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Nakba: Understanding the Palestinian Catastrophe
Kim Bullimore
Al-Nakba (“the catastrophe”) refers to the destruction of Palestinian society that took place in 1948, when more than 500 villages were destroyed by Zionist militia and more than 1 million Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes—750,000 fleeing to neighbouring Arab states and the other 250,000 becoming internal refugees in the newly formed Israeli state.
Ever since, Israel has been an apartheid state that has used both military force and legally sanctioned discrimination to oppress the Palestinian people. Like other settler colonial states, Israel is primarily concerned with controlling territory and replacing the indigenous population with a settler population. As the late Australian theorist Patrick Wolfe noted, “settler colonialism destroys to replace”.
Zionism, the ideological foundation on which the Israeli state is built, emerged in the late 1800s in reaction to anti-Semitism and waves of anti-Jewish pogroms taking place in Europe. At the time, a section of the Jewish middle class concluded that anti-Semitism was an eternal and inescapable phenomenon as long as Jews lived among non-Jews. They believed that the only way to avoid it was to establish an independent state for the Jewish people. While the Zionist movement eventually settled on Palestine as the location for the new Jewish state, its leaders also considered a range of other countries, including Argentina, Turkey, Kenya, Angola and Uganda.
Regardless of the area chosen, Zionism’s founding father, Theodore Herzl, understood that it would be impossible to establish without the backing of the one of the major imperial powers. The Zionist movement, however, didn’t gain an imperial sponsor until in 1917, thirteen years after Herzl’s death, when the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, which affirmed that it would “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.
Herzl also understood that, regardless of where the Jewish state was eventually established, it would be necessary to expel the existing indigenous population to make way for Jewish settler colonists. “When we occupy the land … we shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country”, Herzl wrote in an 1895 diary entry. “Both the [expropriation of property] and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”
Herzl here articulated two of Zionism’s central doctrines: exclusivist Jewish labour and “transfer”. As Palestinian historian Nur Masalha explains in Expulsion of the Palestinians, the concept of “transfer” within Zionist ideology came to be “a euphemism denoting the organised removal of the indigenous population of Palestine to neighbouring countries”. Moreover, he notes, it “occupied a central position in the strategic thinking of the leadership of the Zionist movement and the Yishuv [the Jewish population in Palestine prior to the founding of Israel] as a solution to the ‘Arab question’ in Palestine … Virtually every member of the Zionist pantheon of founding fathers and important leaders supported it and advocated it in one form or another”.
Prior to the 1890s, Jewish people made up less than 4 percent of the population of Palestine, while Palestinian Arab Muslims and Christians made up the overwhelming majority. It was therefore essential, if the Zionist project were to succeed, to change the demographic balance. Over the next 50 years, mass Zionist immigration to Palestine increased the Jewish settler population to approximately one-third of the overall population. The Zionist movement also bought land from Palestinian and Arab landowners, establishing dozens of colonies and expelling the Palestinian tenant farmers and their families who had worked the land for centuries.
It soon became clear that very few Palestinians had any interest in selling their land to the colonists. By 1947, Jewish settlers had succeeded in purchasing just 7 percent of privately owned land in the territory. However, as Patrick Wolfe notes in his 2016 book Traces of History, even this limited acquisition of territory allowed the Zionist movement “to establish a colonial beachhead” in Palestine from which it could carry out the mass, violent expulsion of most of the Palestinian Arab population, expropriate the lands which they once occupied and establish the state of Israel.
As Zionist settler colonialism intensified, political violence in 1920, 1921, 1929 and 1933 erupted as tensions between the Jewish Zionist settlers and the Palestinian Arab population boiled over. In 1936, Palestinians began a three-year anti-colonial revolt. Combining non-violent civil disobedience, general strikes and armed struggle, tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from all classes mobilised to throw off the shackles of British imperialism and Zionist settler colonialism.
During the revolt, British mandate police stations and government buildings were targeted; British convoys were attacked; roads, railroads and telegraph lines were cut; and trains and oil pipelines were blown up. More than 5,000 Palestinians were killed by British troops.
