Donald Trump occasionally says something true, even though he may not understand its implications. At most campaign rallies, Trump would thunder, “A nation without borders is not a nation” – a slight dumbing down of Reagan’s comment that “a nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.” Both were railing against illegal immigration. But we can turn Trump’s quote around and ask: what about a nation that literally has no consistent borders – such as Israel today?
Trump’s first visit to the holy land coincides the fiftieth anniversary of the Six-Day War, the genesis of this problem, and Yom Yerushalayim, which commemorating the third day of the war when Jerusalem was re-unified. The war of course ended with the conquest of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and Sinai. Two of those areas still have no agreed upon borders; one is a mass of contradicting boundaries and jurisdictions; and only one, Sinai, led to a stable border between two countries. Without borders, is Israel still a nation?
When Israel conquered all the lands of historic Palestine in 1967, it took under its wings about a million Palestinians, including many refugees from the previous war who fled from or were expelled by Israeli forces. Two contiguous territories, one an independent Jewish state and one under Jordanian occupation, came under one ruler, but not under one rule. Years of defacto coexistence, where Israelis could jaunt off to Jericho to get a hit of Arab authenticity, were disrupted by the first intifada. That evolved into Oslo, and then devolved again, along with unfulfilled “confidence-building measures,” into the violence, resistance, and terror of the second intifada, starting in 2000. Israel began to wall off much of the West Bank in earnest in 2003; by 2006 the wall had stopped most suicide bombings.
Every political perspective on the “matsav,” Zionist or not, has its own way of assigning the blame for the breakdown of Oslo and the violence, but that’s not what this article is about. It’s about the border, or lack thereof.
The separation wall or security fence can be thought of as a border – it sometimes follows the Green Line of the 1949 armistice, which is an internationally recognized if temporary border of sorts. But often the wall doesn’t follow that line, veering off-course to separate Palestinians from their olive groves and farms, or to include areas of Israeli settlement – almost always (85% of the time) adding territory from would-be Palestine to Israel’s side of the wall. But even if we were to treat the wall like a defacto border – though it is a poor simulacrum of the actual Green Line – it doesn’t function like any border.
What is a border for, after all? In military terms, a border defines that area within which a nation’s army may act with freedom, the area where it has the right to defend its territory by international consensus. In civil terms, a border defines the area within which a nation’s laws apply, as well as defining who is within or outside that nation’s territory.
Neither the Green Line nor the line of the wall act like a border in any of these senses. Israel’s military acts with complete freedom on the other side of the Green Line within Areas B and C, which comprise 75% of the West Bank. (Area C by itself, where Israel’s military has complete jurisdiction over Palestinians, is more than 60%.) And Israel’s citizens stream back and forth over that line and past the wall with nothing more than a wave by a soldier. They can work and settle on either side of it, and their lives are administered by Israeli civil courts, on either side. They use different roads than the Palestinians, and can usually call on the military to take their side, except in cases of egregious abuse or court-mandated restrictions.
Everyone who cares about the issues knows these facts. Even though there are sometimes logical reasons behind them, they are a big part of why pro-Palestinian or anti-Zionist activists want to call the wall an “apartheid wall” – whether we like that term or not.
But whatever whatever one calls the wall, no one would call it a border. From the Palestinian side, the separation wall divides up the land into dozens of separate pieces, and the boundaries of Area B further divide the land up into hundreds more pieces. From both sides, the actual border is not territorial but judicial: if one is Jewish and Israeli, one is on the Israeli side of the border and under Israeli law, wherever one lives. If one is Palestinian, one is under the jurisdiction of Israeli military courts, wherever one lives in Areas B or C. (That’s true even though some civil issues in Area B are handled by Palestinian courts.)
Another meaning of borders is the lines drawn on a map. Though Jews have never ceased to decry that the Palestinians want to wipe Israel off the map, Israel has with little compunction wiped Palestine off the map. In fact, on most maps of Israel distributed by the government, printed by Jewish publishers, or used in Jewish religious schools, there is no Green Line at all. Palestinians might in fact be using “contranegative” maps that wipe out Israel – but Israel’s maps more accurately reflect the political reality.
The only meaning of borders for a non-Palestinian visitor to Israel, from a map perspective, is that you might be warned not to cross into Area A when you rent a car. Or you might look at a phone coverage map: until the end of 2015, Palestinians had no access to 3G networks, and still have no access to 4G. There are plenty of other problems – you just can’t find most of them on the average map you’ll get in Israel.
