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<\/a>\u00a9 Najeh Hashlamoun \/ APA Images<\/p><\/div>\n
Riddle:\u00a0 What has been around for nearly 47 years; covers a territory the size of Connecticut; holds nearly three million people; is carved up by hundreds of blockades, barriers, \u201cspecial security zones,\u201d \u201cclosed military areas,\u201d \u201ckilling zones,\u201d and roads accessible only to a privileged minority; features an adult male population where an estimated two of every five have been arrested or imprisoned, many without ever being charged; and yet remains essentially invisible?<\/p>\n
Stumped?\u00a0 It\u2019s called the Occupied West Bank, 60 percent of which remains under the full military control of Israel.\u00a0 You\u2019re forgiven if the answer did not come readily.\u00a0 In the U.S., references to Israel\u2019s military occupation of the West Bank have fallen out of favor. Dennis Ross, President Clinton\u2019s architect of the Camp David failure, spent a full page in a New York Times <\/em>op-ed, making \u201crecommendations\u201d for \u201cboth sides\u201d in preparation for President Obama\u2019s visit to the region, without once mentioning the word, or the concept. The Los Angeles Times<\/em> managed the same feat, in side-by-side op-eds, both by Israelis, including one by a settler who argued for the legitimacy of the West Bank settlements.<\/p>\n I have traveled across the West Bank over the last two decades, and intensively since 2009 for a book about a Palestinian violist and his dream to build a music school in Ramallah. \u00a0In the South Hebron Hills I met Palestinian children who\u2019ve been stoned by settlers, or had dogs set upon them as they tried to walk three miles to school.\u00a0 There I met a villager who risked arrest by driving his red Toyota pickup down the nearly impassible road to take the children to their classes. \u00a0Improvements on the road are forbidden, because it lies in a military zone.\u00a0 A few days later, in apparent punishment, his truck was smashed to a crumpled pulp by the army.<\/p>\n At a place called the Azzun of Darkness, near Qalqilia, I saw the separation barrier rising on three sides, nearly 25 feet high, enclosing the community so tightly that it blocked out light, and contact with the rest of Palestine.\u00a0 At Jayyous, I visited with an old man who told me how that same barrier cut off access to his olive trees, which now lay dying, and to his family on the other side.\u00a0 \u201cMy sons don\u2019t know their uncles and aunts,\u201d he told me, sitting beside a bookshelf lined with classics, including The Old Man and the Sea, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, <\/em>and The Idiot.<\/em><\/p>\n In Ramallah I learned of a Israeli military night raid \u2013 in a place supposedly under Palestinian autonomy \u2013 of the home of Ramzi Aburedwan, director of the music school, Al Kamandjati.\u00a0 He was away, on a special invitation to play for the Queen of Holland, but Celine, his French-Lebanese wife, watched in horror at 2 a.m. as their metal door was yanked off and ten soldiers entered, pointing their M-16s at her while her six-month-old slept in the next room. They had the wrong house, the commander later explained.\u00a0 Soldiers took off three other doors in the apartment building before finding their suspect.\u00a0 Later, at the music school, I met children who told of being forced to pull out \u00a0their instruments at checkpoints and play for the soldiers.\u00a0 A ten- year-old girl named Al\u00e1, a gifted violinist, chose the song Beautiful Girl.\u00a0 And just a few days ago, Oday Khatib, the school\u2019s star singer, was arrested in his refugee camp, Al Fawwar, near Hebron. \u00a0“God undo his capture, oh Lord,” several of Oday’s Facebook friends posted in Arabic.<\/p>\n These few stories are representative of an occupation of Palestine so pervasive that it\u2019s now nearly impossible travel for an entire minute without seeing some evidence of the domination of a stateless people: settlement, military post, flapping flags of Israel, charred stumps of a razed former olive grove, a jeep patrol, a checkpoint, a roadside detention of young Palestinian men.<\/p>\n Most ubiquitous is the daily encounter at checkpoints, a staple of Palestinian life, when families submit to searches and hours-long waits by bored young soldiers at military guardposts flanked by machine gun nests.\u00a0 To some this humiliation, especially of young men who tend to be darker than the soldiers who detain them, \u00a0is reminiscent of South African apartheid.\u00a0 On a visit to the Holy Land, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was reminded of the days \u201cwhen young white police officers prevented us from moving about.\u201d\u00a0 To Americans it may feel more like the days of Jim Crow.<\/p>\n How did 47 years of such military domination get relegated to footnote status?\u00a0 How, in a region filled with correspondents, have we come to essentially ignore the expropriation of ten percent of the West Bank to build a separation barrier, the razing of hundreds of thousands of olive trees for \u201csecurity\u201d purposes, regular military sweeps into ostensibly autonomous areas, the detention without charge of hundreds of people at a time, the demolishing of thousands of family homes, the sealing off of the Jerusalem holy sites to nearly all West Bankers, except by special permit, and the military control of more than half of their land base?