The British authorities also carried out collective punishment against whole Palestinian villages. This included bombing several villages out of existence, demolishing houses, enacting curfews, outlawing Palestinian political parties and associations, deporting or exiling their leaders and banning public protests. Hundreds of Palestinians were also convicted by British military courts; more than 50 were hanged and 2,500 detained in internment camps. By late 1938, Palestine was under a state of siege. It took more than 20,000 British and 15,000 Zionist troops to finally put the revolt down in 1939.
By the end of the uprising, the Zionist movement was stronger than it had been in 1936, having increased its military capacity due to its collaboration with Britain to suppress the revolt. Between 1940 and 1945, Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion continued to strengthen and expand the military capabilities of the Zionist movement in Palestine, while supporting Britain’s war efforts in Europe.
With the Palestinian national movement crushed, the leaders of the Zionist movement also began final preparations for the creation of the Zionist state, including creating a detailed registry of every Arab village in Palestine. This registry, known as the Village Files, was compiled by the Jewish National Fund, which was responsible for settling Jewish colonists in historic Palestine. Today, the fund remains one of the key tools used by the Zionist movement to enable the colonisation of Palestine.
According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, although the Village Files recorded the location of the villages, access roads, land quality and other socio-cultural information such as the names of village leaders, religious affiliations of the inhabitants and their main sources of income, they were not simply an “academic exercise in geography”.
Pappe explains in his 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine that the files also included “an index of hostility” towards the Zionist project based on whether the villages had participated in the 1936-39 revolt. Accompanying the index was a series of lists, which identified individuals and families who had fought against the British and the Zionists during the revolt or had been involved in the Palestinian national movement in any capacity.
According to Pappe, these lists, along with lists added in 1947 detailing “wanted” persons, were used in 1948 by Zionist militias as they seized control of and occupied Palestinian villages. Any Palestinians on the lists were immediately identified and “shot on the spot”.
As the war in Europe drew to a close in 1945, the Zionists under the leadership of Ben-Gurion enacted a new strategy, believing they were now militarily and demographically strong enough to need no longer the imperial backing of Britain. Over the next three years, Zionist militias attacked not only Palestinian Arabs but also British troops and infrastructure, including the terrorist bombing of Britain’s administrative headquarters in the King David Hotel in 1946, resulting in the death of 91 government officials, soldiers, police and office workers.
Zionist terrorist attacks on both British infrastructure and Palestinian villages escalated further after 29 November 1947, when the United Nations announced its plan to partition Palestine. The UN plan allocated 55 percent of Palestine to the Zionist movement, despite Palestinian Arabs making up two-thirds of the population.
Between December 1947 and March 1948, Zionist militias stepped up their terrorist bombings of Palestinian neighbourhoods and villages. Among the attacks ordered by Ben-Gurion at the end of January 1948 was the destruction of the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in Jerusalem. On 7 February, a week after the attack, Ben-Gurion also visited the Palestinian village of Lifta on the outskirts of Jerusalem, which had been destroyed in early January. According to Pappe, after the visit, Ben-Gurion “jubilantly recounted” to other leaders of his political party:
“In many Arab neighbourhoods in the west [of Jerusalem] you do not see even one Arab … what happened in Jerusalem and in Haifa—can happen in large parts of the country … If we persist it is quite possible that in the next six or eight months there will be considerable changes in the country, very considerable, and to our advantage. There will certainly be considerable changes in the demographic composition of the country.”
Throughout February 1948, the Zionist militia under Ben-Gurion’s command continued to terrorise Palestinian villages, expelling their residents. In March, Ben-Gurion finalised Plan Dalet, the Zionist movement’s blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Pappe notes in his book that, at the beginning of April, “each brigade commander received a list of the villages or neighbourhoods that had to be occupied, destroyed, and their inhabitants expelled”.
