While the world watches in silence as Gaza is bombed openly, without modesty, Israel presses forward with its imperious plans for the West Bank, writes Gabriela Becker* The massive onslaught against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip is an escalation of a brutal policy of Israeli suppression that is, contrary to media coverage that presents Israel's most recent crimes as out of the ordinary, in continuity with past measures aimed at controlling the present and writing the future. The power- driven reality is one where occupation is maintained under the title of "Palestinian statehood", ghettoisation under the title of "independence and self-determination", and land, air and sea assault under the title "the search for peace". Continuing to eat away at an already minuscule and inhumanely suffocated Strip, the occupation persists in ethnically cleansing the northern Beit Hanun and Beit Lahya areas, along with Rafah to the south adjacent to the Egyptian border. For Israelis, missile attacks against Israeli-proclaimed "buffer zones", which seek to eradicate villages and refugee camps, go hand-in-hand with proclamations by Israeli decision-makers and talking heads about being "disengaged" from Gaza. The Gaza Strip today is not only surrounded by Israeli controlled "crossings" and coastline, it is besieged by missile and F-16 aerial strikes, assassinations and killings, tank penetration and devastation, and the endless thunder of warplanes breaking the sound barrier. Prior to the recent blitz, hundreds of Israeli missiles had already been landing daily on the Strip, killing people and terrorising a population trying to survive in a non-existent economy and amid a closure policy mapped out by the occupation decades earlier. With its most recent savagery, the Israeli government aims to restate its message to the Palestinian people: that Israel will engineer the demise of the Palestinian national struggle by any and all means, whether killing, forced impoverishment or ghettoisation. Meanwhile, and as reported in the Israeli daily Haaretz, Israeli officials have openly acknowledged using media coverage of Gaza to speed up the implementation of plans for parts of the West Bank, including Jerusalem. While missiles were falling on Gaza, the Israeli interior minister announced, only hours before the expiry of a 30-day ultimatum, that he would be authorising the expulsion of four Hamas Jerusalemite Palestinian Legislative Council officials from their city, thus opening the door for larger scale ID confiscation, expulsion and arrests, both of activists and Jerusalemites in general. While some media coverage ensued, no international outcry followed. All along, and which has been the case since the establishment of the Jewish state on top of Palestine, the Israeli government sends out "feelers" to the international community to gauge the extent to which -- or more precisely, the way in which -- it can enact its plans. That Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh's office was decimated and that open threats to his life are being made in typically unabashed Israeli fashion tells us that Israel can get away with anything and that cajoling the world to defend Palestine is futile. In Jerusalem, each day marks one step closer to the occupation's final takeover of the city, with yet another Friday where only Jerusalemites over the age of 45 were allowed to enter Al-Aqsa Mosque while the number of Palestinians able to access the Old City has never been smaller, all beginning with the closure of the West Bank and Gaza in 1993 and now near permanent with the soon to be completed apartheid wall. Also last week, together with its antiquities authority, the occupation chose to make its official re-announcement of plans to destroy parts of the Magharbe entrance of Al-Haram Al-Sharif -- the Old City compound that houses Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Qubbet Al-Sakhra, or Dome of the Rock -- under the pretence of removing "unstable and dangerous" structures and thus allowing for the further penetration by settlers of the Haram Al-Sharif area. This is additionally confirmed by the targeting of those parts of the Silwan neighbourhood just outside the Old City's Magharbe gate where settlements that include occupied houses and settler parking lots will soon be turned into an even larger car park, hotel and shopping complex. The completion of the Jerusalem sections of the apartheid wall is ongoing on a daily basis. The southernmost part of the Jerusalem wall, deep within the Bethlehem district, is currently being constructed on the lands of the village of Al-Khader, facing large-scale destruction. This section of the wall will mean the isolation of the westernmost villages of the district -- and their annexation by the occupation -- as well as a swelling of the colonial "greater Jerusalem" borders for settlement expansion and Palestinian expulsion. There is additional talk by the occupation of creating more walls around Palestinian neighbourhoods closer to the centre of Jerusalem, specifically areas not yet isolated from the city by the wall, such as Shufat, Beit Hanina, Tur/the Mount of Olives and Jabal Mukaber. In the northern West Bank, further incursions into Qalqiliya, Nablus and Jenin are taking place as the occupation destroys infrastructure and murders resistance fighters, indeed anyone else it so desires. Continuing with its massive arrest campaign, the Israeli occupation seeks to undermine Palestinian social organising as it preserves its swollen prison system -- such as in Hawara or Ofer prisons in the West Bank and the Naqab and Megiddo prisons inside the Green Line -- that represents but another wall-encircled Israeli-controlled ghetto system. For the past weeks, and away from international media coverage, in villages like Sabastiya and Nakura near Nablus, occupation forces and bulldozers have been uprooting trees and razing areas to "cleanse" as much Palestinian land as possible for the establishment of what is being called by the occupation "sterile zones" to encircle settlements east of the Wall -- within areas allegedly not to be annexed by the wall. The number of settlements that will have such zones established around them is growing. Many Palestinian homes and much Palestinian infrastructure are likely to be targeted under this pretence. This, however, is but a continuation of the horrors that Rafah has lived for years and that the people in northern Gaza faced after the so-called "disengagement": the targeting, with destructive impunity, of vast areas for clearance in the name of creating "zones". Whatever these "zones" are -- zone, buffer zones, or sterile zones -- the goal is the same: pushing the Palestinians onto less and less land while the state of Israel creates "facts on the ground" by force. The appalling silence of the international community as all of the above unfolds in broad daylight is compounded by the "aid" industry of international organisations in Palestine that has acted to the benefit of the occupation since the start of its extensive involvement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip following the signing of the Oslo Accords. These donors, aid agencies, humanitarian organisations, and so-called human rights groups have been a major instrument coercing Palestinians into compliance, blunting and undermining Palestinian opposition and resistance to the Oslo process of expanding Israeli control. Scenes of truckloads of food and fuel entering Gaza are less acts of kindness by humanitarian aid organisations as media ploys given a green light by the occupation, or not, with little to no international pressure coming to bear. International complicity is founded on the intimate collaboration between Israel and friendly states in presenting the core issue -- occupation -- as a humanitarian issue instead of a political one. As missiles land on Gaza, international agencies scrap and scramble to see which of them will land the upcoming funds to "rebuild" and "repair" Gaza. So-called "job creation" and "business generation" are terms in the "development" world that should better be linked to the conscious state violence that creates the disaster from which international agencies are the prime beneficiaries. Meanwhile, warnings from foreign governments of a possible "humanitarian catastrophe" are signals to Israel that it can achieve what it wants in more effective ways. "Do not be so apparent in your goals that even the Western media is unable to cover up your crimes, but regardless we will support you," such warnings actually say. The Gaza ghetto, the Jerusalem ghetto, and the northern and southern West Bank ghettos -- all comprised of even smaller ghettos -- are being completed and defined not just in terms of borders but in terms of how minimal their infrastructure will be, and the kind of international rhetoric/discourse that will ensue in order to maintain them. Gaza is to be closed off and bombarded, Jerusalem overtaken by settlements and its Palestinian inhabitants expelled and marginalised, the rest of the West Bank ghettoised into shrinking cantons surrounded by walls, bypasses and more settlements. This is not what awaits but what already exists in occupied Palestine. * The writer is a Jerusalem-based researcher.
