Israel’s security, Palestine’s patience
They never saw it coming?
Not a scoundrel, no. University educated, loquacious, well-read, and unemployed. If he was a shade in a paint catalogue, we’d call him off-pearl white, pallid-puce or, in French, vaurien-âtre. Because he wasn’t dishonest as such. He just pushed everything he could to the maximum of laziness. To protect identities, I shall anonymise this account by calling him he.
I met him at a speech-giving competition, and it became clear to me very quickly that he was gay, so I made it very clear to him very, very quickly, that I was not one to jump into bed with guys I meet at speech-giving competitions. Which was code for him.
In the course of our conversation, it was revealed that we lived within a couple of miles of each other, and so he introduced me to his speech club, to his noisy, rabid, malevolent dog, to his wee, ground-floor flat, to his clapped-out old sofa and to his problems. He also introduced me to a neighbour and friend of his, who is now a best friend of mine, so I can’t say but that, in the course of time, he didn’t have his uses. Apart from that, he was useless. Though amusing. Captain Von Trapp would’ve said Expensive, but very, very funny.
He was, as he put it, an out-of-work writer (and, boy, do I know what one of those is), but he asked me if I would cast an eye over his résumé, and I willingly agreed. It was the first time I had deep insight into the fellow and there were a few surprises in store for me. For all he had the plummy, middle-class accent of England, he was American-born, Brazilian-raised, and a US citizen. He and his wife were divorced (I think this probably happened around the time that he discovered his gayness) and he had previously been employed by the United States diplomatic service. That was a loose description, for he was not a diplomat and that would transpire to be his nemesis, as far as the Belgian government was concerned. Because as long as he was married to the diplomat that had wheedled him into the embassy, he enjoyed an unlimited length of stay in Belgium. But the second he divorced from her, he was on his own. And he had divorced from her around two years previously. Belgium was starting to drum its fingers, waiting for his naturalisation application.
Meanwhile he had problems with the water company. He and the flat upstairs, for some utterly inexplicable reason, shared the same water meter, and her upstairs apparently used too much, I suspect for greatly unnecessary chores like mopping the floor, which he tended to dispense with. What he lacked in his water pipes was amply made up for by what was in the walls of the house, and the mildew in his bedroom was quite offensive to the olfactory organ, albeit tempered by the niff of his King Charles spaniel. At least, I think it was mildew …
The regal dog had free rei(g)n of the house and used it to bark at anything that moved, that cast a shadow or that had the intention of casting a shadow or … well, who knows why dogs bark? Frightened that his dog might take it upon itself to bark at other people as well, he installed a fence around his garden, not without, of course, first soliciting the permission of the landlord, which was duly forthcoming. Off he went with a roll of chain-link fencing and a sledgehammer to whack the posts into the turf, and several months later, it became terribly apparent that he’d pierced the return pipe on the house’s oil central heating system. The clean-up cost 60 thou, which he couldn’t, and didn’t, pay, which was ultimately why I ended up buying his car, and which formed an additional impulse to what would be his hasty flit.
Having dealt with his water bill as best I could, I returned his CV with my suggestions and advised him that his residence in Belgium and the fact he didn’t have a residence permit were two circumstances that were fundamentally opposed to each other, and he needed to resolve the conflict at the earliest opportunity. Oh, he knew. And that was that. Resolve them, he did not, that is, until the Belgian government resolved them for him and served him with a notice to quit the realm within 30 days. I smiled inwardly when I learned of this fact: an American being deported, well, well, well!
Thirty days is theoretically long enough to pack one’s things and clear off, but he pushed the time limit to, let’s say, the limit, and I made the mistake of asking Is there anything I can do? Well, a good portion of his clobber ended up in my basement, and stayed there for about six years; some other togs ended up in our mutual acquaintance’s (now, my best friend’s) basement, where she later would have a flood, which pretty much took care of most of the tat but involved us, her driver and her company’s van in a rushed déménagement about a year later, from which he was of course absent, but the nett effect of which was to bring me and said acquaintance closer together. From that viewpoint, it was heart-warming. Because the acquaintance had long since gone off him.
He’d landed himself on her for his last night in the realm, invited her for dinner at a plush joint where he ordered everything on the menu, including oysters and champers, which was gracious enough, until the bill was presented, and he stated indignantly that he didn’t have any money, so she stumped up the 300 or so euros for the repast that he had just treated her to. After taxiing him to the airport at something like three a.m., she’d returned home and flopped back into bed, and was later that morning confronted by her maid, who asked what precisely was to happen to the bottle of yellow lemonade and the ochre and sepia-blotched duvet that had been left in his room. The lemonade went down the loo, where it belonged, and the duvet was promptly burned—which it all too readily did.