Following Ben-Gurion’s formal declaration of the establishment of Israel on 14 May, his new government set up an unofficial “Transfer Committee” to oversee the continued ethnic cleansing. In The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, Israeli Zionist historian Benny Morris notes that a 5 June memorandum issued by the Transfer Committee argued that “the uprooting of the Arabs should be seen as a solution to the Arab question” and proposed “preventing Arabs from returning to their places” by carrying out the “destruction of villages as much as possible during military operations” and the “settlement of Jews in a number of villages and towns”.
By the time Zionist forces finished implementing Plan Dalet in January 1949, the Zionist movement had taken control of 78 percent of historic Palestine and expelled 1 million Palestinians from their homes.
Since 1948, Israel has continued to expand, annexing more and more Palestinian land. In 1967, it took East Jerusalem, Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, ethnically cleansing a further 350,000-400,000 Palestinians from their land and homes. Since then, Israel has established more than 130 colonies in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, while another 100 wildcat (unofficial) colonies have been established independently. More than 600,000 Israeli colonists are living in the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem in contravention of international law.
For Palestinians, the Nakba of 1948 never ended.
(Courtesy: Red Flag, an Australian socialist publication.)
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Israel Is Carrying Out Mass Murder, Aided and Abetted by the US
Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie. Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime.
Israel has made it clear it is ready to destroy and kill as wantonly now as it was in 2014. Israel’s defense minister Benny Gantz, who was the chief of staff during the murderous assault on Gaza in 2014, has vowed that if Hamas “does not stop the violence, the strike of 2021 will be harder and more painful than that of 2014.” The current attacks have already targeted several residential high rises including buildings that housed over a dozen local and international press agencies, government buildings, roads, public facilities, agricultural lands, two schools and a mosque.
I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, four of them as The New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I lived for weeks at a time in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison where over two million Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to find clean water and endure constant Israeli terror. I have been in Gaza when it was pounded with Israeli artillery and air strikes. I have watched mothers and fathers, wailing in grief, cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and daughters. I know the crimes of the occupation—the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage.
I also have listened from Gaza to the lies emanating from Jerusalem and Washington. Israel’s indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror. And, while I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged by groups such as Hamas.
The false equivalency between Israeli and Palestinian violence was echoed during the war I covered in Bosnia. Those of us in the besieged city of Sarajevo were pounded daily with hundreds of heavy shells and rockets from the surrounding Serbs. We were targeted by sniper fire. The city suffered a few dozen dead and wounded each day. The government forces inside the city fired back with light mortars and small arms fire. Supporters of the Serbs seized on any casualties caused by Bosnian government forces to play the same dirty game, although well over 90 percent of the killings in Bosnia were the fault of the Serbs, as is also true regarding Israel.
The second and perhaps most important parallel is that the Serbs, like the Israelis, were the principal violators of international law. Israel is in breach of more than 30 U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 that states that Palestinian “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”
This is the truth. Any other starting point for the discussion of what is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians is a lie.
Israel’s once vibrant peace movement and political left, which condemned and protested against the Israeli occupation when I lived in Jerusalem, is moribund. The right-wing Netanyahu government, despite its rhetoric about fighting terrorism, has built an alliance with the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia, which also views Iran as an enemy. Saudi Arabia, a country that produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks, is reputed to be the most prolific sponsor of international Islamist terrorism, allegedly supporting Salafist jihadism, the basis of al-Qaeda, and groups such as the Afghanistan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Al-Nusra Front.
Saudi Arabia and Israel worked closely together to back the 2013 military coup in Egypt, led by General Adbul Fattah el Sisi. Sisi overthrew a democratically elected government. He has imprisoned tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists and human rights defenders, on politically motivated charges. The Sisi regime collaborates with Israel by keeping its common border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping them in the Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated places on earth. Israel’s cynicism and hypocrisy, especially when it wraps itself in the mantle of protecting democracy and fighting terrorism, is of epic proportions.
Those who are not Jewish in Israel are either second class citizens or live under brutal military occupation. Israel is not, and never has been, the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people. From the 7th century until 1948, when Jewish colonial settlers used violence and ethnic cleansing to create the state of Israel, Palestine was overwhelmingly Muslim. It was never empty land. The Jews in Palestine were traditionally a tiny minority. The United States is not an honest broker for peace but has funded, enabled and defended Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. Israel is not defending the rule of law. Israel is not a democracy. It is an apartheid state.
