Bulldozing Palestine, one village at a time

Bulldozing Palestine, one village at a time | Israel | Al Jazeera

It was a bit ironic to see a small group of Israeli settlers enter the large solidarity tent stationed at the entrance of Khan al-Ahmar last Wednesday. They had come, they said, to show "solidarity" with the Palestinian Bedouins protesting a demolition order.

Since 2017, the whole Bedouin village has been threatened with demolition by the Israeli authorities. Earlier that day, Israeli soldiers attacked villagers and activists who had staged a protest, injuring 35.

"You know, I try not to be afraid, but I don't know what will happen to us. Where will we go, what will we do?

Khan al-Ahmar, a village of 180 people, is about 15km northeast of Jerusalem and falls within what is known as Area C of the occupied West Bank, as defined by the Oslo Accords. The area has been inundated with more than 300,000 Israelis living in 125 illegal settlements and is under Israeli administrative control. Under the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authorities was supposed to take over administering the area, but, of course, Israel never let that happen.

As a result, it is now the Israeli state that controls the land in Area C and that decides on building permits. Khan al-Ahmar existed before the state of Israel was created in 1948. In the 1950s, Palestinian Bedouins expelled from the Negev desert by the Israeli army moved to the West Bank and settled in the village, expanding it. Read More

Gazan Gandhis: Gaza Bleeds Alone as ‘Liberals’ and ‘Progressives’ Go Mute

Does no State or Head of State have the intestinal fortitude to speak out?

Three more Palestinians were killed and 611 wounded last Friday, when tens of thousands of Gazans continued their largely non-violent protests at the Gaza-Israel border.

Yet as the casualty count keeps climbing – nearly 45 dead and over 5,500 wounded – the deafening silence also continues. Tellingly, many of those who long chastised Palestinians for using armed resistance against the Israeli occupation are nowhere to be found, while children, journalists, women and men are all targeted by hundreds of Israeli snipers who dot the Gaza border.

Israeli officials are adamant. The likes of Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, perceives his war against the unarmed protesters as a war on terrorists. He believes that “there are no innocents in Gaza.” While the Israeli mindset is not in the least surprising, it is emboldened by the lack of meaningful action, or outright international silence to the atrocities taking place at the border.

The International Criminal Court (ICC), aside from frequent statements laced with ambiguous legal jargon, has been quite useless thus far. Its Chief Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, derided Israel’s killings in a recent statement, but also distorted facts in her attempt at ‘even-handed language’, to the delight of Israeli media.

(https://sabrangindia.in/article/gazan-gandhis-gaza-bleeds-alone-liberals-and-progressives-go-mute

Will Israel pay a price for its latest Gaza massacre?

The Electronic Intifada

Palestinians are calling for escalating global campaigns to isolate Israel after its army killed 16 people in the Gaza Strip and wounded almost 1,500 others.

Meanwhile, Israel has rejected calls for an international investigation and its defense minister has commended soldiers on Friday’s slaughter.

“Evoking memories of the South African apartheid regime’s massacre of peaceful protesters in Sharpeville in 1960, Israel’s military committed a new massacre against Palestinian civilians as they were peacefully commemorating Palestinian Land Day,” the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC) said Monday.

The BNC, the steering group for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, urged people around the world to “mainstream the demand for all private and public entities in your country to end all cooperation and/or trade with the Israeli military and ‘security sector.’”

It also calls for heightened campaigns targeting companies and financial institutions complicit in Israel’s crimes. Read More

Coat Bomb and Explosive Prosthesis: British Intel Files Reveal How the Zionist Stern Gang Terrorized London

In July 1946, one of these groups, the Irgun, led by the future Israeli prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Menachem Begin, blew up the headquarters of the British administration in Palestine, Jerusalems King David Hotel, with heavy loss of civilian life and damage. The newly released MI5 files show that another group fighting the British, the Lehi or Stern Gang, dispatched cells to carry out bombings and assassinations in Britain itself. The Stern Gang is thought to be the worlds last terrorist group to describe itself publicly as terrorist, with some of its members using the term as a badge of honor.

In April 1947, two Stern Gang terrorists, a man and a woman, attempted to blow up the Colonial Office in Whitehall in the center of London. They planted a bomb containing 24 sticks of explosives at Dover House, headquarters of the Colonial Office, but it failed to go off because it was not fused correctly. The head of Londons Special Branch, commander Leonard Burt, believed that if the bomb had gone off, it would have caused as much damage as the bombing of the King David Hotel in London nine months earlier. Read More

Shades of the Third Reich

The shocking story of Israel's disappeared babies | Israel News | Al Jazeera

The first consequence is likely to be mounting pressure on the government to open the state's adoption files so that the true extent of the disappearances can be gauged and families reunited.

But Hanegbi's otherwise evasive comments will do little to end suspicions that officials are still actively trying to avoid confronting the most contentious questions: Why were the infants taken from their families? Did hospitals and welfare organisations traffic children in Israel's early years? And were state bodies complicit in the mass abductions?

When asked by Israeli TV programme Meet the Press whether government officials were involved, Hanegbi would say only: "We may never know." Read More

How will US Jerusalem move affect Israel's far right? By Jonathan Cook

'Tipping point'

"We may remember this date as the tipping point, as the moment when a new consensus emerged in Israel behind the idea of total Jewish supremacy," journalist David Sheen, an expert on Israel's far-right movements, told Al Jazeera.

Similar concerns were expressed by Yousef Jabareen, a Palestinian member of Israel's parliament.

"We can expect to see a move rightwards across Israeli society," he told Al Jazeera. "The centre-left parties were already tacking much closer to the right. They will now want to align themselves with Trump's position. Meanwhile, the right will be encouraged to move to the extreme right."

Both noted that Avi Gabbay - the recently elected leader of the Zionist Union, the official opposition and the party that was once the backbone of the Israeli peace camp - had begun espousing positions little different from those of right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. More

Ten Myths About Israel

Ten Myths About Israel | Countercurrents

Particularly, in the US and some European States, the Israeli and Zionist versions of history are wide-spread. Israel’s narrative relies on a collection of myths aimed at bringing the moral right and the ethical behavior of the Palestinians into twilight and making their claim to their country appear as illegitimate. Israel’s negation of Palestinian existence in the Land of Palestine is, however, a falsification of history.

“Ten Myths About Israel” came out in Germany in 2016 under the title ” What’s wrong with Israel? The Ten Main Myths of Zionism”. The mainstream media ignored it, which could also be the case in the US. It’s sad but that how media power works in favor of Israel.

Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, who lives in exile in Britain, deals in this book with the myths of Zionism and exposes them as legends consisting of half-truths and fabrications of history. The Zionist narrative has only little to do with historical reality and truth.

(http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/07/22/ten-myths-about-israel/

Violence: The language of a Jewish state

Barbarism by an educated and cultured people’ — Dawayima massacre was worse than Deir Yassin

After the massacre, a letter was sent to the editor of the leftist affiliated newspaper Al-Hamishmar, but never published.

