Democratic Palestine : 32 (ص 26)
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- Democratic Palestine : 32 (ص 26)
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government policy during the war in Lebanon, according to a
1959 law which authorizes the government to decide what level
of government employees are forbidden to make such
criticism. It had previously been assumed that higher-ranking
employees were referred to, but Spiro lost the job he had held
for 40 years at the Education Ministry, and his pension rights
(reported by the International Committee for Palestinian
Human Rights, May 26, 1986, Paris).
There have been several recent cases of Israelis being im-
prisoned for contact with Palestinian organizations in the in-
terests of peace and/or informational work. One case in-
volves dedicated Zionists, four MKs who were sentenced to six
months in jail and heavy fines for meeting PLO officials in
Romania in 1986. Two other cases concern anti-Zionist Israelis
who face even stiffer punishment for publishing work. In 1987,
the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem was closed
and its director, Michael Warshawsky arrested, on charges of
links to the PFLP. The center’s work focuses on human rights
violations against Palestinians. In February 1988, the
newspaper Derech Hanitzotz was closed. In April, its three
Israeli editors were arrested on charges of affiliation to the
DFLP; they face up to 40 years imprisonment if convicted.
(Since this writing, the three have been tried; on January 25th,
they were sentenced to prison terms ranging from nine to 30
months. as a result of plea bargaining.)
Even the ordinary Israeli citizen is subject to more
surveillance than the citizens of most countries, as attested to
by the CIA and State Department documents found in the US
embassy in Teheran after the 1979 revolution, and first
published by CounterSpy: «Security checks on native born
Israelis are relatively easy to do, for the young Israeli, whose
life is well documented, rarely enjoys the luxury of privacy.
Police files, school records, university professors, army
records, youth movements, political affiliations, voting
records, family history, political persuasions and friends are
scrutinized. If the applicant is foreign born, detailed immigra-
tion records may reveal pertinent information which can be
cross-checked. Loyalty to Israel is the principal criterion. If the
subject was a Zionist from early youth, he belongs to a special
category; if he has never belonged to the leftist parties,
MAPAM, MAKI and RAKAH, or to Herut, a rightist party,
his employment opportunities are considerably enhanced.»
MILITARY PRIORITIES IN SETTLEMENT
The high degree of social cohesion in Israeli society is not
alone due to indoctrination, though this of course occurs.
More important, it is related to the very way the state was built
up, Starting with such a simple thing as where people lived.
From the beginning, military priorities predominated in how
the settler population was distributed. Along the 1949 armistice
lines, a chain of armed kibbutzim was established, filled with
settlers drawn mainly from the ‘socialist’ Zionist youth
movements who had constituted the Palmach, the Zionist
strike force in pre-state days. Thus, when Ben Gurion dissolved
the Palmach, this didn’t reduce the Zionist military forces, but
24
integrated them into the nominally civilian population.
Behind this frontline, a second line of ‘defense’ was created
by crowding newly arrived Oriental Jews into moshavim and
‘development towns’ on confiscated Palestinian land. «... the
numbers of people the Israeli authorities installed in these
areas exceeded the needs of normal economic planning, and
can only be explained by this political motive (preventing
Palestinians from returning to work their land)» (Raphael
Shapiro, «Zionism and its Oriental Subjects,» Forbidden
Agendas, 1984.) Shapiro’s point is borne out by the fact that
unemployment is consistently twice as high in the ‘development
towns’ as in ‘Israel’ generally. The pro-Zionist writer, Em-
manuel Marx, also affirms the essentially military priorities of
Zionist settlement policy: «The (development) town was plan-
ned within the framework of a national settlement policy...
This scheme sought in particular to settle the strategically sen-
sitive regions along the Egyptian and Jordanian borders... the
Israeli defense authorities felt no urgent need to establish many
Jewish settlements in Galilee, as the Lebanon border stayed
peaceful» (Israel in the Middle East). Of course, this changed
in the seventies with the nationalist reawakening of the
Palestinian Arabs; new plans were adopted for Judaizing the
Galilee, while the Zionists dealt with Lebanon through outright
aggression.
The phenomenon of settlements as military outposts was
repeated in the 1967 occupied territories. Military priorities are
blatant in that far greater per capita subsidies go to West Bank
settlers than to residents of ‘Israel’ proper,accounting for 80%
of the state’s development budget in 1983. Within the West
Bank, the priorities are also clear: «By 1985, the World Zionist
Organization alone had invested $80,000 per family on Jewish
settlements in the highlands of the occupied West Bank and
$160,000 per family in the Jordan Valley» - the most strategic
part (Middle East Report, May-June 1988). Transportation
routes follow the same priorities. Yaacov Granek, director of
national planning for the Egged Bus Cooperative, said that
Egged has for years run lines that «can be called political lines
for they are not at all economically viable» (quoted in Journal
of Palestine Studies 49, Fall 1983).
Far from being founded on socialist principles, the com-
munal form of living was chosen for military and economic
efficiency. Although kibbutzniks constitute only 3% of the
Israeli population, they account for 10% of the gross national
product (International Herald Tribune, February 18, 1987).
They have remained a bastion of the political-military elite,
contributing 25% of Israeli ministers, 22% of the middle and
high military command and the majority of air-force pilots
(Uri Davis, Israel: Utopia Incorporated, 1977). The kibbutzim
followed the Israeli economy into industrialization and then
the age of hightech, including arms production for export. The
January 7, 1983 edition of Haaretz reported that kibbutz Beth
Alfa, affiliated to the self-proclaimed socialist party, Mapam,
had been providing equipment to the Chilean army. In 1987,
Israeli Foreign Affairs reported that the same kibbutz had sold
six water cannons to the apartheid regime in Pretoria, which
Democratic Palestine, March 1989
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