America’s favorite friend in the Middle East, funded to the tune of $6 billion a year, has an established record of ethnic cleansing. Outside of some universities, this history is largely ignored here for political reasons. But Israel’s own historians have painstakingly combed through national and military archives and exposed Israel’s expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 war.
The results of that dispossession are still on display today. Four million Palestinians live and die in controlled and caged ghettoes on less than one-fifth of the land that belonged to them, now occupied by Israel. Meanwhile, Israel allows Jews born anywhere in the world to settle this expropriated land.
But it’s one thing to prevent people from reclaiming their stolen property. It’s another to prevent them from leaving their cages altogether.
Yet that’s exactly what happened last week, as Israel denied Palestinian Fulbright scholars from getting to America, despite unprecedented civil disobedience by an American diplomat.
The chosen would-be scholars are from Gaza, a concentration camp of 1.5 million people, which Israel has subjected to collective punishment ever since Hamas won elections. Few supplies are allowed in except in the event of “emergencies,” meaning that children go malnourished, chronic diseases go untreated, and poverty and anger festers.
Israel allowed only about 60 out of 600 Gaza students accepted by foreign universities to study abroad this year. Seven Fulbright scholars were among those barred.
America tried to intervene, with Condoleezza Rice opining, “If you cannot engage young people and give them a complete horizon to their expectations and to their dreams, then I don’t know that there would be any future for Palestine.”
The Israelis made noises about expediting the process but still threw up barriers. One US diplomat, fed up with delays and excuses as he tried to get two students out, sat in the middle of the Israel-Jordan border crossing in protest.
Can one imagine a similar scene unfolding in any other country “allied” to the United States? In a pristine display of the “special relationship,” America’s officials are reduced to staging acts of civil disobedience to get their way.
It didn’t work. The two students had their visas revoked after making the crossing. One of them had already reached Washington, DC, before being shipped back to Jordan.
The Israelis fumed over the incident, with a senior Foreign Ministry figure bellowing, “It’s a disgrace. If I had behaved that way at an American border crossing, I’d either be in jail or no longer in the U.S. ”
Such is the extent of Israeli narcissism: denying the wretched of the earth an education is national policy; protesting against it is a “disgrace.”
It’s a revealing episode. Israelis rant about “Palestinian hate” and the evils of Hamas’ ideology — and then lock young Palestinians in a box with Hamas and throw away the key.
As one of the dejected students said, “If I’m sitting here jobless, with no chance for education and employment, I might as well grow a beard and join the others.”
But there is a method to the madness. As one of the Palestinians students who got through said, Israel’s strangulation “splits the society” as some Palestinians with connections get out and others seethe in resentment.
It is the great hope of Israeli policy, aptly termed “politicide” by the late Israeli historian Baruch Kimmerling, that the Palestinians crack apart and collapse under the accumulated weight of interminable indignities.
As the IDF chief of staff boasted to the Knesset 25 years ago, “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”
It has not happened — yet.