The Israeli army controls the consciousness of the Israeli public by keeping it ignorant of the realities of occupation, argues Ran HaCohen* How do Israelis view current developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? The key term appears to be ignorance. Except for a few hundred peace activists Israelis have no idea of the realities of occupation: they have at best an extremely vague idea of what the checkpoints, the siege, the apartheid wall or the economic catastrophe in the territories look like. It is an institutionalised ignorance: it has been Israel's policy for at least 10 years to keep the Palestinians out of Israeli consciousness. The roots of the process can be traced to the Oslo years. The continuous "closure" of the occupied territories, combined with a massive import of foreign workers to push out Palestinians from the labour market, left the Israeli street virtually free of Palestinians. Israelis who used to visit the territories for shopping or tourism have been deterred by actual violence and by official warnings and prohibitions. The physical separation is complemented by the media. Israel's public television channel has not nominated a "territories reporter" for three years. Ha'aretz is the only Israeli newspaper which regularly gives good information about the occupied territories, but it is marginalised even within this small-circulation daily. Since the eruption of the recent Intifada, the occupied territories became even more of a private estate of the Israeli army. International activists are deported; Israelis are not allowed in; journalists are coopted or kept out. The electronically fenced Gaza Strip is a black hole; the apartheid wall, the ultimate incarnation of the ideology of contain-and-make-invisible, will have the same effect on the West Bank. It is no coincidence that both sides of the wall have now been assigned to army control. The Israeli public is kept in the dark about what is happening just a 20-minute drive from Tel-Aviv, or just across (and even within) the municipal borders of Jerusalem. Even the Knesset faces difficulties in its rare attempts to get reliable information from the army. An unprecedented discussion on human rights in the territories in the Knesset's Constitution, Law and Justice Committee recently met extreme reluctance and dodges on the part of the army to supply basic facts and figures. Committee Chairman Michael Eitan (Likud) admitted: "I am not certain that the responsible officials are aware of the fact that there are gross violations of human rights in the field". The Israeli consciousness -- what Israelis know, what they don't know, what they think they know -- is shaped to a large extent by the army, which has successfully placed agents in key positions in government (prime minister, minister of defence and downwards), in various political parties, in the media, and elsewhere in Israel's power centres, with the Ministry of Finance (reporting directly to Washington and the IMF) as the single exception. Unlike Turkey, where the army's excessive involvement in politics is openly faced and perceived as a national problem, the fact that Israel is run for the most part by the army is totally denied, and the country is still represented at home and abroad as if it were a Western democracy. Institutionalised ignorance has made Israeli public opinion extremely easy to manipulate. Though in the long term an overwhelming majority of Israelis consistently oppose the occupation and support withdrawal from the Palestinian territories, including dismantling the settlements, in the short term a confused public can be made to support whatever official propaganda suggests, be it a war, a wall, or a vague "peace plan". The wall may serve as a good illustration. What do Israelis support when they support the wall? Consider a typical question, taken from the recent poll of the Peace Index Project conducted monthly at the Steinmetz Centre for Peace Research at Tel-Aviv University: "In these days, a separation fence between Israel and the Palestinians is being erected. Though the precise location of the fence is yet unknown, it is clear that at least part of the Jewish settlements in the territories will be left outside the fence. Under these circumstances, do you support or oppose the construction of the fence?" Recall that most Israelis assume that the wall is built more-or-less along the Green Line. The havoc it wreaks on Palestinians -- those sealed off behind it, those losing their lands because of it, those squeezed between it and the Green Line -- is unmentioned in the question, just as it is absent from the Israeli consciousness. Mentioning settlements left outside the wall as the only background information should not be seen just as ethnocentric: it also insinuates that the wall might lead to their dismantling, which most Israelis support. Under these false assumptions, the wall sounds tempting indeed; no wonder that 60 per cent of the interviewees supported it -- approximately the ratio of those who support ending the occupation (or the roadmap). But this support is deeply anchored in a framework of ignorance: had the interviewees known that the wall cut deep into the West Bank, taking its most fertile lands; that an "Eastern Fence" was planned to encircle the Palestinians all around while leaving the Jordan Valley in Israeli hands; that the wall would not lead to dismantling settlements but rather accelerate their expansion; that it inflicted further dispossession and impoverishment on the Palestinians -- in short, had they known that the wall was not about ending the occupation but about entrenching it further, the results may have been very different. Be it the wall, the roadmap, the Hudna, or the newly fabricated image of Sharon as a "moderate leader", ignorance of actual realities leads the great majority of Israelis, who truly oppose the occupation, to support measures that perpetuate it. Apparently only an intensive, well-organised information and documentation project, that ceaselessly feeds the media with information on actual life in the occupied territories, can reduce the ease with which Israelis are manipulated over and over again. * The writer teaches at Tel-Aviv University's Department of Comparative Literature and works as a literary translator and critic for the Israeli daily Yedioth Achronoth.
