Occupation Tourism

There is a tourism industry, for people, largely from the Western First World to tour the occupied West Bank. The ostensible purpose, other than making money, is to cultivate positive press for the settlements there. The article quotes a number of participants in this industry, as well as tourists, praising the entire project. However, even the rudimentary re-statement of the facts by the news article dashes all their assertions apart.

"We are not monsters," Ilana Shimon told a clutch of tourists this week, leading them through Havat Gilad, a small settlement outpost built without Israeli government authorization.

"I'm against violence. All we want is to sit on our land and we want you to be our ambassadors," Shimon told her visitors near her home in Havat Gilad, where she lives with 30 other families, making up about 250 people, most of them children.

The quoted person claims to be "against violence", and yet the settlements exist only due to war. As the article explains:

About 300,000 Jewish settlers live in the West Bank, occupied by Israel in a 1967 war and home to 2.5 million Palestinians. The World Court has ruled the settlements illegal.

Occupied land is, by definition, land taken and maintained by military force. International law, and common morality, clearly state that territory seized during war is not legitimate. And even though the quoted settler is against violence, and I'm sure he is a perfectly nice person, his choice to live in the militarily occupied West Bank is a voluntary participation in an illegal, and by defintion, violent enterprise.

The tour took the group through several small settlements, some of them built without official permission by settlers who see themselves as pioneers exercising their claim to a Biblical birthright to the land.

How can anyone exercise a "biblical birthright" to land occupied by someone else? To achieve such a birthright requires the removal, or disenfranchisement, of the people who are already there. Why should the current inhabitants respect someone else's religious claim? It's their religion, after all, and not the current inhabitants. The same logic was used by the conquistadors, who politely informed the Natives of South America that the Pope had given their lands to Spain.

Daniel Lippert said he and his wife come to Israel two or three times a year, but this was their first visit to the West Bank. "We donated money to Havat Gilad last year because it is the right thing to do," Daniel said. "God promised the land to the Jews. The Palestinians should become Israeli citizens or leave."

God promised the West Bank to the Jews, we are told. Such a simple explanation. But why did God not announce this promise to all, surely a great deal of confusion could have been avoided. And where is the evidence of this? In a religious book, of course. I could write a religious book that Portugal is promised to the Daoists or Russia to the Rastafarians, and the only rational differences between our claims would be the number of people who believed each.

"There is no other explanation to our success other than divine providence," Ben Saadon said. "We didn't come here to make a business profit, we came here for the love of the land and as the years go by we see God is rewarding us."

Again, the same logic, applied universally leads to absurdities. There is no other explanation for the success of the CEOs of the financial giants who crashed the world economy, and were protected by government largess, than God favors them.

There is no other possible explanation for wealthy Communist bureaucrats in China or child millionaires enriched by their parent's stock options then God! Clearly God is rewarding all those who are successful, and by extension, punishing all who are desolate.

Thus, the entire occupation is a continuous reward by God onto the settlers and a punishment on the Palestinians. Reversing the religions and areas involved could bring to mind all sorts of different historical atrocities, but people seem to be able to convince themselves that in this case, all the absurdities people usually say are actually true. It wasn't true when everyone else throughout history claimed it was their right to occupy such and such or land, that God favored their violent endeavors, but it's correct this time. Even in this fairly benign Reuters piece, the impossible logic of imperialism is exposed.