That the lie of Israel continues to be embraced by the ruling elites–there is no daylight between statements in defense of Israeli war crime by Nancy Pelosi and Ted Cruz–and used as a foundation for any discussion of Israel is a testament to the corrupting power of money, in this case that of the Israel lobby, and the bankruptcy of a political system of legalized bribery that has surrendered its autonomy and its principles to its major donors. It is also a stunning example of how colonial settler projects, and this is true in the United States, always carry out cultural genocide so they can exist in a suspended state of myth and historical amnesia to legitimize themselves.
The Israel lobby has shamelessly used its immense political clout to demand that Americans take de facto loyalty oaths to Israel. The passage by 35 state legislatures of Israel lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a mockery of our Constitutional right of free speech. Israel has lobbied the U.S. State Department to redefine anti-Semitism under a three-point test known as the Three Ds: the making of statements that “demonize” Israel; statements that apply “double standards” for Israel; statements that “delegitimize” the state of Israel. This definition of anti-Semitism is being pushed by the Israel lobby in state legislatures and on college campuses. The Israel lobby spies in the United States, often at the direction of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, on those who speak up for the rights of Palestinians. It wages public smear campaigns and blacklists defenders of Palestinian rights–including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein; U.N. Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories, Richard Falk, also Jewish; and university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine.
The Israel lobby has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate U.S. elections, far beyond anything alleged to have been carried out by Russia, China or any other country. The heavy-handed interference by Israel in the American political system, which includes operatives and donors bundling together hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in every U.S. congressional district to bankroll compliant candidates, is documented in the Al-Jazeera four-part series “The Lobby.” Israel managed to block “The Lobby” from being broadcast. In the film, a pirated copy that is available on the website Electronic Intifada, the leaders of the Israel lobby are repeatedly captured on a reporter’s hidden camera explaining how they, backed by the intelligence services within Israel, attack and silence American critics and use massive cash donations to buy politicians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secured the unconstitutional invitation by then-House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress in 2015 to denounce President Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear agreement. Netanyahu’s open defiance of Obama and alliance with the Republican Party, however, did not stop Obama in 2014 from authorizing a 10-year $38 billion military aid package to Israel, a sad commentary on how captive American politics is to Israeli interests.
The investment by Israel and is backers is worth it, especially when you consider that the U.S. has also spent over $ 6 trillion during the last 20 years fighting futile wars that Israel and its lobby pushed for in the Middle East. These wars are the greatest strategic debacle in American history, accelerating the decline of the American empire, bankrupting the nation at a time of economic stagnation and mounting poverty, and turning huge parts of the globe against us. They serve Israel’s interests, not ours.
The longer the mendacious Israeli narrative is embraced, the more empowered become the racists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and far-right hate groups inside and outside Israel. This steady shift to the far right in Israel has fostered an alliance between Israel and the Christian right, many of whom are anti-Semites. The more Israel and the Israel lobby level the charge of anti-Semitism against those who speak up for Palestinian rights, as they did against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the more they embolden the real anti-Semites.
Racism, including anti-Semitism, is dangerous. It is not only bad for the Jews. It is bad for everyone. It empowers the dark forces of ethnic and religious hatred on the extremes. Netanyahu’s racist government has built alliances with far-right leaders in Hungary, India, and Brazil, and was closely allied with Donald Trump. Racists and ethnic chauvinists, as I saw in the wars in the former Yugoslavia, feed off of each other. They divide societies into polarized, antagonistic camps that only speak in the language of violence. The radical jihadists need Israel to justify their violence, just as Israel needs the radical jihadists to justify its violence. These extremists are ideological twins.
This polarization fosters a fearful, militarized society. It permits the ruling elites in Israel, as in the United States, to dismantle civil liberties in the name of national security. Israel runs training programs for militarized police, including from the United States. It is a global player in the multibillion-dollar drone industry, competing against China and the United States.
