Fifty years of occupation and seventy years from partition, which led to the Nakba and establishment of Israel. Israel is a man in the seventies. He spent the last fifty years of his life as an occupier. Is the occupation merely an incident, a transient illness, in his life? Is it a constituent part of its being and nature? Is the occupation an illness, which Israel has to recover from? Is it evidence for its health, strength and agility?
The more the years pass, the twenty year interval between the Nakba and Naksa appears as a truce that is not quiet. This time marked the massacres of Kafr Qasem and Qubeiba, murder of infiltrators who returned to their homeland, and 1956 war. Overtime, this truce looks like a marginal detail in a project that is more than 120 years old. For example, who recalls that California was not part of the United States when it was established and that it was occupied almost a century later?
With the end of the last chapter and conclusion of the settlement enterprise in America, all details seem to be secondary vis-à-vis the grand narrative.
Looking at the occupation in its broader context allows us to understand its current process. This occupation is no longer belligerent, ideological or temporary. It is no longer belligerent because those who construct highways, railways and universities, and transport half a million settlers, have nothing to do with the army or security apparatus. It is no longer ideological because the forces which take part in and embrace settlement and control over land and resources are not a Messianic, religious right wing any more. These are parties of the political centre, economy sharks who are avid for cheap land, and poor groups who enjoy better living conditions, tax exemptions and spacious houses. When these two factors meet, the result is that Israel no longer deals with it [the occupation] as if it were temporary.
All this tempts us to say that the Green Line has been erased and become as brown as the land. However, the colour of the line is not painted by Israel alone. If the last chapter in America’s narrative was written, the last chapter in Palestine’s narrative has not. Extreme caution should be taken to understand politics as the inevitable consequence of historical analysis and requirements of logic. There is a political logic in the thought of those who insist on thickening and demarcating the Green Line in tandem with international and UN Security Council resolutions. Nevertheless, time is not on their side.
Nothing justifies that Palestinians accept this threshold as long as Israel does not admit that the Green Line to be its border. Reciprocity requires that the Green Line be either a border for both parties or not be a border at all. The Green Line today is a Green Line for Palestinians solely. In the eyes of Israel and its settlers, it does not exist. Let this reciprocity be an idea that might inform the Palestinian strategy.
