Tag: Comment Is Free

Israel’s laws of persecution

Nimer Sultany | The Guardian

8 September 2009

Two cases brought before Israeli courts last week revealed the attitude of the establishment towards Palestinian Arab citizens of the state. One shows how Palestinian citizens are treated as victims of police brutality, and the second shows how they are regularly victimised because of their opposition to injustice.

In the first, a policeman who shot and killed an Arab citizen in 2006 was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment. The unbearable leniency of the sentence is more evidence of the total disregard for Arab life inside Israel, where ethnicity of the victim is a de facto mitigating circumstance in the case of Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Indeed, this was the only case in which any policeman or soldier was indicted since the mass protests of October 2000, in spite of the fact that about 40 citizens were killed during this period.

The second case involved an indictment against Rawi Sultani, a 23-year-old law student, for “contact with a foreign agent” and “delivering information to the enemy”; two flawed articles in Israel’s laws comparable in their application to use of “national security” laws by authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the world. The young student is a political activist of the National Democratic Assembly (NDA), a party that calls for the transformation of Israel from a Jewish state into a state for all its citizens. Rawi is also the son of a well-known leader of the party. He is accused of having contact with another youth, who allegedly turned out to be a Hezbollah member, during a national Arab youth conference in Morocco. Allegedly, Rawi disclosed information regarding the Israeli army’s chief of staff, given their membership in the same gym. Yet the case is based on a tendentious account of one statement of a publicly known fact regarding the chief’s membership in that gym made by the accused.

The identity of the accused, the identity of his father, the party to which they both belong, the timing of the case and the kind of charges chosen cannot be easily overlooked and give grounds to questioning the political incentives behind the indictment and the message behind it. One would be hard put to explain the extensive surveillance against leaders and activists of the NDA as revealed by this case.

Indeed, since the emergence of the NDA in the mid 1990s, it faced mounting legal and public attacks. These attacks took a stronger turn since October 2000 and culminated in the forced exile of Azmi Bishara, the leader of the NDA, who was accused with similar charges in 2007. What was supposed to be a fatal blow to the NDA and its legitimacy within the Arab minority has failed, with the party’s success in the Israeli parliamentary elections in February. However, this did not deter the establishment from mounting further attacks on the cadres of the party. Thus, we have witnessed in the last month show-arrests and interrogations of many young activists of the NDA that are reminiscent of crackdowns on pro-democracy activists in authoritarian regimes.

Its connections with the Arab world is a recurring theme of the persecution of the NDA as a party challenging the Jewishness of the state, and is the real incentive behind Rawi’s case. The NDA has, since its inception, challenged the iron cage surrounding Arab citizens following 1948. Israel has detached Arab citizens from their familial, historical, cultural and sociopolitical milieu. The legislation preventing family unification and the naturalisation of spouses of Arab citizens if they were residents of the occupied territories or other Arab countries surrounding Israel is only the most draconian example of this policy of segregation. Israeli law also defines a long list of Arab states as enemy states and prohibits Arab citizens from visiting them, and prohibits political parties from expressing support of Arab liberation struggles. In short, “national security” is broadly defined to fit the dominant ideology of the state rather than the security of citizens, regardless of their national affiliation.

Yet, as Rawi’s father correctly argues, the Palestinian citizens of Israel cannot be expected to treat the Arab world as an enemy and they cannot be held accountable for the political views or affiliations of other Arabs they meet in their travels outside Israel. Indictments such as Rawi’s aim at forcing Palestinian citizens to adopt the Zionist newspeak and refrain from connections with the Arab world and from identifying with its legitimate cause against Israel’s continuing occupation of Arab lands.

Criminalising dissent is not unique to Israel. Many oppressive states, such as apartheid South Africa, have used it to de-legitimise parties, ideas and activities disliked by ruling elites and security apparatuses. Furthermore, persecution on grounds of “security” creates an immediate divide between Arab and Jewish citizens. In 2007, the head of Shabak, the Israeli general security agency, stated that struggles against the Jewishness of the state, even if lawful and democratic, would be deemed subversive. The current right-wing government is seeking to condition citizenship on loyalty to Zionist ideology, a demand unparalleled in any democracy and contrary to the most basic of human rights. With this kind of attitude, it is no wonder that young Arab men and women inside Israel are victimised because of their noble aspirations to equality and freedom.

