40 years of West Bank occupation are causing Israel and Palestine to fragment.
The Biblical imperative that settlers use to justify claims to the West Bank, the rejection by Israel of the applicability of the Geneva Convention – all this is now exacting a price Israel can no longer afford to pay, financially, socially or morally. As for the Palestinians - they have long been broken financially and politically and have nothing more to give.
And the moral bankruptcy is nowhere starker than in Hebron.

In this small city in the West Bank, some 5000 Israeli militia may not intervene to curb settler violence against the majority Palestinian population because they are there to protect these 500 settlers. Meanwhile Palestinians in Old Hebron may not use their own front doors to enter their streets let alone drive down them. Recently, when the Army gave orders to forcibly evacuate illegal settlements, soldiers refused to obey the orders. Law and order is as rare a commodity in Hebron as water in the Negev Desert.

In another West Bank settlement – Alfe Manesh, east of Qalqilia, Don the US settler, replete with Stetson hat, check shirt and nickel-plated 9mm browning semi-automatic pistol, explains why not a single UN Resolution pertaining to the settlements has legal force because they are based on UN Charter chapter VI, and not chapter VII. “Laws matter if someone can enforce them” he explains – “and as no-one can enforce the law, the legality or otherwise of this settlement is irrelevant”. Although there is no shortage of water for the plants and the lush greens, Don offers me none to drink. I thank him for his lecture and depart.

5 miles further west are the Palestinian villages of Hajjah and Imateen. The 3,000 villagers of Imateen have access to mains water – but the Israelis ignore all requests to connect the village to the mains supply, an obligation of the Israelis for this Area ‘C’ village. Instead the villagers have to siphon off water into bottles and other portable containers from a standpipe a mile away for which they have no Israeli permit.

In the adjacent village of Hajjah, the Village Elder, Bassam Abu Bilal, explains that their old sewage system has ruptured, causing the drinking water to become polluted. 10% of the village’s 250 children have amoebic dysentery as a result. The authorities have been made aware, but nothing is done to repair the sewage pipes.

The effect of this Northern-Ireland-style cycle of blood-letting is expressed most starkly, not by air strikes or Qassam rockets, but by the moral corruption of those Israeli soldiers now suffering from PTSD because of what they had to do and endure as occupiers in the West Bank, notably Hebron.

The psychological damage caused to countless soldiers, senior NCOs and officers by having to pay the moral price of the occupation, is summed up by Michael, an ex -IDF officer of the Nachal Brigade, who said “Whatever I used to call democracy here in Israel, would simply vanish in Hebron. You give a young soldier so much power that the horrible things he does become the normal things after a time. But the source of all the evil in that city is the power of the settlers over us, the Magav (Israeli Border Guards) and the Police. I lost all sense of moral values and decency - I just lost all sense of all the limits I grew up with – what my family had taught me to believe in – all of this was destroyed in me by Hebron”

Michael and I had met at Café Hillel in the German Colony in West Jerusalem. As he paused for thought, he remarked how this whole sick power game was just taking and taking – he nodded towards the counter some 20 feet away behind new glass panels. 3 years earlier his sister had lost her best friend the day before she was due to be married, killed on that same spot by a suicide bomb attack on the café.

Michael continued:- “In Hebron the fanatical Jews I was guarding, didn’t behave with the same morality or values I was raised on. I reached a point in Hebron where I didn’t know who the enemy was any more – the fanatical Jew settlers who were going crazy and I need to protect the Arabs from him, or whether I need to protect the Jew from the Arabs we were told would always attack, but never did. If the Jews are capable of writing on the Arab’s house doors ‘Arabs to the gas chambers’ and drawing a Star of David, which to me is like a swastika when they draw it like that, then somehow the term Jew has changed for me. I think of myself as emotionally damaged’.

