Palestinian protesters gather as a shower of tear gas canisters fired by Israeli troops land on the field east of Gaza City, on Aug. 10, 2018. Picture by: Wissam Nassar/Xinhua News Agency/PA Images. All rights reserved.
Palestinians across Israel, the West Bank and Gaza are banding together in a general strike on October 1, in protest of Israel’s Jewish Nation-State Law and President Donald Trump’s ‘deal of the century.’
Israel’s
Palestinian citizens
recently committed a serious crime, a clear case of
democracy-terrorism designed to damage
the very
foundations of the only Jewish state in the Middle East: Their
elected representatives dared bring
Israel’s new Nation-State Law to the attention of the United
Nations.
The
recently enacted law formalizes what has been the reality for
Israel’s Palestinian citizens all along: a fundamental inequality –
legal and
institutional – that separates the Arab population, about a fifth
of the citizenry, from the Jewish majority. Joint List Knesset member
Aida Touma-Sliman summed
up the situation:
“We went to the United
Nations to protest the law that defines us, Palestinian citizens of
Israel, as second-class citizens, legitimizes the occupation and
perpetuates Israel’s place in the dubious company of ethnocentric,
discriminatory and exclusionist countries.”
And
the response in Israel? Predictably,
the reactions
ranged from demands for an investigation of the Arab representatives
by the Knesset’s
Ethics Committee – as if
there is any
measure of ethics left in a parliament that legislates race laws –
to calls for their
expulsion from the
parliament, the
outlawing of
all Arab
representation, and physical expulsion to Gaza.
Israeli
Jews of a certain age may recall the popular
“go to Gaza”
curse, sometimes preceded by the observation that “the only
good Arab is a dead
Arab”. If the Arabs could not be killed, so the thinking went, at
least there should be the consolation of sending them to Gaza, in a
sort of a
mini-transfer. Once there, Israelis reserved for themselves the right
to teach the Palestinians a lesson should they get too uppity, as the
people of Gaza have found in recent months. As they have protested
Israel’s 11-year blockade on the tiny coastal enclave, the snipers
of the most moral army have had their index fingers ready on the
trigger.
Israeli
government ministers understand that it is time to
put
the Arabs in their proper place. Transport minister Yisrael Katz
suggested that the members of the Joint List move “to represent
Gaza, or one of our other neighboring ‘democracies’.” Housing
minister Yoav Galant argued:
“There is no room in the
Knesset for those who act against Israel's interests. The time has
come for the judicial system to permit outlawing these dangerous
extremists and removing them from the Knesset.”
Not
to be outdone, tourism minister Yariv Levin proclaimed:
"In any normal country there's one definition for [their
actions] – treason. I hope the judicial system tries them." He
must have known that calling someone a “traitor” in Israel is
akin to declaring hunting season on them.
Separately
or not, ongoing violent attacks on Palestinians in Gaza, the West
Bank and inside Israel have been on the rise.
For
over a decade, Israel’s repeated, devastating attacks on the Gaza
Strip, coupled with a prolonged siege, have had profound
consequences. Death
and destruction are evident everywhere: key infrastructure –
roads, electrical systems, water and sewer – has collapsed; housing
stock is destroyed; essential public health facilities are failing;
children are malnourished; the economy is in dire straits and
employment opportunities non-existent for most.
Harvard
researcher Sara Roy wrote
last year: “Gaza is in a state of humanitarian shock, due primarily
to Israel’s blockade, supported by the US, the EU and Egypt and now
entering its 11th year.” As Roy reported, the question repeated
again and again by Gazans was: “What do the Israelis want?” She
wondered: “Why is Gaza being punished in so heartless a manner, and
what does Israel truly hope to gain by it?”
With
Israel’s noose set tightly around Gaza’s neck, and the prospects
for an end to the 51-year-long occupation now gone, a popular
uprising brought about large weekly demonstrations this past spring
and summer along the fence separating the Gaza Strip from Israel.
Over
several months, Israeli military snipers have “picked off”
unarmed demonstrators as targets. The result: over 160 lives
terminated and thousands of others afflicted with life-long injuries,
among them many children, now doomed to survive with missing limbs,
paralysis and damaged organs.
These
assaults reflected a purposeful Israeli policy: the selection of
ammunition
– "butterfly bullets" – designed to maximize bodily
damage. Israel knows only too well that Gaza’s medical
infrastructure is incapable of properly repairing such serious
injuries – hence the large number of amputations.
The
Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem
has declared: “Israel is treating the protest in Gaza as it has
handled similar events in the past: Broad, unlawful use of lethal
force at a heavy price to lives, baseless legal interpretations
issued to justify this policy, and whitewashing the crimes within
days.”
After
the recent massacres of unarmed civilians, Roy warned:
“Gaza will not disappear. It will not ‘sink into the sea’, as
the late Yitzhak Rabin once wished it would. Gaza is a human rights
catastrophe and an ecologic disaster.”
On
the frontiers of the Wild West Bank, meanwhile, it is business as
usual: the occupation is thriving, and expanding, intently and
methodically. Recent legal decisions have empowered the Israeli
government to push the boundaries yet further.