Yair Auron

As Auron notes, there are still many archives of the time which are classified. Auron also states that there was an investigation that was never concluded and “died out” as a massive amnesty was provided to military personnel in February 1949.

This is a very exhaustive article, but I found it useful enough to translate this letter in full on its own. The letter, which first “disappeared,’ was provided to Auron by historian Benny Morris. Although these matters have been referred to in passing in historical summaries, the letter has never been published before in full.

The letter is brought forth by a member of the MAPAM leftist party, S. Kaplan, who got the letter of testimony from the soldier. It is written to Eliezer Peri, editor of Al Hamishmar, and dated 8th November 1948 (18 days after the massacre):

To comrade Eliezer Peri, good day,

Today I have read the editorial of “Al Hamishmar” where the question of our army’s conduct was aired, the army which conquers all but its own desires.

A testimony provided to me by an officer which was in [Al] Dawayima the day after its conquering: The soldier is one of ours, intellectual, reliable, in all 100%. He had confided in me out of a need to unload the heaviness of his soul from the horror of the recognition that such level of barbarism can be reached by our educated and cultured people. He confided in me because not many are the hearts today who are able to listen.

There was no battle and no resistance (and no Egyptians). The first conquerors killed from eighty to a hundred Arabs [including] women and children. The children were killed by smashing of their skulls with sticks. There was not a house without dead. The second wave of the [Israeli] army was a platoon that the soldier giving testimony belongs to.

In the town were left male and female Arabs, who were put into houses and were then locked in without receiving food or drink. Later explosive engineers came to blow up houses. One commander ordered an engineer to put two elderly women into the house that was to be blown up. The engineered refused and said he is willing to receive orders only from his [own] commander. So then [his] commander ordered the soldiers to put the women in and the evil deed was performed.

One soldier boasted that he raped an Arab woman and afterwards shot her. An Arab woman with a days-old infant was used for cleaning the back yard where the soldiers eat. She serviced them for a day or two, after which they shot her and the infant. The soldier tells that the commanders who are cultured and polite, considered good guys in society, have become vile murderers, and this occurs not in the storm of battle and heated response, but rather from a system of expulsion and destruction. The fewer Arabs remain – the better. This principle is the main political motive of [the] expulsions and acts of horror which no-one objects to, not in the field command nor amongst the highest military command. I myself was at the front for two weeks and heard boasting stories of soldiers and commanders, of how they excelled in the acts of hunting and “fucking” [sic]. To fuck an Arab, just like that, and in any circumstance, is considered an impressive mission and there is competition on winning this [trophy].

We find ourselves in a conundrum. To shout this out in the press will mean to assist the Arab League, which our representatives deny all complaints of. To not react would mean solidarity with moral corruption. The soldier told me that Deir Yassin [another massacre, by Irgun militants, April 1948] is not the peak of hooliganism. Is it possible to shout about Deir Yassin and be silent about something much worse?

It is necessary to initiate a scandal in the internal channels, to insist upon an internal investigation and punish the culprits. And first of all it is necessary to create in the military a special unit for the restraint of the army. I myself accuse first of all the government, which doesn’t seem to have any interest to fight the phenomena and perhaps even encourages them indirectly. The fact of not-acting is in itself encouragement. My commander told me that there is an unwritten order to not take prisoners of war, and the interpretation of “prisoner” is individually given by each soldier and commander. A prisoner can be an Arab man, woman or child. This was not only done at the exhibition windows [major Palestinian towns] such as Majdal and Nazareth.

I write this to you so that in the editorial and in the party the truth will be known and something effective would be done. At least let them not indulge in phony diplomacy which covers up for blood and murder, and to the extent possible, also the paper must not let this pass in silence.

Kaplan

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Israel continues to sow the seeds of discontent

The National – 26 January 2016 - Israel, it seems, has found a new weapon against Palestinian attacks – the humble cucumber seed.

Soldiers have been handing out seeds at checkpoints with advice to Palestinians – a nation of farmers until their lands were swallowed up by Jewish settlements – to stop their recent knife attacks on Israelis and invest in a peaceful future.

Palestinians were not fooled. The seeds, the packets revealed, were produced by the very settlements that corralled them into their urban enclaves.

Israel’s image-laundering is directed at western nations that have propped up the occupation – economically and diplomatically – for decades. As ever, Israel hopes to persuade outsiders that the occupation is benevolent.

The futility of its PR, however, is highlighted by the latest initiative of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

New legislation is designed to intimidate and silence Israeli human rights organisations – the international community’s eyes and ears in the occupied territories. These groups are to be defined as “moles”, or agents of foreign governments. Justice minister Ayelet Shaked warned that such foreign intervention “endangers democracy”.

The problem is that the governments funding the human rights activity are not Israel’s enemies, but some of its staunchest supporters – European states.

Israel treats Europe’s support for human rights as malign interference, but it welcomes the vast sums channelled its way via the European Union’s special trade agreement and the billions in US military aid. It is this kind of foreign intervention that sustains the occupation.

The new legislation, however, risks leaving the EU and US exposed. Removing the minimal restraints imposed on the Israeli army by monitoring activity, the crimes of occupation – and western complicity in them – will be all the starker. More

 

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Palestine overwhelmed by Illegal American Immigrants

If there were a Palestinian Donald Trump, he’d be fulminating against illegal immigrants swamping the Palestinian West Bank. And he’d be complaining that fully 1 in 6 of these undocumented squatters are Americans.

Since Americans have trouble understanding the basic facts of the situation, it is worthwhile underscoring that the United Nations General Assembly’s partition plan for British Mandate Palestine in 1947 did not include Gaza or the West Bank of the Jordan. Those territories were never awarded to Jewish settlers or later Israelis by any legitimate authority (even the UNGC is not an executive body and the Security Council should have signed off to grant real legitimacy in law). Israel militarily conquered Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 and have by now so altered the ways of life, economy and society of these occupied territories that the Occupation is illegal by the Hague Convention of 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1949 (designed to prevent atrocities against occupied populations of the sort the Axis carried out during WW II).

It is strictly illegal for the occupying power to attempt to annex occupied territory or to transfer its citizens into militarily occupied territory. Mussolini’s Italy pulled that stunt with the parts of France he occupied during WW II. When you hear that someone has violated the Geneva Convention, that isn’t just an abstract matter. It means that someone is acting the way the dictators acted during the war, because it is that kind of lawless behavior the conventions were attempting to forestall from happening again.

Israel illegally annexed part of the Palestinian West Bank to its district of Jerusalem and then settled it with Israeli squatters. Am I comparing Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to Mussolini in Menton, France? If the shoe fits . . .

Outside the territory annexed to Jerusalem, there are at least 350,000 Israeli squatters who have usurped Palestinian land.

