Although it has proven to be of enormous political consequence, Palestinian official Ziad Abu Ain's death last week following an altercation with Israeli occupation forces is noteworthy for its counterintuitive ordinariness. The fundamental nature of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship is laid bare in the basic facts of the case. It's terrible significance does not lie in the death of an important official but in illustrating the tragic fate of yet another Palestinian.
On Wednesday, Abu Ain had been participating in a non-violent tree-planting protest at the West Bank village of Turmusiya when a scuffle broke out between some of the protesters and Israeli occupation forces. Video footage indicates a heavy-handed response by the Israeli troops. Still photographs clearly show some of the soldiers grabbing Abu Ain by the neck.
Moments later, he collapsed and subsequently died. After an autopsy attended by representatives of both sides, Israel insists that Abu Ain died of an existing heart condition.
Palestinian pathologists counter that he was directly injured, perhaps by a rifle butt or blows to the head or chest. They say his injuries caused his death.
What precisely happened at the scene and the exact relationship of those events to Abu Ain’s death may never be properly ascertained. After all, there have been numerous contentious incidents between Israel and the Palestinians, some of them even more dramatic. The death of the 12-year-old Palestinian boy, Muhammad Al Durrah, in Gaza in September 2000 at the beginning of the second intifada is an obvious case in point.
Abu Ain's death in these circumstances was always going to be contentious and politically significant too. He was a senior official and served as the minister in charge of dealing with settlements and the West Bank separation barrier. His deat came at a time of heightened tensions between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA).
The incident, which would always have been the subject of controversy under the best of circumstances, is now greatly exacerbating tensions between Israel and the PA.
Some Palestinian officials, including chief negotiator Saeb Erekat, have even suggested that it could lead to the suspension of security coordination between PA security forces and Israeli authorities. However, that is unlikely to be sustainable as both sides acknowledge the profound importance of fundamental coordination and its role in the maintenance of calm and basic law and order.
But incidents like these highlight how difficult such security coordination has become for the PA, and why it is so controversial even though it plainly benefits both parties. In the absence of peace negotiations or any other means of ending the conflict, incidents like these illustrate the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship and of the lives of an occupied people. Such incidents are stark reminders of the unhealthiness and untenable nature of this relationship of dominance and subordination.
So Abu Ain’s death is not noteworthy because he was a senior Palestinian official and had a confrontation with Israeli soldiers. It’s significant because the dynamic played out in Turmusiya that day was so typical – and indeed almost inevitable – given the basic realities of occupation.
The villagers of Turmusiya have long faced targeted attacks on their olive groves and farms by nearby extremist Jewish settlers. They strongly suspect the settlers and some Israeli officials want to drive the local Palestinians away in order to settle more of the area, including Turmusiya village itself. Abu Ain and some others had gone to the village to plant olive saplings in both a real and symbolic protest against the settlers’ attacks.
Even though Turmusiya is virtually unique in the West Bank, because something like 70 per cent of its almost 8,000 residents are US citizens of Palestinian origin, this has never helped protect it from settler attacks.
In much the same way, Abu Ain’s official status did not distinguish him in the eyes of the Israeli soldiers. And it did not protect him from the fate that would have been meted out to any other outspoken Palestinian protester in those circumstances.
It does not seem to matter to anyone that the militant settlers harassing Turmusiya come from an unauthorised settlement of Adei-Ad, which even the Israeli authorities say is illegal.
Instead, when a group of Palestinians gathered at this West Bank village for a peaceful protest that involved planting olive trees, the response from Israeli troops was predictably heavy-handed.
The violence was inevitable. After all, the occupation is a system of control over millions of Palestinian noncitizens by a few thousand, heavily armed Israeli troops.
So even though the settlers are from an illegal outpost, the Israeli military presence is essentially there to secure their interests over those of the local Palestinians.
Abu Ain merely suffered the fate of an ordinary Palestinian caught up in an incident whose dynamics are hard-wired into the inherent injustice and abuses of an occupation defined by aggressive settlement.
Many such incidents have happened before, albeit with much less publicity. And they will inevitably happen again, as long as the conflict and the occupation persist.
Hussein Ibish is a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine
On Twitter: @ibishblog