\u00a0 It\u2019s not as though these issues are never<\/em> covered; but they\u2019re below the radar, aberrations that are not built into the basics of policy or press coverage.<\/p>\n Why?\u00a0 I believe the answer lies in the four-word mantra of U.S. policy and American press coverage of the region:\u00a0 Israelis must feel secure.\u00a0 The statement is true enough, and few people would argue against it, but as exclusive policy and \u00fcber narrative, those words alone add up to disaster.\u00a0 They are rooted largely in the Holocaust, and the rightful determination of Israelis and Jews around the world to \u201cnever again go like sheep to the slaughter.\u201d\u00a0 But their application as essence of policy and coverage amounts to a kind of Leon Uris Exodus<\/em> narrative, which praises the rising of Israel out of the Holocaust\u2019s ashes, but ignores or vilifies the other people who paid the price.\u00a0 Seven hundred fifty thousand Palestinians fled or were driven out of their homes during the creation of Israel; their dispossession ripples forward into today\u2019s occupied land, and the dream of freedom that still lives within it.<\/p>\n Occupation and freedom:\u00a0 These concepts are just as legitimate as any Israeli\u2019s right to feel secure. For a just and comprehensive peace, these ideas need\u00a0 to share equal status.\u00a0 Yet the notion of occupation is increasingly ignored by the American press as some quaint remnant of a revolutionary past.\u00a0 More important, the corrosive nature of the occupation, and the struggle of a people to free itself from it, has been essentially dropped as policy issues by successive American administrations eager to speak, as President Obama did Wednesday, of the \u201ceternal\u201d American bond with Israel.\u00a0 The irony is that by refusing to publicly confront the occupation, and meaningfully back the Palestinian quest for freedom \u2013 instead of blocking it at the United Nations \u2013 the Obama administration is undermining the Israeli security goal at the center of its policy.\u00a0 Permanent occupation in reservation-style enclaves is not a long term answer for Israel and Palestine, and in the end it will not make Israelis feel secure.<\/p>\n On Thursday President Obama is spending a few hours of his three-day Mideast visit in Ramallah and its environs.\u00a0 In his bulletproof caravan, he\u2019s whisked through a VIP checkpoint, thus missing the opportunity to see the vast border crossing at Qalandia, with its mind-numbing rows of metal gates and turnstiles.\u00a0 He won\u2019t see the humiliation of Palestinians at the hundreds of other checkpoints, roadblocks, and barriers.\u00a0 He won\u2019t likely visit with any residents of Area C, representing the 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli control, where even small improvements on homes are forbidden, lest Israeli bulldozers arrive to demolish them.\u00a0 And according to reports, the president has declined to meet with the families of prisoners, including many who languish in jail, unaware if a charge will ever be filed.<\/p>\n Instead the President Obama will visit with the West Bank Palestinian leadership, largely discredited for its failure \u2013 abetted by the Americans \u2013 to deliver on a long promised independent state.\u00a0 Few Palestinians seem to be expecting very much, least of all on any American movement to end the long occupation. \u00a0Yes, the president offered the familiar lukewarm American diplo-speak about how the settlements do not advance “the cause of peace.” \u00a0But there’s little expectation of strong language to confront the reality of the Palestinians’ Kafka-esque predicament. \u00a0\u00a0The president will, however, find it difficult not to be reminded of it from time to time.<\/p>\n On Thursday the president will watch a youth group perform traditional Palestinian dance at a youth center in Al Bireh, next to Ramallah.\u00a0 From there, as he leaves, he need only look to the hill just above:\u00a0 There stands a place once known as Jabil Tawil, formerly a hiking area for summer visitors from the Gulf.\u00a0 Thirty two years ago, Jewish nationalists, backed by Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon, seized it, planted it with trailers, and renamed it Psagot.\u00a0 Its looming red-roofed homes will stare back down at the president, reminding him of the occupation he is increasingly reluctant to confront.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Riddle:\u00a0 What has been around for nearly 47 years; covers a territory the size of Connecticut; holds nearly three million people; is carved up by hundreds of blockades, barriers, \u201cspecial security zones,\u201d \u201cclosed military areas,\u201d \u201ckilling zones,\u201d and roads accessible only to a privileged minority; features an adult male population where an estimated two more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=660"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":663,"href":"http:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660\/revisions\/663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}