The meaning of occupation for Palestine, or what could eventually become Palestine, is neatly summarized in the fact that Palestine according to the ABC’s of Oslo is made of so many islands with their own borders that the idea of a nation with contingous borders is meaningless. But if there is no border for Palestine, then there is no border for Israel either.
So – “no nation without borders” – true or not? Porous borders make for unchecked immigration and unchecked import and export of goods, but non-functioning borders have an entirely different meaning. A proper border defines the limits beyond which a nation’s laws no longer apply. The kind of entity whose borders can be pushed to wherever its military reaches, irrespective of boundaries, is an empire, or a wannabe empire.
That was the condition of biblical Israel, during the time of the judges and during the monarchies. The whole of the ancient world was a constant struggle to see which nation or group, or even family, could force itself upon the territory of its neighbors. The book of Judges describes it this way: “every man would do what was upright in his own eyes.” But however we describe it, both under the judges and under the kings, it was often a shitshow – not just Philistines killing Israelites and vice versa, but Israelites killing Israelites, in the thousands.
For example, in Judges 8, the Ephraimites almost go to war against Gideon’s forces when they are insulted because they were not asked to join the fight with Midian. Gideon circumvents a rebellion by flattering them. But in Judges 12, under similar circumstances, after Yiftach defeats Ammon, there’s a full on war, and Yiftach’s men kill 12,000 Ephraimites, who are rooted out as they try to escape because they pronounce the shin of shibolet wrong, like an “s.” (Kind of like checking papers when someone has the “wrong,” i.e. Hispanic, accent.) That’s just one of dozens of examples of internecine massacres.
The government is not about to carry out massacres against its intra-tribal enemies (though war against Gaza is hardly felt to be a moral problem to most Israelis). But it has been trying very hard to undermine the tribal membership of Jews who disagree with its policies, in part by erasing any political meaning the Green Line might still have.
Many Jews in the U.S. want to boycott goods coming from Israeli West Bank settlements, even though they would buy goods coming from Israel proper. Israel and right-wing Jewish lobbies (along with some evangelical groups) have been working to outlaw every distinction made between the two. A law passed just two months ago allows Israel to deport any foreigner coming from Chutz La’aretz (outside “The Land”) who supports any form of boycott, whether of Israel or the settlements. And when Netanyahu recently refused to meet with the German foreign minister after the minister met with B’tselem, Israel’s human rights organization, and Breaking the Silence, the point wasn’t to snub the minister. It was to expel B’tselem and Breaking the Silence from the body politic. Not only BDS but human rights is becoming our modern-day shibolet.
The problem with this confuscation, of course, is that the government will eventually get their wish: all thoughtful opposition to the occupation of would-be Palestine will be overwhelmed and submerged by a sea of BDS boycotts. In fact, the further the government creeps away from justice, the more plausible the claim that the only way things will change is through a total boycott of Israel. That’s something I won’t support, but it’s becoming harder and harder to convince people who are not Israeli loyalists to go along with lesser measures.
I was raised on the idea of Jerusalem as “one city for one people” – ir echad l’am echad. But there are two peoples sharing one land, and no map or doppelgänger of a legal system can change that. Anything less than ir echad lishnei amim, “one city for two peoples,” is a lie. But as we approach the fiftieth Yom Yerushalayim, that lie continues to become more and more true, a self-fulfilling prophecy that is a self-fulfilling disaster.
We can’t entirely blame the state. God promises Jacob that his descendants will spread seaward, east, north, and south into the Negev (Gen. 28:14) – no borders mentioned. Isaiah tells the people, “Enlarge your tent…spread right and left, and inherit the nations.” (54:2-3) Moreover, the West Bank – Yehudah v’Shomron, Judea and Samaria – is the main locus of our ancestral lands, and much of what is now Israel proper was Philistine, the source and namesake of Palestine.
But it’s too late to switch places, though it’s not too late to define places. Border is not land: if we have to live on one land with a real border that defines two nations, still Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, could live in both places – if there’s justice and equity on both sides of the border. Isaiah also says “Let the refugees of Moab dwell in you…and establish a throne through lovingkindness,” (16:4-5) Moab the enemy, located in what is now the territory of Jordan, is invited in; just as refugees in general are invited in. That’s what a border is really for – to define a safe space for human beings. It’s the only way “good fences make good neighbors,” and it’s the only way Israel can become the nation it is supposed to be. Because a nation without borders is no nation.
‘A nation without borders is not a nation’ – how the occupation continues to unwind Israel : http://ift.tt/2qwaDPG
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