By Jeff Halper
The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions The two months left before the Israeli elections in May will be among the most momentous in the modern history of the Middle East. For over twenty years Israeli governments, guided by the steady yet quiet work of Ariel Sharon, have been "creating facts on the ground." A structure of occupation, displacement and apartheid has been systematically constructed around the Palestinian population of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. It is designed to ensure Israeli control and de facto annexation of more than half the Occupied Territories, while confining its two million Palestinians to an archipelago of small, crowded, impoverished and disconnected bantustans.

The process by which this has occurred over the past two decades is best described as "low-intensity warfare" against the Palestinians - creating permanent structures of control and segregation while avoiding any outright clash or conflict that might draw international attention or effective opposition from home and abroad. Most important, the structure of apartheid had to be constructed in a piecemeal fashion over many years, so that the overall conception could not be comprehended. The steps were small, disconnected in time and place, each so unimportant that it wouldn't create a major fuss -- a small Israeli settlement here, some Palestinian houses demolished there, a short and functional by-pass road around that village, some expropriated land over that hill, another "neighborhood" around Jerusalem, an industrial park connected to a "bloc" of settlements, temporary, then permanent constraints on Palestinian movement, "autonomy" within isolated enclaves. As the final pieces are now hastily put into place, we awake and find ourselves confronting nothing less than an entrenched system of annexation and apartheid.

The results are staggering. Since 1967 Israel has taken control of 70% of the Occupied Territories. While more than 90% of the Palestinians are confined to small and disconnected enclaves, some 350,000 Israelis have been moved into luxurious towns and settlements throughout the West Bank, Gaza and "Greater" Jerusalem. While Palestinians are unable to move freely without passes, Israel has constructed hundreds of kilometers of exclusively "Jewish" roads, eating up hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland and burying the delicate environment under masses of concrete. While Israel has moved its most polluting industries to the West Bank, Palestinians have been reduced to poverty and dependence on Israeli labor markets. In the process some 6000 Palestinian homes have been demolished by the Israeli army as it attempts to check natural urban or village growth, leaving at least 30,000 people homeless. The Occupation has made life miserable for the Palestinian population. But we Israelis suffer as well the constant violence, the brutalizing of our young people who are sent to demolish other people's homes, the corruption that comes with exploited cheap and unprotected labor. We are all caught in a downward spiral of violence, war, economic decline, oppression, hatred, hopelessness.

We are now witnessing the completion of the annexation and apartheid process - indeed, a brazen attempt by the Netanyahu government to "steal" the elections by making them irrelevant. If Sharon/Netanyahu/Arens lose, they will have made Israel's control of the Occupied Territories irreversible, foreclosing the option of a Palestinian state forever. If they win and are pressured to implement the Wye Accords, they will have created such "facts on the ground" that after Wye no further withdrawal could ever be contemplated. Bulldozers rather than negotiations and the ballot box are deciding the fate of the peace process with dire consequences for all of us, Israeli and Palestinian alike.

Now is the time to act. As Israelis (from more than a dozen organizations - ed.) who believe in the possibility and moral necessity of a just peace, we must call attention to the government's drive to solidify the Occupation, and rise up to oppose it. Israel's increasing campaign of house demolitions symbolizes more than anything else the cruelty and oppression of the Occupation. On March 12/13, hundreds of Israelis will join Palestinians in rebuilding demolished Palestinian homes on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. We will replant groves of olive and fruit trees uprooted by the settlers and our army, and block construction of the massive system of by-pass highways used to carve the West Bank into bantustans.

To find out what happened, Click here

For more information about how you can help, write to Jeff Halper

Yahoo's 1998 Israeli Election Page

Ariga's coverage of the 1996 Israeli elections

To the current election editorial from Ariga