The
failure of the Khan al-Ahmar residents’ petition in Israel’s High
Court of Justice against the demolition of their village is
illustrative. According to Israel’s Haaretz editorial:
“The argument that the
settlement enterprise is the act of individuals has been proven
groundless. It is the act of a state that breaks international law,
which prohibits an occupying state to settle its citizens in the
occupied area.”
The
editorial writers make the further point that Israel’s self-serving
legal rationalizations are being exposed for what they are:
“The legal viewpoint, that
the Jewish settlement on ‘state’s lands’ in the territories is
temporary, and therefore legal as far as international law is
concerned, has been smashed on the rock of reality and Israel’s
policy. Nothing is more permanent than this false transience.”
In
another case, the Jerusalem District Court recently ruled that an
outpost settlement – these are viewed as illegal even according to
Israeli law – could be “legalized” retroactively. Haaretz
reported
that the court accepted in “a precedent-setting ruling” the claim
of the outpost’s residents that “transactions conducted in good
faith under certain conditions are considered valid – even if they
have certain legal faults”. The conspiracy to steal Palestinian
land over many decades and in violation of international law was
dismissed as similar to buying “stolen goods” in error.
In
parallel, Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din reported
on a “price tag” pre-Holiday
Special: Ten
attacks by settlers in ten days, in the
first two weeks of Elul, the month of mercy that precedes the Jewish
High Holidays. They included
throwing rocks at
Palestinian cars and homes, burning a tractor, uprooting more than
200 olive trees, destroying
a water well,
puncturing car tires, smashing windshields and scrawling
hateful graffiti, as well as
carrying out extremely
violent attacks on
individuals.
In
addition, those perpetrating crimes against Palestinians have shown
that they are equally capable of hurting Jews. They recently attacked
Jewish activists, members of Ta’ayush,
who were trying to
protect the Palestinian population in the West Bank – in place of
an occupation
army that has forgotten that is one of its duties.
The
true war criminals, however, those holding ultimate responsibility
for such actions,
are the members of all Israel’s governments and all its military
commanders. According to international law, they are required to
protect the occupied population, but
instead they
have done the exact
opposite: They have overseen a process of ethnic cleansing whose
purpose is to minimize Palestinian presence in the West Bank, the
small territory remaining of the Palestinians’
original homeland.
Violence
against Israel’s Palestinian citizens has escalated too. A Haaretz
editorial
from last spring noted:
“Over the weekend there
was a
demonstration in Haifa protesting the killings along the
Gaza border fence. The violent suppression of this protest and the
detention of 21 demonstrators, including Jafar Farah, the director of
the Mossawa Center that advocates for Israeli Arabs’ rights, are a
further sign of the growing restrictions on the democratic space
available to this community.”
While
in police custody, Farah’s knee was broken.
More
recently, three Palestinian citizens of Israel were attacked
by eight Israeli Jews armed with knives and chains on Haifa's Kiryat
Haim neighborhood beach. The gang was reportedly heard saying, “Arabs
should not be at the beach” and “They should go to their ‘own
places.’"
Indeed,
it is in the
interests of
the Jewish State to further minimize Palestinian presence in the
public space. Because it has been impossible until now to expel
Palestinian citizens from universities, hospitals and
pharmacies, some
restless Israelis have in the meantime set about the preliminary task
of cleansing the beaches
and the Knesset of Arabs.
For
those who care to
examine the past, the patterns are unmistakable. Since 1948, a
process of people replacement has been underway (I covered it in
greater detail here):
ethnic cleansing, now taking place daily, mainly in the West Bank,
using a variety of methods and at different locales. The separation
and isolation of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank, the siege and the
attacks are part of that
same process.
Attacks
against Palestinians, whether in the West Bank or within Israel
proper, constitute pieces of mosaic in those
patterns. The goal
– in 1948,
in 1967, and since then – has been
as much territory as possible
and as little
“foreign” population: the natives that have
lived in the
country for, at the very
least, many
hundreds of years.
This holds as true
in Area “C” in the West Bank as it does on the Kiryat Haim beach
in Israel.
The
Nation-State Law, the object of protest by Palestinian citizens of
Israel and more than a few Jewish Israelis, is enmeshed in
the same
“cleansing” procedure. A
strong people
minimizes the presence – whether physically, visually or
representationally – of a
weak people: a
process that is fundamentally illegal according to
international law
and profoundly obscene according to all ethical codes.
Israel
is proving to the world that it is most certainly
not a state of all
its citizens. Those who are not Jewish, the Palestinians whose
families survived the Nakba,
may have some rights – more than can be said for Palestinians in
the occupied territories – but they are lesser citizens, citizens
on constant probation.
And just as their
knees are much more vulnerable
to police violence,
they are entirely exposed to the
Jewish pogromists,
whether on the beach or in the Knesset.
The
members of the Joint List are right to
reach out to the UN
and the international community. In front of our eyes, the State of
Israel is turning into a democracy for Jews only. And even some of
those Jews are being put on notice.
What's next?
“Palestinians across Israel, the West Bank and Gaza are banding together in a general strike on October 1, in protest of Israel’s Jewish Nation-State Law and President Donald Trump’s ‘deal of the century.’ The general strike was announced this week by the Arab Higher Monitoring Committee, an umbrella organization that represents Arab citizens of Israel.”