Quiet slicing of the West Bank makes abstract prayers for peace obscene

Slavoj Zizek | The Guardian

18 August 2009

On 2 August 2009, after cordoning off part of the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in east Jerusalem, Israeli police evicted two Palestinian families (more than 50 people) from their homes; Jewish settlers immediately moved into the emptied houses. Although Israeli police cited a ruling by the country’s supreme court, the evicted Arab families had been living there for more than 50 years. The event – which, rather exceptionally, did attract the attention of the world media – is part of a much larger and mostly ignored ongoing process.

Five months earlier, on 1 March, it had been reported that the Israeli government had drafted plans to build more than 70,000 new homes in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank; if implemented, the plans could increase the number of settlers in the Palestinian territories by about 300,000 Such a move would not only severely undermine the chances of a viable Palestinian state, but also hamper the everyday life of Palestinians.

A government spokesman dismissed the report, arguing that the plans were of limited relevance – the construction of homes in the settlements required the approval of the defence minister and the prime minister. However, 15,000 have already been fully approved, and 20,000 of the proposed housing units lie in settlements that Israel cannot expect to retain in any future peace deal with the Palestinians.

The conclusion is obvious: while paying lip-service to the two-state solution, Israel is busy creating a situation on the ground that will render such a solution impossible. The dream underlying Israel’s plans is encapsulated by a wall that separates a settler’s town from the Palestinian town on a nearby West Bank hill. The Israeli side of the wall is painted with the image of the countryside beyond the wall – but without the Palestinian town, depicting just nature, grass and trees. Is this not ethnic cleansing at its purest, imagining the outside beyond the wall as empty, virginal and waiting to be settled?

On the very day that reports of the government’s 70,000-home plan emerged, Hillary Clinton criticised the rocket fire from Gaza as “cynical”, claiming: “There is no doubt that any nation, including Israel, cannot stand idly by while its territory and people are subjected to rocket attacks.” But should the Palestinians stand idly while the West Bank land is taken from them day by day?

When peace-loving Israeli liberals present their conflict with Palestinians in neutral, symmetrical terms – admitting that there are extremists on both sides who reject peace – one should ask a simple question: what goes on in the Middle East when nothing is happening there at the direct politico-military level (ie, when there are no tensions, attacks or negotiations)? What goes on is the slow work of taking the land from the Palestinians on the West Bank: the gradual strangling of the Palestinian economy, the parcelling up of their land, the building of new settlements, the pressure on Palestinian farmers to make them abandon their land (which goes from crop-burning and religious desecration to targeted killings) – all this supported by a Kafkaesque network of legal regulations.

Saree Makdisi, in Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, describes how, although the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is ultimately enforced by the armed forces, it is an “occupation by bureaucracy”: it works primarily through application forms, title deeds, residency papers and other permits. It is this micro-management of the daily life that does the job of securing slow but steady Israeli expansion: one has to ask for a permit in order to leave with one’s family, to farm one’s own land, to dig a well, or to go to work, to school, or to hospital. One by one, Palestinians born in Jerusalem are thus stripped of the right to live there, prevented from earning a living, denied housing permits, etc.

Palestinians often use the problematic cliché of the Gaza strip as “the greatest concentration camp in the world”. However, in the past year, this designation has come dangerously close to truth. This is the fundamental reality that makes all abstract “prayers for peace” obscene and hypocritical. The state of Israel is clearly engaged in a slow, invisible process, ignored by the media; one day, the world will awake and discover that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, that the land is Palestinian-frei, and that we must accept the fact. The map of the Palestinian West Bank already looks like a fragmented archipelago.

In the last months of 2008, when the attacks of illegal West Bank settlers on Palestinian farmers became a regular daily occurrence, the state of Israel tried to contain these excesses (the supreme court ordered the evacuation of some settlements) but, as many observers have noted, such measures are half-hearted, countered by the long-term politics of Israel, which violates the international treaties it has signed. The response of the illegal settlers to the Israeli authorities is “We are doing the same thing as you, just more openly, so what right do you have to condemn us?” And the state’s reply is basically “Bde patient, and don’t rush too much. We are doing what you want, just in a more moderate and acceptable way.”

The same story has been repeated since 1949: Israel accepts the peace conditions proposed by the international community, counting on the fact that the peace plan will not work. The illegal settlers sometimes sound like Brunhilde from the last act of Wagner’s Walküre – reproaching Wotan and saying that, by counteracting his explicit order and protecting Siegmund, she was only realising Wotan’s own true desire, which he was forced to renounce under external pressure. In the same way the settlers know they are realising their own state’s true desire.

While condemning the violent excesses of “illegal” settlements, the state of Israel promotes new “legal” building on the West Bank, and continues to strangle the Palestinian economy. A look at the changing map of East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians are gradually encircled and their living area sliced, tells it all. The condemnation of anti-Palestinian violence not carried out by the state blurs the true problem of state violence; the condemnation of illegal settlements blurs the illegality of the legal ones.

