How
Israel Enforces
"Demographic Separation"
By Jonathan Cook
20 January, 2007
Countercurrents.org
When
I published my book Blood and Religion last year, I sought not only
to explain what lay behind Israeli policies since the failed Camp David
negotiations nearly seven years ago, including the disengagement from
Gaza and the building of a wall across the West Bank, but I also offered
a few suggestions about where Israel might head next.
Making predictions in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict might be considered a particularly dangerous
form of hubris, but I could hardly have guessed how soon my fears would
be realized.
One of the main forecasts
of the book was that Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line --
those who currently enjoy Israeli citizenship and those who live as
oppressed subjects of Israel’s occupation -- would soon find common
cause as Israel tries to seal itself off from what it calls the Palestinian
“demographic threat”: that is, the moment when Palestinians
outnumber Jews in the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan
River.
I suggested that Israel’s
greatest fear was ruling over a majority of Palestinians and being compared
to apartheid South Africa, a fate that has possibly befallen it faster
than I expected with the recent publication of Jimmy Carter’s
book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. To avoid such a comparison, I
argued, Israel was creating a “Jewish fortress”, separating
-- at least demographically -- from Palestinians in the occupied territories
by sealing off Gaza through a disengagement of its settler population
and by building a 750km wall to annex large areas of the West Bank.
It was also closing off the
last remaining avenue of a Right of Return for Palestinians by changing
the law to make it all but impossible for Palestinians living in Israel
to marry Palestinians in the occupied territories and thereby gain them
citizenship.
The corollary of this Jewish
fortress, I suggested, would be a sham Palestinian state, a series of
disconnected ghettos that would prevent Palestinians from organizing
effective resistance, non-violent or otherwise, but which would give
the Israeli army an excuse to attack or invade whenever they chose,
claiming that they were facing an “enemy state” in a conventional
war.
Another benefit for Israel
in imposing this arrangement would be that it could say all Palestinians
who identified themselves as such -- whether in the occupied territories
or inside Israel -- must now exercise their sovereign rights in the
Palestinian state and renounce any claim on the Jewish state. The apartheid
threat would be nullified.
I sketched out possible routes
by which Israel could achieve this end:
* by redrawing the borders, using the wall, so that an area densely
populated with Palestinian citizens of Israel known as the Little Triangle,
which hugs the northern West Bank, would be sealed into the new pseudo-state;
* by continuing the process of corralling the Negev’s Bedouin
farmers into urban reservations and then treating them as guest workers;
* by forcing Palestinian citizens living in the Galilee to pledge an
oath of loyalty to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state”
or have their citizenship revoked;
* and by stripping Arab Knesset members of their right to stand for
election.
When I made these forecasts,
I suspected that many observers, even in the Palestinian solidarity
movement, would find my ideas improbable. I could not have realized
how fast events would overtake prediction.
The first sign came in October
with the addition to the cabinet of Avigdor Lieberman, leader of a party
that espouses the ethnic cleansing not only of Palestinians in the occupied
territories (an unremarkable platform for an Israeli party) but of Palestinian
citizens too, through land swaps that would exchange their areas for
the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Lieberman is not just any
cabinet minister; he has been appointed deputy prime minister with responsibility
for the “strategic threats” that face Israel. In that role,
he will be able to determine what issues are to be considered threats
and thereby shape the public agenda for next few years. The “problem”
of Israel’s Palestinian citizens is certain to be high on his
list.
Lieberman has been widely
presented as a political maverick, akin to the notorious racist Rabbi
Meir Kahane, whose Kach party was outlawed in the late 1980s. That is
a gross misunderstanding: Lieberman is at the very heart of the country’s
rightwing establishment and will almost certainly be a candidate for
prime minister in future elections, as Israelis drift ever further to
the right.
Unlike Kahane, Lieberman
has cleverly remained within the Israeli political mainstream while
pushing its agenda to the very limits of what it is currently possible
to say. Kadima and Labor urgently want unilateral separation from the
Palestinians but are shy to spell out, both to their own domestic constituency
and the international community, what separation will entail.
Lieberman has no such qualms.
He is unequivocal: if Israel is separating from the Palestinians in
parts of the occupied territories, why not also separate from the 1.2
million Palestinians who through oversight rather than design ended
up as citizens of a Jewish state in 1948? If Israel is to be a Jewish
fortress, then, as he points out, it is illogical to leave Palestinians
within the fortifications.
These arguments express the
common mood among the Israeli public, one that has been cultivated since
the eruption of the intifada in 2000 by endless talk among Israel’s
political and military elites about “demographic separation”.