This link explains the process of illegal Israeli squatting on and theft of Palestinian land (a process the International Court of Justice ruled is illegal in 2004).

Some 60,000 of the squatters, today’s equivalent of Mussolini’s Black Shirts , are Americans, according to a new study.

Those American politicians like Mike Huckabee and Donald Trump, who make exaggerated and untrue statements against undocumented workers in the United States but who defend illegal Israeli immigration into the West Bank, are supreme hypocrites. The Israeli squatters, moreover, are often hostile and aggressive, excluding Palestinians from the townhouses they construct on stolen property. More

 

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Ben Gurion ’48 letter barred return to Haifa

Over many decades, Israel’s self-serving deceptions about the Nakba in 1948 have been exposed for the lies Palestinians already knew them to be.

It was long accepted in the west that, as Israel claimed, Palestinians left their homes because they had been ordered to do so by neighbouring Arab leaders. The lie usefully distracted diplomats and scholars from the much more pertinent question of why Israel had refused to allow 750,000 Palestinian refugees to return to their homes after the war finished, as international law demanded.

The myth about the Arab leaders’ order, which had been steadily undermined by the work of the "new historians" of the late 1980s, was decisively punctured two years ago by an Israeli scholar who was given the wrong file by Israeli army archivists. It showed the story of the Arab leaders’ order was concocted by Israeli officials.

The same files should also have ended an equally diverting and lengthy debate about how many Palestinian villages Israel ethnically cleansed in 1948. Most Palestinian scholars were agreed it was well over 500; Israeli experts variously claimed it was between 300 and 400. Not that hundreds of ethnically cleansed villages was not bad enough, but Israel was happy to engage in a debate designed to make Palestinians look like inveterate exaggerators. Again, Israel’s archives confirmed the Palestinian account, with 530 villages razed.

Now another, related deception has been exposed. For decades Israel’s supporters have been arguing that Haifa, one of Palestine’s most important cities, was not ethnically cleansed of its population. The tens of thousands of Palestinians who fled under Israeli attack in April 1948 were later urged to return, according to Israel’s supporters, but they chose not to. Further proof, it seemed, that the Palestinians had only themselves to blame for losing their homeland. They chose to stay away.

Strangely, none of Israel’s propagandists ever seriously tried to suggest that the other 700,00 or so Palestinian refugees had been invited back home. It seemed as if the welcome supposedly extended in Haifa was reason enough for all Palestinians in exile to put aside their fears of Israel’s shoot-to-kill policy at its new borders and make the journey home.

But now a letter signed by David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and the engineer of its ethnic cleansing policy in 1948, shows that, far from Haifa’s doors being thrown open, Ben Gurion ordered that the refugees be barred from returning.

Written on 2 June 1948, the letter was sent to Abba Khoushy, soon to become Haifa’s mayor. It states: "I hear that Mr. Marriot [Cyril Marriot, the British consul in Haifa] is working to return the Arabs to Haifa. I don’t know how it is his business, but until the war is over we don’t want a return of the enemy. And all institutions should act accordingly."

Of course, that policy was not reversed after the war, as Ben Gurion hinted it might be. And one can wonder how much more specific his orders were to his army commanders if this was what he was telling civilian administrators.

The myth about Haifa was encouraged by Golda Meir, who wrote in her autobiography that Ben Gurion told her: "I want you to immediately go to Haifa and see to it that the Arabs who remain in Haifa are treated appropriately. I also want you to try and persuade the Arabs who are already on the beach to return home. You have to get it into their heads that they have nothing to fear."

Meir added: "I went immediately. I sat on the beach there and begged them to return home… I pleaded with them until I was exhausted but it didn’t work."

Heartbreaking – if only it were true.

How much longer must we wait to explode all the other myths associated with the Nakba, and much of Israel’s history ever since? More

www.haaretz.com/news/features/.premium-1.658179

 

 

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Teju Cole: Slow violence, cold violence – Teju Cole on East Jerusalem

Not all violence is hot. There’s cold violence too, which takes its time and finally gets its way. Children going to school and coming home are exposed to it. Fathers and mothers listen to politicians on television calling for their extermination. Grandmothers have no expectation that even their aged bodies are safe: any young man may lay a hand on them with no consequence.

The police could arrive at night and drag a family out into the street. Putting a people into deep uncertainty about the fundamentals of life, over years and decades, is a form of cold violence. Through an accumulation of laws rather than by military means, a particular misery is intensified and entrenched. This slow violence, this cold violence, no less than the other kind, ought to be looked at and understood.

Near the slopes of Mount Scopus in East Jerusalem is the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Most of the people who live here are Palestinian Arabs, and the area itself has an ancient history that features both Jews and Arabs. The Palestinians of East Jerusalem are in a special legal category under modern Israeli law. Most of them are not Israeli citizens, nor are they classified the same way as people in Gaza or the West Bank; they are permanent residents. There are old Palestinian families here, but in a neighbourhood like Sheikh Jarrah many of the people are refugees who were settled here after the nakba ("catastrophe") of 1948. They left their original homes behind, fleeing places such as Haifa and Sarafand al-Amar, and they came to Sheikh Jarrah, which then became their home. Many of them were given houses constructed on a previously uninhabited parcel of land by the Jordanian government and by the UN Relief and Works Agency. East Jerusalem came under Israeli control in 1967, and since then, but at an increasing tempo in recent years, these families are being rendered homeless a second or third time.

There are many things about Palestine that are not easily seen from a distance. The beauty of the land, for instance, is not at all obvious. Scripture and travellers’ reports describe a harsh terrain of stone and rocks, a place in which it is difficult to find water or to shelter from the sun. Why would anyone want this land? But then you visit and you understand the attenuated intensity of what you see. You get the sense that there are no wasted gestures, that this is an economical landscape, and that there is great beauty in this economy. The sky is full of clouds that are like flecks of white paint. The olive trees, the leaves of which have silvered undersides, are like an apparition. And even the stones and rocks speak of history, of deep time, and of the consolation that comes with all old places. This is a land of tombs, mountains and mysterious valleys. All this one can only really see at close range.

Another thing one sees, obscured by distance but vivid up close, is that the Israeli oppression of Palestinian people is not necessarily – or at least not always – as crude as western media can make it seem. It is in fact extremely refined, and involves a dizzying assemblage of laws and bylaws, contracts, ancient documents, force, amendments, customs, religion, conventions and sudden irrational moves, all mixed together and imposed with the greatest care.