It oversees hundreds of cybersurveillance startups whose espionage innovations, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, have been utilized abroad “to locate and detain human rights activists, persecute members of the LGBT community, silence citizens critical of their governments, and even fabricate cases of blasphemy against Islam in Muslim countries that don’t maintain formal relations with Israel.”
Israel, like the United States, has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. One million Israelis, many of them among the most enlightened and educated, have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists—Israeli and Palestinian—endure constant government surveillance, arbitrary arrests and vicious government-run smear campaigns. Mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, physically assault dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and African immigrants in the slums of Tel Aviv. These Jewish extremists have targeted Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, demanding their expulsion. They are supported by an array of anti-Arab groups including the Otzma Yehudit Party, the ideological descendant of the outlawed Kach party, the Lehava movement, which calls for all Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories to be expelled to surrounding Arab states, and La Familia, far-right soccer hooligans. Lehava in Hebrew means “flame” and is the acronym for “Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land.” Mobs of these Jewish fanatics parade through Palestinian neighborhoods, including in occupied East Jerusalem, protected by Israeli police, shouting to the Palestinians who live there “Death to the Arabs,” which is also a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches.
Israel has pushed through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that echo the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law, for example, permits “small, exclusively Jewish towns planted across Israel’s Galilee region to formally reject applicants for residency on the grounds of ‘suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.” Israel’s educational system, starting in primary school, uses the Holocaust to portray Jews as eternal victims. This victimhood is an indoctrination machine used to justify racism, Islamophobia, religious chauvinism and the deification of the Israeli military.
There are many parallels between the deformities that grip Israel and the deformities that grip the United States. The two countries are moving at warp speed towards a 21rst century fascism, cloaked in religious language, which will revoke what remains of our civil liberties and snuff out our anemic democracies. The failure of the United States to stand up for the rule of law, to demand that the Palestinians, powerless and friendless, even in the Arab world, be granted basic human rights mirrors the abandonment of the vulnerable within our own society. We are headed, I fear, down the road Israel is heading down. It will be devastating for the Palestinians. It will be devastating for us. And all resistance, as the Palestinians courageously show us, will only come from the street.
(Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. Courtesy: Scheerpost.)
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Israel Is an Apartheid State
Tom Gilchrist
In Israel, an apartheid system ensures the domination of the Jewish population over Palestinians. As Human Rights Watch notes in its recent report, “A threshold crossed: Israeli authorities and the crimes of apartheid and persecution”:
“Every day a person is born in Gaza into an open-air prison, in the West Bank without civil rights, in Israel with an inferior status by law, and in neighboring countries effectively condemned to lifelong refugee status, like their parents and grandparents before them, solely because they are Palestinian and not Jewish.”
To understand how Israeli apartheid operates, it is important to know that all territory between Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, whether legally part of Israel or part of the occupied Palestinian territories, is part of a single regime of Israeli control. As Yariv Levin, the speaker of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, put it in 2014:
“The correct policy, from the point of view of Israeli interests regarding our political ability at the moment, is to combine the attempt to hold the maximum amount of territory and apply sovereignty over the maximum amount of territory while keeping the Arab population within it to a minimum.”
Apartheid is enforced in several ways in the pursuit of this goal.
There are discriminatory migration policies. After the mass expulsions of Palestinians with the foundation of Israel, the Knesset passed the Law of Return in 1950. This law bestows the right on all Jewish people, no matter where they were born, to migrate to Israel with full citizenship rights.
No such right of return is granted to non-Jewish Palestinians who were driven from the territory, or to their family members. In fact, the 2003 Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law explicitly denies citizenship or residency to inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which would normally be available for those marrying an Israeli citizen.
Discriminatory migration policies aren’t enough, however—Israel faces what Zionists term the “demographic threat”. Palestinians make up around 20 percent of Israel’s citizens. But Palestinians are roughly half of the 14 million people living within the combined area making up the state of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. While Palestinian citizens of Israel face discrimination in health, housing and employment, they have at least some rights compared to Palestinians in the occupied territories, including the right to vote in Israel’s elections. To grant all Palestinians the same rights as Israelis would be an immediate threat to Jewish supremacy.
