Dead Men Waiting

Last week, another tour of the West Bank took place, led by Doron Meinert of "Looking the Occupation in the Eye" (Mistaklim Lakibush Ba'einayim). These tours are based on the principle that seeing is believing – the understanding that seeing things for oneself will always be clearer and more moving than listening to rumors or stories. This time, a group of senior faculty from Tel Aviv University joined the tour. Ben-Zion Eshel was part of this group and wrote about the experience.

Ayala Shalev, Editor, That’s About Us

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Dead Men Waiting

Ben-Zion Eshel

The tours in the West Bank are intended, quite literally, to show the reality on the ground: the communities living there, the outposts popping up like mushrooms after the rain, the power dynamics between the residents and the settlers, the affinity between the settlers and the military—and everything this creates on the ground. When one truly takes the trouble to arrive and see with their own eyes, this painful reality delivers a very bitter dose of understanding that cannot be ignored: one cannot ignore the fact that settler violence against Palestinian residents is part of an organized plan of "decisiveness" (Hachra'a); and one cannot ignore the military-police-settler connection, working hand-in-hand to realize this organized plan.

A wise man who participated in this tour later said: "It is not that there are two different legal systems in the West Bank – it is simply a land without law for everyone. There is no legal system to protect the Palestinians, no legal system to limit the settlers, there is no law for anyone."

What is there? There is a system that oppresses and crushes the dignity of Palestinians; and there is a system that grants privileges and coddles settler terrorism, integrating it with institutionalized Israeli terrorism.

In his book At the Mind's Limits (Hebrew title: Beyond Guilt and Atonement), Jean Améry writes that the denial of Jewish dignity represented by the Nuremberg Laws was, in fact, the denial of the Jews' right to live—and they essentially turned him, Améry, into a "dead man waiting." This is, in effect, the situation of Palestinians living between the Jordan River and the sea, at various levels of this denial of dignity.

In these days more than ever, we hear Israelis declaring from every possible stage that "the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have lost their right to live, from youth to old age, from infants to women, because they all support Hamas." It is fitting here to respond with a question – if we take into account that the most murderous organization, meaning the one that has left behind the most dead, is the Israeli Air Force; and if we take into account that this Air Force is an object of admiration and support among the vast majority of Jewish society in Israel, does that negate our right to dignity and to life? Food for thought.

It must be understood that at the foundation of the assertion that Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have no right to dignity and life, stands the perception that Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem also lack this right, and we are only waiting for one mistake on their part so that we can destroy them as we destroyed Gaza – destruction and expulsion or "voluntary migration" from the place that was once their home and which we have made unfit for human life.

Therefore, the free hand that Israel grants to settler terrorism in the West Bank is not a bug, it is a feature; therefore, settler terrorism merges with the institutional terrorism of the State of Israel; and therefore, this is also what lies at the base of crime in Arab society in Israel – an institutional decision to abandon an entire population to the dance of death of organized crime.

The basis for all these phenomena is one – the absolute denial of dignity from the Palestinians, a denial that turns them into "dead men waiting."

A little over eighty years since the Allies defeated the Third Reich and the Nazi regime, the Jews today have a 78-year-old state whose most impressive creation is the oppression of the Palestinian people and the denial of their dignity along with their right to live. The succeeding generations of those Jews have since turned the Palestinians today into the Jews of the 21st century: the State of Israel is turning the Palestinians into those stripped of the right to dignity and life, into dead men waiting.

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Ben-Zion Eshel is a Protective Presence activist at UCPIP and "Looking the Occupation in the Eye"