Palestinians
In Israel Find Themselves Part Of The Disengagement Debate
By Jonathan Cook
10 August 2005
The
Electronic Intifada
Until
this weekend Israel's one million Palestinian citizens had stayed out
of the debate about the country's imminent disengagement from Gaza.
"It's not our story," they said when pressed, "this is
an entirely Jewish conversation." Although Israeli Jews have been
flying blue and orange ribbons from their cars for months - showing
respectively support for and opposition to the disengagement - car aerials
in Israel's Arab towns and villages have remained resolutely bare.
That is no longer
the case. At the weekend the Arab drivers in the Galilee could be seen
flying black ribbons to commemorate the killings of four Arab citizens
on a bus on Thursday afternoon by a young Jewish extremist with his
Israeli army-issued rifle. Now Israel's Palestinian citizens find themselves
part of the conversation, whether they like it or not.
Mourners at the
funerals in the Arab town of Shefaram on Friday were agreed that the
bus was attacked because it was a soft target for extremist settles
prepared to use any tactics to stop the disengagement. The 19-year-old
gunman, Eden Nathan Zada, presumably hoped that by killing Arab citizens
he could provoke riots across the Galilee that would draw the massed
ranks of soldiers away from Gaza. The settlers might then be able to
reach their desired destination, the threatened settlements of the Strip.
The country's Arab
minority, however, is refusing to be dragged into a confrontation with
the security forces. And for the moment, at least, the government appears
to be siding with Arab citizens against the extremist settlers. Ariel
Sharon, who lost no time in denouncing Zada as "a bloodthirsty
terrorist", needs Palestinian citizens to stay "on side"
as he takes on opponents who hope to bring about his downfall over the
disengagement.
But what about the
day after the pullout from Gaza? What does Sharon plan then? In this
respect, the country's Arab citizens have strong grounds to be extremely
fearful, as many of their leaders admit in private.
Their reasoning
is based on an understanding that the second intifada is all but finished
and that a third intifada - with very different features and goals -
will begin soon after disengagement. The signs are that, despite their
success in staying out of the two previous intifadas, the minority will
have little choice but to be dragged into the struggle this time.
That assessment
is based on a view shared by almost all Palestinians that Sharon has
no intention of turning the disengagement - what they interpret as a
military redeployment to Gaza's perimeters - into the first step towards
Palestinian statehood.
And as if to confirm
their fears, the Israeli prime minister and his generals are already
warning that they will "respond very harshly", as Sharon recently
told Condoleezza Rice, against any signs of what Israel regards as Palestinian
"terrorism". General Eival Giladi, a military adviser to Sharon,
has said there is likey to be "major collateral damage", that
is civilian deaths, if Gazans refuse to keep quiet post-disengagement.
In such circumstances, it is difficult to believe Palestinians and Israelis
will not be forced into another round of bloodletting.
For the time being,
however, Palestinians are adopting a wait-and-see policy as they try
to divine their future and the likely response of the international
community. They are fully aware that, just as Olso altered the terms
of the conflict, the disengagement will transform the nature of the
occupation and require new strategies of resistance.
So what will be
the battleground of a third intifada? Most likely, it will be shaped
by Israel's current obsessive policy of "ethnic consolidation",
of which disengagement is only a small part. Israeli demographers believe
that today's slim majority of Jews in the land between the Mediterranean
and the River Jordan - 5.2 million Jews to 4.9 million Palestinians
- will be eroded within a decade. For Israelis that revives issues that
have been dormant since the Jewish state was established through war
and ethnic cleansing in 1948.
The disengagement
will instantly erase at least 1.2 million Gazans from the balance-sheet.
But as the historian Benny Morris and the former chief of staff Moshe
Yaalon have suggested the Israeli government's greater concern is the
"unfinished business" of 1948, the 20 per cent of the indigenous
Palestinian population who were not expelled from the newly founded
state of Israel.
Today comprising
more than one million Israeli citizens, they are perceived by the Sharon
government to be a double threat. First, they challenge Israel's self-promotion
as a "Jewish and democratic" state by exposing the fact that
its politics are framed in entirely ethnic and racist terms.
But, more importantly
in the eyes of Israeli policy-makers, a large Palestinian minority at
the heart of the Jewish state fatally undermines Israel's territorial
ambitions in the occupied territories. Through potential marriage to
the one million "Israeli Arabs", Palestinians in the West
Bank and Gaza are offered a backdoor route to Israeli citizenship, thereby
reversing the ethnic cleansing of more than half a century ago.
As Israel has been
turning up the heat on the occupied territories, Israelis have begun
fearing that more Palestinians will choose this path. That was why the
Knesset passed an amendment to the Citizenship Law last month, making
it impossible for most Palestinians to naturalise as Israelis on marrying
an Israeli Arab. It closed once and for all the door on potentially
tens of thousands of Palestinians, and many more of their offspring,
who might have been eligible for Israeli citizenship.
The other strategy
being formulated by Sharon against Israel's Palestinian minority is
what is being called the "silent transfer" of a sliver of
land known as the Little Triangle, close to the West Bank, along with
its quarter of a million Arab citizens, from Israeli sovereignty to
that of the Palestinian Authority. In return Sharon would demand the
annexation to Israel of illegal Jewish settlement blocs in the West
Bank, including Maale Adumim and Ariel.
Despite the overwhelming
opposition of the Triangle's residents to the plan, Sharon is reported
to be working with his officials to devise a way to sell this "transfer
of citizenship" to the international community. If the plan is
carried out, the Triangle's inhabitants would lose all citizenship rights,
and instead would find themselves being encased behind a new section
of Israel's wall.
According to Professor
Yoav Peled of Tel Aviv University, Israel has reached a "dangerous
turning point" where it is searching ever more desperately for
a pretext to remove the citizenship rights of the Palestinians it inherited
unwillingly in 1948. The goal, says Prof Peled, is to create a demographically
pure Jewish state and alongside it a stunted, phantom state for the
region's Palestinians.
As a result, Palestinians
under Israeli rule - whether Arab citizens or occupied subjects - are
finding themselves being pushed into the same corner, victims of the
same oppressive and racist policies. The more Israel presses on with
its "unfinished business" from 1948, the more likely it is
that a third, even more violent intifada is just around the corner.
Jonathan Cook
reports from Israel. He is a contributor to two forthcoming books,
The Other Side of Israel (published by Doubleday, September 6) and Catastrophe
Remembered (published by Zed Books, October 7). His website can be found
at www.jkcook.net.