The Heart of Occupation

The comparison was as unholy as it was inescapable.

On my way out of the Bethlehem pedestrian checkpoint on Sunday, heading back to Jerusalem from Hebron, I was met by a stiff current of Palestinians filing the other way.

At the checkpoint's entrance, a bottleneck of human traffic that opens up to an uncluttered security terminal screaming permanence, an Israeli soldier with a M-16 draped across his chest was dividing the crowd of mostly men into two lines. He then divided the group length-wise, allowing only handfuls to enter the terminal at any one time.

The Palestinians followed the soldier's orders promptly, patiently, quietly. I squeezed through, disturbing the system's well-rehearsed order, unable to keep an image out of my mind, that of an SS officer sending lines of Jews to the left and to the right, to death and to life.

Did I just think what I think I thought, I asked myself?

Comparisons to Nazism, whether to criticize Israel overall or the occupation in particular, are far too frequent. I cringe when I hear the common refrain, "Zionism is Nazism," or, "Israel is an apartheid state."

Unqualified historical comparisons are a weak and disingenuous way to argue against Israel's excesses, and devalue the suffering inflicted by the original event. If there were a law against verbal negligence, surely such irresponsible comments would be banned. "Only Hitler is Hitler," a journalism professor of mine liked to say.

On the ride back to Jerusalem, I thought about what I had seen and why it prompted my mind to so quickly jump to scenes of a concentration camp. Certainly, it is quite easy to describe the madness of the occupation without lunging for the Nazi card. Once through the checkpoint, after all, Palestinians aren't stuffed into gas chambers. All but Israel's most extreme right wing have long-since dropped calls to cleanse the West Bank of Arabs. And Israel has and does face legitimate security concerns that were nowhere to be found in Nazi Germany.

But the image refuses to go away.

Why? Because what Israel's occupation of the West Bank lacks in ideology and motivation in relation to Nazism, it more than makes up for in appearance, and that should be unsettling enough. The mere sight of frighteningly armed Jews controlling nearly every aspect of the lives of humiliated Arabs, no matter how justified or rationalized, turns my stomach.

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It is more than out of concern for Palestinians. The occupation of the West Bank -- a mere four years shy of surpassing the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe -- is corroding Israel's soul, and the soul of every Jew who professes love for it.

Then again, what's the alternative? The Israeli army is the de facto protector of an ailing Palestinian Authority. Absent the occupation, the West Bank would likely fall to extremists as Gaza fell to Hamas; moderate political and social institutions are simply too weak to fill the vacuum. And so a self-fulfilling prophecy has been created whereby the occupation both frustrates and ensures stability.

As I wrote in an earlier post about Ramallah, the occupation is far too normal. Even the unsightly separation barrier -- very much a wall around Jerusalem and nearby settlements -- feels like a natural extension of the landscape.

"[I feel] nothing," said Jamal Maraqa, a shopkeeper who sells his wares directly underneath the homes of the Jewish settlers. "We got used to it."

That the Jews of Hebron literally look down upon the Arabs there (often the case in cities where both communities live, and harmonious Haifa is no exception) is sadly symbolic of the vast power imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians.

What the wall, raids, curfews, checkpoints, land grabs and settlements have succeeded in doing over the decades is castrate an entire people. The Palestinians see themselves as having no control over their future, so they've lost the will to create one. Israel, meanwhile, has no reason to make concessions, but neither can Israel do much more to increase its security given the conditions that itself controls; as a soldier friend of mine told me, there is no one left in the West Bank to arrest.

So long as Israel wants peace but doesn't need it, and the Palestinians need peace but don't want it, stalemate will continue to be status quo. By this I mean peace is part of Israel's ethos, but peacemaking isn't worth the risk. It would mean giving up power and confronting its own extremists in exchange for tenuous security, which is nothing more than what it has now. In other words, peacemaking runs counter to Israel's material interests; so long as Intel keeps making its processors here, Israel doesn't need peace.

The Palestinians' need for peace, however, is more than existential, it is essential. Israel controls their every move, making it impossible to accomplish anything, whether as individuals or as a nation. But the feeble position in which they find themselves, compounded by decades of political mismanagement and national abuse have left them clueless about how to move tangibly forward.

There is a hint of hope, as a recent Times article suggests, one in a series of progress-themed stories the paper's Jerusalem bureau has put out the last several months. But the peace process remains a top-down effort; average Palestinians don't own it. In fact, they're still waiting for someone else to do it for them.

"America, this is a big state in all the world," said Khalid Mahmoud Sliman, my driver for the afternoon. "America can make something to stop the problem. To tell everyone to stop, don't kill anybody."

Maraqa, the shopkeeper, echoed these sentiments, albeit on a less optimistic note: "From Ronald Reagan to Carter, to Bush the father to Bush the son, Bill Clinton -- none of them have done anything to us," he said. "Now we are waiting for Obama."

Why wait? Why, after 60 years without a country to call home, are the Palestinians still waiting for someone from the outside to make peace for them? Why is there no homegrown grassroots movement? How can Palestinians justify their righteous condemnation of the West's interference in Arab politics (e.g., Iraq) when they are asking for just that for themselves?

Where is the anger, beyond what inspires terrorism? Where is Palestine's King?

My inability to find answers to Palestinian stagnation is for me the most frustrating aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian abyss. We can talk all day about how terrible the occupation is, but in so doing we forget it is the not the first time in the 20th century that a nation has been denied, occupied or subjugated. What about India, East Germany, Argentina, Chile, South Africa and Serbia? What about segregated America?

There I go, myself making historical comparisons. Except they are not unqualified comparisons, and that is precisely the point. Each of these cases had different causes for and manifestations of their misfortune. But in each case, people overcame far more superior and violent-prone forces through determined, nonviolent civil disobedience.

Why not Palestine?