When Benjamin Netanyahu speaks about “economic peace,” his new, brilliant diplomatic platform, which will postpone any diplomatic moves far into the unforeseeable future, I see his face shrink, his chin sharpen, a patch cover his eye. Moshe Dayan is speaking, just as he spoke in a cabinet meeting 40 years ago, in early December 1968.

The Eshkol government met then to discuss Dayan’s proposal for a policy on the occupied territories. Dayan’s plan had three pillars: large-scale settlement on the West Bank mountain ridge, permanent Israeli rule of the territories without Israeli citizenship for the Arab residents, and economic integration of the territories with Israel. Arabs would work in Israel, Hebron would get its electricity from the Israeli grid, and Israel would raise the standard of living of the residents of the territories. As a result, Dayan argued, they would become dependent on Israel, maybe even grateful to it.

The official cabinet minutes are still classified, but a partial record from a reliable source exists. Dayan’s words reveal his worldview with shocking clarity. “We want to keep this population calm. Let them work, let them study,” he said – and then added that when he visited the one-time German colony of Togo in Africa, “I was impressed by the memories they still have of German rule before World War I. [The Germans] left orchards and culture.”

Read the rest in Hebrew or English at Ha’aretz, and feel free to come back to SoJo to comment.

Above us, two eagles fought: One swooped ahead, the other caught up and dove, the two of the them locked together, plunged, let go, and flew again. “They’re fighting about territory,” said Brad, our guide. “One has entered the other’s territory, and is being warned to leave.”

Elephants emerged from the trees into open grassland near the river bank, a line of dark beasts, moving silently in the late afternoon light. We sat, awed, in the small open truck on a dirt road through the Hluhluwe Game Reserve. Brad explained the cushioning of their feet, which allows them to move like apparitions through the bush. He pointed out at a small elephant and said it was a young male. “They reach sexual maturity when they’re 12-13, like humans,” he said. “Then his mother will force him out of the herd, which will be quite traumatic for him.” For the next 10 years, Brad said, the young bull will live on its own. Then it will start fighting the older bulls for breeding rights.

Elephants, Brad said, are very emotional creatures. “They don’t like death at all. When one dies, the others try to lift her up.” The elephant population in the reserve is rising, he said, and eventually will have to be “culled.” The experts say that whole families have to be “culled.” They’ve learned experience: When only adults were “culled,” the young ones were traumatized. They were much more aggressive, attacking humans more willingly. Some mature bulls had to be brought in from elsewhere, and after a very long time were able to impose order.

At dusk, three rhinoceroses – mother, father and little half-ton child – ambled onto the dirt road in front of us. They like the heat rising from the packed dirt of the road, Brad said. The mother’s long lower horn and shorter upper horn were both curved and sharp. The father’s upper horn was short and dull, apparently broken off in a fight with another male. The females’ horns stay complete, Brad said, because they don’t fight each other. No, said someone in our party of four, they just gossip viciously about each other for many years. Eventually, as Brad moved our truck inch by inch closer, the rhinos rambled back into the trees.

We didn’t see any lions or leopards. Brad had warned us not to expect any. The big predatory cats are elusive. If I heard him right, he also said that they are not bothered by seeing death. They see it all the time. They create it.

The big beasts remind you of the beauty of creation and of its cruelty. They fight over territory, and expel intruders. The males fight over females. The females choose the winners of battle, the powerful and overbearing, who will mate and wander back into the bush. There is a reason we call certain behavior “beastly.”

Yet elephants mourn. They teach their young, who will turn criminal if they lack parenting. Wolves nurse the pups of other wolves. Closer to home, I’ve watched one street cat adopt and nurse a kitten abandoned by another. Male cats are reputedly utterly uninterested in their offspring. But I once saw an adolescent male alley cat adopt an abandoned kitten, lick it like a mother licking its child, lead it to look for food. He cared for it until it was grown and then the two stayed together.

