One of the first lessons you learn in the Jerusalem bureau of an international news outlet, is the vocabulary of settlement.
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It isn't formal, frontal instruction. You pick it up by osmosis, by subtle correction, by shrewd imitation. It's easy, second nature, once you get the rhythm of it.
You learn certain key phrases, certain forms of address. There is, before all else, the word settler itself. To which the prefix Jewish is automatically appended.
Never mind that in all the world, certainly in all of the world's media, there is only one kind of person who is, at this point, known as a settler. The Jewish kind.
Of course, there's no real need whatsoever to add the modifier Jewish. That it is added anyway, routinely, sometimes even sheepishly, changes little. There is, after all, no danger of thinking that the settlers of Judea and Samaria are Palestinians, or, Laura Ingalls Wilder, or for that matter, Inuit.
Of course, what adding "Jewish" does do, for readers long inured to the wire service catch phrase "illegal under international law," is suggest that there is something illicit about these people.
Never mind that the use of "Jewish," as opposed to, say, "Israeli" or "West Bank," has exactly the kind of tabloid - not to say discreetly anti-Semitic - zing that editors so love to exploit, even as they cluck their serious, oh so correct, clucks.
Not that I'm taking sides, here. It's more complicated than that. I'm writing this not because I'm a journalist, but because I'm a settler. In fact, I was a settler long before I became a journalist.
I've actually lived in four different settlements. None of them over the Green Line. Technically, then, I'm a legal settler.
Only I'm not. Not really. I'm really no more legal than the settlers a few miles over the next ridge, in the West Bank.
I put it to you that none of us settlers, none of us Israelis, are altogether legal.
Here's the rub: We're not illegal either.
We are, to put it most accurately, a-legal, in the same sense that the term amoral means neither moral nor immoral, somehow outside of the universe of right and wrong, somehow beyond the pale of moral judgments, distinctions, sensibility.
Over the years, Israelis in general have evolved a society in which individuals, in order simply to get by in daily life, find themselves bending laws, skirting regulations, ignoring edicts, defying highway rules, tax rules, building codes, zoning codes, television tax requirements.
The most telling example of this, of course, is the settlements, which are, depending on the observer, at once thoroughly legal and patently illegal.
The same government which, settlers always trumpet, "sent us here to settle" [translation: politicians retroactively gave in to the pressure of settlers who, in may cases, were given legitimacy to squat], has always been pathologically ambivalent about the business of settlement, recognizing the danger inherent in people just going out and doing what they damn pleased.
But we're really no different on our side of the Green Line. Even more than the West Bank settlers, we cut corners, cut in lines, cut off fellow motorists.
How did we all get like this? That's the easy part. The 20th century made us like this. It worked like this: Take one part pogroms, one part blood libel, one part Catholic Christ-killer catechism, one part American anti-immigration laws, six million parts German genocide, one part British anti-immigration laws, 3,000 parts UN Security Council condemnation, and a monster is born.
Stated differently, if the world doesn't play by the rules where you are concerned, there is every likelihood that you will see no reason to play by the rules yourself.
All of us Jewish settlers, all six million of us, have gotten used to living under world quarantine, boycotted, repeatedly condemned by august international bodies, forsaken by friends, rebuffed even by the Red Cross.
In the space of less than a week in 1967, the world's largest, most fearful ghetto, turned into the world's smallest, most surprised empire.
We couldn't administer either one.
By now, the principle of alegality is so bound up with the national personality, that it is everywhere apparent. There are laws against every ill, but at root, the law means nothing. For decades, bribery and graft were so much a part of politics that, when law enforcement finally went after corruption in public life, the number of suspects was staggering.
Alegality has also long occupied pride of place within IDF policies, in particular where occupying the territories was concerned. Examples abound in the Civil Administration, which is, of course, military.
A particularly glaring case of alegality is that of "focused prevention," or assassinations. A nation which has decreed and carried the death penalty only once in 58 years, is now routinely, often remotely, executing suspected terrorists without trial or even arrest and questioning.
There is the case of the West Bank fence/wall/barrier, which, while barring entry to bombers, also slices off broad areas of Palestinian land, and poses no end of problems to innocent farmers and other civilians.
Then there is the excruciatingly alegal case of Ahmed Saadat, the jailed head of the Popular Front for the Liberations of Palestine. For years, as Saadat sat in a form of Palestinian custody, Israel railed against the Palestinian Authority's contention that there was insufficient evidence to try Saadat for the murder of cabinet minister Rehavam Ze'evi.
Then, several weeks after a huge IDF operation kidnapped Saadat at gunpoint from the Jericho prison that had been abandoned by U.S. and British observers, Israel disclosed that there was, in fact, insufficient evidence to try Saadat for the murder of cabinet minister Rehavam Ze'evi.
Oddly enough, the way back from alegality seems to pass through the Green Line. Perhaps the most radical new voice in the Knesset is that of Otniel Shneller, a former chairman of the settlement movement's Yesha Council and a resident of the West Bank enclave of Ma'aleh Michmash.
Shneller has been strongly pressing for adoption of Ehud Olmert's convergence plan, arguing that the sacrifice of many West Bank settlements is worth the goal of having, for the first time since 1967, one Israel once again.
Shneller's right. We need to become one people again. More than we need Hamas to recognize us, more than we need the world to acknowledge us, we ourselves need to recognize a legal Israel.
We need to become legal. Until we do, we can't be ourselves. And, freedom-obsessed as we are, until we become legal, we can't really become free.
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Previous blogs:
The Holocaust - Get over it
The cult of suicide, the culture of failure
Confessions of a Jewish refugee
A Place at the table
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