction. Israeli land expert Dror Etkes told me: ‘How do you on the one hand keep the narrative you tell yourself – that you are a democracy, that you are a villa in the jungle, that you are a place which differs from the entire area around it – and on the other hand you are pleasing the most tribal and territorial and chauvinist and nationalist and violent needs or interests of your own society. Israel is not willing to give up either one of these desires.’
Over six years, the thing that most surprised me about Israel was that it is two totally different things: a triumph and a tragedy.
It is a triumph because of what it has achieved in the first seven decades of its life. Israel rose from the Holocaust to become a State three years later. It became a dynamic economy and was able to defend itself against any threat. It revived Hebrew, turned a desert into a bread basket and became a dream for Jews.
It is a tragedy because that dream is being destroyed by a greed for more land.
By 2017, Benjamin Netanyahu had been Prime Minister for a total of 11 years. After four terms of Netanyahu the settlement enterprise was so firmly entrenched that a Palestinian State was virtually no longer viable.
It seemed the Oslo peace process could not survive Benjamin Netanyahu. I believe that more than any other leader, he has been responsible for consigning Israel to long-term war.
It’s now highly unlikely that there will be a peaceful resolution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. As the occupation passed its 50th year in 2017, an indefinite future of violence set in. The Israeli public has been so inculcated, for so long, to believe that they cannot make peace with Palestinians – the savages – that peace would now be almost impossible. As Benjamin Netanyahu told Israelis of Palestinians: ‘They murder – we build.’
Netanyahu has killed off the two-State solution. A Palestinian State is dead before it has been born. As far as the majority of Israelis are concerned, they have won the conflict with the Palestinians. And in a military sense they have. Because this is the world’s slowest war, the international community has, largely, grown tired of it. Because, on average, there are one or two Palestinians killed every week (excluding wars with Gaza), they rarely make the headlines; they are ‘the norm’. Virtually no media outlet in the world will run a story about the deaths of one or two Palestinians.
In 1989, towards the end of apartheid, I met a South African diplomat in Sydney who told me that the aim of his government was to maintain an ‘acceptable’ level of violence between the white and black populations. Incidents such as the notorious 1976 Soweto massacre were not acceptable. But in daily life, with a hostile black community, there would always be some violence; the aim was to ensure that it did not cause South Africa problems internationally.
Israel has reached a similar situation. As long as, on average, only one or two Palestinians a week are killed, the world can live with it. But maintaining an ‘acceptable’ level of international criticism does not solve the underlying problem.
The occupation of 2.9 million Palestinians cannot go on forever – especially when that number becomes 4 or 5 million. Unlike the South African regime, which ultimately was brought down by economic sanctions, Israel has shown that it can sustain a long international campaign. But what it cannot sustain is the cancer growing from within: a cancer that one day will be fatal if not cut out. The internet and mobile phones are destroying Israel’s ability to manage its message by hasbara.
The editorial board of the New York Times has written about ‘increased talk among Israelis of the “one-state solution”, in which Israel subsumes the West Bank formally while incorporating the Palestinian population or somehow shifting the Palestinians to Jordan and Egypt. The likeliest outcome, given the growth rate of the Arab population, is that Israel would be confronted with a miserable choice: to give up being a Jewish state – or to give up being a democratic state by denying full voting rights to Palestinians.’
And so, after 50 years of occupation, the reality has come to this. That Israel is faced with ‘a miserable choice’. But many would argue that the Palestinians no longer have a choice, miserable or not.
Benjamin Netanyahu has, finally, got what he wished for. Israel’s hundreds of settlements and outposts are firmly entrenched. A Palestinian State is now almost physically impossible. This is victory for Netanyahu and his political base, the Likud Party, with its nationalist–religious core.
But in coming years, there will be tragic consequences of Netanyahu’s sacrifice of peace on the altar of Greater Israel. It will be unthinkable tragedy.
Israel is a country steeped in military tradition. In many militaries around the world the term ‘Code Red’ means a state of high alert and imminent danger. After six years of living in Israel, I have come to a very clear, but regrettable, view: Israel, Code Red.
EPILOGUE
Farewell, Jerusalem
6 January 2015
IT WAS OUR LAST DAY IN JERUSALEM. SYLVIE, JACK AND I woke up at the American Colony Hotel. It was almost six years to the day since we arrived here to begin our great adventure. Six years since we landed at Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, excited but uncertain about what lay ahead. A few days earlier we’d moved out of our house, and since then we’d been based here, saying goodbye to friends and contacts and doing tasks such as closing bank accounts and trying to convince a bureaucrat in the water company that we wanted our programmed payments to cease.
Early in our time here, Sylvie and I had talked about how, when we finally left, we’d have a farewell party to which we’d invite our Israeli and Palestinian friends. How naïve we’d been. We now realised how absurd that idea was. The days when Israelis and Palestinians would share social occasions were long gone.