Say this is all instinct. Say that the elephants’ empathy for the dead is instinct. Then compassion and xenophobia are both part of the wiring of the animal brain. The war between those inclinations may also be part of the hard wiring of the beast – despite the old belief that such choices are the sole province of human beings. Perhaps people choose empathy more often. Perhaps the only difference is that humans are capable of symbolic thinking and abstract language, and have created beliefs and texts to explain compassion and pass it on and sharpen it and sometimes give it a slightly better chance against evil. Or maybe we will only be able to believe in that absolute distinction until we decipher the language of giraffes – who, as Brad told us, communicate with each other infrasonically, in voices that fall below the range of human hearing. The bush is humbling: How much more is there that we don’t hear?

History here is also humbling. I came to South Africa for Limmud, a festival of Jewish learning, organized by volunteers. It’s a bottom-up, volunteer effort, and I’m told that many of the people who came to study together in Cape Town and Jo’burg have never been seen before at Jewish community events. In Jo’burg, I attended a discussion on Jews in human rights activism and another on South African Jewish history. At the discussion, the names of many Jews who’d fought apartheid were mentioned. Some went to jail or into exile. A participant in the discussion said, “Let’s face it: Most Jews were fascists.” There was rustling in the audience. He corrected himself. “Well, most Jews were willing to live with fascism.” With that, nearly everyoe could agree.

There were Jews who risked everything. And there were those who lived with the reality, or who at most voted for an opposition party. In between were people who opposed the system, even said so publicly, but continued with their lives. I understand them. They did not want to endanger themselves or their community. And life was comfortable – as life based on other’s labor and poverty can be. Self-interest won out. Call it an instinct for apathy. Yet those who fought seems always to be reaching beyond words, beyond ideology, to explain why they made their choice. They looked (this is critical, they looked) at pass laws, at people being consigned to the shacks of the townships, at a society built from cruelty, and responded with feral empathy.

It is terribly impolitic to write from South Africa with any comparisons to home. It is even more impolitic to think of apartheid and occupation in the same hour while in Durban, where I now am, because the city has become a name for unjust comparisons, for dehumanizing Israel in the name of faux humanism. If I dare mention apartheid and occupation while in Durban, NGO Monitor may issue a special report against me.

All right, the occupation and apartheid aren’t at all the same. We can list all the differences at another time, including the real threats to Israel and the errors of sundry Palestinian leaders.

Occupation and apartheid aren’t the same, except in this: The occupation is dehumanizing. It is built on the presumption that some people, on the basis of their ancestry, can be caged so that other people will live comfortably. And the great majority of Israelis can lead their lives without ever seeing it. Even the teachers who teach in Jerusalem religious schools and truly believe that they are teaching their pupils to be good people can drive past the checkpoints without thinking about them or about the people who live beyond them.

I listened to stories of South African activists and wondered why we let it continue – rather, why I can live next to it. How much is enough opposition? How does one reach past the instinct of apathy to the instinct of empathy?

My friend John showed up in South Jerusalem. Long ago and far away, John and I slouched in the back of high school classes together in Los Angeles, mumbling snidely about what was being left out of American history (women, blacks, slaughter of Indians, lynch mobs, poor folk…). Eventually I went into mumbling snidely as a profession. John, by contrast, is gainfully employed in high-tech, working for an Israeli firm that kindly brought him for a visit to the home office.

In late afternoon we walked out to the promenade. Some Palestinian kids were playing soccer on a stretch of lawn despite the ferocious heat. In front of us was the Old City and the Dome of the Rock. On the east, I pointed out to John, was the high concrete wall dividing the Palestinian side of Jerusalem from the Palestinian towns of the West Bank.

“So,” John asked me, “is there anything parallel to Israel’s control of the West Bank? What do you think of Jimmy Carter calling it apartheid? Is it like Jim Crow?” (I don’t claim this is a precise quote; it was Shabbat afternoon, when I don’t write.) But that’s the gist.

I don’t know if there’s any precise parallel to a military occupation that’s lasted 41 years, I told him. Everyone looks for parallels in history and politics, trying to judge an unfamiliar situation on the basis of a familiar one, or a morally ambiguous condition on the basis of a morally clear one. But history isn’t like medicine, in which 100 million cases can be classified as one disease. In history, there are two few cases, each one too idiosyncratic. Every unhappy nation is unhappy in its own way, to misquote Tolstoy.