The impression this insistence on legality confers, from the Israeli side, is of an infinitely patient due process that will eventually pacify the enemy and guarantee security. The reality, from the Palestinian side, is of a suffocating viciousness. The fate of Palestinian Arabs since the nakba has been to be scattered and oppressed by different means: in the West Bank, in Gaza, inside the 1948 borders, in Jerusalem, in refugee camps abroad, in Jordan, in the distant diaspora. In all these places, Palestinians experience restrictions on their freedom and on their movement. To be Palestinian is to be hemmed in. Much of this is done by brute military force from the Israeli Defence Forces – killing for which no later accounting is possible – or on an individual basis in the secret chambers of the Shin Bet. But a lot of it is done according to Israeli law, argued in and approved by Israeli courts, and technically legal, even when the laws in question are bad laws and in clear contravention of international standards and conventions.

The permanent residency of a Palestinian in East Jerusalem is anything but permanent

The reality is that, as a Palestinian Arab, in order to defend yourself against the persecution you face, not only do you have to be an expert in Israeli law, you also have to be a Jewish Israeli and have the force of the Israeli state as your guarantor. You have to be what you are not, what it is not possible for you to be, in order not to be slowly strangled by the laws arrayed against you. In Israel, there is no pretence that the opposing parties in these cases are equal before the law; or, rather, such a pretence exists, but no one on either side takes it seriously. This has certainly been the reality for the Palestinian families living in Sheikh Jarrah whose homes, built mostly in 1956, inhabited by three or four generations of people, are being taken from them by legal means.

As in other neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem – Har Homa, the Old City, Mount Scopus, Jaffa Gate – there is a policy at work in Sheikh Jarrah. This policy is two-fold. The first is the systematic removal of Palestinian Arabs, either by banishing individuals on the basis of paperwork, or by taking over or destroying their homes by court order. Thousands of people have had their residency revoked on a variety of flimsy pretexts: time spent living abroad, time spent living elsewhere in occupied Palestine, and so on. The permanent residency of a Palestinian in East Jerusalem is anything but permanent, and once it is revoked, is almost impossible to recover.

The second aspect of the policy is the systematic increase of the Jewish populations of these neighbourhoods. This latter goal is driven both by national and municipal legislation (under the official rubric of "demographic balance") and is sponsored in part by wealthy Zionist activists who, unlike some of their defenders in the western world, are proud to embrace the word "Zionist". However, it is not the wealthy Zionists who move into these homes or claim these lands: it is ideologically and religiously extreme Israeli Jews, some of whom are poor Jewish immigrants to the state of Israel. And when they move in – when they raise the Israeli flag over a house that, until yesterday, was someone else’s ancestral home, or when they begin new constructions on the rubble of other people’s homes – they act as anyone would who was above the law: callously, unfeelingly, unconcerned about the humiliation of their neighbours. This two-fold policy, of pushing out Palestinian Arabs and filling the land with Israeli Jews, is recognised by all the parties involved. And for such a policy, the term "ethnic cleansing" is not too strong: it is in fact the only accurate description.

Each Palestinian family that is evicted in Sheikh Jarrah is evicted for different reasons. But the fundamental principle at work is usually similar: an activist Jewish organisation makes a claim that the land on which the house was built was in Jewish hands before 1948. There is sometimes paperwork that supports this claim (there is a lot of citation of 19th-century Ottoman land law), and sometimes the paperwork is forged, but the court will hear and, through eccentric interpretations of these old laws, often agree to the claim. The violence this legality contains is precisely that no Israeli court will hear a corresponding claim from a Palestinian family. What Israeli law supports, de facto, is the right of return for Jews into East Jerusalem. What it cannot countenance is the right of return of Palestinians into the innumerable towns, villages and neighbourhoods all over Palestine, from which war, violence and law have expelled them.

History moves at great speed, as does politics, and Zionists understand this. The pressure to continue the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem is already met with pressure from the other side to stop this clear violation of international norms. So Zionist lawyers and lawmakers move with corresponding speed, making new laws, pushing through new interpretations, all in order to ethnically cleanse the land of Palestinian presence. And though Palestinians make their own case and though many young Jews, beginning to wake up to the crimes of their nation, have marched in support of the families evicted or under threat in Sheikh Jarrah – the law and its innovative interpretations evolve at a speed that makes self-defence all but impossible.

This cannot go on. The example of Sheikh Jarrah, the cold violence of it, is echoed all over Palestine. Side by side with this cold violence is, of course, the hot violence that dominates the news: Israel’s periodic wars on Gaza, its blockades on places such as Nablus, the random unanswerable acts of murder in places such as Hebron. In no sane future of humanity should the deaths of hundreds of children continue to be accounted collateral damage, as Israel did in the summer of 2014.

In the world’s assessment of the situation in Palestine, in coming to understand why the Palestinian situation is urgent, the viciousness of law must be taken as seriously as the cruelties of war. As in other instances in which world opinion forced a large-scale systemic oppression to come to an end, we must begin by calling things by their proper names. Israel uses an extremely complex legal and bureaucratic apparatus to dispossess Palestinians of their land, hoping perhaps to forestall accusations of a brutal land grab. No one is fooled by this. Nor is anyone fooled by the accusation, common to many of Israel’s defenders, that any criticism of Israeli policies amounts to antisemitism. The historical suffering of Jewish people is real, but it is no less real than, and does not in any way justify, the present oppression of Palestinians by Israeli Jews.

A neighbourhood like Sheikh Jarrah is an x-ray of Israel at the present moment: a limited view showing a single set of features, but significant to the entire body politic. The case that is being made, and that must continue to be made to all people of conscience, is that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is criminal. This case should also include the argument that the proliferation of bad laws by the legislature and courts of Israel is itself antisemitic in effect, to the extent that they fuel the ancient calumnies against Jewish people. Nothing can justify either antisemitism or the racist persecution of Arabs, and the current use of the law in Israel is a part of the grave ongoing offence to the human dignity of both Palestinians and Jews. More

• Teju Cole’s books include Open City. He is a contributor to Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation, edited by Vijay Prashad (Verso).

 

 

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The 'Land of the Free' supports one of the most repressive states in the world

Crimes against humanity in Gaza: is it really a 'buffer zone' - or a bigger plan

The international community and states parties to the United Nations should hang their heads in shame

Late last week, the White House decried Israel’s attack on a UN school in Gaza as "totally unacceptable" and "totally indefensible", then proceeded to approve $225m in funding for its Iron Dome. On Monday, the US state department went further, calling the airstrikes upon a UN school "disgraceful" – and yet America provides Israel with more than $3.1bn every year, restocking the ability of the Israel Defense Force (IDF) to hit more schools, and to wage total war against an imprisoned people, because of their nationality.

American taxpayers should not be paying for this. And the western world should stop rejecting serious inquiries about Israel’s moral inconsistencies, or allow it to benefit from cognitive dissonance and information overload amid the current crisis in Gaza.

There is a land grab going on. The Israeli prime minister, Binjamin Netanyahu, has shrunk Gaza’s habitable land mass by 44%, with an edict establishing a 3km (1.8-mile) buffer zone, a "no-go" zone for Palestinians – and that’s quite significant, because a good part of Gaza is only 3 to 4 miles wide. Over 250,000 Palestinians within this zone must leave their homes, or be bombed. As their territorial space collapses, 1.8m Gazans now living in 147 square miles will be compressed into 82 square miles.

