The+Fault+Line

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Title Explanation:** The chapter, The Fault Line, describes the ethnic/religious make-up of Israel and the delicate balance between Palestinians and Jews. Unlike Lebanon, which held many groups of various ethnic backgrounds, religions and nationalities, Israel is "built over just one [fault line], which separates the Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs" (Friedman 323). While the fault line in Israel was largely hidden for a long time, the growing tensions between Palestinians and Jews living and working together in Israel of the "Earthquake," i.e. Intifada, that would come.

The Israeli government was so strong that it was able to "absorb the shock waves and tremors along the fault line" and even blur the line between Jewish land and Palestinian land that many people, removed from the history, did not know where it was or that it existed (Friedman 323). There was so much blurring that Israel and the "occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip were... a single binational society" (324). Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza became "'Israelified'" because their survival and success depended on their assimilation into Israeli culture, business, and society (325). In fact, the Palestinians succeeded economically under the Israeli system, selling and producing Jewish goods, such as yarmulkes.
 * Palestinian Assimilation into Israeli Life:**

They had no other choice; "[The Palestinians] had no stable independent economic base to fall back on and they were not willing to endure the economic and personal hardships that mass civil disobedience would have entailed" (329). Additionally, the Palestinians were divided along "ethnic, clan, sectarian, and regional" lines, thereby denying any possibility of organizing mass civil disobedience (330). But, Palestinians engaged in more personal levels of revolution. "Israeli youths in the early 1980s [wore] T-Shirts emblazoned with the word //I Love Palestine// over an olive tree...under their regular shirts, so the Israeli soldiers couldn't see them" (332).
 * Why Didn't the Palestinians Revolt?**

Israelis made it so that Palestinians did not feel at home in their own homes by, for example, arresting people in their own homes even "at their most private moments" (337). Palestinians were treated similar to how migrant workers are treated in the US. In Jerusalem Israelis would pull up to a group of Palestinians in a van and hire them for a days work. The work itself was even more humiliating because they were being hired to help build Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. Additionally, because of some terrorist activities carried out by Palestinians, Israelis and the world at large equated the word "Palestinian" with the word "terrorist," leading to embarrassing security checks at airports, dirty looks, etc. and further alienating the Palestinians. Friedman tells the story of a West Bank journalist, Jameel Hamad, "who, with his neatly trimmed mustache, glasses, and salt-and-pepper hair, looks more like a grocer... than a potential highjacker," flying from Frankfurt to Tel Aviv (339). He was made to step aside before boarding the plane and asked to identify his luggage so that it could be checked by security. The flight was held up ninety minutes and of course, nothing was found to be awry. Hamad was humiliated and angered.
 * Marginalization of Palestinians:**

Friedman, Thomas L. __From Beirut to Jerusalem__. Toronto: Collins Publishers, 1989.