Officially, the occupied territories, seized in 1967 by Israel, are a temporary military occupation, whose final status is to be determined by future negotiations. But there is nothing temporary about an occupation that has lasted more than half a century.
Ostensibly, Israel shares authority over parts of the occupied territories with the Palestinian Authority, which engages in “security coordination” with Israel.
That is, the Palestinian Authority acts as a police force of the Israelis—in return, its leaders get to pretend that they lead a quasi-autonomous territory. But Israeli security forces have the right to act against whoever they want throughout the occupied territories; throughout most of the West Bank, they exercise sole authority. Israel also maintains control over the population registry, voting rights and borders of the territories.
While Israel doesn’t directly occupy the Gaza Strip, it maintains complete control over its borders and airspace. Israel decides who gets to enter and leave, and what can be imported and exported. The blockade that it has imposed since 2007 has been devastating. While Israel has the highest COVID-19 vaccination rate in the world, only 36,000 people in Gaza have been vaccinated out of a population of more than 2 million. During the 14 years of the blockade, Israel has regularly bombed the territory, but blocks the import of construction materials that would be required to rebuild.
The façade of a separation between Israel and the occupied territories enables Israeli sovereignty over the entire region while denying basic rights to the 5 million Palestinians who live within those territories.
In many instances, Israel maintains separate codes of law for Israeli Jews and non-Jewish Palestinians. Apart from East Jerusalem, Palestinians in the West Bank are under military rule. In East Jerusalem, which Israel has annexed, most Palestinians are defined as permanent residents, which grants them additional but still limited rights. But the more than 441,000 Jewish settlers throughout the occupied territories are given full rights as citizens of Israel and governed according to civil law.
So while Jewish settlers in the West Bank have full voting rights, none of the Palestinians living in the same area have the right to vote in Israel’s parliamentary elections, despite the power that Israel exercises over their lives, while permanent residents in East Jerusalem are limited to voting in municipal elections. In theory, most Palestinians in the occupied territories have the right to vote in elections for the Palestinian Authority, but the last such election was in 2006. Even if elections were to take place, the Palestinian Authority is in practice completely subordinate to the Israeli state.
The two codes of law, civil and military, which Jews and Palestinians live under in the West Bank, grant both groups dramatically different rights. Palestinians accused of crimes are tried in military courts with an almost 100 percent conviction rate. A 2014 report from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel found that “since the 1980s, all Israeli citizens brought to trial before the military courts were Arab citizens and residents of Israel”. Jewish settlers in the West Bank are tried in the regular Israeli court system.
Searching Jewish settlers requires a permit. Searching Palestinians does not. Jewish settlers, detained under Israeli law, must be brought before a judge within 24 or 96 hours, depending on the circumstances. Palestinians, detained under military law, can be held for up to eight days until they are required to be brought before a military judge. As citizens of Israel, Jewish settlers have rights to freedom of speech and assembly unless there is “near certainty” that it would harm security interests. Palestinians can be imprisoned for up to ten years for attempts to influence public opinion that “may” harm public peace.
Palestinians in East Jerusalem are governed under civil law as permanent residents. A pathway to citizenship exists, but it requires recognising the Israeli occupation as legitimate. Most Palestinians do not apply for it, but of those who have, the vast majority have not received it. Permanent residency, in contrast to citizenship, is conditional and insecure. It can be revoked at any time by the minister of the interior.
Israeli citizens can live and move freely throughout the territory Israel controls (except for the Gaza Strip). Palestinians from the West Bank are unable to enter Israel, East Jerusalem and large parts of the West Bank without difficult-to-obtain permits. Movement within the West Bank is restricted by hundreds of armed checkpoints. Security forces at these checkpoints can stop Palestinians without reason or leave them waiting at gunpoint for hours before allowing them to continue.
Palestinians in the occupied territories require Israeli permission to travel internationally, a right they are routinely denied without explanation. While Israeli citizens can leave and re-enter the country at any time, residents of East Jerusalem who leave the city risk having their residency revoked. The minister of the interior has withdrawn residency from at least 14,701 Palestinians since 1967.