Gaza’s entire social and physical infrastructure of housing, hospitals, places of worship, more than 130 of its schools, plus markets, water systems, sewer systems and roads are being destroyed. Under constant attack, without access to water, sanitary facilities, food and medical care, Gazans face an IDF-scripted apocalypse.

With Gaza’s land mass shrinking due to Israeli military action, it’s about time someone asked: What is the end game? Three weeks ago, Moshe Feiglin, deputy speaker of the Knesset, called for Gaza to "become part of sovereign Israel and will be populated by Jews. This will also serve to ease the housing crisis in Israel."

Israel has a housing crisis? After the "no-go" buffer zone is evacuated, there will be 21,951 Palestinians per square mile in Gaza, while Israel’s population density stands at 964 persons per square mile.

Deputy Speaker Feiglin wants the Palestinians in Gaza to lose all of their land. One must not assume that Mr Feiglin or his Likud faction speak for the main government actors like Prime Minister Netanyahu. After all, Knesset politics are complex and divergent. But since Gaza has just lost control of that 44% of its land, it may also be time to ask: does the establishment of that 3km zone represent the unfolding of a larger plan? Is that the end game?

At the very point where an aroused public becomes aghast at the slaughter of Gazans, the western world becomes inured to the violence, hypnotized by the media’s cadence of body counts. The intolerable becomes normalized, and later ignored as old news. Which would seem a perfect time to leave in place the 3km zone – for security purposes, of course – and then advance the proposal that Palestinians crammed into the remaining 56% of Gaza simply … leave.

I assume the IDF acts with deliberation, under orders from the Netanyahu government. And I think the extraordinary and illegal forced relocation of over 250,000 Palestinians from 44% of Gazan land is a crime against humanity under the guise of establishing a "buffer zone" for security purposes.

Look at the region’s maps from recent history. Look at the steady erosion of Palestinian land and the acquisition of land by Israel, and you can understand that the present attack on Gaza is not about solely about Hamas. It’s about land. It isn’t just about Hamas’s rockets. It’s about land. It isn’t just about Hamas’s tunnels. It’s about land. It isn’t about kidnappings. It is about land. It isn’t even about meeting a housing crisis in Israel. It is about grabbing land from the Palestinians in Gaza and the natural resources that go with the land, upon the occasion of Israel’s military invasion of Gaza.

Yes, Hamas’s attacks on Israel are illegal and should be condemned, and those who ordered the attacks should be held accountable under law. All policies and practices which refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist should be condemned. Israel has a right to exist. But Israel’s right to exist is impaired when Israel decides Palestinians have no right to exist on their own land. It’s time for us to stop paying for Israel’s dubious, destructive self-righteousness. And it’s time for the solipsism syndrome afflicting Israel’s leaders to get a day of discussion in the International Criminal Court concerning their attacks on Gaza – and especially their new 3km "buffer zone". More

 

 

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Paving Way for War Crimes Charges, Palestinians Move to Join International Criminal Court

Following the defeat of a United Nations Security Council resolution that demanded an end to Israeli occupation and recognition of Palestinian statehood, Palestine's president Mahmoud Abbas signed a Palestinian request to join the International Criminal Court on Wednesday, a move that the Guardian wrote sets "Palestinians on a diplomatic collision course with Israel and the U.S."

"There is aggression practiced against our land and our country, and the Security Council has let us down—where shall we go?” Mr. Abbas reportedly said at his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, as he signed the Rome Statute, the founding charter of the Hague court, as well as over a dozen other international treaties and conventions.

"We want to complain to this organization," he said, referring to the court. "As long as there is no peace, and the world doesn’t prioritize peace in this region, this region will live in constant conflict. The Palestinian cause is the key issue to be settled."

As expected, the decision elicited an angry response from Israel. "The one who needs to fear the International Criminal Court in the Hague is the Palestinian Authority, which has a unity government with Hamas, a terror organization like (the Islamic State group) which commits war crimes," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement.

According to the Associated Press, Netanyahu called Israel's soldiers "the most moral army in the world" and said the country would take unspecified "retaliatory steps."

The AP noted that "turning to the International Criminal Court marks a major policy shift by transforming Abbas' relations with Israel from tense to openly hostile. Abbas has been threatening to join the court since 2012, but held off under American and Israeli pressure. The Palestinians can use the court to challenge the legality of Israeli settlement construction on occupied lands and to pursue war crimes charges connected to military activity."

The State Department criticized the move as well. In a statement issued Wednesday, it said it was "deeply troubled by today’s Palestinian action regarding the ICC," and called it "an escalatory step that will not achieve any of the outcomes most Palestinians have long hoped to see for their people." More

 

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Israel’s looming gas empire requires a final solution in Gaza

“The destruction which I have seen coming here is beyond description,” said UN secretary-general, Ban Ki Moon, after his October tour of the Gaza Strip.

Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s military incursion into Gaza this past summer, wrought an unprecedented level of devastation on the tiny strip of land inhabited by 1.8 million people. The operation had damaged or destroyed over 100,000 homes, affecting more than 600,000 Palestinians - a third of the population.

Mowing the grass

“Basically the town is unliveable,” said Mayor Mohammed al-Kafarna about Beit Hanoun. “There is no power, water or communications. There are not basics for life.” One major sewage pipe serving nearly half a million people had been severed, sending huge quantities of raw sewage into the sea and on fields.

In 2012, a UN report warned that Gaza “will not be liveable by 2020”. The following year, Israel’s tightening of its blockade prompted Filippo Grande, commissioner-general of the UN Works and Relief Agency (UNWRA), to say that “Gaza is quickly becoming uninhabitable.”

Israel’s massive bombardment of Gaza this summer has fast-tracked that outcome. This is no accident. While Israeli officials will not admit it, this strategic goal can be surmised from the statements of those close to key officials in Netanyahu’s administration.

Dismantling Gaza

“The only durable solution,” wrote Martin Sherman in the Jerusalem Post during the summer onslaught, “requires dismantling Gaza, humanitarian relocation of the non-belligerent Arab population, and extension of Israeli sovereignty over the region”: a recipe for ethnic cleansing and colonisation. He complained that the elected Israeli government is constrained by an unelected “left-wing” political discourse wedded to “the two-state concept and the land-for-peace doctrine,” both of which must be rejected.

For Sherman, the current strategy of periodically “mowing the grass” – “a new round of fighting every time the Palestinian violence reaches levels Israel finds unacceptable” – must be replaced by a final solution: “The grass needs to be uprooted – once and for all.”