If, nonetheless, one looks for a category, what is happening in the West Bank resembles colonialism more than apartheid. It is closer to Algeria than South Africa, though there are flaws in the Algerian parallel as well. Apartheid applied to the entire territory under the rule of the old South African regime; it was explicitly based on the construct of “race” and had no other purpose but to divide the races.

Even if the Green Line, the pre-1967 boundary, does not appear on official Israel maps, it exists as a legal and administrative boundary. Inside sovereign Israel, pre-1967 Israel for practical purposes, there’s a democracy, even if flawed. Palestinian citizens of Israel face discrimination, but they are voting citizens. The multiparty system insures that their votes can’t be gerrymandered away. They have more reasons than I’d like to list here for being dissatisfied – and are sometimes able to use an imperfect political and legal system to press for change.

The West Bank, on the other hand, isn’t legally part of Israel. Legally, for 41 years, it has been under military rule, temporary in apparent perpetuity. It was originally acquired in Israel in 1967 in something close to a fit of absence of mind – a defensive war, planned at the last minute, in which the goals shifted from hour to hour and the troops advanced further than anyone expected in advance. Palestinians live under military rule, and in some areas with the limited home rule of the Palestinian Authority.

But Israeli citizens who have settled there, with government support, as if Israel will control the territory forever, have the rights of Israeli citizens and then some. The two-tier legal system has been there virtually from the start. In a secret memo written in 1968, urging expanded settlement, then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan acknowledged that “settlement in administered territory, as we know, contravenes international agreements,” dismissed that as a problem, and went on to worry about the legal status of settlers. He didn’t want them subject to local law. He got his way. (Much more on this in my book, The Accidental Empire.)

He did want economic “integration” of the West Bank and Israel, which meant Palestinians would work for Israelis. He expected Palestinians to be appreciative. In a cabinet debate, he proposed German rule of Togo as a positive model. Dayan’s opponents explicitly warned from the summer of 1967 onward that permanent Israeli rule of the West Bank would be colonialism and would be denounced as such internationally. They lost the political argument. Shlomo Gazit, who in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the military officer working directly under Dayan in administering the West Bank, wrote three decades later:

At the end of the sixties, the world was already watching the end of the era of colonialism, and precisely then Israel found itself marching in the opposite direction.

But colonialism is also imprecise. On one hand, France could leave Algeria without fearing that Algerians would claim France as their own and keep up the war. Domestic support for leaving the West Bank would be much higher in Israel if we could abandon our Algeria as easily. Israelis on the moderate left would be much more comfortable at labeling the occupation as “colonialism” if Palestinians and their supporters did not apply the same term to pre-1967 Israel, as if Jews were just Frenchman who’d come here to build plantations, with no historical tie to the land.

On the other hand, as I once explained in the American Prospect, Ariel Sharon’s plans for Palestinian “autonomy” in fragmented enclaves, and later for “statehood” in those same enclaves, was influenced by South Africa’s grand apartheid, with its fictitiously independent bantustans.

In general, I don’t like the use of “apartheid” as a term, because it delegitimizes Israel as such, and not just the occupation. It also ignores the original cause of the occupation, a war of defense. But as long as the occupation continues, and settlement grows, and the possibility of withdrawal and a two-state agreement grows dimmer, the use of the word will grow. The insult exaggerates but is not utterly imaginary.

I’m not trying to reproduce word for word what I told John as we looked out over the wall-divided landscape of Jerusalem. This is more or less the idea. At the end I suggested one more weak parallel. He’d brought me a book about the Lincoln-Douglas debates. In those awful days of American history, many Americans were willing to allow the moral blight of slavery to continue lest civil war erupt. Today many Israelis would rather accept the occupation than face armed conflict with the settlers. Their fear is justified, yet the blight cannot continue. One of our deepest challenges is to find a way to leave without fratricide. It will take more than one quiet Shabbat afternoon with a friend to figure out a solution to that problem.

See also:

Is All Criticism Anti-Israel? A Question for NGO Monitor

The First Settlement, the Lasting Danger

Israeli Right Supports Right of Return

Dov, the guy who owns the hole-in-the-wall computer lab, explained to Elliott and me that the operating system was only in English; he didn’t have Arabic Windows. As for service, he said, that would be no problem, "as long as he brings it here."

