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Spare A Thought For A New Generation Of Palestinian Refugees

By Avigail Abarbanel

23 April, 2010
Australiansforpalestine.com

My husband Ian and I have recently moved from Australia to the Scottish Highlands. It has been three months since we arrived here and we are still feeling an enormous sense of dislocation. We feel lost, confused and insecure much of the time. This is despite the fact that we chose this move ourselves, that we have been planning it for years, that we have reasonable financial back-up, that we have all our possessions and even our cats with us and that we absolutely love it here. This beautiful green and serene environment around us is precisely what we were looking for.

All these uncomfortable feelings that we are experiencing are a part of the process of adjustment to a big life change. It is an inevitable process that our brain goes through each time our reality changes in a significant way and we lose everything that was previously familiar to us. We cannot speed this process up, and we cannot avoid it. (See my paper on adjustment to change ‘Grief and how to deal with it — a no-nonsense approach to grief’ at [1] or [2]. It doesn’t matter whether we initiated the process ourselves or whether it was imposed on us, we have to adjust to our new reality. It’s uncomfortable and it’s going to take time before we feel sufficiently familiar with our new environment and start to feel ‘normal’ again.

In our case Ian and I are dealing only with the effects of this adjustment process and it’s really hard. Imagine what people feel on top of all that, when they do not choose to leave and the dislocation is brutally forced on them by powers that they cannot fight. Imagine what they feel when they are not allowed to take their possessions with them, when they know their houses and their land will be stolen by the same forces that are kicking them out, when they are forced to move somewhere where they do not want to be, where the living conditions are far worse than where they come from, when they are torn away from loved ones without any consideration for the emotional effect it has on them and when they have no certainty about work, about their citizenship, or anything really.

Adjustment to change is appallingly difficult even when the conditions are near perfect, as is the case with Ian and me. But when you add to it brutality, powerlessness and injustice, theft of property and possessions, a forced separation from loved ones and a forced and indefinite state of uncertainty, the suffering is unimaginable.

Last week it was reported that Israel has issued a new military order that will enable the deportation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank. The Israeli occupation forces will use a new definition of the term ‘infiltrator’ to try to deport people from the West Bank to the Gaza strip. A number of observers have commented that the new definition of ‘infiltrator’ is so vague that it can effectively be used against any Palestinian in the West Bank. Tens of thousands of people will suddenly find themselves defined as criminals without having committed any crime.

I wonder when Israel will begin to widen the trap to deport also Palestinian citizens of Israel. I am certain that is also in the pipelines. But Israel is waiting until the world gets used to the new measure before it goes further. It got away with Lebanon and Gaza and now this will pass and the world will do nothing, as usual.

Brutal insane regimes often do things in steps. They consciously and deliberately desensitise the world to ever-increasing violations so that they can escape scrutiny. It’s the old ‘frog in the pot’ analogy. By the time Israel reaches the worst violations, it will be too late. The world has chosen to turn a blind eye to so much already, and conveniently also chooses to believe Israel’s ‘rational’ and ‘calm’ justifications for what it is doing. The blood of the Palestinians is not only on Israel’s hands, but also on the hands of all the Heads of Government in the Western world who are still placating Israel and are doing absolutely nothing to stop it.

According to the online BBC report from the 12th of April ‘Israeli military sources say the [new deportation order] will allow more judicial oversight, and only affect a small number of cases’. (See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8614908.stm.) In other words, they are downplaying the magnitude and illegality of this order, claiming that it is justified on bureaucratic and security grounds and trying to reassure us that it won’t affect many people. They also say that ‘existing orders already allow for the deportation of West Bank Palestinians deemed by Israel to be there illegally’ by which they are trying to claim that there is nothing new or sinister about this order and that it really is just an internal legal matter. Finally they try to reassure us that they are a reasonable and considerate regime saying that ‘the new order allows for each case to be reviewed by a military judicial panel before deportations are carried out’.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t believe them and I don’t feel reassured. This new order, hiding behind a veneer of legality and ordinary bureaucracy, is simply the next phase in Israel’s existing plan to empty the West Bank of Palestinians. As I have argued many times before, Israel has a charter, and that is to be a safe haven for all Jews anywhere. This is because many Israeli and non-Israeli Jews believe with all their hearts that another Holocaust is imminent, and that Jews everywhere still face a real threat of annihilation. Israel is to be the place that all Jews can escape to, and where they will be welcomed with open arms. This is the purpose of Israel’s Law of Return and also the reason behind Israel’s stubborn refusal to define its identity clearly. Any clear definition of Israel as an ordinary liberal democracy or a religious Jewish state threatens this project. Jews of all walks of life (religious or non-religious) expect to be able to enter Israel without any problem should they ever need to, and many believe that the time for that is near.

