Israel is profiting from its separation principle

Israel's ideology of seperation from Palestinians defines the conflict now more than ever, writes Joseph Dana

The Palestinian city of Abu Dis is seen near the Israeli separation barrier in the West Bank. Ahmad Gharabli / AFP Photo

In the summer of 2011, thousands of Israelis poured into the streets of Tel Aviv to demand economic reform. With slogans like “the nation demands social justice”, one would have thought that the protesters were calling for an end of the conflict with Palestinians as well.

The opposite was true. Arguing that it was time to address the state of the Israeli economy free from uncomfortable discussion of the occupation, protest leaders refused to discuss Palestinians in any way.

How could it be that a generation of young Israelis could take to the streets in a “social justice” protest while willingly ignoring the Palestinian issue? The answer speaks to the direction of travel in the conflict and informs the current wave of violence gripping Palestine.

Israel has embraced a narrative of separation with the Palestinians. The roots of this corrosive thinking extend to the beginning of Zionism. Early Zionist leaders envisioned Israel as an outpost of European civilisation in the Middle East.

The movement’s intellectual forefather, Theodor Herzl, didn’t attempt to conceal his settler colonial plans for the movement when he wrote that he wanted Israel to be “part of a wall of defence for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilisation against barbarism”. This line of thinking has continued to the present day in the minds of Israeli leaders. Former prime minister and defence minister Ehud Barak famously described the goal of Zionism as maintaining a “villa in the jungle”.

To realise this goal, Israel has had to create physical and intellectual separation. Palestinians have been tucked behind a network of walls and removed from the lives of Israelis as day labourers.

Many Israelis only encounter Palestinians during their military service these days. As such, most Israelis have expressed surprise at the current spate of attacks by Palestinians for the simple reason that the occupation and conflict doesn’t feature on their daily radars. They are shocked when confronted with resistance to their domination thanks to this collective cognitive dissonance about the conflict.

Historians and analysts often point to Israel’s right wing as the main culprit of the separation principle while ignoring the ideology’s obvious colonial complexion. Rightist leaders like Vladimir Jabotinsky, author of the Iron Wall doctrine that envisioned the country as a colonial outpost perpetually at odds with the natives, helped build the intellectual infrastructure for separation. But it was liberal Israeli leaders who made it a physical reality.

In the late 1980s, Labour leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Haim Ramon pushed for the creation of a concrete wall that would separate Palestinians from the Israeli heartland. The two-state solution envisioned in the Oslo Accords, which Rabin signed, was sold to the Israeli liberals as a realisation of the old Zionist mantra: “Them over there; us over here.”

After the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, Rabin’s government began building new fences around Gaza and slowly revoking Palestinian work permits in large numbers. With the outbreak of the second intifada, the rhetoric of separation accelerated. Palestinian terror attacks gave the Israeli leadership a reason to build the physical barrier Rabin had dreamed of in the 1980s.

By 2005, Israel decided to remove thousands of Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip, which was marketed to the world as a move for peace when in fact it was a device to entrench separation. Overnight Gaza became an open-air prison that could be monitored, controlled and economically exploited by Israel. Palestinian labourers who once ventured into Israel for daily work vanished.

Over time, Israel has all but lost interest in Palestinian labour. In this way, Israel’s domination of Palestinians is markedly different from, say, apartheid South Africa’s exploitation of black Africans as a source of cheap labour.

But that doesn’t mean that Israel doesn’t exploit Palestinians. Indeed, Tel Aviv has focused its resources on monitoring and corralling Palestinians throughout the occupied territories. The skills and technologies used to accomplish this task are packaged and sold throughout the world to governments and cities, from the slums of Rio de Janeiro to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

The Israeli drone industry, for example, wouldn’t be a global leader without the occupation serving as the ultimate laboratory for testing and craft perfection. Tel Aviv’s ability to clamp down on neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem in response to the current wave of violence will also be used to market Israel’s arms industry.

The maintenance of this arms industry, from the foot soldiers required on the ground to the human intelligence required to control other peoples is founded on the principle of separation as envisioned by early Zionist leaders and entrenched by the Israeli leadership. The most iconic representation of the principle at work – the West Bank separation barrier – is one of the most expensive national projects in the history of the country.

Now that the peace process has been put on hold, the only constants left in the conflict are continued Israeli occupation and entrenchment of the separation ideology. Recent attacks on Israelis will only serve to entrench the idea that Israel must maintain the status quo or face more terror.

In the long term, this is unsustainable for any society. In the meantime, however, there are several efforts under way that will chip away at the intellectual foundation of separation. Israel’s parliament is set to approve a bill that will make Arabic mandatory from the first grade. Any effort to reverse the separation between Israelis and Palestinians will ultimately help unravel Israeli colonialism in Palestine.

On Twitter: @ibnezra