Therein resides the two-facedness of the much-praised non-biased “honesty” of the Israeli supreme court: by occasionally passing judgment in favour of the dispossessed Palestinians, proclaiming their eviction illegal, it guarantees the legality of the remaining majority of cases.

Taking all this into account in no way implies sympathy for inexcusable terrorist acts. On the contrary, it provides the only ground from which one can condemn the terrorist attacks without hypocrisy.

Slavoj Zizek is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities szizek@yahoo.com

Taking over Jerusalem

Matt Kennard | The Guardian

5 August 2009

A couple of months ago I spent a fortnight in Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement – activists who help Palestinians non-violently resist Israeli oppression. The most pressing of many issues during my stay was the attempts by an Israeli settler company, Nahalat Shimon, backed by the Israeli courts, to cleanse East Jerusalem of its Arab population, focusing its efforts at that time on the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

I spent a week sleeping on a floor in the house of the Hanoun family – a husband and wife and their three children. Longer-term activists were sleeping there as well, ready to document their inevitable eviction. Well, last Saturday at 5.30am the Israeli border police did come and forceably evict them (so forceably that the son Rami had to be taken to hospital). The activists were arrested, as were protesters who subsequently took to the streets. The Hanouns were offered a tent by the Red Cross.

Sheikh Jarrah is in a valley down from the American Colony hotel where Tony Blair stays in a luxury suite when visiting Jerusalem as the Quartet’s “Peace Envoy”. When you look out of the Hanouns’ window, you can see Blair’s hotel 30 metres away; Blair can probably see the Hanouns’ house during his morning swim. He has said nothing.

The most disturbing fact about Israel’s eviction programme is that when you look around East Jerusalem and the surrounding area there are considerable plots of land without homes. If they wanted to build new illegal settlements without kicking out Palestinians in the area they could do so. The targeting of Sheikh Jarrah and other areas is actually a process of racial purification, the transformation of East Jerusalem into a unified Jewish Jerusalem.

The Hanoun family have been the victims of terror for decades as they have fought off Israel’s attempts to take their homes. Maher Hanoun’s father was a refugee from the nakba (or “the catastophe”, as Palestinians call the founding of Israel in 1948). The Jordanian government gave them the property in 1956 as compensation and transferred the ownership to them in 1962. Maher was born in 1958 so has spent his whole life, and bought up all his children, in his home.

As in other parts of East Jerusalem, Maher was offered payment if he would go quietly. He refused. “This is my home,” he said to me. “I would never respect myself if I sold my home for money. They want to build a settlement on our hearts, on our dreams.”

Across the way, there is a makeshift tent where a 62-year-old woman now lives after settlers took over her house. Initially they only took two parts of her house so she was literally living next to them. Then she was kicked out. Her husband had a heart attack when their house was violently repossessed with the help of more than 50 soldiers (on the night of Barack Obama’s US election victory). After spending some time in hospital, her husband had another attack two weeks later and died. The family again refused money to leave their homes. “I don’t have a life now,” she said from her tent. “With my husband and house gone, there is no life. I just hope with the help of God that this occupation will stop and we can return to our homes.”

I don’t know what happened to this women in the eviction on Saturday night, but one report I read said even her tent had been destroyed.

The one good thing about the Netanyahu-Lieberman administration is that they are much more honest about their colonisation programme than their “centrist” predecessors. The Netanyahu administration is now willing to get rid of some “outposts”, in return for continued expansion in East Jerusalem and “natural growth” in existing settlements throughout the West Bank. That was the policy negotiated by Ehud Olmert and George Bush before the Annapolis conference in 2007. Netanyahu is just more honest in saying that it obviates the possibility of a Palestinian state.

Maher agrees: “I can’t see how we can have a capital if there is no land, no houses, no people,” he said.

The next stop in this attempt to cleanse the putative future capital of Palestine of its indigenous population is the Bustan area of Silwan which sits in the valley down from the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall. When I first arrived in Israel I went on the City of David tour, which functions as a three-hour Israeli propaganda extravaganza (dressed up as an archeological experience). King David in Biblical lore is said to have been the first Jewish leader to settle the land in Jerusalem and his son King Solomon is said to have built the First Temple in 960 BC.

In 2005, some archeological finds purported to provide evidence that the lore was true. Now, the Israeli government wants to turn the homes of the people of Silwan into an archaeological theme park. Eighty-eight houses are due for demolition, home to about 1,500 Palestinians.