Unfortunately, Muhammad Abu Arkub, to whom we were delivering the computer, has about as much chance as getting a permit to enter Jerusalem for a computer repair as he does of getting back his wife’s gold. Dov wasn’t being snide. He’s the old-fashioned gruff kind of guy who curses about everything and then puts in twice the work fixing your computer that he planned and charges no more, and would be embarrassed if you mentioned it. But the village of Wadi al-Shajneh, in the South Hebron Hills, is beyond where he does service calls. He was surprised when Elliott explained why we were buying the computer. "And you with a kipah ," he said. Not that he objected to what we were doing.

Elliott read about Muhammad in a Ha’aretz article by Gideon Levy, a few days after we went to Hebron to give a washing machine to Ghassan Burqan. If you read my previous post (Journey to Hebron: Nightmares and Hope ), you’ll remember that Ghassan had bought his own washing machine and was carrying it to his home in the Israeli-controlled side of Hebron when he was stopped by Border Police, beat up and arrested. The machine disappeared. In memory of our late friend Gerald Cromer, Elliott decided we should bring Ghassan a replacement.

Muhammad’s home was searched by soldiers who arrived at midnight. They said they were looking for weapons. The search lasted two hours. Muhammad, his wife Lubna, their two small daughters, and Muhammad’s younger brother Rami were all kept under guard in Rami’s home – a single-room shack built onto the side of Muhammad’s house. When the search was over, and the family rushed back into the main house, they found their computer and television smashed. And, they say, the jewelry box where Lubna kept her gold was gone.

Rami ran to where the soldiers’ jeeps were parked, sat down in one, and demanded the gold. Normally a Palestinian could expect arrest for such behavior. Instead, the soldiers pushed him out and left. I measure that as oblique, partial evidence confirming a theft took place: Arresting Rami might have required explaining the incident to higher-ups, and Rami would told why he jumped it in the jeep.

A gift of gold, from groom to bride, is part of Palestinian wedding customs. It’s not just for beauty; it’s a financial asset for emergencies. Muhammad, 24, had given Lubna 200 grams of gold, 7 ounces, over $6,000 at today’s prices.

According to Levy, the B’Tselem human rights organization has testimony of a dozen or so similar incidents in the area in recent months. I want to be careful: A complaint isn’t proof. (Muhammad filed a complaint with the Israeli police in Hebron. Unfortunately, there’s very little chance that the investigation will lead anywhere and that he’ll ever get answers.) If these reports are true, a small number of soldiers are exploiting the opportunies for corruption provided by the occupation, which has created a realm of "ein din ve’ein dayan," as Talmudic texts say: No judge and no justice. Give young men guns and power to search homes to stop terror attacks, and have a "justice" system that ignores abuses, because the abuses are against people who lack the vote and are therefore transparent politically – and you will get abuses. The answer, ultimately, is to end occupation.

After the search: The remains of Muhammad’s computer

With the ultimate not scheduled soon, Elliot suggested that we replace Muhammad’s computer. We had donations left over for the washing machine from my friends at Kehillat Yedidya, our progressive Orthodox congregation. The gold was beyond our means, but we could do what we could, with the thought after all that were Gerald around, he would have done it. Yehiel, who works for Rabbis for Human Rights, drove again: Three men with graying beards and skullcaps, driving south, out on Highway 60, on a hot June morning, past the roadblocks, past the red tile roofs of Efrat stretched out in suburban comfort over the terraced hills between the Palestinian villages. The road looped east past Kiryat Arba and Hebron. At junctions near Palestinian villages stood tall pillboxes: cylinders of grey concrete with gun slits at the top, like chess pieces placed on the board of the south Hebron Hills, to show that player with the grey pieces controls the board.

At one checkpoint near the settlement of Otniel, we picked up Musa, the B’Tselem field worker. Then we turned into the Palestinian town of Dura. Muhammad has a barber shop there. The main street is well kept; new stores and apartment buildings have been built recently. A truck with Palestinian plates and the word "Spring" in Hebrew on the side – the name of a soft-drink brand – was delivering to local grocery stores: Musa says the town is relatively prosperous, so the amount of gold that a young man buys his bride is known to be large there, and in the neighboring villages, like Wadi al-Shajneh.