Regular opinion polls show that about two-thirds of Israelis support
transfer, either voluntary or forced, of Palestinian citizens from the
state.
Recent polls also reveal
how fashionable racism has become in Israel. A survey conducted last
year showed that 68 per cent of Israeli Jews do not want to live next
to a Palestinian citizen (and rarely have to, as segregation is largely
enforced by the authorities), and 46 per cent would not want an Arab
to visit their home.
A poll of students that was
published last week suggests that racism is even stronger among young
Jews. Three-quarters believed Palestinian citizens are uneducated, uncivilized
and unclean, and a third are frightened of them. Richard Kupermintz
of Haifa University, who conducted the survey more than two years ago,
believes the responses would be even more extreme today.
Lieberman is simply riding
the wave of such racism and pointing out the inevitable path separation
must follow if it is to satisfy these kinds of prejudices. He may speak
his mind more than his cabinet colleagues, but they too share his vision
of the future. That is why only one minister, the dovish and principled
Ophir Pines Paz of Labor, resigned over Ehud Olmert’s inclusion
of Lieberman in the cabinet.
Contrast that response with
the uproar caused by the Labor leader Amir Peretz’s appointment
of the first Arab cabinet minister in Israel’s history. (A member
of the small Druze community, which serves in the Israeli army, Salah
Tarif, was briefly a minister without portfolio in Sharon’s first
government.)
Raleb Majadele, a Muslim,
is a senior member of the Labor party and a Zionist (what might be termed,
in different circumstances, a self-hating Arab or an Uncle Tom), and
yet his apppointment has broken an Israeli taboo: Arabs are not supposed
to get too close to the centers of power.
Peretz’s decision was
entirely cynical. He is under threat on all fronts -- from his coalition
partners in Kadima and in Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu, and from
within his own party -- and desperately needs the backing of Labor’s
Arab party members. Majadele is the key, and that is why Peretz gave
him a cabinet post, even if a marginal one: Minister of Science, Culture
and Sport.
But the right is deeply unhappy
at Majadele’s inclusion in the cabinet. Lieberman called Peretz
unfit to be defense minister for making the appointment and demanded
that Majadele pledge loyalty to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
Lieberman’s party colleagues referred to the appointment as a
“lethal blow to Zionism”.
A few Labor and Meretz MKs
denounced these comments as racist. But more telling was the silence
of Olmert and his Kadima party, as well as Binyamin Netanyhu’s
Likud, at Lieberman’s outburst. The centre and right understand
that Lieberman’s views about Majadele, and Palestinian citizens
more generally, mirror those of most Israeli Jews and that it would
be foolhardy to criticise him for expressing them -- let alone sack
him.
In this game of “who
is the truer Zionist”, Lieberman can only grow stronger against
his former colleagues in Kadima and Likud. Because he is free to speak
his and their minds, while they must keep quiet for appearance’s
sake, he, not they, will win ever greater respect from the Israeli public.
Meanwhile, all the evidence
suggests that Olmert and the current government will implement the policies
being promoted by Lieberman, even if they are too timid to openly admit
that is what they are doing.
Some of those policies are
of the by-now familiar variety, such as the destruction of 21 Bedouin
homes, half the village of Twayil, in the northern Negev last week.
It was the second time in a month that the village had been razed by
the Israeli security forces.
These kind of official attacks
against the indigenous Bedouin -- who have been classified by the government
as “squatters” on state lands -- are a regular occurrence,
an attempt to force 70,000 Bedouin to leave their ancestral homes and
relocate to deprived townships.
A more revealing development
came this month, however, when it was reported in the Israeli media
that the government is for the first time backing “loyalty”
legislation that has been introduced privately by a Likud MK. Gilad
Erdan’s bill would revoke the citizenship of Israelis who take
part in “an act that constitutes a breach of loyalty to the state”,
the latest in a string of proposals by Jewish MKs conditioning citizenship
on loyalty to the Israeli state, defined in all these schemes very narrowly
as a “Jewish and democratic” state.
Arab MKs, who reject an ethnic
definition of Israel and demand instead that the country be reformed
into a “state of all its citizens”, or a liberal democracy,
are typically denounced as traitors.
Lieberman himself suggested
just such a loyalty scheme for Palestinian citizens last month during
a trip to Washington. He told American Jewish leaders: “He who
is not ready to recognize Israel as a Jewish and Zionist state cannot
be a citizen in the country.”
Erdan’s bill specifies
acts of disloyalty that include visiting an “enemy state”
-- which, in practice, means just about any Arab state. Most observers
believe that, after Erdan’s bill has been redrafted by the Justice
Ministry, it will be used primarily against the Arab MKs, who are looking
increasingly beleaguered. Most have been repeatedly investigated by
the Attorney-General for any comment in support of the Palestinians
in the occupied territories or for visiting neighbouring Arab states.