The Occupation and the rocket attacks form a rapacious creditor constantly drawing on an emotional bank account already hugely overdrawn. But even if the Israeli authorities turn a blind eye to the moral price of Occupation, what is now emerging is probably the one factor that may cause the Occupation to end – the cost to the Israeli economy.

Superficially things look good – low inflation and unemployment, strong imports and exports, and rising share prices. How, on the face of it, can the Israeli economy be flourishing, yet with no prospect for a durable peace in the offing? Part of the answer is that the economy is rather like an ill woman wearing rouge to look healthy on the outside. The inside picture is chronically different.

Exports are in unpleasant goods – diamonds, pesticides and arms know-how (war is a tradable commodity). Imports are almost all vitally-needed raw materials. Poverty has been rising since the 1970s to an all-time high of 35.2% of children now living under the poverty line. In socio-economic terms Israel is rated is the 63rd most unequal society in the world – lower than Mexico.

And the cost of the occupation is rising. Settler aid ensures that the State pays for 50% of the cost of a house, tax aid reduces taxes for settlers, and vast amounts are channelled into the settlement expansion building programme – and all Ministries have to contribute. The cost of subsidising the settler lifestyle runs at about $3 billion per annum – yet the military cost of maintaining the Occupation Forces is closer to $9 billion a year. This equates to 14% of the yearly State budget. Emigration is rising, immigration dropping and the rate of the Israeli population growth is 2% a year.

To pay for the Occupation the State has had to sell off public sector assets such as El Al, El Al shipping, the oil refineries and other utilities. It has had a trade deficit year on year that has been balanced only by international (mainly US) aid. The 2007 budget is one so stringent in cuts it would make Gordon Brown’s budget a positive cornucopia by comparison. And as long as resource continues to be pumped into maintaining the growing settler population and in subjugating the Palestinians, the economy will worsen.

The corrosive power of the Occupation has now been sowing increasing discord in the Army, with Haredi soldiers refusing to obey orders on the instructions of their rabbis, to evacuate settlers from illegal settlements in Old Hebron. Officers and senior NCOs have lied to cover tracks of their own vigilante actions against innocent Palestinians. Punishment, in the rare cases such actions come to military courts, is weak. In the summer a group of Israeli doctors had to take the Army to the High Court to order the Army to open the Eretz Crossing to tend to civilian wounded. Even when High Court orders are delivered, the Army has ignored them.

The director of the Jerusalem-based Rabbis for Human Rights, Rabbi Arik Aschermann, is in despair at this moral meltdown across almost all sectors of Israeli society. “For me the real Zionism today is creating an Israel which is not only physically strong, but morally strong and that reaches our highest Jewish values. And yet I look around me and cry out at what is happening to Israeli society - I look at the suppression of the Palestinian people – the home demolitions, the settler violence and I ask myself "Is this what Zionism has come to? Is this what we created the State of Israel for? To be demolishing the home of this or that person whom we never gave a fair chance to build legally?”

Avraham Schomroni is an elderly grandfather who lost his Air Force son in the 1970s. Jamal al Khoudary is a Palestinian who lost his sister to an Israeli air-to-surface missile attack. Together they united in a joint Israeli-Palestinian group of bereaved families called ‘The Parents’ Circle’ who have lost loved ones to the violence caused by the Occupation and the resistance to it. It is now some 350 families strong, from each side of the Wall. And membership of the ‘Parents Circle’ is sadly growing.

They talk to school and university students and they petition their respective Governments for another way forward than constant violence and blood-letting and more bereavement. Avraham said “You can’t overcome darkness with more darkness - we need a candle of hope” . Jamal agrees, saying “As long as people are willing to talk, no one needs to be buried”.

Meanwhile in Old Hebron the violence of the settler behaviour blights any change in the moral climate. If both Israeli and Palestinian societies are to stand any chance of recovering enough to cope with the peace their people deserve, then let the Gordian knot of Hebron be untied so that peace can start there rather than be buried there along with Abraham. His many children deserve better.