On this, our last morning, we gathered for breakfast. There was a certain sadness for the three of us. The Middle East had become such a major part of our lives. Jack had virtually grown up here. He came here as an innocent, wide-eyed, eight-yearold boy and was leaving a 14-year-old on the verge of young adulthood. Most of his real friends were here. Likewise, Sylvie and I had enjoyed a golden period in our marriage, travelling for work and pleasure, and building up a wonderful circle of friends.
However, the conflict was with us until the very end. The American Colony Hotel, which is in East Jerusalem, ordered a Palestinian taxi driver for us – what the Israelis call a Jerusalemite. He told us his family had stayed here during the violence of 1948 when Israel was established, and he only had Israeli residency, not citizenship. This meant he had limited rights – for example, Israel did not allow him to vote in national elections.
As we arrived at the security gates leading to Ben-Gurion Airport, he wound down his window. When dealing with armed Israeli security officers at these checkpoints, Palestinian drivers often try to speak Hebrew with thick Israeli accents, in the hope that they won’t be taken aside.
On this, our last trip to the airport, this strategy failed as dismally as such attempts usually did. The Israeli officers could tell immediately that he was a Palestinian, which meant we would have a much longer security check and he would
be given a serious interrogation.
Finally we were allowed into the terminal. We sat at the gate waiting to board.
‘What an extraordinary time we’ve had,’ Sylvie said to Jack and me. We discussed where we thought Israel was heading. The conversation had a sad personal note for Sylvie: two days earlier, a Palestinian woman she knew from the village of Nabi Saleh in the West Bank was shot by Israeli soldiers, although had survived.
I asked Jack how he looked back on his time here. ‘It’s been fun,’ he said. ‘But I think the political situation is terrible. Some of my friends from school have to stop themselves from speaking Arabic in the street for fear that they will be attacked. It’s sad.’
My own thoughts wandered across the extraordinary stories I’d covered while based here. I’d been an eyewitness to the optimism of the Arab world as it tried to find democracy then watched it all come crashing down so violently. My view was that the Arab Spring failed not because ‘Arabs and democracy don’t go together’, as some say, but because countries cannot go from dictatorships to democracies in one step. Democracy will come, one day, to various Arab countries, but first they need to set up independent institutions such as police forces and civil services. I’d covered the funeral of Nelson Mandela, who I regarded as the greatest man of the 20th century. I’d covered three wars between Israel and Gaza, and seen the senselessness of that conflict.
Finally our plane took off. As I looked down at Tel Aviv’s high-rise buildings glistening beside the Mediterranean Sea, I felt a sadness that these years had passed – so quickly. Professionally, I felt proud that I’d done my job honestly. The Israeli lobby made all sorts of efforts to get me to soften my reporting. I was pleased I hadn’t buckled.
This had been the toughest assignment I’d ever had – by far. But those who’d read my reports over those six years could have been confident that they were reading facts, not propaganda. Back in Australia, I will often run into people, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who remark that they were surprised I was able to get published what I did, and that they appreciated it. That, in the end, is what journalists should do: report what’s in front of them. Then it’s over to the politicians and the public to decide what they do with that information. But without facts, they cannot know what they are dealing with.
Several crucial events had occurred during our six years in Jerusalem. Firstly, Israel reached its demographic tipping-point between Israelis and Palestinians: a crucial factor in any potential solution. Depending on whose figures you accept, the number of Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza equalled or passed the number of Jews in Israel and the West Bank (since 2005 there have been no Jews in Gaza).
Professor Sergio DellaPergola is regarded as Israel’s foremost demographer. According to him, as of 2016 the Jewish population of Israel, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem was 6,336,400. This compares with the Palestinian population of 5,967,100 – made up of 1,757,700 living in Israel, 2,448,800 in the West Bank and 1,750,600 in Gaza. However, the Israeli Civil Administration estimates that there are 2,919,350 registered Palestinians in the West Bank. This would mean that the Palestinian population has passed the Jewish population. Whichever figure one accepts, the tipping-point has either arrived or is arriving, with faster birth rates of Palestinians than Israelis.
The reason this is so important is because it means, now or in the near future, a minority Jewish population has control over the lives and movements of a majority Palestinian population. While Israel does not occupy Gaza the way it does the West Bank, it controls movement in and out of Gaza with its naval blockade and it controls entry and exit points, along with Egypt in the south.
The other major event that happened in our time in Israel was a dramatic escalation in settlement growth. When we arrived in 2009 there were 296,000 settlers in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem. When we left, there were 385,000, according to the Israeli human rights group Peace Now. This meant the number of settlers had grown by 30 per cent.
As we sat for the first time all those years ago on our balcony over Jerusalem, there was so much we didn’t know. We did not truly understand either Israelis or Palestinians, and we did not understand that the powerful side of the equation – Israel – has, for now, pushed away the desire for peace.
