The
Real Meaning Of Deporting
Hamas Members Of Parliament
By Jonathan Cook
22 April, 2006
Countercurrents.org
The
policy of “hitnatkut”, or unilateral disengagement, developed
by Ariel Sharon needed a swift facelift following the withdrawal of
settlers from Gaza last year. And Israel’s prime minister-designate,
Ehud Olmert, has found it in the related concept of “hitkansut”,
variously translated as “convergence”, “consolidation”
and “ingathering”.
After all, Olmert could hardly
campaign convincingly for a West Bank disengagement when it was clear
Jewish settlers and soldiers would continue occupying a significant
proportion of Palestinian land at the withdrawal’s end. So convergence
is usefully, and misleadingly, supplanting disengagement.
Many critics of Israel assume
convergence is simply jargon disguising the government’s intention
illegally to annex swaths of West Bank territory. The grand land theft
will be sold to the world as a painful withdrawal of Jewish settlers,
even if the great majority (probably 80 per cent) are left in place
and only the most remote settlements are dismantled.
But events this week suggest
that the principle of hitkansut will have a far wider application than
just to the West Bank settlement blocs, with results even more sinister
than many had anticipated. Olmert’s consolidation, it is becoming
clear, will embrace Palestinians too.
The shape of things to come
was hinted at this week in the wake of Monday’s suicide bombing
in Tel Aviv by the small militant group Islamic Jihad. Rather than approving
the usual indiscriminate military strikes against Palestinian population
centres that characterised the Sharon era, Olmert pursued a low-key,
but no less disturbing, response.
He revoked the rights of
three Hamas MPs and a Palestinian cabinet minister, Mahmoud Abu Tir,
to reside in Jerusalem. The intention is to deport them to the West
Bank, behind the separation wall Israel is hastily completing, where
they will lose all the rights they currently enjoy to live and work
inside Jerusalem and Israel.
Apparently Israel is considering
extending this punishment to other members of Hamas in Jerusalem and
possibly anyone working for the Palestinian Authority.
Once upon a time, back in
the 1970s and 1980s, Israel would regularly dump hundreds of Palestinian
political activists at a time across the border in Lebanon. Now the
border will be, more conveniently, much closer to hand: just a stone’s
throw from the centre of Jerusalem.
What are the grounds for
the deportations? The official reason is the failure of Hamas to denounce
the suicide bombing. Olmert told an emergency meeting of the cabinet:
“Any member of a government involved in terrorism should not be
granted any immunity in the form of his Israeli residency identification.”
Let’s ignore Olmert’s
gratuitous extension of the meaning of the word “terrorism”,
and concentrate instead on the extent of his chutzpah. Israel occupied
East Jerusalem during the Six-Day war of 1967 and later annexed the
Palestinian half of the city and its inhabitants to Israel in violation
of international law.
Now Olmert, the former mayor
of Jerusalem and a man well-versed in underhand manoeuvres in the holy
city, is expelling Palestinians from East Jerusalem on the grounds that
he doesn’t like their politics.
Foreign minister Tzipi Livni
observed that Israel had the right to revoke the residency of whomever
it deemed disloyal to Israel. In other words, Olmert and his cronies
are behaving as though Palestinian residency in Jerusalem is a right
conferred by Israel -- as though Palestinians are immigrants rather
than the city’s indigenous inhabitants living under an illegal
and increasingly vicious occupation.
Of course, Israel’s
approach towards East Jerusalem and its residents is not new, though
the degree of brazen cheek in Israel’s singling out of Palestinian
public figures for this treatment, and Olmert’s happy courting
of publicity over the abuse of their rights, is.
Despite the illegal annexation
of East Jerusalem by Israel, Palestinians living there do not have Israeli
citizenship. Instead, they are classified as “permanent residents”,
without voting rights or Israeli passports. Theoretically, their residency
offers them rights of free movement inside Jerusalem and Israel, unlike
West Bankers who since Oslo have been confined by curfews, checkpoints
and now the wall.
But in practice, as the deportations
prove, “permanent residency” is not necessarily so permanent.
Israel has for some time been narrowing the terms of who qualifies for
residency in Jerusalem: Palestinians who study or work abroad often
find they are not entitled to return to the city; the recent revoking
of family unification means many spouses and children of East
Jerusalem residents are facing deportation; and the arbitrary route
of the wall across East Jerusalem is putting some residents on the wrong
side, making it all but impossible for them to reach jobs, shops, schools
and hospitals in the city centre.
The reason for these measures
and others by Israel -- such as planning rules that make it almost impossible
for East Jerusalemites to build homes to cope with their natural population
growth; and the abuse of their rights to vote in Palestinian elections
-- is clear.
The hope is that under such
relentless pressure most Palestinians will leave Jeruslem and seek residence
in the West Bank, where they will have even less rights to withstand
Israeli abuses and where they will pose far less of a demographic threat
to an expanded Israeli state’s “Jewishness”.
But this week’s deportation
of Palestinian MPs who refuse to toe the Israeli line reveals yet another
layer of Israel’s plan. What Olmert hopes to achieve with “hitkansut”
is not only consolidating the inclusion of Jewish settlers inside the
expanded borders of the new Jewish state but also consolidating the
exclusion of Palestinians who currently enjoy residency in territory
coveted by Israel: namely East Jerusalem. While Olmert will be busy
“ingathering” the settlers, he will also be busy “outgathering”
Palestinians from Jerusalem.
However, unlike Olmert’s
plans for the consolidation of Jews, who will be gathered into a single,
expanded Jewish state, Israel clearly has different vision of consolidation
for the Palestinians -- despite Sharon’s weasly words to the United
Nations last year about wanting to create a Palestinian state on the
land left after the limited withdrawal from the West Bank.
Given the nature of the Jewish
settlement blocs left after “hitkansut” -- their fingers
penetrating deep into the West Bank at strategic points -- Palestinian
land will be separated into a series of ghettoes, isolated and cut off
one from the next.
In Olmert’s consolidation
plan, Jerusalem will be turned into a ghetto comprising only those Palestinians
prepared to have no contact with or offer no support to the rest of
their people, including their own elected representatives.
The West Bank, meanwhile,
will be consolidated into a series of small ghettoes, based on the main
cities, filled with Palestinians whose rights can be trampled on by
Israel at will. And finally Gaza will be consolidated into yet another
ghetto, disconnected from Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Palestinian politics, whether
of the Fatah or Hamas variety, will be meaningless in such an environment.
It is not hard to predict the response: the year-long Hamas ceasefire
will be strained beyond breaking point. Terrorism -- human bombs or
home-made Qassam rockets -- will be the only answer for Palestinians
who want to resist the arm’s-length occupation. That may suit
Israel, offering it yet more excuses -- in reply to the “terror”
-- to further “consolidate” the Palestinian population into
smaller, more tightly controlled ghettoes.
At the same Israeli cabinet
meeting at which the deportations of the Hamas MPs were agreed, ministers
discussed changing the classification of the Palestinian Authority,
the Palestinians’ government, from a “hostile entity”
to the harsher status of an “enemy entity”. The move was
rejected for the time being.
One senior official told
the Israeli media why: “There are international legal implications
in such a declaration, including closing off the border crossings, that
we don't want to do yet.” Not yet. But soon, when the infrastructure
of imprisonment is complete.
Jonathan Cook,
based in Nazareth, Israel, is the author of “Blood and Religion:
The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State”, published by
Pluto Press and available in the US from University of Michigan Press
(http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=224729).
His website is www.jkcook.net