http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?mador=4&datee=10/23/00&id=97667
Separation means economic punishment
By Danny Rubinstein, Ha'aretz 10/23/2000
The idea of a separation between the State of Israel and the Palestinians
has many supporters in Israel (last year, Dan Shiftan of Haifa University
published a serious study on the subject entitled "The Imperative to
Separate"). One of Yitzhak Rabin's election slogans in 1992, "Get Gaza
out of Tel Aviv," was a big hit. People don't like seeing hordes of Arabs
from the West Bank and Gaza roaming our streets. Prime Minister Ehud
Barak's variation on this theme is: "We are here and they are there." In
the wake of the bloodshed of recent weeks, the proposal has come up
again: We must separate ourselves from them.Last week, the prime
minister ordered his ministries to explore the options. The greatest fear is
security, i.e. the infiltration of terrorists along with the tens of thousands of
laborers, businessmen and others who have entry permits. Creating a
separation over the last few years was simple: Residents of the territories
were no longer issued such permits. In Israeli political lingo, it's called
"sealing off" the territories. But this is misleading. In practice, the West
Bank and Gaza have been sealed off for 10 years (ever since the Gulf
War).
Previously, for more than twenty years, the Arabs of the West Bank and
Gaza could enter Israel freely. At the Erez crossing, for example, two or
three bored soldiers would sit there, barely glancing at the vehicles
driving by. Today - for those who haven't visited the area of late - it is a
huge military installation, with some of the most complex administrative
procedures of any border crossing in the world.
As we have seen in recent years, the moratorium on entry permits has
not helped much from a security standpoint. Most of the suicide bombings
carried out by Hamas in 1994-1996 took place when the territories were
fully closed and Arabs from the West Bank were not being granted
permits. Terrorists don't need permits. They have their ways of getting
around roadblocks. The ones who are harmed are the more than 100,000
Arab laborers and the thousands of businessmen who have lost their
livelihood. Those who require various services in Israel, especially
medical care, have also been hard hit.
The fact that the Palestinian economy and service sector are almost
completely reliant on the State of Israel is no secret. Without jobs in
Israel, the Palestinian economy is collapsing and many residents of the
West Bank and Gaza are on the verge of starvation. In other words, in the
past, separation was a means of imposing economic punishment on the
Arabs of the territories.
Genuine separation can only be achieved by dismantling settlements,
primarily those in the heart of Arab population centers in the territories.
The settlement of Netzarim is essentially a neighborhood of Gaza; in
order to separate between the two, one of them will have to go - either
Gaza, with its one million inhabitants, or the handful of Jewish families in
Netzarim.
In Hebron, the situation is even more absurd. There is no way of
separating between Jews and Arabs in Hebron and the current
understandings have been no help at all. To keep the problems at bay, the
Israel Defense Forces has imposed a curfew on 30,000 Arabs living in
the Jewish part of town, all for the relative comfort of a few hundred
settlers.
The groundwork for separation must, therefore, focus not on sealing the
border between Israel and the territories, but on dismantling the
settlements, starting with those whose very existence cannot be
reconciled in any way with the idea of separation.