Throughout all the areas it controls, Israeli policies discriminate in favour of the Jewish population and ensure greater Jewish control over the land. Adalah, a Palestinian-run legal centre in Israel, has documented some 65 laws that explicitly discriminate against Palestinians living in Israel. Palestinian citizens face discrimination in health, housing and employment. Discriminatory planning policies within the Israeli state confine Palestinians in overcrowded towns. While Palestinian citizens make up 20 percent of the population, Palestinian municipalities make up less than 3 percent of the land. The creation of more than 900 Jewish localities has been approved since 1948. For Palestinians, there have been none.
According to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Israel has demolished 7,591 Palestinian-owned structures in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 2009, displacing 11,408 people. It is extremely difficult for Palestinians to gain building permits throughout the territories. In East Jerusalem, a series of discriminatory laws enables settlers and settler organisations to evict Palestinians from their homes and transfer the latter to Jewish owners (as has occurred recently in the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah).
Throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem, at least 280 Jewish settlements have been established, home to more than 600,000 Jewish settlers. Discriminatory policies systematically favour Israeli settlers over Palestinians in these territories, including access to roads and water. The World Bank in 2009 found that Israelis in the West Bank consume four times more water than Palestinians.
That these interconnected regimes of oppression operate as a system of apartheid has long been recognised by Palestinian activists. As Palestinian writer Linah Alsaafin put it a decade ago in an article at the Electronic Intifada: “Apartheid is very much alive in occupied Palestine. It is our reality that we breathe through our congested lungs every minute of our waking lives”.
Recently, more mainstream human rights organisations have begun to catch up. In January this year, Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem released a position paper titled “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid”. Last month, Human Rights Watch released the substantial report quoted above. These documents provide substantial details of the oppression faced by Palestinians.
At the same time, we need to go beyond the human rights framework of these NGOs. The Human Rights Watch report ends with a series of recommendations. These are all directed to various nation-states, in particular the United States and the countries of the European Union, or to international organisations like the International Criminal Court. When it comes to the liberation of Palestinians, this gets things totally backwards.
It is not by accident that Western governments and their institutions so stridently back Israel. In the Middle East, a region with two-thirds of the world’s oil reserves, the alliance with Israel has been crucial for Western imperial strategy in the 20th and 21st centuries. As US President Joe Biden once put it, “If there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one to make sure our interests were preserved”.
Imperialist states will not be persuaded by moral cases, no matter how compelling. And justice for Palestine cannot be won through international courts. The dismantling of the Israeli apartheid state and liberation for Palestinians will be won only through independent revolutionary struggle in Palestine and across the Middle East.
(Courtesy: Red Flag, an Australian socialist publication.)
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Muna is Palestine, Yakub is Israel: The Untold Story of Sheikh Jarrah
Ramzy Baroud
There are two separate Sheikh Jarrah stories – one read and watched in the news and another that receives little media coverage or due analysis.
The obvious story is that of the nightly raids and violence meted out by Israeli police and Jewish extremists against Palestinians in the devastated East Jerusalem neighborhood.
For weeks, thousands of Jewish extremists have targeted Palestinian communities in Jerusalem’s Old City. Their objective is the removal of Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. They are not acting alone. Their riots and rampages are directed by a well-coordinated leadership composed of extremist Zionist and Jewish groups, such as the Otzma Yehudit party and the Lehava Movement. Their unfounded claims, violent actions and abhorrent chant “Death to the Arabs” are validated by Israeli politicians, such as Knesset member Itamar Ben-Gvir and the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, Arieh King.
Here is a little introduction to the political discourse of Ben-Gvir and King, who were caught on video shouting and insulting a wounded Palestinian protester. The video starts with MK Ben-Gvir disparagingly yelling at a Palestinian who was apparently wounded by Israeli police, yet returned to protest against the evictions planned for Sheikh Jarrah.
Ben-Gvir is heard shouting, “Abu Hummus, how is your ass?”