Sherman is no pariah. On the contrary, his ideas increasingly represent the thinking of senior Israeli cabinet officials. As founding director of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), an initiative dedicated to laying “the foundations of a new assertive Zionist-compliant paradigm,” Sherman’s platform is endorsed by the following key Israeli leaders: Yaakov Amidror, Israel’s national security adviser until 2013; Uzi Landau, minister of tourism and ex-minister for energy; and Moshe Ya’alon, vice prime minister and incumbent defence minister.

Colonisation

These connections reveal critical elements of Israel’s security strategy. Amidror, for instance, has long advocated that Israel directly occupy Gaza “for many years,” to prevent a situation where “Hamas is strengthened into an entity similar to Hezbollah.”

His successor, Yossi Cohen, who presided with Ya’alon over Operation Protective Edge and who has previously served as deputy head of Shin Bet (Israel’s domestic security agency), told Israeli Army Radio that the operation had successfully created conditions that would facilitate the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) return to power in Gaza at Hamas’ expense. Hamas needed to be “demilitarised”, he said.

Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman agreed: “As long as Hamas controls Gaza, we won’t be able to ensure the safety of Israel's citizens in the South and we won't be able to make a peace agreement.” Earlier during the latest invasion of Gaza, Lieberman recommended that Israel consider re-occupying Gaza to end rocket attacks.

Palestinian statehood: A threat to Israel’s energy hegemony?

Another Sherman endorser, Uzi Landau, who is currently minister of tourism, was minister for energy and water from 2009 to 2013. There he oversaw Israel’s resource policies, especially concerning gas discoveries and export options. In 2011, when the PA was bidding to secure formal UN recognition of Palestinian statehood, Landau told Israeli radio that Israel should unilaterally declare its sovereignty over the Jordan Valley, West Bank settlements, and all of Gaza to head off the bid. He had previously been dispatched by the foreign ministry to Chile, Colombia and Australia to lobby against the PA campaign.

Why would Landau, then energy and water minister, be sent to lobby against Palestinian statehood?

In recent years, Israel had made increasingly significant energy discoveries throwing light on the link. In December 2010, the Texas based energy company Noble energy announced that it had discovered 25 trillion cubic feet of gas in the offshore Leviathan field (downgraded more recently to 17 trillion). This followed the US Geological Survey’s (USGS) assessment earlier in the year of an estimated 122 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable gas in the Levant basin, encompassing the waters of Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus and Gaza. This is “bigger than anything we have assessed in the United States,” said a USGS spokesperson at the time.

Landau’s advisers: Israel’s gas could deplete in decades

The new discoveries would turn Israel into a gas-export powerhouse, with potentially transformative implications across the region. But there were potential pitfalls.

In 2012, the chief scientists of Landau’s energy and water ministry warned the government that Israel did not have sufficient gas resources to sustain both exports and domestic demand. Citing a gap of “100 to 150 billion cubic metres between the demand projections that were presented to the committee and the most recent projections,” they said that Israel’s “gas reserves are likely to last even less than 40 years!"

By 2055, the chief scientists argued, even if Israel chose not to export any gas, it would entirely exhaust its offshore reserves. But if Israel exports significant quantities of gas, and if it turns out that much of its gas turns out to be not commercially extractable, then the breaking point could arrive decades earlier. “The more gas we use now, the sooner we'll need to start importing gas or oil or to find alternative technology.”

Landau and his colleagues obviously took the report seriously enough that, according to Ha'aretz, they excluded the report’s findings from the committee determining Israel’s gas export policy.

Threat of war

Complicating matters further, many of the recently discovered oil and gas resources Israel is claiming for itself are in disputed territorial waters where maritime boundaries are not clearly defined.

In the summer of 2010, Landau said that Israel would “not hesitate to use force” to protect its offshore gas discoveries. He was responding to claims that Leviathan’s deposits extend into Lebanon’s territorial waters.

Similarly, two offshore fields that Israel is already exploiting have been claimed by the Palestinian Authority to extend into Gaza's offshore territory – Mari-B, which is near depletion, and Noa North, both of which are being developed by Noble Energy.

Gaza’s gas: The key to peace?

In March 2014, just a few months before the IDF launched Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, the German Marshall Fund of the United States published a policy brief on Israel’s interests in Gaza’s gas fields by Simon Henderson, director of the Gulf and Energy Policy Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) in Washington DC. WINEP is notable for its influence amongst US foreign policymakers. Current and former WINEP members have had senior roles in successive US administrations, including Obama's, and its alumni have gone onto serve across various US government agencies on Middle East policy.

Henderon’s policy brief in particular pinpointed the Gaza Marine, where just over 1 trillion cubic feet of gas was discovered by BG Group in 2000. Gaza Marine could supply all of Palestinian power for up to 20 years. Although the election of Hamas in 2006 in Gaza left negotiations over the gas between Israel and the PA at a stalemate, according to Henderson: “In late 2011 and early 2012, there was renewed Israeli interest in devising a way to exploit the natural gas of Gaza Marine.”

International diplomatic interest further increased in 2013, with Quartet Middle East envoy Tony Blair and US secretary of state John Kerry seeing the Gaza Marine as integral to a potential peace package. In October 2013, Israeli officials conceded that the Israeli government was “very supportive” of the project. All this is corroborated by British Foreign Office files released under Freedom of Information.

Israel’s vision for the Gaza Marine includes a range of options. Apart from boosting PA revenues dramatically, “Using Gaza Marine gas may also reduce the need of Israel to consume its own natural gas to generate electricity for the Palestinians,” observed Henderson. “Such usage will also marginally lower Israel’s dependence on fields controlled by the Noble Energy/Delek group, which currently holds the licenses for the Tamar field and all the other Israeli fields likely to come on stream in the next few years.”

Gaza’s gas, Henderson continued, “would be available for transfer into Israel’s natural gas main network, feeding power stations and petrochemicals across the country.” The gas could also be used for Gaza’s power plant, or even to power the West Bank. In the latter case, “the Gaza Marine natural gas would be fed to an Israel power plant to generate electricity. That electricity would then be supplied to the West Bank.”

Gaza’s gas: The key to exports?

But there is another dimension to the strategic significance of the Gaza Marine: Israel’s gas ambitions. This was alluded to by Ariel Ezrahi, senior energy adviser in Tony Blair’s Office of the Quartet Representative in east Jerusalem, who noted that the biggest obstacle to Israel becoming a regional gas exporter is the opposition of domestic Arab populations in Jordan, Egypt, Turkey and elsewhere.

This opposition could, however, be overcome if Israel finds a way to integrate Gaza’s gas into the export equation, so that Arab publics find a way to see gas deals with Israel as acceptable: “… it would be wise for Israel to at least consider the contribution of the Palestinian dimension to these deals,” said Ezrahi. “I think it’s a mistake for Israel to rush into regional agreements without at least considering the Palestinian dimension and how it can contribute to Israeli interests.” Israel should use the Gaza Marine “as an asset as they strive to join the regional power grid, and as a bridge to the Arab world,” by selling Palestinian “gas to various markets,” or promoting a deal with the corporations developing Israel’s “Tamar and Leviathan [fields] that will allow for the sale of cheap gas to the [Palestinian] Authority.”

