Israel has used a covert procedure to cancel the residency status of 140,000 West Bank Palestinians between 1967 and 1994, the legal advisor for the Judea and Samaria Justice Ministry’s office admits, in a new document obtained by Haaretz. The document was written after the Center for the Defense of the Individual filed a request under the Freedom of Information Law.
IOA Editor: This important story sheds light on just one instance of many that is part of a far larger, planned and coordinated effort by the Israeli government to replace Palestine’s Arab population with Israeli Jewish population: in other words, opportunistic Ethnic Cleansing, in small steps incrementally leading towards the desired result – reducing one population and increasing the other. Amira Hass has written on this extensively, as have others.
UPDATE Top Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat: “This policy should not only be seen as a war crime as it is under international law; it also has a humanitarian dimension: we are talking about people who left Palestine to study or work temporarily but who could not return to resume their lives in their country with their families.”
RELATED Gideon Levy: It’s called ethnic cleansing
Ghada Karmi: “On setting up its state in 1948, Israel set about demolishing every vestige of Palestinian life and history in the land… The battle to preserve Lifta must be won – it remains a physical memory of injustice and survival.”
Minister of Science and Technology Daniel Hershkowitz awarded Eliyahu with the prize for “his actions, effort and devotion to the Jewish nature of the Land of Israel.”
IOA Editor: The “devotion to the Jewish nature of the Land of Israel” is the same racist devotion to keep away the Palestinian people, dispossessed from the very same land, including Israeli citizens, even as short-term renters (e.g., Palestinian students in Safed). Ethnocentric Israel, a rapidly diminishing democracy-for-Jews only, now officially awards members of its ruling tribe often described by fellow Israeli-Jews as ‘racist’ and ‘extremist’ for their “devotion” to racist discriminatory laws and practices. Ethnic cleansing — “dunam here and dunam there,” bit by bit, one student and one family at a time — whether in Safed, or in Silwan, or elsewhere.
And no one is a human being without recognizing that the other is also one, and that it is important to get to know him, both his shortcomings and hopes. No one is born a murderer and no one is destined to be murdered, and no nation has a monopoly on suffering and mourning. The warning sign before a holocaust, genocide, politicide, ethnocide or ethnic cleansing is the same everywhere and at all times. True, learned research distinguishes between each, but the victims don’t care about the minute distinctions.
Hamoked director Dalia Kerstein: “There is clearly a policy to push Palestinians out of Jerusalem and Israel to reduce what is called here the ‘Palestinian demographic threat.’ It’s really a case of ethnic cleansing.”
A recent ruling demonstrates the bureaucratic machinery the state has created to restrict the Palestinians’ ability to enter, live and work on land west of the separation fence.
IOA Editor: This is an important news story which points to the ultimate effect of Israeli supreme court decisions: supporting Israel’s methodical process of ethnic cleansing, bit by bit — as the old Zionist saying goes, “duman here, and dunam there” — this time 9.5% of the West Bank territory. Next time what?
The past few years have seen an increase in calls for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. This is part of a broader campaign to apply pressure on the Israeli state and its agencies. A recent initiative to suspend relations between the University of Johannesburg (UJ) and Ben-Gurion University (BGU) in Israel received much media attention in South Africa and gave rise to controversy.
Libya is a different case. Libya is rich in oil, and though the US and UK have often given quite remarkable support to its cruel dictator, right to the present, he is not reliable. They would much prefer a more obedient client. Furthermore, the vast territory of Libya is mostly unexplored, and oil specialists believe it may have rich untapped resources, which a more dependable government might open to Western exploitation.
Higher Arab Monitoring Committee chair Mohammad Zeidan: “Israel is regressing into dangerous directions in its treatment of its Arab citizens.”
Some 1,500 Israeli Arabs protested in Lod (Lydda) on Tuesday against government policies which affect Israel’s Arab sector, launching the events of Land Day, to be marked on Wednesday. The protesters were demonstrating against the government demolition of the houses of the Abu Eid family, which left some 50 family members, 30 of them children, without a home.
The one-two punch of settler “price tag” attacks carried out under the watch of the army and with the encouragement of state-funded religious nationalist rabbis is common all over the West Bank. Most Jewish Israelis view the army with reverence, and are reluctant to criticize its conduct under any circumstance. And though settler violence is considered a matter of controversy in Israeli society, a new poll shows that a staggering number of Israelis support the pogroms meted out by fanatical settlers against defenseless Palestinians.
Like most Arab residents of East Jerusalem who chose not to apply for Israeli citizenship, Fahmi had Israeli residency, but not citizenship. Residency is automatically revoked in the event of an absence of many years or the acquisition of citizenship from another country.
IOA Editor: This seemingly small matter, one case among thousands, reflects the essence of the Israeli-Palestinian “conflict:” It is part of an ongoing, systematic effort on Israel’s part to replace the Palestinian Arab population with a Jewish population: a long term process of Ethnic Cleansing. To that end, a complex web of laws covering citizenship and immigration, land ownership and use, town development and residency, economic benefits, and much more has been set up. New laws are added as deemed necessary, such as the law authorizing ‘admission committees’ approval for residency in Israeli towns, which is designed to exclude Palestinians and others who do not conform to a vague lifestyle standard.
An updated map of Israeli colonization of the West Bank was released by Peace Now. It deserves careful study. Also note the graph on the left which shows clearly that colonization peaked during the so-called “Oslo Peace Process,” and again during the Camp David Peace charade hosted by US president Bill Clinton. This provides fresh evidence, if it were needed, that as far as Israel is concerned the negotiations were an exercise in deception and fraud.
The failure of the US to halt the slow-motion ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israel has consequences. The failure to acknowledge the collective humiliation and anger felt by most Arabs because of the presence of US troops on Muslim soil, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan but in the staging bases set up in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, has consequences. The failure to denounce the repression, including the widespread use of torture, censorship and rigged elections, wielded by our allies against their citizens in the Middle East has consequences. We are soaked with the stench of these regimes.
In the wake of the recent attack on Coptic Christians in Egypt, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, warned that Christians face a campaign of “religious cleansing in the Middle East”. But, given Western governments’ colonial history and double standards on human rights, Arab Christians would be better served by an end to destructive Western intervention in the region than by sympathetic statements.
Half a million trees planted over the past 18 months on the ancestral lands of Bedouin tribes in Israel’s Negev region were bought by a controversial Christian evangelical television channel that calls itself God-TV.
No society is immune to deterioration into violent racism. In the Israel of today, we can observe quite a few conditions whose presence in other societies and among other peoples led to racial separation, ethnic cleansing and even genocide. There are minority groups (Arabs and foreigners ) who are ostracized by the majority, a growing racist ideology, attempts to limit the political activities and civil rights of the minority, a tense security situation and strong political elements with vested interests in territorial expansion.
“Postponing the eviction of Beit Yonatan is a premeditated move by [Jerusalem mayor] Barkat and the settlers to use the Palestinians as an excuse to avoid the order of the court,” said Peace Now leader Yariv Oppenheimer.
Given [Israel’s] predispositions, combined with the disparities in bargaining power between the parties, as well as the one-sided hegemonic role of the United States, who but a fool could think that a just peace could emerge from the such a deformed pattern of geopolitical diplomacy?
The absence of an effective Palestinian political body that could mobilize and represent refugees as a collective national group, combined with repressive state policies, catapulted UNRWA to center stage. Taking on a unique and visible role, it assumed many of the functions of a welfare government.
