According to the [Israeli] court decision, the custodian of abandoned property in the West Bank area allocated the land on which the farm stands to the World Zionist Organization, which granted a permit for use of the land to Sussia, a cooperative agricultural association [a group of Jewish settlers].
Zionism
The right wing considers recognition of the reality created in 1949 to be the chief enemy of Zionism. The dynamic of a conquering nationalism can never recognize that any situation created at any given time is final.
IOA Editor: Written from an Israeli-centered perspective, Sternhell focuses on the extreme “right” Zionism (Netanyahu, Yaalon, et al), correctly pointing out its dangerous and unstoppable nature. Unfortunately, he lets “mainstream” Zionism (not the subject of this article) go scot-free. In fact, much of what he says about “right wing” Zionism applies equally to “mainstream” Zionism. Perhaps the grass is greener when one conjures up the dream-images of what Zionism-Lite could/should have been. However, for the Palestinians, the harsh reality of dispossession and ethnic-cleansing of the past 100+ years was managed and carried out mostly by “mainstream” Zionism: some 77 years (about 40 years pre-statehood, followed by 37 of the past 63 years of Israeli statehood, including the 1967 war and subsequent occupation and settlement). Therefore, this article is important for the understanding of Zionism, both “right” and “mainstream,” not for the implied, and very limited, differences between them.
Last Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of Israeli youth marched along the Green Line to celebrate Jerusalem Day, an annual commemoration of the Israeli occupation of the city in the 1967 war. The organization of the march was done under a Zionist banner. Three days later, thousands of Israelis marched in Tel Aviv in support of the Two State Solution. While many organizations participated, the overall slogan was “Netanyahu says no, Israel says yes to a Palestinian state”.
RELATED Jerusalem Day 2011 by Just Jerusalem
Netanyahu … is determined to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state by any and all means. That did not start with the present government – it is an aim deeply embedded in Zionist ideology and practice. The founders of the movement set the course, David Ben-Gurion acted to implement it in 1948, in collusion with King Abdallah of Jordan. Netanyahu is just adding his bit.
MP Haneen Zoabi: “You are creating a monstrous state that will enter the thoughts and emotions of citizens. Is accepting my history considered incitement? … The Nakba is a historic truth, not a position or freedom of expression.”
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.
[T]he ideology behind these tours … builds on the Zionist selectivity we were taught in our schools, claiming a Jewish right over the land and erasing that of the Palestinians who have lived there for centuries. It prepares us for army service and it underlines the legal designation of Palestinians as ‘foreigners’ making them outsiders…
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.
A selection of video reports from Al-Jazeera’s comprehensive coverage of the leaked Israeli-Palestinian negotiations documents.
Livni to Ahmed Qurei and Saeb Erekat: “Israel was established to become a national home for Jews from all over the world. The Jew gets the citizenship as soon as he steps in Israel, and therefore don’t say anything about the nature of Israel… The basis for the creation of the state of Israel is that it was created for the Jewish people. Your state will be the answer to all Palestinians including refugees. Putting an end to claims means fulfilling national rights for all.”
The ACLU of Washington filed a federal lawsuit against King County over the decision to cancel a bus ad that alleges Israeli war crimes. The lawsuit claims that King County violated the First Amendment rights of the group that sought to place the ad on the sides of [Seattle] Metro Transit buses.
RELATED Seattle Mideast awareness campaign: Gaza vigil and metro bus ad campaign
Attorney Kais Nasser: “Anyone who reads the documentation file can see that the request for a permit was in fact intended to take revenge on the mufti in his grave, 100 years later, for his political positions in the Arab-Jewish conflict… The request for a permit has a political and Zionist agenda.”
IOA Editor: From the Before and After photos, the demolition of this fine example of Jerusalem architecture appears to be a done deal. Yet another bit of Palestinian history erased by Israel.
Hilik Bar, secretary general of the Labor Party: “Judea and Samaria is the land of our fathers and the Bible, and the Labor Party and its members are not disconnected from what this region represents, historically and religiously. We should all stay true to the legacy of the nation’s Fathers and Mothers, and pass it on from generation to generation. Labor belongs to the center and not to the far left […] we feel closer to the settlements’ people here than to the far left.”
IOA Editor: As Sheizaf correctly points out, Labor has not evacuated even a single settlement, and the colonization of the West Bank started on the party’s watch in the 1970s. It was subsequently expanded greatly under Rabin and prospered under Barak, throughout the Oslo “peace talks.” Indeed, Israel’s Labor movement was responsible for the colonization of Palestine from pre-statehood and, since 1967, it has steadfastly rejected opportunities to end the conflict with the Palestinians based on Land-for-Peace, that is, ending the Occupation in return for peace. Historically, there’s little doubt that Labor had played a far larger role in dispossessing the Palestinians than than the various Likud-led governments.
MKs from the party heading the opposition recently voted in favor of two bills that should have been easy “nays”: giving mortgage help to would-be settlers and probing leftist organizations.
IOA Editor: Another, rather mundane, instance where so-called “Labor,” “Centrist” Israeli parties participate, alongside the “Extreme Right,” in the daily conduct of Israel’s colonization program: the century-long dispossession and repression of the Palestinian people, now with a new McCarthyist twist pointing to its own Jewish citizens. History doesn’t repeat itself, it simply continues.
From an unbiased viewpoint, even if it were true that present-day Jews are descended from an ancient people forcibly exiled from Palestine, it would clearly not justify Zionist colonization and the ‘repossession’ of the country after two millennia from its long-standing inhabitants. This is the epitome of hutzpah coming from Zionists, who deny the right of return to the Palestinians they evicted and exiled 62 years ago.
Israel’s strategic aim is to prevent the creation of anything that can even remotely be described as a sovereign Palestinian state; to colonize as much as possible of the best Palestinian lands; and to confine the Palestinians to a series of disconnected enclosures not so much like Bantustans (which were a useful reserve of exploitable labour power for the South-African apartheid regime), but like US Indian reservations, or open prisons. The Gaza Strip has already been converted into the largest prison camp in the world.
Adalah lawyer Suhad Bishar: “This legislation makes clear in very blunt fashion that the thrust of policy in Israel is towards maintaining segregation in housing between Jewish and Arab citizens.”
