Israel's military-controlled apparatus keeps the broad public ignorant about occupation realities, writes Ran HaCohen in this reply to Jonathan Cook
4 - 10 September 2003

In mid-August, just before the last eruption of violence, Israel offered to return four towns to Palestinian control. Portrayed as a generous gesture, the list of towns could be found all over the media: Qalqilia, Ramallah, Tulkarm, and Jericho. I wonder how many Israelis, if any at all, have noticed the manipulation, unmentioned in any journalistic report I have seen: during the present Intifada, the Israeli army did not occupy Jericho and the town had not been taken out of Palestinian control in the first place.

I couldn't help thinking of this anecdote while reading the brilliant response of Jonathan Cook to my previous column (Al-Ahram Weekly, 21-27 August 2003). "HaCohen is wrong," writes Cook, "to think that Israelis are ignorant of what is being done in their name. They know exactly what happens: their Zionist training simply blinds them to its significance." Cook insists that "Any Israeli [...] has ample opportunity to find out what is really happening to Palestinians [...] not from the now mainly compliant Hebrew media but from eyewitnesses to the actual events."

I am not convinced by Cook's "theory of knowledge", i.e. that in our society eye-witnesses can compete with the credibility and exposure enjoyed by the mass media. First, there may be fewer eye-witnesses to the actual events than Cook suggests: combatant soldiers are always a minority within the military. Second, a soldier usually sees just his small part of the picture; the overall view (land, water, employment, freedom of movement etc.) may well escape him. Third, no eye-witness can convey his story to more than a few dozen friends and relatives back home; even if the story passes on to more remote audiences, it becomes a rumour. Collective consciousness is therefore shaped by the media much more than by any eye-witness. Not without reason are soldiers not allowed to talk to journalists: eye-witness becomes dangerous once it turns into a media item. And as for the Israeli media, Cook and I would probably agree that its designation as "mainly compliant" is an understatement.

Nevertheless, I believe I am not the only reader who has found much of Cook's article very convincing, but not really disproving mine; we seem to have stressed two sides of the same coin. Cook has done an impressive work describing the hegemonic Israeli ideology; I never meant to play it down. Ideology shapes not only what we (think we) know, but our blind spots and ignorance as well. The main difference between Cook's account and my own concerns the homogeneity of the present Israeli ideology: whereas Cook argues for a more egalitarian model, in which all members of society share similar knowledge sterilised by a shared "Zionist training", my model is less democratic, depicting a military-controlled apparatus that ensures the broad public is kept ignorant about occupation realities.

It is important to stress that by emphasising the role of ignorance I by no means claimed innocence for the Israeli public; I hope no reader misunderstood me this way. All Israelis are informed enough to know that terrible things are done in their name in the occupied Palestinian territories. They (or we) cannot claim innocence on the grounds of ignorance of the precise nature or extent of the atrocities. Once you have heard your neighbour's cries, you cannot excuse your inaction by claiming you didn't know whether she was being murdered, raped, or just robbed.

Cook's argument, then, overestimates the homogeneity of ideology. Even the most totalitarian regime cannot turn all people into automatons. Indeed, as Cook says, many Israelis do believe that "anti-Semitism lurks everywhere," and that "anything can be done in its name, as long as it serves the interests of the Jews and their state". But do all Israelis believe that? Do all of them believe that all the time? Can the military clique, which is in fact ruling Israel, trust all Israelis to believe that all the time? I think the answer is negative.

This takes us to what looks to me as the crucial flaw in Cook's analysis: its failure to take into account the significant developments of the last three years. Zionist ideology has been hegemonic in Israel since its very beginning. Everything Cook is saying about this ideology is true and has been so for more than 50 years. But in the last three years, something quite different emerges. Zionist ideology may not have loosened its grip, but it seems no longer sufficient to b(l)ind the Israeli society together. The reason is that Israel's atrocities have now intensified to an extent unimaginable in previous decades.

Land confiscation has accompanied the occupation all along, but taking Palestinian towns with tanks and bombing them from the air is something quite different. Gradual pushing of Palestinians from areas designated for Jews has been an old practice, but sealing off millions behind a gigantic wall is something else. Curfew has been in the policing arsenal for centuries, but depriving a whole people of its freedom of movement for months on end is quite another story. At this stage of Israeli aggression -- planned and dictated by a triumvirate (prime minister, minister of defence, and chief-of-staff) with no public debate and no democratic control -- keeping the Israelis in the dark has become an inevitable means of control. In the Palestinian territories, the present phase accompanies the shift from direct (pre-Oslo) or indirect (Oslo) Israeli colonisation to an eliminationist policy on the verge of genocide. For Israel proper, it is part and parcel of its decline from a relatively open, relatively democratic society to closed militaristic authoritarianism.

When I talk of ignorance, I do not mean that Israelis do not know there is occupation. They have known that for three-and-a-half decades, and their ideology has enabled them to live with it -- more (on the Right) or less (on the Left) comfortably. But the current phase of occupation differs from its former stages in the intensified use of disinformation and state-controlled ignorance. And so, while Israelis generally believe that "it must be quite terrible over there," very few of them know which Palestinian towns are under siege or closure at a given time, and what is the difference between the two. They do not know of villages locked behind a fence and a closed gate. They hardly know where the so-called "Separation Fence" is erected, and what it means for the Palestinians. Israelis have no idea how long it would take for a Palestinian to get from Ramallah to Bethlehem, and whether he is allowed to. And they definitely do not know that when the army is reported to remove a permanent checkpoint somewhere in the occupied Palestinian territories it is replaced by an even worse temporary checkpoint. Obviously, all this has immediate impact on the question "who is to blame" for the violence, which translates directly into political support.

"Repression" may be a good term to bridge Cook's concept of ideology with my suggestion of ignorance; but my point is that this "repression" starts well above the individual level. It starts with manipulated and manipulative information controlled by the upper echelon of Israel's military, which has turned the occupied Palestinian territories into its private estate, of which the Israeli public and even the parliament are effectively kept out.

* The writer teaches at Tel-Aviv University's Department of Comparative Literature and works as literary translator and critic for the Israeli daily Yedioth Achronoth