“The bullet is still there, that’s why he is limping,” responds the Deputy Mayor, King, to Ben-Gvir. King continues, “Did they take the bullet out of your ass? Did they take it out already? It is a pity it did not go in here,” King continues, pointing to his head.
Delighted with what they perceive to be a whimsical commentary on the wounding of the Palestinian, Ben-Gvir and King’s entourage of Jewish extremists laugh.
While “Abu Hummus”, wounded yet still protesting, is a testament to the tenacity of the Palestinian people, King, Ben-Gvir, the settlers and the police are a representation of the united Israeli front aimed at ethnically cleansing Palestinians and ensuring Jewish majority in Jerusalem.
Another important participant in the ongoing Israeli ethnic cleansing campaign in Jerusalem is Israel’s court system which has provided a legal cover for the targeting of Palestinian inhabitants of Jerusalem.
The legal foundation of the Jewish settlers’ constant attempts at acquiring more Palestinian properties can be traced back to a specific 1970 law, known as the Legal and Administrative Matters Law, which allowed Jews to sue Palestinians for properties they claim to have owned prior to the establishment of Israel on the ruins of historic Palestine in 1948. While Palestinians are excluded from making similar claims, Israeli courts have generously handed Palestinian homes, lands and other assets to Jewish claimants. In turn, these homes, as in the case of Sheikh Jarrah and other Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, are often sold to Jewish settler organizations to build yet more colonies on occupied Palestinian land.
Last February, the Israeli Supreme Court awarded Jewish settlers the right to many Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah. Following a Palestinian and international backlash, it offered Palestinians a ‘compromise’, whereby Palestinian families relinquished ownership rights to their homes and agreed to continue to live there as tenants, paying rents to the very illegal Jewish settlers who have stolen their homes in the first place, but who are now armed with a court decision.
However, the ‘logic’ through which Jews claim Palestinian properties as their own should not be associated with a few extremist organizations. After all, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 was not the work of a few extreme Zionists. Similarly, the illegal occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967 and the massive settlement enterprise that followed was not the brainchild of a few extreme individuals. Colonialism in Israel was, and remains, a state-run project, which ultimately aims at achieving the same objective that is being carried out in Sheikh Jarrah – the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to ensure Jewish demographic majority.
This is the untold story of Sheikh Jarrah, one that cannot be expressed by a few news bytes or social media posts. However, this most relevant narrative is largely hidden. It is easier to blame a few Jewish extremists than to hold the entire Israeli government accountable. Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is constantly manipulating the subject of demographics to advance the interests of his Jewish constituency. He is a strong believer in an exclusive Jewish state and also fully aware of the political influence of Jewish settlers. For example, shortly before the March 23 elections, Netanyahu made a decision to greenlight the construction of 540 illegal settlement units in the so-called Har-Homa E Area (Abu Ghneim Mountain) in the occupied West Bank, in the hope of acquiring as many votes as possible.
While the Sheikh Jarrah story is garnering some attention even in mainstream US media, there is a near-complete absence of any depth to that coverage, namely the fact that Sheikh Jarrah is not the exception but the norm. Sadly, as Palestinians and their supporters try to circumvent widespread media censorship by reaching out directly to civil societies across the world using social media platforms, they are often censored there, as well.
One of the videos initially censored by Instagram is that of Muna al-Kurd, a Palestinian woman who had lost her home in Sheikh Jarrah to a Jewish settler by the name of Yakub.
“Yakub, you know this is not your house,” Muna is seen outside her home, speaking to Yakub.
Yakub answers, “Yes, but if I go, you don’t go back. So what’s the problem? Why are you yelling at me? I didn’t do this. I didn’t do this. It’s easy to yell at me, but I didn’t do this.
Muna: “You are stealing my house.”
Yakub: “And if I don’t steal it, someone else is going to steal it.”
Muna: “No. No one is allowed to steal it.”
The untold story of Sheikh Jarrah, of Jerusalem – in fact, of all of Palestine – is that of Muna and Yakub, the former representing Palestine, the latter, Israel. For justice to ever be attained, Muna must be allowed to reclaim her stolen home and Yakub must be held accountable for his crime.
[Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU).]