Six years later, a shipping company came and removed the stuff from my basement and, finally, I could get my car in again. My second car, that is. For I had purchased his car for the 2,500 euros I’d given a buddy of mine for the legal services I’d engaged for him for that oil-pollution case, and which he also had no cash to pay. Y’know …
Because he signed a power of attorney in my favour (so it said) over his bank account here, I had the pleasure of filling in annual W-Ben forms for the US government for the next decade.
In many ways the world has been cruel to him. But, having known him for around 15 years now, I think I can pass a sort of assessment on him: he goes as far as he can until he is stopped by circumstance, and then he just treads water until circumstance forces him to change tack. He came to Belgium because his wife came to Belgium. He stayed because nothing stopped him staying after he divorced. When he was asked to go, he went and did as he was told. And there is really nothing much wrong with that, because, in the end, that’s what the most of us do.
It’s what they now want Palestinians to do, because it’s what they have done till now. Palestinians are compliant, they do as they are told and they tread water until circumstance changes their circumstances. They don’t have a master plan for their futures, because they have no futures that they can count on. They have no friends with basements where they can store their clobber; they take it with them each time on the back of a donkey, or on their own backs. Because they have naught else. Hounded out of the realm. The realm that is theirs. They cope like no other people I know. And their circumstances just changed again.
I think in all this blame game between Israelis and Palestinians, in all the mire of terrorism, Zionism, lawn-mowing, recrimination, murder, revenge, security, concentration camps, catastrophes (by now, there’s been more than just the one), Holy Lands, rights of return, expulsions, settlement, occupations, and arguments over whose tahini is best, arguments that many on the outside just don’t want to know, don’t want to hear about, don’t want to expend the energy to try to understand, but just want to shut up and get off the headlines, there is a fundamental distinction between Jew and Arab that gets lost in the fray: whenever the Zionists, or, as they became, the Israelis, make a move, their first concern is always their security. They need to ensure their security.
When they came in numbers to Palestine, the first thing they did was congregate at the Red House in Tel Aviv and plot. The short-statured, shocking white-haired David Gruen, soon to be Ben Gurion, was at their helm, issuing directives to map the villages, in vast detail, including who was who, and who, if necessary, would need to be eliminated. The Palestinians had built their villages for community, for amenity, for togetherness, and for easy access to the nearby fields they farmed. They had no walls, except to prop up their olive trees. They had no barbed wire, or checkpoints or turnstiles. Anyone who wanted could come into their midst, for they had nothing to hide, from anyone, be he Jew, gentile, Arab or whatever. They were used to being occupied—by the Turks—and used to being allowed to get on with their lives—by the Turks. And very soon after the arrival of Zionists, their lives became the subject of secret dossiers, ethnic cleansing strategies and murder plots, as their new neighbours schemed to kill them.
You cannot invade someone else’s country and not be secure, after all. In the Wild West, the Americans built the forts that still emblazon the names of many cities: Fort Worth, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Wayne, Fort Myers, Fort Collins, Fort Smith, Fort Pierce, Fort Walton Beach, Fort Bend County, fort-une. And they built these forts for security against the native population whose land they were stealing. In Sierra Leone, the Portuguese built forts, for security as they stole the population. When you build a fort in your own country, it’s to protect what’s yours. When you build one in someone else’s, it’s to take what’s theirs. Israeli security is all about securing for themselves what’s been taken from others.
When the Palestinians realised, during the Mandate, that Britain was calmly allowing their country to be taken up by incomers, they initially did nothing. Then, after 20 years, they finally said, enough is enough and they rose up, in 1936, whereupon the British put them down. Their leaders were either killed or imprisoned. Palestinian resistance, which, with the patience of Job, took 20 years to finally surface, was eliminated. The British did it for the Zionists to whom they had promised someone else’s country back in 1917.
It is a pattern you can virtually follow every step of the way throughout the modern history of Palestine. In each case, a quiet, resilient people is provoked and provoked and provoked until they react. And when they do, it’s their fault. Israel simple defends itself. When the United Nations first allocated less than half (42 per cent) of Palestine to 828,000 Palestinians (including 10,000 Jews) and 56 per cent to a population of 499,000 Jews and 438,000 Palestinians, they, in their innocence and ignorance, assumed that the Jews would live contentedly with the Palestinians in Palestine and that the Palestinians and Jews would contentedly cohabit in Israel. That was quite some assumption.
