Will You Just Stand On The Sidelines?

by Amira Hass; Ha'aretz; November 06, 2002

After the elections the preachers of the "transfer
solution" will be strengthened, the surveys say. It
doesn't matter right now exactly how much stronger
they'll become. The important thing is that every day
that goes by, the preachers of transfer feel ever more
confident about raising their "permanent solution" in
the Israeli public.

No law stops them from posting thousands of leaflets
and placards calling for the expulsion of Arabs, or as
they put it rather more bluntly, "Them there, us
here." Nobody in the law enforcement agencies shows
any enthusiasm for fighting them. No attorney general
has forbidden them to raise their "ideas" in various
media interviews, when the more appropriate titles,
"fascists" or "racists" and even "neo-Nazis" are used
to describe people like them in Europe. The
Transferists hide little and show off much; with
smooth talk they speak of "willing and agreed
transfer" without going into explanations that there
is no such thing. They speak mercifully about the
residents of the refugee camps of the West Bank and
Gaza, for whom, they say, and for the benefit of their
children, should be resettled - east of the Jordan
River. The preachers know well the distress in which
the refugees live; many of them live but a spit away
from the camps, in the villas of lushly gardened
settlements.

Not all the transferists come from the settlements,
though presumably the settlers are disproportionately
represented among all the transfer voters. The
settlers and their lobbyists can be accused of
extremism, but they are only taking to the logical
conclusion the settlement policies in the territories;
this policy, officially founded in Israeli military
orders and legitimized by civil laws, has had two
faces: Israeli development and limits on Palestinian
development. All the limits on development - whether
by expropriation of some 45 percent of the West Bank,
or by prohibitions on construction - have included the
partially hidden element of applying pressure to "thin
out" the Palestinian population. During the years of
direct occupation, for example, there were orders
issued that quickly led to residency rights being
stripped from West Bank-born Palestinians who traveled
overseas.

The settlers of the Golan, the Jordan Valley, Hebron
and Ofra were pioneers who did first what the Labor
Alignment governments and senior members of the
Zionist movement wanted and encouraged. It's time to
end the myth that the pioneers forced themselves on
helpless governments. Therefore, if the settlers were
the tip of the spear, today, with the preaching for
transfer, the cries of anger should not be directed at
them. Lessons should be learned from the past: They
are succeeding because there are strains in the regime
(military and ideological in particular) that support
them. They are doing and saying what others think.

The question must be directed to the Labor Party,
Meretz and even Shinui and to some of the more
balanced social elements that still exist in Shas and
the Likud: Do you intend to stand on the sidelines,
encouraging with your inaction the transferists, who
more than ever are motivated by divine messianic
delusions?

Will you prevent including moral objection to transfer
in your election campaign materials, because it will
drive some voters away? Will the military people in
your ranks warn the soldiers among the transferists
that any attempt to conduct a transfer operation will
be met with active resistance?

Will your field activists make do with lighting
candles and inviting rock bands to Rabin memorials and
forever be afraid to confront the transferists, to
avoid civil war? Will law professors and historians,
members of those parties and movements that support
centrist governments, remain silent until after the
ethnic cleansing has taken place?

Will the religious among you, forsaking their Judaism
for the mounting brutal propaganda, join other
"mitzvah-abiding" people, who sanctify the land and
scorn human beings?

Will the authors who picked olives with the
Palestinians make do with that, and not demand that
the law enforcement authorities in Israel make clear
their position? Is transfer an inseparable part of the
founding ideology of the State of Israel, or a twisted
mutation, which should not be allowed to rise up
against its creator?