woensdag 13 november 2013

Zionist Terror 167

The structural roots of Israeli apartheid

by Noura Erakat [http://www.mecaforpeace.org/news/structural-roots-israeli-apartheid], No. 1, 2013

Palestinian-Israeli negotiations have intensified<http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Qatar-to-give-150-million-in-debt-relief-to-Palestinians-329383> in recent days. The talks, facilitated by US Secretary of State John Kerry, have resulted in 13 meetings between the two delegations to discuss issues of mutual concern. Yet in the midst of the current flurry of activity aimed at saving the two-state solution from the shelves of rich archival libraries, three-time Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is insisting that the conflict is not a political one at all.

To the contrary, at a recent talk delivered at Bar Ilan University<http://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-netanyahus-speech-at-bar-ilan/>, Netanyahu explained that the conflict is about Palestinian hatred for Jews as a people. There is, he maintains, a cultural malaise inherent to Palestinians that is not connected to Israeli military and structural violence against a dispossessed and stateless people. His diagnosis leaves little in the way of possible remedies, aside from cultural sensitivity trainings (for Palestinians, mind you) or, more realistically, the indefinite subjugation of an entire people - billed to US taxpayers.

The hawkish leader's analysis is contingent on the belief that Palestinians are not rational actors, but emotional ones impervious to reason. Netanyahu's analysis is fundamentally racist and flawed because itascribes to Jewish immigration into Mandatory Palestine an innocuous character it has never possessed.

Israel's establishment as a homeland for a Jewish majority in a land where a Palestinian-Arab majority existed has necessitated the on-going forced removal and subjugation of the non-Jewish Palestinian population - not simply in the Arab-Israeli War or the Six-Day War, but into the present day.

Forced into ghettoised communities

Today, there are 6.8 million Palestinian refugees. These are people who fled the war and the threat of harm in 1948 - the Nakba - and 1967, and their descendants. Yet the travails of Palestinians are by no means finished. Israel's present-day administrative practices in housing, residency, water distribution, urban planning, education, and taxation policies are herding Palestinians into ghettoised communities or forcing them from the territory altogether.

Within Israel, Palestinians are squeezed into designated areas or urban townships, as is the case with the 70,000 Palestinian bedouin<http://adalah.org/eng/?mod=articles&ID=1589> in the Negev. Within the West Bank, Israeli policies are forcing Palestinians to search for opportunities in Area A, or a mere 16 percent of the occupied territory, severely constraining their movement. And the Gaza Strip, subject to a naval blockade and a comprehensive land siege, is the largest ghetto of all.

Surrounding the concentrated and disconnected West Bank population centres is an intricate network of Jewish settler colonies, with the attendant physical and economic infrastructure, and whose residents are subject to a different set of laws designated for Jewish persons only with the intention - and result - of privileging them legally, administratively, economically, and politically.

Still, this apartheid reality is not the worst-case scenario for Palestinians, many of whom insist that, come what may, they will never be forced out again.

Endorsing apartheid

Yet notwithstanding the courageous Palestinian determination to stay rooted to what land remains to them, Israel is pressuring thousands of Palestinians out of the territory and into forced exile along with those already removed since 1948. Between 1967 and 1994, Israel revoked the residency rights of approximately140,000<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/11/israel-palestinians-residency-rights> Palestinians in the Occupied Territory through what can best be termed "silent deportation". The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics comments that, were it not for Israel's discriminatory policies, the Palestinian population would be greater by 14 percent.

Within Israel, the ban on family reunification<http://adalah.org/eng/Articles/1185/Israeli-Supreme-Court-Upholds-Ban-on-Family> has forced Palestinian citizens, constituting approximately 20 percent of Israel's population, to build their families and lives outside of their place of birth if they marry a Palestinian from the Occupied Territories or a resident of an "enemy state". After the Israeli High Court upheld the discriminatory ban, Israeli Knesset member Yaakov Katz explained "... the State of Israel was saved from being flooded by 2-3 million Arab refugees<http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ben-white/israels-high-court-upholds-racist-citizenship-law-avoid-national-suicide>".