The blue velvet hills of my youth have been destroyed

Raja Shehadeh | The Guardian

5 July 2009

I can remember the appearance of the hills around Ramallah in 1979, before any Jewish settlement came to be established there. In the spring of that year I walked north from Ramallah, where I live, to the nearby village of A’yn Qenya and up the pine-forested hill. A gazelle leapt ahead of me. When I reached the top I could see hills spread below me like crumpled blue velvet, with the hamlets of Janiya and Deir Ammar huddled between its folds. On top of the highest hill in the distance stood the village of Ras Karkar with its centuries-old citadel that dominated the area during Ottoman times. I had been following the worrying developments of extensive settlement-building elsewhere in the West Bank and wondered how long it would be before these hills came under the merciless blades of the Israeli bulldozers. I didn’t have to wait long. A year later the top of the hill was lopped off and the settlement of Dolev, then a cluster of red-tiled Swiss-style chalets, was established.

Now, more than 25 years later, Dolev has expanded and taken over the hills to its north for vineyards. Numerous highways for the exclusive use of its Jewish settlers connect it to the many other settlements in the area and to Israel’s coastline. Those settlers travelling to and from Israeli cities where they work can only see road signs indicating other Jewish settlements. They encounter no Palestinian traffic on the roads nor do they see any Palestinian villages. No wonder then that I was once stopped by an armed settler and interrogated as to why I was taking a walk in his hills. When I asked him what right he had to be there, he answered: “I live here.” He then pointedly added: “Unlike you, I really live here.”

Not a single year has passed since Israel acquired the territories in 1967 in which Jewish settlements were not built. Had it pursued peace as assiduously, surely it would have achieved it by now. Instead, whenever the US pressed for a peace initiative, the “proper Zionist response” was the creation of new a settlement. The pattern of settling the Ramallah hills illustrates well the workings of this doomed policy. The Jewish settlement of Talmon was established in 1989 on the lands of the Palestinian village of Janiya, when the government of Yitzhak Shamir was being pressured to agree to start negotiations with the Palestinians. Talmon B was established, about two miles away, when the US secretary of state, James Baker, arrived in Israel two years later to broker the first ever peace conference between Israel and Arab countries.

At that time, Shamir dismissed the new settlement as “just a new neighbourhood”. The signing of the Oslo accords under a Rabin government in 1993 led to the building of a road connecting Dolev to Beit Eil, running through private Palestinian land. This winding road passed through the beautiful wadi linking Ramallah to A’yn Qenya, causing extensive destruction to the ancient rock formations and olive orchards along the way. One rockface that I particularly miss used to be studded with cyclamens during the late winter months, coming down all the way to the spring – which was also destroyed.

The Israeli policy of speeding up settlement construction in the face of US diplomatic pressure shows no sign of changing. Following the latest US administration declaration that Israel must impose a complete freeze on settlements, the country’s defence minister, Ehud Barak, declared last week the decision to establish 300 housing units in Givat Habrecha (Hebrew for hill of the blessing), one of the 12 outposts near the settlement of Talmon in the Ramallah hills. A few days later, on 29 June, he announced a further expansion of the illegal settlement of Adam, where 50 families are to move to a new neighbourhood located on a relatively large parcel of land outside the built–up area of the settlement. This also violates the Israeli commitment in the road map agreement not to expand the area of existing settlements.

This demand for a freeze on new settlements – which is not accepted by Israel even temporarily, as one Likud minister underlined today– falls short of what should happen if a viable peace is to be achieved: a complete evacuation of all the settlements built illegally in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967. Some would say this cannot possibly happen, given that there are around half a million Israeli settlers living in the West Bank. But who would have thought in 1962 that it would be possible to evict a million French Algerians who had been living in the country for almost a century and who represented roughly 9% of the population ?

Until this happens, we will have a continuation of the present reality where there is a single apartheid Israeli state encompassing pre-1967 borders and the Palestinian occupied territories. The sad truth is that when Israeli illegal settlements come to an end, as they must, Palestinians will not be able to undo the damage caused to the landscape by this massive, politically motivated development.

Israel pushes out its own people

Dimi Reider | The Guardian

10 June 2009

Whenever Barack Obama speaks of the Middle East these days, there’s one thing that worries “senior Israeli officials” most. “He didn’t say ‘Jewish state’,” they mutter to reporters. “He had all the time to say these two words, and didn’t. Why didn’t he?”

Binyamin Netanyahu himself utters this phrase at every opportunity. He even went as far as turning this coveted idea into a precondition for negotiating with the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, before being shushed by Washington.

