This article was edited on Aug. 12 to reflect a correction: the Israel Land Authority and the Israeli Police–not the Israeli Army–were responsible for the demolition of the Bedouin village.
I’m not an expert on domestic security. Unlike my Israeli friends, I’ve never served one day in combat nor toted an M-16, so I can’t interpret the larger implications of one Israeli government decision or another (though I have no problem critiquing what I see as disturbing trends). All I can do is observe.
That said, I felt a ray of hope for Israeli-Palestinian relations upon reading an article in the JTA that the IDF is relaxing its West Bank border restrictions during Ramadan, which started today. Palestinian Israeli and West Bank Palestinian relatives can cross the border to visit each other, and the IDF instructed its soldiers serving in the Bank to refrain from eating, drinking and smoking during daylight hours. This is all great. While I oppose the occupation, and while we’ll see how well this is enforced, I’m supportive of the IDF’s efforts to accommodate Muslims’ restrictions and customs.
Then I noticed another article on the JTA’s sidebar, this time about how the Israel Land Authority and Israel Police have demolished a Bedouin village three times in a row. Again, not an expert, but this looks bad. This is bad, insofar as Israel seems dedicated to destroying the homes of Palestinian Israelis three times in a row. And it’s bad insofar as a Bedouin member of Knesset said that actions like these will bring about an “intifada in the Negev.”
Are these two Israels the same, one whose army pays respect to Ramadan but whose police destroy Bedouin villages We can damn the state for one and bless it for the other, we can keep our mouths shut or we can realize that we cannot unequivocally castigate Israel’s security apparatus nor point to it as the unequivocally moral. We can protest and we can praise, but either way we must live in the tension.