Hamas: The obstacle

For Israel, the existence of Hamas remains the chief obstacle to any of these scenarios. According to Simon Henderson: “The main challenge to Secretary Kerry’s vision is that the Gaza Marine natural gas field is offshore the Gaza Strip, controlled by Hamas, whose authority is not recognised by the PA, which is based in Ramallah. Additionally, the United States regards Hamas as a terrorist organisation and Washington is therefore legally constrained from cooperating with it.”

In other words, from the perspective of Israeli hawks and the entities of the Quartet - the US, EU, UN and Russia - the fundamental obstacle to both the proposed ‘peace package’ and Israel’s interests in becoming a regional energy hegemony, is the continued existence of Hamas in Gaza.

In 2007, incumbent defence minister Ya’alon advised in an influential policy paper that there was only one way to solve this problem: “It is clear that without an overall military operation to uproot Hamas control of Gaza, no drilling work can take place without the consent of the radical Islamic movement.” Ya’alon is yet another Israeli government official who endorses Martin Sherman’s IISS initiative.

Since then, successive Israeli military operations - including Operation Protective Edge - have aimed at degrading Hamas’ power in Gaza by making the entire civilian population of the strip pay the price. Through excessive military action to devastate Gaza’s critical infrastructure until much of the strip is virtually “uninhabitable,” Israel has successfully accelerated this process.

Strangulating Gaza

Under the new ceasefire agreement with Hamas after the operation, Israel had secured even more Draconian powers to enforce its ongoing siege of Gaza. This included a partial military re-occupation by maintaining a 100 metre buffer zone inside Gaza; a joint Israeli, UN and PA committee to supervise the process for goods being permitted into Gaza; tight monitoring of imports of construction materials, as well as their use inside Gaza, to guarantee they would not be used by Hamas to build ‘terror tunnels’ and weapons; and on the table for discussion, Israel’s top priority was to make the total demilitarisation of Gaza a precondition for reconstruction and rehabilitation.

Under this extraordinary scheme, Gaza will be under constant surveillance by Israeli drones, and the PA-UN supervisory committee will submit all details of homes needing rebuilding to an Israeli database for close monitoring and approval.

Against this context, the decision by the EU General Court to remove Hamas from a list of terrorist groups along with the European Parliament’s new resolution recognising “in principle… Palestinian statehood and the two-state solution,” takes on new meaning.

To move forward, what remains of the aborted Kerry-Quartet vision for ‘peace’ encompassing the exploitation of Gaza’s gas, requires Hamas’s military capabilities – already infinitesimal compared to Israeli’s $15.5 billion military budget – to be degraded to the point of being utterly negligible.

The EU’s latest measures appear designed to incentivize the Palestinians and Hamas to comply with this vision of a pliable, demilitarised Gaza as a step toward a ‘two-state’ solution dominated and controlled by Israel: the carrot. Israel’s threat and use of force to smash Gaza into an uninhabitable no-man’s land, in which the US and the EU are complicit through extensive trade and military aid to Israel, is the stick. More

 

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Israelis rattled by search for truth about the Nakba

First ‘truth commission’ avoids issue of reconciliation as veteran Israeli fighters due to confess to 1948 war crimes

Middle East Eye – 9 December 2014

The first-ever “truth commission” in Israel, to be held on Wednesday, will feature confessions from veteran Israeli fighters of the 1948 war who are expected to admit to perpetrating war crimes as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homes.

The commission is the culmination of more than decade of antagonistic confrontations between a small group of activists called Zochrot, the Hebrew word for Remembering, and the Israeli authorities as well as much of the Jewish public.

Founded in 2002, Zochrot is dedicated to educating Israeli Jews about what Palestinians call the Nakba, Arabic for catastrophe, referring to Israel’s creation on the ruins of their homeland more than six decades ago. The group also campaigns for the right of return for Palestinian refugees to Israel, probably the biggest taboo in Israeli society.

The commission, which has no official standing, could be the first of several such events around Israel, to investigate atrocities and war crimes committed in different localities, said Liat Rosenberg, Zochrot’s director.

“We have looked to other such commissions around the world as models, most obviously in South Africa,” she said. “But unlike the one there, ours does not include the element of reconciliation because the conflict here has yet to be resolved.

“We cannot talk about reconciliation when the Nakba is ongoing. We are still in a situation where there is apartheid, constant violations of human rights and 70 percent of the Palestinian community are refugees.”

The commission is likely to provoke outrage from the Israeli government, which passed the so-called Nakba Law in 2011 to try to make it harder to commemorate Palestinian suffering. The impact of the law is being widely felt. Just last month, the culture ministry vowed to block a government grant to a Tel Aviv cultural centre that hosted a Zochrot film festival on the Nakba.

Names kept secret

Rosenberg said Israeli veteran fighters and Palestinian witnesses participating in the truth commission had asked for their names to be kept secret until the hearings for fear that friends and family would put pressure on them to withdraw.

The commission is being held in the city of Beersheva, a once-Bedouin town that was ethnically cleansed in 1948 and is today the largest Jewish city in the Negev region in southern Israel.

Zochrot said it had chosen the city to host the first event event because forced expulsions of Bedouin from the Negev had taken place not only in 1948, but had continued on a large scale, out of view of observers, for many years afterwards.

The commission is the latest project by Zochrot that discredits a traditional Israeli narrative that some 750,000 Palestinians left under orders from Arab leaders and that Israel’s army acted only in self-defence. Such beliefs have fed into the common assumption from the Israeli public that Israel’s army is the “most moral in the world”.

“This is not just about researching the truth,” said Rosenberg. “The truth of the Nakba is to a large degree known, but the task is to expose the truth to the Israeli Jewish public – both so that it is forced to take responsibility for what happened and so there can be accountability.”

The commission is the direct result of a project launched by Zochrot two years ago to create an alternative archive of the Nakba, based on filmed testimonies from Palestinian refugees and Israeli veterans. Activists fear that, as the generation of refugees and fighters dies off, they will take their secrets to the grave.

Israeli military archives relating to the 1948 war began being opened to academics in the late 1980s. This led to a group of so-called “new historians” overturning the traditional accounts of that period and unearthing written evidence of massacres and ethnic cleansing operations for the first time.

Archives closed

However, historians have reported in recent years that the Israeli authorities have become more reluctant to open files and many of the more controversial episodes of the 1948 war are still unclear.

Rosenberg hopes the commission will begin to fill some of the gaps.

According to Rosenberg, three Israeli fighters and three Palestinian witnesses will testify before a panel of six commissioners. The commissioners will then question them further about events and make follow up recommendations.

The hearings are due to be streamed online.