One, Azmi Bishara, has been put on trial twice for these offences.
Meanwhile, Jewish MKs have
been allowed to make the most outrageous racist statements against Palestinian
citizens, mostly unchallenged.
Former cabinet minister Effi
Eitam, for example, said back in September: “The vast majority
of West Bank Arabs must be deported ... We will have to make an additional
decision, banning Israeli Arabs from the political system … We
have cultivated a fifth column, a group of traitors of the first degree.”
He was “warned” by the Attorney-General over his comments
(though he has expressed similar views several times before), but remained
unrepentant, calling the warning an attempt to “silence”
him.
The leader of the opposition
and former prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, the most popular politician
in Israel according to polls, gave voice to equally racist sentiments
this month when he stated that child allowance cuts he imposed as finance
minister in 2002 had had a “positive” demographic effect
by reducing the birth rate of Palestinian citizens.
Arab MKs, of course, do not
enjoy such indulgence when they speak out, much more legitimately, in
supporting their kin, the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, who
are suffering under Israel’s illegal occupation. Arab MK Ahmed
Tibi, for example, was roundly condemned last week by the Jewish parties,
including the most leftwing, Meretz, when he called on Fatah to “continue
the struggle” to establish a Palestinian state.
However, the campaign of
intimidation by the government and Jewish members of the Knesset has
failed to silence the Arab MKs or stop them visiting neighboring states,
which is why the pressure is being ramped up. If Erdan’s bill
becomes law -- which seems possible with government backing -- then
the Arab MKs and the minority they represent will either be cut off
from the rest of the Arab world once again (as they were for the first
two decades of Israel’s existence, when a military government
was imposed on them) or threatened with the revocation of their citizenship
for disloyalty (a move, it should be noted, that is illegal under international
law).
It may not be too fanciful
to see the current legislation eventually being extended to cover other
“breaches of loyalty”, such as demanding democratic reforms
of Israel or denying that a Jewish state is democratic. Technically,
this is already the position as Israel’s election law makes it
illegal for political parties, including Arab ones, to promote a platform
that denies Israel’s existence as a “Jewish and democratic”
state.
Soon Arab MKs and their constituents
may also be liable to having their citizenship revoked for campaigning,
as many currently do, for a state of all its citizens. That certainly
is the view of the eminent Israeli historian Tom Segev, who argued in
the wake of the government’s adoption of the bill: “In practice,
the proposed law is liable to turn all Arabs into conditional citizens,
after they have already become, in many respects, second-class citizens.
Any attempt to formulate an alternative to the Zionist reality is liable
to be interpreted as a ‘breach of faith’ and a pretext for
stripping them of their citizenship.”
But it is unlikely to end
there. I hesitate to make another prediction but, given the rapidity
with which the others have been realized, it may be time to hazard yet
another guess about where Israel is going next.
The other day I was at a
checkpoint near Nablus, one of several that are being converted by Israel
into what look suspiciously like international border crossings, even
though they fall deep inside Palestinian territory.
I had heard that Palestinian
citizens of Israel were being allowed to pass these checkpoints unhindered
to enter cities like Nablus to see relatives. (These familial connections
are a legacy of the 1948 war, when separated Palestinian refugees ended
up on different sides of the Green Line, and also of marriages that
were possible after 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza,
making social and business contacts possible again.) But, when Palestinian
citizens try to leave these cities via the checkpoints, they are invariably
detained and issued letters by the Israeli authorities warning them
that they will be tried if caught again visiting “enemy”
areas.
In April last year, at a
cabinet meeting at which the Israeli government agreed to expel Hamas
MPs from Jerusalem to the West Bank, ministers discussed changing the
classification of the Palestinian Authority from a “hostile entity”
to the harsher category of an “enemy entity”. The move was
rejected for the time being because, as one official told the Israeli
media: “There are international legal implications in such a declaration,
including closing off the border crossings, that we don't want to do
yet.”
Is it too much to suspect
that before long, after Israel has completed the West Bank wall and
its “border” terminals, the Jewish state will classify visits
by Palestinian citizens to relatives as “visiting an enemy state”?
And will such visits be grounds for revoking citizenship, as they could
be under Erdan’s bill if Palestinian citizens visit relatives
in Syria or Lebanon?
Lieberman doubtless knows
the answer already.
Jonathan Cook is
a writer and journalist living in Nazareth, Israel. His book, Blood
and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State, is published
by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
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