Muhammad’s house is a small one on a dirt road. He invited us to sit in Rami’s shack: a bed on one wall, pillows around the others on the floor for guests. On one wall Rami had taped a photo of himself and some cut-out pictures of beautiful women, clothed but provocative: A bachelor’s room. On the small stereo he had a disc that appeared to be Islamicist speeches. The room was a small village museum to the infinite contradictions of the human soul. Yakut, Muhammad’s three-year-old daughter, danced around the room looking at us. She had curls, and tiny stud earings.

Muhammad and his daughter with Musa and the new computer

This was the difference between Wadi al-Shajneh and Hebron: In Hebron, a three-year-old Palestinian had to be told that the bearded men who’d come in the house were not settlers, that one need not fear them. In the village, the child was unafraid, despite the night of the search. Musa said that Otniel is a quiet settlement. The settlers of Hebron and Kiryat Arba are known as violent, and the ones from the outpost of Havat Maon are "criminals." On Highway 60, settler drivers sometimes try to run Palestinians off the road. But inside Wadi al-Shajneh a three-year-old had not yet learned to hate or fear. This a reason for hope: A generation of Jews and Palestinians might be born who could live without fearing each other.

Elliott had brought a bracelet for Lubna, Muhammad’s wife. He didn’t say where or how he got it. Muhammad took it to her. She appeared at the door, dressed full length in black, wearing a head scarf and a beautiful smile, and thanked us and vanished. The three strangers sit with the master of the house, and the woman is in the tent, Elliott said. And from here, I asked, do we go to take the measure of Sodom, and what should we report?

Muhammad said that before the Israeli search in his house, he’d been called in several times by the Palestinian security services for questioning. On the Israeli side this is called effective cooperation. On the Palestinian side the word to be used would be "collaboration" and it cracks the legitimacy of Abu Mazen’s regime.

I am glad about any bombs found before they find their way to Jerusalem or Beersheba. But security measures, especially harsh ones, without the hope of a political solution – without the hope of the occupation ending – are like healing the skin over a deep wound. Beneath the healing, the abcess festers and the poison spreads.

The destroyed computer and TV were still in the yard. The computer had been pulled from its case; the fan hung out to one side. The TV was a black frame with no screen. Mute relics, unable to provide testimony to anything but force and speed.

Elliott explained to Musa and Muhammad what the technical papers in Hebrew said. Muhammad would have to get an Arabic operating system, he said. He said we’d brought this as mitzvah. Muhammad, who’d once worked in construction inside Israel, before the second intifada, didn’t remember that Hebrew word till Elliott said that "Allah wants…" and then Muhammad shook his head "yes."

Then we shook hands, and waved to Yakut, and drove back through hillsides, terraced with vineyards and olive groves, the twice-loved hills waiting for human beings to stop fighting over them like two angry young men who think the way to show love is jealousy and fists.

Some 600 American Christian Zionists, led by well-known Evangelical leader, Pastor John Hagee, will arrive in Israel this week to express their support for Israel on the Jewish Homeland’s 60th year of Independence. One of the highlights of their visit will take place on Thursday evening, April 3rd in Ariel…

Pastor John Hagee, who established Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, is considered the leading Evangelist in the U.S.A today…

Since anyone visiting this fair blog knows my view of Hagee, I won’t repeat that. But it’s worth pointing out to the flack who produced this note that “evangelist” (a preacher or missionary) doesn’t mean the same thing as Evangelical (the type of Protestantism that stresses Bible study and adult acceptance of Jesus). Furthermore, crowning Hagee as the leading Evangelical is awfully unfair to Evangelicals.

And furthermore, and moreover, and pay attention here, Rev. Hagee: Ariel is not in Israel. It is in the West Bank. According to Israeli law, it is in territory that Israel holds under military occupation. Supporting Ariel means supporting the growth of a settlement that Israel will almost certainly have to evacuate in any final-status agreement – except that Rev. Hagee’s purpose is to help prevent such an agreement. Which is not a great way to support the State of Israel.