The intended purpose of Israeli laws, policies, and decrees within the state, as well as the Occupied Territories, is to diminish the Palestinian population. Under international law, this policy amounts to forced population transfer. In common speech, it is ethnic cleansing - sometimes by Israeli military might and sometimes via the law.

It is in this context that Netanyahu proclaimed in his Bar Ilan address: "We will not be satisfied with recognition of the Israeli people or of some kind of bi-national state which will later be flooded by refugees<http://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-netanyahus-speech-at-bar-ilan/>."

Palestinians officially recognised<http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/36917473237100E285257028006C0BC5> the State of Israel in 1993. The demand for something more, namely recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and state of the Jews alone, began in the early 2000s<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/01/AR2010100104177_pf.html>. Such recognition is a way of sanctioning Jewish privilege and ongoing Palestinian forced removal, dispossession, and exile.

Israeli vs Jewish

To date, a bifurcation<http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/4532/singular-legal-regime-necessitates-one-state-solut> between Israeli citizenship and Jewish nationality has facilitated both of these objectives. There is no such thing as an Israeli nationality under Israeli law. Israel recognises two basic bundles of rights - one for Jewish nationals who are entitled to citizenship, housing and education subsidies, employment opportunities and one for Israeli citizens only.

In effect, a Jewish national (as defined by Israeli law) residing in London with no relationship to the state is entitled to more state benefits and protection than a Palestinian-Israeli citizen in Nazareth whose family lineage in the area dates back centuries.

A group of Jewish-Israelis concerned with this structural discrimination recently filed a petition to the Israeli High Court of Justice seeking recognition for an Israeli people rather than a Jewish one<http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/.premium-1.550241>. Despite the law's discriminatory implications, the court rejected the petition, explaining that the issue of whether there is a "peoplehood ... common to all its residents and citizens, called 'Israeli' ... is a national-political-social question and it is not the court's place to decide it.<http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/.premium-1.550241>"

Some Israelis, like those who comprise the NGO Zochrot<http://www.zochrot.org/en>, are intent on having this discussion among Jewish-Israelis. In late September, Zochrot organised a conference<http://zochrot.org/en/content/conference-programfrom-truth-redress-realizing-return-palestinian-refugees> aimed at promoting acknowledgment and accountability among Jewish-Israelis for the ongoing forced removal and exile of Palestinians. It explains that "realising the return of Palestinian refugees is a prerequisite for the country's decolonisation, ending the conflict, doing justice and creating an egalitarian civil society serving the interests of all itsmembers<http://zochrot.org/en/event/conferencefrom-truth-redress-realizing-return-palestinian-refugees>".

The NGO Monitor, an Israeli organisation incensed by the proposition of equality, has launched a campaign against Zochrot by targeting its European government funders<http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article/european_government_funding_for_zochrot_s_return_of_palestinian_refugees_conference>.

To an outside observer brought up on the merit of equal rights, the conditions to which Palestinians are subject are cause for indignation rather than the irrational hatred voiced by Netanyahu. Significantly, these conditions are the fruit of power, privilege, and politics and they can be remedied by affording equality, justice, and dignity for all. US taxpayers would be better off investing in these ideals rather then in an apartheid regime, which they are helping to make more durable.

Noura Erakat is a Palestinian human rights attorney and is currently an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

Little joy in West Bank as 26 Palestinian prisoners return home

By Amira Hass<http://www.haaretz.com/misc/writers/amira-hass-1.278>, Nov. 3, 2013, Ha'aretz

The noise in recent days from the Israeli lobby against the release of Palestinian prisoners<http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.555196> was the opposite of the limited interest the Palestinian public was showing before the release early Wednesday. But the media in the Palestinian Authority was trying to create an atmosphere of excitement and joy - they're laying on the nationalist songs, interviews with the parents of prisoners and interviews with the people who have made a living from the "prisoners file" for 20 years.