Six years on, we had seen so much. We had lived and breathed this place, the good and the bad, the wonderful and the dreadful. We had met good people on both sides of the conflict who yearned for peace, and for their children to have better lives than they’d had.
But we were also leaving disappointed and sad. We knew that what is coming could have been avoided. And we got to know too many of the people – both Israeli and Palestinian – who will face this coming storm.
This tragedy now seems inevitable. Almost 3 million people in the West Bank cannot be denied all civil rights for more than 50 years without dire consequences and almost two million people in Gaza cannot be locked forever in the world’s largest open-air prison. One day many of those five million people will rise up.
We arrived back in Australia on 10 January 2015. Shortly after our return, we were invited to a Bar Mitzvah in the northern Sydney suburb of Neutral Bay. The son of some friends of ours had come of age.
Something occurred at the event that surprised me. Towards the end of the ceremony, the rabbi asked us all to pray for the Israeli Defence Forces. He drew on Deuteronomy 20:4: ‘For the Lord, your God, is the one who goes with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you.’
I was surprised both by the explicit message and the fact that it was being delivered in Australia. I’d heard many such exhortations in Israel, but hearing this in Sydney jarred. My reading of the prayer was that virtually anything the IDF do in battle is justified because, after all, God is not just with them, but fighting against the enemy to save them.
I’d covered three Gaza wars and found it hard to believe that any god could justify the dropping of white phosphorus onto heavily populated areas. The fact that we were being asked in a relatively modern Jewish community in Sydney to pray for a foreign army confirmed how deeply the propaganda of ‘the most moral army in the world’ had seeped into Australia.
Another event occurred after our return that confirmed why the Israeli Government believes it has the support of countries like Australia in continuing its occupation. In February 2017, Benjamin Netanyahu made an official visit: the first by a sitting Israeli prime minister. The reception he received was extraordinary; I had no doubt that he would never receive such adulation in Israel.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s office invited me to a lunch for Netanyahu in Sydney. It was attended by about 400 business men and women, including leaders of the Jewish community. This was a serious show of business power; I walked past six billionaires before I even found my table.
That night, Netanyahu received a rapturous reception at the Central Synagogue in Sydney’s Bondi Junction. Soon afterwards, I had lunch with Rabbi Levi Wolff, chief minister at the synagogue. Over chicken soup and a bottle of kosher wine in Bondi, Rabbi Wolff told me he’d never seen anything like the interest the Netanyahu visit evoked. Two Holocaust survivors who were desperate for a seat in the synagogue on the day came to see Rabbi Wolff and rolled up their sleeves, displaying their tattooed numbers from the Holocaust. For them the opportunity to see Netanyahu rounded out their circle of survival.
Rabbi Wolff and I talked about some of the themes of this book. He predicted that I would be hit by some criticism, but he toasted me with a glass of wine: ‘You have an important job to do. As Dick Cheney said, “Dogs never bark at parked cars.” If you’re moving and actually doing something in life then people will attack you.’
A year and a half after we returned to Australia, we went back to Jerusalem. It was our first overseas holiday after coming home and the three of us all nominated Jerusalem as the place we’d most like to visit. For all its problems, we were drawn back. Leaving Israel had made us realise the dept
hs of the friendships we had made there, both Israeli and Palestinian. ‘Welcome back to your second home!’ Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar quipped when we went to dinner at his apartment in Netanya.
When you live in conflict, friendships and family become even more important. We were keen to experience the strange magic of Jerusalem again. The city may be, as Amos Oz once wrote, ‘an old nymphomaniac who squeezes lover after lover to death, before shrugging him off her with a yawn’, but we were enchanted by her. We visited our neighbours from Avi’s apartment, Ilan the historian and Stephanie the museum curator. Ilan had developed lymphoma, but was being successfully treated. ‘My doctor is an Arab woman,’ he told us proudly, explaining that hospitals remained perhaps the only place of coexistence. Ilan and Stephanie were old-time Israelis who were distressed at how the occupation was sabotaging their country.
While I was there, I checked the situation in the military court. After my various articles, the Israeli Government had vowed to improve the system. The Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Yigal Palmor had two years earlier told me that his government had taken note of my reporting about children. ‘You’ve made a difference,’ he said.
But in fact I found the situation had worsened. Detention rates for Palestinian children were up 93 per cent in 2016, according to Military Court Watch. I realised that this situation could never really improve as long as the occupation continued. There might occasionally be a dip, but the ongoing detention of Palestinians is a key weapon in maintaining settlements and enforcing the occupation.
For many years, Israeli lawmakers had given lip service to the idea of a Palestinian State. But they’d always fallen back on a range of excuses as to why this was not possible – most commonly that the Palestinians were not ‘partners for peace’.