But why this sudden insistence on what is supposed to be an internal Israeli matter, the self-definition of the state? As Abbas rightly commented, Israel can call itself the Hebrew Socialist Republic for all he cares. Why bring up this internal matter with Obama and Abbas, Israel’s primary foreign policy objectives?

The truth is that Netanyahu is speaking neither to Abbas nor to Obama. He is speaking to world public opinion, as he prepares for confrontation with a fourth party to the conflict, one that is as crucial as it is overlooked: the Israeli-Palestinian minority.

Israeli Palestinians, most of them native Palestinians who remained in what became Israel after 1948, constitute 21% of the population. Their very existence poses a critical reality check on Israel’s self-perception as Jewish and democratic, and if one throws in the population of the West Bank and Gaza, the proportion of Jews in Israeli-controlled areas shrinks to a mere 51%.

Despite discrimination in all walks of life – education, housing, civil service, politics – the Palestinian minority in Israel is slowly gaining ground. The number of Palestinian students on Israeli campuses is growing from year to year, discrimination is actively challenged both in court and in public life, and the years of housing neglect are biting back at Jewish hegemony as they push more and more young Palestinian professionals into previously Jewish-only areas.

So as almost any honest Zionist will tell you, here’s the dilemma. Israel’s proclaimed raison d’etre is maintaining a rigidly ethnocentric Jewish state, one in which Jews will never be in a minority. Being a minority must be understood in the emotional sense rather than the numerical one. This is important to our own historic memory as persecuted minorities, but even more so because maintaining a democracy is quintessential to Israel’s standing in the world community. On the other hand, given Palestinian advancement within Israel, an open democracy that plays by the rules will inevitably result in the erosion of the purist nation-state. So in the three-part Jewish, Palestinian and democratic conundrum, one element has to be dismissed. Netanyahu’s new catchphrase seems to indicate that that element will be the Palestinian minority in Israel.

Avigdor Lieberman is much maligned for his racism, but his line exemplifies one that had become very mainstream in Israel: a Palestinian state needs to be established – the sooner the better, before Palestinians in the occupied territories despair of nationalism and begin requesting the vote. Yet the geopolitical situation as it stands will, in such a scenario, still leave Israel as a bi-national state. His solution is annulling the citizenship of about half the Israeli Palestinians and redrawing the maps so that they find themselves within the new Palestinian state.

Lieberman’s position is widely shared; even self-proclaimed dove Tzipi Livni said, on several occasions, that “once a Palestinian state is established … we will be able to tell any Palestinian wishing to realise his national identity that he is now able to do it elsewhere”. More ominously, recent developments on the ground suggest the machinery for carrying out such an unprecedented task is already in motion.

The interior minister, Eli Yishay, had launched a legislative project to allow him the annulment of anyone’s citizenship without the authorisation of the attorney general. The IDF announced it would be allocating a special infantry brigade “to deal with a potential Arab uprising in case of war”. Last week’s national defence drill included just such a scenario – while most Israelis practised going into bomb shelters, army and police practised “suppressing a large-scale Arab revolt in the north” – the exact area of Lieberman’s proposed geographical experiment. And the outlandish bills recently tabled at the Knesset, ranging from banning commemoration of the Nakba to making citizenship conditional on a loyalty oath to a Jewish state, contribute to further alienation between the two communities and attach new fuses to an already much-rattled powder keg.

Are we facing the prospect of an ethnic cleansing? To a degree, ethnic cleansing has always been part and parcel of Israeli political life. Despite its bloody connotations, ethnic cleansing can be carried out in many ways. Family-by-family expulsion from “illegal housing” and discriminative economic pressure to emigrate is ethnic cleansing, too. We appear to be marching towards a nasty and brutal escalation on that front.

The reason why Netanyahu is talking over the heads of Palestinian Israeli citizens is precisely because most of them (over 70%) want to remain part of a sovereign democracy rather than the vague and improbably West Bank statelet. The reason he’s trying to create a fictional outside leadership for them in the character of the Palestinian Authority they so despise is precisely because their real leadership – their mayors, intellectuals, politicians and NGOs – persistently call for internal, Jewish-Arab dialogue over their rights and the role each community should play in a joint and truly democratic state.

Netanyahu’s efforts to throw in Israeli Palestinians with the West Bankers must be resisted. If he wants to make them part of the regional process, they should be heard speaking for themselves; if he doesn’t open the door for them as partners, they must be let in through the window, with every discussion of the peace process featuring exploration of the Israeli Palestinians’ exclusive plight. Most importantly, powerful international defence of their rights as Israel’s equal must be mounted and persistently ensured.