In order to become the Jewish safe haven it is expected to be, Israel needs all the land but without the non-Jewish people who live on it. It also needs to control all the available resources and not share them with anyone else. After all, when millions of Jews flock to Israel from all over the world they will need somewhere to live and they will need water and agricultural land. It is not difficult to see that Israel’s attempts to crush Palestinian resistance in Gaza and in Lebanon using every means possible, its ever broadening settlement program and land confiscation, its systemic discrimination against the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the bureaucratic maze designed to make the lives of Palestinians unbearable are all consistent with Israel’s charter. All of these are strategies designed to ‘encourage’ the Palestinians to give up on any hope they might still have of returning home and instead to leave the area forever. Those who won’t leave of their own accord will be driven out, one way or another. This is sinister but it’s also not new. Other regimes have done this before, but for some reason the world pretends it’s not happening again now in Palestine.

This latest order is simply a logical and consistent move in the direction of Israel’s fulfilment of its charter. It is chillingly cynical because Israel does not care how its behaviour or policies affect the feelings of the Palestinians, their standard of living or anything at all about them. Israel simply does not care what happens to the Palestinians because they are the ‘object’, the ‘obstacle’ that has always been in the way of Israel’s vision of itself as the Jewish safe haven. They have been in the way ever since the Zionist movement discovered that Palestine was inhabited, not just an empty country waiting for Jews to ‘return’ to it.

Israel has always pursued the fulfilment of its purpose ruthlessly and single-mindedly, regardless of who happened to be in government there. The support for and loyalty to Israel’s charter are not limited to a particular political party. It is at the heart of what Israel is and what it means to be an Israeli Jew. To a lesser or greater extent it is what every Israeli Jew upholds (except for a relatively small number of peace and human-rights activists). The Labor party in Israel has always supported Israel’s charter but presented a milder approach to achieving it by professing (at least outwardly) that in the interest of peace it is willing to give up some territory and support a two-state solution. In reality, even parties that still consider themselves to be Left wing are deeply Zionist and do not question the morality, the viability or the cost of an exclusively Jewish state. This means that they still support Israel’s charter: they still support the idea that Israel needs to be a safe haven for all Jews and that in order to be that, it has to be exclusively Jewish and under Jewish control.

Thankfully many Jews around the world have already withdrawn their previously unquestioning support for Israel, and their numbers are growing daily. Many Jews are starting to question the entire Zionist premise that it is OK to create an exclusively Jewish state at the expense of another people. They can see what it is doing to the Palestinian people, and their human values cannot accept this, despite any Jewish fears or loyalties they might still have.

They also see not only what Israel has become, but what it has always been. Things have never been different there; it’s just that due to the insistence of good people around the world, Israel can no longer hide its dirty deeds from the world. It has also grown over-confident and is openly defiant of every international law or convention that seeks to protect the rights of people. This over-confidence would not have been possible without the blank cheque and unconditional support Israel has been receiving from the United States. It is time for the US to clip Israel’s wings and stop it before it goes too far because the next step after ethnic cleansing and deportations is genocide.

Next time you go through a big life change like moving or changing jobs please spare a thought for those people who are made into refugees for no fault of their own. Please do whatever you can to make sure that international support for Israel stops. It’s the only way, because Israel is so single-minded about its mission and so steeped in traditional Jewish fear of annihilation, that it is unlikely to stop of its own accord.

Avigail Abarbanel is a psychotherapist and counsellor. She is a former Israeli citizen and a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. She recently moved from Canberra Australia to the Scottish Highlands. Her website is at: www.avigailabarbanel.me.uk

Original article can be found here