One veteran of the fighting in the Negev, Amnon Neumann, has already gone on record in testimony that can be seen in Zochrot’s film archive.

He has said the Bedouin in the Negev – contrary to popular Israeli perception – put up almost no resistance to advancing Jewish forces because they lacked “a military capacity” and “had no weapons”. Nonetheless, he said, the Israeli army terrified the Bedouin villagers out of their homes by shooting either at them, or above their heads.

“We drove them out. Women and children went to Gaza. … By the morning there was nobody there. We burnt their houses,” Neumann said.

When villagers tried to sneak back to tend crops or vineyards under the cover of night, he recounted, the soldiers opened fire. “We would shoot and kill them. This was part of the horrible things we did.”

In other filmed testimony, Mordechai Bar-On, an officer in 1948 with the Givati Brigade, confirmed that orders were to shoot “infiltrators” – a reference to refugees who tried to return to their villages. “Even if there were women and children. I remember I told myself that we would do it. … There was an order to kill, not even catch them,” Bar-On said.

For the most part, the Israeli veterans are coming forward now out of a feeling of guilt.

“At that time I did not see anything wrong with what we were doing,” Neumann said. “If I was told to do things that I do not want to mention [here], I did them with no doubts at all. … Not now. It is already 50, 60 years that I am filled with regret.”

But challenges remain, and despite veterans coming forward, piecing together events can still be difficult.

Rosenberg said many of those giving filmed testimony, including Neumann, have been reluctant to go into details of the war crimes they participated in. It is now hoped that the questioning by the commissioners will encourage participants to be even more forthcoming.

Put on trucks to Gaza

The commission will also move beyond the 1948 period and examine expulsions in the semi-desert Negev region, comprising nearly two-thirds of Israel’s landmass, for the 12 years following the war.

Isolated from the rest of the new state of Israel, the Negev was largely unmonitored as the Israeli military carried out expulsions of Bedouin throughout the 1950s, said Raneen Jeries, a Zochrot organiser.

More than 2,000 Palestinian inhabitants of al-Majdal, which later became the Jewish city of Ashkelon, were put on trucks and shipped to Gaza nearly two years after the war ended, according to Nur Masalha, a Palestinian historian and expert on Israeli “transfer” policies.

Jeries said the legacy of the events of 1948 was being felt to this day, with policies of expulsion continuing in the Negev and the occupied territories.

Haaretz reporter Amira Hass revealed three months ago that the Israeli military was planning to forcibly relocate for a second time the Jahalin tribe. The tribe was driven out of the Negev in 1948 and fled to the safety of the West Bank, then under Jordanian control. However, Israel occupied the land after the 1967 war, and it seems that Israeli authorities now want to expel some 12,500 Jahalin tribes people, this time to a site near Jericho.

Zochrot had been successful in forcing Israelis to recognise the Nakba and a darker side to the 1948 war, said Neve Gordon, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva, where the truth commission is to be held.

“A decade ago, if I mentioned the Nakba in a class of 150 students, hardly any of them would have known what I meant. Now 80 or 90 per cent would know,” Gordon told MEE.

Gordon also attributed the change both to Zochrot’s activities and statements by Arab legislators representing Israel’s large Palestinian minority, comprising a fifth of the total population.

Law against commemoration

But as the issue of the Nakba has become more visible in Israel, sensitivity about it has only grown. Ahead of Nakba Day last May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lashed out at the Palestinian Authority for commemorating the day, saying: “They are standing silent to mark the tragedy of the establishment of Israel, the state of the Jewish people.”

Palestinians were educating their children with “endless propaganda” calling for the disappearance of Israel, he said.

Economy Minister Naftali Bennett went further, saying: “We need not tolerate Israeli Arabs who promote Nakba Day.”

The government has backed up its rhetoric with legislation, passing a Nakba Law in 2011 that denies public funds to institutions and organisations that commemorate the Palestinians’ dispossession. The measure is partly seen as a reaction to Zochrot’s growing success.

The original legislation, which would have criminalised any commemoration of the Nakba – making many of Zochrot’s activities illegal – was water-downed after Israel came under strong international pressure.

In Zochrot’s early years, its main efforts were directed at escorting Israeli Jews and Palestinian refugees to some of the more than 500 Palestinian villages that Israel destroyed during and after the 1948 war. The villages were razed to prevent refugees from returning home.

The remnants of most of the villages are now barely traceable, hidden under forests planted by a charity called the Jewish National Fund or lost within gated communities in which only Jews can live.

Zochrot has continued such visits, placing signposts to remind the new Jewish inhabitants that their communities are built on the ruins of Palestinian homes, often belonging to neighbours living a short distance away. A large proportion of Israel’s Palestinian minority were internally displaced by the 1948 war and live close to their original homes but are barred from returning.

Backlash on campuses

Eitan Bronstein, who founded Zochrot, said the current challenge was how to change Israeli Jews’ perception of the Nakba.

“They now recognise the word but what does it mean to them? Many, it seems, think it is simply a negative label Palestinians have attached to Israel’s establishment. We have an Independence Day that they call their Nakba,” Bronstein said.

“We need to educate them about the events of the Nakba, what occurred and our responsibility for it. They have to stop thinking of it as just propaganda against Israel.”

The right wing, including the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, has grown increasingly rattled by Zochrot’s agenda-setting programme of events.

The popularity of a far-right youth movement, Im Tirtzu, has grown rapidly on Israeli university campuses over the past few years, in part as a backlash to commemorations of the Nakba by Zochrot and Palestinian students.

Last month, when Zochrot held its second Nakba and Right of Return Film Festival in Tel Aviv, the culture minister, Limor Livnat, immediately threatened to pull a government grant worth more than $450,000 from the cinema that hosted it.

“The state cannot bear the cost of funding of an entity that encourages debate over what the Palestinians call ‘the right of return’,” Livnat said in a statement. She was reported to have based her decision on her reading of the Nakba Law.

“The antagonism towards Zochrot and the idea of the Nakba is part of the educational process,” said Bronstein. “It is a necessary phase Israel needs to pass through if we are to get to a point of reconciliation.”

Unfazed by threats

Bronstein and others have faced angry opposition from the Israeli public and police as they have tried to stage Nakba commemorations – most notably in Tel Aviv in 2012, when they were surrounded by riot police for four hours. Three Zochrot activists were arrested.

Yet Zochrot’s organisers, whose members include both Jewish and Palestinian citizens, seem largely unfazed by the threats and hostility their group generates.

Last year Zochrot arranged a conference that for the first time examined not just the principle of the right of return but practical ways to implement it.

This year the group launched a phone app, called iNakba, in three languages, which provides users with detailed maps and information on the destroyed villages.

Jeries said it had had thousands of downloads, giving Israelis for the first time the chance to peel away the subsequent layers of construction and forestation to see what was destroyed, often on their doorstep. More

Tagged as: Bedouin, destroyed villages, Nakba

 

© 2014