The Palestinians said no, it’s not fair. Of course it wasn’t fair. How could anyone say it was fair? Nothing in the Zionist take-over of Palestine has ever been measured against any scale of fairness. But the Palestinian objections became the Zionists’ excuse to say how unreasonable the Palestinians were and proceeded with their ethnic cleansing, in which the cleansers claimed the status of victim. When Palestinians throw stones, they’re unreasonable, so Israelis shoot back with bullets, then they shoot some more, even after the stones have stopped, then they release machine guns, just to be sure. When Palestinians organise peaceful protest, Israelis find that unreasonable and engage in sniper fire to kill; to kill the disabled, to kill women and to kill children—shot in the head. Clean. Through the skull. When Palestinians retaliate against their oppressors, they are deemed terrorists—they are eliminated, annihilated and swept from their land. Given the constant fears and measures needed to ensure this security, one almost wonders if Israelis wouldn’t be more secure in another country; like America, for instance, where they have so many friends.
Israel wants to kill Arabs, and when they say stop killing us, that is cited as the reason to kill them. So bent is Israel on killing them that it will kill its own citizens in its rabid desire to get at Palestinians. It designs computer programs to decide who will die and who in their surroundings will also die, and who in their family will also die, and this they do without even human intervention. Drones that shoot from the sky, cameras that shoot in the streets, that record every motion, every pair of knickers hung on a wash line, every pick of the nose by a toddler. Israel is a world-class expert in spying, killing, oppressing, destroying, excluding and sucking up to America. Sucking America’s ass. Digging its long, curvy tongue up the hole and into the shit and sucking it all out and smiling as it swallows. Mmmm, delicious. Give us more. Give us your bombs and your death and your hatred and we will spread your manure around the Middle East and we will be loved by you for it.
Not that I want to provoke anyone, mind, I’m sure you understand, but the end balance is this: Israel provokes until it has some sort of pretext to start destroying, and then it destroys as much as it can until someone in America says We think that’s enough. And, on the other hand, Palestine suffers and sustains all the blows that Israel metes out to them until they themselves eventually say We think that’s enough. Oh, no, it’s not, retorts Israel. Who are the human animals?
Arabs are resilient. They inhabit a harsh place, hot and at times unforgiving. They seek much comfort in their faith, one they do not cite as a birthright. They were long ruled by imperial masters until they arose to throw them off with the help of another empire. When that other empire betrayed them, they were shocked at the treachery. When the empire betrayed them again, they were dumbfounded: the empire that heralded the invasion of a European folk that knows only oppression, that celebrates arson, that rejoices in the destruction of their fellow humans, their neighbours, their hosts and their properties: homes, schools and universities, hospitals, the sick and injured, children, places of worship, cemeteries, orchards, culture, identity. They whoop and holler as if genocide were a shooting gallery at the fairground.
They call the Palestinians vermin. But they don’t treat Palestinians like vermin; they treat them like Jews. Like Jews were treated in times gone by in Germany and Poland and Russia. They cite moral superiority, as if their people’s suffering confers immunity on them. False: suffering confers the right to recompense, not the right to cause suffering, not to anyone, and certainly not those who seek only to repel an invader from their land. It is that which the Israelis claim, is it not: the right to defend themselves from an invader? If patience is a virtue, then the people of Palestine are among the most virtuous of all people.
You can trace the story of modern Palestine through that mire of terrorism, Zionism, lawn-mowing, recrimination, murder, revenge, security, concentration camps, catastrophes, Holy Lands, rights of return, expulsions, settlement, occupations, and arguments over whose tahini is best, and you’ll see, again and again, that trend: Israel demands and rants and claims and kills till it’s finally stopped; and Palestine suffers, and dies, and wails, and cries until they eventually stop and say—now, our turn. That’s Israeli security: to tease and taunt till they have a reaction, and then pummel.
If you look at the Israeli security infrastructure, it’s not barbed wire and patrolmen with pistols, you know. It’s AI and Red Wolf and Blue Wolf and NSO Pegasus. It’s frictionless surveillance, and other propaganda lies. It’s a three-hour commute into Jerusalem for a 20-minute journey. It’s fear of being shot for engaging your car’s first gear before the trooper says “Fine.” It’s a mortal dread of giving them any excuse, simply because anything is an excuse. So, with all that in place, how come the Israelis had absolutely no idea about 7 October? Skeleton staff at their observation posts? Utterly taken by surprise? I bet they thought all their Christmases had come in one.
He, the guy we started with, claimed that he never saw it coming, what came to him when he was deported. I’ve little doubt Palestine never saw it coming either. And that’s the difference: Israel did.