The OC Central Command, Yair
Naveh, dropped a cluster bomb early this week.
He signed an order barring Israeli citizens from taking Palestinian
passengers
in their Israeli vehicles within the West Bank.
The order will take effect on January 19, 2007 and it exempts those who
take
Palestinians with permits to enter Israel and the settlements,
or
those who take their first-degree relatives with them.
The reason for the new order, as noted in the IDF
Spokesperson's announcement, is of course, security: to impede those
who want
"to perpetrate terrorist attacks on the home front of the State of
Israel
and in the Judea, Samaria and Jordan Valley
regions." Therefore, the order sounds like a standard IDF shell whose
objective is "self-defense," but in practice it is another component
in the regime of national and ethnic separation that exists in the West Bank, a regime of privileges for the Jewish
settler
minority, at the expense of the Palestinians' individual and national
rights.
Like other military orders and Knesset laws, which are cleverly cloaked
in the
guise of the security argument, this order, too, sheds cluster bombs
that will
continue to destroy the remaining chance of establishing
Peace-relations with
the Palestinians.
The security argument will satisfy the vast majority
of
Israelis, just as they are content with the security explanation for
hundreds
of road closures and dozens of military checkpoints inside the West Bank. The fact that these limit mobility to
a
minimum and separate between a village and its lands, one village and
another,
a village and the city, and from one district and another, that is,
disrupt the
normal life that it is still possible to maintain under the Israeli
occupation
regime, never deterred the army commanders who formulated the orders,
never
stopped the High Court of Justice judges who approved and continue to
approve
the orders, and it never bothered the Labor party's MKs. Most of the
Israeli
public is also not troubled by the fact that it is precisely the
checkpoints
and roadblocks which serve the Israeli colonization policy; they are
dissecting
the occupied West Bank into small and
disconnected enclaves where Palestinians live, surrounded by an ocean
of
settlement momentum and Jewish territorial contiguity.
The ban
prohibiting Israelis from taking Palestinian passengers in their cars
within
the West Bank is part of the regime of "transportation separation" Israel has created in the West Bank. The ban complements another order
that bars Palestinians
with permits to enter Israel
from using those crossing points from the West Bank to Israel
where
Israelis pass through. The Palestinians have separate crossing points.
The ban
is in addition to the two separate systems of roads the security
establishment
continues to build unhindered in the West Bank: one for the Jewish
settlers and
those affiliated with them (and, by accident, for the opponents of the
Occupation and Israeli Arabs, as no order against their using it has
been
issued yet) and the other for the Palestinians. One is spacious, lit
up, safe
and allows for quick and brief travel. The other is narrow, exhausting,
not in
good shape and full of checkpoints, and makes the travel slow and
time-consuming.
This is the hierarchy that is in effect embedded in
"the
settlement enterprise" - improved infrastructure for the Jewish
residents
and constant expansion and development, as opposed to decreasing the
Palestinians' space and preventing its development. The new order
follows an
order that already bars all Palestinians from traveling and remaining
in the
Jordan Valley, a third of the West Bank's area, and the policy of
"differentiation" Naveh frequently uses: the sweeping ban on all
residents of the northern West Bank, or alternately those aged 16-35,
from
traveling south, within the West Bank. This theft of time and space
from the
Palestinians is vital for ensuring that "their separate development"
will always lag behind Jewish development, will always flounder on the
brink of
a weak, inferior and degrading existence.
The new order will not hinder "terrorist elements"
from linking up with car thieves with good knowledge of the country's
hidden
paths, who infiltrate into the West Bank
in
stolen Israeli vehicles; it will not stop them from attaching stolen
Israeli
license plates to their cars, forging documents, dressing up as
Israelis or
abducting Israelis. The real aim of the order is to attack civilian
targets,
targets of peace. The ban on Israelis taking Palestinians in their cars
affects
the rights of Israelis (Jews and non-Jews) who have Palestinian
friends: they
won't be able to travel together in the West Bank,
visit friends together, to help them get to the doctor, their home or
their
olive groves more quickly.
The ban affects all the determined Israeli groups
working
against the occupation: Mahsom Watch, Yesh Din, Activists against the
Separation Fence, Rabbis for Human Rights, Ta'ayush, the Committee
Against
House Demolitions. It also affects human rights groups such as Hamoked
- the
Center for the Defense of the Individual, B'Tselem, and the Association
for
Civil Rights. Activists from all the above organizations and movements
meet
with Palestinians, travel with them and build up friendships with them.
In
their meetings and joint travels on the roads of the West Bank, they
serve as a
reminder to the Palestinians that there are Israelis who are not
soldiers and
settlers, that there are Israelis who oppose the regime of privileges
and that
therefore, there is perhaps hope for a fair political solution.
Naveh's order, if it is not rescinded in time, leaves
behind
countless little cluster bombs that will detonate and damage this hope
as well.