The official spokesmen were asking once again that this be depicted as a big achievement for the PA, especially for President Mahmoud Abbas - another step on the way to ending the occupation. But the masses' general apathy hasn't waned.

There were a number of reasons. The natural joy over the release of 26 longtime prisoners doesn't change the fact that the Palestinians are troubled by an abundance of problems that touch every family and individual. And everyone knows that these problems aren't about to be solved.

Here are some examples: the fate of the Palestinian refugees who remain in Syria or are among the more than two million people who have been displaced; Israel's success in ignoring the international position and continuing to build in the settlements and expropriate land; the dangersawaiting olive pickers and farmers<http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.554690> in general from the settlers; salaries liable not to be paid next month; the social, political and economic disintegration of East Jerusalem, which is being cut off from the West Bank; the blockade of Gaza that has only become more serious since the coup in Egypt; and the Palestinian political schism whose end is nowhere in sight.

Another reason for the absence of rejoicing was the broad opposition to relaunching the peace talks with Israel under the continued construction in the settlements and the large doubts about the talks' results. Even those who supported a relaunch of the negotiations<http://www.haaretz.com/news/keeping-track-of-the-peace-process> know that the chances of an acceptable agreement are slim. It's clear to everyone that the return to futile talks was the price the PA paid for the prisoner release - prisoners of war in Palestinian eyes - 20 years late.

Some people even think that this was a too high a price for giving up on the aggressive diplomatic channel at the United Nations - but they can't say it in public. They don't want to create the impression that the fate of the prisoners and the pain of their families aren't important to them. (Hamas managed to cover up the very high price - in human life, wounded and economic damage - that the Palestinians paid for the release of the prisoners in the Gilad Shalit<http://www.haaretz.com/misc/tags/Gilad%20Shalit-1.476999> deal. They don't talk about this openly either.)

And another reason: The releases at the beginning of the Oslo process<http://www.haaretz.com/meta/Tag/Oslo%20Accords> were understood as the beginning of the end of the arrests and the granting of freedom to thousands of Palestinians every year. This is no longer so. Everyone knows that within three days after the release of the 26 prisoners, the Israeli security apparatus will "compensate" itself and fill the quota with more Palestinian detainees.

Just this Monday, soldiers in Hebron arrested two more members of the Palestinian Legislative Council from the Hamas Change and Reform slate in the West Bank: Nizar Ramadan, 53, and Mohammed Bader, 55. In doing so the number of legislative council members jailed in Israel reached 15 - nine of whom are under extended administrative detention.

Also Monday, another 20 or so Palestinians were arrested throughout the West Bank, including students from Hebron and Nablus. The Israeli policy of arrests is seen as part of the apparatus of regular repression - institutionalized and planned - that is inherent to a foreign ruler that imposes itself on a population. The release of a few prisoners does not signal a change in the Israeli approach.

Amid the apathy concerning the prisoners, the PA is trying to revive the issue abroad. On Sunday, in South Africa's Robben Island prison - which has been converted into a museum - in the same cell where Nelson Mandela was held, the "Free Marwan Barghouti and All Palestinian Political Prisoners" international campaign was launched. (The word order is first Barghouti and then all the prisoners.)

Representatives of Fatah, the PA and Palestinian human rights groups came to South Africa for the launch of the campaign, along with Barghouti's wife Fadwa Barghouti. On hand were members of the African National Congress, and at the head of the group was Ahmed Kathadra, the 84-year-old former prisoner who served 26 years of a life sentence and hard labor handed down during the apartheid era. Mandela, Kathadra and many others had committed the crime of belonging to the African National Congress' military wing.

The campaign is conveying: Just as South African prisoners who were opponents of apartheid were released as negotiations were under way (and even before they were officially under way), the Palestinian prisoners must be released. In today's Israel there's a kind of apartheid similar to what prevailed in those days in South Africa. And Barghouti is the Mandela of the Palestinians who must be released to advance the negotiations for change.

Abroad this may sound good, but it's another reason for the Palestinians who have stayed home not to celebrate. Their doubts about their leaders both inside and outside the prisons runs very deep.



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